“In the meantime, our newly-arrived improvisatore exhibits his qualities to triumphant effect. He is a soldier and a fine man; but this gift comes to him apart from his training, God knows whence. He will sing and rhyme you an hour on end; and, observe, he is very flattering, though veiled, in allusions to a supreme lord and comrade who possesses his heart.”
To these passages the sick duchess answered in due course, and with a characteristic warning, the whole gist of which may be conveyed in a single sentence:
“As to this minstrel, beware that the medicine, my Pippo, does not prove a drug, given for a definite purpose, but afterwards indulged in for its own sake”—a really preposterous suggestion, which it was incumbent on a cadet of Spain to wave aside with the briefest comment:
“You make me smile, dearest wife; you positively amuse me. The man is to be regarded, like a courier, as a mere vehicle for the conveyance of an august document of the heart. He would hardly commit the absurdity, I think, of associating his own personal insignificance with the message he was employed to deliver, any more than the fiddle, could it speak, would claim to be other than a vulgar structure of wood and string, obedient only to the hand of its master, and denuded of all importance the moment that hand was withdrawn. Believe me, ma chérie, the percipience of the unelect is not so negligible a quantity as you would seem to imagine. This instrument—if indeed an instrument it is—will play its part with a full sense of the momentary distinction that part confers upon it, yet without a thought but of sinking thereafter into the oblivion which is its necessary destiny. If it were otherwise, there remain means to persuade it. Yet it cannot be otherwise. I think I may answer for our daughter that she will entertain no delusions as to the relative values of the hand and of the instrument upon which it plays. Which, certainly, is quite enough said upon that small subject.”
Yet it was a very small subject who once crept through the keyhole of the King’s treasury and robbed his Magnificence’s coffers.
CHAPTER V.
IL TROVATORE
Isabella mistrusted few people and disliked nobody for long. She was one of those happily constituted girls who are troubled with no problems, have no quarrel with destiny, and never resent their not having been born boys. She had endearing looks and a fine spirit, but without self-consciousness in the one, or arrogance in the other. She was never in arms for the prerogatives of her sex, because it never occurred to her that they were being either questioned or abused. If she coquetted at all, it was more with women than with men; yet she was equally natural with both. As sweet a princess as Perdita—as sweet a milkmaid she would have been, had fortune deposed her. Impressionable, poor child—it was a pity only that nature, not sparing her the softest of hearts, should have done so little to protect its own rich achievement from harm. But nature, bent only on relentless propagation, designs these triumphant things as lures.
Isabella, during all her young life, had endeared herself with whomsoever she had visited. Grandpapa Louis, the cynic and impure, doted upon his charmante; haughty grandmamma in Spain had, on her death, left her the solitary bequest devoted by that opulent lady to her lord’s relations. Isabella did not want the money, but she wept over that proof of affection; while papa Philip tried not to weep, tears of chagrin, over being left out in the cold. However, in that dismal poverty of the exchequer, something to somebody was better than nothing to nobody; and I have no doubt that the legacy was taken into account in all subsequent dispositions of the young Infanta’s “household.”
Wealth, after all, is like the other things, size and sound, relative. We are not to suppose, you and I, that, because a certain thousand a year might appear to us opulence, a duke might not consider himself a pauper on fifty times that income. I do not know what the revenues of Parma represented to Don Philip in hard cash; I do know that he was constantly and piteously complaining to his royal relatives of his embarrassments. One man’s affluence is another man’s necessity; else you and I again might have criticised the expenditure of the Parmese Court, have commented on the waste, the idle profusion of a State, which, for mere vanity’s sake, must boast a superfluity of service which it was inadequate to support; have suggested a drastic economy here, a wholesale retrenchment there. We should have been assured, no doubt, that all that could be done had been done, and that only the indispensable remained—a possibly unanswerable statement from the opposite to our own point of view. From that standpoint the emptiness of the great palace at Colorno, during the absence of the Court, was so qualified an emptiness that its superfluous inmates could still have peopled a substantial villa or two, and left something over for emergencies, Besides the personal staff, which included attendants, preceptors, valets and grooms sufficient—with a lady of the wardrobe, two femmes de chambre, and some minor officials attached to Isabella alone—the gardens, the stables, the kitchens, the guard-house all gave indolent occupation to a small garrison of retainers, who, mostly idle and mostly gossips, numbered amongst themselves none, perhaps, quite so pert and so voluble as Fanchette Becquet, the Infanta’s first femme de confiance.
Fanchette, who hailed from Paris, had attained her present post more through private and particular interest than through particular merit. There were reasons for this, it was understood, which it was not necessary to divulge, but of which the girl herself was fully sensible, and of which she would have been the last not to take ample advantage. There was no high-born lady of the Court who presumed, or was allowed to presume, so much on her position as Fanchette. Her very audacity and insolence of retort possessed for certain masculine minds a charm which was a perpetual source of indulgence and profit to her. The duke himself had been known to suffer her impertinences with an enjoying relish which redounded in no ways to her disadvantage. In style and temper she was a veritable Parisian mondaine, dapper and pretty, though her lips were a little thin and her nose a little sharp. She had no heart at all, but her emotions, easily responsive to small provocation, blinded herself and others to that defect.