The Villa was tall and narrow, the cream-coloured plaster-wash which covered it blurred and patched with greenish-grey. There were small, square stone verandas to all the windows, even the smallest. The roof was covered with crinkled, dull red tiles showing a very moderate slope and wide projecting eaves, in the true Slav fashion. The long, narrow garden was terraced; at the top of the terrace, rather to the right, stood a group of sago palms, and three tall cypresses silhouetted out against the wide stretching waters of the Bay of Gravosa, the wooded slope of Lapad; those evening skies which are nowhere else quite so exquisite and bland.
Everything was thick with moss – steps, terraces and balustrades; the roses ran wild in strangling masses, fell in cataracts of bloom. At the bottom of the garden were the remnants of a decayed landing-stage, patched and re-patched, overhanging the wide and tranquil waters of the Ombla, which rises out of the flat ground – spreading almost immediately to its full width – some three kilometres further inland, and flowing in all for little more than five kilometres before it reaches the sea.
Here on the right bank there is no continuous road, and to reach Ragusa or Gravosa one must first cross the water; though there are oddments of rough cart-tracks running at devious angles away from the river and up among the hills to the scattered houses and hamlets.
All this lent an inexpressible tranquillity to the house, with its air of an elegant and somewhat faded beauty – that strange indomitableness which went with the old elegance of sloping shoulders – inclining a little forward; like a lady leaning her head upon her hand, and gazing at herself in the mirror of the river, re-living the past, watching, with aloof detachment, the sturdy peasant life, the men, women and children in their boats, crossing and re-crossing it; disturbing but never obliterating her own reflection in that stream which is so broad and, to all appearance, so steady and purposeful, that it seems as though it can have no conception of the brevity of the life before it.
And yet, begin or end as it may, the Ombla is quite complete, like a section of any long, wide river, when it passes the Villa, less than two miles from Gravosa; in the same way as the Villa was complete, sufficient unto itself; that Villa of which a chance American tourist, with an order to view, had once remarked, ‘I guess I don’t see that house fitting itself to anyone, adapting itself to anyone; the tenant would have to do the adapting, realize that he was there upon sufferance, and that’s not the sort of colour for me.’
Some empty houses have a melancholy air of feeling the slight that is being put upon them; but this house was not like that: too indifferent for contempt, and yet not altogether indifferent, only secure in its quiet knowledge that of all those who invaded it, no one would stay very long; long enough to alter anything; superimposing their own impression upon what was, after all, a real personality.
And yet it had once been ‘just a house’, subservient as other houses are; that was up to 1870.
In 1869 the Chadwicks were ‘doing’ the Adriatic, and stayed for some weeks at Ragusa. In those days an English firm of shippers and general merchants had a business in Gravosa – which is, as you know, the port – Steven, Curtis and Co, of which young Archie Steven was the manager; and he and Daisy Chadwick fell in love with each other at their first meeting.
The Chadwicks went away at once: more properly speaking, they ‘took Daisy away’, with prompt decision, ‘nipping the thing in the bud’, as they called it. But they did not go back to America; only as far as Paris, for they were like that with her. They did not want their only child to marry an Englishman and live in Dalmatia of all places; they did not want her to marry at all, unless it were some man of their own set living quite close to them in New York, so that they might see her every day. But after this first spurt of firmness, of which Daisy herself perfectly understood the value, they were divided and weakened between their own desires and the fear that if they ‘snatched her away all at once’, as Mrs Chadwick put it, it might ‘break the darling child’s heart. Far better to go about it gradually, give her time to get over it.’
In the end – and it was always the same where Daisy was concerned; she herself had told Archie how it would be – this graduation ended in a rather shamefaced creeping back to Trieste and so on down amongst the islands to Ragusa.
That does not mean that Daisy Chadwick was in any sort of way, above all the modern way, tyrannical or over-strong-minded; but she was spoilt and they loved her, as, indeed, she deserved to be loved. There was a strain of obstinacy, too, but for all that she was very sweet and sensitive, would have been kinder – all round kinder – had she ever known what it was to come in contact with unhappiness; though there was nothing unselfish or unkind in her love for Archie – there never can be that in real, in all-absorbing love, when each finds the greatest joy in the other’s happiness; when there may be, and often is, as much avidity in giving as in taking. Anyhow, she was radiant with happiness; there never was anyone so happy, unless it were Archie himself, and he ran her close.
There were a good many Americans in Ragusa just then, and the engagement was celebrated by a tea-party at the hotel; not that imposing Austrian affair of the immediately pre-war days, but a smaller and much humbler hostel, nearer to the town.
Daisy wore white – oh yes, I have a portrait of her as she was then; more, I ‘feel it in my bones’, as we used to say; have felt it more and yet more distinctly, ever since I came back to Ragusa – a pleated skirt, a looped polonaise preposterously bunched out at the back and decorated with flat bows of black velvet; a bodice with a multitude of small black velvet buttons running straight from the peak below the waist right up to the throat, and ending in a tight little ruffle similar to that which finished off the sleeves.
Her hair was dressed high, very elaborately, balancing her bustle, with something puffed out at the back of her head that was not quite a chignon, finished by a small square-cut fringe in front. She had a frail, slender little figure, dark-brown eyes, large and soft; a pale complexion and a small heart-shaped face. Her mouth was a little restricted, not at all shrewishly, but with that rather pathetic look of a person who feels herself weak and is yet inwardly compelled to get her own way: a something so nearly desperate that it may have justified her parents’ fear of her dying, of sheer grief or chagrin, if they separated her too forcibly from her lover.
It was a gay little party. The hotel stood slightly raised above the gateway of the old town, and the window of the Chadwicks’ sitting-room looked out on to the sea, the fortress with its grey feet in the water, and that enchanted isle of Lacroma, breathing romance.
Indeed, it was all romantic – the Dalmatian peasants in their pretty dresses thronging the streets immediately below the windows; the sound of strange tongues in the air; the view; the very cakes served at tea. Above all, the age itself, the young ladies with those funny little hats dipping forward on the pretty heads, those streaming veils and ribands; palpitating with excitement over the engaged couple; young ladies with their papas and mammas, no young men apart from Archie Steven, for these had to stay at home in New York occupied by ‘that horrid business’.
Oddly enough, it was the lovers, with all their ecstasy of happiness, who struck the one prosaic note in the party. Mr Chadwick was obliged to return to America – that horrid business again: ‘As if anyone wanted business’, as someone said – and Daisy must either be married at once, or go back with them and wait until Archie should be able to come over and fetch her.
The engaged couple were both against this, as they would be now; and yet even more so, for in those days there was a sort of persistence of haste over this business of getting married, a something which was certainly not passion, and not altogether sensuality, yet nearer to that; for young people had so very little apart from sex in common; while the persistence tended to be a little harder and more fixed on the young lady’s side, for the simple reason that time was short, and one lapsed so very quickly into ‘an old maid’, a lamentable state with nothing to it but loneliness and ‘ridiculousness’.
In this case, however, the decision was mutual, and both were equally determined to get married as soon as possible. The very idea of separation – an Atlantic between them! – seemed preposterous, and, after all, there was really no need for it, no shortage of money or anything of that sort: the only difficulty being as to where they were to live when they were married.
There were a good many pleasant villas scattered about Ragusa, Gravosa, Lapad and along the shores of the Ombla in the immediate post-war days, but not as far back as 1869; and the people who had houses there then were established in them for life. They were their ‘homes’; they expected them to be their children’s homes, and would by no means part with them.
Daisy had a fancy for the Ombla, it was so ‘sweetly pretty’ and so near Gravosa that Archie would be able to return home for his midday lunch; besides, the idea of going everywhere in a boat appealed to her as very romantic, ‘almost like Venice’.
At the very beginning of that afternoon she had merely felt that she ‘would like’ to live on the Ombla. After she had talked with her friends, and they had applauded her taste, however, it grew to seem the only place. Though, after all, it made no difference where she and Archie set their hearts, for all districts were alike in this, there was no house vacant, either to be let or sold.
‘Though there is that one Villa on the Ombla which would just suit you perfectly, if only – only you could have it,’ cried Amy Fuller, Daisy’s ‘dearest’ friend, whom she had met and confided in during that very short period of probation in Paris – ‘that dreadful time’, as she called it – and whose parents had been induced to bring her on to Ragusa, all ready for the part of chief bridesmaid – palest pink, with those new floating panels and ruches, and Dolly Varden hat; that at least was settled. ‘It’s the sweetest place, with its garden sloping down to the river, and such roses! I never saw such roses, terribly in want of pruning though; and the dearest little balconies where Daisy could stand and watch for Mr Steven coming home in the evening, wave her handkerchief to him. A rather tall, narrow house, just opposite to that pretty little church at the first bend.’
‘The Villa Carlotta,’ said Steven. ‘Oh yes, if we could have that we’d be all right; but it belongs to old Señorina Frascati, and nothing would induce her to sell or even let it.’
‘Señorina – that means “Miss”, doesn’t it? Only fancy an old maid living in a sweet place like that!’ cried someone. ‘Such a sweetly romantic place, too!’
‘It’s belonged to her family for years: she’s always lived there.’
‘The more reason why she should give it up to us now,’ said Daisy, and laughed; though there was that faint tightness about her mouth. ‘Archie, couldn’t you persuade her?’
‘Nothing would persuade her, my pet; nothing! Why, even you couldn’t do that.’
‘Is she old – really old? Because if she’s really old she may die soon,’ cried one of Daisy’s friends, with the hard cruelty of the young.
‘If you ask me, I don’t know what’s the use of people like that going on living,’ pouted another. ‘They can’t be happy – they can’t, all alone like that!’
‘And the worst of it is they don’t give anyone else the chance to be happy, either.’
‘Well, if Archie and I have to wait until the old lady departs this life –’ began Daisy, a little impatiently: upon which Archie took her hand and remarked laughingly:
‘Well, my darling, we can’t kill her, you know!’
‘Such a lovely house!’ sighed Daisy.
‘And so altogether what you want!’
‘It does seem a shame!’
‘Oh, Daisy, it does seem a shame!’
The chorus was broken by Irene Stratton, the intellectual of the party, dark and intense: ‘Listen – listen! I have an idea.’ She glanced round, saw that her elders were safely out of hearing in the veranda, enjoying the sunset – a soft glow of gold and crimson – and drew her chair a little more closely in towards the others; who edged forward, so that the young heads were bent together in a circle. ‘Really an idea – something too thrilling!’
‘What? Oh, Irene, what? Do, do tell us!’
‘Well, there’s something quite new, all the rage, in New York. Rose Farquarson wrote and told me about it – people are going mad over it.’
‘What? A game?’
‘No, no; something much more serious. They call it “The Power of the Will”.’ She paused for a moment, glancing round, giving her astounding words time to soak in.
‘But – but –’ They were plainly puzzled.
‘The Power of the Will. They say people can do anything – make anyone else do anything – if they join together and make up their minds to do it. They just sit round in a circle and hold hands, willing something to happen, and it does’ – triumphantly – ‘it does happen! The most out-of-the-way things! Why, even two people can do it if their wills are strong enough, or they really want anything enough. Lena Kelly got Rose to help her will that her beau should come and see her, and he just walked in, five minutes later! Five minutes, exactly five minutes! – the time it took him to come from his house to Lena’s. She and Rose paced it next day, with long strides like a man’s, and that’s what it took, to a moment.’
‘He might have come anyhow,’ protested young Steven, who did not care to think of his sex being so played upon.
‘But he wouldn’t have done; that’s just it! He was dreadfully angry with Lena, because, he said, she’d been encouraging someone else; had gone off declaring that he’d never speak to her or come near her again, more than a week before. And you know how stupidly obstinate men are. Rose says that he looked quite silly when he came in, just as though he’d been walking in his sleep. Oh, of course, I’m sure it could be done; I’m sure of it. Why, I’ve done it myself, willing people with their backs to me to turn round, and they’ve always done it! Always! I just say to myself, “Turn – turn – turn”, like that, very firmly and quietly.’
‘Well, anyhow, you won’t will the old Frascati out of her Villa, I bet you anything,’ protested Archie Steven, a square-built, dark young man, capable of a sort of restive, sulky obstinacy.
Irene tossed her dark head, Leghorn hat and long drooping white feather: ‘You men!’ she said; while Daisy broke in, a trifle querulously, overwrought with emotion and excitement, ill-pleased that her lover should seem ordinary and unpliable, lacking in sentiment and imagination.
‘Archie, how can you be so narrow and dull! I think it’s all too wonderfully interesting. Oh dear, if only, only, we could, just put it into that old woman’s head to move, think what it would mean to us – to me, anyhow. I have set my heart on that house. I know I said to Amy – didn’t I, Amy? – the very first time I saw it, “Why, it’s just exactly the place we want!”’
‘But, my darling, she won’t move, she can’t move,’ protested young Steven. ‘It’s no good thinking of it; she’s practically bed-ridden. Why, you might as well wish her dead.’
‘Well, I don’t see why one shouldn’t, if –’ Daisy Chadwick broke off, turning her head aside, her lips tightening, her face a little sullen, at her lover’s horrified exclamation:
‘Daisy! Daisy!’
Miss Stratton glanced impatiently from one to another, determined that her chance of showing off should not be allowed to slip through any “silliness”.
‘Suppose we will that she shall leave the Villa – just that. No one can object to that, for the fun of the thing – as a sort of game – for once.’
She looked round at the young faces, excited and a little awestruck; drew them with something compelling in her dark eyes.
‘Come, now, you take my hand, Amy, and Daisy take Amy’s. – Oh, of course, Mr Steven must have the other, though he is such a dreadful unbeliever. Now you, Miss Rice – and Millicent and Laura on my left. Ssh! There must be no laughing or talking – Amy! Amy! you mustn’t whisper like that; you’ll spoil it all.’
Tittering a little, overcome by the imperious beauty’s force of character, fearful of seeming silly or ‘old-fashioned’, the little party linked hands.
‘Now, will. Will with all your might. I shall say “One – two – three”, and when I say “three” you must all repeat to yourselves very firmly: “Señorina Frascati must leave the Villa Carlotta – she must – must – must leave it”.’
There was a moment’s almost breathless silence; then Miss Stratton’s voice was heard: ‘One – two – three,’ and a little thrill ran round the circle.
The sun had dropped suddenly, the wide, bare room was full of grey shadows; tall grey ghosts from the cypresses; huddled swaying masses from the planes and fig-trees which just topped the veranda, moving uneasily, sighing, shivering with the sudden small wind of twilight through their leaves; while the air indoors grew chill. The hands which held each other, clutching tighter and tighter, were like ice, and someone broke out in a hysterical laugh; bitten off, out of sheer fright, even before Miss Stratton’s impatient:
‘S-s-sh!’
Then something rustled in at the open French window, across the bare polished floor – it might have been the shirr of a woman’s silk gown, it might have been the Señorina herself coming to challenge them – and Amy Fuller broke into a shrill scream, cut short by her hand to her mouth.
‘Oh, by Jove, I’ve had enough of this!’ cried young Steven, and flung aside from the circle; so roughly that his fiancée, clinging to his hand, cried out: ‘Oh, Archie – Archie, you hurt me!’
‘You sillies! You sillies! Mr Steven, I’m surprised at you! All for this – this!’ cried Irene, her voice shriller than usual, pushing at a large, dry, dead plane leaf with her foot. ‘Spoiling it all – how could you! Just when I felt it coming – felt it!’
‘What coming?’ enquired young Steven, adding under his breath, ‘What bosh!’
‘Our way, of course. Oh, you men, how dense you are!’
‘What’s the use of being cross? It was only a game,’ pleaded Amy Fuller, clinging to one of the other girls. ‘Nothing but a game.’
‘Oh, was it?’ cried Irene Stratton darkly. ‘Oh, was it, indeed?’
‘Anyhow, it gave me the creeps, just like someone pouring cold water down my back,’ put in Laura Carr.
‘And me!’
‘And me!’
‘Ugh! Horrid – but dreadfully exciting!’
‘And supposing – supposing that she – Señorina Frascati – died? – if that – that was the way she left the Villa?’ cried another, with a more daring fancy. ‘What should we feel like then? How terrible it would be!’
‘But why should she die, when no one willed her death?’ enquired Miss Rice, more level-headed than the rest. ‘No one could be so wicked as to wish for a thing like that.’
‘Oh! Oh!’ The interruption came from Miss Stratton, with an unusually loud laugh. ‘How do you know that, may I ask? Anyhow, mark my words for it, if anyone did will her to die, and their will was strong enough, that’s what will happen. She’ll die, and then perhaps you’ll believe what I –’
‘Nonsense! Nonsense! Oh, what cruel nonsense!’ cried Daisy Chadwick, in such a queer, hoarse voice that they all turned, staring at her through the gloom. ‘Things like that are ordained by God; even if we willed and willed and willed’ – she had jumped up from her chair, stood looking from one to another almost fiercely – ‘it couldn’t make any difference, couldn’t!’
‘Oh, couldn’t it!’ broke in Miss Stratton, with a harsh, offended laugh. ‘Really, Daisy, that’s all you know. And, after all, if it couldn’t, where was the good of all our willing? Amy and Mr Steven broke the spell; but I’m sure, certain, that whatever the one of us who was most in earnest, the strongest among us, was wishing, will come to pass. And it’s not always the strongest either; it’s the most intense. That’s what Rose told me. Anyhow, I don’t care what Mr Steven says; mark my word for it, that old woman will find herself obliged to quit the Villa Carlotta. Why, I could feel the force of our willing running straight right up through my fingers.’
‘Yes, yes; all tinglingly,’ put in another girl.
‘There, now! Millicent felt it too. Just you see, Daisy, the Señorina will be out of the Villa within a month. And if anyone did happen to wish she’d die –’
‘No, no, no!’ exclaimed Daisy Chadwick, sharply, passionately. Then again: ‘No, no, no!’ – her voice rising to a scream.
‘Daisy! Oh, Daisy!’ Amy Fuller, with her arm in her friend’s, felt her sway, stiffened her slight frame against hers, and cried out: ‘Mr Steven, Mr Steven, she’s fainting!’ as the other girl slid to the floor.
Daisy was exhausted and languid all next day. She kept in bed, by the doctor’s orders, until early evening, when her insistence upon seeing her lover became such that she was allowed to dress and lie upon a sofa in the veranda, on the most sheltered side of the house; for of course it was impossible for any young lady to see a young gentleman in her own room, unless she were actually dying.
It was then, with Steven kneeling by her side, that she told him of the wish that had taken possession of her, against her own volition, without her knowledge as it seemed: ‘I began to say what Irene had told us to – “Señorina Frascati must leave the Villa Carlotta – must leave the Villa Carlotta –” I never even thought of anything else – at least – oh, Archie, I’m sure, sure I didn’t! And then it was just as though something, someone else inside me, got hold of my unspoken words and twisted them so that I heard myself – just like listening to someone else – repeating over and over again, “Señorina Frascati must die – must die – must die”.’
Young Steven had one arm round her, one hand in hers; he did not relax his clasp, but something in the set expression of his face frightened her with the thought of losing him.
‘Archie – Archie, you mustn’t look like that! It makes me feel a murderess. It can’t make any difference – it can’t! God couldn’t let the selfish wish – and it wasn’t really a wish – of one silly girl …’ she hesitated, not daring to put it into words; then added, ‘do that,’ almost under her breath.
Archie Steven groaned: ‘If that was all,’ he said.
‘Archie – Archie!’ Raising herself a little, Daisy put one hand to his face, turned it towards her, and for a moment they looked straight into each other’s eyes; then she repeated, ‘Archie – oh, Archie!’ and, burying her face on his shoulder, began to cry. For though she was not very clever, she loved him and realized with no further telling what had happened – that her lover himself had been impelled, somehow or other, hating the whole thing as he did, to wish as she had wished; though it might have amounted to no more than this: ‘I wish to goodness the old woman was dead, and there was an end to all this fuss and uncertainty.’
One is inclined to think of the early Victorian women as altogether insipid, but Daisy Chadwick must have been very far from that, for all her fragility. It is certain she loved her Archie intensely, too, for it is only a great love that can refrain from reproaches, reminders; and when the atmosphere of menace weighed too heavily upon her, she might, without blame, have assuaged her own misery and self-reproach to some extent with some such spoken words as: ‘Never forget, it was you as well as me.’ But, small as she was in some ways, brooding and resentful as young Steven so often showed himself with other people, they neither of them ever descended to this; never again spoke the fear that haunted them – though it might have been better if they had, dispersing it all in some small measure – not even when the Señorina Frascati died a week later, from the effect of a paralytic stroke which had fallen upon her the very evening of that ill-fated tea-party: not even when – just at the time young Steven was making up his mind to leave Dalmatia, take what of his interests he could with him to America, making a home at home for his bride – Mr Chadwick, with the air and feeling of having done a great, a magnanimous thing for the young people, announced the purchase of the Villa Carlotta as his wedding-present.
‘You can be married when you like, now,’ was what he said. ‘There’s your home practically ready for you to step into, and Mama and I can be getting back to real life again.’
‘Real life!’ It was strange that so prosaic a man should have uttered words so pregnant, for ‘real life’ was the one thing that seemed missing in the Villa Carlotta. It was all too like an uneasy dream. The young couple were not unhappy, no one could say that. They were, if anything, too happy. There was something hectic in the avidity with which they seized upon every moment and emotion; almost as though they realized that it could not last; while Daisy Steven flamed up into a beauty of which no one could have suspected quiet little Daisy Chadwick.
‘She is lovely,’ people said; then added, ‘but she is never still for a moment; it would be dreadful to live with her.’
‘She is still enough when her husband is there.’
‘But how she watches him, never taking her eyes off him! A man can’t like that.’
‘But he watches her in the same way. Oh, I’ve seen him – one’s as bad as the other in that.’
‘As though each were a candle – puff! and it would be out.’
‘There is something positively uncanny about them.’
‘Something uncanny about the whole household, the house … Well, you know, they do say –’
Heads bent closer, they whispered together, more particularly the older inhabitants of the place; the story grew, beginning with some hotel servant: A spell had been cast upon the Señorina Frascati by the young American woman, and she had died.
‘One may wish death into a house,’ said someone, ‘but it is not so easy to wish it out again.’
The tourist season passed; the summer was oppressively hot; but the old house with its thick walls was cool as a cellar when one came into it. Not that Daisy was there overmuch: anyhow, when her husband was away, for after a few months, when all her American friends had departed, and she was, on account of her health, going out far less than she had done, she spent most of her time on the little landing-stage at the edge of the Ombla; sometimes sewing tiny, intricate garments, but more often sitting with idle hands, gazing down into the water, or out along the short length of the river to the bay; her mouth restricted, her eyes strained; her face, as the sultry summer dragged on its way, growing thinner and oddly haggard, with that flame of beauty wiped out of it.
She had been there practically the whole of one day, having her light lunch, the local fare of goat’s cheese, figs and coffee, brought to her, when, soon after four o’clock, she happened to drop her thimble into the water, and went up to the house to look for another; moving slowly, for it was only a few weeks until the time when she expected to be a mother.
At the top of the last terrace she paused to glance back, and seeing a boat that she believed to be her husband’s, though he was before his time, hurried into the house, found another thimble, and called to her Italian servant to bring afternoon tea down to the landing-stage; for the house felt more oddly chill than usual after the warm air outside – ‘As cold as death,’ as someone had once said – and she hated to be in it.
Archie Steven was climbing up from his boat, as she emerged.
The landing-stage had always been rotten; they had talked and talked and talked of having it repaired, and got no further than that. Indeed, they did not want to spend money on the place, had no heart for it.
Anyhow, the steps were quite broken away; one just clambered up out of the boat as best one could. Young Steven’s body and one knee were on the stage; he was kicking away from the boat, when Daisy caught the crash of breaking timber, one cry, and ran down the terrace, blinded with a mist of cold fear across her eyes.
Archie Steven was a good swimmer; but there was a swift current, and he was all tangled up with the broken planking of the landing-stage, the overturned boat. From the first moment it was hopeless; and he was out in the Bay of Gravosa before they found him, two days later.
The doctor and the local people who, at this juncture, proved themselves friends, did their best to persuade little Mrs Steven to leave the house, but she would not. Crushed by grief, incredibly aged, all her girlhood gone – though she was not yet twenty – she seemed to have fixed herself into some mood of silent, fierce determination. She would tell no one what it was, but I think I realize it; feeling it in myself with her blood: that fatalism which says, though not in words: ‘If They’ve got to have this’ – meaning the Fates, our old enemies – ‘or got to have that, let them have it; nothing I can do or say will make any difference.’ And something else, too, that old idea of propitiation, of an offering, to the jealous gods, which – in mid-Victorian days – took the form of a persistence in lying upon any bed which you yourself had made.
Anyhow, she stayed in the house, refused to leave it even for an hour; determined to fight it out with it; at least, that’s how it seems to me. Sometimes she would go to the window and stand staring down into the Ombla for as much as an hour together, but she never moved out of doors, even into the garden.
One knows, and one can still hear something of what her days were, as she moved like an automaton through those wide, bare rooms. The old Italian servant, who was a young girl then, has told me about it, and there is that feeling in my bones: that something more intensely real than vision. But the nights – they are beyond me, with not so much as a hint of what they had to say to each other during those long, still hours – she and that house, robbed of its rightful owner – for, thank God! I am one of those who ‘sleep o’ nights’.
Anyhow, and one must be thankful for this, it did not last long, for the baby, my mother, was born three weeks later, and Daisy Steven paid the price, the double price, no doubt willingly enough, with her life.
The old Chadwicks, broken-hearted at their daughter’s loss, were already on the way to Europe to fetch her, and took the child back with them; while the Villa was let to an Austrian couple, who lived there for eighteen months, at the end of which time the wife died of what seemed like a broken heart, and the husband committed suicide; these two being followed by an impecunious family of Italians who lost their two eldest children in the few months they were there.
It was empty for some years after this, until an eccentric Englishman took it, and died there. There were three or four more tenants, all equally unfortunate; and then, for a space of ten years or more, the house stood empty, intensified in that air of aloof indifference – ‘Like a white-faced nun,’ as someone put it – for Ragusa had dropped into disfavour as a haunt for tourists, and none of the local families, however poor – and they tried dividing it up into tenements – would so much as think of living there.
Then came a sort of revival. A new type of tourists ‘discovered’ the place, and it was flooded with artists. Among them a young American couple – my father and mother, Daisy Steven’s daughter – who had met and married in Paris, and who, falling deeply in love with the place, took it for the season: more beautiful than ever with its cascades of roses, its air of half-wild aloofness.
Had they attempted to buy the Villa, there would have been the title-deeds to go into, and they might have realized what they were doing. As it was, they made no enquiries; to their minds it was just a delightfully romantic place to camp in and sketch from, to entertain their friends from Paris in; and nothing more. The old Chadwicks had been dead for many years, and though my mother knew that her parents had lived and died in that neighbourhood, it all seemed so immensely far away. Once she did actually say to my father: ‘Why, only think that it might have been here, in this very house!’ – but that was nothing more than a fanciful conjecture, and never again so much as mentioned between them, so far as anyone knew; while it seems evident that the young wife’s spirits remained quite unaffected by the tragic air of the place. And yet it must, in some amazing way, have soaked past her and into her unborn child, for I can scarcely bear to think of the dreams of my childhood; the tall Villa which haunted them, the terror which overhung any walk in a strange place, lest by rounding a corner I should come upon it, be forced by my nurse to mount those terraces, enter that door; all alike ascribable to pre-natal influence alone, for I had been taken away from the place the very day that I was born; never so much as seen a photograph of it.
My father and mother must have been, superficially at least, very unlike Archie Steven and his wife; for during their short life – my mother was but twenty and her husband a couple of years older – the whole outlook upon marriage had changed, superficially – again I insist upon that word, for it is one of the states which never really change – and people no longer took for granted that almost monastical seclusion of the personal life; the jealous appropriations of two people, one for another.
In those days newly-married people were beginning to keep their own boy and girl friends, to go about in separate parties, and the Villa was livelier than it could ever have been since Señorina Frascati’s girlhood – or ever had been, like enough – full of gay young voices and laughter.
People were all very certain that ‘silliness’ and ‘fuss’ were done with, buried away back in the dark ages. I know my father used to chaff my mother continually about her adorers, of whom she had a train, and she used to chaff him back, with what seemed like the greatest openness and freedom; for of course I have heard a great deal about those days, all ‘so very free-and-easy’.
But were they free? – were they easy, even in the beginning? I doubt it; I doubt if there ever is, ever could be, any freedom or easiness in love, with its fierce, primitive emotions, its jealousies, still – and for ever – as persistent as in the dark ages, gloss them over as we may.
There was one young American – also an artist, and originally my father’s friend – constantly at the house, though he was actually staying in the hotel at Ragusa. My father made a joke of his evident, but rather theatrical, devotion to his wife – I have met people who were staying there at the time, and it was the joke, they said – never betraying the faintest signs of jealousy; continually leaving my mother to the other man’s care, with a – ‘Oh, Teddy will take you’ – ‘Teddy will look after you’ – ‘You don’t want me, you’ve got Teddy’ – ‘Tch, tch! what a wife!’ for ever laughing and teasing: until one day, with no apparent reason whatever, no single word of remonstrance or warning, he walked into the long salon where they were sitting side by side upon a sofa, all the doors and windows wide open, my mother sewing, Teddy Alton reading aloud to her, and fixed his revolver at first one, then the other; finally turning it upon himself and blowing out his brains. There in the clear sunlight, in a mid-afternoon of midspring, with the rest of the party upon the terrace outside – and I insist upon this point, for it was usually in the evening that the menace of the Villa made itself most plainly felt.
Teddy Alton escaped with a grazed shoulder, the bullet shattering a mirror behind him; while my mother was hit in the breast, and died two months later, when I was born.
Somehow or other I have missed the lightheartedness of that intermediate generation. Perhaps it did not go deep enough, was never really there at all – think of the secret, brooding sense of wrong, the truly primitive suspicions and fear and passion, which must have possessed my father, despite his veneer of modernity and gaiety, to lead to such an end. And wondering over this brings one to that other wonder as to what my mother really thought, to affect me as I was affected; though it may have been nothing more than the fact that I was conceived and passed the months before my birth in that accursed Villa. How melodramatic it looks when one writes it, and yet that is what it was.
In the end I ferreted out the whole story. The imprint of it all had haunted me until I was a grown-up, but I had never dared to speak of it to a soul, terrified that they might put me down as a lunatic. Strange to say, I never saw any sort of an apparition in the Villa, plainly as I saw the house itself in my dreams, in my mind’s eye, had no distinct impression of my mother. But I knew, I knew – it was like remembering – precisely how Daisy Steven – my grandmother – had felt, how she had looked, even, in the days before her marriage: her dress, the way she wore her hair, every little pose and gesture. The intervening generation seemed to be partially missed out, hurried and blurred, but it was as though she and I were moving round in a circle to meet each other; every impression growing clearer and yet more clear, as time went on; until at last, unable to bear it any longer I confided in a woman friend, who saved me by the sanest advice.
‘Go to Ragusa and see the place. If necessary, buy it and pull it down. Anyhow, face it all out; bring it to book, as it were. It’s the only way to shake yourself clear.’
I did that; and even going to meet it, from the very moment I left New York, I seemed to be cleaving my way through the mist. My life opened before me. For one thing, I fell in love on board ship, and though I would not let my lover come with me to Ragusa – for that must be fought out alone – the whole thing served to put me on a par with other, ordinary people. For that was all I wanted: not to be wrapt away and apart, as is the case with most girls in love.
I stayed in a little boarding-house on the edge of the bay in Gravosa, and I can never forget my first sight of the Villa. Repelled and yet drawn, I was like a woman with a mother whom she hates and fears, with whom she is yet strangely at one; whose opinion she defers to in every thought, at once cringing and defying.
Of one thing l am certain: if I had not been engaged to be married, with my lover waiting for me in Trieste, I would never have been able to get away; would have bought the house and lived in it for just so long as it allowed me to do so.
As it was, I acted at once, it was my only hope: buying the house, not to live in but to destroy, turning into it an army of house-breakers.
Even then – and this will show you – though my heart was in Trieste, something else of me, far more persistent and indestructible, was bound up with the Villa Carlotta, and I found myself unable to leave the district so long as one stone remained upon another; wrote again and again, deferring my departure.
The house had me on that, as it had meant to all along; for I could not keep away, and it knew it.
People had spoken of it as being like a ‘white-faced nun’, and I suppose there were nuns at the time of the Inquisition as cruel as the priests – for that was what it had grown to, out of indifference to cruelty.
And yet it just missed. I suppose that it, too, was growing old, with the spell that little Daisy Chadwick and her sweetheart had wished into it, for I escaped with nothing more than a broken ankle.
I had no business in the house; the men had warned me that it was unsafe. Later on, they insisted upon this as though I wished to dispute it, as though I cared one way or another, being free. Anyhow, I was just going out of the front door, when it awoke from an afternoon doze of senility, realized that I might escape it.
The whole fabric of the place was so loosened, it was little wonder that the heavy stone cornice over the porch fell as it did. It was my own fault; I had been warned – how they reiterated this. ‘Fortunate for the American that it caught nothing more than the back of one heel as she went out; a lucky escape, that; more than she deserved.’
How lucky, no one knows; how great my escape, my sense of freedom! And yet, with it all – and is life always like this? – with all my happiness, my new lightheartedness, there is a something that I miss, a queer sense of loss and – well, yes, loneliness – with that Villa, upright and silent watcher at my bedside, gone for ever.