“It will not be your fault, at least, madame,” said Isabella, “if my ears by this time are not inured to offence,” and, very pale, with her head high, she walked out of the room.
CHAPTER VI.
NON DOLCE FAR NIENTE
And so we reach a situation which, having no least authority to complicate itself, must suffice us in its simplicity to the end. It is a situation as old as the human drama; it has formed the groundwork for a thousand tales of passion and infidelity, more fierce, more involved than this that I relate; it embraces for its essentials but three characters, the lady, and the diffident lover, and the false friend. Yet, although our version may not rank in poignancy with the tragedy of the Rimini, or in homeliness with the courtship of Miles Standish, it can claim for its main details that virtue of truth which ennobles even little calamities above the finest ecstacies of the imagination.
It is into a brief idyll of love and summer, then, that we are now to penetrate. Would it might begin and end there in the green gardens—to flow, in Tennyson’s words:
“... sweetly on and on,
Calming itself to the long-wished-for end,
Full to the banks, close on the promised good.”
But, alas! though the spirit of romance plead to us, soft as his loveliest temptress to St. Anthony, our historical conscience must remain cold and deaf to its entreaties. As things happened, so must they be recorded.
The lady, and the lover, and the false friend. It is such a simple tale, and so haunted by precedent, that the least sophisticated reader, given these premises, could surely write it for himself. Only remember that no such friend was ever false by design. Nor was this one. He began by detesting his task, not from conscientious motives, but because he went into it branded by the wounding stigma of her who was its object. He knew in what comparative light she would regard his advocacy; and he knew that in his own conscious acceptance of that estimate was foretold the failure of his mission. What value were to be attached to the praises of such a man?—so would run her thoughts. To be belauded by him were to be implied despicable. So he would only end by confirming the very complaint he was sent to alleviate—and serve those right who had commissioned him. It would do them no harm to learn that to strain devotion too far were to have it snap and recoil on themselves. At this beginning of things he really believed that he hated the young Infanta—a sentiment certainly little conducive to the successful accomplishment of his business.
And it did nothing to put him on better terms with himself to realise with what contemptuous confidence he was delegated to this task. Joseph or Philip—it was all the same moral of princely omnipotence. He was with both of them just the insensate instrument, to be played upon, to evoke certain emotions at command, and then to be dispensed with as a mere mechanical agent that had served its purpose. That he might prove a self-conscious agent, possessing feelings and passions of his own, never seemed to occur to either of them as remotely conceivable. He was just turned loose into the green pastures of Colorno, as a lowly steer might be entrusted to the company of a pedigree heifer—entrusted to excite her interest, that is to say, in the royal bull which was to succeed him by and by.