The Diary opened thus:
"Here am I in London. I don't know whether to be frightened or glad. Luigi is very kind, but he did not tell me he would bring me to such miserable lodgings as this. Would it not have been better had we never met? I should have known that a teacher cannot be rich. Yet I do think him handsome, and he makes love so meltingly that I would rather live in a garret than not have married him. No letter from grandmamma. She is very unkind. Mamma would not have treated me so had she been alive. But what is an orphan to expect but unkindness?"
A few days later: "To-day I heard from Miss Cowley" (this was the schoolmistress, as I knew from reference in the grandmother's letters). "She says I have acted wickedly and have forfeited all happiness in this world by marrying a beggarly Italian teacher. How my eyes flashed when I read 'beggarly Italian teacher!' The cold-hearted thing would have cried with fear had she seen me. Luigi is out all day and he comes in tired, and to-night I thought he received my kiss coldly. But it must be my fancy. Oh, what a fancy I have! I think I shall go mad some of these days."
The chronicle continued much in this strain through many entries. It recorded from time to time a letter from her grandmother inclosing five pounds, but repeating her assurance that she would have nothing more to do with her. Then the tone of the diarist grew more querulous; though her love for her husband deepened, so it seemed, in proportion as his fell off.
"How can I help being jealous?" she wrote in one entry; "he is all day long away from me teaching other girls, any one of whom he may admire far above me and secretly love. When I told him this he seemed to shrink away from my look; and indeed it was passionate enough; and he cried out, half in Italian and half in English, 'God of mine! you will go mad if you do not keep that devil of a spirit of yours down!' I threw myself on his neck, and asked him never, never to cease to love me. His beautiful eye melted, and he fondled me with his exquisite grace. So I go to bed happy."
If her husband earned money she seemed to benefit little from it; for some of her records ran, that she had to sit in the dark till he came home, for there was no candle in the house, she had no money to buy one, and the stingy landlady did not offer to lend her a lamp. "To-day I dined on bread-and-cheese and some of the potatoes left from yesterday, fried. If grandmamma knew this she would send me some money. But I'll not write to her about it. No, she shall think I am flourishing; and if I were dying with hunger I would just wish her to think I had plenty to eat."
Up to a certain entry she continued writing of her husband in warm terms. She avowed her belief that she must be somewhat crazy to find him so fascinating. "Sometimes I think him more so than at other times," she wrote; but added, "if I am to regain my reason at the sacrifice of my love I would rather be mad." There was a good deal of pungent writing in these entries. I could find nothing to illustrate the slightest mental derangement. But her language was curiously characteristic, and the exhibition of a nature made up of warm and sudden passions, impulsive and generous, but vengeful and arbitrary too, was absolutely complete.
Before long her entries grew somewhat incoherent. She is racked with jealousy. She is certain that her husband has ceased to love her. "I have been married now six months," she says; "how dare I humour such misgivings? But what is it that tells me of Luigi's indifference? Not my bodily eyes, for his behaviour is not altered. The spirit sees farther than the reason. If I loved him with my mind I should not have these presentiments; but I love him with my soul. It is my soul that is jealous; and the soul is endowed with the vision of immortality and can make the future present.
"To-day is my birthday. I am twenty-two years old. It has rained steadily since the morning. I watched the muddy water in the gutter boiling round the grating near the lamp-post until I fell asleep. A cheerful birthday! There was a little piece of boiled beef for dinner, hard as my shoe, and the potatoes were not cooked. Yet when Luigi comes home, he never asks me if I am hungry. Does he care? He would if he knew. But how should he know? I I am always pale, so that he sees nothing unusual in my white face. I sometimes think he is afraid of me. He said last night, 'Your eyes flash like a madwoman's.' I answered, 'It is with love!'"
There were no records of any hours of pleasure. Sometimes she chronicled a short walk. The place of her abode was not named; but I judged from some references to the locality that they must have lodged in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square. The landlady was a German, and the diarist complained of the atmosphere of the house having been made all day long nauseating and tepid with the smell of cooking.