All the morning, as every day, the bell of the entrance door of Vittorio Lante's pretty but modest apartments in Via de' Prefetti had done nothing but ring: and his housekeeper, his only servant, an old woman of very honest appearance, who had been settled with him by his mother, had done nothing but announce to her master the visits of the most diverse and strange people. This pilgrimage of friends, acquaintances, and strangers had begun directly after Vittorio had returned from Paris, in fact from Cherbourg, where he had accompanied his fiancée, Mabel Clarke, and his future mother-in-law, Annie Clarke, whence they had embarked on a colossal transatlantic liner. Scarcely had the newspapers announced, rather solemnly, the arrival of the Prince of Santalena, Don Vittorio Lante, who in the spring would depart for America, where would be celebrated, with marvellous sumptuousness, his marriage with Miss Mabel Clarke, than those apartments, usually calm and silent, had been invaded every day by people of all conditions and kinds. In December Don Vittorio Lante della Scala, whom everyone now complacently called the Prince of Santalena, although he had not yet been able to repurchase, shall we say, the right to bear this title, had gone to Terni to pass the feasts of Christmas and the New Year with his mother, Donna Maria Lante della Scala, who lived in great retirement in a few rooms of the majestic Palazzo Lante, and he did not return until the middle of January. Again the oddest people, known and unknown, began to overflow the small but elegant abode of Don Vittorio, and as winter declined to spring, the people arrived in increasing numbers and besieged Vittorio at home. They waited for him at the door and went to look for him in the parloir of his club, where he lunched and dined; they ran everywhere he was wont to repair. Each morning and evening bundles of letters arrived for him, some of which were registered and insured to the value of a thousand and two thousand lire. One day, in fact, he had a letter with a declared value of five thousand lire. And all, intimate and ordinary friends, old and new acquaintances, strangers and unknown, wrote him letters, sent him enclosures, forwarded him documents, attracted by the immense fortune he was about to possess in marrying Mabel Clarke with a dowry of fifty millions—and some said a hundred millions. All desired and wished, all asked from him, with some excuse or other, with one pretext or another, a little part, a big part, a huge part of this fortune which was not yet his, but which would be his within six, four, or two months.
One sought a loan on his return from the honeymoon, a friendly loan, nothing else, through the ties of old affection, giving no hint as to the date or manner of repayment; someone asked a serious loan with splendid guarantees and first mortgages; another wished to sell him the four horses of his stage-coach; another wished to give up to him his kennels, another a villa, a castle, a palace, a property, another wished him to redeem from the Government an island in the Tyrrhennian Sea to go hunting there; while another wished him to acquire a yacht of two thousand tons.
Every day to all this were added the visits of vendors of jewels, of linen, of fashions for men and women, of fine wines and liqueurs, wanting him to buy from them for fabulous sums, offering all the credit possible, to be paid for a year after the marriage, so that they might have the honour of being his purveyors. To their visits and letters were added those of other strange beings, small and great inventors who asked much money to relinquish their inventions; discoverers of wonderful secrets which they would reveal for a consideration; girls who asked for a dowry to enable them to marry; singers who asked to be maintained at the Conservatoire for two or three years, the time that was necessary to become rivals of Caruso; widows with six sons who wished to lodge three or four with him; people out of employment who would like to follow him to America when he went to marry; other unemployed who asked for letters of introduction to John Clarke; adventurers who compared themselves with him and wanted to know how he had managed to please a girl with fifty millions; seamstresses who asked for a sewing-machine; students who wanted him to pay their university fees. All this was done in fantastic alternation, sometimes honest, sometimes false, but often grotesque and disgusting; for the saraband was conducted on a single note—money, which it is true he had not yet, as nearly everyone knew that he was poor, but that within six months or less he would have an immense fortune. In fact, some of the more cynical and shameless believed that he already had money, as if Mabel Clarke's millions, or million, or half a million, had already reached him as a present from the future father and mother-in-law, or from his fiancée herself. Indeed, an old mistress of a month asked for three thousand francs which she said would be of immediate use to her and which he could surely give her since he had so much money from America: in exchange she offered him some love letters which he had written her, threatening on the other hand to send them to his fiancée in America. He who had registered his letter to the value of five thousand lire sent him a copy of a bill of exchange of his father's, of thirty years ago, a bill which Don Giorgio Lante had never paid; and, as usual, the correspondent threatened a great scandal. During the first two months this strange assault at home, at the club, in the streets, in drawing-rooms, in fact everywhere he went, this curious assault of avarice and greed interested and amused him. He was supremely happy in those early days. He had taken leave of Mabel, certain of her troth; Annie Clarke, the silent idol, had smiled on him benevolently from the deck of the liner, and he was sure that John Clarke would give him his daughter. At that time he received gracious letters—a little brief it is true—from Mabel, and still more often cablegrams—a form she preferred—of three or four words in English, always very affectionate: and he replied at once. He was supremely happy!
The human comedy, the human farce which bustled, not around him, but around the money he was going to possess, was at bottom somewhat flattering. He enjoyed all the pleasures of vanity which an enormously rich man can have, although still poor. His nature was simple and frank, his heart was loyal. He loved Mabel ardently and enthusiastically; but the sense of power which he had for a short time came pleasantly to him. Therefore he was polite to all his morning and evening aggressors; he refused no one a hearing; he never said no. Only with a courteous smile he postponed to later any decision, till after the marriage or the honeymoon. Some sought for a bond or a promise in writing; amiably and firmly he refused, without allowing him who was so persistent to lose all hope. Vittorio Lante was never impatient with all those who asked of him from fifty lire to five hundred thousand, sometimes smiling and laughing as he kept the most eccentric letters to laugh at them with Mabel in America, when they should have some moments of leisure. In these annoyances of wealth there was a hidden pleasure, of which for some time he felt the impressions keenly.
Then a cablegram of the 3rd of December, from New York, told him that John Clarke had consented. Intoxicated with joy he telegraphed to Mabel, to Annie, even to John Clarke, and left at once for Terni, to announce the glad tidings to his noble and gentle mother. Still soon some shadows began to spread themselves over his life; light shadows at first and then darker. Like lightning the news of the betrothal of the great American millionairess with a young Roman prince had been spread and printed everywhere in all the European newspapers, and gradually there had begun witty and slightly pungent comments, then rather cutting remarks. Whoever sent the French, German, and English papers to him at Terni, to the Palazzo Lante, which first congratulated him ironically and afterwards, gradually complicating the news and redoubling the echoes, treated him as a broken noble of extinct heraldry, as a dowry-hunter, a seller of titles; whoever sent these witty, impertinent, often directly libellous papers had marked in red and blue, with marks of exclamation, the more trenchant remarks. Implacably, while he was away from Rome, away from every great centre, in the solitude of his ancient palace—with what sarcasm the ruin of this palace had been described in the papers and the necessity for restoring it with Papa Clarke's money!—he received whole packets of these papers and in his morbid curiosity and offended feelings he opened all, devouring them with his eyes, and read them through, to become filled with anger and bitterness.
But if a tender letter from Mabel reached him at Terni, if she replied with a tender expression to a dispatch of his, his anger calmed and his bitterness melted. His mother saw him pass from one expression to another, but she was unwilling to inquire too closely. With a tender smile and gentle glance she asked him simply:
"Does Mabel still love you?"
"Always, mamma," he replied, trembling with emotion at the recollection of the beautiful, fresh girl.
But new papers arrived and again his mind was disturbed with anger and sorrow. He would have liked to reply to them all, with denials, with violent words, with actions against those people of bad faith, against the villains who had published the news, who had printed the articles and paragraphs full of gall: he would have liked to have picked a quarrel with the paper, cuffed the journalist and fought a duel with him; he wished to fight a dozen duels, make a noisy scandal, and then reduce to silence those chroniclers of slander and calumny by giving true light to the truth of deeds. Then he hesitated and repented of it. He tore up the letter he had begun and exercised over himself a pacifying control. Was he right to reply to malignity, lies, and insinuations? Was it not better to shrug the shoulders, and let them talk and print, and smile at it all; laugh at the journalists and despise the journals? Would not Mabel Clarke, if she had been with him, have thought and decided so, the American girl without prejudices, free in ideas and sentiments, incapable of allowing herself to be conquered by conventionality and social hypocrisy? Then he repressed and controlled himself. But in the depth of his spirit now and then arose a second reason for silence: with increasing bitterness he told himself that some and many of the things had the appearance of truth, and that some of them, moreover, were true. He loved Mabel Clarke sincerely, but it was undeniable that it was a magnificent match for whomsoever married her, even if he were rich, and he instead was absolutely poor. Mabel loved him loyally, but she was the daughter of an American merchant and he was the heir of a great name, a descendant of a great family. Love was there, but barter in one way or another had all the appearance of existing, and did exist. The rest, it is true, was the malignity, insinuation, and calumny of journalists; but the barter was undeniable, even sanctioned by ardent sympathy. What was the use of writing, of lawsuits, of cuffing and provoking duels? It were better to be silent and pretend to smile and laugh; in fact, in a fury of pretence to smile and really laugh at all papers and journalists.
On reaching Rome during the first ten days of January he was consoled by a single thought against such infamies; that Mabel on the other side might know little or nothing of them. Letters and telegrams continued to be always very affectionate: the marriage ought to take place in the middle of April, but John Clarke had been unwilling to fix a precise date. That exalted his heart and rendered him strong against everything that was printed about the nuptials: gradually now the papers became silent. But at home, where his aggressors repaired more than ever, to ask whatever they could ask from a man immensely rich, even they in the middle of their discourses, would let slip a phrase or an allusion, that they had read something and had been scandalised by it: how could rascals on papers nowadays be allowed to insult such a gentleman as he was—Don Vittorio Lante, Prince of Santalena as they knew him to be?
At each of these allusions which wounded him, even in the midst of the adulations and flatteries of his interlocutors, he trembled and his face became clouded: he noted that everyone knew them and everyone had read them, that the calumnies had been spread broadcast in every set. Even at the club, now and then, someone with the most natural disingenuousness would ask him if he had read such and such a Berlin paper; someone else, more friendly, would tell him frankly how he had grieved to read an entre-filet of a Parisian paper. Sometimes he would smile or jest or shrug his shoulders, and sometimes he showed his secret anger. His well-balanced, always courteous mood changed; sometimes he treated petitioners badly and dismissed them brusquely. Such would leave annoyed, murmuring on the stairs that as a matter of fact the European papers had not been wrong to treat Don Vittorio Lante della Scala as a very noble and fashionable adventurer, but still an adventurer. He passed ten restless days in which only Mabel's letters and telegrams came to calm him a little.
But he experienced the deepest shock when complete packets of American papers arrived for him, voluminous, and all marked with red and blue pencil, since each contained something about his engagement, his marriage, his nobility, and his family. In long columns of small type were spread out the most unlikely stories, most offensive in their falseness; therein were inserted the most vulgar and grotesque things at his expense, or at the expense of Italy or Italians. It was a regular avalanche of fantastic information, of extravagant news, of lying declarations, of interviews invented purposely, of fictitious correspondence from Rome, and in addition to all this the most brutal comments on this capture of an American girl and her millions by another poor European gentleman, in order to carry away the girl and her money, and make her unhappy, to waste her money on other women as did all sprigs of European nobility, not only in Italy, but wherever they had managed to ensnare an American girl. Other marriages between rich American women and aristocratic but poor Europeans were quoted, with their often sad lot, conjugal separations, with their divorces, fortunes squandered in Europe, with their souls alienated from mother and father, and every American paper concluded that their daughters were mad and foolish again to attempt an experience which had always succeeded ill with them; that this miserable vanity of becoming the wife of an English Duke, a Hungarian magnate, a French marquis or Italian Prince should be suppressed. They should put it away: American women should wed American men and not throw away their fresh persons and abundant money on corrupt and cynical old Europe.
When he had read all this, Vittorio Lante was thoroughly unhappy. The papers were old, but there were some recent ones; the latest, those of ten or twelve days previously, breathed an even more poisonous bitterness. By now he had learned to speak English much better, and understood it perfectly; none of that perfidy, none of that brutality escaped him, and all his moral sensibility grieved insupportably, all his nerves were on edge with spasms, as he thought that Mabel Clarke, his beloved, his wife to be, had read those infamies from America, and had absorbed all that poison. He would have liked to telegraph her a hundred or a thousand words, to swear to her that they were all nauseating lies; but he repented of it and tore up the telegram, striving to reassure himself, as he thought that a direct and independent creature like Mabel Clarke, that a loyal and honest friend like the American girl would laugh at and despise the horrid things.
But by a mysterious coincidence, which made him secretly throb with anguish, a week passed by without a letter or note, or a single word by telegram, reaching him from New York; Vittorio passed a fortnight of complete silence between anguish and despair. Instead, a very broad and voluminous letter, under cover and registered, reached him from New York, containing a long article about his indiscretions, dated from Rome, in which it was narrated, with the most exaggerated particulars, how Miss Mabel Clarke's fiancé in Italy had seduced a cousin two or three years ago, how she had had a son by him, and how he had deserted her and her little one in a district of Lazio. Vittorio Lante, who in three weeks of silence had written Mabel Clarke four letters, and sent three telegrams without obtaining a reply, dying with impatience and anxiety, and hiding it from people, felt as if a dart were passing through his heart, from side to side, felt as if all his blood were ebbing away, and he remained exhausted and bloodless, unable to live or die.
So that morning at the end of February all those whom Giovanna, the faithful servant, gradually announced, since her master, pale and taciturn, consented to receive them with an automatic nod, found a man who received them with a silent and fleeting smile, with a rare word as he listened but scarcely replied to them, when they had finished expounding their ideas and propositions, as if he had understood nothing, and perhaps had heard nothing of them. For four or five days, with a great effort of the will, Vittorio kept up appearances, driving back his anguish to the depths of his heart, knowing that profound dissimulation is necessary in the world, and that the world must see little of our joy and none of our sorrow.
That morning there filed before him a traveller for a motor-car company who wished to make him buy three cars, of forty, sixty, and eighty horse-power respectively, to be paid for, naturally, after the marriage, but consignable a month previously with, of course, a fixed contract; a kind of tatterdemalion, all anointed, who offered him a Raphael, an authentic Raphael, for two hundred thousand lire, and who ended by asking for two francs to get something to eat; a gentleman of high society, who lived by the sale of old pictures, tapestry, bronzes, and ivories, who took them from the antiquaries and re-sold them, gaining a little or a big commission, a friend who proposed increasing the prices, since Mabel Clarke was to pay, and that they should both divide the difference, proposing to him, in fact, that he should rob his future wife; a littérateur who came to seek from him the funds to launch a review in three languages, and who proposed to insert therein his own articles which Vittorio Lante should sign with his name; an agent of a bankrupt exchange, known to be unable to go on 'change, who proposed some mining affairs in Africa for John Clarke to take up, offering him a stiff commission so that he should transfer these uncertain shares to his father-in-law. And, more or less, in all demands, proposals, and requests which were made to him that morning, he perceived the intention to mock and cheat him, but still more he discovered in many of them the conception that he was a man of greed, who could for more or less money deceive his wife and father-in-law, cheat and rob them, like a sponger or society thief. Even more sorrowfully than at other times, he trembled when he noticed the expression of lack of esteem in which the people in his presence held him, people who dared in his own house to propose crooked bargains, equivocal business, as they offered him his own price!
"Am I, then, dishonoured?" he thought, with a rush of bitterness. The morning passed and afternoon came: he was alone, and for the third or fourth time in three or four hours he asked Giovanna if letters or telegrams had arrived. It was an almost convulsive demand, which he had repeated constantly for three weeks, the only demand that showed another human being the state of convulsion in which he found himself. Nothing came, nor that morning either, except the newspapers, and a letter from Donna Maria Lante from Terni, which Giovanna had at once consigned to him. He composed his face, resumed the artless, jolly expression which had been his worldly mask, went to lunch at the club, and replied to three or four............