Fantasy

II.

II.The fan of Artemisia Minichini, made of a large sheet of manuscript, waved noisily to and fro.

“Minichini, you disturb the Professor,” said Friscia, the assistant teacher, without raising her eyes from her crochet work.

“Friscia, you don’t feel the heat?” returned Minichini, insolently.

“No.”

“You are lucky to be so insensible.”

In the class room, where the Tricolor young ladies were taking their lesson in Italian history, it was very hot. There were two windows opening upon the garden, a door leading to the corridor, three rows of benches, and twenty-four pupils. On a high raised step stood the table and armchair of the Professor. The fans waved hither and thither, some vivaciously, some languidly. Here and there a head bent over its book as if weighted with drowsiness. Ginevra Avigliana stared at the Professor, nodding as if in approval, though her face expressed entire absence of mind. Minichini had put down her fan, opened her pince-nez, and fixed it impudently upon the Professor’s face. With her nose tip-tilted, and a truant lock of hair curling on her forehead, she laughed her silent laugh that so irritated the teachers. The Professor explained the lesson in a low voice. He was small, spare, and pitiable. He might have been about two-and-thirty, but his emaciated face, whose dark colouring had yellowed with the pallor of some long illness, proclaimed him a convalescent. A big scholarly head surmounting the body of a dwarf, a wild thick mane in which some white hairs were already visible, proud yet shy eyes, a small dirty black beard, thinly planted towards the thin cheeks, completed his sad and pensive ugliness.

He spoke without gesture, his eyes downcast; occasionally his right hand moving so slightly. Its shadow on the wall seemed to belong to a skeleton, it was so thin and crooked. He proceeded slowly, picking his words. These girls intimidated him, some because of their intelligence, others because of their impertinence, others simply because of their s*x. His scholastic austerity was perturbed by their shining eyes, by their graceful and youthful forms; their white garments formed a kind of mirage before his eyes. A pungent scent diffused itself throughout the class, although perfumes were prohibited; whence came it? And, at the end of the third bench, Giovanna Casacalenda, who paid not the slightest attention, sat, with half-closed eyes, furiously nibbling a rose. Here in front, Lucia Altimare, with hair falling loose about her neck, one arm hanging carelessly over the bench, resting her brow against her hand and hiding her eyes, looked at the Professor through her fingers; every now and then she pressed her handkerchief to her too crimson lips, as if to mitigate their feverishness. The Professor felt upon him the gaze that filtered through her fingers; while, without looking at her, he could see Giovanna Casacalenda tearing the rose to pieces with her little teeth. He remained apparently imperturbable, still discoursing of Carmagnola and the conspiracy of Fiesco, addressing himself to the tranquil face of Caterina Spaccapietra, who pencilled rapid notes in her copy-book.

“What are you writing, Pentasuglia?” asked the teacher Friscia, who had been observing the latter for some time.

“Nothing,” replied Pentasuglia, reddening.

“Give me that scrap of paper.”

“What for? There is nothing on it.”

“Give me that scrap of paper.”

“It is not a scrap of paper,” said Minichini, audaciously, taking hold of it as if to hand it to her. “It is one, two, three, four, five, twelve useless fragments....”

To save her schoolfellow, she had torn it to shreds. There was silence in the class: they trembled for Minichini. The teacher bent her head, tightened her thin lips, and picked up her crochet again as if nothing had happened. The Professor appeared to take no notice of the incident, as he looked through his papers, but his mind must have been inwardly disturbed. A flush of youthful curiosity made him wonder what those girls were thinking of—what they scribbled in their little notes—for whom their smiles were meant, as they looked at the plaster bust of the King—what they thought when they drew the tricolor scarves round their waists. But the ghastly face and false grey eyes of Cherubina Friscia, the governess, frightened him.

“Avigliana, say the lesson.”

The girl rose and began rapidly to speak of the Viscontis, like a well-trained parrot. When asked to give a few historical comments, she made no reply; she had not understood her own words.

“Minichini, say the lesson.”

“Professor, I don’t know it.”

“And why?”

“Yesterday was Sunday, and we went out, so I could not study.”

The Professor made a note in the register; the young lady shrugged her shoulders.

“Casacalenda?”

This one made no answer. She was gazing with intense earnestness at her white hands, hands that looked as if they were modelled in wax.

“Casacalenda, will you say the lesson?”

Opening her great eyes as if she were dazed, she began, stumbling at every word, puzzled, making one mistake upon another: the Professor prompted, and she repeated, with the winning air of a strong, beautiful, young animal: she neither knew nor understood, nor was ashamed, maintaining her sculpturesque placidity, moistening her savage Diana-like lips, contemplating her pink nails. The Professor bent his head in displeasure, not daring to scold that splendid stupid creature, whose voice had such enchanting modulations.

He made two or three other attempts, but the class, owing to the preceding holiday, had not studied. This was the explanation of the flowers, the perfumes, and the little notes: the twelve hours’ liberty had upset the girls. Their eyes were full of visions, they had seen the world, yesterday. He drew himself together, perplexed; a sense of mingled shame and respect kept every mouth closed. How he loved that science of history! His critical acumen measured its widest horizons; his was a vast ideal, and he suffered in having to offer crumbs of it to those pretty, aristocratic, indolent girls, who would have none of it. Still young, he had grown old and grey in arduous study; and now, behold—gay and careless youth, choosing rather to live than to know, rose in defiance against him. Bitterness welled up to his lips and went out towards those creatures, thrilling with life, and contemptuous of his ideal: bitterness, in that he could not, like them, be beautiful and vigorous, and revel in heedlessness, and be beloved. Anguish rushed through his veins, from his heart, and poisoned his brain, that he should have to humiliate his knowledge before those frivolous, scarcely human girls. But the gathering storm was held back; and nothing of it was perceptible save a slight flush on his meagre cheekbones.

“Since none of you have studied,” he said slowly, in a low voice, “none of you can have done the composition.”

“Altimare and I have done it,” answered Caterina Spaccapietra. “We did not go home,” she added apologetically, to avoid offending her friends.

“Then you read, Spaccapietra; the subject is, I think, Beatrice di Tenda.”

“Yes; Beatrice di Tenda.”

Spaccapietra stood up and read, in her pure, slow voice:—

“Ambition had ever been the ruling passion of the Viscontis of Milan, who shrank from naught that could minister to the maintenance of their sovereign power. Filippo Maria, son of Gian Galeazzo, who had succeeded his brother, Gian Galeazzo, differed in no way from his predecessors. For the love of gain, this Prince espoused Beatrice di Tenda, the widow of a Condottiere, a soldier of fortune, a virtuous and accomplished woman of mature age. She brought her husband in dowry the dominions of Tortona, Novara, Vercelli and Alessandria; but he tired of her as soon as he had satisfied his thirst for wealth. He caused her to be accused of unfaithfulness to her wifely duty, with a certain Michele Orombello, a simple squire. Whether the accusation was false, or made in good faith, whether the witnesses were to be relied upon or not, Beatrice di Tenda was declared guilty, and, with Michele Orombello, mounted the scaffold in the year 1418, which was the forty-eighth of her life, she having been born in 1370.”

Caterina had folded up her paper, and the Professor was still waiting; two minutes elapsed.

“Is there no more?”

“No.”

“Really, is that all?”

“All.”

“It is a very meagre composition, Spaccapietra. It is but the bare narrative of the historical fact, as it stands in the text-book. Does not the hapless fate of Beatrice inspire you with any sympathy?”

“I don’t know....” murmured the young scholar, pale with emotion.

“Yet you are a woman.... It so happens that I had chosen a theme which suggests the manifestation of a noble impulse; say of pity, or contempt for the false accusation. But like this, the story turns to mere chronology. The composition is too meagre. You have no imagination, Spaccapietra.”

“Yes, Professor,” replied the young girl, submissively, as she took her seat again, while tears welled to her eyes.

“Let us hear Altimare.”

Lucia appeared to start out of a lethargy. She sought for some time among her papers, with an ever increasing expression of weariness. Then, in a weak inaudible voice, she began to read, slowly, dragging the syllables, as if overpowered by an invincible lassitude....

“Louder, Altimare.”

“I cannot, Professor.”

And she looked at him with such melancholy eyes that he repented of having made the remark. Again, she touched her parched lips with her handkerchief and continued:—

“... through the evil lust of power. He was Filippo Maria Visconti, of a noble presence, with the eye of a hawk, of powerful build, and ever foremost in the saddle. The maidens who watched him pass, clad in armour under the velvet coat, on the breastpiece of which was broidered the wily, fascinating serpent, the crest of the Lords of Visconti, sighed as they exclaimed: 'How handsome he is!’ But under this attractive exterior, as is ever the case in this melancholy world, where appearance is but part of mise-en-scène of life, he hid a depraved soul. Oh! gentle, loving women, trust not him who flutters round you with courteous manner, and words that charm, and protestations of exquisite sentiment; he deceives you. All is vanity, all is corruption, all is ashes! None learnt this lesson better than the hapless Beatrice di Tenda, whose tale I am about to tell you. This youthful widow was of unblemished character and matchless beauty; fair was her hair of spun gold, soft were her eyes of a blue worthy to reflect the firmament; her skin was as dazzling white as the petals of a lily. Her first marriage with Facino Cane could not have been a happy one. He, a soldier of fortune, fierce, blood-thirsty, trained to the arms, the wine, and the rough speech of martial camps, could scarcely have been a man after Beatrice’s heart. Woe to those marriages, in which one consort neither understands nor appreciates the mind of the other. Woe to those marriages in which the man ignores the mystic poetry, the mysterious sentiments of the feminine heart! These be the unblessed unions, with which alas! our corrupt and suffering modern society teems. Facino Cane died. His widow shed bitter tears over him, but her virgin heart beat quicker when she first met the valorous yet malefic Filippo Maria Visconti. Her face turned as pale as Luna’s when she drags her weary way along the starred empyrean. And she loved him with all the ardour of her stored-up youth, with the chastity of a pious soul loving the Creator in the created, blending divine with human love. Beatrice, pure and beautiful, wedded Filippo Maria for love: Filippo Maria, black soul that he was, wedded Beatrice for greed of money. For a short time the august pair were happy on their ducal throne. But the hymeneal roses were worm-eaten: in the dewy grass lay hidden the perfidious serpent, perfidious emblem of the most perfidious Visconti. No sooner had he obtained possession of the riches of Beatrice, than Filippo Maria wearied of her, as might be expected of a man of so hard a heart and of such depraved manners. He had, besides, formed an infamous connection with a certain Agnese del Maino, one of the most vicious of women; and more than ever he was possessed of the desire to rid himself of his wife. There lived at the Court of the Visconti, a simple squire named Michele Orombello, a young troubadour, a poet, who had dared to raise his eyes to his august mistress. But the noble woman did not reciprocate his passion, although the faithlessness and treachery of Filippo Maria caused her the greatest unhappiness, and almost justified reprisals; she was simply courteous to her unfortunate adorer. When Filippo Maria saw how matters stood, he at once threw Michele Orombello and his chaste consort into prison, accusing them of treason. Torture was applied to Beatrice, who bore it bravely and maintained her innocence. Michele Orombello, being younger and perchance weaker to combat pain, or because he was treacherously advised that he might thereby save Beatrice, made a false confession. The judges, vile slaves of Filippo Maria, and tremblingly submissive to his will, condemned that most ill-starred of women and her miserable lover to die on the scaffold. The saintly woman ascended it with resignation; embracing the crucifix whereon the Redeemer agonised and died for our sins. Then, perceiving the young squire, who, weeping desperately, went with her to death, she cried: 'I forgive thee, Michele Orombello;’ and he made answer: 'I proclaim thee the purest of wives!’ But it availed not; the Prince’s will must needs be carried out; the axe struck off the squire’s dark head. Beatrice cried: 'Gesù Maria;’ and the axe felled the blonde head too. A pitiable spectacle and full of horror for those assembled! Yet none dared to proclaim the infamy of the mighty Filippo Maria Visconti. Thus it ever is in life, virtue is oppressed, and vice triumphs. Only before the Eternal Judge is justice, only before that God of mercy who has said: 'I am the resurrection and the life.’”

A profound silence ensued. The pupils were embarrassed, and looked furtively at each other. Caterina gazed at Lucia with frightened astonished eyes. Lucia remained standing, pale, panting, contemptuous, with twitching lips. The Professor, deep in thought, held his peace.

“The composition is very long, Altimare,” he said at last. “You have too much imagination.”

Then silence once more—and the dry malicious hissing voice of Cherubina Friscia, “Give me that composition, Altimare.”

All trembled, seized by an unknown terror.