A Rich Full Death

9

Tuesday 14th

My dear Prescott,

I have so much to tell you I scarcely know where or how to start. I will therefore begin at the beginning: with those high hopes which ended my last letter-and which were utterly dashed to pieces not twenty-four hours later, in a quiet yew-lined alley at the English Cemetery.

As the Church here will not allow heretics to be buried within the city walls, the graveyard in question is on a little knoll just outside the Pinti gate. It is normally a quiet, not to say lonely, spot; but on the occasion of DeVere’s burial service on Saturday afternoon half Florence seemed to be there, despite the gloomy weather. The diplomatic corps was of course out in force, to say nothing of the Grand Duke’s personal band, who played a selection of lugubrious melodies with great relish before unwisely attempting ‘God Save the Queen’, which emerged sounding like the Grand March from Signor Verdi’s latest extravaganza.

I had wondered whether Mr Browning would attend the funeral. He had admitted that he did not know DeVere-but how was he to explain to his wife and Mr Powers that he could not be bothered to pay his last respects to a man whose word had been enough to draw him from his hearth on a foul night less than a week earlier?

At all events, he was there, surrounded by all the important names of Florence: poets, novelists, essayists, artists, diplomats, critics, and the like. Seizing what I saw as a golden opportunity to exploit my hard-won intimacy with Mr Browning, I pushed my way through the throng of eminent personages and greeted him familiarly.

Never have I been so cruelly reminded that pride comes before a fall. The change in his manner was painfully perceptible — and not only to me, which would have been quite bad enough a case, but to all and sundry. I was not only disgraced, but publicly disgraced.

Not that Browning was in the least unpleasant or brusque. The opposite, rather-his expression was laden with that over-solicitude, that excess of polite interest which the English use with people they do not like, or have no interest in, or wish for whatever reason to keep at a distance.

Desperate to get away and hide my shame, I gabbled something about hoping that we could meet again some time soon.

‘Ah, yes. Yes indeed,’ Browning replied vaguely. ‘Yes, we must try to see if we cannot do something of the kind at some time.’

I caught a smile on one of the faceless faces about me, and to wipe it off pursued, ‘I am free all next week, for example!’

‘Are you indeed? I envy you! But my wife, as you may know, is very poorly at present, and so I must regretfully put the claims of society on one side for the moment-indeed, for the foreseeable future.’

Then, looking about him, he exclaimed suddenly, ‘But this will never do, Mr Booth! I am monopolising you most shamefully.’

And he turned gracefully away, and was closed in by a group including young Lytton, the scribbling diplomat he and his wife cultivate. This individual looked at me as they went off, and said something to Browning with what looked most unpleasantly like a smirk. Browning replied-I know not what, nor do I want to know-and Lytton, the puppy, laughed. It was all about as mortifying as can well be imagined.

I made my way home alone, feeling utterly and completely miserable. The light that had flared up and seemed to settle into a steady flame had now been brutally extinguished, leaving me in a darkness even more total than before. I called myself a fool, a credulous idiot, for being so completely mistaken about the nature of Browning’s interest in me. So far from our relationship being impeded by his fascination with Isabel’s death, it was now clear that it had been that and that alone which had kept it in existence. Now we were like strangers: worse than strangers, indeed, for as strangers we could in time have come to know each other, gradually building an acquaintanceship that might have ripened-given all the goodwill on my side, at least-into real friendship.

But from the moment I had unluckily happened to stumble on Browning’s secret that night at the villa, everything had changed. The immediate effect was almost miraculous, permitting me to develop what appeared to be a close intimacy with Robert Browning after only a few hours’ acquaintance. But like forced fruit, the resulting friendship ripened early and then quickly rotted. The secret which had bound us together then, now split us irrevocably apart. With Isabel and DeVere dead and buried, the mere sight of me could be nothing to Browning but a goad to his conscience, a reminder of whatever guilty knowledge he harbours in his breast. Useless to tell him that I do not care what that secret is! I know, and he knows that I know, and that fact now stands between us like the memory of some ancient wrong.

Thus I reasoned, worming myself deeper and deeper into the clinging clayey stuff of despair.

Saturday passed, and Sunday: two days, like most of those which make up a life, so featureless and devoid of incident that they blur into one another, forming one undistinguished lump of time. I lolled around my rooms, stared out of my window, leafed through musty old books, elaborated a thousand impossible schemes, lay on my sofa and gazed up at the ceiling with its elaborate design of concentric circles. I saw no one and no one came to see me. I almost ceased to exist, reduced to a mere licked whimpering spirit hiding in its corner, more than half in love with easeful death.

But such a state could not last, and when Monday dawned bright and clear and sunny I shook off this unhealthy inactivity and determined to escape from the grey walls of Florence and fill my lungs with some country air. There is a stables some little distance from my house, and there I went and hired a gig for a modest sum, and stood in the sunlight and smoked a cigar while the stable lads hitched my vehicle up, allowing myself to be diverted by the sheer vitality of the scene-all the coming and going occasioned by the presence in the same yard of a poultry shop where two frowsy girls stood plucking fowl, a wagon-maker’s where a new cart was being painted, a smithy at his bellows, and a cheap inn for the peasantry attached to the stables. All this at the bottom of a well, as it were, with lines of washing strung overhead from one back-balcony to another, and caged canaries chirping away like mad-and through it all a patch of pale delicate blue sky just visible.

It was a week to the day since I had undertaken the journey to Siena to verify Joseph Eakin’s alibi, and by dint of brooding upon everything that had happened since then, I found myself taking the same road past the Guidi Palace (I gave it hardly a glance) to the imposing Porta Romana, where as usual I was held up for a lengthy period by the press of bullock-carts laden with vegetables and hides and demijohns of oil and wine, for everything that comes to market here must still pay a stiff tax at the city gate, as in the Middle Ages.

Once outside the walls it is unusual to see another vehicle, and thus I was free to enjoy to the full the beauties of the road, which are considerable even at this time of year. The gentle slopes of reddish-brown soil were superbly offset by the olive trees, with their elusive shade of grey-green-though the mystery, somehow, is as much in the texture of the colour as its shade-which, together with the whole of the pale blue sky I had but glimpsed before, made up a very pleasing composition. It was moreover one of those days when the clarity of the air makes crystal seem murky by comparison. You feel that if only your eyes were good enough you could count the buttons on a shepherd’s coat five miles away, or reach out and pick up the team of miniature white buffalo ploughing that distant hillside.

My mood, however, was darkened by the comparison I was bound to make between the last occasion I had driven that way, as Mr Browning’s trusted confidant, and my position now. This impression was strengthened when I stopped to eat at the same inn as before, where everything was of course unchanged, as it has been no doubt for the past three hundred years: the same food, the same wine, the same dog, the same peasants. Nothing had altered but my situation. Was there no help for that? Could I find-or make-no way back?

After my stop at the inn I turned off the high road, and headed north and east on little farm-tracks winding over the hills towards the Arno. I was reluctant to return to Florence. Whilst I remained out in the country my fate remained as it were in abeyance, and I sought to frustrate it as long as possible. And so I made my way across the valley by backways and forgotten lanes, right around the city to Fiesole, where I went to watch day turn to night from those immemorial slopes set with villas and long rows of cypresses: a landscape exactly fitted to the human scale, with the wild sublimity of the Apennine peaks behind to put all that barely-achieved perfection in perspective.

The sunset proved to be magnificent-a broad band of brilliant crimson spread right across the valley westward to the sea, cut into by the jagged edges of the coastal hills below, and melting away upwards by infinite gradations into a zone of pure gold which aged to a pale verdigris, and then flowed imperceptibly into the most delicate translucent rose, before cooling to azure which in turn deepened, almost overhead, into a rich indigo canopy flecked with glinting stars and artfully arranged fluffy cloudlets streaked with grey shadows and pink light from the invisible sun. In short, the whole affair was quite in Salvatore Rosa’s best manner, and there I stayed, lost in admiration, until it grew dark.

Down in the valley Florence had vanished beneath a thick layer of mist, out of which a few of the taller towers and domes rose up like the remnants of a drowned city. I went downhill towards it as towards the surface of a moonlit lake, and when I reached the shore it was with something like dread that I saw that the road continued down into those grey depths, and that I had no choice but to follow.

I got home safely, however, and was groping my way up the stairs towards my front door, when I heard someone move in the darkness ahead of me. Instantly I stopped, all the hairs on the back of my neck bristling up-a most extraordinary and unpleasant sensation. The next moment a door opened on the next landing up, where a lonely old nobody named Hackwood ekes out a dreary existence with a cat for company. He had opened the door to put this beast out for the night, and it thus remained open only a few seconds-but during that time a shaft of light fell down on to my landing, and reflected back from the toes of two highly-polished black boots standing against the wall near the top of the stairs.

That was all I had time to see before darkness came rushing back, and blind panic seized me. I dashed forward, fumbling with keys that would open any other lock in the universe but my own! Then a hand gripped my arm, and I stifled a scream as a voice whispered, ‘Don’t be alarmed, Mr Booth! It’s only me!’-a voice I recognised with an overwhelming sense of relief as that of Robert Browning.

Somehow the door opened, and we got inside. My nerves were jangling like a pianoforte which some demented virtuoso of the modern school has taken to playing with an axe. Fortunately the lamps were all burning, and in their peaceful light my nightmare terrors were quickly dispelled.

Something in this fact, however, seemed to strike my visitor, who had gone off into a brown study, murmuring ‘That’s strange!’ When I enquired what he meant, he replied, ‘The lamps-who lit them?’

‘There is no mystery,’ I explained. ‘My servant left them burning. He knew I would be home shortly, and that I have a horror of the darkness.’

‘I do not mean that,’ Browning replied. ‘I was referring to that night at the villa. Don’t you remember? Beatrice-Mrs Eakin’s maid-said that when she returned in the evening she found the lamps burning. But Mrs Eakin was dead by five o’clock, when the rain stopped-and at that time it was still light. So who lit the lamps?’

I must confess I reacted very impatiently to this belated bit of reasoning.

‘What does it matter now?’ I protested. ‘We know who killed Isabel, and he has paid with his life. I really have no wish to dwell on the topic any further.’

Browning looked at me strangely, and changed the subject, apologising for having startled me. He explained that he had called upon me several times already that day, and on this occasion had been about to give up when I had returned, and he had thus appeared to be lying in wait for me like a foot-pad. He followed this apology with another, much more strongly felt, for his behaviour at the cemetery: it had been but one symptom, he said, of a black reaction which had seized him after the exertions of the previous week.

I nodded politely, and said nothing.

‘To tell you the truth, Mr Booth,’ he went on, ‘I am not near as much enamoured of life in Florence as I once used to be. Indeed, I should leave for London or Paris tomorrow, if such a thing were possible. But with the state of my wife’s health that is of course out of the question, and so I make a virtue of necessity. Which is not very difficult, in a sense: the place has charm, no doubt about it. But after-how long is it now? — almost eight years, it does sometimes all begin to seem a little quiet, a little-dare I say? — provincial

‘So you see this bad business, for all its horrors, gave me what I badly needed-a change, a lift, call it what you will. I should not say so, perhaps, but there it is: it diverted me! And when it came, as I thought, to a conclusion, the effect was to plunge me into the blackest depression I have known for many months-and you suffered the consequences, I fear. I do not know if I can do anything to make amends, but since you were kind enough to mention your interest in my work, I have brought you this.’

He handed me a volume, upon whose spine I read the title Sordello.

This piece might aptly be described as an acid test for aspiring admirers of my poetry,’ Browning said sardonically. ‘Its reception almost broke my heart, for I had the highest hopes of the piece; and although I can now see its faults plainly enough-though not how to remedy them! — I still have a special place in my heart for it, as for a deformed child. Please accept it, with my most humble apologies.’

I was speechless with joy and gratitude. But to my chagrin, instead of continuing to talk thus about his work, Browning turned away-as if to put this matter behind him-and began to pace the floor slowly, hands clasped behind his back.

‘And now I have something very serious to tell you,’ he went on-as though his poetry were not serious! ‘Yesterday I was invited to dine by William Bulwer, who was the British Minister here until his retirement recently. In the course of the meal one of the other guests remarked to our host that he was doubly grateful to be there, since his own table was saddened for him by the fact that poor Cecil DeVere had sat at it on that very day a week earlier, the very image of health and enviable good fortune.

‘You may imagine with what feelings I listened to this news. I managed to keep my wits about me to the extent of enquiring if it had not been on the same day that Mrs Eakin had yielded to whatever tragic urge had impelled her to self-destruction. This was established, and Bulwer then perorated at some length upon the cruel and unexpected blows which fate deals out, and the whole conversation moved on to an elevated plane-but not before I had ascertained beyond the shadow of a doubt that on Sunday the fifth of February Cecil DeVere had been a guest at a formal dinner, commencing at three o’clock and ending not earlier than half-past six; during the whole of which time he was in the company of eleven illustrious members of the diplomatic community in Florence, and therefore could not by the wildest stretch of the imagination have had anything whatever to do with the death of Isabel Eakin!’