The Countess of Albany. Vernon Lee
Читать онлайн книгу.
well-bred people of that day, gave over as a partner for life a half-educated, worldly-ignorant and absolutely will-less young girl of nineteen and a half, who doubtless considered herself extremely fortunate in being chosen for so brilliant a match.
There is a glamour, even for us, connected with the name of Charles Edward Stuart; in his youth he forms a brilliant speck of romantic light in that dull eighteenth century, a spot of light surrounded by the halo of glory of the devotion which he inspired and the enthusiasm which he left behind him. We feel, in a way, grateful to him almost as we might feel grateful to a clever talker, a beautiful woman, a bright day, as to something pleasing and enlivening to our fancy. But the brilliant effect which has pleased us is like some gorgeous pageant connected with the worship of a stupid and ferocious divinity; nay, rather, if we let our thoughts dwell upon the matter, if we remember how, while the prisons and ship-holds were pestilent with the Jacobite men and women penned up like cattle in obscene promiscuity, while the mutilated corpses were lying still green, piled up under the bog turf of Culloden, while so many of the bravest men of Scotland, who had supplicated the Young Pretender not to tempt them to a hopeless enterprise, were cheerfully mounting the scaffold "for so sweet a prince," Charles Edward was dancing at Versailles in his crimson silk dress and diamonds, with his black-eyed boast the eldest-born Princess of France. Nay, worse, if we remember how the man, for whose love and whose right so much needless agony had been expended, let himself become a disgrace to the very memory of the men who had died for him: if we bear all this in mind, Charles Edward seems to become a mere irresponsible and fated representative of some evil creed; the idol, at first fair-shapen and smiling, then hideous and loathsome, to which human sacrifices are brought in solemnity; a glittering idol of silver, or a foul idol of rotten wood, but without nerves and mind to perceive the weeping all around, the sop of blood at its feet. And now, after the sacrifice of so many hundreds of brave men to this one man, comes the less tragic, less heroic, perfectly legitimate and correct sacrifice to him of a pretty young woman, not brave and not magnanimous, but very fit for innocent enjoyment and very fit for honourable love.
CHAPTER III.
REGINA APOSTOLORUM.
Charles Edward had refrained from drink, or at least refrained from any excesses, in honour of his marriage. Perhaps the notion that France was again taking him up, a notion well-founded since France had bid him marry and have an heir, and the recollection of the near miscarriage of all his projects, thanks to having presented himself, a year before, to the French Minister so drunk that he could neither speak nor be spoken to, perhaps the old hope of becoming after all a real king, had turned the Pretender into a temporarily-reformed character. Or, perhaps, weary of the life of melancholy solitude, of debauched squalor, of the moral pig-stye in which he had been rotting so many years, the idea of decency, of dignity, of society, of a wife and children and friends, may have made him capable of a strong resolution. Perhaps, also, the unfamiliar, wonderful presence of a beautiful and refined young woman, of something to adore, or at least to be jealous and vain of, may have wakened whatever still remained of the gallant and high-spirited Polish nature in this morose and besotten old Stuart. Be this as it may, Charles Edward, however degraded, was able to command himself when he chose, and, for one reason or another, he did choose to command himself and behave like a tolerably decent man and husband during the first few months following on his marriage. Besides the redness of his face, the leaden suffused look of his eyes, the vague air of degradation all about him, there was perhaps nothing, at first, that revealed to Louise, Queen of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, that her husband was a drunkard and well-nigh a maniac. Engaging he certainly could not have been, however much he tried (and we know he tried hard) to show his full delight at having got so charming a little wife; indeed, it is easy to imagine that if anything might inspire even a properly educated and high-born young Flemish or German lady of the eighteenth century with somewhat of a sense of loathing, it must have been the assiduities and endearments of a man such as Charles Edward. But Louise of Stolberg had doubtless absorbed, from her mother, from her older fellow-canonesses, nay, from the very school-girls in the convent where she had been educated, all proper views, negative and positive, on the subject of marriage; nor must we give to a girl who was probably still too much of a child, too much of an unromantic little woman of the world, undeserved pity on account of degradation which she had most probably, as yet, not sufficient moral nerve to appreciate. Her husband was old, he was ugly, he was not attractive; he may have been tiresome and rather loathsome in his constant attendance; he may even have smelt of brandy every now and then; but as marriages had been invented in order to give young women a position in the world, husbands were not expected to be much more than drawbacks to the situation; and as to the sense of life-long dependence upon an individual, as to the desire for love and sympathy, it was still too early in the eighteenth century, and perhaps, also, too early in the life of a half-Flemish, half-German girl, very childish still in aspect, and brought up in the worldly wisdom of a noble chapter of canonesses, to expect anything of that kind.
There must, however, from the very beginning, have been something unreal and uncanny in the girl's situation. The huge old palace, crammed with properties of dead Stuarts and Sobieskis, with its royal throne and daïs in the ante-room, its servants in the royal liveries of England, must have been full of rather lugubrious memories. Here James III. of England and VIII. of Scotland had moped away his bitter old age; here, years and years ago, Charles Edward's mother, the beautiful and brilliant grand-daughter of John Sobieski, had pined away, bullied and cajoled back from the convent in which she had taken refuge, perpetually outraged by the violence of her husband and the insolence of his mistress; it was an ill-omened sort of place for a bride. Around extended the sombre and squalid Rome of the second half of the eighteenth century, with its huge ostentatious rococo palaces and churches, its straggled, black and filthy streets, its ruins still embedded in nettles and filth, its population seemingly composed only of monks and priests (for all men of the middle-classes wore the black dress and short hair of the clergy), or of half-savage peasants and workmen, bearded creatures, in wonderful embroidered vests and scarves, looking exceedingly like brigands, as Bartolomeo Pinelli etched them even some thirty years later. A town where every doorway was a sewer by day and a possible hiding-place for thieves by night; where no woman durst cross the street alone after dusk, and no man dared to walk home unattended after nine or ten; where, driving about in her gilded state-coach of an afternoon, the Pretender's bride must often have met a knot of people conveying a stabbed man (the average gave more than one assassination per day) to the nearest barber or apothecary, the blood of the murdered man mingling, in the black ooze about the rough cobble-stones over which the coaches jolted, with the blood trickling from the disembowelled sheep hanging, ghastly in their fleeces, from the hooks outside the butchers' and cheesemongers' shops; or returning home at night from the opera, amid the flare of the footmen's torches, must have heard the distant cries of some imprudent person struggling in the hands of marauders; or, again, on Sundays and holidays have been stopped by the crowd gathered round the pillory where some too easy-going husband sat crowned with a paper-cap in a hail-storm of mud and egg-shells and fruit-peelings, round the scaffold where some petty offender was being flogged by the hangman, until the fortunate appearance of a clement cardinal or the rage of the sympathising mob put a stop to the proceedings. Barbarous as we remember the Rome of the Popes, we must imagine it just a hundred times more barbarous, more squalid, picturesque, filthy, and unsafe if we would know what it was a hundred years ago.
But in this barbarous Rome there were things more beautiful and wonderful to a young Flemish lady of the eighteenth century than they could possibly be to us, indifferent and much-cultured creatures of the nineteenth century, who know that most art is corrupt and most music trashy. The private galleries of Rome were then in process of formation; pictures which had hung in dwelling-rooms were being assembled in those beautiful gilded and stuccoed saloons, with their out-look on to the cloisters of a court, or the ilex tops or orange espaliers of a garden, filled with the faint splash of the fountains outside, the spectral silvery chiming of musical clocks, where, unconscious of the thousands of beings who would crowd in there armed with guide-books and opera-glasses in the days to come, only stray foreigners were to be met, foreigners