Meantime that year of new experience, uplifting love and growth by inches must ever remain wonderful to me--with Aurelia's music in my ears and Love's wild music in my heart. Happy, happy days of my youth!
"Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquellos, a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados!" cried the knight of La Mancha; and I may call that Paduan year my age of song. It ran its course to the sound of flutes, harps, and all sweet music. I never knew, until I knew Aurelia, that such exulting tides of melody could pour from human throat.
When Aurelia rose in the morning and threw open her green shutters, if the sunlight was broad upon the Pra, flecked upon the trees, striking the domes and pinnacles of the Santo with fire, she sang full diapason with that careless fling of the voice, that happy rapture, that bravura which makes the listener's heart go near to burst with her joy. If rain made the leaves to droop, or scudded in sheets along the causeways, she sang plaintively, the wounded, aggrieved, hurt notes of the nightingale. Her song then would be some old-remembered sorrow of her land--of Ginevra degli Almieri, the wandering wife; of the Donna Lombarda, who poisoned her lover; or of the Countess Costanza's violated vow. So she shared confidences with the weather, and so unbosomed herself to nature and to God. Meantime she was as busy as a nesting-bird. She made her doctor's chocolate, and took it in to him with the gazette or the news- sheet; she would darn a hole in my stocking, on my leg, without pricking me at all, look me over, brush me, re-tie my hair, pat me into order with a critical eye, and send me off to my classes or study with a sage counsel to mind my books, and a friendly nod over her shoulder as we each went our ways. She would go to mass at the Santo, to market in the Piazza; she would cheapen a dress-length, chat with a priest, admonish old Nonna, the woman of the house--all before seven o'clock in the morning; and not before then would she so much as sip a glass of coffee or nibble a crust of bread. On Sundays and Festas she took her husband's arm and went to church as befitted, wearing her glazed gown of silver grey, her black lace zendado. She took a fan as well as a service-book-- and happy was I to carry them for her; she had lace mittens on her hands and a fine three-cornered hat on her head. She looked then what she truly was, the thrifty young housewife, who, if she was as lovely as the summer's dawn, was so only by the way. And thrifty she proved herself. For when she had kneeled and crossed herself twice towards the altar, she pulled up the shining silk gown all about her middle and sat down upon her petticoat.
Exquisite, fragrant, piteous Aurelia! Is it wonderful that I loved her? And who was I--O heaven! What sort of lover was I to disturb her sweetly ordered life? To that I must next address myself, cost me what it may.
CHAPTER III
MY DANGEROUS PROGRESS
I was fairly diligent during my year of study at Padua, fairly punctual in attendance at my classes and lectures, fairly regular in my letter- writing home. I acquired no vices, though there were plenty to be got, was not a wine-bibber, a spendthrift, nor a rake. I was too snug in the Casa Lanfranchi to be tempted astray, and any truantry of mine from the round of my tasks led me back to Aurelia and love. To beat up the low quarters of the town, to ruffle in the taverns and chocolate houses with sham gentlemen, half frocked abbes and rips; to brawl and haggle with vile persons and their bullies, set cocks a-fighting or rattle the dice- box in the small hours--what were these pleasures to me, who had Aurelia to be with? From the first she had taken her duties to heart, to mother me, to keep me out of harm's way, to maintain her husband's credit by making sure of mine. These things she set herself to do with a generous zest which proved her undoing. Slowly, and from the purest of motives, her influence upon me, her intercourse with me grew and spread. Slowly the hours I spent with her extended--unperceived by her, exquisitely perceived by me--until, at the date to which I am now come, near a year after my entering the university, I may say there was not a spare moment of the day, from my rising to my going to bed, which was not passed with Aurelia.
To make the full import of this plain to the reader I must particularise to some extent. My own rooms, I have explained, were in the same house, two storeys below the Lanfranchi apartment. In them I was served with my chocolate by old Nonna the servant, and was understood to leave them at seven o'clock in the morning and not to return until midday, when I dined with my hosts. The afternoons were my own. I was at liberty to take horse exercise--and I kept two saddle-horses for the purpose--or to make parties of pleasure with such of my fellow-students as were agreeable to me. At six I supped with Aurelia alone, and at seven I was supposed to retire--either to my own room for study and bed, or into the town upon my private pleasures. These, I say, were the rules laid down by Aurelia and her husband at the beginning of my residence in Padua. By almost imperceptible degrees they were relaxed, by other degrees equally hard to measure they were almost wholly altered.
The first to go was the practice of taking my chocolate abed. One morning Nonna was late, and I rose without it. The same thing happened more than twice, so then I went upstairs to find out what had hindered her. There I found my Aurelia fresh from Mass and market, drinking her morning coffee. Explanations, apologies, what-not, ensued; she invited me to share her repast. From that time onwards I never broke my fast otherwise than with her. So was it with other rules of intercourse. The doctor was a machine in the ordering of his life. His chocolate at six, his clothes at eight; he left the house at nine and returned at noon. He left it again at two in the afternoon and returned at nine in the evening; he supped; he went to bed on the stroke of ten. Except on Sundays, high festivals, the first, the middle, and the last day of carnival, through all the time of my acquaintance with him, I never knew him break these habits but once, and that was when his mother died at Mestre and he had to attend the funeral. On that occasion he must rise at six, and miss his dinner at noon. He was furious, I never saw a man so angry.
I cannot tell how or when it was that I first spent the whole of my afternoons in Aurelia's society, nor how or when it was that, instead of leaving her house at seven in the evening, I stayed on with her till the stroke of nine, within a few minutes of the doctor's homecoming. It is a thing as remarkable as true that nothing is easier to form than a habit, and nothing more difficult to break. Formed and unbroken these habits were, unheeded by ourselves, but not altogether unperceived. There was one member of the household who perceived them, and never approved. I remember that old Nonna used to shake her finger at us as we sat reading, and how she used to call out the progress of the quarters from the kitchen, where she was busy with her master's supper. But my beloved mistress could not, and I would not, take any warning. It became a sort of joke between Aurelia and me to see whether Nonna would miss one of the quarters. She never did; and as often as not, when nine struck and I not gone, she would bundle me out of doors by the shoulders and scold her young mistress in shrill Venetian, loud enough for me to hear at my own chamber door. Aurelia used to tell me all she had said next morning. She had an excellent gift of mimicry; could do Nonna and (I grieve to say) the doctor to the life.
The end of this may be guessed. Privilege after privilege was carelessly accorded by Aurelia, and greedily possessed by me. At the end of six months' residence those three still evening hours existed, not for the blessedness of such intercourse alone, but to be crowned by the salutation of an adorable hand; and when I retired at last, it was not to my bed, but to my window; to the velvet spaces of the night, to the rustling trees, the eloquent congress of the stars; to sigh my secret abroad to those sympathetic witnesses, to whisper her name, to link it with my own; to tell, in a word, to the deep-bosomed dark all the daring fancies of a young man intoxicated with first love. And from privilege to privilege I strode, a fine conqueror. A very few months more, and not only was I for ever with Aurelia, but there was no doubt nor affectation of concealment on my part of how I stood or wished to stand before her. I postulated myself, in fine, as her servant in amours--cavalier I will not say, for that has an odious meaning in Italy, than which to describe my position nothing could be wider of the truth. I did but ask liberty to adore, sought nothing further, and got nothing else. This, upon my honour, was ever the sum of my offence--up