The Temptress (La tierra de todos)

As usual the Marquis de Torre Bianca got up late. Leaving the security of his bedroom, he cast an uneasy glance at the letters and newspapers waiting for him on a silver salver in the library. Some of the postmarks were foreign. At sight of these he breathed a sigh of relief. That much respite at least.... But some of the letters were from Paris; and at these he frowned. He knew what they would be like. They would be long and full of unpleasant allusions, to say nothing of reproaches and threats.... He noted uncomfortably the addresses printed on some of the envelopes, and at their names, his creditors appeared before him, an indignant and vociferous crowd.... Alas! He knew what was in those letters.

If they had only been addressed to his wife! She received letters like that with the utmost serenity, as though debts and clamorous creditors were her native element--“The Fair Elena” her friends called her, acknowledging a beauty which couldn’t be denied, but which her women friends liked to allude to as “historic”--it had lasted so long. The Marquis, however, had a more antiquated conception of honor than the historically fair Elena. He went so far as to believe that it is better not to contract debts if there is no possibility of paying them.

Fearful lest the servant should find him still dubiously eyeing his mail, the Marquis began opening his letters.... After all, they were not so bad! One was from the firm which had sold the Marquise her most recently acquired automobile. Of the ten installments to be paid, it had collected only two.... And there were numerous other letters from shops that supplied the Marquise with her needs. From her establishment near the Place Vendome her debts had reached out and permeated the neighborhood. The maintenance, to say nothing of the comfort, of the establishment, necessitated the services of innumerable tradespeople.

The servants had just as good a reason to write him letters as the tradespeople. But instead they relied upon the worldly arts of the Marquise to provide them with a means of compensating themselves for long unpaid services. So they expressed their disgust by a reluctant and unbending attitude in the discharge of their duties.

The Marquis was wont, when he had finished the perusal of his morning mail, to look about him with something very like alarm. There was his Elena, giving parties and going to all the most distinguished festivities in Paris; occupying the most desirable apartment of an elegant house on a fashionable street, keeping a luxurious automobile, and never less than five servants. By what mysterious adjustments and manoeuvres could his wife and he keep up this manner of life? Every day there were new debts; every day they required more money for perpetually increasing expenses. Whatever funds he had disappeared like a river in the sand. And yet Elena seemed to consider this manner of living reasonable and proper, just as though it were that of all her friends....

At this point the Marquis caught sight of a letter he had overlooked, a letter bearing an Italian postmark.

“From Mother,” he said.

As he read it his expression lightened. He even smiled. Yet this letter too had complaints to make. But they were gentle, resigned.

The echoes of his mother’s voice, awakened in his memory by her words, called up before him the old white palace of the Torre Biancas, one of the monuments of his distant Tuscany. Huge, in ruins now, surrounded by gardens of the past, with vast halls whose floors were tiled, and whose ceilings were gay with paintings of mythological scenes, it had long contained a wealth of famous paintings that hung on its bare walls, marking out their squares and rectangles in the dust gathering for centuries on the slowly crumbling plaster.

But the pictures and the priceless bits of statuary had already vanished from their places when the Marquis’ father took possession of his ancestral halls. His only resource for an income lay in the archives of the Torre Biancas. Autographs of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and other Florentines who had had correspondence with his ancestors, paid the expenses of one generation....

Around the palace the gardens of three centuries stretched out their marble steps, and balustrades crumbling under the weight of matted rose vines, to the Tuscan sun. Mosses and vines crept into the cracks of the stone, tracing out their patterns with supreme indifference to the decay their presence caused. On the driveways the ancient box, cut back to form wide walls and deep triumphal arches, looked as black as the ruins of a burnt city. It was so long now since the gardens had received any care that they were beginning to look like a flowering forest. The paths at the step of infrequent visitors sent out melancholy echoes which startled the birds like the shot of an arrow, disturbed swarms of insects floating under the outspreading branches, startled the little snakes crawling among the tree trunks.

Wearing the clothes of a simple peasant, and served only by a little country girl, the Marquis’ mother lived alone in these vast halls and gardens, accompanied by thoughts of her son, preoccupied with the problem he presented. How was she to provide money for him?

The only visitors at the palace were dealers in antiques to whom she sold one by one the remnants of a splendor already pillaged by those who had preceded her at Torre Bianca. But she must send several thousand lire to that last member of the noble line, who was playing a part worthy of his title in London, Paris, and all the great cities of the world. And convinced that fortune, so mindful of the first Torre Biancas, would finally remember her son, she reduced her own needs to the barest necessities, ate peasant’s food served to her on a rough pine table, in one of those marble rooms in which nothing now remained that could be sold.

Touched, as always, by her letter, the Marquis was murmuring softly to himself, “Mother! Mother!” He read again--

“I didn’t know what to do, Federico, after sending you the money you last received from me. If you could see the house in which you were born, my son, I wonder what you would say? No one will offer me more than a twentieth part of its value. But, until some foreigner who really wants to buy it comes along, I am willing to sell the floors, and even those wonderful old ceilings, the only things left now that have any market value. Anything to get you out of your difficulties, to prevent the slightest reproach from attaching to your name. I can live on very little, perhaps even less than I allow myself now. But isn’t it at the same time possible for you and Elena to reduce your expenses a little without Elena’s giving up in any way the position that being your wife entitles her to? Your wife is rich! Can’t she help you to keep up your establishment?”

The Marquis paused. The simple way in which his mother expressed her anxieties hurt him; and her illusions about Elena stabbed him like remorse. She believed Elena to be rich! She believed that he could induce his wife to live economically and simply ... hadn’t he tried to at the beginning of their marriage ...?

Elena’s arrival cut short his reflections. It was already past eleven, and she was going out to take her daily drive in the Bois. She liked to begin the day with this open air review of her acquaintances.

The somewhat ostentatious elegance of her dress suited her kind of beauty. Although between thirty and forty, frequent fasts and eternal vigilance still preserved her slenderness, which was enhanced by her height; and the care she took of her person kept her in what might be called that “third youth” which the women of our great modern cities enjoy.

It was only when she was absent that Torre Bianca was aware of her faults. As soon as she stepped into the room, his admiration of her took complete possession of him, making him accede blindly to whatever she might ask.

She greeted him now with a smile, to which he responded. Putting her arms about his shoulders she kissed him, and began talking to him with a childish lisp, which, well he knew, presaged a request. And yet this trick of hers had never lost its power to stir him, subduing his will.

“Good morning, Bunny! I got up so late this morning, and I have a thousand things to do before going out, but I couldn’t go without seeing my darling little Rabbit.... Give me another kiss, and I’m off!”

Smiling humbly, with an air of submissive gratitude like that of a faithful dog, the Marquis allowed himself to be petted. Elena finally tore herself away, but before she had quite reached the library door she suddenly remembered something important and stopped short.

“Have you some money?”

The Marquis’ smile vanished. His eyes put the question:

“How much do you want?”

“Oh, not so much. About eight thousand francs.”

Elena’s tailor, one on the Rue de la Paix, needless to say, had suddenly stopped being as respectful as Elena thought he should be--his bill was only three years old!--and he had threatened court proceedings.

At her husband’s gesture when she mentioned this sum, Elena’s childlike smile vanished; but she still used her little girl’s lisp to complain.

“You say that you love me, Federico, and you refuse to give me this little bit of money....”

“There are some of the letters and claims of our creditors....” The Marquis pointed to the heap on the table.

Elena smiled once more, but this time there was something cruel about the curl of her lips.

“I can show you a great many documents as interesting as those. But you are a man, and men are supposed to provide money in their homes so that their wives needn’t suffer.... How am I to pay my debts if you don’t help me?”

He looked at her with something like fear in his eyes.

“I have given you such a lot of money! But everything that falls into your hands vanishes like smoke.”