At this juncture, some friends of his, who had emigrated to Tunis in the recent troubles of Italy, wrote to recommend his joining them there; and urged on by the representations of all who were interested in his welfare—his desperate condition sanctioning so desperate a step as foreign travel was usually looked upon—encouraged especially by ourselves, with our restless, enterprising British notions, he embarked in a small trading-vessel, almost reduced to a skeleton.
Months, nay, years have passed since then, and it seemed as if all clue to the poor young painter were completely lost, when, by a strange coincidence, I received a letter from him at the very moment when the ink was still wet upon the page where I had been relating his ill-starred attachment. I wish I could transcribe the whole of this letter—I wish it could be laid tangibly before my readers—so clumsily, squarely folded, with its coarse red seal, stamped with some copper coin very probably, its stiff handwriting and deficient orthography; and its contents, so simple, so poetical, so unassuming, of which a few extracts, to give the continuation of his vicissitudes, can furnish but a very imperfect idea.
After relating the failure of the hopes with which he had landed at Tunis, he says that, resolved to leave no path that might lead to independence unexplored, he even set his beloved art comparatively aside, and had betaken himself to whatever honest employment he might find. Entering the service of the Pacha of Tripoli, he had been sent as a mineralogist—“for amongst the Turks,” he naïvely remarks, “one may do anything—far into the interior, amongst men and manners completely different from our own, to explore a mine reported to be of silver, but which, with my usual ill-luck, turned out of very inferior iron.” Then, encouraged by the Pacha's promises, he accompanied him to Constantinople, where, finding to his cost that he must put no faith in princes, he turned to his painting again. But the city was swarming with Italian refugees, artists among the rest, all contending for the bare means of subsistence; so, after a few months of painful struggles, he went back to Africa, and entered into some trading speculations. Neither in this new career was he successful. Perhaps he worked with a sinking heart, for the tidings reached him that the young girl so faithfully loved was about to be married; and “what imbittered this announcement, was learning that the character of her future husband offered but slender prospects for her happiness.” His little ventures failed; his resources were exhausted; and he was under the necessity of returning to his native country. There he found strange reverses had suddenly befallen her whom he had schooled himself to look upon as irrevocably lost. Her parents were both dead; the marriage had been broken off; and from comparative affluence she was so reduced as, jointly with a widowed sister, to have opened a day-school for little girls.
“I saw her then,” he goes on, “under the pressure of sorrow. I found her, in the words of Petrarch, più bella, ma meno altera; and yet, even at that moment, my cruel destiny prevented me from saying, 'I am here to comfort and sustain you!'”
Once more he went forth, hoping against hope, with the aim of establishing himself as a portrait-painter and drawing-master at ——, on the shores of the Mediterranean, whither many English families annually resort; and the object of his letter was modestly and unaffectedly to request that if I knew any of my country-people intending to winter there, I would recommend him to their notice.
I felt very sad to perceive how he overrated the signorina forestiera's influence, and the extent of her acquaintance; or else in his simplicity imagining that to be English is synonymous with belonging to a vast brotherhood, giving and demanding the hand of fellowship on every side. I wish it were thus in this instance at least, for the first use I should make of this blissful state of fraternity, would be to claim patronage and encouragement for the poor artist, whose history then could soon be pleasantly wound up like orthodox story-books, in these words, “and so they were married, and lived very happily all the rest of their days.”
CHAPTER XXIII.
From Ancona to Umana—Moonlight view—The country-house—Indifference of the Anconitans to flowers and gardening—Ascent of the mount—Magnificent prospect at sunrise—Trappist convent.
The famous Santa Casa, or Holy House of Loretto, has long been recognised as the principal attraction of the Marche; indeed, it is so well known to tourists, that I should have left my excursion thither unrecorded, had not this omission rendered my picture of local manners and customs incomplete. Little as the Anconitans are given to locomotion, I never met an instance of one who had not visited the shrine at least once in his or her life, whilst a few make it a point of conscience to repair thither every year. The distance from Ancona, by the high-road, is twenty miles—a journey of five hours, in that country of steep hills and slow coaches; but travellers are generally disposed to overlook the tedium of the way in their admiration of the scenery it discloses. Few, however, have any conception of the still more picturesque features of the circuitous route through which, one lovely evening in June, we pursued our pilgrimage to Loretto.
There was nothing very original or brilliant in our party. The V—— family—the same with whom we went to the rural christening—joined the expedition, too adventurous for any of our Italian friends; the consul, the Chevalier V——, this time escorting his wife and lively Polish daughters, very proud, as he protested, of the charge my uncle had delegated to him as his representative towards my cousins and unworthy self. He was a good man, that dear chevalier, in every acceptation of the term, but his sphere was certainly not a scrambling gipsying enterprise, such as we contemplated, and his presence would have proved hopelessly depressing, had it not been for the antidote furnished by the indomitable spirits of a lieutenant and two little midshipmen belonging to an English frigate lying in the harbour, who had obtained permission to accompany us. The fair hair and ruddy cheeks of the middies, reminding Madame V—— of her own absent boys, had pleaded irresistibly in their favour; their extreme juvenility too, she argued, screened her from any breach of the convenances she was always so solicitous to maintain. As to the young lieutenant, he was a married man, carried about his baby's likeness in a locket, and spent fabulous sums in presents for his wife. No anxiety could therefore be felt on his score, no dread of exciting the remonstrance of a certain black-browed parish priest, who, I very well know, left the poor lady no peace on the impropriety of throwing her daughters into the temptations of English male heretical society.