Chapter XV (1)
Ensconced on the Tuscan slope of the Apennines, on the road from Bologna to Florence, stood an inn, frequented by travellers less for its comforts than for its convenient situation, and here, under a pergola, on a warm September morning of 1831, Tristram and Dormer were seated. The road, visible from their present position, clung desperately to the side of the mountain; down below was a torrent, faintly clamouring, and opposite rose another mountain wall, green and thickly wooded. At this wall Charles Dormer was now absently gazing, thinking of the spot, further back, from which they had seen, vast and indistinct, the plain of Lombardy, and beyond it, just visible above the horizon like a flock of small clouds, the summits of the Alps. For it was out of the Alps, after all, that they had come to see Florence.
The voyage had done him good, but as soon as they landed and he had begun to sightsee, his headaches came back again. Then he would abstain for a little—and try once more. Matters came at last to a climax in April, at Rome, and very unwillingly indeed he had obeyed the English doctor whom Tristram called in, and gone up to Switzerland for the summer. The air of the mountains and the quiet had worked something of a miracle, and so, having promised themselves, during their exile, that they would still fulfil their intention of seeing Florence, they had recrossed the Alps, proposing, after seeing that city, to take ship at Leghorn. But this morning Dormer, to whom this plan was chiefly due, being in the mood when one can survey oneself with a rather cynical amusement, was quite conscious that he was not now so burningly anxious to see Florence as he had been, for he was beginning to chafe to get back to Oxford. The long letter in his hand had not lessened that anxiety.
He looked across the table at Tristram, who was reading an old English newspaper. If he himself had gained physical health from his travels Tristram had equally come to a measure of spiritual. Dormer knew now that what he had hoped was the true explanation of Tristram’s perplexity was indeed true, and that Tristram no longer felt a barrier between himself and the priesthood; in fact he was going to be ordained at Christmas.
“In how many weeks shall we be home again, did you say?” he asked suddenly.
Tristram raised a bronzed face from his newspaper. “In about six, I reckon. Why? Is anything the matter?”
“Oh, no,” returned his friend. “I was only wondering if we could just get an idea of Florence in two or three days and then go on to Leghorn.”
“But you have been wanting all the summer to be in Florence,” said Tristram, laying down his paper.
“Yes, I know, but...”
“What has Newman been writing to you?” asked Tristram suspiciously.
“An enthusiastic account of the woods of Dart. He has been staying with Froude, you know.”
“We have seen better things than the Dart—or even the Axe—for that matter,” observed Tristram. “Anything else?”
Dormer turned over the pages of his letter. “He sends me a tirade against Liberalism and the anti-dogmatic principle, which makes me long to be home. He says the Bill is bound to pass and the nation is for revolution.”
“Well, I suppose we knew that,” returned Tristram, unimpressed. “How is he getting on with the Councils?”
“Very well, I think. I told you, Tristram, that he was the right man.”
“Oh, I dare say he is good enough,” was the grudging reply.
“Listen to this,” said Dormer. “‘My work opens a grand and most interesting field to me, but how I shall ever be able to make one assertion, much less to write one page, I cannot tell.’ That will be all right.”
No response from Tristram. Dormer smiled to himself and, seeing the mood he was in, omitted the rest of the page where Newman confided to him his fear that he should be obliged to confine himself to the one Council dealing with the Arian heresy.
“Here is something about you. ‘It seems very unlikely that Froude will be able to join Mozley at St. Ebbe’s. His father and Keble are both against it, and he himself wants to try his hand first at the Ecclesiastical history of the Middle Ages. What a pity it is not a year later, when I suppose Hungerford would have been in priest’s orders. It would have been just the thing for him. Remember, anyhow, that Oxford is the proper sphere for him and do not let him escape elsewhere. If, as you say, he must have work amongst the poor, Keble agrees with me that something must be found for him near at hand. The times are troublous, and Oxford will want hot-headed men.’”
“I am much obliged to Newman. No one has ever called me hot-headed before.”
“Oh, you know what he means,” said Dormer.
“Anyhow, I can’t see what good he thinks I am going to be to him. But for the next few years I don’t mind very much what I do. Eventually, of course, I should like my parish to be a poor one, and as I shall never marry I shall be able to live in it, however squalid it may be.”
“I quite agree,” said Dormer conciliatingly, “that you are made for that sort of thing, but for the time being, perhaps...”
“These poor, ignorant, dirty priests are at least one with their people,” pursued Tristram unregarding, his eyes fixed on the road below them. “I expect the mere fact of their being quite alone makes them more accessible. Yes, there is a great deal, Charles, from the practical standpoint, in your celibate views. I wish the accompaniments of that state were not sometimes so ugly. I should have expected anyone as fastidious as you to be the first to see that side of it. Look there!” And he pointed to a snuffy, cassocked form toiling up the slope. “If he had had a wife his clothes might have been mended, and perhaps he might even have washed his face sometimes.”
“If you come to think of it,” said Dormer in a matter-of-fact tone, “the accompaniments of a martyrdom could never have been anything but ugly.”
“My dear fellow,” retorted Tristram, smiling, “I think I have heard you in that vein before. You are an idealist, and no doubt it’s very comforting. I have the misfortune to be unable to get away from facts. Read about this boat race between Oxford and London amateurs which took place in June. I must go and pack if we are to reach Florence to-night.”
He threw Dormer the paper, stooped to pat the flea-ridden puppy of the hotel, and went in.
(2)
And they might have reached Florence that night if it had not been for Giulia Barlozzi.
To the human eye Giulia Barlozzi, sitting by the roadside to beg, appeared little but a bundle of rags. To the equine perception she was evidently something much more portentous, and the horses testified their aversion in a very effective way. The postilion basely if prudently contrived to slip off before the pace became impossible, and the masterless animals tore unchecked down the steep Apennine road, the open carriage swaying and banging behind them. The crash came at the bottom, where, to make matters really final, there was a sharp turn and a stone bridge. Tristram was flung clear, landing, slightly stunned, not six inches from the parapet. When he picked himself up, half stupefied, peasants, miraculously sprung from nowhere, had seized the horses and were dragging Dormer, apparently dead, from beneath the shattered carriage.
Frenzied with apprehension, Tristram struggled across the road, but before he got to his friend a curtain seemed to come down over his vision. He heard excited, encouraging voices in his ears, arms supported him, and, half carried, half led, he found himself, after an uncertain interval, seated in a room with someone bathing his head. Around him was a babel more awful than he had ever imagined could proceed from the human tongue, lamentations, explanations, curses, cries and prayers. And on a table in the middle of the room, white, dusty, and bleeding a little from a cut on the temple, lay Dormer, very still.
“Charles!” cried Tristram in a voice of anguish, springing to his feet. Instantly the torrent of talk was turned on to him.
“Non è morto! non è morto!” he was volubly assured a score of times before he had satisfied himself that it was true. A pæan of inward thanksgiving burst from him when he ascertained that Dormer, though unconscious, was certainly breathing. Voices of commiseration and intense sympathy surged round him as he bent over his friend, voices appreciative of Dormer’s appearance—“he has a face like San Giovanni himself”—voices informing him that the priest had been sent for——
“A priest!” cried Tristram in his stumbling Italian. “It is a doctor that is wanted!” But when he tried to explain that he and his friend did not belong to their Church, a dirty hand waved before his eyes a missal which Dormer had bought at Bologna, and which had been jerked out of his pocket in the catastrophe, and he was assured that his friend was a Christian, and that the parroco was coming as fast as he could. However, when Tristram gathered that the medical skill of this ecclesiastic—which was represented as being very great—was all that he was likely to obtain that day, there being no doctor within many miles, he was prepared to welcome him more warmly, especially as just at that juncture he had made the unpleasant discovery that Dormer’s right leg was certainly broken.
The parroco had not arrived, and discussion was still raging round the table and its burden when Dormer came back to consciousness. Tristram, who was wetting his lips with brandy at the time, stopped as he saw his friend’s eyes open, and said, in no very steady voice, “Thank God!... Charles, my dear fellow, I am afraid your leg is broken. But I thought... O, thank God it is no worse.”
Dormer lay quiet a moment, his head on Tristram’s arm. “This... reminds me... of Eton, he said at last, faintly. And, sick with pain, he added, very characteristically, “It is entirely my own fault... for insisting on returning... to Florence.”