Eustace and Hilda (90 page)

The astigmatism which was disturbing Eustace's mental vision now suddenly communicated itself to his feet. They faltered, they knew they were on the wrong tack. He looked up. What was this campo with the terra-cotta-washed, round-apsed church, and the trees and the sweeping crescent of houses that ended in a restaurant covered with a vine? San Giacomo dell'Orio, the street sign told him. He was out of his way, much too far to the left. A panic seized him, an access of train-fever intensified a thousand-fold. He started to run. Hilda was asking for him, he could almost hear her voice.

As often happens in Venice, his destination, which had been so coy with him, suddenly gave itself up, and he found himself face to face with the faded blue-green door of the garden of the Palazzo Contarini-Falier. A short cut! This door was always kept locked, but in an impulse of relief that was half-way to happiness he pushed it, and behold it opened. He had never been in the garden, no one ever went, and though he had often looked at it from above, from the Gothic window of the salone and from Lady Nelly's sitting-room, from which it was accessible by a stone staircase, his mind had merely made a vague image which he had never had the curiosity to clarify.

The door slammed to behind him, and he looked round, startled. The high walls gave the place an air of secrecy, and Eustace could see no footprints on the cindery, earthy path. It looked utterly uncared for. Yet someone must come here, for on his left, confined in a tumbled-down enclosure which might have been the ruins of a room, was a colony of chickens, grave, listless, yet expectant; somebody must feed them, one of the servants, perhaps, in her spare time. Strewn about were objects of utility from which the usefulness had departed: an old bicycle tyre, a strange thing to see in Venice, and equally strange, the spokes of a wheel. Here were some rusty curtain rods, with the rings still on them; there a great iron tub full of water which might recently have been used for washing, for the ground around it was wet. Farther on Eustace had to pick his way through a litter of large stone objects dumped here and forgotten. He noticed the branching corner of a well-head, beautifully carved, and St. Mark's mild lion in plaster, clumsily moulded but entire except for its tail. Two thin, wild-eyed cats which had been lurking there fled at his approach.

Yet the impression was not entirely sordid, for in the lanky chicken-legged hedges one could trace the original formal layout; unpruned rose trees sprawled on the walls, with here and there a late-flowering bloom; a pergola supported an immense wistaria on stone columns with stiff-leaved capitals; and built into the wall, but projecting over it in casual Italian fashion, rose a grand Palladian arch. Some of the hedges grew to the height of a man, forming square compartments; green solitudes haunted by an age-old privacy. They led one into another almost like segments of a maze, and in the last he came upon a statue that made him jump, so life-like was it.

The garden must once have been much larger, he supposed. The combination of squalor and splendour, so typically Venetian, fascinated him, and by its likeness to his own case began to draw some of the soreness from his thoughts. He wandered on, his footsteps getting slower, towards the great bulk of the palace which blocked the end of the garden like a cliff. On this the architect had been sparing with ornament; plain spaces of green-grey plaster soared up, relieved only by round-headed windows whose peeling shutters, closed against the heat of the day, had a blind, forbidding look. He began to experience that unaccountable unwillingness to go farther which had visited him once at Highcross Hill and again at the park gate of Anchorstone Hall, and his heart began to pound. But he could not go back, for the gate was locked; he could not climb out, for the walls were high; he must go forward. Hilda was asking for him.

Now he could see, a little to his left, the upper part of the stone staircase, and at its summit the open door which gave on the vestibule of Lady Nelly's room. A short ascent, compared to many Eustace had made, and a gentle gradient, but he shrank from it, and what was his relief, as he passed a clump of bamboos and the full extent of the staircase came into view, to see, stooping down, perhaps in search of something she had dropped, a woman whose dark clothes and self-effacing aspect made him think at once of Lady Nelly's maid. This, then, was the dryad of the garden, this prosaic middle-aged woman, whom the chickens relied on for their food.

He coughed so as not to startle her, and evidently she heard him, for though she did not turn round she stood up, raising her arms in a wide gesture that might have been calling down a blessing or a curse. Then her hands fell to her sides, and slowly she began to mount the stairs.

Eustace followed at a discreet distance, for he did not want to seem to be pressing on her, and when he reached the door of the little vestibule she had disappeared, into Lady Nelly's room, he supposed. He went through into the great sala and paused on the threshold to stare, so changed was it from what he remembered. Nearly all the furniture had gone, except for the group of chairs by the column where they sat before and after dinner; the room could hardly have looked barer on the day the builders left it. He strained his eyes to take in more details, but vainly, for the dusky light that came from either end scarcely met in the middle. He too felt unfurnished, unlighted, and alone, and with a sigh he was crossing the floor to where the main stairway began its second flight when he saw the maid again, standing on the first step, with the resigned air of one accustomed to wait on other people's convenience. The moment his eyes rested on her she began to move, and this time he realised that he was consciously following her. She was wearing a black shawl, a costume she might have borrowed from the Venetian women, and like them too she wore felt slippers, for her feet made no sound on the mosaic pavement.

The door of his room at the far end of the upper gallery stood open. Puzzled, he thought, ‘Why does she take me to my own room?' but when he had followed her in he saw why: it was no longer his room, every trace of his occupancy had disappeared. At once he felt an alien, an intruder; the very furniture with which he had lived for three months had the air of waiting for a new tenant. But the letter, the letter! Looking neither to right nor left, he tiptoed across to the grey-green writing-table. It was open and empty, only a thin sprinkling of pink dust showed where his paper-weight had lain. Then, and not till then, he let his eyes roam around the unremembering room, unconsciously trying to recover from it the self that he had enjoyed there.

Could Lady Nelly have given orders to pack his things; were they already standing in a little heap, hardly more noticeable than horse-dung on a road, in the great entrata, where even Lady Morecambe's cabin trunk and her fleet of white suitcases had made so poor a showing? Had she leaped at this chance to be rid of him? ‘Her maid will tell me,' he thought; but the maid was not there: she had left him to draw his own conclusions.

Yet when he went out into the gallery, closing the door behind him, she was there after all, standing motionless with her back to him, her head bowed. “Can you tell me——?” he began, but she did not turn round, she merely moved away from him, like a taciturn guide who will not or cannot answer questions.

He followed her to the far end of the gallery to another door, standing half open, from behind which came the strong glare of electric light and the sound of someone moving about. He knocked and went in, and there was the maid on her hands and knees laying out his shoes under a table. He could only see her back and the soles of her felt slippers. ‘How quickly she has got to work!' he thought, and then she heard him and turned, and he saw at once that it was Elvira, the dark, pretty housemaid, Elvira. Her face wreathed in smiles, she scrambled to her feet.

“Ah, signore!” she exclaimed, “Scusi tanto”—but the Signora Contessa, molto, molto dispiacente, had told her to move his things, tutta la sua roba—because of the sposi, the newly married couple, who were coming to-morrow for the grande festa. “Tutta la casa sarà piena, piena.” Pressing her knuckles together, she indicated that nowhere would there be an inch of room. “Camera stretta ma carina, non è vero?” she went on chattily, measuring the room with her eye.

Lady Nelly had said he would be like Truth at the bottom of a well. It was certainly a narrow room, compared with his old one, and the two tall windows emphasised its height. He was not so sure that it was pretty. The pale pink pattern round the cornice might have been stencilled on, and the design in the centre of the ceiling was flamboyant and cheap, the kind of thing you might expect to find in an hotel bedroom, recently done up.

The maid followed his eyes anxiously. “You like?” she said.

Eustace was touched by her solicitude for his comfort, and the presence of a human being suddenly seemed very precious. “But what have you done with your shawl?” he asked her in Italian.

“My shawl?” she repeated; “but I have no shawl. Even outside I do not use the shawl, only the older women use it.”

“But you were wearing one just now,” said Eustace, “when you showed me the way here.”

She gazed at him with round eyes. “But—scusi—the signore is mistaken. I did not show him the way. I have been in this room for a little half-hour—una mezzoretta—arranging the signore's things.”

“Ah, then it was the Countess's maid; I thought it must have been.”

“Ma no, scusi—Mees Simmonds is out till seven o'clock. Besides, she is English, she does not wear the shawl.”

Eustace's tired mind wanted to shelve the problem, but could not quite dismiss it, and he said casually, “I saw a lady in black in the garden and she brought me up here.”

Elvira's eyes goggled again, and the hairbrushes she was holding slipped from her fingers to the floor.

“In the garden, signore?”

“Yes, she was looking for something.”

“And she was dressed in black?”

“Yes.”

“And she came into the house?”

“Yes.”

Elvira's whole being seemed to contract with terror.

“Allora, signore, ha visto la larva!” she gasped.

“La larva?” echoed Eustace.

“Si, si, la larva! La larva! E porta sfortuna! Aie, aie!” And with two piercing little screams she rushed from the room.

Eustace dropped into a chair. He had seen the larva, and it brought bad luck. But how could a caterpillar bring bad luck? Anyhow, he had seen no caterpillar. Had the woman in the garden been looking for a caterpillar, perhaps? Larva, larva, it was a Latin word. Groping among his classical studies, his memory brought out something pale with the milky glow of phosphorescence, something in an incomplete, provisional state of being.

Now it came to him. Larva was a ghost. He had seen a ghost.

W
HEN THE
snarl of the word ‘larva' ceased to tear at his mind, the silence bit into the sore place like an acid. Through the door Elvira had left open he peered out into the gallery. It was nearly dark, but he could see clouds scudding past the windows. He turned back, shutting the door. Elvira had left her job half finished. His possessions were lying all about—on the narrow divan bed, to which a mosquito net had not yet been fixed, on the dressing-table, on the floor. What matter?—it would have been waste of time to tidy them when to-morrow he must pack them. Perhaps Elvira would never come back. His mind followed her into the street bawling ‘Larva! Larva!' Perhaps all the servants would leave.

He opened his largest suitcase, and found inside the newspaper his shoes had been wrapped in when he came. He smoothed the paper out. The date was July 5th, and he remembered some of the headlines. The heaviest things should go at the bottom, but he could not pack the shoes he was wearing. Which should he leave out to travel in? His mind would not deal with the question, so he decided to shelve it and pack his books instead. They were all together on a flimsy table hardly large enough to hold them. He must leave out two at least to read in the train. Which two? Stepping over his suitcase, he approached the table, and it was then he saw the letter. But the handwriting was Stephen's, not Aunt Sarah's. He felt at once disappointed and reprieved, and opened the envelope without any of his habitual hesitation.