The pot of basil

She was married early in September. When she had been told that it was to be, she had simply acquiesced, quite quietly, quite gravely. “To make him happy”—she had not forgotten the wistful words—almost his last—and the withholding of the sign was proof that the sacred injunction was not rescinded. If his dear ghost still held her to that sacrifice, there must be reasons for it hidden among the inscrutable silences. Perhaps that way alone lay the end she so wearied for. If this poor residue from all which exalted life above its material perishableness was enough for Joseph’s content, she valued it too little to grudge it him. Let him be happy with it, if he would and could.

And so she was married, quite quietly, as befitted her mourning, in the ducal palace at Parma. The ceremony was performed by proxy, the Prince of Liechtenstein representing his royal master, and immediately following it the new archduchess set out for Vienna. It is enough for our remaining purpose to record the whole-heartedness of her reception there by that susceptible young man, her husband, who had only once before in his life seen the face which was now to awaken in him the liveliest emotions of love. Isabella much more than justified the archduke’s earlier impression of her: he found her beautiful and desirable beyond all expectation, and he laid his soul then and there at her feet, with assurances of its eternal dedication to her love and service.

Eternity was a big, sad word in that connection of expediency, and tragic, because it could never be more than a one-sided compact. She had nothing but a temporal gift to offer him in exchange for it, but she lent to that what grace she could through the pathetic sweetness of its giving. He deserved only kindness of her; he had had no voice, no hand, no knowledge, in the deed which had been his gain. And what a little gain, after all! It seemed hardly worth all this plotting, all this wreck of lives and ruin of souls to end on such a paltry acquisition. It were as though a party of musicians had fought for the possession of a delicate instrument, with which in the meantime they had been belabouring one another.

It is said that on the bridal evening, when left alone together in their room, the young wife turned to her husband with some expression of this thought upon her lips. She had been looking from the window, into the blown star-lit darknesses of a night such as that which had imprinted for ever its death-shadow upon her soul, and the emotion of that piteous memory was alive and terrible in her. She looked into his face, an intense and appealing sadness in her own, and clasping her hands as if in prayer, spoke to him:

“I will try to be to you a good wife, during the three years we shall remain together.”

“How?” he answered, amazed: “what is this arbitrary limit?”

“I do not know,” she said, sighing: “only something tells me it will not be longer.”

What had he to do, then, but, in his exultant happiness, laugh to scorn her fears, take her to his impassioned arms, declare the immortality of their union? She was overwrought, he said, oppressed by fancies born of change and recent sorrow. In the creative fire of love all those dismal spectres would pass consumed, leaving new life and hope to spring from out their ashes.

She shook her head; but he would not be gainsaid. The confidence of the autocrat was in him; he read in her mood nothing but the diffidence of a young soul temporarily overweighted by its own aggrandisement. There is no reason for supposing that he knew anything whatever about the real state of affairs; there is every reason for surmising that the truth would have been jealously withheld from him. He never once, in after months, alluded to Tiretta, or appeared to have kept in mind the part played by that romantic agent of his in the sequence of events. It is possible that, even had a hint of the truth been conveyed to him, he would have scorned to attach any consequence to the story. The cicisbeo of his day was almost as formal an institution in society as her ladyship’s pet lap-dog or confessore; sometimes, even, he was solemnly inducted in family conclave; and not seldom he was quite the most harmless member of the domestic circle. The first condescension of an archduke and destined emperor was sufficient to sweep all such ephemeral fancies into oblivion.

Well, if princes must be princes in these matters, Joseph had got, let it be admitted, the best that he deserved. I think so myself. I feel a little impatient, I must confess, of that enamoured philosopher, who, having sent as it were a professional appraiser to value his fancy, could behave to her, when acquired, as if she were the prize of his most single and determined devotion.

But he was really devoted to her—even passionately so; and if she repaid him with duty rather than affection, he was not the man or the philosopher to complain. He knew well enough that there must always be something lacking in unions of policy, which nothing but a miracle of chance could make soul-unions; and Joseph could not be unjust or unreasonable—save, perhaps, when he regarded the quality of his own reason and found it pre-eminent. So he was satisfied to remain the positive pole of love to his wife’s negative.

For the rest, the young archduchess did all, or almost all, that was expected of her. She was a dutiful wife, a gentle mistress, a timely mother; and if the one babe she bore to her husband was of her own sex, not her disinclination to oblige, but nature, was responsible for the reservation.

Infanticide, by unsophisticated girls, is often due to terror and repulsion over the totally unforeseen. On a higher plane we find the fruit of lovelessness regarded by its bearer with cold alien eyes. That is far too harsh a description of Isabella’s attitude towards her little infant; yet the thing seemed oddly strange to her, something queerly remote from her own knowledge and volition—a changeling, as it were, that had been deposited by her while she slept. It attracted her; she was curious about it; but in a detached way. It gratified her most in its relation to the task she had set herself, and which was now accomplished. She had given a potential heir to the throne; she had made him happy. Surely, now, she might look with confident eyes to her release. This poor physical residue of her had played out its part.

It had, in truth; and so we approach the end. There is no need to linger over it, now the little ground is cleared, and the other actors in the drama are put away like inessential shadows into the background. It is the passion of the moonlit garden once more—the rapture and the meeting.

It had been evident that the young wife was drooping; it had been increasingly evident since the birth of her child. Always frail and delicate, marriage, it seemed, had never with her, as with some fragile constitutions, stayed the tendency to decline, but had rather confirmed and increased it. Something was gone from her, indeed, which no vital force of love could replace. She seemed to fade where she stood, like a spent lily. As the months drew on she grew weaker and still weaker. Her husband saw, but without understanding. It was a transient indisposition in his eyes. Autocrats are incredulous of death. One night at the opera she fainted. Some moment in it had stabbed her with a too-poignant memory. There was consternation then; but she rallied—yet never to the ground she had lost, and was still steadily yielding. She grew to be the shadow of herself; yet not so much the shadow as the phantasm. Her beauty did not go, nor her young symmetry; only it was strangely refined, as if some light within shone through dissolving walls.

And yet she was never but gentle and lovely-sweet with all; very patient, uncomplaining, but always without merriment or laughter.

And so one day there dawned upon her the third anniversary of her lover’s death.

On that day she would not look upon her basil. For a week past she had put it aside where her eyes could not encounter it. There had been signs, which yet the wild longing in her heart could not find courage to verify. Now she dared not put them to the test; she dared not risk the ruin of her hopes until the last possible moment of endurance.

It came with the dying day. In the last lingering hour of light she hurried towards the spot. Something greeted her even in the instant of her approach—something like a sweet hand held out. She gasped; she gave one little cry of rapture so intense that God in His high place must have wept to hear it. The little bush was mealed over with fragrant flowers as thick as snow.

That night she was to sup with the archduke privately in the Schönbrunn palace. As she came in to him, he seemed conscious of some change in her which was like a startling revelation and recovery. It was the nixie of the pool he saw again—girlish, radiant, captivating. Her cheeks were like fresh roses; she sparkled over with merriment and audacity. A little staggered at first, he rallied quickly to the delight of the challenge, and responded buoyantly to her mood. He was jubilant in what he believed to be the first definite sign of her restored health. That, and not that alone. Was it conceivable that he detected here a hint that she might come to be to him something that she had never quite been yet—something which he only seemed now to recognise for the first time as a fully achieved desire, a fully satisfied hunger, a perfect realisation of a dream which had hitherto lacked its best fulfilment? He thought he would sacrifice much philosophy, much pride to ensure that gain. To be to her at last not the husband but the lover! As soon as possible, that they might be alone, he dismissed the attendants.

It was a lovely moon-drowned night. The long windows of the room opened upon wide spaces of tranquil garden, whose trees and beds and slender rosaries were but soft accents on the universal glow. All liquid and milky-green, it might have been some under-world of strange waters from which they looked up, to see the bright globe just misted through that deep transparency. Somewhere a fountain falling, with a little flop and tinkle, gave voice to the illusion. The dewy lawn looked a though frosted over with moonbeams. It was a long fairy track, fading into ineffable mysteries.

Isabella sat fronting her husband—fronting the open windows. She had been talking to him, sweetly, remorsefully—as one, on the prick of departure and longing for home, might talk to a generous host whom yet one was already forgetting—when all in a moment she fell silent. Something in her face startled and thrilled him. It seemed transfigured, lit up with an immortal joy. The eyes were gazing, not at him, but past him, out into the garden, as if along that luminous track some vision were advancing into their ken. Suddenly and soundlessly she rose, and, still fixedly gazing, went swiftly past him out into the night. One faint movement he made to detain her, but ineffectually. He was conscious of an inexplicable awe—a strange paralysis of will and motion. And then he heard a cry—as it were a cry of intense and loving rapture, and, instantly disenthralled by it, he started to his feet and turned. She was running into the moonlight, her arms held out as if in a very ecstasy of welcome—and yet there was nothing there. But in the moment that he moved to pursue her, actually as if she threw herself without stopping into some spirit’s lovely keeping, she pitched and fell headlong.

When he reached her, she lay in that drowning tide of light like a spent phantom of the mists. A smile of utter rest was on her lips. She was dead.

“Fair Isabel: poor simple Isabel.”

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.

Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. ecstacy/ecstasy, orange-grove/orange grove, etc.) have been preserved.

[End of text]