Marie Tarnowska

Like a dream within a dream.—Poe.

It was in the prison infirmary that I first heard the details of what had passed in the Villa Santa Maria del Giglio, on that fatal morning of August the 3rd. As the nursing sister sat beside me, renewing from time to time the cold bandages placed on my throbbing forehead, she told me in low tones the mournful and tragic story. I listened as if I were listening in a dream to the story of a dream.

“When (she said) at early morning the Venetian servant-girl heard a knock at the door she went to open it, and a pale youth stepped quickly across the threshold. He asked for Count Kamarowsky, and bade the girl tell him that Nicolas Naumoff, of Orel, had arrived and desired to see him. The girl went to her master's door and knocked. He was awake and had risen. On hearing her message, he hurried out to meet his friend, for he loved him like a brother—”

(“Ah, sister, I know, I know! He loved him like a brother!”)

“When he saw Naumoff come in he went forward to meet him with open arms. The young man raised his hand and fired five shots point blank into his body. The Count fell to the ground; but even then he stretched out his arms to the young man and said: 'My friend, why have you done this to me? In what way have I ever harmed you?' The young man, with a cry as if he had awakened from a dream, flung himself on the ground at his feet. Then the wounded man showed him the balcony from which he might escape, and with fast-ebbing breath forgave him and bade him farewell.”

(“Oh, sister, sister, with fast-ebbing breath he forgave him and bade him farewell!”)

“He was carried to the hospital, and the doctors wanted to give him chloroform while they probed the gaping, deep-seated wounds; but he would not take it. 'Do what you have to do without sending me to sleep,' he said. 'I shall have plenty of time to sleep—afterwards.' The doctors groped for the bullets in the lacerated flesh, and stitched up the five, deep-seated wounds.... When it was over he asked for you.”

(“Sister, sister, he asked for me!”)

“He begged that you might be summoned quickly, and many telegrams were sent, but you neither came nor replied.”

(“I neither came nor replied!”)

“On the third day he was better. He spoke to those around him, and again he asked for you, and hoped that you would come. In the hospital he was in the hands of an old and very famous surgeon; but alas! as Fate would have it—”

(“What? what? As Fate would have it—?”)

“As Fate would have it, the mind of this old and celebrated surgeon suddenly gave way. None knew that anything was amiss, as he stood that day at the bedside of the sufferer whom his skill had saved. He spoke to his assistants in the same calm, authoritative voice as usual, but he ordered that the stitches should be taken out of the five wounds that were just beginning to heal. Those around him recoiled in amazement. They were thunderstruck. But he repeated the disastrous order in the voice of one who is accustomed to command and to save lives that are in peril. Then—”

(“What then? What then?”)

“Then the assistants, doubting their own wisdom, but not that of the man who had been their master, obeyed, and reopened the five deep-seated wounds which were just beginning to heal. And again, as Fate would have it—”

(Ah, Fate! The ghoul, the vampire Fate! She who has pursued me since my birth! She who has caught us and crushed us all in her torturing grip, splintering us like frail glass bubbles in her hand! Now she had entered the sick room of Paul Kamarowsky, had brooded over his bedside, and in fiendish pleasantry had scourged the old surgeon's brain with madness, whipping it to frenzy as a child whips a top, guiding his hand to tear the injured body and reopen the fast-healing wounds.)

“As Fate would have it, the old surgeon gave other and still more dreadful orders. Ah, holy Virgin! how shall the horror be told?… When the bewildered assistants, aghast at what they had done, laid the sufferer back on his pillows, the slaying had been accomplished.”

(“The slaying had been accomplished!”)

“With his last breath he called upon your name.”

(“With his last breath he called upon my name!”)

XLIII

E son quasi a l'estremo.
Luce degli anni miei, dove se' gita?

    Carducci.

If I were to be asked to name the darkest hour of my dark life, well do I know which of all my gloomy memories would raise its spectral face.

Not the terror-haunted hours of madness and crime, not the anguish-stricken nights passed at the bedside of those I loved, not my own life-struggles with the monsters of disease and dementia, tearing at the very roots of my life—no, the darkest hour of my life was that glorious summer morning in Venice, when I was brought from the prison of La Giudecca to attend my trial at the Criminal Court. The sun flung a sparkling net of diamonds athwart the blue waters of the lagoon, and the gondola bore me with peaceful splash of oar over the dancing waters. The gondolier steadied the swaying skiff at the wave-kissed steps, and I rose, drawing my veil about me, to disembark.

As I placed my foot on the steps—how often before, in happier days, had I thus stepped from my gondola, greeted and smiled upon by the kindly Venetian idlers!—I lifted my eyes. A crowd had assembled at the top of the steps and thronged the piazza. They stood in serried ranks, menacing and silent, leaving a narrow pathway for me to pass. I faltered and would have stepped back, but the carabinieri at my side held my arms and impelled me forward. At that moment some one in the crowd—a woman—laughed. As if that sound had shattered the spell that held them mute, the mob broke into a tumult of noise, a storm of hisses and cries, shrieks and jeers, hootings and maledictions, while, rising above it and more cruel than all, was the laughter, the strident, mocking laughter that accompanied my every step and gesture.

And there, tall and motionless in the midst of the laughing, hissing, shrieking mob, stood my father, his white hair stirring in the breeze, his eyes—the proud blue O'Rourke eyes—fixed upon me.

Oh, father, father whose heart I have broken, in that hour I paid the wages of my sin. Not these dark years of imprisonment, not the mantle of ignominy that clothes me with eternal defilement, not the gloomy solitude in which I see the gradual fading of my youth, not the horror of the past, nor the hopelessness of the future—not these are the deadliest of my punishments; but the memory of your white hair in the crowd that hissed its hatred, and laughed its contempt of your daughter, and the jeers that greeted you, and the rude hands that jostled you when you stepped forward and laid your hand in blessing on my degraded head.

········

Marie Tarnowska is silent. Her story is told.

EPILOGUE

The verdant landscape of Central Italy swings past the train that carries me homeward. The looped vines—like slim green dancers holding hands—speed backwards as we pass. Far behind me lies the white prison of Trani; and the memory of Marie Tarnowska and of her sins and woes drifts away from me, like some shipwrecked barque, storm-tossed and sinking, that I have gazed upon, powerless to help.

The long summer day is drawing to its close; above the Apennines where the sky is lightest the new moon floats like a little boat of amber on an opal sea. Like a fragment of a dream the song returns to my memory, the childish song of which I have never heard and shall never hear more than the first two lines:

When little children sleep, the Virgin Mary
Steps with white feet upon the crescent moon…

As the train carries me homeward, back to the joys of life and love and freedom, back to the welcome of friends and the safety of a sheltered hearth, I think once more of her whom I have left in the gloom of her prison cell.

Soon, very soon, the hour of her release will strike, and the iron doors that have guarded her will open wide to let her pass.

What then, what then, Marie Tarnowska?

Who will await you at the prison gate? Surely Grief, Scorn, and Hatred will be there. But by your side I seem to see a guardian spirit, shielding your drooping head with outstretched wings. It is the sister of lost Innocence—Repentance; and in her wake comes the blind singer, Hope.