Delphi collected works o.., p.393
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 393
But all the time as he climbed one terrible sentence rang ever in his ear, “Who visiteth the sins of the fathers on the children unto the third and fourth generation.” Who visiteth the sins of the father on the children! The father on the children! the father on the children! He climbed to its tune. It haunted and followed him.
Insanity! Was he mad to try such a wild climb? Insanity! Was it some crazy impulse that drove him forth to-day, when he ought rather to have stopped to comfort and succor his mother? What was that man doing now — that man — his father? Then the terror grew deeper on him. Was it the inherited selfishness of the brute’s brutal nature that had sent Hubert himself out to climb, climb, climb, instead of staying to protect his worse than widowed mother from the creature’s outrages? And Fede — dear Fede — for whom he would give his life, was he right to leave her so? Ought he not to have tried to make the burden lighter for her? Yet — surely no! He must never again see her. To see Fede and bid her good-by was only unnecessarily to harrow her feelings. He could not face it. But was that, too, selfishness? How could he escape his own inherited character? How think himself outside his father’s traits in him? Whatever way he turned, he ran his head once more against the great blank wall of his ancestral temperament.
Climbing, ever climbing, hour after weary hour, driven by such torturing thoughts, and biting his own arm now and again for relief, he gained the summit. But it took him all day, for the northern face was steeper by far than the usual path, and he clambered up by himself with numerous delays and endless difficulties. On the top, once gained, he rested, weary. He could not scramble down again without some hours of repose. He had no food or covering, and the wind was chilly; still he must stop where he was till his limbs had recovered from their fatigue and stiffness. He was bruised and torn, and he was glad of his hurts: the physical pain seemed to relieve the mental. It acted as a counter-irritant. By this time he had fully walked off his first restless mood, which began to be succeeded by a terrible depression. Evening came on. The peaks grew dark. The white blossoms shone with a strange internal light, as if they were self-luminous. He lay down on a bed of flowering daphne and saxifrage — close Alpine plants swept short by the wind, which made a sort of spring cushion for his head and limbs — and looked up at the sky in listless indifference. His brain was all a blur, his eyes ached wearily. Still, he did not sleep, but mused to himself, in a deadly monotone, “Who visiteth the sins of the fathers on the children unto the third and fourth generation.” At moments of emotion, the Bible words of our childhood recur to us. They come with the sanctity, the solemnity, the power of ancestral echoes.
The night was cold, and he was only a few hundred yards below snow-level. Now and then, to warm himself, he rose and walked about restlessly on the little rocky platform that formed the summit. As he did so, he kept stumbling over loops of root and gnarled stocks of low bushes. His heel struck against stones: he almost fell. Did he lift his feet as high as usual, he wondered? At the thought a chilly shudder came over him all at once. That shuffling gait — that indecision of step — was it not one of the premonitory symptoms of locomotor ataxy?
Not for himself he cared, but for his mother’s sake — and Fede’s. How could he dream, such as he was, of ever marrying Fede?
The night wore away slowly. He lay down again and watched it. Cold dews fell upon him. The stars came out, one by one, moved slowly across the zenith, and westered by degrees till they set behind the rearing white mass of the Himmelberg. He could see its whiteness now by their rays quite easily. Strange, how at moments of overpowering emotion, other thoughts will yet obtrude themselves now and then in shot threads across the woof of consciousness! As he lay there and watched those silent constellations crawl with stealthy pace in measured spaces athwart the face of heaven, he realized, as he had never realized before, why astronomy was the earliest of all the sciences to force itself upon the mind of primitive man — the sleeper under the open, the watcher of the sky through roofless nights of summer and winter. When the early hunter lay awake, even so, and tossed on his uneasy couch, and counted the groups that followed one another with even, unhurrying tramp across the sphere overhead, how could he fail to note the slow sequence of their movements, the invariable order of their secular rising and setting? Hubert absolutely envied those ignorant savages. If only he could have thrown himself back into their place and forgotten these terrible lessons of modern physiology! But no — the doom was pronounced against him — pronounced by those immutable laws of nature, which, like the God of the Hebrews, visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation — though, unlike him, they show no mercy to any, whether he love them or hate them, whether he keep or keep not their mute commandments.
Gradually, morning approached. Hubert knew from the stars in sight that dawn could not be far from reddening the horizon. By this time an alternative feeling possessed him; he was painfully conscious now into what an agony of terror he must have cast his mother. His thoughts rambled in a haze. He rose once more, and by the uncertain light began to grope and feel his way down the treacherous mountain. One false step would solve the insoluble problem. Now was the chance to slip; now was the time for an unintentional and half-unwilling suicide — for he was not quite at the point where he would knowingly and intentionally have flung himself down on the rocks below. From that last resource of hunted lives he shrank even then with real moral repugnance. But if only he could miss his foothold and fall against his will — how easy an outlet such an accident would afford him from an insupportable dilemma!
Dawn primrosed the sky. Once more the white flowers on the slopes glowed as if self-luminous. He clambered recklessly down, clinging to twigs and ledges that seemed all but hopeless. Yet he never missed his foothold. Perhaps the very absence of fear and of the sense of danger which his weariness of life and longing for death gave him may have acted as a preservative. If he had clutched at those slender supports in any terrified or half-hearted fashion they might have yielded and let him go: but the recklessness itself with which he trusted to their flimsy aid made them adequate for his purpose. He swung from them as lightly, as surely, and as easily as a squirrel or a monkey. He had recurred to the level of the boy or the savage, who risks a life which he values little. Day broke as he descended the steep face of rock; at the base of the first great pinnacle he could already see his track with perfect distinctness.
Thenceforth his way was easy. He shuffled and stumbled down much more quickly and surely than he had mounted. It was about nine o’clock by the village church when he found himself once more in the one long gleaming street of Rothenthal.
And he was not dead. And he had cleared up nothing. The situation remained exactly where it was before he started, except that he had no doubt succeeded in casting his mother and Fede into transports of fear for his immediate safety. Selfish, selfish, selfish! No doubt, a son of that unwelcome father!
CHAPTER XI.
THE ENGLISH FOR FEDE.
IN Mrs. Egremont’s salon, about nine o’clock, Cecco, the Marchese’s valet, peeped in at the door, where Rosa was engaged in dusting the furniture.
“Good morning, signorina,” he said in Italian, just poking his head somewhat tentatively round the corner.
“Good morning,” Rosa repeated in her own Teutonic variety of the Tuscan dialect. She was a cosmopolitanized Bernese, and spoke most European languages in a more or less broken fashion.
“The young signore not yet come back?” Cecco inquired with curiosity.
“No,” Rosa answered, playing carelessly with her duster. She pretended to be busy with the objects on the mantelpiece. “He left a note on his table for Number Twenty, to say he had gone up for a climb on the Rothenspitze, and might be out all night. But Number Twenty doesn’t like it, I’m sure of that: she’s been crying all night, I think: her eyes are red and swollen this morning.”
“Something’s gone wrong,” Cecco murmured, venturing in a step or two.
“This is Number Twenty’s salon,” Rosa observed in her coquettish way, looking round at him with a warning glance. “She’ll be out here presently.”
“No, she won’t,” Cecco answered, taking another step, in. “She’s gone out on the terrace, looking for Twenty-Four. There’s something wrong somewhere, as you say, signorina. Our young lady has been crying, too, ever since yesterday morning.”
“It’s odd,” Rosa continued, pausing awhile and fronting him. “I think the horrid old man in Seventy-Two must have something to do with it.”
Cecco dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “You know why we’ve come here?” he said. “There’s a marriage to be arranged between our young lady, the Marchesa Fede, and—”
“And Number Twenty-Four; well, I knew that already, silly,” Rosa answered, brusquely.
“Who told you?” Cecco inquired, drawing yet a step nearer to her.
Rosa flicked her duster. “Who told me?” she answered. “Well, I call that a good one! Do you think I’ve been eight years a chambermaid, and must wait to know things till people tell me?”
“But yesterday morning,” Cecco went on, “Number Twenty-Four and Number Seventy-Two had a talk together, and ever since, then there’s been nothing but misfortunes. The young signore has gone off up the Rothenspitze; our Marchesa’s in tears, the picture of misery; the signore’s mother is crying her eyes out; and my Marchese’s walking up and down in his room, swearing at me all the time as if it were an earthquake in Florence!”
“Hateful old man!” Rosa cried. “I mean Seventy-Two. I should just like to know what he has to do with them. It’s he who has come and made all the bother.”
“Perhaps he’s Twenty’s husband,” the valet suggested, with a gleam of white teeth.
“Oh, no, he’s not,” Rosa answered, still dusting coquettishly at the vases on the mantelpiece, “for I heard madame say something to Twenty-Four — that’s her son — about his father having died at least twenty years ago.”
“But she may have married again, stupid!” Cecco retorted.
“Stupid yourself! If she had, how could she and her son be both called the same name? They’re all of them Egremontes.” She pronounced the word as four syllables, Italian fashion.
“That’s true,” Cecco answered, pondering. “Then perhaps he’s her lover.”
Rosa pouted her lips. “You don’t understand the Inglese,” she answered, candidly.
“That’s Italian manners. The English ladies never have lovers, signore.”
Cecco nodded his head. “True!” he assented, after a pause. “I quite forgot that. Droll manners, those English! One wonders what they live for. You seem very much interested in the family, signorina.”
Rosa tossed her pretty head. “Nobody else in the hotel!” she answered. “One must interest oneself in something. Besides, I rather want Twenty to take me with her as lady’s-maid to England.”
“To England! Ah, well, perhaps then we may meet there, for my Marchese is sure to carry me with him to England for the wedding.”
“But the wedding will be in Florence, won’t it? at Santa Croce or Santa Maria?” the chambermaid suggested.
“Trust my Marchese for that!” Cecco cried. “He’s a man of business, my Marchese, and ‘in the present depressed condition of the wine-market’” — he imitated his master’s most pompous manner—” ten lire to a soldo he’ll put the expense of his daughter’s marriage on Number Twenty’s shoulders.”
Rosa was dusting a photograph on the mantelpiece as he spoke. It was the portrait of a tall and handsome man, close-shaven and clear-featured and very distinguished-looking. It stood in a silver frame. “I think this must be Number Twenty’s gentleman,” she said, after a pause. “She keeps it here always in the middle of the shelf, and she often looks at it. It is no doubt the signore her husband.”
“Oh, no,” Cecco put in. “That man’s name’s not Egremonte. I know him well. He was a friend of my Marchese’s. That’s the great American poet who died at Florence when I was lift at the Minerva. He used often to drop in for our table d’hôte. I remember him well. He was a very great man. He gave me five lire once for posting a letter for him.”
“He’s handsome,” Rosa said, scrutinizing it. “So he was a poet, was he? The signora has his photograph in her bedroom as well, with some verses on the back of it. Perhaps he wrote them. But the verses are in English — or perhaps in American — so I cannot read them.”
“Well, you see, he was a distinguished man,” Cecco replied, full of importance. “Oh, distinguished — but distinguished! His friends were proud of him. A poet’s a poet. When the King of Italy — the Re Galantuomo, I mean, Vittorio Emmanuele, not this man Umberto — when the King came to Florence, the poet was always asked to dine at the Pitti Palace: and when he died, the American ambassador came on purpose from Rome to attend the funeral. So I ask you, was he distinguished?
He must of course have been a very clever poet. Such brains those men have. It makes one dizzy to think of it.”
“Take care,” Rosa said; “I hear the signora coming.”
Cecco retreated with dignity from the room. One moment later Mrs. Egremont and Hubert entered it.
“You can go, Rosa,” Mrs. Egremont said, pale and white, but still with the external calm of an English lady.
“Yes, madame; at your service, madame,” Rosa answered, in her official voice, and beat a retreat, curtseying.
“Mother,” Hubert cried, taking her hand, “I — I have caused you so much trouble. Can you ever forgive me for it?”
Mrs. Egremont sank into a chair. “I knew you would come back, my boy,” she said, with a quivering lip, “unless you slipped by accident. I knew you would not — intentionally — kill yourself.”
“You knew that, mother?”
Mrs. Egremont hesitated. “Yes, I knew it, my boy — but—”
“But what?”
She faltered. “I thought,” she said, after a pause, “you might try — half unawares — to let your foot slip on some damp piece of rock, and be dashed to pieces.”
There was a moment’s silence, then Hubert answered, “It would have been better so, mother.”
Mrs. Egremont flung her arms round him. “No, no, my darling,” she murmured. “For my sake, no — for my sake — and for Fede’s.”
“Where is she?” Hubert asked, trembling.
“In her room.”
“Was she very much frightened?”
“No. She has confidence in you. She knows in her heart you could never desert her.”
Hubert paused again. “Oh, mother!” he cried at last, “I will not reproach you. Who am I to reproach you — I, that creature’s son! But why, oh why did you keep it from me always?”
Mrs. Egremont’s bosom heaved. “I thought it was for the best,” she answered, faltering.
“The truth is best,” Hubert retorted. “I would always know it.”
“The truth is best?” Mrs. Egremont echoed, with a faint tremor of the lips. “Oh, Hubert, do you think so?”
There was agony in her voice — doubt, terror, longing.
“It was kind of you to try, I know,” Hubert went on, not perceiving it. “I see you wanted to shield me — oh, my God, from what? I can’t bear to think of it. From what I am in myself! From knowing the truth about my own inmost nature!”
Mrs. Egremont leant forward. “Hubert, my darling,” she broke out, “for years I have borne this trouble in silence for your sake — and every other trouble. I have done all I could to hide it from you, till the world itself had almost forgotten his very existence.”
Hubert rocked himself to and fro. “But oh, the terrible awakening,” he cried, “from the ideal I had formed in my heart of my lost, dead father! No, I did not form it; you gave it to me, mother.” And he swayed himself moodily.
Mrs. Egremont’s lips trembled as if she must answer something; but with an effort she suppressed it. “Oh, is the truth really best?” she cried at last. “I wonder, I wonder. Is the truth really best? Hubert, I dare not.”
Hubert gazed at her again. “You, my mother!” he cried. “How could you ever bring yourself to marry such a man? How could you so far dishonor your own fine nature? How could you consent to spend one day of your life with him?”
Mrs. Egremont bowed her head. “Hubert,” she cried, “don’t recall to me my shame! Don’t remind me once more of it! Don’t reproach me, my boy! You will crush me if you speak of it.”
“Reproach you!” Hubert answered, with bitterness. “If I reproach you, I reproach myself — I reproach that man whom I know to be my father.”
Mrs. Egremont wrung her hands. “Consider how young I was,” she went on, in an evasive voice. “Only seventeen when I married! My mother was determined to get me off her hands to somebody; and Colonel Egremont, who was a friend of hers, happened to be the first man to make me an offer. Ask Emilius about it all: he will tell you how it was. I was delivered over, an innocent girl, bound hand and foot, to that wretched creature.”
“Mother, mother, if it were I, I would have cut my right hand off first!”
Mrs. Egremont paused. “But you never knew my mother, Hubert,” she answered slowly. “She was a terrible woman, my mother. Hot and cold by turns — passionate and cruel. Everybody who came near her did as she told them. She ordered me to marry Colonel Egremont, and I obeyed her as implicitly as I would have obeyed her if she had ordered me to shut the nursery door. I was hardly out of the nursery, indeed, when she married me off to him. I’ll tell you how it happened. I had been at school — here in Switzerland — so happy, so happy. I came back when I was seventeen, not having seen my mother’s face for three whole years; and, full of delight at finding myself at home again, I rushed into her drawing-room in Hans Place, and flung my arms round her, crying aloud, ‘Mother!’ She was sitting there, as it happened, with one of her admirers, a cabinet minister; she moved in that society, and was a very great lady: and she didn’t like the interruption — for she was a handsome woman still, and couldn’t bear to have a grown-up daughter in the house with her. So she held me off, with our kissing me, and said, in a freezing tone, ‘Your complexion’s ruined! You’re not half as good-looking, child, as you were three years ago. Go up-stairs, and take off your hat, and wash yourself after your journey — and then, perhaps, you’ll be in a fit condition to come down and say how-do-you-do to Lord Winstanley.’ I slunk off, chilled. That same evening she said to me, in a very cold voice, ‘Julia, I must marry you. It shall be Colonel Egremont.’ I didn’t like him, though I didn’t know him, of course, as I know him now; and I said, ‘Oh, mother!’
