A Rich Full Death

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!’

10

Now then, Prescott, a test! How do you think I responded? Rack your brains and pronounce. Did I gasp and gawp? Hold my tongue but look volumes? Clutch my temples and fall writhing to the floor? Invoke the gods?

I did none of these things. I laughed-a fierce, hard, brittle, convulsive laughter, akin to vomiting. Strangely enough, Browning took this bizarre outburst quite in his stride.

‘Oh, you may laugh!’ he cried. ‘You have my leave. I quite deserve it. I agree that I look absolutely ridiculous, with all my fine theories.’

I tried to protest that I was not laughing at him-but the fit shook me so