Iolanthe's Wedding Part 14

The heart's change of residence is probably the saddest there is. Many things get broken and many a cherished memento falls into the gutter.

But if it cannot be prevented, then the moving may as well be done thoroughly and energetically.

"Off with the old love before you're on with the new."

A truth of startling pregnancy. Many a person has arrived too late because he lingered too long saying good-bye. Piles of novels could be written on this subject.

Sometimes, too, the heart stays in the old house but moves to another apartment. Then hate follows love and love follows hate, the latter, at least, in Marlitt's romances. And more than this, friends.h.i.+p moves in where love once dwelt.

And then, finally, there are the cases in which friends.h.i.+p clears the way for love.

You shake your head. You believe friends.h.i.+p never clears the way for love? You mean because we two friends are so proof against love? Oh, we are the exception. Between us rises the intellectual love of truth like a crystal wall in the Arctic Ocean. But I can give you examples, my dear lady, any number of examples, of friends.h.i.+p clearing the way for love. And mostly unhappy examples.

It seems to be an iron law of happiness that love should begin with pa.s.sion and end in the peace of tranquil friends.h.i.+p--marriage, I mean.

The reverse way is not excluded, but it leads--to the desert.

There are abstract enthusiasts that construe the marriage of souls as a necessary preliminary to physical love. But nature punishes lying. When friends.h.i.+p between a man and a woman ends in love, either the friends.h.i.+p or the love is not true. And woe, woe if the friends.h.i.+p has not been friends.h.i.+p but love.

Apropos of this--do you happen to remember the portrait of a woman that created such a stir at the exhibition two or three years ago and brought the painter so much fame and so many orders? A frail figure, almost too frail, in a simple black velvet dress. A thin suffering face, a pale forehead with the crown on it of the quiet aristocracy of thought. Half-closed dreamy eyes, a bluish gleam from between dark lashes. Upper lip covered with fine down and an expression of longing and smiling melancholy about the mouth. Now I remember to a dot. You and I admired the picture together. You stood studying it a long time and then said:

"That's the way I fancy Vittoria Colonna must have looked."

I said nothing to that. I was astonished by your keenness, because there really were many resemblances of character between the lady of the portrait and Michael Angelo's unhappy friend. Her fate, too, was curiously like Vittoria Colonna's. Of course, I may not tell how I came to know her story. At that time it was still in progress, and the change that came later--well----

She was the widow of a well-known architect. His house was a social centre for a swarm of talented young artists, among them K----, the painter of the portrait. He was a jolly young fellow, easy-going and saucy. The maelstrom of the years at the Academy had not destroyed the perfect childlikeness of his genius, and, as a result, the air of being blase and weighted with the woes of the world that he put on in deference to his varied experiences was all the more becoming as at the slightest provocation he dropped this manner and burst into a ringing laugh.

Hedwig soon realised there was a sound core to the young man's rather giddy character, and since everybody felt that his talent was of the first order and only needed a little cultivation to bear glorious fruit, she took pleasure in looking out for him. And he, for his part, surrendered himself ardently to the guidance of a woman a few years older than himself, a woman whom he came to adore.

He brought her his sketches, and she pa.s.sed upon them, with a sharp eye for both the painter's sense of form and for the tiniest slip of his still uncertain hand. He made her the confidante of his creative ideas, which gushed from his brain impetuously, and he received them back from her matured and refined. There was not a corner of his heart that did not lie open to her view, and she was wise enough even to place the right estimate upon the youthful coa.r.s.eness with which his sentiments sometimes bubbled over. Another woman might have felt hurt, while she took it as evidence of his surplus of strength, and smiled and gently poked fun at him, and so brought harmony out of the chaos within him.

She showered riches on him, and what she got back in return was scarcely less in value. Held fast at the side of an ill-tempered aging husband, an ailing woman herself and growing weaker from year to year, she had matured in mind at an early age; and she had paid toll in the loss of youthful spirits and elasticity. But now whole streams of a fresh blithe life poured out of him into her. She felt rejuvenated in his presence. And a tender motherliness, the shadow of a joy that had been denied her, was interwoven with her other feelings for him.

Her husband was glad to see his lonely wife occupied and did not interfere. And why should he have interfered? Never was there less occasion for jealousy. The young scapegrace, as a matter of fact, even confided his love affairs to her, and she tried by smiling advice to render them at least innocuous enough not to hamper the development of his talent.

Three years pa.s.sed. Hedwig's husband died. Her illness had grown worse, and at the physician's advice she went south, to Nice.

She lived in great retirement, broken into only now and then, when a young genius long of hair and none too clean of s.h.i.+rt turned up in her modest drawing-room, generally in money difficulties and bringing a letter of recommendation from her friend.

Her one diversion was corresponding with K----, whose work and position kept him in Berlin.

He often wrote her that he adored her like a saint.

She, for her part, parried his onslaughts of ecstasy and was satisfied that in spite of his volatile nature and his growing fame, he preserved his old liking for her.

Three years more pa.s.sed. Then, once, late in autumn he suddenly appeared at Nice, tired, worn out by work, spiritually desolate, unsteadier than ever, but--a full-grown man.

"I have come to be cured by you," he exclaimed the first time he was in her house.

She wept for joy.

Soon they dropped into greater intimacy than ever, and yet she sometimes experienced a sense of shyness which she had not felt before in her relation with him, for the very reason that he was no longer the boy she could look down on with unconstrained motherliness. The difference in years seemed to have been wiped out, inwardly as well as outwardly, and he had grown close to her intellectually, alarmingly close.

He often complained to her of his afflictions--the miserable headaches that kept bothering him, the result of overwork, and then the worries of his profession, the disillusionments. They were by no means formidable, but easily too much for the spoiled darling of fortune. She devoured everything he said. The least little thing of concern to him a.s.sumed prodigious importance.

But there seemed to be a good deal that he did not tell her.

"And how about the women?" she asked, smiling, though tortured by suddenly rising jealousy.

"Oh, let's not talk of the women. I've forgotten every one of them. Now you are my one and only one."

She thrilled, but said nothing. Oh, had he known how _her_ whole being lost itself in his!

These words of his caressed her from now on, echoing even in her sleep at night.

They celebrated Christmas together.

When the candles were burning on the tree and the homelike scent of pine and apples filled the room, he caught her hands, looked long into her eyes smiling, and said:

"You know, you and I ought really to marry."

She felt her blood bounding hot through her veins, but she held on to herself, and burst out laughing.

"You think I'm joking," he went on. "No, no, I'm not. I am in deep earnest. You yourself tell me--we're each of us alone, we don't care about the world, we have come to understand each other as no other two people on earth have ever understood each other. Why should we not share our fate the rest of our lives?"

"Now do be sensible," she said, trying to keep up a show of lightness, "and don't talk such nonsense any more; for nonsense it is, whether said in fun or in deep earnest. Exactly what you need--a woman hanging round your neck who is five years older than you and soon will be altogether faded. Besides, you don't strike me as having been born to be a nurse, and you know I am slowly making my way graveward. So the matter's settled."

That night she cried to herself.

The next day his headache bothered him worse than ever. With her he was privileged to make himself comfortable, and he stretched out on the sofa, and she adjusted the cus.h.i.+ons under his head.

"Your hands are always so cool," he said. "In the days of old you sometimes used to stroke my forehead so soothingly. It did me no end of good. I have spoiled my chance for that form of happiness, too."

She pa.s.sed her shaking hand over his head and brow, and when she touched his cheek, he caught her fingers in both his hands.

"Let them stay there," he said with a great sigh. "My cheeks are on fire."

Her cheeks were burning, too.

Christmas week went by, and the man and the woman drew still closer together in the solitude of their hearts. New Year's eve came, and they decided to wait up and greet the new year together.

Hedwig was preparing the tea, and he was leaning back in an easy chair, smoking cigarettes and looking through the blue clouds at her housewifely ways. There was a rosy sheen on her cheeks and something like the promise of happiness glittering in her eyes.

He felt so happy and yet so oppressed that he wanted to jump up and clasp her in his arms simply to lift the burden from his soul.

She spoke little. She seemed occupied with her own thoughts, and he with his.

At about eleven o'clock there was a noise on the street, and the red glow of smoking torches came through the window. It was a procession of masqueraders got up by a private society, a foretaste of the public carnival to follow.

She opened the French window and they went out on the balcony, on which potted pomegranate-trees were in full bloom. It was a soft warm night, like our own nights in spring. The stars were sparkling, and a vague s.h.i.+mmer lay upon the ocean.