The pot of basil

by Bernard Capes

At dinner-time the pigeons would fly down from their cote, and, entering the house by its open door, strut, with bobbing heads, about the stone-paved floor, watching for scraps. They soon came to recognise in il Signor Talé a sympathetic spirit, and to congregate about his chair with a persistent confidence which delighted him. In other respects he found in his quarters a seasonableness which glorified all shortcomings. His humble bed smelt of rosemary; the sparkle of insect life in his ewer testified to the living freshness of the stream from which it was daily replenished; appetite lent to the homely cuisine an epicurean relish. Raw ham, salted sausage, macaroni, thin broth followed by the lesso, or anæmic meat boiled down to produce it, sometimes a cut of manzo, which was hobbledehoy calf, cabbage served alone, and always ricotta, a sort of buttermilk cheese—on such country fare he was enthusiastic to batten, and his enjoyment of all things was as convincing as it was captivating. He had not been established two days before everyone was in love with him—Annina, the deaf old contadina who did the marketing and general housekeeping, solemn Bissy, whose particular property he was, even Aquaviva himself, whom his charm and virile interest in all things won from reticence to an astonishing horticultural communicativeness. They all succumbed to him and became his unconscious confederates and abettors, jealously guarding the privacy it was understood he desired, jealously possessing him and shutting the world from their knowledge.

Not that in that respect there was much need for finesse. The season was yet early, the spot isolated, the gardens not sufficiently advanced to attract visitors. Yet it had been a mild winter, and crops, for the time of year, were well forward. Everything was flushing green, not with the chill reluctance of a northern spring, but with a fearless confidence in the loving-kindness of a climate which was always a true bountiful mother to its nurslings. Here but to peep was to open and expand, and the growth of a day was the full measure of its trust in nature. It was seldom that that trust was abused by cold winds or belated blizzards; but, even when this happened, the sun was quick and sure to staunch all wounds inflicted, and to win back the earth to smiles and reassurance.

So Tiretta came actually to inhabit the beautiful haunted place so associated with his first enchantment. It was no fortuitous choice, of course, which had led him there, laden, for all his baggage, with one soldierly valise; yet he had hardly hoped at the first to realise so easily and so compactly his scheme of opportunism. Now, if she came, he would be always on the spot to greet her—in what way circumstance must decide. His life, his whole happiness, was bound up in that chance: but would she come? He had only Fanchette’s hint to go upon. It might have been wholly unwarranted; it might have been actually designed to confine him to a given place, whereby the risk of meeting him elsewhere should be avoided. The thought necessarily suggested another: was she, actively or negatively, in collusion with her maid to procure such a fiasco? He had again only Fanchette’s admission for comfort. But Fanchette was a liar—he knew that instinctively. Still the girl had obviously sought to get rid of him, and the truth had been drawn from her only with reluctance. She would not have conceded even so much, unless the pressure of facts had been too strong for her to resist. On the other hand, she might have suggested the compromise entirely on her own responsibility, and with the intent, having definitely disposed of him, to keep the knowledge of his whereabouts a secret from her mistress.

That would be a stultifying development—in the lack of any. Yet what could he do now to counter such a design, if it existed? He understood that for some reason Fanchette, always a capricious quantity, had joined the forces against him—at the instigation of what or whom—or by the tacit acquiescence of whom? Not of her: his whole soul, his whole knowledge, rejected the thought of such shallowness, such treachery, on the part of one proved so incorruptible. They were inseparable affinities, bound by that subconscious compact, whose roots were in the mystery of the past. And then, if confirmation were needed, his pathetic dream! This man of dreams, indeed, trusted their evidence beyond the most convincing that could be offered by any living witness. He had seen his love’s eyes, once in that trance, once on the steps of the Madonna della Steccata, and had read therein a message of deathless fidelity. It was enough: he could not be mistaken: he would not wrong her or himself again by the shadow of one suspicion.

And yet, watching the passage of the fruitless hours, he would sometimes grow despondent, or angry with his own irresolution, or with the easy way in which he lent himself to the designs of his enemies. Would she ever come? Then he would stand listening, as if he heard in the deep places of his heart the voice of his love crying to him to hasten and deliver her from the hostile forces by which she was watched and environed. That was the worst of all; for what was he to do, how escape from the mesh of uncertainty in which he had involved himself? To break from it now were to betray himself and her—to invite the very tragedy he had come here to avoid. Not to avoid for his own sake, for he was reckless; but he must be wonderfully tender and considerate in all things which touched upon her wellbeing. For himself, he held his life lightly, lacking the reassurance which alone could give it a purpose and a value. He did not seem to care much what happened to him; what precautions he took were really nominal. That Bissy should know him was of course inevitable; yet there seemed no object in confessing himself to the boy—no object in anything in particular, indeed. It was that very indifference which was his unconscious safeguard. Where there is no atmosphere of concealment nobody suspects. He was accepted, generally, on his own showing, and, specifically, on his own merits.

Those were characteristic and sufficient. His mental suspense, his perpetual soul-hunger, never seemed to affect his winning attitude towards his surroundings. Outwardly he appeared that lovable, interested, oddly humorous creature who, endearing himself, without effort or design, to all about him, seemed troubled by no sense of responsibility towards anybody or anything in the world. He could not help himself there; the faculty of ingratiation was native to him and quite unforced. But it is wrong to judge such qualities as necessarily superficial. Popularly, the sparkling surface speaks the shallow current: it is as true as to insist that beauty is only skin deep. There are many of these old saws that need re-casting. Is there no deep thinker who has his playful side? It was sage Harcourt, was it not, whose “half-awakened bards” so offended the poet? As to exteriority, one might say, with as true a proverbial sententiousness, that the pint bottle of champagne is not to be told from the magnum by its effervescence. The fact is that manner is no indication of matter, and that some men can jest under torture while others cannot. It is just a question of constitution. Think of Keats, confined in quarantine on his death journey, desperately summoning up more puns in a week than he had ever been guilty of in a year. So, as il Signor Talé loitered in the wakening gardens, asking innumerable questions, making innumerable impracticable suggestions, delightedly absorbed, to all appearance, in floricultural lore, no one might have guessed from those rising bubbles the darkness of the tragic deeps from which they ascended.

These, to be sure, with whom he lived were simple country folk, unsophisticated save in the one direction of their business, and little apt at reading character. They were quite ready to accept him for what he palpably was—a charming and profitable addition to their ménage—without puzzling their brains as to what he might be. Parma was almost terra incognita to them: it was ten miles away—it might have been a hundred, for any influence it bore upon their lives. The pulse-beats of it came to them like a sound of bells so distant as to seem no more than a pleasing rumour. They were indifferently interested in its events; hardly more so in its personalities. Once or twice the dead duchess was mentioned among them; but chiefly, it seemed, because she was associated with their local experience. Tiretta gathered that her memory was respected, though with some reserve due to the not yet forgotten resentment against the Spanish occupation. But with Isabella it was different. They all loved the young Infanta, so sweet, so natural, so prettily friendly. The visitor, cunning man, found no difficulty in “drawing” them on that subject, though, for net result, he learned no more of her than he knew already. They were quite uninformed as to the general march of events, knew nothing about the proposed Austrian alliance, were as unworldly disposed as though to their minds it was all wilderness outside this their garden of Eden. He could have found their pastoral naïveté wonderfully refreshing, had the ferment in his mind been more amenable to such soothing influences; as it was, he could at least endure it good-humouredly.

One day—it was the third after his arrival—he came upon Aquaviva busily employed over a number of little shrubs which he had just fetched out from their winter shelter. The sight brought a shock of colour to the visitor’s cheek, a rather wistful smile to his lips. What memory was here laid bare and bleeding? It was like the disinterment of still breathing hope.

For some moments he watched the old man in silence. It was whimsically wonderful to him that the handling of these things should awaken no associations in that abstracted mind. Yet so it seemed. Not once had Aquaviva appeared, nor did he appear now, to connect him with any figure of the past. Presently Tiretta spoke:

“What are those, mi’ amico?”