‘These benefactors,’ said he, ‘are like men who help a drowning swimmer to sustain himself a little longer: they never carry him to the shore. Their mission is not rescue, it is only to prolong a struggle, to protract a fate.’
The snow lay on the Apennines, and even on the lower hills around Florence, ere Gerald was sufficiently recovered to move about his room. The great dreary house, silent and tenantless, was a dominion over which he wandered at will, sitting hours long in contemplation of frescoed walls and ceilings, richly carved architraves, and finely chiselled traceries over door and window. Had they who reared such glorious edifices left no heirs nor successors behind them? Why were such splendours left to rot and decay? Why were patches of damp and mildew suffered to injure these marvellous designs? Why were the floors littered with carved and golden fretwork? What new civilisation had usurped the place of the old one, that men preferred lowly dwellings—tasteless, vulgar, and inconvenient—to those noble abodes, elegant and spacious ‘Could it possibly be that the change in men’s minds, the growing assertion of equality, had tended to suppress whatever too boldly indicated superiority of station? Already distinctions of dress were fading away. The embroidered jabot, the rich falling ruffle, the ample peruke, and the slashed and braided coat, were less and less often seen abroad. A simpler and more uniform taste in costume began to prevail, the insignia of rank were seldom paraded in public, and even the liveries of the rich displayed less of costliness and show than in times past. Over and over had Gabriel directed the youth’s attention to these signs, saying, with his own stern significance—
‘You will see, boy, that men will not any longer wait for equality till the churchyard.’
Was the struggle, then, really approaching?—were the real armies, indeed, marshalling their forces for the fight? And if so, with which should he claim brotherhood? His birth and blood inclined him to the noble, but his want and destitution gave him common cause with the miserable.
It was a dreary day of December, a low, leaden sky, heavily charged with rain or snow, stretched over a landscape inexpressibly sad and wretched-looking. The very character of Italian husbandry is one to add greatly to the rueful aspect of a day in winter: dreary fields of maize left to rot on the tall stalks; scrubby olive-trees, in all the deformity of their leafless existence; straggling vine branches, stretching from tree to tree, or hanging carelessly about—all these damp and dripping, in a scene desolate as a desert, with no inhabitants, and no cattle to be seen.
Such was the landscape that Gerald gazed on from a window, and, weary with reading now, stood long to contemplate.
‘How little great folk care for those seasons of gloom!’ thought he. ‘Their indoor life has its thousand resources of luxury and enjoyment: their palaces stored with every appliance of comfort for them—pictures, books, music—all that can charm in converse, all that can elevate by taste about them. What do they know of the trials of those who plod heavily along through mire and rain, weary, footsore, and famishing?’ And Marietta rose to his mind, and he pictured her toiling drearily along, her dress draggled, her garments dripping. He thought he could mark how her proud look seemed to fire with indignation at an unworthy fate, and that a feverish spot on her cheek glowed passionately at the slavery she suffered. ‘And why am I not there to share with her these hardships?’ cried he aloud. ‘Is not this a coward’s part in me to sit here in indolence, and worse again, in mere dependence? I am able to travel: I can, at least, crawl along a few miles a day; strength will come by the effort to regain it. I will seek her through the wide world till I find her. In her companionship alone has my heart ever met response, and my nature been understood.’
A low, soft laugh interrupted these words. He turned, and it was the Abbé Girardon, a friend of the Marquise de Bauffremont’s, who always accompanied her, and acted as a sort of secretary in her household. There was a certain half-mocking subtlety, a sort of fine raillery in the manner of the polished Abbé which Gerald always hated; and never was he less in the humour to enjoy the society of one whom even friends called ‘malin.’
‘I believed I was alone, sir,’ said Gerald, half haughtily, as the other continued to show his whole teeth in ridicule of the youth’s speech.
‘It was chance gave me the honour of overhearing you,’ replied the Abbé, smiling. ‘I opened this door by mere accident, and without expecting to find you here.’