I.
"If anything could make a man forgive himself for being sixty years old," said the Consul, holding up his wine-glass between his eye and the setting sun,—for it was summer-time, "it would be that he can remember M. —— in her divine sixteenity at the Park Theatre, thirty odd years ago. Egad, Sir, one couldn't help making great allowances for Don Giovanni, after seeing her in Zerlina. She was beyond imagination piquante and delicious."
The Consul, as my readers may have partly inferred, was not a Roman Consul, nor yet a French one. He had had the honor of representing this great republic at one of the Hanse Towns,—I forget which,—in President Monroe's time. I don't recollect how long he held the office, but it was long enough to make the title stick to him for the rest of his life with the tenacity of a militia colonelcy or village diaconate. The country people round about used to call him "the Counsel" which, I believe,—for I am not very fresh from my school-books,—was etymologically correct enough, however orthoepically erroneous. He had not limited his European life, however, within the precinct of his Hanseatic consulship, but had dispersed himself very promiscuously over the Continent, and had seen many cities, and the manners of many men—and of some women,— singing-women, I mean, in their public character; for the Consul, correct of life as of ear, never sought to undeify his divinities by pursuing them from the heaven of the stage to the purgatorial intermediacy of the coulisses, still less to the lower depth of disenchantment into which too many of them sunk in their private life.
"Yes, Sir," he went on, "I have seen and heard them all,—Catalani, Pasta, Pezzaroni, Grisi, and all the rest of them, even Sonntag,— though not in her very best estate; but I give you my word there is none that has taken lodgings here," tapping his forehead, "so permanently as the Signorina G——, or that I can see and hear so distinctly, when I am in the mood of it, by myself. Rosina, Desdemona, Cinderella, and, as I said just now, Zerlina,—she is as fresh in them all to my mind's eye and ear, as if the Park Theatre had not given way to a cursed shoe-shop, and I had been hearing her there only last night. Let's drink her memory," the Consul added, half in mirth and half in melancholy,—a mood to which he was not unused, and which did not ill become him.
Now no intelligent person, who knew the excellence of the Consul's wine, could refuse to pay this posthumous honor to the harmonious shade of the lost Muse. The Consul was an old-fashioned man in his tastes, to be sure, and held to the old religion of Madeira which divided the faith of our fathers with the Cambridge Platform, and had never given in to the later heresies which have crept into the communion of good-fellowship from the South of France and the Rhine.
"A glass of Champagne," he would say, "is all well enough at the end of dinner, just to take the grease out of one's throat, and get the palate ready for the more serious vintages ordained for the solemn and deliberate drinking by which man justifies his creation; but Madeira, Sir, Madeira is the only stand-by that never fails a man and can always be depended upon as something sure and steadfast."
I confess to having fallen away myself from the gracious doctrine and works to which he had held so fast; but I am no bigot,—which for a heretic is something remarkable,—and had no scruple about uniting with him in the service he proposed, without demur or protestation as to form or substance. Indeed, he disarmed fanaticism by the curious care he bestowed on making his works conformable to the faith that was in him; for, partly by inheritance and partly by industrious pains, his old house was undermined by a cellar of wine such as is seldom seen in these days of modern degeneracy. He is the last gentleman, that I know of, of that old school that used to import their own wine and lay it down annually themselves,—their bins forming a kind of vinous calendar suggestive of great events. Their degenerate sons are content to be furnished, as they want it, from the dubious stores of the vintner, by retail.
"I suppose it was her youth and beauty, Sir," I suggested, "that made her so rememberable to you. You know she was barely turned seventeen when she sung in this country."
"Partly that, no doubt," replied the Consul, "but not altogether, nor chiefly. No, Sir, it was her genius which made her beauty so glorious. She was wonderfully handsome, though. She was a phantom of delight, as that Lake fellow says,"—it was thus profanely that the Consul designated the poet Wordsworth, whom he could not abide,— "and the best thing he ever said, by Jove!"
"And did you never see her again?" I inquired.
"Once, only," he answered,—"eight or nine years afterwards, a year or two before she died. It was at Venice, and in Norma. She was different, and yet not changed for the worse. There was an indescribable look of sadness out of her eyes, that touched one oddly and fixed itself in the memory. But she was something apart and by herself, and stamped herself on one's mind as Rachel did in Camille or Phèdre. It was true genius, and no imitation, that made both of them what they were. But she actually had the physical beauty which Rachel only compelled you to think she had by the force of her genius and consummate dramatic skill, while she was on the scene before you."
"But do you rank M. —— with Rachel as a dramatic artist?" I asked.
"I cannot tell," he answered; "but if she had not the studied perfection of Rachel, which was always the same and could not be altered without harm, she had at least a capacity of impulsive self-adaptation about her which made her for the time the character she personated,—not always the same, but such as the woman she represented might have been in the shifting phases of the passion that possessed her. And to think that she died at eight-and-twenty! What might not ten years more have made her!"
"It is odd," I observed, "that her fame should be forever connected with the name she got by her first unlucky marriage in New York. For it was unlucky enough, I believe,—was it not?"
"You may say that," responded the Consul, "without fear of denial or qualification. It was disgraceful in its beginning and in its ending. It was a swindle on a large scale; and poor Maria G—— was the one who suffered the most by the operation."
"I have always heard," said I, "that old G—— was cheated out of the price for which he had sold his daughter, and that M. M. —— got his wife on false pretences."
"Not altogether so," returned the Consul. "I happen to know all about that matter from the best authority. She was obtained on false pretences, to be sure, but it was not G—— that suffered by them. M. M. ——, moreover, never paid the price agreed upon, and yet G—— got it for all that."
"Indeed!" I exclaimed, "it must have been a neat operation. I cannot exactly see how the thing was done; but I have no doubt a tale hangs thereby, and a good one. Is it tellable?"
"I see no reason why not," said the Consul; "the sufferer made no
secret of it, and I know of no reason why I should. Mynheer Van
Holland told me the story himself, in Amsterdam, in the year
'Thirty-five."
"And who was he?" I inquired, "and what had he to do with it?"
"I'll tell you," responded the Consul, filling his glass and passing the bottle, "if you will have the goodness to shut the window behind you and ring for candles; for it gets chilly here among the mountains as soon as the sun is down."
I beg your pardon,—did you make a remark?—Oh, what mountains? You must really pardon me; I cannot give you such a clue as that to the identity of my dear Consul, just now, for excellent and sufficient reasons. But if you have paid your money for the sight of this Number, you may take your choice of all the mountain ranges on the continent, from the Rocky to the White, and settle him just where you like. Only you must leave a gap to the westward, through which the river—also anonymous for the present distress—breaks its way, and which gives him half an hour's more sunshine than he would otherwise be entitled to, and slope the fields down to its margin near a mile off, with their native timber thinned so skilfully as to have the effect of the best landscape-gardening. It is a grand and lovely scene; and when I look at it, I do not wonder at one of the Consul's apophthegms, namely, that the chief advantage of foreign travel is, that it teaches you that one place is just as good to live in as another. Imagine that the one place he had in his mind at the time was just this one. But that is neither here nor there. When candles came, we drew our chairs together, and he told me in substance the following story. I will tell it in my own words,—not that they are so good as his, but because they come more readily to the nib of my pen.