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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cardinal's Snuff-Box, by Henry Harland
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Cardinal's Snuff-Box
+
+Author: Henry Harland
+
+Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5610]
+Posting Date: March 25, 2009
+Last Updated: March 13, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX
+
+By Henry Harland
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+“The Signorino will take coffee?” old Marietta asked, as she set the
+fruit before him.
+
+Peter deliberated for a moment; then burned his ships.
+
+“Yes,” he answered.
+
+“But in the garden, perhaps?” the little brown old woman suggested, with
+a persuasive flourish.
+
+“No,” he corrected her, gently smiling, and shaking his head, “not
+perhaps--certainly.”
+
+Her small, sharp old black Italian eyes twinkled, responsive.
+
+“The Signorino will find a rustic table, under the big willow-tree, at
+the water's edge,” she informed him, with a good deal of gesture. “Shall
+I serve it there?”
+
+“Where you will. I leave myself entirely in your hands,” he said.
+
+So he sat by the rustic table, on a rustic bench, under the willow,
+sipped his coffee, smoked his cigarette, and gazed in contemplation at
+the view.
+
+Of its kind, it was rather a striking view.
+
+In the immediate foreground--at his feet, indeed--there was the river,
+the narrow Aco, peacock-green, a dark file of poplars on either bank,
+rushing pell-mell away from the quiet waters of the lake. Then, just
+across the river, at his left, stretched the smooth lawns of the park of
+Ventirose, with glimpses of the many-pinnacled castle through the trees;
+and, beyond, undulating country, flourishing, friendly, a perspective of
+vineyards, cornfields, groves, and gardens, pointed by numberless white
+villas. At his right loomed the gaunt mass of the Gnisi, with its black
+forests, its bare crags, its foaming ascade, and the crenelated range of
+the Cornobastone; and finally, climax and cynosure, at the valley's
+end, Monte Sfiorito, its three snow-covered summits almost
+insubstantial-seeming, floating forms of luminous pink vapour, in the
+evening sunshine, against the intense blue of the sky.
+
+A familiar verse had come into Peter's mind, and kept running there
+obstinately.
+
+“Really,” he said to himself, “feature for feature, down to the very
+'cataract leaping in glory,' the scene might have been got up, apres
+coup, to illustrate it.” And he began to repeat the beautiful hackneyed
+words, under his breath....
+
+But about midway of the third line he was interrupted.
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+“It's not altogether a bad sort of view--is it?” some one said, in
+English.
+
+The voice was a woman's. It was clear and smooth; it was crisp-cut,
+distinguished.
+
+Peter glanced about him.
+
+On the opposite bank of the Aco, in the grounds of Ventirose, five or
+six yards away, a lady was standing, looking at him, smiling.
+
+Peter's eyes met hers, took in her face.... And suddenly his heart gave
+a jump. Then it stopped dead still, tingling, for a second. Then it flew
+off, racing perilously.--Oh, for reasons--for the best reasons in the
+world: but thereby hangs my tale.
+
+She was a young woman, tall, slender, in a white frock, with a white
+cloak, an indescribable complexity of soft lace and airy ruffles, round
+her shoulders. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow,
+sparkled, where it caught the light, in a kind of crinkly iridescence,
+like threads of glass.
+
+Peter's heart (for the best reasons in the world) was racing perilously.
+“It's impossible--impossible--impossible”--the words strummed themselves
+to its rhythm. Peter's wits (for had not the impossible come to pass?)
+were in a perilous confusion. But he managed to rise from his rustic
+bench, and to achieve a bow.
+
+She inclined her head graciously.
+
+“You do not think it altogether bad--I hope?” she questioned, in her
+crisp-cut voice, raising her eyebrows slightly, with a droll little
+assumption of solicitude.
+
+Peter's wits were in confusion; but he must answer her. An automatic
+second-self, summoned by the emergency, answered for him.
+
+“I think one might safely call it altogether good.”
+
+“Oh--?” she exclaimed.
+
+Her eyebrows went up again, but now they expressed a certain whimsical
+surprise. She threw back her head, and regarded the prospect critically.
+
+“It is not, then, too spectacular, too violent?” she wondered, returning
+her gaze to Peter, with an air of polite readiness to defer to his
+opinion. “Not too much like a decor de theatre?”
+
+“One should judge it,” his automatic second-self submitted, “with some
+leniency. It is, after all, only unaided Nature.”
+
+A spark flickered in her eyes, while she appeared to ponder. (But I am
+not sure whether she was pondering the speech or its speaker.)
+
+“Really?” she said, in the end. “Did did Nature build the villas, and
+plant the cornfields?”
+
+But his automatic second-self was on its mettle.
+
+“Yes,” it asserted boldly; “the kind of men who build villas and plant
+cornfields must be classified as natural forces.”
+
+She gave a light little laugh--and again appeared to ponder for a
+moment.
+
+Then, with another gracious inclination of the head, and an
+interrogative brightening of the eyes, “Mr. Marchdale no doubt?” she
+hazarded.
+
+Peter bowed.
+
+“I am very glad if, on the whole, you like our little effect,” she went
+on, glancing in the direction of Monte Sfiorito. “I”--there was the
+briefest suspension--“I am your landlady.”
+
+For a third time Peter bowed, a rather more elaborate bow than his
+earlier ones, a bow of respectful enlightenment, of feudal homage.
+
+“You arrived this afternoon?” she conjectured.
+
+“By the five-twenty-five from Bergamo,” said he.
+
+“A very convenient train,” she remarked; and then, in the pleasantest
+manner, whereby the unusual mode of valediction was carried off, “Good
+evening.”
+
+“Good evening,” responded Peter, and accomplished his fourth bow.
+
+She moved away from the river, up the smooth lawns, between the trees,
+towards Castel Ventirose, a flitting whiteness amid the surrounding
+green.
+
+Peter stood still, looking after her.
+
+But when she was out of sight, he sank back upon his rustic bench, like
+a man exhausted, and breathed a prodigious sigh. He was absurdly pale.
+All the same, clenching his fists, and softly pounding the table with
+them, he muttered exultantly, between his teeth, “What luck! What
+incredible luck! It's she--it's she, as I 'm a heathen. Oh, what
+supernatural luck!”
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Old Marietta--the bravest of small figures, in her neat black-and-white
+peasant dress, with her silver ornaments, and her red silk coif and
+apron--came for the coffee things.
+
+But at sight of Peter, she abruptly halted. She struck an attitude of
+alarm. She fixed him with her fiery little black eyes.
+
+“The Signorino is not well!” she cried, in the tones of one launching a
+denunciation.
+
+Peter roused himself.
+
+“Er--yes--I 'm pretty well, thank you,” he reassured her. “I--I 'm only
+dying,” he added, sweetly, after an instant's hesitation.
+
+“Dying--!” echoed Marietta, wild, aghast.
+
+“Ah, but you can save my life--you come in the very nick of time,” he
+said. “I'm dying of curiosity--dying to know something that you can tell
+me.”
+
+Her stare dissolved, her attitude relaxed. She smiled--relief, rebuke.
+She shook her finger at him.
+
+“Ah, the Signorino gave me a fine fright,” she said.
+
+“A thousand regrets,” said Peter. “Now be a succouring angel, and make a
+clean breast of it. Who is my landlady?”
+
+Marietta drew back a little. Her brown old visage wrinkled up,
+perplexed.
+
+“Who is the Signorino's landlady?” she repeated.
+
+“Ang,” said he, imitating the characteristic nasalised eh of Italian
+affirmation, and accompanying it by the characteristic Italian jerk of
+the head.
+
+Marietta eyed him, still perplexed--even (one might have fancied) a bit
+suspicious.
+
+“But is it not in the Signorino's lease?” she asked, with caution.
+
+“Of course it is,” said he. “That's just the point. Who is she?”
+
+“But if it is in your lease!” she expostulated.
+
+“All the more reason why you should make no secret of it,” he argued
+plausibly. “Come! Out with it! Who is my landlady?”
+
+Marietta exchanged a glance with heaven.
+
+“The Signorino's landlady is the Duchessa di Santangiolo,” she answered,
+in accents of resignation.
+
+But then the name seemed to stimulate her; and she went on “She lives
+there--at Castel Ventirose.” Marietta pointed towards the castle. “She
+owns all, all this country, all these houses--all, all.” Marietta joined
+her brown old hands together, and separated them, like a swimmer, in a
+gesture that swept the horizon. Her eyes snapped.
+
+“All Lombardy?” said Peter, without emotion.
+
+Marietta stared again.
+
+“All Lombardy? Mache!” was her scornful remonstrance. “Nobody owns all
+Lombardy. All these lands, these houses.”
+
+“Who is she?” Peter asked.
+
+Marietta's eyes blinked, in stupefaction before such stupidity.
+
+“But I have just told you,” she cried “She is the Duchessa di
+Santangiolo.”
+
+“Who is the Duchessa di Santangiolo?” he asked.
+
+Marietta, blinking harder, shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“But”--she raised her voice, screamed almost, as to one deaf--“but the
+Duchessa di Santangiolo is the Signorino's landlady la, proprietaria di
+tutte queste terre, tutte queste case, tutte, tutte.”
+
+And she twice, with some violence, reacted her comprehensive gesture,
+like a swimmer's.
+
+“You evade me by a vicious circle,” Peter murmured.
+
+Marietta made a mighty effort-brought all her faculties to a
+focus--studied Peter's countenance intently. Her own was suddenly
+illumined.
+
+“Ah, I understand,” she proclaimed, vigorously nodding. “The Signorino
+desires to know who she is personally!”
+
+“I express myself in obscure paraphrases,” said he; “but you, with
+your unfailing Italian simpatia, have divined the exact shade of my
+intention.”
+
+“She is the widow of the Duca di Santangiolo,” said Marietta.
+
+“Enfin vous entrez dans la voie des aveux,” said Peter.
+
+“Scusi?” said Marietta.
+
+“I am glad to hear she's a widow,” said he. “She--she might strike a
+casual observer as somewhat young, for a widow.”
+
+“She is not very old,” agreed Marietta; “only twenty-six, twenty-seven.
+She was married from the convent. That was eight, nine years ago. The
+Duca has been dead five or six.”
+
+“And was he also young and lovely?”
+
+Peter asked.
+
+“Young and lovely! Mache!” derided Marietta. “He was past forty. He was
+fat. But he was a good man.”
+
+“So much the better for him now,” said Peter.
+
+“Gia,” approved Marietta, and solemnly made the Sign of the Cross.
+
+“But will you have the kindness to explain to me,” the young man
+continued, “how it happens that the Duchessa di Santangiolo speaks
+English as well as I do?”
+
+The old woman frowned surprise.
+
+“Come? She speaks English?”
+
+“For all the world like an Englishman,” asseverated Peter.
+
+“Ah, well,” Marietta reflected, “she was English, you know.”
+
+“Oho!” exclaimed Peter. “She was English! Was she?” He bore a little on
+the tense of the verb. “That lets in a flood of light. And--and what, by
+the bye, is she now?” he questioned.
+
+“Ma! Italian, naturally, since she married the Duca,” Marietta replied.
+
+“Indeed? Then the leopard can change his spots?” was Peter's inference.
+
+“The leopard?” said Marietta, at a loss.
+
+“If the Devil may quote Scripture for his purpose, why may n't I?”
+ Peter demanded. “At all events, the Duchessa di Santangiolo is a very
+beautiful woman.”
+
+“The Signorino has seen her?” Marietta asked.
+
+“I have grounds for believing so. An apparition--a phantom of
+delight--appeared on the opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco, and
+announced herself as my landlady. Of course, she may have been an
+impostor--but she made no attempt to get the rent. A tall woman, in
+white, with hair, and a figure, and a voice like cooling streams, and an
+eye that can speak volumes with a look.”
+
+Marietta nodded recognition.
+
+“That would be the Duchessa.”
+
+“She's a very beautiful duchessa,” reiterated Peter.
+
+Marietta was Italian. So, Italian--wise, she answered, “We are all as
+God makes us.”
+
+“For years I have thought her the most beautiful woman in Europe,” Peter
+averred.
+
+Marietta opened her eyes wide.
+
+“For years? The Signorino knows her? The Signorino has seen her before?”
+
+A phrase came back to him from a novel he had been reading that
+afternoon in the train. He adapted it to the occasion.
+
+“I rather think she is my long-lost brother.”
+
+“Brother--?” faltered Marietta.
+
+“Well, certainly not sister,” said Peter, with determination. “You have
+my permission to take away the coffee things.”
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Up at the castle, in her rose-and-white boudoir, Beatrice was writing a
+letter to a friend in England.
+
+“Villa Floriano,” she wrote, among other words, “has been let to an
+Englishman--a youngish, presentable-looking creature, in a dinner
+jacket, with a tongue in his head, and an indulgent eye for
+Nature--named Peter Marchdale. Do you happen by any chance to know who
+he is, or anything about him?”
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Peter very likely slept but little, that first night at the villa; and
+more than once, I fancy, he repeated to his pillow his pious ejaculation
+of the afternoon: “What luck! What supernatural luck!” He was up, in
+any case, at an unconscionable hour next morning, up, and down in his
+garden.
+
+“It really is a surprisingly jolly garden,” he confessed. “The agent was
+guiltless of exaggeration, and the photographs were not the perjuries
+one feared.”
+
+There were some fine old trees, lindens, acacias, chestnuts, a
+flat-topped Lombardy pine, a darkling ilex, besides the willow that
+overhung the river, and the poplars that stiffly stood along its border.
+Then there was the peacock-blue river itself, dancing and singing as it
+sped away, with a thousand diamonds flashing on its surface--floating,
+sinking, rising--where the sun caught its ripples. There were some
+charming bits of greensward. There was a fountain, plashing melodious
+coolness, in a nimbus of spray which the sun touched to rainbow
+pinks and yellows. There were vivid parterres of flowers, begonia and
+geranium. There were oleanders, with their heady southern perfume; there
+were pomegranate-blossoms, like knots of scarlet crepe; there were
+white carnations, sweet-peas, heliotrope, mignonette; there were endless
+roses. And there were birds, birds, birds. Everywhere you heard their
+joyous piping, the busy flutter of their wings. There were goldfinches,
+blackbirds, thrushes, with their young--the plumpest, clumsiest,
+ruffle-feathered little blunderers, at the age ingrat, just beginning to
+fly, a terrible anxiety to their parents--and there were also (I regret
+to own) a good many rowdy sparrows. There were bees and bumblebees;
+there were brilliant, dangerous-looking dragonflies; there were
+butterflies, blue ones and white ones, fluttering in couples; there were
+also (I am afraid) a good many gadflies--but che volete? Who minds
+a gadfly or two in Italy? On the other side of the house there were
+fig-trees and peach-trees, and artichokes holding their heads high in
+rigid rows; and a vine, heavy with great clusters of yellow grapes, was
+festooned upon the northern wall.
+
+The morning air was ineffably sweet and keen--penetrant, tonic, with
+moist, racy smells, the smell of the good brown earth, the smell of
+green things and growing things. The dew was spread over the grass like
+a veil of silver gossamer, spangled with crystals. The friendly country
+westward, vineyards and white villas, laughed in the sun at the Gnisi,
+sulking black in shadow to the east. The lake lay deep and still, a
+dark sapphire. And away at the valley's end, Monte Sfiorito, always
+insubstantial-seeming, showed pale blue-grey, upon a sky in which still
+lingered some of the flush of dawn.
+
+It was a surprisingly jolly garden, true enough. But though Peter
+remained in it all day long--though he haunted the riverside, and cast
+a million desirous glances, between the trees, and up the lawns, towards
+Castel Ventirose--he enjoyed no briefest vision of the Duchessa di
+Santangiolo.
+
+Nor the next day; nor the next.
+
+“Why does n't that old dowager ever come down and look after her river?”
+ he asked Marietta. “For all the attention she gives it, the water might
+be undermining her property on both sides.”
+
+“That old dowager--?” repeated Marietta, blank.
+
+“That old widow woman--my landlady--the Duchessa Vedova di Santangiolo.”
+
+“She is not very old--only twenty-six, twenty-seven,” said Marietta.
+
+“Don't try to persuade me that she is n't old enough to know better,”
+ retorted Peter, sternly.
+
+“But she has her guards, her keepers, to look after her property,” said
+Marietta.
+
+“Guards and keepers are mere mercenaries. If you want a thing well done,
+you should do it yourself,” said Peter, with gloomy sententiousness.
+
+On Sunday he went to the little grey rococo parish church. There were
+two Masses, one at eight o'clock, one at ten--and the church was quite
+a mile from Villa Floriano, and up a hill; and the Italian sun was
+hot--but the devoted young man went to both.
+
+The Duchessa was at neither.
+
+“What does she think will become of her immortal soul?” he asked
+Marietta.
+
+On Monday he went to the pink-stuccoed village post-office.
+
+Before the post-office door a smart little victoria, with a pair
+of sprightly, fine-limbed French bays, was drawn up, ducal coronets
+emblazoned on its panels.
+
+Peter's heart began to beat.
+
+And while he was hesitating on the doorstep, the door opened, and
+the Duchessa came forth--tall, sumptuous, in white, with a wonderful
+black-plumed hat, and a wonderful white-frilled sunshade. She was
+followed by a young girl--a pretty, dark-complexioned girl, of fourteen,
+fifteen perhaps, with pleasant brown eyes (that lucent Italian brown),
+and in her cheeks a pleasant hint of red (that covert Italian red, which
+seems to glow through the thinnest film of satin).
+
+Peter bowed, standing aside to let them pass.
+
+But when he looked up, the Duchessa had stopped, and was smiling on him.
+
+His heart beat harder.
+
+“A lovely day,” said the Duchessa.
+
+“Delightful,” agreed Peter, between two heart-beats.--Yet he looked, in
+his grey flannels, with his straw-hat and his eyeglass, with his lean
+face, his even colour, his slightly supercilious moustaches--he looked a
+very embodiment of cool-blooded English equanimity.
+
+“A trifle warm, perhaps?” the Duchessa suggested, with her air of polite
+(or was it in some part humorous?) readiness to defer to his opinion.
+
+“But surely,” suggested he, “in Italy, in summer, it is its bounden duty
+to be a trifle warm?”
+
+The Duchessa smiled.
+
+“You like it? So do I. But what the country really needs is rain.”
+
+“Then let us hope,” said he, “that the country's real needs may remain
+unsatisfied.”
+
+The Duchessa tittered.
+
+“Think of the poor farmers,” she said reproachfully.
+
+“It's vain to think of them,” he answered. “'T is an ascertained fact
+that no condition of the weather ever contents the farmers.”
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+“Ah, well,” she consented, “then I 'll join in your hope that the fine
+weather may last. I--I trust,” she was so good as to add, “that you're
+not entirely uncomfortable at Villa Floriano?”
+
+“I dare n't allow myself to speak of Villa Floriano,” he replied. “I
+should become dithyrambic. It's too adorable.”
+
+“It has a pretty garden, and--I remember--you admired the view,” the
+Duchessa said. “And that old Marietta? I trust she does for you fairly
+well?” Her raised eyebrows expressed benevolent (or was it in some part
+humorous?) concern.
+
+“She does for me to perfection. That old Marietta is a priceless old
+jewel,” Peter vowed.
+
+“A good cook?” questioned the Duchessa.
+
+“A good cook--but also a counsellor and friend. And with a flow of
+language!”
+
+The Duchessa laughed again.
+
+“Oh, these Lombard peasant women. They are untiring chatterers.”
+
+“I 'm not sure,” Peter felt himself in justice bound to confess, “that
+Marietta is n't equally untiring as a listener. In fact, there's only
+one respect in which she has disappointed me.”
+
+“Oh--?” said the Duchessa. And her raised eyebrows demanded particulars.
+
+“She swears she does n't wear a dagger in her garter--has never heard of
+such a practice,” Peter explained. “And now,” he whispered to his soul,
+“we 'll see whether our landlady is up in modern literature.”
+
+Still again the Duchessa laughed. And, apparently, she was up in modern
+literature. At any rate--
+
+“Those are Lombard country-girls along the coast,” she reminded him.
+“We are peaceful inland folk, miles from the sea. But you had best be on
+your guard, none the less.” She shook her head, in warning. “Through all
+this country-side that old Marietta is reputed to be a witch.”
+
+“If she's a witch,” said Peter, undismayed, “her usefulness will be
+doubled. I shall put her to the test directly I get home.”
+
+“Sprinkle her with holy water?” laughed the Duchessa. “Have a care. If
+she should turn into a black cat, and fly away on a broomstick, you'd
+never forgive yourself.”
+
+Wherewith she swept on to her carriage, followed by her young companion.
+
+The sprightly French bays tossed their heads, making the harness tinkle.
+The footman mounted the box. The carriage rolled away.
+
+But Peter remained for quite a minute motionless on the door-step,
+gazing, bemused, down the long, straight, improbable village street,
+with its poplars, its bridge, its ancient stone cross, its irregular
+pink and yellow houses--as improbable as a street in opera-bouffe. A
+thin cloud of dust floated after the carriage, a thin screen of white
+dust, which, in the sun, looked like a fume of silver.
+
+“I think I could put my finger on a witch worth two of Marietta,” he
+said, in the end. “And thus we see,” he added, struck by something
+perhaps not altogether novel in his own reflection, “how the primary
+emotions, being perennial, tend to express themselves in perennial
+formulae.”
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Back at the villa, he enquired of Marietta who the pretty brown-eyed
+young girl might have been.
+
+“The Signorina Emilia,” Marietta promptly informed him.
+
+“Really and truly?” questioned he.
+
+“Ang,” affirmed Marietta, with the national jerk of the head; “the
+Signorina Emilia Manfredi--the daughter of the Duca.”
+
+“Oh--? Then the Duca was married before?” concluded Peter, with
+simplicity.
+
+“Che-e-e!” scoffed Marietta, on her highest note. “Married? He?” Then
+she winked and nodded--as one man of the world to another. “Ma molto
+porn! La mamma fu robaccia di Milano. But after his death, the Duchessa
+had her brought to the castle. She is the same as adopted.”
+
+“That looks as if your Duchessa's heart were in the right place, after
+all,” commented Peter.
+
+“Gia,” agreed Marietta.
+
+“Hang the right place!” cried he. “What's the good of telling me her
+heart is in the right place, if the right place is inaccessible?”
+
+But Marietta only looked bewildered.
+
+He lived in his garden, he haunted the riverside, he made a daily
+pilgrimage to the village post, he thoroughly neglected the work he had
+come to this quiet spot to do. But a week passed, during which he never
+once beheld so much as the shadow of the Duchessa.
+
+On Sunday he trudged his mile, through the sun, and up the hill, not
+only to both Masses, but to Vespers and Benediction.
+
+She was present at none of these offices.
+
+“The Pagan!” he exclaimed.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Up at the castle, on the broad marble terrace, where clematis and
+jessamine climbed over the balustrade and twined about its pilasters,
+where oleanders grew in tall marble urns and shed their roseate petals
+on the pavement, Beatrice, dressed for dinner, in white, with pearls in
+her hair, and pearls round her throat, was walking slowly backwards and
+forwards, reading a letter.
+
+“There is a Peter Marchdale--I don't know whether he will be your Peter
+Marchdale or not, my dear; though the name seems hardly likely to be
+common--son of the late Mr. Archibald Marchdale, Q. C., and nephew of
+old General Marchdale, of Whitstoke. A highly respectable and stodgy
+Norfolk family. I've never happened to meet the man myself, but I'm
+told he's a bit of an eccentric, who amuses himself globe-trotting, and
+writing books (novels, I believe) which nobody, so far as I am aware,
+ever reads. He writes under a pseudonym, Felix--I 'm not sure whether
+it's Mildmay or Wildmay. He began life, by the bye, in the Diplomatic,
+and was attache for a while at Berlin, or Petersburg, or somewhere; but
+whether (in the elegant language of Diplomacy) he 'chucked it up,' or
+failed to pass his exams, I'm not in a position to say. He will be near
+thirty, and ought to have a couple of thousand a year--more or less.
+His father, at any rate, was a great man at the bar, and must have left
+something decent. And the only other thing in the world I know about
+him is that he's a great friend of that clever gossip Margaret
+Winchfield--which goes to show that however obscure he may be as a
+scribbler of fiction, he must possess some redeeming virtues as a social
+being--for Mrs. Winchfield is by no means the sort that falls in love
+with bores. As you 're not, either--well, verbum sap., as my little
+brother Freddie says.”
+
+Beatrice gazed off, over the sunny lawn, with its trees and their
+long shadows, with its shrubberies, its bright flower-beds, its marble
+benches, its artificial ruin; over the lake, with its coloured sails,
+its incongruous puffing steamboats; down the valley, away to the rosy
+peaks of Monte Sfiorito, and the deep blue sky behind them. She plucked
+a spray of jessamine, and brushed the cool white blossoms across her
+cheek, and inhaled their fairy fragrance.
+
+“An obscure scribbler of fiction,” she mused. “Ah, well, one is an
+obscure reader of fiction oneself. We must send to London for Mr. Felix
+Mildmay Wildmay's works.”
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+On Monday evening, at the end of dinner, as she set the fruit before
+him, “The Signorino will take coffee?” old Marietta asked.
+
+Peter frowned at the fruit, figs and peaches--
+
+    “Figs imperial purple, and blushing peaches”--
+
+ranged alternately, with fine precision, in a circle, round a central
+heap of translucent yellow grapes.
+
+“Is this the produce of my own vine and fig-tree?” he demanded.
+
+“Yes, Signorino; and also peach-tree,” replied Marietta.
+
+“Peaches do not grow on fig-trees?” he enquired.
+
+“No, Signorino,” said Marietta.
+
+“Nor figs on thistles. I wonder why not,” said he.
+
+“It is n't Nature,” was Marietta's confident generalisation.
+
+“Marietta Cignolesi,” Peter pronounced severely, looking her hard in the
+eyes, “I am told you are a witch.”
+
+“No,” said Marietta, simply, without surprise, without emotion.
+
+“I quite understand,” he genially persisted. “It's a part of the game
+to deny it. But I have no intention of sprinkling you with holy water-so
+don't be frightened. Besides, if you should do anything outrageous--if
+you should turn into a black cat, and fly away on a broomstick, for
+example--I could never forgive myself. But I'll thank you to employ
+a little of your witchcraft on my behalf, all the same. I have lost
+something--something very precious--more precious than rubies--more
+precious than fine gold.”
+
+Marietta's brown old wrinkles fell into an expression of alarm.
+
+“In the villa? In the garden?” she exclaimed, anxiously.
+
+“No, you conscientious old thing you,” Peter hastened to relieve her.
+“Nowhere in your jurisdiction--so don't distress yourself: Laggiu,
+laggiu.”
+
+And he waved a vague hand, to indicate outer space.
+
+“The Signorino should put up a candle to St. Anthony of Padua,”
+ counselled this Catholic witch.
+
+“St. Anthony of Padua? Why of Padua?” asked Peter.
+
+“St. Anthony of Padua,” said Marietta.
+
+“You mean of Lisbon,” corrected Peter.
+
+“No,” insisted the old woman, with energy. “St. Anthony of Padua.”
+
+“But he was born in Lisbon;” insisted Peter.
+
+“No,” said Marietta.
+
+“Yes,” said he, “parola d' onore. And, what's more to the purpose, he
+died in Lisbon. You clearly mean St. Anthony of Lisbon.”
+
+“No!” Marietta raised her voice, for his speedier conviction. “There is
+no St. Anthony of Lisbon. St. Anthony of Padua.”
+
+“What's the use of sticking to your guns in that obstinate fashion?”
+ Peter complained. “It's mere pride of opinion. Don't you know that the
+ready concession of minor points is a part of the grace of life?”
+
+“When you lose an object, you put up a candle to St. Anthony of Padua,”
+ said Marietta, weary but resolved.
+
+“Not unless you wish to recover the object,” contended Peter.
+
+Marietta stared at him, blinking.
+
+“I have no wish to recover the object I have lost,” he continued
+blandly. “The loss of it is a new, thrilling, humanising experience.
+It will make a man of me--and, let us hope, a better man. Besides, in
+a sense, I lost it long ago--'when first my smitten eyes beat full
+on her,' one evening at the Francais, three, four years ago. But it's
+essential to my happiness that I should see the person into whose
+possession it has fallen. That is why I am not angry with you for being
+a witch. It suits my convenience. Please arrange with the powers of
+darkness to the end that I may meet the person in question tomorrow
+at the latest. No!” He raised a forbidding hand. “I will listen to
+no protestations. And, for the rest, you may count upon my absolute
+discretion.
+
+           'She is the darling of my heart
+            And she lives in our valley,'”
+
+he carolled softly.
+
+           “E del mio cuore la carina,
+            E dimor' nella nostra vallettina,”
+
+he obligingly translated. “But for all the good I get of her, she might
+as well live on the top of the Cornobastone,” he added dismally. “Yes,
+now you may bring me my coffee--only, let it be tea. When your coffee is
+coffee it keeps me awake at night.”
+
+Marietta trudged back to her kitchen, nodding at the sky.
+
+The next afternoon, however, the Duchessa di Santangiolo appeared on the
+opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco.
+
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Peter happened to be engaged in the amiable pastime of tossing
+bread-crumbs to his goldfinches.
+
+But a score or so of sparrows, vulture-like, lurked under cover of the
+neighbouring foliage, to dash in viciously, at the critical moment, and
+snatch the food from the finches' very mouths.
+
+The Duchessa watched this little drama for a minute, smiling, in silent
+meditation: while Peter--who, for a wonder, had his back turned to the
+park of Ventirose, and, for a greater wonder still perhaps, felt no
+pricking in his thumbs--remained unconscious of her presence.
+
+At last, sorrowfully, (but there was always a smile at the back of her
+eyes), she shook her head.
+
+“Oh, the pirates, the daredevils,” she sighed.
+
+Peter started; faced about; saluted.
+
+“The brigands,” said she, with a glance towards the sparrows' outposts.
+
+“Yes, poor things,” said he.
+
+“Poor things?” cried she, indignant. “The unprincipled little monsters!”
+
+“They can't help it,” he pleaded for them. “'It is their nature to.'
+They were born so. They had no choice.”
+
+“You actually defend them!” she marvelled, rebukefully.
+
+“Oh, dear, no,” he disclaimed. “I don't defend them. I defend nothing.
+I merely recognise and accept. Sparrows--finches. It's the way of the
+world--the established division of the world.”
+
+She frowned incomprehension.
+
+“The established division of the world--?”
+
+“Exactly,” said he. “Sparrows--finches the snatchers and the
+snatched-from. Everything that breathes is either a sparrow or a finch.
+'T is the universal war--the struggle for existence--the survival of
+the most unscrupulous. 'T is a miniature presentment of what's going on
+everywhere in earth and sky.”
+
+She shook her head again.
+
+“YOU see the earth and sky through black spectacles, I 'm afraid,”
+ she remarked, with a long face. But there was still an underglow of
+amusement in her eyes.
+
+“No,” he answered, “because there's a compensation. As you rise in the
+scale of moral development, it is true, you pass from the category of
+the snatchers to the category of the snatched-from, and your ultimate
+extinction is assured. But, on the other hand, you gain talents and
+sensibilities. You do not live by bread alone. These goldfinches, for a
+case in point, can sing--and they have your sympathy. The sparrows
+can only make a horrid noise--and you contemn them. That is the
+compensation. The snatchers can never know the joy of singing--or of
+being pitied by ladies.”
+
+“N... o, perhaps not,” she consented doubtfully. The underglow of
+amusement in her eyes shone nearer to the surface. “But--but they can
+never know, either, the despair of the singer when his songs won't
+come.”
+
+“Or when the ladies are pitiless. That is true,” consented Peter.
+
+“And meanwhile they get the bread, crumbs,” she said.
+
+“They certainly get the bread-crumbs,” he admitted.
+
+“I 'm afraid “--she smiled, as one who has conducted a syllogism
+safely to its conclusion--“I 'm afraid I do not think your compensation
+compensates.”
+
+“To be quite honest, I daresay it does n't,” he confessed.
+
+“And anyhow”--she followed her victory up--“I should not wish my garden
+to represent the universal war. I should not wish my garden to be a
+battle-field. I should wish it to be a retreat from the battle--an abode
+of peace--a happy valley--a sanctuary for the snatched-from.”
+
+“But why distress one's soul with wishes that are vain?” asked he. “What
+could one do?”
+
+“One could keep a dragon,” she answered promptly. “If I were you, I
+should keep a sparrow-devouring, finch-respecting dragon.”
+
+“It would do no good,” said he. “You'd get rid of one species of
+snatcher, but some other species of snatcher would instantly pop UP.”
+
+She gazed at him with those amused eyes of hers, and still again,
+slowly, sorrowfully, shook her head.
+
+“Oh, your spectacles are black--black,” she murmured.
+
+“I hope not,” said he; “but such as they are, they show me the
+inevitable conditions of our planet. The snatcher, here below, is
+ubiquitous and eternal--as ubiquitous, as eternal, as the force of
+gravitation. He is likewise protean. Banish him--he takes half a minute
+to change his visible form, and returns au galop. Sometimes he's an
+ugly little cacophonous brown sparrow; sometimes he's a splendid florid
+money-lender, or an aproned and obsequious greengrocer, or a trusted
+friend, hearty and familiar. But he 's always there; and he's always--if
+you don't mind the vernacular--'on the snatch.'”
+
+The Duchessa arched her eyebrows.
+
+“If things are really at such a sorry pass,” she said, “I will commend
+my former proposal to you with increased confidence. You should keep a
+dragon. After all, you only wish to protect your garden; and that”--she
+embraced it with her glance--“is not so very big. You could teach
+your dragon, if you procured one of an intelligent breed, to devour
+greengrocers, trusted friends, and even moneylenders too (tough though
+no doubt they are), as well as sparrows.”
+
+“Your proposal is a surrender to my contention,” said Peter. “You would
+set a snatcher to catch the snatchers. Other heights in other lives,
+perhaps. But in the dark backward and abysm of space to which our lives
+are confined, the snatcher is indigenous and inexpugnable.”
+
+The Duchessa looked at the sunny landscape, the bright lawns, the high
+bending trees, with the light caught in the network of their million
+leaves; she looked at the laughing white villas westward, the pale-green
+vineyards, the yellow cornfields; she looked at the rushing river, with
+the diamonds sparkling on its surface, at the far-away gleaming snows of
+Monte Sfiorito, at the scintillant blue shy overhead.
+
+Then she looked at Peter, a fine admixture of mirth with something like
+gravity in her smile.
+
+“The dark backward and abysm of space?” she repeated. “And you do not
+wear black spectacles? Then it must be that your eyes themselves are
+just a pair of black-seeing pessimists.”
+
+“On the contrary,” triumphed Peter, “it is because they are optimists,
+that they suspect there must be forwarder and more luminous regions than
+the Solar System.”
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+“I think you have the prettiest mouth, and the most exquisite little
+teeth, and the eyes richest in promise, and the sweetest laughter, of
+any woman out of Paradise,” said Peter, in the silence of his soul.
+
+“It is clear I shall never be your match in debate,” said she.
+
+Peter made a gesture of deprecating modesty.
+
+“But I wonder,” she went on, “whether you would put me down as 'another
+species of snatcher,' if I should ask you to spare me just the merest
+end of a crust of bread?” And she lifted those eyes rich in promise
+appealingly to his.
+
+“Oh, I beg of you--take all I have,” he responded, with effusion.
+“But--but how--?”
+
+“Toss,” she commanded tersely.
+
+So he tossed what was left of his bread into the air, above the river;
+and the Duchessa, easily, deftly, threw up a hand, and caught it on the
+wing.
+
+“Thank you very much,” she laughed, with a little bow.
+
+Then she crumbled the bread, and began to sprinkle the ground with it;
+and in an instant she was the centre of a cloud of birds. Peter was at
+liberty to watch her, to admire the swift grace of her motions, their
+suggestion of delicate strength, of joy in things physical, and the
+lithe elasticity of her figure, against the background of satiny lawn,
+and the further vistas of lofty sunlit trees. She was dressed in white,
+as always--a frock of I know not what supple fabric, that looked as if
+you might have passed it through your ring, and fell in multitudes of
+small soft creases. Two big red roses drooped from her bodice. She wore
+a garden-hat, of white straw, with a big daring rose-red bow, under
+which the dense meshes of her hair, warmly dark, dimly bright, shimmered
+in a blur of brownish gold.
+
+“What vigour, what verve, what health,” thought Peter, watching
+her, “what--lean, fresh, fragrant health!” And he had, no doubt, his
+emotions.
+
+She bestowed her bread crumbs on the birds; but she was able, somehow,
+to discriminate mightily in favour of the goldfinches. She would make a
+diversion, the semblance of a fling, with her empty right hand; and the
+too-greedy sparrows would dart off, avid, on that false lead. Whereupon,
+quickly, stealthily, she would rain a little shower of crumbs, from
+her left hand, on the grass beside her, to a confiding group of finches
+assembled there. And if ever a sparrow ventured to intrude his ruffianly
+black beak into this sacred quarter, she would manage, with a kind of
+restrained ferocity, to “shoo” him away, without thereby frightening the
+finches.
+
+And all the while her eyes laughed; and there was colour in her cheeks;
+and there was the forceful, graceful action of her body.
+
+When the bread was finished, she clapped her hands together gently,
+to dust the last mites from them, and looked over at Peter, and smiled
+significantly.
+
+“Yes,” he acknowledged, “you outwitted them very skilfully. You, at any
+rate, have no need of a dragon.”
+
+“Oh, in default of a dragon, one can do dragon's work oneself,” she
+answered lightly. “Or, rather, one can make oneself an instrument of
+justice.”
+
+“All the same, I should call it uncommonly hard luck to be born a
+sparrow--within your jurisdiction,” he said.
+
+“It is not an affair of luck,” said she. “One is born a sparrow--within
+my jurisdiction--for one's sins in a former state.--No, you little
+dovelings”--she turned to a pair of finches on the greensward near her,
+who were lingering, and gazing up into her face with hungry, expectant
+eyes--“I have no more. I have given you my all.” And she stretched out
+her open hands, palms downwards, to convince them.
+
+“The sparrows got nothing; and the goldfinches, who got 'your all,'
+grumble because you gave so little,” said Peter, sadly. “That is what
+comes of interfering with the laws of Nature.” And then, as the two
+birds flew away, “See the dark, doubtful, reproachful glances with which
+they cover you.”
+
+“You think they are ungrateful?” she said. “No--listen.”
+
+She held up a finger.
+
+For, at that moment, on the branch of an acacia, just over her head, a
+goldfinch began to sing--his thin, sweet, crystalline trill of song.
+
+“Do you call that grumbling?” she asked.
+
+“It implies a grumble,” said Peter, “like the 'thank you' of a
+servant dissatisfied with his tip. It's the very least he can do. It's
+perfunctory--I 'm not sure it is n't even ironical.”
+
+“Perfunctory! Ironical!” cried the Duchessa. “Look at him! He's warbling
+his delicious little soul out.”
+
+They both paused to look and listen.
+
+The bird's gold-red bosom palpitated. He marked his modulations by
+sudden emphatic movements of the head. His eyes were fixed intently
+before him, as if he could actually see and follow the shining thread of
+his song, as it wound away through the air. His performance had all the
+effect of a spontaneous rhapsody. When it was terminated, he looked
+down at his auditors, eager, inquisitive, as who should say, “I hope you
+liked it?”--and then, with a nod clearly meant as a farewell, flew out
+of sight.
+
+The Duchessa smiled again at Peter, with intention.
+
+“You must really try to take a cheerier view of things,” she said.
+
+And next instant she too was off, walking slowly, lightly, up the green
+lawns, between the trees, towards the castle, her gown fluttering in the
+breeze, now dazzling white as she came into the sun, now pearly grey as
+she passed into the shade.
+
+“What a woman it is,” said Peter to himself, looking after her. “What
+vigour, what verve, what sex! What a woman!”
+
+And, indeed, there was nothing of the too-prevalent epicene in the
+Duchessa's aspect; she was very certainly a woman. “Heavens, how she
+walks!” he cried in a deep whisper.
+
+But then a sudden wave of dejection swept over him. At first he could
+not account for it. By and by, however, a malicious little voice began
+to repeat and repeat within him, “Oh, the futile impression you must
+have made upon her! Oh, the ineptitudes you uttered! Oh, the precious
+opportunity you have misemployed!”
+
+“You are a witch,” he said to Marietta. “You've proved it to the hilt. I
+'ve seen the person, and the object is more desperately lost than ever.”
+
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+That evening, among the letters Peter received from England, there was
+one from his friend Mrs. Winchfield, which contained certain statistics.
+
+“Your Duchessa di Santangiolo 'was' indeed, as your funny old servant
+told you, English: the only child and heiress of the last Lord Belfont.
+The Belfonts of Lancashire (now, save for your Duchessa, extinct) were
+the most bigoted sort of Roman Catholics, and always educated their
+daughters in foreign convents, and as often as not married them to
+foreigners. The Belfont men, besides, were ever and anon marrying
+foreign wives; so there will be a goodish deal of un-English blood in
+your Duchessa's own ci-devant English veins.
+
+“She was born, as I learn from an indiscretion of my Peerage, in 1870,
+and is, therefore, as near to thirty (the dangerous age!) as to the
+six-and-twenty your droll old Marietta gives her. Her Christian names
+are Beatrice Antonia Teresa Mary--faites en votre choix. She was
+married at nineteen to Baldassarre Agosto, Principe Udeschini, Duca di
+Santangiolo, Marchese di Castellofranco, Count of the Holy Roman Empire,
+Knight of the Holy Ghost and of St. Gregory, (does it take your breath
+away?), who, according to Frontin, died in '93; and as there were no
+children, his brother Felipe Lorenzo succeeded to the titles. A younger
+brother still is Bishop of Sardagna. Cardinal Udeschini is the uncle.
+
+“That, dear child, empties my sack of information. But perhaps I have
+a bigger sack, full of good advice, which I have not yet opened. And
+perhaps, on the whole, I will not open it at all. Only, remember that
+in yonder sentimental Italian lake country, in this summer weather, a
+solitary young man's fancy might be much inclined to turn to thoughts
+of--folly; and keep an eye on my friend Peter Marchdale.”
+
+Our solitary young man brooded over Mrs. Winchfield's letter for a long
+while.
+
+“The daughter of a lord, and the widow of a duke, and the niece-in-law
+of a cardinal,” he said. “And, as if that were not enough, a bigoted
+Roman Catholic into the bargain.... And yet--and yet,” he went on,
+taking heart a little, “as for her bigotry, to judge by her assiduity
+in attending the village church, that factor, at least, thank goodness,
+would appear to be static, rather than dynamic.”
+
+After another longish interval of brooding, he sauntered down to the
+riverside, through his fragrant garden, fragrant and fresh with the
+cool odours of the night, and peered into the darkness, towards Castel
+Ventirose. Here and there he could discern a gleam of yellow, where
+some lighted window was not entirely hidden by the trees. Thousands
+and thousands of insects were threading the silence with their shrill
+insistent voices. The repeated wail, harsh, prolonged, eerie, of some
+strange wild creature, bird or beast, came down from the forest of
+the Gnisi. At his feet, on the troubled surface of the Aco, the stars,
+reflected and distorted, shone like broken spearheads.
+
+He lighted a cigarette, and stood there till he had consumed it.
+
+“Heigh-ho!” he sighed at last, and turned back towards the villa. And
+“Yes,” he concluded, “I must certainly keep an eye on our friend Peter
+Marchdale.”
+
+“But I 'm doubting it's a bit too late--troppo tardo,” he said to
+Marietta, whom he found bringing hot water to his dressing-room.
+
+“It is not very late,” said Marietta. “Only half-past ten.”
+
+“She is a woman--therefore to be loved; she is a duchess--therefore to
+be lost,” he explained, in his native tongue.
+
+“Cosa.” questioned Marietta, in hers.
+
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Beatrice and Emilia, strolling together in one of the flowery lanes up
+the hillside, between ranks of the omnipresent poplar, and rose-bush
+hedges, or crumbling pink-stuccoed walls that dripped with cyclamen and
+snapdragon, met old Marietta descending, with a basket on her arm.
+
+Marietta courtesied to the ground.
+
+“How do you do, Marietta?” Beatrice asked.
+
+“I can't complain, thank your Grandeur. I have the lumbago on and off
+pretty constantly, and last week I broke a tooth. But I can't complain.
+And your Highness?”
+
+Marietta returned, with brisk aplomb.
+
+Beatrice smiled. “Bene, grazie. Your new master--that young Englishman,”
+ she continued, “I hope you find him kind, and easy to do for?”
+
+“Kind--yes, Excellency. Also easy to do for. But--!” Marietta shrugged
+her shoulders, and gave her head two meaning oscillations.
+
+“Oh--?” wondered Beatrice, knitting puzzled brows.
+
+“Very amiable, your Greatness; but simple, simple,” Marietta explained,
+and tapped her brown old forehead with a brown forefinger.
+
+“Really--?” wondered Beatrice.
+
+“Yes, Nobility,” said Marietta. “Gentle as a canarybird, but innocent,
+innocent.”
+
+“You astonish me,” Beatrice avowed. “How does he show it?”
+
+“The questions he asks, Most Illustrious, the things he says.”
+
+“For example--?” pursued Beatrice.
+
+“For example, your Serenity--” Marietta paused, to search her memory.--
+“Well, for one example, he calls roast veal a fowl. I give him roast veal
+for his luncheon, and he says to me, 'Marietta, this fowl has no wings.'
+But everyone knows, your Mercy, that veal is not a fowl. How should veal
+have wings?”
+
+“How indeed?” assented Beatrice, on a note of commiseration. And if
+the corners of her mouth betrayed a tendency to curve upwards, she
+immediately compelled them down. “But perhaps he does not speak Italian
+very well?” she suggested.
+
+“Mache, Potenza! Everyone speaks Italian,” cried Marietta.
+
+“Indeed?” said Beatrice.
+
+“Naturally, your Grace--all Christians,” Marietta declared.
+
+“Oh, I did n't know,” said Beatrice, meekly. “Well,” she acknowledged,
+“since he speaks Italian, it is certainly unreasonable of him to call
+veal a fowl.”
+
+“But that, Magnificence,” Marietta went on, warming to her theme, “that
+is only one of his simplicities. He asks me, 'Who puts the whitewash on
+Monte Sfiorito? 'And when I tell him that it is not whitewash, but
+snow, he says, 'How do you know?' But everyone knows that it is snow.
+Whitewash!”
+
+The sprightly old woman gave her whole body a shake, for the better
+exposition of her state of mind. And thereupon, from the interior of her
+basket, issued a plaintive little squeal.
+
+“What have you in your basket?” Beatrice asked.
+
+“A little piglet, Nobility--un piccolo porcellino,” said Marietta.
+
+And lifting the cover an inch or two, she displayed the anxious face of
+a poor little sucking pig.
+
+“E carino?” she demanded, whilst her eyes beamed with a pride that
+almost seemed maternal.
+
+“What on earth are you going to do with him?” Beatrice gasped.
+
+The light of pride gave place to a light of resolution, in Marietta's
+eyes.
+
+“Kill him, Mightiness,” was her grim response; “stuff him with almonds,
+raisins, rosemary, and onions; cook him sweet and sour; and serve him,
+garnished with rosettes of beet-root, for my Signorino's Sunday dinner.”
+
+“Oh-h-h!” shuddered Beatrice and Emilia, in a breath; and they resumed
+their walk.
+
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+Francois was dining--with an appearance of great fervour.
+
+Peter sat on his rustic bench, by the riverside, and watched him,
+smoking a cigarette the while.
+
+The Duchessa di Santangiolo stood screened by a tree in the park of
+Ventirose, and watched them both.
+
+Francois wore a wide blue ribbon round his pink and chubby neck; and his
+dinner consisted of a big bowlful of bread and milk.
+
+Presently the Duchessa stepped forth from her ambush, into the sun, and
+laughed.
+
+“What a sweetly pretty scene,” she said. “Pastoral--idyllic--it reminds
+one of Theocritus--it reminds one of Watteau.”
+
+Peter threw his cigarette into the river, and made an obeisance.
+
+“I am very glad you feel the charm of it,” he responded. “May I be
+permitted to present Master Francois Vllon?”
+
+“We have met before,” said the Duchessa, graciously smiling upon
+Francois, and inclining her head.
+
+“Oh, I did n't know,” said Peter, apologetic.
+
+“Yes,” said the Duchessa, “and in rather tragical circumstances. But
+at that time he was anonymous. Why--if you won't think my curiosity
+impertinent--why Francois Villon?”
+
+“Why not?” said Peter. “He made such a tremendous outcry when he was
+condemned to death, for one thing. You should have heard him. He has
+a voice! Then, for another, he takes such a passionate interest in his
+meat and drink. And then, if you come to that, I really had n't the
+heart to call him Pauvre Lelian.”
+
+The Duchessa raised amused eyebrows.
+
+“You felt that Pauvre Lelian was the only alternative?”
+
+“I had in mind a remark of Pauvre Lilian's friend and confrere, the
+cryptic Stephane,” Peter answered. “You will remember it. 'L'ame d'un
+poete dans le corps d'un--' I--I forget the last word,” he faltered.
+
+“Shall we say 'little pig'?” suggested the Duchessa.
+
+“Oh, please don't,” cried Peter, hastily, with a gesture of
+supplication. “Don't say 'pig' in his presence. You'll wound his
+feelings.”
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+“I knew he was condemned to death,” she owned. “Indeed, it was in his
+condemned cell that I made his acquaintance. Your Marietta Cignolesi
+introduced us. Her air was so inexorable, I 'm a good deal surprised to
+see him alive to-day. There was some question of a stuffing of rosemary
+and onions.”
+
+“Ah, I see,” said Peter, “I see that you're familiar with the whole
+disgraceful story. Yes, Marietta, the unspeakable old Tartar, was
+all for stuffing him with rosemary and onions. But he could not bring
+himself to share her point of view. He screamed his protest, like a man,
+in twenty different octaves. You really should have heard him. His voice
+is of a compass, of a timbre, of an expressiveness! Passive endurance, I
+fear, is not his forte. For the sake of peace and silence, I intervened,
+interceded. She had her knife at his very throat. I was not an instant
+too soon. So, of course, I 've had to adopt him.”
+
+“Of course, poor man,” sympathised the Duchessa. “It's a recognised
+principle that if you save a fellow's life, you 're bound to him for
+the rest of yours. But--but won't you find him rather a burdensome
+responsibility when he's grownup?” she reflected.
+
+“--Que voulez-vous?” reflected Peter. “Burdensome responsibilities
+are the appointed accompaniments of man's pilgrimage. Why not Francois
+Villon, as well as another? And besides, as the world is at present
+organised, a member of the class vulgarly styled 'the rich' can
+generally manage to shift his responsibilities, when they become too
+irksome, upon the backs of the poor. For example--Marietta! Marietta!”
+ he called, raising his voice a little, and clapping his hands.
+
+Marietta came. When she had made her courtesy to the Duchessa, and
+a polite enquiry as to her Excellency's health, Peter said, with
+an indicative nod of the head, “Will you be so good as to remove my
+responsibility?”
+
+“Il porcellino?” questioned Marietta.
+
+“Ang,” said he.
+
+And when Marietta had borne Francois, struggling and squealing in her
+arms, from the foreground--
+
+“There--you see how it is done,” he remarked.
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+“An object-lesson,” she agreed. “An object-lesson in--might n't one call
+it the science of Applied Cynicism?”
+
+“Science!” Peter plaintively repudiated the word. “No, no. I was rather
+flattering myself it was an art.”
+
+“Apropos of art--” said the Duchessa.
+
+She came down two or three steps nearer to the brink of the river. She
+produced from behind her back a hand that she had kept there, and held
+up for Peter's inspection a grey-and-gold bound book.
+
+“Apropos of art, I've been reading a novel. Do you know it?”
+
+Peter glanced at the grey-and-gold binding--and dissembled the emotion
+that suddenly swelled big in his heart.
+
+He screwed his eyeglass into his eye, and gave an intent look.
+
+“I can't make out the title,” he temporised, shaking his head, and
+letting his eyeglass drop.
+
+On the whole, it was very well acted; and I hope the occult little smile
+that played about the Duchessa's lips was a smile of appreciation.
+
+“It has a highly appropriate title,” she said. “It is called 'A Man of
+Words,' by an author I've never happened to hear of before, named Felix
+Wildmay.”
+
+“Oh, yes. How very odd,” said Peter. “By a curious chance, I know it
+very well. But I 'm surprised to discover that you do. How on earth did
+it fall into your hands?”
+
+“Why on earth shouldn't it?” wondered she. “Novels are intended to fall
+into people's hands, are they not?”
+
+“I believe so,” he assented. “But intentions, in this vale of tears,
+are not always realised, are they? Anyhow, 'A Man of Words' is not like
+other novels. It's peculiar.”
+
+“Peculiar--?” she repeated.
+
+“Of a peculiar, of an unparalleled obscurity,” he explained. “There has
+been no failure approaching it since What's-his-name invented printing.
+I hadn't supposed that seven copies of it were in circulation.”
+
+“Really?” said the Duchessa. “A correspondent of mine in London
+recommended it. But--in view of its unparalleled obscurity is n't it
+almost equally a matter for surprise that you should know it?”
+
+“It would be, sure enough,” consented Peter, “if it weren't that I just
+happen also to know the author.”
+
+“Oh--? You know the author?” cried the Duchessa, with animation.
+
+“Comme ma poche,” said Peter. “We were boys together.”
+
+“Really?” said she. “What a coincidence.”
+
+“Yes,” said he.
+
+“And--and his book?” Her eyebrows went up, interrogative. “I expect, as
+you know the man, you think rather poorly of it?”
+
+“On the contrary, in the teeth of verisimilitude, I think extremely
+well of it,” he answered firmly. “I admire it immensely. I think it's
+an altogether ripping little book. I think it's one of the nicest little
+books I've read for ages.
+
+“How funny,” said she.
+
+“Why funny?” asked he.
+
+“It's so unlikely that one should seem a genius to one's old familiar
+friends.”
+
+“Did I say he seemed a genius to me? I misled you. He does n't. In fact,
+he very frequently seems--but, for Charity's sake, I 'd best forbear
+to tell. However, I admire his book. And--to be entirely frank--it's a
+constant source of astonishment to me that he should ever have been able
+to do anything one-tenth so good.”
+
+The Duchessa smiled pensively.
+
+“Ah, well,” she mused, “we must assume that he has happy moments--or,
+perhaps, two soul-sides, one to face the world with, one to show his
+manuscripts when he's writing. You hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.
+That, indeed, is only natural, on the part of an old friend. But you
+pique my interest. What is the trouble with him? Is--is he conceited,
+for example?”
+
+“The trouble with him?” Peter pondered. “Oh, it would be too long and
+too sad a story. Should I anatomise him to you as he is, I must blush
+and weep, and you must look pale and wonder. He has pretty nearly
+every weakness, not to mention vices, that flesh is heir to. But as for
+conceit... let me see. He concurs in my own high opinion of his work, I
+believe; but I don't know whether, as literary men go, it would be fair
+to call him conceited. He belongs, at any rate, to the comparatively
+modest minority who do not secretly fancy that Shakespeare has come back
+to life.”
+
+“That Shakespeare has come back to life!” marvelled the Duchessa. “Do
+you mean to say that most literary men fancy that?”
+
+“I think perhaps I am acquainted with three who don't,” Peter replied;
+“but one of them merely wears his rue with a difference. He fancies that
+it's Goethe.”
+
+“How extravagantly--how exquisitely droll!” she laughed.
+
+“I confess, it struck me so, until I got accustomed to it,” said he,
+“until I learned that it was one of the commonplaces, one of the normal
+attributes of the literary temperament. It's as much to be taken
+for granted, when you meet an author, as the tail is to be taken for
+granted, when you meet a cat.”
+
+“I'm vastly your debtor for the information--it will stand me in stead
+with the next author who comes my way. But, in that case, your friend
+Mr. Felix Wildmay will be, as it were, a sort of Manx cat?” was her
+smiling deduction.
+
+“Yes, if you like, in that particular, a sort of Manx cat,” acquiesced
+Peter, with a laugh.
+
+The Duchessa laughed too; and then there was a little pause.
+
+Overhead, never so light a breeze lisped never so faintly in the
+tree-tops; here and there bird-notes fell, liquid, desultory, like drops
+of rain after a shower; and constantly one heard the cool music of the
+river. The sun, filtering through worlds and worlds of leaves, shed upon
+everything a green-gold penumbra. The air, warm and still, was sweet
+with garden-scents. The lake, according to its habit at this hour of
+the afternoon, had drawn a grey veil over its face, a thin grey veil,
+through which its sapphire-blue shone furtively. Far away, in the summer
+haze, Monte Sfiorito seemed a mere dim spectre of itself--a stranger
+might easily have mistaken it for a vague mass of cloud floating above
+the horizon.
+
+“Are you aware that it 's a singularly lovely afternoon?” the Duchessa
+asked, by and by.
+
+“I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so,” Peter hazarded, with the
+least perceptible approach to a meaning bow.
+
+In the Duchessa's face, perhaps, there flickered, for half-a-second, the
+least perceptible light, as of a comprehending and unresentful smile.
+But she went on, with fine aloofness.
+
+“I rather envy you your river, you know. We are too far from it at
+the castle. Is n't the sound, the murmur, of it delicious? And its
+colour--how does it come by such a subtle colour? Is it green? Is it
+blue? And the diamonds on its surface--see how they glitter. You know,
+of course,” she questioned, “who the owner is of those unequalled gems?”
+
+“Surely,” Peter answered, “the lady paramount of this demesne?”
+
+“No, no.” She shook her head, smiling. “Undine. They are Undine's--her
+necklaces and tiaras. No mortal woman's jewel-case contains anything
+half so brilliant. But look at them--look at the long chains of
+them--how they float for a minute--and are then drawn down. They are
+Undine's--Undine and her companions are sporting with them just below
+the surface. A moment ago I caught a glimpse of a white arm.”
+
+“Ah,” said Peter, nodding thoughtfully, “that's what it is to have 'the
+seeing eye.' But I'm grieved to hear of Undine in such a wanton mood. I
+had hoped she would still be weeping her unhappy love-affair.”
+
+“What! with that horrid, stolid German--Hildebrandt, was his name?”
+ cried the Duchessa. “Not she! Long ago, I'm glad to say, she learned to
+laugh at that, as a mere caprice of her immaturity. However, this is a
+digression. I want to return to our 'Man of Words.' Tell me--what is the
+quality you especially like in it?”
+
+“I like its every quality,” Peter affirmed, unblushing. “Its style,
+its finish, its concentration; its wit, humour, sentiment; its texture,
+tone, atmosphere; its scenes, its subject; the paper it's printed
+on, the type, the binding. But above all, I like its heroine. I think
+Pauline de Fleuvieres the pearl of human women--the cleverest, the
+loveliest, the most desirable, the most exasperating. And also the most
+feminine. I can't think of her at all as a mere fiction, a mere shadow
+on paper. I think of her as a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood woman,
+whom I have actually known. I can see her before me now--I can see
+her eyes, full of mystery and mischief--I can see her exquisite little
+teeth, as she smiles--I can see her hair, her hands--I can almost catch
+the perfume of her garments. I 'm utterly infatuated with her--I could
+commit a hundred follies for her.”
+
+“Mercy!” exclaimed the Duchessa. “You are enthusiastic.”
+
+“The book's admirers are so few, they must endeavour to make up in
+enthusiasm what they lack in numbers,” he submitted.
+
+“But--at that rate--why are they so few?” she puzzled. “If the book is
+all you think it, how do you account for its unpopularity?”
+
+“It could never conceivably be anything but unpopular,” said he. “It has
+the fatal gift of beauty.”
+
+The Duchessa laughed surprise.
+
+“Is beauty a fatal gift--in works of art?”
+
+“Yes--in England,” he declared.
+
+“In England? Why especially in England?”
+
+“In English-speaking--in Anglo-Saxon lands, if you prefer. The
+Anglo-Saxon public is beauty-blind. They have fifty religions--only one
+sauce--and no sense of beauty whatsoever. They can see the nose on one's
+face--the mote in their neighbour's eye; they can see when a bargain is
+good, when a war will be expedient. But the one thing they can never see
+is beauty. And when, by some rare chance, you catch them in the act of
+admiring a beautiful object, it will never be for its beauty--it will be
+in spite of its beauty for some other, some extra-aesthetic interest it
+possesses--some topical or historical interest. Beauty is necessarily
+detached from all that is topical or historical, or documentary or
+actual. It is also necessarily an effect of fine shades, delicate
+values, vanishing distinctions, of evasiveness, inconsequence,
+suggestion. It is also absolute, unrelated--it is positive or negative
+or superlative--it is never comparative. Well, the Anglo-Saxon public
+is totally insensible to such things. They can no more feel them, than a
+blind worm can feel the colours of the rainbow.”
+
+She laughed again, and regarded him with an air of humorous meditation.
+
+“And that accounts for the unsuccess of 'A Man of Words'?”
+
+“You might as well offer Francois Villon a banquet of Orient pearls.”
+
+“You are bitterly hard on the Anglo-Saxon public.”
+
+“Oh, no,” he disclaimed, “not hard--but just. I wish them all sorts of
+prosperity, with a little more taste.”
+
+“Oh, but surely,” she caught him up, “if their taste were greater, their
+prosperity would be less?”
+
+“I don't know,” said he. “The Greeks were fairly prosperous, were n't
+they? And the Venetians? And the French are not yet quite bankrupt.”
+
+Still again she laughed--always with that little air of humorous
+meditation.
+
+“You--you don't exactly overwhelm one with compliments,” she observed.
+
+He looked alarm, anxiety.
+
+“Don't I? What have I neglected?” he cried.
+
+“You 've never once evinced the slightest curiosity to learn what I
+think of the book in question.”
+
+“Oh, I'm sure you like it,” he rejoined hardily. “You have 'the seeing
+eye.'”
+
+“And yet I'm just a humble member of the Anglo-Saxon public.”
+
+“No--you're a distinguished member of the Anglo-Saxon 'remnant.' Thank
+heaven, there's a remnant, a little scattered remnant. I'm perfectly
+sure you like 'A Man of Words.'”
+
+“'Like it' is a proposition so general. Perhaps I am burning to tell
+someone what I think of it in detail.”
+
+She smiled into his eyes, a trifle oddly.
+
+“If you are, then I know someone who is burning to hear you,” he avowed.
+
+“Well, then, I think--I think...” she began, on a note of deliberation.
+“But I 'm afraid, just now, it would take too long to formulate my
+thought. Perhaps I'll try another day.”
+
+She gave him a derisory little nod--and in a minute was well up the
+lawn, towards the castle.
+
+Peter glared after her, his fists clenched, teeth set.
+
+“You fiend!” he muttered. Then, turning savagely upon himself, “You
+duffer!”
+
+Nevertheless, that evening, he said to Marietta, “The plot thickens.
+We've advanced a step. We've reached what the vulgar call a
+psychological moment. She's seen my Portrait of a Lady. But as yet, if
+you can believe me, she doesn't dream who painted it; and she has n't
+recognised the subject. As if one were to face one's image in the glass,
+and take it for another's! 3--I 'll--I 'll double your wages--if you
+will induce events to hurry up.”
+
+However, as he spoke English, Marietta was in no position to profit by
+his offer.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Peter was walking in the high-road, on the other side of the river--the
+great high-road that leads from Bergamo to Milan.
+
+It was late in the afternoon, and already, in the west, the sky was
+beginning to put on some of its sunset splendours. In the east, framed
+to Peter's vision by parallel lines of poplars, it hung like a curtain
+of dark-blue velvet.
+
+Peter sat on the grass, by the roadside, in the shadow of a hedge--a
+rose-bush hedge, of course--and lighted a cigarette.
+
+Far down the long white road, against the blue velvet sky, between the
+poplars, two little spots of black, two small human figures, were moving
+towards him.
+
+Half absently, he let his eyes accompany them.
+
+As they came nearer, they defined themselves as a boy and a girl.
+Nearer still, he saw that they were ragged and dusty and barefoot.
+
+The boy had three or four gaudy-hued wicker baskets slung over his
+shoulder.
+
+Vaguely, tacitly, Peter supposed that they would be the children of some
+of the peasants of the countryside, on their way home from the village.
+
+As they arrived abreast of him, they paid him the usual peasants'
+salute. The boy lifted a tattered felt hat from his head, the girl
+bobbed a courtesy, and “Buona sera, Eccellenza,” they said in concert,
+without, however, pausing in their march.
+
+Peter put his hand in his pocket.
+
+“Here, little girl,” he called.
+
+The little girl glanced at him, doubting.
+
+“Come here,” he said.
+
+Her face a question, she came up to him; and he gave her a few coppers.
+
+“To buy sweetmeats,” he said.
+
+“A thousand thanks; Excellency,” said she, bobbing another courtesy.
+
+“A thousand thanks, Excellency,” said the boy, from his distance, again
+lifting his rag of a hat.
+
+And they trudged on.
+
+But Peter looked after them--and his heart smote him. They were clearly
+of the poorest of the poor. He thought of Hansel and Gretel. Why had he
+given them so little? He called to them to stop.
+
+The little girl came running back.
+
+Peter rose to meet her.
+
+“You may as well buy some ribbons too,” he said, and gave her a couple
+of lire.
+
+She looked at the money with surprise--even with an appearance of
+hesitation. Plainly, it was a sum, in her eyes.
+
+“It's all right. Now run along,” said Peter.
+
+“A thousand thanks, Excellency,” said she, with a third courtesy, and
+rejoined her brother....
+
+“Where are they going?” asked a voice.
+
+Peter faced about.
+
+There stood the Duchessa, in a bicycling costume, her bicycle beside
+her. Her bicycling costume was of blue serge, and she wore a jaunty
+sailor-hat with a blue ribbon. Peter (in spite of the commotion in his
+breast) was able to remember that this was the first time he had seen
+her in anything but white.
+
+Her attention was all upon the children, whom he, perhaps, had more or
+less banished to Cracklimbo.
+
+“Where are they going?” she repeated, trouble in her voice and in her
+eyes.
+
+Peter collected himself.
+
+“The children? I don't know--I didn't ask. Home, aren't they?”
+
+“Home? Oh, no. They don't live hereabouts,” she said. “I know all the
+poor of this neighbourhood.--Ohe there! Children! Children!” she cried.
+
+But they were quite a hundred yards away, and did not hear.
+
+“Do you wish them to come back?” asked Peter.
+
+“Yes--of course,” she answered, with a shade of impatience.
+
+He put his fingers to his lips (you know the schoolboy accomplishment),
+and gave a long whistle.
+
+That the children did hear.
+
+They halted, and turned round, looking, enquiring.
+
+“Come back--come back!” called the Duchessa, raising her hand, and
+beckoning.
+
+They came back.
+
+“The pathetic little imps,” she murmured while they were on the way.
+
+The boy was a sturdy, square-built fellow, of twelve, thirteen, with
+a shock of brown hair, brown cheeks, and sunny brown eyes; with
+a precocious air of doggedness, of responsibility. He wore an old
+tail-coat, the tail-coat of a man, ragged, discoloured, falling to his
+ankles.
+
+The girl was ten or eleven, pale, pinched; hungry, weary, and sorry
+looking. Her hair too had been brown, upon a time; but now it was faded
+to something near the tint of ashes, and had almost the effect of being
+grey. Her pale little forehead was crossed by thin wrinkles, lines of
+pain, of worry, like an old woman's.
+
+The Duchessa, pushing her bicycle, and followed by Peter, moved down
+the road, to meet them. Peter had never been so near to her before--at
+moments her arm all but brushed his sleeve. I think he blessed the
+children.
+
+“Where are you going?” the Duchessa asked, softly, smiling into the
+girl's sad little face.
+
+The girl had shown no fear of Peter; but apparently she was somewhat
+frightened by this grand lady. The toes of her bare feet worked
+nervously in the dust. She hung her head shyly, and eyed her brother.
+
+But the brother, removing his hat, with the bow of an Italian
+peasant--and that is to say, the bow of a courtier--spoke up bravely.
+
+“To Turin, Nobility.”
+
+He said it in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, quite as he might have
+said, “To the next farm-house.”
+
+The Duchessa, however, had not bargained for an answer of this measure.
+Startled, doubting her ears perhaps, “To--Turin--!” she exclaimed.
+
+“Yes, Excellency,” said the boy.
+
+“But--but Turin--Turin is hundreds of kilometres from here,” she said,
+in a kind of gasp.
+
+“Yes, Excellency,” said the boy.
+
+“You are going to Turin--you two children--walking--like that!” she
+persisted.
+
+“Yes, Excellency.”
+
+“But--but it will take you a month.”
+
+“Pardon, noble lady,” said the boy. “With your Excellency's permission,
+we were told it should take fifteen days.”
+
+“Where do you come from?” she asked.
+
+“From Bergamo, Excellency.”
+
+“When did you leave Bergamo?”
+
+“Yesterday morning, Excellency.”
+
+“The little girl is your sister?”
+
+“Yes, Excellency.”
+
+“Have you a mother and father?”
+
+“A father, Excellency. The mother is dead.” Each of the children made
+the Sign of the Cross; and Peter was somewhat surprised, no doubt, to
+see the Duchessa do likewise. He had yet to learn the beautiful custom
+of that pious Lombard land, whereby, when the Dead are mentioned, you
+make the Sign of the Cross, and, pausing reverently for a moment, say in
+silence the traditional prayer of the Church:
+
+“May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the
+Mercy of God, rest in peace.”
+
+“And where is your father?” the Duchessa asked.
+
+“In Turin, Excellency,” answered the boy. “He is a glass-blower. After
+the strike at Bergamo, he went to Turin to seek work. Now he has found
+it. So he has sent for us to come to him.”
+
+“And you two children--alone--are going to walk all the way to Turin!”
+ She could not get over the pitiful wonder of it.
+
+“Yes, Excellency.”
+
+“The heart-rending little waifs,” she said, in English, with something
+like a sob. Then, in Italian, “But--but how do you live by the way?”
+
+The boy touched his shoulder-load of baskets.
+
+“We sell these, Excellency.”
+
+“What is their price?” she asked.
+
+“Thirty soldi, Excellency.”
+
+“Have you sold many since you started?”
+
+The boy looked away; and now it was his turn to hang his head, and to
+let his toes work nervously in the dust.
+
+“Haven't you sold any?” she exclaimed, drawing her conclusions.
+
+“No, Excellency. The people would not buy,” he owned, in a dull voice,
+keeping his eyes down.
+
+“Poverino,” she murmured. “Where are you going to sleep to-night?”
+
+“In a house, Excellency,” said he.
+
+But that seemed to strike the Duchessa as somewhat vague.
+
+“In what house?” she asked.
+
+“I do not know, Excellency,” he confessed. “We will find a house.”
+
+“Would you like to come back with me, and sleep at my house?”
+
+The boy and girl looked at each other, taking mute counsel.
+
+Then, “Pardon, noble lady--with your Excellency's permission, is it
+far?” the boy questioned.
+
+“I am afraid it is not very near--three or four kilometres.”
+
+Again the children looked at each other, conferring. Afterwards, the boy
+shook his head.
+
+“A thousand thanks, Excellency. With your permission, we must not turn
+back. We must walk on till later. At night we will find a house.”
+
+“They are too proud to own that their house will be a hedge,” she said
+to Peter, again in English. “Aren't you hungry?” she asked the children.
+
+“No, Excellency. We had bread in the village, below there,” answered the
+boy.
+
+“You will not come home with me, and have a good dinner, and a good
+night's sleep?”
+
+“Pardon, Excellency. With your favour, the father would not wish us to
+turn back.”
+
+The Duchessa looked at the little girl.
+
+The little girl wore a medal of the Immaculate Conception on a ribbon
+round her neck--a forlorn blue ribbon, soiled and frayed.
+
+“Oh, you have a holy medal,” said the Duchessa.
+
+“Yes, noble lady,” said the girl, dropping a courtesy, and lifting up
+her sad little weazened face.
+
+“She has been saying her prayers all along the road,” the boy
+volunteered.
+
+“That is right,” approved the Duchessa. “You have not made your First
+Communion yet, have you?”
+
+“No, Excellency,” said the girl. “I shall make it next year.”
+
+“And you?” the Duchessa asked the boy.
+
+“I made mine at Corpus Christi,” said the boy, with a touch of pride.
+
+The Duchessa turned to Peter.
+
+“Do you know, I haven't a penny in my pocket. I have come out without my
+purse.”
+
+“How much ought one to give them?” Peter asked.
+
+“Of course, there is the fear that they might be robbed,” she reflected.
+“If one should give them a note of any value, they would have to change
+it; and they would probably be robbed. What to do?”
+
+“I will speak to the boy,” said Peter. “Would you like to go to Turin by
+train?” he asked.
+
+The boy and girl looked at each other. “Yes, Excellency,” said the boy.
+
+“But if I give you money for your fare, will you know how to take care
+of it--how to prevent people from robbing you?”
+
+“Oh, yes, Excellency.”
+
+“You could take the train this evening, at Venzona, about two kilometres
+from here, in the direction you are walking. In an hour or two you would
+arrive at Milan; there you would change into the train for Turin. You
+would be at Turin to-morrow morning.”
+
+“Yes, Excellency.”
+
+“But if I give you money, you will not let people rob you? If I give you
+a hundred lire?”
+
+The boy drew back, stared, as if frightened.
+
+“A hundred lire--?” he said.
+
+“Yes,” said Peter.
+
+The boy looked at his sister.
+
+“Pardon, Nobility,” he said. “With your condescension, does it cost a
+hundred lire to go to Turin by train?”
+
+“Oh, no. I think it costs eight or ten.”
+
+Again the boy looked at his sister.
+
+“Pardon, Nobility. With your Excellency's permission, we should not
+desire a hundred lire then,” he said.
+
+Peter and the Duchessa were not altogether to be blamed, I hope, if they
+exchanged the merest hint of a smile.
+
+“Well, if I should give you fifty?” Peter asked.
+
+“Fifty lire, Excellency?”
+
+Peter nodded.
+
+Still again the boy sought counsel of his sister, with his eyes.
+
+“Yes, Excellency,” he said.
+
+“You are sure you will be able to take care of it--you will not let
+people rob you,” the Duchessa put in, anxious. “They will wish to
+rob you. If you go to sleep in the train, they will try to pick your
+pocket.”
+
+“I will hide it, noble lady. No one shall rob me. If I go to sleep in
+the train, I will sit on it, and my sister will watch. If she goes to
+sleep, I will watch,” the boy promised confidently.
+
+“You must give it to him in the smallest change you can possibly scrape
+together,” she advised Peter.
+
+And with one-lira, two-lira, ten-lira notes, and with a little silver
+and copper, he made up the amount.
+
+“A thousand thanks, Excellency,” said the boy, with a bow that was
+magnificent; and he proceeded to distribute the money between various
+obscure pockets.
+
+“A thousand thanks, Excellency,” said the girl, with a courtesy.
+
+“Addio, a buon' viaggio,” said Peter.
+
+“Addio, Eccellenze,” said the boy.
+
+“Addio, Eccellenze,” said the girl.
+
+But the Duchessa impulsively stooped down, and kissed the girl on her
+poor little wrinkled brow. And when she stood up, Peter saw that her
+eyes were wet.
+
+The children moved off. They moved off, whispering together, and
+gesticulating, after the manner of their race: discussing something.
+Presently they stopped; and the boy came running back, while his sister
+waited.
+
+He doffed his hat, and said, “A thousand pardons, Excellency-”
+
+“Yes? What is it?” Peter asked.
+
+“With your Excellency's favour--is it obligatory that we should take the
+train?”
+
+“Obligatory?” puzzled Peter. “How do you mean?”
+
+“If it is not obligatory, we would prefer, with the permission of your
+Excellency, to save the money.”
+
+“But--but then you will have to walk!” cried Peter.
+
+“But if it is not obligatory to take the train, we would pray your
+Excellency's permission to save the money. We should like to save the
+money, to give it to the father. The father is very poor. Fifty lire is
+so much.”
+
+This time it was Peter who looked for counsel to the Duchessa.
+
+Her eyes, still bright with tears, responded, “Let them do as they
+will.”
+
+“No, it is not obligatory--it is only recommended,” he said to the boy,
+with a smile that he could n't help. “Do as you will. But if I were you,
+I should spare my poor little feet.”
+
+“Mille grazie, Eccellenze,” the boy said, with a final sweep of his
+tattered hat. He ran back to his sister; and next moment they were
+walking resolutely on, westward, “into the great red light.”
+
+
+The Duchessa and Peter were silent for a while, looking after them.
+
+They dwindled to dots in the distance, and then, where the road turned,
+disappeared.
+
+At last the Duchessa spoke--but almost as if speaking to herself.
+
+“There, Felix Wildmay, you writer of tales, is a subject made to your
+hand,” she said.
+
+We may guess whether Peter was startled. Was it possible that she had
+found him out? A sound, confused, embarrassed, something composite,
+between an oh and ayes, seemed to expire in his throat.
+
+But the Duchessa did n't appear to heed it.
+
+“Don't you think it would be a touching episode for your friend to write
+a story round?” she asked.
+
+We may guess whether he was relieved.
+
+“Oh--oh, yes,” he agreed, with the precipitancy of a man who, in his
+relief, would agree to anything.
+
+“Have you ever seen such courage?” she went on. “The wonderful babies!
+Fancy fifteen days, fifteen days and nights, alone, unprotected, on the
+highway, those poor little atoms! Down in their hearts they are really
+filled with terror. Who would n't be, with such a journey before him?
+But how finely they concealed it, mastered it! Oh, I hope they won't be
+robbed. God help them--God help them!”
+
+“God help them, indeed,” said Peter.
+
+“And the little girl, with her medal of the Immaculate Conception. The
+father, after all, can hardly be the brute one might suspect, since he
+has given them a religious education. Oh, I am sure, I am sure, it was
+the Blessed Virgin herself who sent us across their path, in answer to
+that poor little creature's prayers.”
+
+“Yes,” said Peter, ambiguously perhaps. But he liked the way in which
+she united him to herself in the pronoun.
+
+“Which, of course,” she added, smiling gravely into his eyes, “seems the
+height of absurdity to you?”
+
+“Why should it seem the height of absurdity to me?” he asked.
+
+“You are a Protestant, I suppose?”
+
+“I suppose so. But what of that? At all events, I believe there are
+more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the usual
+philosophies. And I see no reason why it should not have been the
+Blessed Virgin who sent us across their path.”
+
+“What would your Protestant pastors and masters do, if they heard you?
+Isn't that what they call Popish superstition?”
+
+“I daresay. But I'm not sure that there's any such thing as
+superstition. Superstition, in its essence, is merely a recognition of
+the truth that in a universe of mysteries and contradictions, like ours,
+nothing conceivable or inconceivable is impossible.”
+
+“Oh, no, no,” she objected. “Superstition is the belief in something
+that is ugly and bad and unmeaning. That is the difference between
+superstition and religion. Religion is the belief in something that is
+beautiful and good and significant--something that throws light into the
+dark places of life--that helps us to see and to live.”
+
+“Yes,” said Peter, “I admit the distinction.” After a little suspension,
+“I thought,” he questioned, “that all Catholics were required to go to
+Mass on Sunday?”
+
+“Of course--so they are,” said she.
+
+“But--but you--” he began.
+
+“I hear Mass not on Sunday only--I hear it every morning of my life.”
+
+“Oh? Indeed? I beg your pardon,” he stumbled. “I--one--one never sees
+you at the village church.”
+
+“No. We have a chapel and a chaplain at the castle.”
+
+She mounted her bicycle.
+
+“Good-bye,” she said, and lightly rode away.
+
+“So-ho! Her bigotry is not such a negligible quantity, after all,” Peter
+concluded.
+
+“But what,” he demanded of Marietta, as she ministered to his wants
+at dinner, “what does one barrier more or less matter, when people are
+already divided by a gulf that never can be traversed? You see that
+river?” He pointed through his open window to the Aco. “It is a symbol.
+She stands on one side of it, I stand on the other, and we exchange
+little jokes. But the river is always there, flowing between us,
+separating us. She is the daughter of a lord, and the widow of a duke,
+and the fairest of her sex, and a millionaire, and a Roman Catholic.
+What am I? Oh, I don't deny I 'm clever. But for the rest? ... My
+dear Marietta, I am simply, in one word, the victim of a misplaced
+attachment.”
+
+“Non capisco Francese,” said Marietta.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+And after that, for I forget how many days, Peter and the Duchessa did
+not meet; and so he sank low and lower in his mind.
+
+Nothing that can befall us, optimists aver, is without its value; and
+this, I have heard, is especially true if we happen to be literary men.
+All is grist that comes to a writer's mill.
+
+By his present experience, accordingly, Peter learned--and in the
+regretful prose of some future masterpiece will perhaps be enabled to
+remember--how exceeding great is the impatience of the lovesick,
+with what febrile vehemence the smitten heart can burn, and to
+what improbable lengths hours and minutes can on occasions stretch
+themselves.
+
+He tried many methods of distraction.
+
+There was always the panorama of his valley--the dark-blue lake, pale
+Monte Sfiorito, the frowning Gnisi, the smiling uplands westward. There
+were always the sky, the clouds, the clear sunshine, the crisp-etched
+shadows; and in the afternoon there was always the wondrous opalescent
+haze of August, filling every distance. There was always his
+garden--there were the great trees, with the light sifting through high
+spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees,
+the butterflies, with their colour, and their fragrance, and their
+music; there was his tinkling fountain, in its nimbus of prismatic
+spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a half-hour's
+walk, there was the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top
+church, its odd little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded
+frescoed house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian
+life:--the cobbler tapping in his stall; women gossiping at their
+toilets; children sprawling in the dirt, chasing each other, shouting;
+men drinking, playing mora, quarrelling, laughing, singing, twanging
+mandolines, at the tables under the withered bush of the wine-shop; and
+two or three more pensive citizens swinging their legs from the parapet
+of the bridge, and angling for fish that never bit, in the impetuous
+stream below.
+
+Peter looked at these things; and, it is to be presumed, he saw them.
+But, for all the joy they gave him, he, this cultivator of the sense of
+beauty, might have been the basest unit of his own purblind Anglo-Saxon
+public. They were the background for an absent figure. They were the
+stage-accessories of a drama whose action was arrested. They were an
+empty theatre.
+
+He tried to read. He had brought a trunkful of books to Villa Floriano;
+but that book had been left behind which could fix his interest now.
+
+He tried to write--and wondered, in a kind of daze, that any man should
+ever have felt the faintest ambition to do a thing so thankless and so
+futile.
+
+“I shall never write again. Writing,” he generalised, and possibly not
+without some reason, “when it is n't the sordidest of trades, is a mere
+fatuous assertion of one's egotism. Breaking stones in the street were
+a nobler occupation; weaving ropes of sand were better sport. The only
+things that are worth writing are inexpressible, and can't be written.
+The only things that can be written are obvious and worthless--the very
+crackling of thorns under a pot. Oh, why does n't she turn up?”
+
+And the worst of it was that at any moment, for aught he knew, she might
+turn up. That was the worst of it, and the best. It kept hope alive,
+only to torture hope. It encouraged him to wait, to watch, to expect;
+to linger in his garden, gazing hungry-eyed up the lawns of Ventirose,
+striving to pierce the foliage that embowered the castle; to wander the
+country round-about, scanning every vista, scrutinising every shape and
+shadow, a tweed-clad Gastibelza. At any moment, indeed, she might turn
+up; but the days passed--the hypocritic days--and she did not turn up.
+
+
+Marietta, the kind soul, noticing his despondency, sought in divers
+artless ways to cheer him.
+
+One evening she burst into his sitting-room with the effect of a small
+explosion, excitement in every line of her brown old face and wiry
+little figure.
+
+“The fireflies! The fireflies, Signorino!” she cried, with strenuous
+gestures.
+
+“What fireflies?” asked he, with phlegm.
+
+“It is the feast of St. Dominic. The fireflies have arrived. They
+arrive every year on the feast of St. Dominic. They are the beads of his
+rosary. They are St. Dominic's Aves. There are thousands of them. Come,
+Signorino, Come and see.”
+
+Her black eyes snapped. She waved her hands urgently towards the window.
+
+Peter languidly got up, languidly crossed the room, looked out.
+
+There were, in truth, thousands of them, thousands and thousands of tiny
+primrose flames, circling, fluttering, rising, sinking, in the purple
+blackness of the night, like snowflakes in a wind, palpitating like
+hearts of living gold--Jove descending upon Danae invisible.
+
+“Son carin', eh?” cried eager Marietta.
+
+“Hum--yes--pretty enough,” he grudgingly acknowledged. “But even so?”
+ the ingrate added, as he turned away, and let himself drop back into
+his lounging-chair. “My dear good woman, no amount of prettiness
+can disguise the fundamental banality of things. Your fireflies--St.
+Dominic's beads, if you like--and, apropos of that, do you know what
+they call them in America?--they call them lightning-bugs, if you can
+believe me--remark the difference between southern euphuism and western
+bluntness--your fireflies are pretty enough, I grant. But they are
+tinsel pasted on the Desert of Sahara. They are condiments added to a
+dinner of dust and ashes. Life, trick it out as you will, is just an
+incubus--is just the Old Man of the Sea. Language fails me to convey to
+you any notion how heavily he sits on my poor shoulders. I thought I had
+suffered from ennui in my youth. But the malady merely plays with the
+green fruit; it reserves its serious ravages for the ripe. I can promise
+you 't is not a laughing matter. Have you ever had a fixed idea? Have
+you ever spent days and nights racking your brain, importuning the
+unanswering Powers, to learn whether there was--well, whether there was
+Another Man, for instance? Oh, bring me drink. Bring me Seltzer water
+and Vermouth. I will seek nepenthe at the bottom of the wine-cup.”
+
+Was there another man? Why should there not be? And yet was there? In
+her continued absence, the question came back persistently, and scarcely
+contributed to his peace of mind.
+
+
+A few days later, nothing discouraged, “Would you like to have a good
+laugh, Signorino?” Marietta enquired.
+
+“Yes,” he answered, apathetic.
+
+“Then do me the favour to come,” she said.
+
+She led him out of his garden, to the gate of a neighbouring meadow. A
+beautiful black-horned white cow stood there, her head over the
+bars, looking up and down the road, and now and then uttering a low
+distressful “moo.”
+
+“See her,” said Marietta.
+
+“I see her. Well--?” said Peter.
+
+“This morning they took her calf from her--to wean it,” said Marietta.
+
+“Did they, the cruel things? Well--?” said he.
+
+“And ever since, she has stood there by the gate, looking down the road,
+waiting, calling.”
+
+“The poor dear. Well--?” said he.
+
+“But do you not see, Signorino? Look at her eyes. She is
+weeping--weeping like a Christian.”
+
+Peter looked-and, sure enough, from the poor cow's eyes tears were
+falling, steadily, rapidly: big limpid tears that trickled down her
+cheek, her great homely hairy cheek, and dropped on the grass: tears of
+helpless pain, uncomprehending endurance. “Why have they done this thing
+to me?” they seemed dumbly to cry.
+
+“Have you ever seen a cow weep before? Is it comical, at least?”
+ demanded Marietta, exultant.
+
+“Comical--?” Peter gasped. “Comical--!” he groaned....
+
+But then he spoke to the cow.
+
+“Poor dear--poor dear,” he repeated. He patted her soft warm neck, and
+scratched her between the horns and along the dewlap.
+
+“Poor dear--poor dear.”
+
+The cow lifted up her head, and rested her great chin on Peter's
+shoulder, breathing upon his face.
+
+“Yes, you know that we are companions in misery, don't you?” he said.
+“They have taken my calf from me too--though my calf, indeed, was only a
+calf in an extremely metaphorical sense--and it never was exactly mine,
+anyhow--I daresay it's belonged from the beginning to another man. You,
+at least, have n't that gall and wormwood added to your cup. And now
+you must really try to pull yourself together. It's no good crying. And
+besides, there are more calves in the sea than have ever been taken from
+it. You'll have a much handsomer and fatter one next time. And besides,
+you must remember that your loss subserves someone else's gain--the
+farmer would never have done it if it hadn't been to his advantage.
+If you 're an altruist, that should comfort you. And you must n't mind
+Marietta,--you must n't mind her laughter. Marietta is a Latin. The
+Latin conception of what is laughable differs by the whole span of
+heaven from the Teuton. You and I are Teutons.”
+
+“Teutons--?” questioned Marietta wrinkling her brow.
+
+“Yes--Germanic,” said he.
+
+“But I thought the Signorino was English?”
+
+“So he is.”
+
+“But the cow is not Germanic. White, with black horns, that is the
+purest Roman breed, Signorino.”
+
+“Fa niente,” he instructed her. “Cows and Englishmen, and all such
+sentimental cattle, including Germans, are Germanic. Italians are
+Latin--with a touch of the Goth and Vandal. Lions and tigers growl and
+fight because they're Mohammedans. Dogs still bear without abuse the
+grand old name of Sycophant. Cats are of the princely line of Persia,
+and worship fire, fish, and flattery--as you may have noticed. Geese
+belong indifferently to any race you like--they are cosmopolitans;
+and I've known here and there a person who, without distinction of
+nationality, was a duck. In fact, you're rather by way of being a duck
+yourself: And now,” he perorated, “never deny again that I can talk
+nonsense with an aching heart.”
+
+“All the same,” insisted Marietta, “it is very comical to see a cow
+weep.”
+
+“At any rate,” retorted Peter, “it is not in the least comical to hear a
+hyaena laugh.”
+
+“I have never heard one,” said she.
+
+“Pray that you never may. The sound would make an old woman of you. It's
+quite blood-curdling.”
+
+“Davvero?” said Marietta.
+
+“Davvero,” he assured her.
+
+And meanwhile the cow stood there, with her head on his shoulder,
+silently weeping, weeping.
+
+He gave her a farewell rub along the nose.
+
+“Good-bye,” he said. “Your breath is like meadowsweet. So dry your
+tears, and set your hopes upon the future. I 'll come and see you again
+to-morrow, and I 'll bring you some nice coarse salt. Good-bye.”
+
+But when he went to see her on the morrow, she was grazing peacefully;
+and she ate the salt he brought her with heart-whole bovine
+relish--putting out her soft white pad of a tongue, licking it
+deliberately from his hand, savouring it tranquilly, and crunching
+the bigger grains with ruminative enjoyment between her teeth. So soon
+consoled! They were companions in misery no longer. “I 'm afraid you
+are a Latin, after all,” he said, and left her with a sense of
+disappointment.
+
+That afternoon Marietta asked, “Would you care to visit the castle,
+Signorino?”
+
+He was seated under his willow-tree, by the river, smoking
+cigarettes--burning superfluous time.
+
+Marietta pointed towards Ventirose.
+
+“Why?” said he.
+
+“The family are away. In the absence of the family, the public are
+admitted, upon presentation of their cards.”
+
+“Oho!” he cried. “So the family are away, are they?”
+
+“Yes, Signorino.”
+
+“Aha!” cried he. “The family are away. That explains everything.
+Have--have they been gone long?”
+
+“Since a week, ten days, Signorino.”
+
+“A week! Ten days!” He started up, indignant. “You secretive wretch! Why
+have you never breathed a word of this to me?”
+
+Marietta looked rather frightened.
+
+“I did not know it myself, Signorino,” was her meek apology. “I heard
+it in the village this morning, when the Signorino sent me to buy coarse
+salt.”
+
+“Oh, I see.” He sank back upon his rustic bench. “You are forgiven.” He
+extended his hand in sign of absolution. “Are they ever coming back?”
+
+“Naturally, Signorino.”
+
+“What makes you think so?”
+
+“But they will naturally come back.”
+
+“I felicitate you upon your simple faith. When?”
+
+“Oh, fra poco. They have gone to Rome.”
+
+“To Rome? You're trifling with me. People do not go to Rome in August.”
+
+“Pardon, Signorino. People go to Rome for the feast of the Assumption.
+That is the 15th. Afterwards they come back,” said Marietta, firmly.
+
+“I withdraw my protest,” said Peter. “They have gone to Rome for the
+feast of the Assumption. Afterwards they will come back.”
+
+“Precisely, Signorino. But you have now the right to visit the castle,
+upon presentation of your card. You address yourself to the porter at
+the lodge. The castle is grand, magnificent. The Court of Honour alone
+is thirty metres long.”
+
+Marietta stretched her hands to right and left as far as they would go.
+
+“Marietta,” Peter enquired solemnly, “are you familiar with the tragedy
+of 'Hamlet'?”
+
+Marietta blinked.
+
+“No, Signorino.”
+
+“You have never read it,” he pursued, “in that famous edition from which
+the character of the Prince of Denmark happened to be omitted?”
+
+Marietta shook her head, wearily, patiently.
+
+Wearily, patiently, “No, Signorino,” she replied.
+
+“Neither have I,” said he, “and I don't desire to.”
+
+Marietta shrugged her shoulders; then returned gallantly to her charge.
+
+“If you would care to visit the castle, Signorino, you could see the
+crypt which contains the tombs of the family of Farfalla, the former
+owners. They are of black marble and alabaster, with gilding--very rich.
+You could also see the wine-cellars. Many years ago a tun there burst,
+and a serving man was drowned in the wine. You could also see the bed
+in which Nabulione, the Emperor of Europe, slept, when he was in this
+country. Also the ancient kitchen. Many years ago, in a storm, the
+skeleton of a man fell down the chimney, out upon the hearth. Also
+what is called the Court of Foxes. Many years ago there was a plague
+of foxes; and the foxes came down from the forest like a great army,
+thousands of them. And the lords of the castle, and the peasants, and
+the village people, all, all, had to run away like rabbits--or the foxes
+would have eaten them. It was in what they call the Court of Foxes that
+the King of the foxes held his court. There is also the park. In the
+park there are statues, ruins, and white peacocks.”
+
+“What have I in common with ruins and white peacocks?” Peter demanded
+tragically, when Marietta had brought her much-gesticulated exposition
+to a close. “Let me impress upon you once for all that I am not a
+tripper. As for your castle--you invite me to a banquet-hall deserted.
+As for your park, I see quite as much of it as I wish to see, from the
+seclusion of my own pleached garden. I learned long ago the folly of
+investigating things too closely, the wisdom of leaving things in
+the vague. At present the park of Ventirose provides me with the raw
+material for day-dreams. It is a sort of looking-glass country,--I can
+see just so far into it, and no farther--that lies beyond is mystery,
+is potentiality--terra incognita, which I can populate with monsters or
+pleasant phantoms, at my whim. Why should you attempt to deprive me of
+so innocent a recreation?”
+
+“After the return of the family,” said Marietta, “the public will no
+longer be admitted. Meantime--”
+
+“Upon presentation of my card, the porter will conduct me from
+disenchantment to disenchantment. No, thank you. Now, if it were the
+other way round, it would be different. If it were the castle and
+the park that had gone to Rome, and if the family could be visited on
+presentation of my card, I might be tempted.”
+
+“But that would be impossible, Signorino,” said Marietta.
+
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+
+Beatrice walking with a priest--ay, I am not sure it would n't be
+more accurate to say conspiring with a priest: but you shall judge.
+
+They were in a room of the Palazzo Udeschini, at Rome--a reception
+room, on the piano nobile. Therefore you see it: for are not all
+reception-rooms in Roman palaces alike?
+
+Vast, lofty, sombre; the walls hung with dark-green tapestry--a pattern
+of vertical stripes, dark green and darker green; here and there a
+great dark painting, a Crucifixion, a Holy Family, in a massive dim-gold
+frame; dark-hued rugs on the tiled floor; dark pieces of furniture,
+tables, cabinets, dark and heavy; and tall windows, bare of curtains
+at this season, opening upon a court--a wide stone-eaved court, planted
+with fantastic-leaved eucalyptus-trees, in the midst of which a brown
+old fountain, indefatigable, played its sibilant monotone.
+
+In the streets there were the smells, the noises, the heat, the glare
+of August of August in Rome, “the most Roman of the months,” they say;
+certainly the hottest, noisiest, noisomest, and most glaring. But here
+all was shadow, coolness, stillness, fragrance-the fragrance of the
+clean air coming in from among the eucalyptus-trees.
+
+Beatrice, critical-eyed, stood before a pier-glass, between two of the
+tall windows, turning her head from side to side, craning her neck a
+little--examining (if I must confess it) the effect of a new hat. It
+was a very stunning hat--if a man's opinion hath any pertinence; it was
+beyond doubt very complicated. There was an upward-springing black brim;
+there was a downward-sweeping black feather; there was a defiant white
+aigrette not unlike the Shah of Persia's; there were glints of red.
+
+The priest sat in an arm-chair--one of those stiff, upright Roman
+arm-chairs, which no one would ever dream of calling easy-chairs,
+high-backed, covered with hard leather, studded with steel nails--and
+watched her, smiling amusement, indulgence.
+
+He was an oldish priest--sixty, sixty-five. He was small, lightly built,
+lean-faced, with delicate-strong features: a prominent, delicate nose; a
+well-marked, delicate jaw-bone, ending in a prominent, delicate chin;
+a large, humorous mouth, the full lips delicately chiselled; a high,
+delicate, perhaps rather narrow brow, rising above humorous grey eyes,
+rather deep-set. Then he had silky-soft smooth white hair, and, topping
+the occiput, a tonsure that might have passed for a natural bald spot.
+
+He was decidedly clever-looking; he was aristocratic-looking,
+distinguished-looking; but he was, above all, pleasant-looking,
+kindly-looking, sweet-looking.
+
+He wore a plain black cassock, by no means in its first youth--brown
+along the seams, and, at the salient angles, at the shoulders, at
+the elbows, shining with the lustre of hard service. Even without his
+cassock, I imagine, you would have divined him for a clergyman--he
+bore the clerical impress, that odd indefinable air of clericism which
+everyone recognises, though it might not be altogether easy to tell
+just where or from what it takes its origin. In the garb of an
+Anglican--there being nothing, at first blush, necessarily Italian,
+necessarily un-English, in his face--he would have struck you, I think,
+as a pleasant, shrewd old parson of the scholarly--earnest type, mildly
+donnish, with a fondness for gentle mirth. What, however, you would
+scarcely have divined--unless you had chanced to notice, inconspicuous
+in this sober light, the red sash round his waist, or the amethyst on
+the third finger of his right hand--was his rank in the Roman hierarchy.
+I have the honour of presenting his Eminence Egidio Maria Cardinal
+Udeschini, formerly Bishop of Cittareggio, Prefect of the Congregation
+of Archives and Inscriptions.
+
+That was his title ecclesiastical. He had two other titles. He was a
+Prince of the Udeschini by accident of birth. But his third title was
+perhaps his most curious. It had been conferred upon him informally by
+the populace of the Roman slum in which his titular church, St. Mary of
+the Lilies, was situated: the little Uncle of the Poor.
+
+As Italians measure wealth, Cardinal Udeschini was a wealthy man. What
+with his private fortune and official stipends, he commanded an income
+of something like a hundred thousand lire. He allowed himself five
+thousand lire a year for food, clothing, and general expenses. Lodging
+and service he had for nothing in the palace of his family. The
+remaining ninety-odd thousand lire of his budget... Well, we all know
+that titles can be purchased in Italy; and that was no doubt the price
+he paid for the title I have mentioned.
+
+However, it was not in money only that Cardinal Udeschim paid. He paid
+also in labour. I have said that his titular church was in a slum. Rome
+surely contained no slum more fetid, none more perilous--a region of
+cut-throat alleys, south of the Ghetto, along the Tiber bank. Night
+after night, accompanied by his stout young vicar, Don Giorgio
+Appolloni, the Cardinal worked there as hard as any hard-working curate:
+visiting the sick, comforting the afflicted, admonishing the knavish,
+persuading the drunken from their taverns, making peace between the
+combative. Not infrequently, when he came home, he would add a pair
+of stilettos to his already large collection of such relics. And his
+homecomings were apt to be late--oftener than not, after midnight; and
+sometimes, indeed, in the vague twilight of morning, at the hour when,
+as he once expressed it to Don Giorgio, “the tired burglar is just
+lying down to rest.” And every Saturday evening the Cardinal Prefect
+of Archives and Inscriptions sat for three hours boxed up in his
+confessional, like any parish priest--in his confessional at St. Mary
+of the Lilies, where the penitents who breathed their secrets into his
+ears, and received his fatherly counsels... I beg your pardon. One must
+not, of course, remember his rags or his sores, when Lazarus approaches
+that tribunal.
+
+But I don't pretend that the Cardinal was a saint; I am sure he was not
+a prig. For all his works of supererogation, his life was a life of pomp
+and luxury, compared to the proper saint's life. He wore no hair shirt;
+I doubt if he knew the taste of the Discipline. He had his weaknesses,
+his foibles--even, if you will, his vices. I have intimated that he was
+fond of a jest. “The Sacred College,” I heard him remark one day, “has
+fifty centres of gravity. I sometimes fear that I am its centre of
+levity.” He was also fond of music. He was also fond of snuff:
+
+“'T is an abominable habit,” he admitted. “I can't tolerate it at
+all--in others. When I was Bishop of Cittareggio, I discountenanced
+it utterly among my clergy. But for myself--I need not say there are
+special circumstances. Oddly enough, by the bye, at Cittareggio each
+separate member of my clergy was able to plead special circumstances
+for himself I have tried to give it up, and the effort has spoiled
+my temper--turned me into a perfect old shrew. For my friends' sake,
+therefore, I appease myself with an occasional pinch. You see, tobacco
+is antiseptic. It's an excellent preservative of the milk of human
+kindness.”
+
+The friends in question kept him supplied with sound rappee. Jests and
+music he was abundantly competent to supply himself. He played the piano
+and the organ, and he sang--in a clear, sweet, slightly faded tenor. Of
+secular composers his favourites were “the lucid Scarlatti, the luminous
+Bach.” But the music that roused him to enthusiasm was Gregorian. He
+would have none other at St. Mary of the Lilies. He had trained his
+priests and his people there to sing it admirably--you should have heard
+them sing Vespers; and he sang it admirably himself--you should have
+heard him sing a Mass--you should have heard that sweet old tenor voice
+of his in the Preface and the Pater Noster.
+
+
+So, then, Beatrice stood before a pier-glass, and studied her new hat;
+whilst the Cardinal, amused, indulgent, sat in his high-backed armchair,
+and watched her.
+
+“Well--? What do you think?” she asked, turning towards him.
+
+“You appeal to me as an expert?” he questioned.
+
+His speaking-voice, as well as his singing-voice, was sweet, but with
+a kind of trenchant edge upon it, a genial asperity, that gave it
+character, tang.
+
+“As one who should certainly be able to advise,” said she.
+
+“Well, then--” said he. He took his chin into his hand, as if it were
+a beard, and looked up at her, considering; and the lines of
+amusement--the “parentheses”--deepened at either side of his mouth.
+“Well, then, I think if the feather were to be lifted a little higher in
+front, and brought down a little lower behind--”
+
+“Good gracious, I don't mean my hat,” cried Beatrice. “What in the world
+can an old dear like you know about hats?”
+
+There was a further deepening of the parentheses.
+
+“Surely,” he contended, “a cardinal should know much. Is it not 'the
+badge of all our tribe,' as your poet Byron says?”
+
+Beatrice laughed. Then, “Byron--?” she doubted, with a look.
+
+The Cardinal waved his hand--a gesture of amiable concession.
+
+“Oh, if you prefer, Shakespeare. Everything in English is one or the
+other. We will not fall out, like the Morellists, over an attribution.
+The point is that I should be a good judge of hats.”
+
+He took snuff.
+
+“It's a shame you haven't a decent snuff-box,” Beatrice observed, with
+an eye on the enamelled wooden one, cheap and shabby, from which he
+helped himself.
+
+“The box is but the guinea-stamp; the snuff's the thing.--Was it
+Shakespeare or Byron who said that?” enquired the Cardinal.
+
+Beatrice laughed again.
+
+“I think it must have been Pulcinella. I'll give you a lovely silver
+one, if you'll accept it.”
+
+“Will you? Really?” asked the Cardinal, alert.
+
+“Of course I will. It's a shame you haven't one already.”
+
+“What would a lovely silver one cost?” he asked.
+
+“I don't know. It does n't matter,” answered she.
+
+“But approximately? More or less?” he pursued.
+
+“Oh, a couple of hundred lire, more or less, I daresay.”
+
+“A couple of hundred lire?” He glanced up, alerter. “Do you happen to
+have that amount of money on your person?”
+
+Beatrice (the unwary woman) hunted for her pocket--took out her
+purse--computed its contents.
+
+“Yes,” she innocently answered.
+
+The Cardinal chuckled--the satisfied chuckle of one whose unsuspected
+tactics have succeeded.
+
+“Then give me the couple of hundred lire.”
+
+He put forth his hand.
+
+But Beatrice held back.
+
+“What for?” she asked, suspicion waking.
+
+“Oh, I shall have uses for it.”
+
+His outstretched hand--a slim old tapering, bony hand, in colour like
+dusky ivory--closed peremptorily, in a dumb-show of receiving; and now,
+by the bye, you could not have failed to notice the big lucent amethyst,
+in its setting of elaborately-wrought pale gold, on the third finger.
+
+“Come! Give!” he insisted, imperative.
+
+Rueful but resigned, Beatrice shook her head.
+
+“You have caught me finely,” she sighed, and gave.
+
+“You should n't have jingled your purse--you should n't have flaunted
+your wealth in my face,” laughed the Cardinal, putting away the
+notes. He took snuff again. “I think I honestly earned that pinch,” he
+murmured.
+
+“At any rate,” said Beatrice, laying what unction she could to her soul,
+“I am acquainted with a dignitary of the Church, who has lost a handsome
+silver snuffbox--beautiful repousse work, with his arms engraved on the
+lid.”
+
+“And I,” retaliated he, “I am acquainted with a broken-down old doctor
+and his wife, in Trastevere, who shall have meat and wine at dinner for
+the next two months--at the expense of a niece of mine. 'I am so glad,'
+as Alice of Wonderland says, 'that you married into our family.'”
+
+“Alice of Wonderland--?” doubted Beatrice.
+
+The Cardinal waved his hand.
+
+“Oh, if you prefer, Punch. Everything in English is one or the other.”
+
+Beatrice laughed. “It was the I of which especially surprised my English
+ear,” she explained.
+
+“I am your debtor for two hundred lire. I cannot quarrel with you over a
+particle,” said he.
+
+“But why,” asked she, “why did you give yourself such superfluous pains?
+Why couldn't you ask me for the money point-blank? Why lure it from me,
+by trick and device?”
+
+The Cardinal chuckled.
+
+“Ah, one must keep one's hand in. And one must not look like a Jesuit
+for nothing.”
+
+“Do you look like a Jesuit?”
+
+“I have been told so.”
+
+“By whom--for mercy's sake?”
+
+“By a gentleman I had the pleasure of meeting not long ago in the
+train--a very gorgeous gentleman, with gold chains and diamonds flashing
+from every corner of his person, and a splendid waxed moustache, and a
+bald head which, I think, was made of polished pink coral. He turned to
+me in the most affable manner, and said, 'I see, Reverend Sir, that you
+are a Jesuit. There should be a fellow-feeling between you and me. I am
+a Jew. Jews and Jesuits have an almost equally bad name!'”
+
+The Cardinal's humorous grey eyes swam in a glow of delighted merriment.
+
+“I could have hugged him for his 'almost.' I have been wondering ever
+since whether in his mind it was the Jews or the Jesuits who benefited
+by that reservation. I have been wondering also what I ought to have
+replied.”
+
+“What did you reply?” asked Beatrice, curious.
+
+“No, no,” said the Cardinal. “With sentiments of the highest
+consideration, I must respectfully decline to tell you. It was too flat.
+I am humiliated whenever I recall it.”
+
+“You might have replied that the Jews, at least, have the advantage of
+meriting their bad name,” she suggested.
+
+“Oh, my dear child!” objected he. “My reply was flat--you would have had
+it sharp. I should have hurt the poor well-meaning man's feelings, and
+perhaps have burdened my own soul with a falsehood, into the bargain.
+Who are we, to judge whether people merit their bad name or not? No, no.
+The humiliating circumstance is, that if I had possessed the substance
+as well as the show, if I had really been a son of St. Ignatius,
+I should have found a retort that would have effected the Jew's
+conversion.”
+
+“And apropos of conversions,” said Beatrice, “see how far we have
+strayed from our muttons.”
+
+“Our muttons--?” The Cardinal looked up, enquiring.
+
+“I want to know what you think--not of my hat--but of my man.”
+
+“Oh--ah, yes; your Englishman, your tenant.” The Cardinal nodded.
+
+“My Englishman--my tenant--my heretic,” said she.
+
+“Well,” said he, pondering, while the parentheses became marked
+again,--“I should think, from what you tell me, that you would find him
+a useful neighbour. Let me see... You got fifty lire out of him, for a
+word; and the children went off, blessing you as their benefactress. I
+should think that you would find him a valuable neighbour--and that he,
+on his side, might find you an expensive one.”
+
+Beatrice, with a gesture, implored him to be serious.
+
+“Ah, please don't tease about this,” she said. “I want to know what you
+think of his conversion?”
+
+“The conversion of a heretic is always 'a consummation devoutly to be
+desired,' as well, you may settle it between Shakespeare and Byron,
+to suit yourself. And there are none so devoutly desirous of such
+consummations as you Catholics of England--especially you women. It is
+said that a Catholic Englishwoman once tried to convert the Pope.”
+
+“Well, there have been popes whom it would n't have hurt,” commented
+Beatrice. “And as for Mr. Marchdale,” she continued, “he has shown
+'dispositions.' He admitted that he could see no reason why it should
+not have been Our Blessed Lady who sent us to the children's aid.
+Surely, from a Protestant, that is an extraordinary admission?”
+
+“Yes,” said the Cardinal. “And if he meant it, one may conclude that he
+has a philosophic mind.”
+
+“If he meant it?” Beatrice cried. “Why should he not have meant it? Why
+should he have said it if he did not mean it?”
+
+“Oh, don't ask me,” protested the Cardinal. “There is a thing the French
+call politesse. I can conceive a young man professing to agree with a
+lady for the sake of what the French might call her beaux yeux.”
+
+“I give you my word,” said Beatrice, “that my beaux yeux had nothing to
+do with the case. He said it in the most absolute good faith. He said he
+believed that in a universe like ours nothing was impossible--that
+there were more things in heaven and earth than people generally dreamed
+of--that he could see no reason why the Blessed Virgin should not have
+sent us across the children's path. Oh, he meant it. I am perfectly sure
+he meant it.”
+
+The Cardinal smiled--at her eagerness, perhaps.
+
+“Well, then,” he repeated, “we must conclude that he has a philosophic
+mind.”
+
+“But what is one to do?” asked she. “Surely one ought to do something?
+One ought to follow such an admission up? When a man is so far on the
+way to the light, it is surely one's duty to lead him farther?”
+
+“Without doubt,” said the Cardinal.
+
+“Well--? What can one do?”
+
+The Cardinal looked grave.
+
+“One can pray,” he said.
+
+“Emilia and I pray for his conversion night and morning.”
+
+“That is good,” he approved.
+
+“But that is surely not enough?”
+
+“One can have Masses said.”
+
+“Monsignor Langshawe, at the castle, says a Mass for him twice a week.”
+
+“That is good,” approved the Cardinal.
+
+“But is that enough?”
+
+“Why doesn't Monsignor Langshawe call upon him--cultivate his
+acquaintance--talk with him--set him thinking?” the Cardinal enquired.
+
+“Oh, Monsignor Langshawe!” Beatrice sighed, with a gesture. “He is
+interested in nothing but geology--he would talk to him of nothing
+but moraines--he would set him thinking of nothing but the march of
+glaciers.”
+
+“Hum,” said the Cardinal.
+
+“Well, then--?” questioned Beatrice.
+
+“Well, then, Carissima, why do you not take the affair in hand
+yourself?”
+
+“But that is just the difficulty. What can I what can a mere woman--do
+in such a case?”
+
+The Cardinal looked into his amethyst, as a crystal-gazer into his
+crystal; and the lines about his humorous old mouth deepened and
+quivered.
+
+“I will lend you the works of Bellarmine in I forget how many volumes.
+You can prime yourself with them, and then invite your heretic to a
+course of instructions.”
+
+“Oh, I wish you would n't turn it to a joke,” said Beatrice.
+
+“Bellarmine--a joke!” exclaimed the Cardinal. “It is the first time
+I have ever heard him called so. However, I will not press the
+suggestion.”
+
+“But then--? Oh, please advise me seriously. What can I do? What can a
+mere unlearned woman do?”
+
+The Cardinal took snuff. He gazed into his amethyst again, beaming at
+it, as if he could descry something deliciously comical in its depths.
+He gave a soft little laugh. At last he looked up.
+
+“Well,” he responded slowly, “in an extremity, I should think that a
+mere unlearned woman might, if she made an effort, ask the heretic to
+dinner. I 'll come down and stay with you for a day or two, and you can
+ask him to dinner.”
+
+“You're a perfect old darling,” cried Beatrice, with rapture. “He'll
+never be able to resist you.”'
+
+“Oh, I 'm not undertaking to discuss theology with him,” said the
+Cardinal. “But one must do something in exchange for a couple of hundred
+lire--so I'll come and give you my moral support.”
+
+“You shall have your lovely silver snuffbox, all the same,” said she.
+
+Mark the predestination!
+
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+                                      “CASTEL VENTIROSE,
+                                          “August 21 st.
+
+“DEAR Mr. Marchdale: It will give me great pleasure if you can dine
+with us on Thursday evening next, at eight o'clock, to meet my uncle,
+Cardinal Udeschini, who is staying here for a few days.
+
+“I have been re-reading 'A Man of Words.' I want you to tell me a great
+deal more about your friend, the author.
+
+                                        Yours sincerely,
+                                     BEATRICE DI SANTANGIOLO.”
+
+It is astonishing, what men will prize, what men will treasure. Peter
+Marchdale, for example, prizes, treasures, (and imagines that he will
+always prize and treasure), the perfectly conventional, the perfectly
+commonplace little document, of which the foregoing is a copy.
+
+The original is written in rather a small, concentrated hand, not
+overwhelmingly legible perhaps, but, as we say, “full of character,” on
+paper lightly blueish, in the prescribed corner of which a tiny ducal
+coronet is embossed, above the initials “B. S.” curiously interlaced in
+a cypher.
+
+When Peter received it, and (need I mention?) approached it to his face,
+he fancied he could detect just a trace, just the faintest reminder, of
+a perfume--something like an afterthought of orris. It was by no means
+anodyne. It was a breath, a whisper, vague, elusive, hinting of things
+exquisite, intimate of things intimately feminine, exquisitely personal.
+I don't know how many times he repeated that manoeuvre of conveying the
+letter to his face; but I do know that when I was privileged to inspect
+it, a few months later, the only perfume it retained was an unmistakable
+perfume of tobacco.
+
+I don't know, either, how many times he read it, searched it, as if
+secrets might lie perdu between the lines, as if his gaze could warm
+into evidence some sympathetic ink, or compel a cryptic sub-intention
+from the text itself.
+
+Well, to be sure, the text had cryptic subintentions; but these were as
+far as may be from any that Peter was in a position to conjecture. How
+could he guess, for instance, that the letter was an instrument, and he
+the victim, of a Popish machination? How could he guess that its writer
+knew as well as he did who was the author of “A Man of Words”?
+
+And then, all at once, a shade of trouble of quite another nature fell
+upon his mind. He frowned for a while in silent perplexity. At last he
+addressed himself to Marietta.
+
+“Have you ever dined with a cardinal?” he asked.
+
+“No, Signorino,” that patient sufferer replied.
+
+“Well, I'm in the very dickens of a quandary--son' proprio nel dickens
+d'un imbarazzo.” he informed her.
+
+“Dickens--?” she repeated.
+
+“Si--Dickens, Carlo, celebre autore inglese. Why not?” he asked.
+
+Marietta gazed with long-suffering eyes at the horizon.
+
+“Or, to put it differently,” Peter resumed, “I've come all the way from
+London with nothing better than a dinner jacket in my kit.”
+
+“Dina giacca? Cosa e?” questioned Marietta.
+
+“No matter what it is--the important thing is what it is n't. It is n't
+a dress-coat.”
+
+“Non e un abito nero,” said Marietta, seeing that he expected her to say
+something.
+
+“Well--? You perceive my difficulty. Do you think you could make me
+one?” said Peter.
+
+“Make the Signorino a dress-coat? I? Oh, no, Signorino.” Marietta shook
+her head.
+
+“I feared as much,” he acknowledged. “Is there a decent tailor in the
+village?”
+
+“No, Signorino.”
+
+“Nor in the whole length and breadth of this peninsula, if you come to
+that. Well, what am I to do? How am I to dine with a cardinal? Do you
+think a cardinal would have a fit if a man were to dine with him in a
+dina giacca?”
+
+“Have a fit? Why should he have a fit, Signorino?” Marietta blinked.
+
+“Would he do anything to the man? Would he launch the awful curses of
+the Church at him, for instance?”
+
+“Mache, Signorino!” She struck an attitude that put to scorn his
+apprehensions.
+
+“I see,” said Peter. “You think there is no danger? You advise me to
+brazen the dina giacca out, to swagger it off?”
+
+“I don't understand, Signorino,” said Marietta.
+
+“To understand is to forgive,” said he; “and yet you can't trifle with
+English servants like this, though they ought to understand, ought n't
+they? In any case, I 'll be guided by your judgment. I'll wear my dina
+giacca, but I'll wear it with an air! I 'll confer upon it the dignity
+of a court-suit. Is that a gardener--that person working over there?”
+
+Marietta looked in the quarter indicated by Peter's nod.
+
+“Yes, Signorino; ha is the same gardener who works here three days every
+week,” she answered.
+
+“Is he, really? He looks like a pirate,” Peter murmured.
+
+“Like a pirate? Luigi?” she exclaimed.
+
+“Yes,” affirmed her master. “He wears green corduroy trousers, and a
+red belt, and a blue shirt. That is the pirate uniform. He has a swarthy
+skin, and a piercing eye, and hair as black as the Jolly Roger. Those
+are the marks by which you recognise a pirate, even when in mufti. I
+believe you said his name is Luigi?”
+
+“Yes, Signorino--Luigi Maroni. We call him Gigi.”
+
+“Is Gigi versatile?” asked Peter.
+
+“Versatile--?” puzzled Marietta. But then, risking her own
+interpretation of the recondite word, “Oh, no, Signorino. He is of the
+country.”
+
+“Ah, he's of the country, is he? So much the better. Then he will know
+the way to Castel Ventirose?”
+
+“But naturally, Signorino.” Marietta nodded.
+
+“And do you think, for once in a way, though not versatile, he could be
+prevailed upon to divert his faculties from the work of a gardener to
+that of a messenger?”
+
+“A messenger, Signorino?” Marietta wrinkled up her brow.
+
+“Ang--an unofficial postman. Do you think he could be induced to carry a
+letter for me to the castle?”
+
+“But certainly, Signorino. He is here to obey the Signorino's orders.”
+ Marietta shrugged her shoulders, and waved her hands.
+
+“Then tell him, please, to go and put the necessary touches to his
+toilet,” said Peter. “Meanwhile I'll indite the letter.”
+
+When his letter was indited, he found the piratical-looking Gigi in
+attendance, and he gave it to him, with instructions.
+
+Thereupon Gigi (with a smile of sympathetic intelligence, inimitably
+Italian) put the letter in his hat, put his hat upon his head, and
+started briskly off--but not in the proper direction: not in the
+direction of the road, which led to the village, and across the bridge,
+and then round upon itself to the gates of the park. He started briskly
+off towards Peter's own toolhouse, a low red-tiled pavilion, opposite
+the door of Marietta's kitchen.
+
+Peter was on the point of calling to him, of remonstrating. Then he
+thought better of it. He would wait a bit, and watch.
+
+He waited and watched; and this was what he saw.
+
+Gigi entered the tool-house, and presently brought out a ladder, which
+he carried down to the riverside, and left there. Then he returned to
+the tool-house, and came back bearing an armful of planks, each perhaps
+a foot wide by five or six feet long. Now he raised his ladder to the
+perpendicular, and let it descend before him, so that, one extremity
+resting upon the nearer bank, one attained the further, and it spanned
+the flood. Finally he laid a plank lengthwise upon the hithermost rungs,
+and advanced to the end of it; then another plank; then a third: and he
+stood in the grounds of Ventirose.
+
+He had improvised a bridge--a bridge that swayed upwards and downwards
+more or less dizzily about the middle, if you will--but an entirely
+practicable bridge, for all that. And he had saved himself at least a
+good three miles, to the castle and back, by the road.
+
+Peter watched, and admired.
+
+“And I asked whether he was versatile!” he muttered. “Trust an Italian
+for economising labour. It looks like unwarrantable invasion of friendly
+territory--but it's a dodge worth remembering, all the same.”
+
+He drew the Duchessa's letter from his pocket, and read it again, and
+again approached it to his face, communing with that ghost of a perfume.
+
+“Heavens! how it makes one think of chiffons,” he exclaimed.
+“Thursday--Thursday--help me to live till Thursday!”
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+But he had n't to live till Thursday--he was destined to see her not
+later than the next afternoon.
+
+You know with what abruptness, with how brief a warning, storms will
+spring from the blue, in that land of lakes and mountains.
+
+It was three o'clock or thereabouts; and Peter was reading in his
+garden; and the whole world lay basking in unmitigated sunshine.
+
+Then, all at once, somehow, you felt a change in things: the sunshine
+seemed less brilliant, the shadows less solid, less sharply outlined.
+Oh, it was very slight, very uncertain; you had to look twice to assure
+yourself that it was n't a mere fancy. It seemed as if never so thin a
+gauze had been drawn over the face of the sun, just faintly bedimming,
+without obscuring it. You could have ransacked the sky in vain to
+discover the smallest shred of cloud.
+
+At the same time, the air, which had been hot all day--hot, but buoyant,
+but stimulant, but quick with oxygen--seemed to become thick, sluggish,
+suffocating, seemed to yield up its vital principle, and to fall a
+dead weight upon the earth. And this effect was accompanied by a
+sudden silence--the usual busy out-of-door country noises were suddenly
+suspended: the locusts stopped their singing; not a bird twittered;
+not a leaf rustled: the world held its breath. And if the river went
+on babbling, babbling, that was a very part of the silence--accented,
+underscored it.
+
+Yet still you could not discern a rack of cloud anywhere in the
+sky--still, for a minute or two.... Then, before you knew how it had
+happened, the snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito were completely lapped in
+cloud.
+
+And now the cloud spread with astonishing rapidity--spread and sank,
+cancelling the sun, shrouding the Gnisi to its waist, curling in smoky
+wreaths among the battlements of the Cornobastone, turning the lake
+from sapphire to sombre steel, filling the entire valley with a strange
+mixture of darkness and an uncanny pallid light. Overhead it hung like
+a vast canopy of leaden-hued cotton-wool; at the west it had a fringe of
+fiery crimson, beyond which a strip of clear sky on the horizon diffused
+a dull metallic yellow, like tarnished brass.
+
+Presently, in the distance, there was a low growl of thunder; in a
+minute, a louder, angrier growl--as if the first were a menace which had
+not been heeded. Then there was a violent gush of wind--cold; smelling
+of the forests from which it came; scattering everything before it,
+dust, dead leaves, the fallen petals of flowers; making the trees writhe
+and labour, like giants wrestling with invisible giants; making the
+short grass shudder; corrugating the steel surface of the lake. Then two
+or three big raindrops fell--and then, the deluge.
+
+Peter climbed up to his observatory--a square four-windowed turret, at
+the top of the house--thence to watch the storm and exult in it. Really
+it was splendid--to see, to hear; its immense wild force, its immense
+reckless fury. Rain had never rained so hard, he thought. Already,
+the lake, the mountain slopes, the villas and vineyards westward, were
+totally blotted out, hidden behind walls and walls of water; and even
+the neighbouring lawns of Ventirose, the confines of his own garden,
+were barely distinguishable, blurred as by a fog. The big drops pelted
+the river like bullets, sending up splashes bigger than themselves.
+And the tiled roof just above his head resounded with a continual loud
+crepitation, as if a multitude of iron-shod elves were dancing on it.
+The thunder crashed, roared, reverberated, like the toppling of great
+edifices. The lightning tore through the black cloud-canopy in long
+blinding zig-zags. The wind moaned, howled, hooted--and the square
+chamber where Peter stood shook and rattled under its buffetings, and
+was full of the chill and the smell of it. Really the whole thing was
+splendid.
+
+His garden-paths ran with muddy brooklets; the high-road beyond his
+hedge was transformed to a shallow torrent.... And, just at that moment,
+looking off along the highroad, he saw something that brought his heart
+into his throat.
+
+Three figures were hurrying down it, half-drowned in the rain--the
+Duchessa di Santangiolo, Emilia Manfredi, and a priest.
+
+In a twinkling, Peter, bareheaded, was at his gate.
+
+“Come in--come in,” he called.
+
+“We are simply drenched--we shall inundate your house,” the Duchessa
+said, as he showed them into his sitting-room.
+
+They were indeed dripping with water, soiled to their knees with mud.
+
+“Good heavens!” gasped Peter, stupid. “How were you ever out in such a
+downpour?”
+
+She smiled, rather forlornly.
+
+“No one told us that it was going to rain, and we were off for a good
+long walk--for pleasure.”
+
+“You must be wet to the bone--you must be perishing with cold,” he
+cried, looking from one to another.
+
+“Yes, I daresay we are perishing with cold,” she admitted.
+
+“And I have no means of offering you a fire--there are no fireplaces,”
+ he groaned, with a gesture round the bleak Italian room, to certify
+their absence.
+
+“Is n't there a kitchen?” asked the Duchessa, a faint spark of raillery
+kindling amid the forlornness of her smile.
+
+Peter threw up his hands.
+
+“I had lost my head. The kitchen, of course. I 'll tell Marietta to
+light a fire.”
+
+He excused himself, and sought out Marietta. He found her in her
+housekeeper's room, on her knees, saying her rosary, in obvious terror.
+I 'm afraid he interrupted her orisons somewhat brusquely.
+
+“Will you be so good as to start a rousing fire in the kitchen--as
+quickly as ever it can be done?”
+
+And he rejoined his guests.
+
+“If you will come this way--” he said.
+
+Marietta had a fire of logs and pine-cones blazing in no time. She
+courtesied low to the Duchessa, lower still to the priest--in fact,
+Peter was n't sure that she did n't genuflect before him, while he made
+a rapid movement with his hand over her head: the Sign of the Cross,
+perhaps.
+
+He was a little, unassuming-looking, white haired priest, with a
+remarkably clever, humorous, kindly face; and he wore a remarkably
+shabby cassock. The Duchessa's chaplain, Peter supposed. How should it
+occur to him that this was Cardinal Udeschini? Do Cardinals (in one's
+antecedent notion of them) wear shabby cassocks, and look humorous and
+unassuming? Do they go tramping about the country in the rain, attended
+by no retinue save a woman and a fourteen-year-old girl? And are they
+little men--in one's antecedent notion? True, his shabby cassock had red
+buttons, and there was a red sash round his waist, and a big amethyst
+glittered in a setting of pale gold on his annular finger. But Peter was
+not sufficiently versed in fashions canonical, to recognise the meaning
+of these insignia.
+
+How, on the other hand, should it occur to the Duchessa that Peter
+needed enlightenment? At all events, she said to him, “Let me introduce
+you;” and then, to the priest, “Let me present Mr. Marchdale--of whom
+you have heard before now.”
+
+The white-haired old man smiled sweetly into Peter's eyes, and gave him
+a slender, sensitive old hand.
+
+“E cattivo vento che non e buono per qualcuno--debbo a questa burrasca
+la pregustazione d' un piacere,” he said, with a mingling of ceremonious
+politeness and sunny geniality that was of his age and race.
+
+Peter--instinctively--he could not have told why--put a good deal more
+deference into his bow, than men of his age and race commonly put into
+their bows, and murmured something about “grand' onore.”
+
+Marietta placed a row of chairs before the raised stone hearth, and
+afterwards, at her master's request, busied herself preparing tea.
+
+“But I think you would all be wise to take a little brandy first,” Peter
+suggested. “It is my despair that I am not able to provide you with a
+change of raiment. Brandy will be the best substitute, perhaps.”
+
+The old priest laughed, and put his hand upon the shoulder of Emilia.
+
+“You have spared this young lady an embarrassing avowal. Brandy is
+exactly what she was screwing her courage to the point of asking for.”
+
+“Oh, no!” protested Emilia, in a deep Italian voice, with passionate
+seriousness.
+
+But Peter fetched a decanter, and poured brandy for everyone.
+
+“I drink to your health--c'est bien le cas de le dire. I hope you will
+not have caught your deaths of cold,” he said.
+
+“Oh, we are quite warm now,” said the Duchessa. “We are snug in an ingle
+on Mount Ararat.”
+
+“Our wetting will have done us good--it will make us grow. You and I
+will never regret that, will we, Emilietta?” said the priest.
+
+A lively colour had come into the Duchessa's cheeks; her eyes seemed
+unusually bright. Her hair was in some disorder, drooping at the sides,
+and blown over her brow in fine free wavelets. It was dark in the
+kitchen, save for the firelight, which danced fantastically on the walls
+and ceiling, and struck a ruddy glow from Marietta's copper pots and
+pans. The rain pattered lustily without; the wind wailed in the chimney;
+the lightning flashed, the thunder volleyed. And Peter looked at the
+Duchessa--and blessed the elements. To see her seated there, in her wet
+gown, seated familiarly, at her ease, before his fire, in his kitchen,
+with that colour in her cheeks, that brightness in her eyes, and her
+hair in that disarray--it was unspeakable; his heart closed in a kind
+of delicious spasm. And the fragrance, subtle, secret, evasive, that
+hovered in the air near her, did not diminish his emotion.
+
+“I wonder,” she asked, with a comical little glance upwards at
+him, “whether you would resent it very much if I should take off my
+hat--because it's a perfect reservoir, and the water will keep trickling
+down my neck.”
+
+His joy needed but this culmination that she should take off her hat!
+
+“Oh, I beg of you--” he returned fervently.
+
+“You had better take yours off too, Emilia,” said the Duchessa.
+
+“Admire masculine foresight,” said the priest. “I took mine off when I
+came in.”
+
+“Let me hang them up,” said Peter.
+
+It was wonderful to hold her hat in his hand--it was like holding a part
+of herself. He brushed it surreptitiously against his face, as he
+hung it up. Its fragrance--which met him like an answering caress,
+almost--did not lessen his emotion.
+
+Then Marietta brought the tea, with bread-and-butter, and toast, and
+cakes, and pretty blue china cups and saucers, and silver that glittered
+in the firelight.
+
+“Will you do me the honour of pouring the tea?” Peter asked the
+Duchessa.
+
+So she poured the tea, and Peter passed it. As he stood close to her,
+to take it--oh, but his heart beat, believe me! And once, when she was
+giving him a cup, the warm tips of her fingers lightly touched his hand.
+Believe me, the touch had its effect. And always there was that heady
+fragrance in the air, like a mysterious little voice, singing secrets.
+
+“I wonder,” the old priest said, “why tea is not more generally drunk by
+us Italians. I never taste it without resolving to acquire the habit. I
+remember, when I was a child, our mothers used to keep it as a medicine;
+and you could only buy it at the chemists' shops.”
+
+“It's coming in, you know, at Rome--among the Whites,” said the
+Duchessa.
+
+“Among the Whites!” cried he, with a jocular simulation of disquiet.
+“You should not have told me that, till I had finished my cup. Now I
+shall feel that I am sharing a dissipation with our spoliators.”
+
+“That should give an edge to its aroma,” laughed she. “And besides, the
+Whites aren't all responsible for our spoliation--some of them are not
+so white as your fancy paints them. They'd be very decent people, for
+the most part--if they were n't so vulgar.”
+
+“If you stick up for the Whites like that when I am Pope, I shall
+excommunicate you,” the priest threatened. “Meanwhile, what have you to
+say against the Blacks?”
+
+“The Blacks, with few exceptions, are even blacker than they're painted;
+but they too would be fairly decent people in their way--if they were
+n't so respectable. That is what makes Rome impossible as a residence
+for any one who cares for human society. White society is so
+vulgar--Black society is so deadly dull.”
+
+“It is rather curious,” said the priest, “that the chief of each party
+should wear the colour of his adversary. Our chief dresses in white, and
+their chief can be seen any day driving about the streets in black.”
+
+And Peter, during this interchange of small-talk, was at liberty to
+feast his eyes upon her.
+
+“Perhaps you have not yet reached the time of life where men begin to
+find a virtue in snuff?” the priest said, producing a smart silver snuff
+box, tapping the lid, and proffering it to Peter.
+
+“On the contrary--thank you,” Peter answered, and absorbed his pinch
+like an adept.
+
+“How on earth have you learned to take it without a paroxysm?” cried the
+surprised Duchessa.
+
+“Oh, a thousand years ago I was in the Diplomatic Service,” he
+explained. “It is one of the requirements.”
+
+Emilia Manfredi lifted her big brown eyes, filled with girlish wonder,
+to his face, and exclaimed, “How extraordinary!”
+
+“It is n't half so extraordinary as it would be if it were true, my
+dear,” said the Duchessa.
+
+“Oh? Non e poi vero?” murmured Emilia, and her eyes darkened with
+disappointment.
+
+Peter meanwhile was looking at the snuffbox, which the priest still held
+in his hand, and admiring its brave repousse work of leaves and flowers,
+and the escutcheon engraved on the lid. But what if he could have
+guessed the part he had passively played in obtaining it for its
+possessor--or the part that it was still to play in his own epopee? Mark
+again the predestination!
+
+“The storm is passing,” said the priest.
+
+“Worse luck!” thought Peter.
+
+For indeed the rain and the wind were moderating, the thunder had rolled
+farther away, the sky was becoming lighter.
+
+“But there's a mighty problem before us still,” said the Duchessa. “How
+are we to get to Ventirose? The roads will, be ankle-deep with mud.”
+
+“If you wish to do me a very great kindness--” Peter began.
+
+“Yes--?” she encouraged him.
+
+“You will allow me to go before you, and tell them to come for you with
+a carriage.”
+
+“I shall certainly allow you to do nothing of the sort,” she replied
+severely. “I suppose there is no one whom you could send?”
+
+“I should hardly like to send Marietta. I 'm afraid there is no one
+else. But upon my word, I should enjoy going myself.”
+
+She shook her head, smiling at him with mock compassion.
+
+“Would you? Poor man, poor man! That is an enjoyment which you will have
+to renounce. One must n't expect too much in this sad life.”
+
+“Well, then,” said Peter, “I have an expedient. If you can walk a
+somewhat narrow plank--?”
+
+“Yes--?” questioned she.
+
+“I think I can improvise a bridge across the river.”
+
+“I believe the rain has stopped,” said the priest, looking towards the
+window.
+
+Peter, manning his soul for the inevitable, got up, went to the door,
+opened it, stuck out his head.
+
+“Yes,” he acknowledged, while his heart sank within him, “the rain has
+stopped.”
+
+And now the storm departed almost as rapidly as it had arrived. In
+the north the sky was already clear, blue and hard-looking--a wall of
+lapis-lazuli. The dark cloud-canopy was drifting to the south. Suddenly
+the sun came out, flashing first from the snows of Monte Sfiorito, then,
+in an instant, flooding the entire prospect with a marvellous yellow
+light, ethereal amber; whilst long streamers of tinted vapour--columns
+of pearl-dust, one might have fancied--rose to meet it; and all wet
+surfaces, leaves, lawns, tree-trunks, housetops, the bare crags of the
+Gnisi, gleamed in a wash of gold.
+
+Puffs of fresh air blew into the kitchen, filling it with the keen sweet
+odour of wet earth. The priest and the Duchessa and Emilia joined Peter
+at the open door.
+
+“Oh, your poor, poor garden!” the Duchessa cried.
+
+His garden had suffered a good deal, to be sure. The flowers lay supine,
+their faces beaten into the mud; the greensward was littered with fallen
+leaves and twigs--and even in one or two places whole branches had been
+broken from the trees; on the ground about each rose-bush a snow of pink
+rose-petals lay scattered; in the paths there were hundreds of little
+pools, shining in the sun like pools of fire.
+
+“There's nothing a gardener can't set right,” said Peter, feeling no
+doubt that here was a trifling tax upon the delights the storm had
+procured him.
+
+“And oh, our poor, poor hats!” said the Duchessa, eyeing ruefully those
+damaged pieces of finery. “I fear no gardener can ever set them right.”
+
+“It sounds inhospitable,” said Peter, “but I suppose I had better go and
+build your bridge.”
+
+So he threw a ladder athwart the river, and laid the planks in place, as
+he had seen Gigi do the day before.
+
+“How ingenious--and, like all great things, how simple,” laughed the
+Duchessa.
+
+Peter waved his hand, as who should modestly deprecate applause. But, I
+'m ashamed to own, he didn't disclaim the credit of the invention.
+
+“It will require some nerve,” she reflected, looking at the narrow
+planks, the foaming green water. “However--”
+
+And gathering in her skirts, she set bravely forward, and made the
+transit without mishap. The priest and Emilia, gathering in their
+skirts, made it after her.
+
+She paused on the other side, and looked back, smiling.
+
+“Since you have discovered so efficacious a means of cutting short the
+distance between our places of abode,” she said, “I hope you will not
+fail to profit by it whenever you may have occasion--on Thursday, for
+example.”
+
+“Thank you very much,” said Peter.
+
+“Of course,” she went on, “we may all die of our wetting yet. It would
+perhaps show a neighbourly interest if you were to come up to-morrow,
+and take our news. Come at four o'clock; and if we're alive... you shall
+have another pinch of snuff,” she promised, laughing.
+
+“I adore you,” said Peter, under his breath. “I'll come with great
+pleasure,” he said aloud.
+
+
+“Marietta,” he observed, that evening, as he dined, “I would have you
+to know that the Aco is bridged. Hence, there is one symbol the fewer
+in Lombardy. But why does--you mustn't mind the Ollendorfian form of my
+enquiry--why does the chaplain of the Duchessa wear red stockings?”
+
+“The chaplain of the Duchessa--?” repeated Marietta, wrinkling up her
+brow.
+
+“Ang--of the Duchessa di Santangiolo. He wore red stockings, and shoes
+with silver buckles. Do you think that's precisely decorous--don't you
+think it 's the least bit light-minded--in an ecclesiastic?”
+
+“He--? Who--?” questioned Marietta.
+
+“But the chaplain of the Duchessa--when he was here this afternoon.”
+
+“The chaplain of the Duchessa!” exclaimed Marietta. “Here this
+afternoon? The chaplain of the Duchessa was not here this afternoon. His
+Eminence the Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here this afternoon.”
+
+“What!” gasped Peter.
+
+“Ang,” said Marietta.
+
+“That was Cardinal Udeschini--that little harmless-looking, sweet-faced
+old man!” Peter wondered.
+
+“Sicuro--the uncle of the Duca,” said she.
+
+“Good heavens!” sighed he. “And I allowed myself to hobnob with him like
+a boon-companion.”
+
+“Gia,” said she.
+
+“You need n't rub it in,” said he. “For the matter of that, you yourself
+entertained him in your kitchen.”
+
+“Scusi?” said she.
+
+“Ah, well--it was probably for the best,” he concluded. “I daresay I
+should n't have behaved much better if I had known.”
+
+“It was his coming which saved this house from being struck by
+lightning,” announced Marietta.
+
+“Oh--? Was it?” exclaimed Peter.
+
+“Yes, Signorino. The lightning would never strike a house that the Lord
+Prince Cardinal was in.”
+
+“I see--it would n't venture--it would n't presume. Did--did it strike
+all the houses that the Lord Prince Cardinal was n't in?”
+
+“I do not think so, Signorino. Ma non fa niente. It was a terrible
+storm--terrible, terrible. The lightning was going to strike this house,
+when the Lord Prince Cardinal arrived.”
+
+“Hum,” said Peter. “Then you, as well as I, have reason for regarding
+his arrival as providential.”
+
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+“I think something must have happened to my watch,” Peter said, next
+day.
+
+Indeed, its hands moved with extraordinary, with exasperating slowness.
+
+“It seems absurd that it should do no good to push them on,” he thought.
+
+He would force himself, between twice ascertaining their position, to
+wait for a period that felt like an eternity, walking about miserably,
+and smoking flavourless cigarettes;--then he would stand amazed,
+incredulous, when, with a smirk (as it almost struck him) of ironical
+complacence, they would attest that his eternity had lasted something
+near a quarter of an hour.
+
+“And I had professed myself a Kantian, and made light of the objective
+reality of Time! thou laggard, Time!” he cried, and shook his fist at
+Space, Time's unoffending consort.
+
+“I believe it will never be four o'clock again,” he said, in despair,
+finally; and once more had out his watch. It was half-past three. He
+scowled at the instrument's bland white face. “You have no bowels, no
+sensibilities--nothing but dry little methodical jog-trot wheels and
+pivots!” he exclaimed, flying to insult for relief. “You're as inhuman
+as a French functionary. Do you call yourself a sympathetic comrade
+for an impatient man?” He laid it open on his rustic table, and waited
+through a last eternity. At a quarter to four he crossed the river. “If
+I am early--tant pis!” he decided, choosing the lesser of two evils, and
+challenging Fate.
+
+He crossed the river, and stood for the first time in the grounds of
+Ventirose--stood where she had been in the habit of standing, during
+their water-side colloquies. He glanced back at his house and garden,
+envisaging them for the first time, as it were, from her point of
+view. They had a queer air of belonging to an era that had passed, to
+a yesterday already remote. They looked, somehow, curiously small,
+moreover--the garden circumscribed, the two-storied house, with its
+striped sunblinds, poor and petty. He turned his back upon them--left
+them behind. He would have to come home to them later in the day, to be
+sure; but then everything would be different. A chapter would have added
+itself to the history of the world; a great event, a great step forward,
+would have definitely taken place. He would have been received
+at Ventirose as a friend. He would be no longer a mere nodding
+acquaintance, owing even that meagre relationship to the haphazard
+of propinquity. The ice-broken, if you will, but still present in
+abundance--would have been gently thawed away. One era had passed; but
+then a new era would have begun.
+
+So he turned his back upon Villa F'loriano, and set off, high-hearted,
+up the wide lawns, under the bending trees--whither, on four red-marked
+occasions, he had watched her disappear--towards the castle, which
+faced him in its vast irregular picturesqueness. There were the oldest
+portions, grimly mediaeval, a lakeside fortress, with ponderous round
+towers, meurtrieres, machiolations, its grey stone walls discoloured
+in fantastic streaks and patches by weather-stains and lichens, or
+else shaggily overgrown by creepers. Then there were later portions,
+rectangular, pink-stuccoed, with rusticated work at the corners, and,
+on the blank spaces between the windows, quaint allegorical frescoes,
+faded, half washed-out. And then there were entirely modern-looking
+portions, of gleaming marble, with numberless fanciful carvings, spires,
+pinnacles, reliefs--wonderfully light, gay, habitable, and (Peter
+thought) beautiful, in the clear Italian atmosphere, against the blue
+Italian sky.
+
+“It's a perfect house for her,” he said. “It suits her--like an
+appropriate garment; it almost seems to express her.”
+
+And all the while, as he proceeded, her voice kept sounding in his ears;
+scraps of her conversation, phrases that she had spoken, kept coming
+back to him.
+
+
+One end of the long, wide marble terrace had been arranged as a sort
+of out-of-door living-room. A white awning was stretched overhead;
+warm-hued rugs were laid on the pavement; there were wicker
+lounging-chairs, with bright cushions, and a little table, holding books
+and things.
+
+The Duchessa rose from one of the lounging-chairs, and came forward,
+smiling, to meet him.
+
+She gave him her hand--for the first time.
+
+It was warm--electrically warm; and it was soft--womanly soft; and it
+was firm, alive--it spoke of a vitality, a temperament. Peter was sure,
+besides, that it would be sweet to smell; and he longed to bend over it,
+and press it with his lips. He might almost have done so, according to
+Italian etiquette. But, of course, he simply bowed over it, and let it
+go.
+
+“Mi trova abbandonata,” she said, leading the way back to the
+terrace-end. There were notes of a peculiar richness in her voice, when
+she spoke Italian; and she dwelt languorously on the vowels, and rather
+slurred the consonants, lazily, in the manner Italian women have,
+whereby they give the quality of velvet to their tongue. She was not an
+Italian woman; Heaven be praised, she was English: so this was just pure
+gain to the sum-total of her graces. “My uncle and my niece have gone to
+the village. But I 'm expecting them to come home at any moment now--and
+you'll not have long, I hope, to wait for your snuff.”
+
+She flashed a whimsical little smile into his eyes. Then she returned
+to her wicker chair, glancing an invitation at Peter to place himself
+in the one facing her. She leaned back, resting her head on a pink silk
+cushion.
+
+Peter, no doubt, sent up a silent prayer that her uncle and her niece
+might be detained at the village for the rest of the afternoon. By her
+niece he took her to mean Emilia: he liked her for the kindly euphemism.
+“What hair she has!” he thought, admiring the loose brown masses, warm
+upon their background of pink silk.
+
+“Oh, I'm inured to waiting,” he replied, with a retrospective mind for
+the interminable waits of that interminable day.
+
+The Duchessa had taken a fan from the table, and was playing with it,
+opening and shutting it slowly, in her lap. Now she caught Peter's eyes
+examining it, and she gave it to him. (My own suspicion is that Peter's
+eyes had been occupied rather with the hands that held the fan, than
+with the fan itself--but that's a detail.)
+
+“I picked it up the other day, in Rome,” she said. “Of course, it's
+an imitation of the French fans of the last century, but I thought it
+pretty.”
+
+It was of white silk, that had been thinly stained a soft yellow, like
+the yellow of faded yellow rose-leaves. It was painted with innumerable
+plump little cupids, flying among pale clouds. The sticks were of
+mother-of=pearl. The end-sticks were elaborately incised, and in the
+incisions opals were set, big ones and small ones, smouldering with
+green and scarlet fires.
+
+“Very pretty indeed,” said Peter, “and very curious. It's like a great
+butterfly's wing is n't it? But are n't you afraid of opals?”
+
+“Afraid of opals?” she wondered. “Why should one be?”
+
+“Unless your birthday happens to fall in October, they're reputed to
+bring bad luck,” he reminded her.
+
+“My birthday happens to fall in June but I 'll never believe that such
+pretty things as opals can bring bad luck,” she laughed, taking the fan,
+which he returned to her, and stroking one of the bigger opals with her
+finger tip.
+
+“Have you no superstitions?” he asked.
+
+“I hope not--I don't think I have,” she answered. “We're not allowed to
+have superstitions, you know--nous autres Catholiques.”
+
+“Oh?” he said, with surprise. “No, I did n't know.”
+
+“Yes, they're a forbidden luxury. But you--? Are you superstitious?
+Would you be afraid of opals?”
+
+“I doubt if I should have the courage to wear one. At all events, I
+don't regard superstitions in the light of a luxury. I should be glad
+to be rid of those I have. They're a horrible inconvenience. But I can't
+get it out of my head that the air is filled with a swarm of malignant
+little devils, who are always watching their chance to do us an ill
+turn. We don't in the least know the conditions under which they can
+bring it off; but it's legendary that if we wear opals, or sit thirteen
+at table, or start an enterprise on Friday, or what not, we somehow
+give them their opportunity. And one naturally wishes to be on the safe
+side.”
+
+She looked at him with doubt, considering.
+
+“You don't seriously believe all that?” she said.
+
+“No, I don't seriously believe it. But one breathes it in with the air
+of one's nursery, and it sticks. I don't believe it, but I fear it just
+enough to be made uneasy. The evil eye, for instance. How can one spend
+any time in Italy, where everybody goes loaded with charms against it,
+and help having a sort of sneaking half-belief in the evil eye?”
+
+She shook her head, laughing.
+
+“I 've spent a good deal of time in Italy, but I have n't so much as a
+sneaking quarter-belief in it.”
+
+“I envy you your strength of mind,” said he. “But surely, though
+superstition is a luxury forbidden to Catholics, there are plenty of
+good Catholics who indulge in it, all the same?”
+
+“There are never plenty of good Catholics,” said sire. “You employ a
+much-abused expression. To profess the Catholic faith, to go to Mass on
+Sunday and abstain from meat on Friday, that is by no means sufficient
+to constitute a good Catholic. To be a good Catholic one would have to
+be a saint, nothing less--and not a mere formal saint, either, but a
+very real saint, a saint in thought and feeling, as well as in speech
+and action. Just in so far as one is superstitious, one is a bad
+Catholic. Oh, if the world were populated by good Catholics, it would be
+the Millennium come to pass.”
+
+“It would be that, if it were populated by good Christians--wouldn't
+it?” asked Peter.
+
+“The terms are interchangeable,” she answered sweetly, with a
+half-comical look of defiance.
+
+“Mercy!” cried he. “Can't a Protestant be a good Christian too?”
+
+“Yes,” she said, “because a Protestant can be a Catholic without knowing
+it.”
+
+“Oh--?” he puzzled, frowning.
+
+“It's quite simple,” she explained. “You can't be a Christian unless
+you're a Catholic. But if you believe as much of Christian truth as
+you've ever had a fair opportunity of learning, and if you try to live
+in accordance with Christian morals, you are a Catholic, you're a
+member of the Catholic Church, whether you know it or not. You can't be
+deprived of your birthright, you see.”
+
+“That seems rather broad,” said Peter; “and one had always heard that
+Catholicism was nothing if not narrow.”
+
+“How could it be Catholic if it were narrow?” asked she. “However, if
+a Protestant uses his intelligence, and is logical, he'll not remain
+an unconscious Catholic long. If he studies the matter, and is logical,
+he'll wish to unite himself to the Church in her visible body. Look at
+England. See how logic is multiplying converts year by year.”
+
+“But it's the glory of Englishmen to be illogical,” said Peter, with
+a laugh. “Our capacity for not following premisses to their logical
+consequences is the principal source of our national greatness. So the
+bulk of the English are likely to resist conversion for centuries
+to come--are they not? And then, nowadays, one is so apt to be an
+indifferentist in matters of religion--and Catholicism is so exacting.
+One remains a Protestant from the love of ease.”
+
+“And from the desire, on the part of a good many Englishmen at least, to
+sail in a boat of their own--not to get mixed up with a lot of foreign
+publicans and sinners--no?” she suggested.
+
+“Oh, of course, we're insular and we're Pharisaical,” admitted Peter.
+
+“And as for one's indifference,” she smiled, “that is most probably due
+to one's youth and inexperience. One can't come to close quarters with
+the realities of life--with sorrow, with great joy, with temptation,
+with sin or with heroic virtue, with death, with the birth of a new
+soul, with any of the awful, wonderful realities of life--and continue
+to be an indifferentist in matters of religion, do you think?”
+
+“When one comes to close quarters with the awful, wonderful realities
+of life, one has religious moments,” he acknowledged. “But they're
+generally rather fugitive, are n't they?”
+
+“One can cultivate them--one can encourage them,” she said. “If you
+would care to know a good Catholic,” she added, “my niece, my little
+ward, Emilia is one. She wants to become a Sister of Mercy, to spend her
+life nursing the poor.”
+
+“Oh? Would n't that be rather a pity?” Peter said. “She's so extremely
+pretty. I don't know when I have seen prettier brown eyes than hers.”
+
+“Well, in a few years, I expect we shall see those pretty brown eyes
+looking out from under a sister's coif. No, I don't think it will be
+a pity. Nuns and sisters, I think, are the happiest people in the
+world--and priests. Have you ever met any one who seemed happier than my
+uncle, for example?”
+
+“I have certainly never met any one who seemed sweeter, kinder,” Peter
+confessed. “He has a wonderful old face.”
+
+“He's a wonderful old man,” said she. “I 'm going to try to keep him a
+prisoner here for the rest of the summer--though he will have it that
+he's just run down for a week. He works a great deal too hard when he's
+in Rome. He's the only Cardinal I've ever heard of, who takes practical
+charge of his titular church. But here in the country he's out-of-doors
+all the blessed day, hand in hand with Emilia. He's as young as she is,
+I believe. They play together like children--and make--me feel as staid
+and solemn and grown-up as one of Mr. Kenneth Grahame's Olympians.”
+
+Peter laughed. Then, in the moment of silence that followed, he happened
+to let his eyes stray up the valley.
+
+“Hello!” he suddenly exclaimed. “Someone has been painting our mountain
+green.”
+
+The Duchessa turned, to look; and she too uttered an exclamation.
+
+By some accident of reflection or refraction, the snows of Monte
+Sfiorito had become bright green, as if the light that fell on them
+had passed through emeralds. They both paused, to gaze and marvel for
+a little. Indeed, the prospect was a pleasing one, as well as a
+surprising--the sunny lawns, the high trees, the blue lake, and then
+that bright green mountain.
+
+“I have never known anything like those snow-peaks for sailing under
+false colours,” Peter said. “I have seen them every colour of the
+calendar, except their native white.”
+
+“You must n't blame the poor things,” pleaded the Duchessa. “They can't
+help it. It's all along o' the distance and the atmosphere and the sun.”
+
+She closed her fan, with which she had been more or less idly playing
+throughout their dialogue, and replaced it on the table. Among the books
+there--French books, for the most part, in yellow paper--Peter saw, with
+something of a flutter (he could never see it without something of a
+flutter), the grey-and-gold binding of “A Man of Words.”
+
+The Duchessa caught his glance.
+
+“Yes,” she said; “your friend's novel. I told you I had been re-reading
+it.”
+
+“Yes,” said he.
+
+“And--do you know--I 'm inclined to agree with your own enthusiastic
+estimate of it?” she went on. “I think it's extremely--but
+extremely--clever; and more--very charming, very beautiful. The fatal
+gift of beauty!”
+
+And her smile reminded him that the application of the tag was his own.
+
+“Yes,” said he.
+
+“Its beauty, though,” she reflected, “is n't exactly of the obvious
+sort--is it? It does n't jump at you, for instance. It is rather in the
+texture of the work, than on the surface. One has to look, to see it.”
+
+“One always has to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing,” he safely
+generalised. But then--he had put his foot in the stirrup--his hobby
+bolted with him. “It takes two to make a beautiful object. The eye of
+the beholder is every bit as indispensable as the hand of the
+artist. The artist does his work--the beholder must do his. They are
+collaborators. Each must be the other's equal; and they must also be
+like each other--with the likeness of opposites, of complements. Art,
+in short, is entirely a matter of reciprocity. The kind of beauty that
+jumps at you is the kind you end by getting heartily tired of--is the
+skin-deep kind; and therefore it is n't really beauty at all--it is only
+an approximation to beauty--it may be only a simulacrum of it.”
+
+Her eyes were smiling, her face was glowing, softly, with interest,
+with friendliness and perhaps with the least suspicion of something
+else--perhaps with the faintest glimmer of suppressed amusement; but
+interest was easily predominant.
+
+“Yes,” she assented.... But then she pursued her own train of ideas.
+“And--with you--I particularly like the woman--Pauline. I can't tell
+you how much I like her. I--it sounds extravagant, but it's true--I can
+think of no other woman in the whole of fiction whom I like so
+well--who makes so curiously personal an appeal to me. Her wit--her
+waywardness--her tenderness--her generosity--everything. How did your
+friend come by his conception of her? She's as real to me as any woman
+I have ever known she's more real to me than most of the women I
+know--she's absolutely real, she lives, she breathes. Yet I have never
+known a woman resembling her. Life would be a merrier business if one
+did know women resembling her. She seems to me all that a woman ought
+ideally to be. Does your friend know women like that--the lucky man? Or
+is Pauline, for all her convincingness, a pure creature of imagination?”
+
+“Ah,” said Peter, laughing, “you touch the secret springs of my friend's
+inspiration. That is a story in itself. Felix Wildmay is a perfectly
+commonplace Englishman. How could a woman like Pauline be the creature
+of his imagination? No--she was a 'thing seen.' God made her. Wildmay
+was a mere copyist. He drew her, tant bien que mal, from the life from
+a woman who's actually alive on this dull globe to-day. But that's the
+story.”
+
+The Duchessa's eyes were intent.
+
+“The story-? Tell me the story,” she pronounced in a breath, with
+imperious eagerness.
+
+And her eyes waited, intently.
+
+“Oh,” said Peter, “it's one of those stories that can scarcely be told.
+There's hardly any thing to take hold of. It's without incident, without
+progression--it's all subjective--it's a drama in states of mind.
+Pauline was a 'thing seen,' indeed; but she wasn't a thing known: she
+was a thing divined. Wildmay never knew her--never even knew who she
+was--never knew her name--never even knew her nationality, though,
+as the book shows, he guessed her to be an Englishwoman, married to
+a Frenchman. He simply saw her, from a distance, half-a-dozen times
+perhaps. He saw her in Paris, once or twice, at the theatre, at the
+opera; and then later again, once or twice, in London; and then, once
+more, in Paris, in the Bois. That was all, but that was enough. Her
+appearance--her face, her eyes, her smile, her way of carrying herself,
+her way of carrying her head, her gestures, her movements, her way of
+dressing--he never so much as heard her voice--her mere appearance
+made an impression on him such as all the rest of womankind had totally
+failed to make. She was exceedingly lovely, of course, exceedingly
+distinguished, noble-looking; but she was infinitely more. Her face her
+whole person--had an expression! A spirit burned in her--a prismatic,
+aromatic fire. Other women seemed dust, seemed dead, beside her. She
+was a garden, inexhaustible, of promises, of suggestions. Wit,
+capriciousness, generosity, emotion--you have said it--they were all
+there. Race was there, nerve. Sex was there--all the mystery, magic, all
+the essential, elemental principles of the Feminine, were there: she was
+a woman. A wonderful, strenuous soul was there: Wildmay saw it, felt it.
+He did n't know her--he had no hope of ever knowing her--but he knew her
+better than he knew any one else in the world. She became the absorbing
+subject of his thoughts, the heroine of his dreams. She became, in fact,
+the supreme influence of his life.”
+
+The Duchessa's eyes had not lost their intentness, while he was
+speaking. Now that he had finished, she looked down at her hands, folded
+in her lap, and mused for a moment in silence. At last she looked up
+again.
+
+“It's as strange as anything I have ever heard,” she said, “it's
+furiously strange--and romantic--and interesting. But--but--” She
+frowned a little, hesitating between a choice of questions.
+
+“Oh, it's a story all compact of 'buts,'” Peter threw out laughing.
+
+She let the remark pass her--she had settled upon her question.
+
+“But how could he endure such a situation?” she asked. “How could he sit
+still under it? Did n't he try in any way--did n't he make any effort at
+all--to--to find her out--to discover who she was--to get introduced to
+her? I should think he could never have rested--I should think he would
+have moved heaven and earth.”
+
+“What could he do? Tell me a single thing he could have done,” said
+Peter. “Society has made no provision for a case like his. It 's
+absurd--but there it is. You see a woman somewhere; you long to make
+her acquaintance; and there's no natural bar to your doing so--you 're a
+presentable man she's what they call a lady--you're both, more or less,
+of the same monde. Yet there 's positively no way known by which you can
+contrive it--unless chance, mere fortuitous chance, just happens to drop
+a common acquaintance between you, at the right time and place. Chance,
+in Wildmay's case, happened to drop all the common acquaintances they
+may possibly have had at a deplorable distance. He was alone on each
+of the occasions when he saw her. There was no one he could ask to
+introduce him; there was no one he could apply to for information
+concerning her. He could n't very well follow her carriage through the
+streets--dog her to her lair, like a detective. Well--what then?”
+
+The Duchessa was playing with her fan again.
+
+“No,” she agreed; “I suppose it was hopeless. But it seems rather hard
+on the poor man--rather baffling and tantalising.”
+
+“The poor man thought it so, to be sure,” said Peter; “he fretted and
+fumed a good deal, and kicked against the pricks. Here, there, now,
+anon, he would enjoy his brief little vision of her--then she would
+vanish into the deep inane. So, in the end--he had to take it out in
+something--he took it out in writing a book about her. He propped up a
+mental portrait of her on his desk before him, and translated it
+into the character of Pauline. In that way he was able to spend long
+delightful hours alone with her every day, in a kind of metaphysical
+intimacy. He had never heard her voice--but now he heard it as often as
+Pauline opened her lips. He owned her--he possessed her--she lived under
+his roof--she was always waiting for him in his study. She is real to
+you? She was inexpressibly, miraculously real to him. He saw her, knew
+her, felt her, realised her, in every detail of her mind, her soul, her
+person--down to the very intonations of her speech--down to the veins
+in her hands, the rings on her fingers--down to her very furs and laces,
+the frou-frou of her skirts, the scent upon her pocket-handkerchief. He
+had numbered the hairs of her head, almost.”
+
+Again the Duchessa mused for a while in silence, opening and shutting
+her fan, and gazing into its opals.
+
+“I am thinking of it from the woman's point of view,” she said, by
+and by. “To have played such a part in a man's life--and never to have
+dreamed it! Never even, very likely, to have dreamed that such a man
+existed--for it's entirely possible she didn't notice him, on those
+occasions when he saw her. And to have been the subject of such a
+novel--and never to have dreamed that, either! To have read the novel
+perhaps--without dreaming for an instant that there was any sort of
+connection between Pauline and herself! Or else--what would almost be
+stranger still--not to have read the novel, not to have heard of it! To
+have inspired such a book, such a beautiful book--yet to remain in sheer
+unconscious ignorance that there was such a book! Oh, I think it is even
+more extraordinary from the woman's point of view than from the man's.
+There is something almost terrifying about it. To have had such an
+influence on the destiny of someone you've never heard of! There's a
+kind of intangible sense of a responsibility.”
+
+“There is also, perhaps,” laughed Peter, “a kind of intangible sense of
+a liberty taken. I'm bound to say I think Wildmay was decidedly at his
+ease. To appropriate in that cool fashion the personality of a total
+stranger! But artists are the most unprincipled folk unhung. Ils
+prennent leur bien la, ou ils le trouvent.”
+
+“Oh, no,” said the Duchessa, “I think she was fair game. One can carry
+delicacy too far. He was entitled to the benefits of his discovery--for,
+after all, it was a discovery, was n't it? You have said yourself how
+indispensable the eye of the beholder is--'the seeing eye.' I think,
+indeed, the whole affair speaks extremely well for Mr. Wildmay. It is
+not every man who would be capable of so purely intellectual a passion.
+I suppose one must call his feeling for her a passion? It indicates a
+distinction in his nature. He can hardly be a mere materialist. But--but
+I think it's heart-rending that he never met her.”
+
+“Oh, but that's the continuation of the story,” said Peter. “He did meet
+her in the end, you know.”
+
+“He did meet her!” cried the Duchessa, starting up, with a sudden access
+of interest, whilst her eyes lightened. “He did meet her? Oh, you must
+tell me about that.”
+
+And just at this crisis the Cardinal and Emilia appeared, climbing the
+terrace steps.
+
+“Bother!” exclaimed the Duchessa, under her breath. Then, to Peter, “It
+will have to be for another time--unless I die of the suspense.”
+
+After the necessary greetings were transacted, another elderly priest
+joined the company; a tall, burly, rather florid man, mentioned, when
+Peter was introduced to him, as Monsignor Langshawe. “This really is her
+chaplain,” Peter concluded. Then a servant brought tea.
+
+“Ah, Diamond, Diamond, you little know what mischief you might have
+wrought,” he admonished himself, as he walked home through the level
+sunshine. “In another instant, if we'd not been interrupted, you would
+have let the cat out of the bag. The premature escape of the cat from
+the bag would spoil everything.”
+
+And he hugged himself, as one snatched from peril, in a qualm of
+retroactive terror. At the same time he was filled with a kind of
+exultancy. All that he had hoped had come to pass, and more, vastly
+more. Not only had he been received as a friend at Ventirose, but he had
+been encouraged to tell her a part at least of the story by which her
+life and his were so curiously connected; and he had been snatched from
+the peril of telling her too much. The day was not yet when he could
+safely say, “Mutato nomine.....” Would the day ever be? But, meanwhile,
+just to have told her the first ten lines of that story, he could not
+help feeling, somehow advanced matters tremendously, somehow put a new
+face on matters.
+
+“The hour for which the ages sighed may not be so far away as you
+think,” he said to Marietta. “The curtain has risen upon Act Three. I
+fancy I can perceive faint glimmerings of the beginning of the end.”
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+All that evening, something which he had not been conscious of noticing
+especially when it was present to him--certainly he had paid no
+conscious attention to its details--kept recurring and recurring to
+Peter's memory: the appearance of the prettily-arranged terrace-end at
+Ventirose: the white awning, with the blue sky at its edges, the sunny
+park beyond; the warm-hued carpets on the marble pavement; the wicker
+chairs, with their bright cushions; the table, with its books and
+bibelots--the yellow French books, a tortoise-shell paperknife, a silver
+paperweight, a crystal smelling-bottle, a bowlful of drooping poppies;
+and the marble balustrade, with its delicate tracery of leaves and
+tendrils, where the jessamine twined round its pillars.
+
+This kept recurring, recurring, vividly, a picture that he could see
+without closing his eyes, a picture with a very decided sentiment.
+Like the gay and gleaming many-pinnacled facade of her house, it seemed
+appropriate to her; it seemed in its fashion to express her. Nay, it
+seemed to do more. It was a corner of her every-day environment; these
+things were the companions, the witnesses, of moments of her life,
+phases of herself, which were hidden from Peter; they were the
+companions and witnesses of her solitude, her privacy; they were her
+confidants, in a way. They seemed not merely to express her, therefore,
+but to be continually on the point--I had almost said of betraying her.
+At all events, if he could only understand their silent language,
+they would prove rich in precious revelations. So he welcomed their
+recurrences, dwelt upon them, pondered them, and got a deep if somewhat
+inarticulate pleasure from them.
+
+On Thursday, as he approached the castle, the last fires of sunset were
+burning in the sky behind it--the long irregular mass of buildings stood
+out in varying shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of red: the
+grey stone, dark, velvety indigo; the pink stucco, pink still, but
+with a transparent blue penumbra over it; the white marble, palely,
+scintillantly amethystine. And if he was interested in her environment,
+now he could study it to his heart's content: the wide marble staircase,
+up which he was shown, with its crimson carpet, and the big mellow
+painting, that looked as if it might be a Titian, at the top; the great
+saloon, in which he was received, with its polished mosaic floor,
+its frescoed ceiling, its white-and-gold panelling, its hangings and
+upholsteries of yellow brocade, its satinwood chairs and tables, its
+bronzes, porcelains, embroideries, its screens and mirrors; the long
+dining-hall, with its high pointed windows, its slender marble columns
+supporting a vaulted roof, its twinkling candles in chandeliers and
+sconces of cloudy Venetian glass, its brilliant table, its flowers and
+their colours and their scents.
+
+He could study her environment to his heart's content, indeed--or to
+his heart's despair. For all this had rather the effect of chilling,
+of depressing him. It was very splendid; it was very luxurious and
+cheerful; it was appropriate and personal to her, if you like; no doubt,
+in its fashion, in its measure, it, too, expressed her. But, at that
+rate, it expressed her in an aspect which Peter had instinctively made
+it his habit to forget, which he by no means found it inspiriting
+to remember. It expressed, it emphasised, her wealth, her rank; it
+emphasised the distance, in a worldly sense, between her and himself,
+the conventional barriers.
+
+And she...
+
+She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she was all
+that she had ever been--and yet--and yet--Well, somehow, she seemed
+indefinably different. Somehow, again, the distance, the barriers, were
+emphasised. She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she
+was all that she had ever been; but, somehow, to-night, she seemed very
+much the great lady, very much the duchess....
+
+“My dear man,” he said to himself, “you were mad to dream for a single
+instant that there was the remotest possibility of anything ever
+happening.”
+
+The only other guests, besides the Cardinal and Monsignor Langshawe,
+were an old Frenchwoman, with beautiful white hair, from one of the
+neighbouring villas, Madame de Lafere, and a young, pretty, witty, and
+voluble Irishwoman, Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, from an hotel at Spiaggia.
+In deference, perhaps, to the cloth of the two ecclesiastics, none of
+the women were in full evening-dress, and there was no arm-taking when
+they went in to dinner. The dinner itself was of a simplicity which
+Peter thought admirable, and which, of course, he attributed to his
+Duchessa's own good taste. He was not yet familiar enough with the Black
+aristocracy of Italy, to be aware that in the matter of food and drink
+simplicity is as much the criterion of good form amongst them, as lavish
+complexity is the criterion of good form amongst the English-imitating
+Whites.
+
+The conversation, I believe, took its direction chiefly from the
+initiative of Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. With great sprightliness and
+humour, and with an astonishing light-hearted courage, she rallied the
+Cardinal upon the neglect in which her native island was allowed to
+languish by the powers at Rome. “The most Catholic country in three
+hemispheres, to be sure,” she said; “every inch of its soil soaked
+with the blood of martyrs. Yet you've not added an Irish saint to the
+Calendar for I see you're blushing to think how many ages; and you've
+taken sides with the heretic Saxon against us in our struggle for Home
+Rule--which I blame you for, though, being a landowner and a bit of an
+absentee, I 'm a traitorous Unionist myself.”
+
+The Cardinal laughingly retorted that the Irish were far too fine, too
+imaginative and poetical a race, to be bothered with material questions
+of government and administration. They should leave such cares to the
+stolid, practical English, and devote the leisure they would thus obtain
+to the further exercise and development of what someone had called “the
+starfire of the Celtic nature.” Ireland should look upon England as
+her working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of Irish saints to
+the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their excessive number. “'T is an
+embarrassment of riches. If we were once to begin, we could never leave
+off till we had canonised nine-tenths of the dead population.”
+
+Monsignor Langshawe, at this (making jest the cue for earnest), spoke
+up for Scotland, and deplored the delay in the beatification of Blessed
+Mary. “The official beatification,” he discriminated, “for she was
+beatified in the heart of every true Catholic Scot on the day when
+Bloody Elizabeth murdered her.”
+
+And Madame de Lafere put in a plea for Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and
+the little Dauphin.
+
+“Blessed Mary--Bloody Elizabeth,” laughed the Duchessa, in an aside
+to Peter; “here is language to use in the presence of a Protestant
+Englishman.”
+
+“Oh, I'm accustomed to 'Bloody Elizabeth,'” said he. “Was n't it a word
+of Cardinal Newman's?”
+
+“Yes, I think so,” said she. “And since every one is naming his
+candidate; for the Calendar, you have named mine. I think there never
+was a saintlier saint than Cardinal Newman.”
+
+“What is your Eminence's attitude towards the question of mixed
+marriages?” Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.
+
+Peter pricked up his ears.
+
+“It is not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in England,”
+ his Eminence replied; “but in the abstract, and other things equal, my
+attitude would of course be one of disapproval.”
+
+“And yet surely,” contended she, “if a pious Catholic girl marries a
+Protestant man, she has a hundred chances of converting him?”
+
+“I don't know,” said the Cardinal. “Would n't it be safer to let the
+conversion precede the marriage? Afterwards, I 'm afraid, he would
+have a hundred chances of inducing her to apostatise, or, at least, of
+rendering her lukewarm.”
+
+“Not if she had a spark of the true zeal,” said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+“Any wife can make her husband's life a burden to him, if she will
+conscientiously lay herself out to do so. The man would be glad to
+submit, for the sake of peace in his household. I often sigh for the
+good old days of the Inquisition; but it's still possible, in the
+blessed seclusion of the family circle, to apply the rack and the
+thumbscrew in a modified form. I know a dozen fine young Protestant men
+in London whom I'm labouring to convert, and I feel I 'm defeated only
+by the circumstance that I'm not in a position to lead them to the altar
+in the full meaning of the expression.”
+
+“A dozen?” the Cardinal laughed. “Aren't you complicating the question
+of mixed marriages with that of plural marriage?”
+
+“'T was merely a little Hibernicism, for which I beg your Eminence's
+indulgence,” laughed she. “But what puts the most spokes in a
+proselytiser's wheel is the Faith itself. If we only deserved the
+reputation for sharp practice and double dealing which the Protestants
+have foisted upon us, it would be roses, roses, all the way. Why are
+we forbidden to let the end justify the means? And where are those
+accommodements avec le ciel of which we've heard? We're not even
+permitted a few poor accommodements avec le monde.”
+
+“Look at my uncle's face,” whispered the Duchessa to Peter. The
+Cardinal's fine old face was all alight with amusement. “In his fondness
+for taking things by their humorous end, he has met an affinity.”
+
+“It will be a grand day for the Church and the nations, when we have
+an Irish Pope,” Mrs. O'Donovan Florence continued. “A good, stalwart,
+militant Irishman is what's needed to set everything right. With a sweet
+Irish tongue, he'd win home the wandering sheep; and with a strong Irish
+arm, he'd drive the wolves from the fold. It's he that would soon sweep
+the Italians out of Rome.”
+
+“The Italians will soon be swept out of Rome by the natural current
+of events,” said the Cardinal. “But an Irish bishop of my acquaintance
+insists that we have already had many Irish Popes, without knowing it.
+Of all the greatest Popes he cries, 'Surely, they must have had Irish
+blood.' He's perfectly convinced that Pius the Ninth was Irish. His very
+name, his family-name, Ferretti, was merely the Irish name, Farrity,
+Italianised, the good bishop says. No one but an Irishman, he insists,
+could have been so witty.”
+
+Mrs. O'Donovan Florence looked intensely thoughtful for a moment....
+Then, “I 'm trying to think of the original Irish form of Udeschini,”
+ she declared.
+
+At which there was a general laugh.
+
+“When you say 'soon,' Eminence, do you mean that we may hope to see the
+Italians driven from Rome in our time?” enquired Madame de Lafere.
+
+“They are on the verge of bankruptcy--for their sins,” the Cardinal
+answered. “When the crash comes--and it can't fail to come before many
+years--there will necessarily be a readjustment. I do not believe that
+the conscience of Christendom will again allow Peter to be deprived of
+his inheritance.”
+
+“God hasten the good day,” said Monsignor Langshawe.
+
+“If I can live to see Rome restored to the Pope, I shall die content,
+even though I cannot live to see France restored to the King,” said the
+old Frenchwoman.
+
+“And I--even though I cannot live to see Britain restored to the Faith,”
+ said the Monsignore.
+
+The Duchessa smiled at Peter.
+
+“What a hotbed of Ultramontanes and reactionaries you have fallen into,”
+ she murmured.
+
+“It is exhilarating,” said he, “to meet people who have convictions.”
+
+“Even when you regard their convictions as erroneous?” she asked.
+
+“Yes, even then,” he answered. “But I'm not sure I regard as erroneous
+the convictions I have heard expressed to-night.”
+
+“Oh--?” she wondered. “Would you like to see Rome restored to the Pope?”
+
+“Yes,” said he, “decidedly--for aesthetic reasons, if for no others.”
+
+“I suppose there are aesthetic reasons,” she assented. “But we, of
+course, think there are conclusive reasons in mere justice.”
+
+“I don't doubt there are conclusive reasons in mere justice, too,” said
+he.
+
+After dinner, at the Cardinal's invitation, the Duchessa went to the
+piano, and played Bach and Scarlatti. Her face, in the soft candlelight,
+as she discoursed that “luminous, lucid” music, Peter thought... But
+what do lovers always think of their ladies' faces, when they look up
+from their pianos, in soft candlelight?
+
+Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, taking her departure, said to the Cardinal, “I
+owe your Eminence the two proudest days of my life. The first was when I
+read in the paper that you had received the hat, and I was able to boast
+to all my acquaintances that I had been in the convent with your
+niece by marriage. And the second is now, when I can boast forevermore
+hereafter that I've enjoyed the honour of making my courtesy to you.”
+
+“So,” said Peter, as he walked home through the dew and the starlight of
+the park, amid the phantom perfumes of the night, “so the Cardinal
+does n't approve of mixed marriages and, of course, his niece does n't,
+either. But what can it matter to me? For alas and alas--as he truly
+said--it's hardly a question of actuality.”
+
+And he lit a cigarette.
+
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+“So he did meet her, after all?” the Duchessa said.
+
+“Yes, he met her in the end,” Peter answered.
+
+They were seated under the gay white awning, against the bright
+perspective of lawn, lake, and mountains, on the terrace at Ventirose,
+where Peter was paying his dinner-call. The August day was hot and
+still and beautiful--a day made of gold and velvet and sweet odours. The
+Duchessa lay back languidly, among the crisp silk cushions, in her low,
+lounging chair; and Peter, as he looked at her, told himself that he
+must be cautious, cautious.
+
+“Yes, he met her in the end,” he said.
+
+“Well--? And then--?” she questioned, with a show of eagerness, smiling
+into his eyes. “What happened? Did she come up to his expectations?
+Or was she just the usual disappointment? I have been pining--oh, but
+pining--to hear the continuation of the story.”
+
+She smiled into his eyes, and his heart fluttered. “I must be cautious,”
+ he told himself. “In more ways than one, this is a crucial moment.” At
+the same time, as a very part of his caution, he must appear entirely
+nonchalant and candid.
+
+“Oh, no--tutt' altro,” he said, with an assumption of nonchalant
+airiness and candid promptness. “She 'better bettered' his
+expectations--she surpassed his fondest. She was a thousand times more
+delightful than he had dreamed--though, as you know, he had dreamed a
+good deal. Pauline de Fleuvieres turned out to be the feeblest, faintest
+echo of her.”
+
+The Duchessa meditated for an instant.
+
+“It seems impossible. It's one of those situations in which a
+disenchantment seems the foregone conclusion,” she said, at last.
+
+“It seems so, indeed,” assented Peter; “but disenchantment, there was
+none. She was all that he had imagined, and infinitely more. She was the
+substance--he had imagined the shadow. He had divined her, as it were,
+from a single angle, and there were many angles. Pauline was the pale
+reflection of one side of her--a pencil-sketch in profile.”
+
+The Duchessa shook her head, marvelling, and smiled again.
+
+“You pile wonder upon wonder,” she said. “That the reality should excel
+the poet's ideal! That the cloud-capped towers which looked splendid
+from afar, with all the glamour of distance, should prove to be more
+splendid still, on close inspection! It's dead against the accepted
+theory of things. And that any woman should be nicer than that adorable
+Pauline! You tax belief. But I want to know what happened. Had she read
+his book?”
+
+“Nothing happened,” said Peter. “I warned you that it was a drama
+without action. A good deal happened, no doubt, in Wildmay's secret
+soul. But externally, nothing. They simply chatted together--exchanged
+the time o' day--like any pair of acquaintances. No, I don't think she
+had read his book. She did read it afterwards, though.”
+
+“And liked it?”
+
+“Yes--she said she liked it.”
+
+“Well--? But then-?” the Duchessa pressed him, insistently. “When
+she discovered the part she had had in its composition--? Was n't she
+overwhelmed? Wasn't she immensely interested--surprised--moved?”
+
+She leaned forward a little. Her eyes were shining. Her lips were
+slightly parted, so that between their warm rosiness Peter could see the
+exquisite white line of her teeth. His heart fluttered again. “I must be
+cautious, cautious,” he remembered, and made a strenuous “act of will”
+ to steady himself.
+
+“Oh, she never discovered that,” he said.
+
+“What!” exclaimed the Duchessa. Her face fell. Her eyes darkened--with
+dismay, with incomprehension. “Do you--you don't--mean to say that
+he didn't tell her?” There was reluctance to believe, there was a
+conditional implication of deep reproach, in her voice.
+
+Peter had to repeat his act of will.
+
+“How could he tell her?” he asked.
+
+She frowned at him, with reproach that was explicit now, and a kind of
+pained astonishment.
+
+“How could he help telling her?” she cried. “But--but it was the one
+great fact between them. But it was a fact that intimately concerned
+her--it was a fact of her own destiny. But it was her right to be told.
+Do you seriously mean that he did n't tell her? But why did n't he? What
+could have possessed him?”
+
+There was something like a tremor in her voice. “I must appear entirely
+nonchalant and candid,” Peter remembered.
+
+“I fancy he was possessed, in some measure, by a sense of the liberty he
+had taken by a sense of what one might, perhaps, venture to qualify as
+his 'cheek.' For, if it was n't already a liberty to embody his notion
+of her in a novel--in a published book, for daws to peck at--it would
+have become a liberty the moment he informed her that he had done so.
+That would have had the effect of making her a kind of involuntary
+particeps criminis.”
+
+“Oh, the foolish man!” sighed the Duchessa, with a rueful shake of the
+head. “His foolish British self-consciousness! His British inability
+to put himself in another person's place, to see things from another's
+point of view! Could n't he see, from her point of view, from any point
+of view but his own, that it was her right to be told? That the matter
+affected her in one way, as much as it affected him in another? That
+since she had influenced--since she had contributed to--his life and his
+art as she had, it was her right to know it? Couldn't he see that his
+'cheek,' his real 'cheek,' began when he withheld from her that great
+strange chapter of her own history? Oh, he ought to have told her, he
+ought to have told her.”
+
+She sank back in her chair, giving her head another rueful shake,
+and gazed ruefully away, over the sunny landscape, through the mellow
+atmosphere, into the golden-hazy distance.
+
+Peter looked at her--and then, quickly, for caution's sake, looked
+elsewhere.
+
+“But there were other things to be taken into account,” he said.
+
+The Duchessa raised her eyes. “What other things?” they gravely
+questioned.
+
+“Would n't his telling her have been equivalent to a declaration of
+love?” questioned he, looking at the signet-ring on the little finger of
+his left hand.
+
+“A declaration of love?” She considered for a moment. “Yes, I suppose
+in a way it would,” she acknowledged. “But even so?” she asked, after
+another moment of consideration. “Why should he not have made her a
+declaration of love? He was in love with her, wasn't he?”
+
+The point of frank interrogation in her eyes showed clearly, showed
+cruelly, how detached, how impersonal, her interest was.
+
+“Frantically,” said Peter. For caution's sake, he kept HIS eyes on the
+golden-hazy peaks of Monte Sfionto. “He had been in love with her, in a
+fashion, of course, from the beginning. But after he met her, he fell in
+love with her anew. His mind, his imagination, had been in love with its
+conception of her. But now he, the man, loved her, the woman herself,
+frantically, with just a downright common human love. There were
+circumstances, however, which made it impossible for him to tell her
+so.”
+
+“What circumstances?” There was the same frank look of interrogation.
+“Do you mean that she was married?”
+
+“No, not that. By the mercy of heaven,” he pronounced, with energy, “she
+was a widow.”
+
+The Duchessa broke into an amused laugh.
+
+“Permit me to admire your piety,” she said.
+
+And Peter, as his somewhat outrageous ejaculation came back to him,
+laughed vaguely too.
+
+“But then--?” she went on. “What else? By the mercy of heaven, she was a
+widow. What other circumstance could have tied his tongue?”
+
+“Oh,” he answered, a trifle uneasily, “a multitude of circumstances.
+Pretty nearly every conventional barrier the world has invented, existed
+between him and her. She was a frightful swell, for one thing.”
+
+“A frightful swell--?” The Duchessa raised her eyebrows.
+
+“Yes,” said Peter, “at a vertiginous height above him--horribly 'aloft
+and lone' in the social hierarchy.” He tried to smile.
+
+“What could that matter?” the Duchessa objected simply. “Mr. Wildmay is
+a gentleman.”
+
+“How do you know he is?” Peter asked, thinking to create a diversion.
+
+“Of course, he is. He must be. No one but a gentleman could have had
+such an experience, could have written such a book. And besides, he's
+a friend of yours. Of course he's a gentleman,” returned the adroit
+Duchessa.
+
+“But there are degrees of gentleness, I believe,” said Peter. “She was
+at the topmost top. He--well, at all events, he knew his place. He had
+too much humour, too just a sense of proportion, to contemplate offering
+her his hand.”
+
+“A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman--under royalty,” said the
+Duchessa.
+
+“He can, to be sure--and he can also see it declined with thanks,”
+ Peter answered. “But it wasn't merely her rank. She was horribly
+rich, besides. And then--and then--! There were ten thousand other
+impediments. But the chief of them all, I daresay, was Wildmay's fear
+lest an avowal of his attachment should lead to his exile from her
+presence--and he naturally did not wish to be exiled.”
+
+“Faint heart!” the Duchessa said. “He ought to have told her. The case
+was peculiar, was unique. Ordinary rules could n't apply to it. And
+how could he be sure, after all, that she would n't have despised the
+conventional barriers, as you call them? Every man gets the wife he
+deserves--and certainly he had gone a long way towards deserving her.
+She could n't have felt quite indifferent to him--if he had told her;
+quite indifferent to the man who had drawn that magnificent Pauline from
+his vision of her. No woman could be entirely proof against a compliment
+like that. And I insist that it was her right to know. He should simply
+have told her the story of his book and of her part in it. She would
+have inferred the rest. He needn't have mentioned love--the word.”
+
+“Well,” said Peter, “it is not always too late to mend. He may tell her
+some fine day yet.”
+
+And in his soul two voices were contending.
+
+“Tell her--tell her--tell her! Tell her now, at once, and abide your
+chances,” urged one. “No--no--no--do nothing of the kind,” protested the
+second. “She is arguing the point for its abstract interest. She is a
+hundred miles from dreaming that you are the man--hundreds of miles from
+dreaming that she is the woman. If she had the least suspicion of that,
+she would sing a song as different as may be. Caution, caution.”
+
+He looked at her--warm and fragrant and radiant, in her soft, white
+gown, in her low lounging-chair, so near, so near to him--he looked
+at her glowing eyes, her red lips, her rich brown hair, at the
+white-and-rose of her skin, at the delicate blue veins in her forehead,
+at her fine white hands, clasped loosely together in her lap, at the
+flowing lines of her figure, with its supple grace and strength; and
+behind her, surrounding her, accessory to her, he was conscious of the
+golden August world, in the golden August weather--of the green park,
+and the pure sunshine, and the sweet, still air, of the blue lake, and
+the blue sky, and the mountains with their dark-blue shadows, of the
+long marble terrace, and the gleaming marble facade of the house, and
+the marble balustrade, with the jessamine twining round its columns.
+The picture was very beautiful--but something was wanting to perfect its
+beauty; and the name of the something that was wanting sang itself
+in poignant iteration to the beating of his pulses. And he longed and
+longed to tell her; and he dared not; and he hesitated....
+
+And while he was hesitating, the pounding of hoofs and the grinding of
+carriage-wheels on gravel reached his ears--and so the situation was
+saved, or the opportunity lost, as you choose to think it. For next
+minute a servant appeared on the terrace, and announced Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence.
+
+And shortly after that lady's arrival, Peter took his leave.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+“Well, Trixie, and is one to congratulate you?” asked Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence.
+
+“Congratulate me--? On what?” asked Beatrice.
+
+“On what, indeed!” cried the vivacious Irishwoman. “Don't try to pull
+the wool over the eyes of an old campaigner like me.”
+
+Beatrice looked blank.
+
+“I can't in the least think what you mean,” she said.
+
+“Get along with you,” cried Mrs. O'Donovan Florence; and she brandished
+her sunshade threateningly. “On your engagement to Mr.--what's this his
+name is?--to be sure.”
+
+She glanced indicatively down the lawn, in the direction of Peter's
+retreating tweeds.
+
+Beatrice had looked blank. But now she looked--first, perhaps, for
+a tiny fraction of a second, startled--then gently, compassionately
+ironical.
+
+“My poor Kate! Are you out of your senses?” she enquired, in accents of
+concern, nodding her head, with a feint of pensive pity.
+
+“Not I,” returned Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, cheerfully confident. “But I
+'m thinking I could lay my finger on a long-limbed young Englishman less
+than a mile from here, who very nearly is. Hasn't he asked you yet?”
+
+“Es-to bete?” Beatrice murmured, pitifully nodding again.
+
+“Ah, well, if he has n't, it's merely a question of time when he will,”
+ said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. “You've only to notice the famished
+gaze with which he devours you, to see his condition. But don't try to
+hoodwink me. Don't pretend that this is news to you.”
+
+“News!” scoffed Beatrice. “It's news and nonsense--the product of your
+irrepressible imagination. Mr. What's-this-his-name-is, as you call him,
+and I are the barest acquaintances. He's our temporary neighbour--the
+tenant for the season of Villa Floriano--the house you can catch a
+glimpse of, below there, through the trees, on the other side of the
+river.”
+
+“Is he, now, really? And that's very interesting too. But I wasn't
+denying it.” Mrs. O'Donovan Florence smiled, with derisive sweetness.
+“The fact of his being the tenant of the house I can catch a glimpse
+of, through the trees, on the other side of the river, though a valuable
+acquisition to my stores of knowledge, does n't explain away his
+famished glance unless, indeed, he's behind with the rent: but even
+then, it's not famished he'd look, but merely anxious and persuasive.
+I'm a landlord myself. No, Trixie, dear, you've made roast meat of the
+poor fellow's heart, as the poetical Persians express it; and if he has
+n't told you so yet with his tongue, he tells the whole world so with
+his eyes as often as he allows them to rest on their loadstone, your
+face. You can see the sparks and the smoke escaping from them, as though
+they were chimneys. If you've not observed that for yourself, it can
+only be that excessive modesty has rendered you blind. The man is head
+over ears in love with you. Nonsense or bonsense, that is the sober
+truth.”
+
+Beatrice laughed.
+
+“I 'm sorry to destroy a romance, Kate,” she said; “but alas for the
+pretty one you 've woven, I happen to know that, so far from being in
+love with me, Mr. Marchdale is quite desperately in love with another
+woman. He was talking to me about her the moment before you arrived.”
+
+“Was he, indeed?--and you the barest acquaintances!” quizzed Mrs.
+O'Donovan Florence, pulling a face. “Well, well,” she went on
+thoughtfully, “if he's in love with another woman, that settles my last
+remaining doubt. It can only be that the other woman's yourself.”
+
+Beatrice shook her head, and laughed again.
+
+“Is that what they call an Irishism?” she asked, with polite curiosity.
+
+“And an Irishism is a very good thing, too--when employed with
+intention,” retorted her friend. “Did he just chance, now, in a casual
+way, to mention the other woman's name, I wonder?”
+
+“Oh, you perverse and stiff-necked generation!” Beatrice laughed. “What
+can his mentioning or not mentioning her name signify? For since he's
+in love with her, it's hardly likely that he's in love with you or me at
+the same time, is it?”
+
+“That's as may be. But I'll wager I could make a shrewd guess at her
+name myself. And what else did he tell you about her? He's told me
+nothing; but I'll warrant I could paint her portrait. She's a fine
+figure of a young Englishwoman, brown-haired, grey-eyed, and she stands
+about five-feet-eight in her shoes. There's an expression of great
+malice and humour in her physiognomy, and a kind of devil-may-care
+haughtiness in the poise of her head. She's a bit of a grande dame, into
+the bargain--something like an Anglo-Italian duchess, for example; she's
+monstrously rich; and she adds, you'll be surprised to learn, to her
+other fascinations that of being a widow. Faith, the men are so fond
+of widows, it's a marvel to me that we're ever married at all until we
+reach that condition;--and there, if you like, is another Irishism for
+you. But what's this? Methinks a rosy blush mantles my lady's brow. Have
+I touched the heel of Achilles? She IS a widow? He TOLD you she was a
+widow?... But--bless us and save us!--what's come to you now? You're as
+white as a sheet. What is it?”
+
+“Good heavens!” gasped Beatrice. She lay back in her chair, and stared
+with horrified eyes into space. “Good--good heavens!”
+
+Mrs. O' Donovan Florence leaned forward and took her hand.
+
+“What is it, my dear? What's come to you?” she asked, in alarm.
+
+Beatrice gave a kind of groan.
+
+“It's absurd--it's impossible,” she said; “and yet, if by any ridiculous
+chance you should be right, it's too horribly horrible.” She repeated
+her groan. “If by any ridiculous chance you are right, the man will
+think that I have been leading him on!”
+
+“LEADING HIM ON!” Mrs. O'Donovan Florence suppressed a shriek of
+ecstatic mirth. “There's no question about my being right,” she averred
+soberly. “He wears his heart behind his eyeglass; and whoso runs may
+read it.”
+
+“Well, then--” began Beatrice, with an air of desperation... “But no,”
+ she broke off. “YOU CAN'T be right. It's impossible, impossible. Wait.
+I'll tell you the whole story. You shall see for yourself.”
+
+“Go on,” said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, assuming an attitude of devout
+attention, which she retained while Beatrice (not without certain starts
+and hesitations) recounted the fond tale of Peter's novel, and of the
+woman who had suggested the character of Pauline.
+
+“But OF COURSE!” cried the Irishwoman, when the tale was finished;
+and this time her shriek of mirth, of glee, was not suppressed. “Of
+course--you miracle of unsuspecting innocence! The man would never have
+breathed a whisper of the affair to any soul alive, save to his heroine
+herself--let alone to you, if you and she were not the same. Couple that
+with the eyes he makes at you, and you've got assurance twice assured.
+You ought to have guessed it from the first syllable he uttered. And
+when he went on about her exalted station and her fabulous wealth! Oh,
+my ingenue! Oh, my guileless lambkin! And you Trixie Belfont! Where's
+your famous wit? Where are your famous intuitions?”
+
+“BUT DON'T YOU SEE,” wailed Beatrice, “don't you see the utterly odious
+position this leaves me in? I've been urging him with all my might to
+tell her! I said... oh, the things I said!” She shuddered visibly. “I
+said that differences of rank and fortune could n't matter.” She gave a
+melancholy laugh. “I said that very likely she'd accept him. I said she
+couldn't help being... Oh, my dear, my dear! He'll think--of course,
+he can't help thinking--that I was encouraging him--that I was coming
+halfway to meet him.”
+
+“Hush, hush! It's not so bad as that,” said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence,
+soothingly. “For surely, as I understand it, the man doesn't dream that
+you knew it was about himself he was speaking. He always talked of the
+book as by a friend of his; and you never let him suspect that you had
+pierced his subterfuge.”
+
+Beatrice frowned for an instant, putting this consideration in its
+place, in her troubled mind. Then suddenly a light of intense, of
+immense relief broke in her face.
+
+“Thank goodness!” she sighed. “I had forgotten. No, he does n't dream
+that. But oh, the fright I had!”
+
+“He'll tell you, all the same,” said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+
+“No, he'll never tell me now. I am forewarned, forearmed. I 'll give him
+no chance,” Beatrice answered.
+
+“Yes; and what's more, you'll marry him,” said her friend.
+
+“Kate! Don't descend to imbecilities,” cried Beatrice.
+
+“You'll marry him,” reiterated Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, calmly. “You'll
+end by marrying him--if you're human; and I've seldom known a human
+being who was more so. It's not in flesh and blood to remain unmoved by
+a tribute such as that man has paid you. The first thing you'll do will
+be to re-read the novel. Otherwise, I'd request the loan of it myself,
+for I 'm naturally curious to compare the wrought ring with the virgin
+gold--but I know it's the wrought ring the virgin gold will itself be
+wanting, directly it's alone. And then the poison will work. And you'll
+end by marrying him.”
+
+“In the first place,” replied Beatrice, firmly, “I shall never marry any
+one. That is absolutely certain. In the next place, I shall not re-read
+the novel; and to prove that I shan't, I shall insist on your taking it
+with you when you leave to-day. And finally, I'm nowhere near convinced
+that you're right about my being... well, you might as well say the
+raw material, the rough ore, as the virgin gold. It's only a bare
+possibility. But even the possibility had not occurred to me before.
+Now that it has, I shall be on my guard. I shall know how to prevent any
+possible developments.”
+
+“In the first place,” said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, with equal firmness,
+“wild horses couldn't induce me to take the novel. Wait till you're
+alone. A hundred questions about it will come flocking to your mind;
+you'd be miserable if you had n't it to refer to. In the next place, the
+poison will work and work. Say what you will, it's flattery that wins
+us. In the third place, he'll tell you. Finally, you'll make a good
+Catholic of him, and marry him. It's absurd, it's iniquitous, anyhow,
+for a young and beautiful woman like you to remain a widow. And
+your future husband is a man of talent and distinction, and he's not
+bad-looking, either. Will you stick to your title, now, I wonder? Or
+will you step down, and be plain Mrs. Marchdale? No--the Honourable
+Mrs.--excuse me--'Mr. and the Honourable Mrs. Marchdale.' I see you in
+the 'Morning Post' already. And will you continue to live in Italy? Or
+will you come back to England?”
+
+“Oh, my good Kate, my sweet Kate, my incorrigible Kate, what an
+extravagantly silly Kate you can be when the mood takes you,” Beatrice
+laughed.
+
+“Kate me as many Kates as you like, the man is really not bad-looking.
+He has a nice lithe springy figure, and a clean complexion, and an open
+brow. And if there's a suggestion of superciliousness in the tilt of his
+nose, of scepticism in the twirl of his moustaches, and of obstinacy in
+the squareness of his chin--ma foi, you must take the bitter with the
+sweet. Besides, he has decent hair, and plenty of it--he'll not go bald.
+And he dresses well, and wears his clothes with an air. In short, you'll
+make a very handsome couple. Anyhow, when your family are gathered
+round the evening lamp to-night, I 'll stake my fortune on it, but I
+can foretell the name of the book they'll find Trixie Belfont reading,”
+ laughed Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+
+
+For a few minutes, after her friend had left her, Beatrice sat still,
+her head resting on her hand, and gazed with fixed eyes at Monte
+Sfiorito. Then she rose, and walked briskly backwards and forwards, for
+a while, up and down the terrace. Presently she came to a standstill,
+and leaning on the balustrade, while one of her feet kept lightly
+tapping the pavement, looked off again towards the mountain.
+
+The prospect was well worth her attention, with its blue and green and
+gold, its wood and water, its misty-blushing snows, its spaciousness
+and its atmosphere. In the sky a million fluffy little cloudlets floated
+like a flock of fantastic birds, with mother-of-pearl tinted plumage.
+The shadows were lengthening now. The sunshine glanced from the smooth
+surface of the lake as from burnished metal, and falling on the coloured
+sails of the fishing-boats, made them gleam like sails of crimson silk.
+But I wonder how much of this Beatrice really saw.
+
+She plucked an oleander from one of the tall marble urns set along the
+balustrade, and pressed the pink blossom against her face, and, closing
+her eyes, breathed in its perfume; then, absent-minded, she let it drop,
+over the terrace, upon the path below.
+
+“It's impossible,” she said suddenly, aloud. At last she went into the
+house, and up to her rose-and-white retiring-room. There she took a book
+from the table, and sank into a deep easy-chair, and began to turn the
+pages.
+
+But when, by and by, approaching footsteps became audible in the
+stone-floored corridor without, Beatrice hastily shut the book, thrust
+it back upon the table, and caught up another so that Emilia Manfredi,
+entering, found her reading Monsieur Anatole France's “Etui de nacre.”
+
+“Emilia,” she said, “I wish you would translate the I Jongleur de Notre
+Dame' into Italian.”
+
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+Peter, we may suppose, returned to Villa Floriano that afternoon in a
+state of some excitement.
+
+“He ought to have told her--”
+
+“It was her right to be told--”
+
+“What could her rank matter--”
+
+“A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman--”
+
+“She would have despised the conventional barriers--”
+
+“No woman could be proof against such a compliment--”
+
+“The case was peculiar--ordinary rules could not apply to it--”
+
+“Every man gets the wife he deserves--and he had certainly gone a long
+way towards deserving her--”
+
+“He should simply have told her the story of his book and of her part in
+it--he need n't have mentioned love--she would have understood--”
+
+The Duchessa's voice, clear and cool and crisp-cut, sounded perpetually
+in his ears; the words she had spoken, the arguments she had urged,
+repeated and repeated themselves, danced round and round, in his memory.
+
+“Ought I to have told her--then and there? Shall I go to her and tell
+her to-morrow?”
+
+He tried to think; but he could not think. His faculties were in a
+whirl--he could by no means command them. He could only wait, inert,
+while the dance went on. It was an extremely riotous dance. The
+Duchessa's conversation was reproduced without sequence, without
+coherence--scattered fragments of it were flashed before him fitfully,
+in swift disorder. If he would attempt to seize upon one of those
+fragments, to detain and fix it, for consideration--a speech of hers,
+a look, an inflection--then the whole experience suddenly lost its
+outlines, his recollection of it became a jumble, and he was left, as it
+were, intellectually gasping.
+
+He walked about his garden, he went into the house, he came out, he
+walked about again, he went in and dressed for dinner, he sat on his
+rustic bench, he smoked cigarette after cigarette.
+
+“Ought I to have told her? Ought I to tell her to-morrow?”
+
+At moments there would come a lull in the turmoil, an interval of quiet,
+of apparent clearness; and the answer would seem perfectly plain.
+
+“Of course, you ought to tell her. Tell her--and all will be well. She
+has put herself in the supposititious woman's place, and she says, 'He
+ought to tell her.' She says it earnestly, vehemently. That means that
+if she were the woman, she would wish to be told. She will despise the
+conventional barriers--she will be touched, she will be moved. 'No woman
+could be proof against such a compliment.' Go to her to-morrow, and tell
+her--and all will be well.”
+
+At these moments he would look up towards the castle, and picture
+the morrow's consummation; and his heart would have a convulsion.
+Imagination flew on the wings of his desire. She stood before him in all
+her sumptuous womanhood, tender and strong and glowing. As he spoke, her
+eyes lightened, her eyes burned, the blood came and went in her cheeks;
+her lips parted. Then she whispered something; and his heart leapt
+terribly; and he called her name--“Beatrice! Beatrice!” Her name
+expressed the inexpressible--the adoring passion, the wild hunger and
+wild triumph of his soul. But now she was moving towards him--she was
+holding out her hands. He caught her in his arms--he held her yielding
+body in his arms. And his heart leapt terribly, terribly. And he
+wondered how he could endure, how he could live through, the hateful
+hours that must elapse before tomorrow would be to-day.
+
+But “hearts, after leaps, ache.” Presently the whirl would begin again;
+and then, by and by, in another lull, a contrary answer would seem
+equally plain.
+
+“Tell her, indeed? My dear man, are you mad? She would simply be amazed,
+struck dumb, by your presumption. I can see from here her incredulity--I
+can see the scorn with which she would wither you. It has never dimly
+occurred to her as conceivable that you would venture to be in love with
+her, that you would dare to lift your eyes to her--you who are nothing,
+to her who is all. Yes--nothing, nobody. In her view, you are just a
+harmless nobody, whose society she tolerates for kindness' sake--and
+faute de mieux. It is precisely because she deems you a nobody--because
+she is profoundly conscious of the gulf that separates you from
+her--that she can condescend to be amiably familiar. If you were of a
+rank even remotely approximating to her own, she would be a thousand
+times more circumspect. Remember--she does not dream that you are Felix
+Wildmay. He is a mere name to her; and his story is an amusing little
+romance, perfectly external to herself, which she discusses with
+entirely impersonal interest. Tell her by all means, if you like Say,
+'I am Wildmay--you are Pauline.' And see how amazed she will be, and how
+incensed, and how indignant.”
+
+Then he would look up at the castle stonily, in a mood of desperate
+renunciation, and vaguely meditate packing his belongings, and going
+home to England.
+
+At other moments a third answer would seem the plain one: something
+between these extremes of optimism and pessimism, a compromise, it not a
+reconciliation.
+
+“Come! Let us be calm, let us be judicial. The consequences of our
+actions, here below, if hardly ever so good as we could hope, are hardly
+ever so bad as we might fear. Let us regard this matter in the light of
+that guiding principle. True, she does n't dream that you are Wildmay.
+True, if you were abruptly to say to her, 'I am Wildmay--you are the
+woman,' she would be astonished--even, if you will, at first, more or
+less taken aback, disconcerted. But indignant? Why? What is this gulf
+that separates you from her? What are these conventional barriers of
+which you make so much? She is a duchess, she is the daughter of a lord,
+and she is rich. Well, all that is to be regretted. But you are neither
+a plebeian nor a pauper yourself. You are a man of good birth, you are a
+man of some parts, and you have a decent income. It amounts to this--she
+is a great lady, you are a small gentleman. In ordinary circumstances,
+to be sure, so small a gentleman could not ask so great a lady to become
+his wife. But here the circumstances are not ordinary. Destiny has
+meddled in the business. Small gentleman though you are, an unusual and
+subtle relation-ship has been established between you and your great
+lady. She herself says, 'Ordinary rules cannot apply--he ought to tell
+her.' Very good: tell her. She will be astonished, but she will see that
+there is no occasion for resentment. And though the odds are, of course,
+a hundred to one that she will not accept you, still she must treat you
+as an honourable suitor. And whether she accepts you or rejects you,
+it is better to tell her and to have it over, than to go on forever
+dangling this way, like the poor cat in the adage. Tell her--put your
+fate to the touch--hope nothing, fear nothing--and bow to the event.”
+
+But even this temperate answer provoked its counter-answer.
+
+“The odds are a hundred to one, a thousand to one, that she will not
+accept you. And if you tell her, and she does not accept you, she will
+not allow you to see her any more, you will be exiled from her presence.
+And I thought, you did not wish to be exiled from her presence, You
+would stake, then, this great privilege, the privilege of seeing her, of
+knowing her, upon a. chance that has a thousand to one against it. You
+make light of the conventional barriers--but the principal barrier of
+them all, you are forgetting. She is a Roman Catholic, and a devout one.
+Marry a Protestant? She would as soon think of marrying a Paynim Turk.”
+
+In the end, no doubt, a kind of exhaustion followed upon his excitement.
+Questions and answers suspended themselves; and he could only look up
+towards Ventirose, and dumbly wish that he was there. The distance was
+so trifling--in five minutes he could traverse it--the law seemed absurd
+and arbitrary, which condemned him to sit apart, free only to look and
+wish.
+
+It was in this condition of mind that Marietta found him, when she came
+to announce dinner.
+
+Peter gave himself a shake. The sight of the brown old woman, with
+her homely, friendly face, brought him back to small things, to actual
+things; and that, if it was n't a comfort, was, at any rate, a relief.
+
+“Dinner?” he questioned. “Do peris at the gates of Eden DINE?”
+
+“The soup is on the table,” said Marietta.
+
+He rose, casting a last glance towards the castle.
+
+            Towers and battlements...
+            Bosomed high in tufted trees,
+            Where perhaps some beauty lies,
+            The cynosure of neighbouring eyes.”
+
+He repeated the lines in an undertone, and went in to dinner. And then
+the restorative spirit of nonsense descended upon him.
+
+“Marietta,” he asked, “what is your attitude towards the question of
+mixed marriages?”
+
+Marietta wrinkled her brow.
+
+“Mixed marriages? What is that, Signorino?”
+
+“Marriages between Catholics and Protestants,” he explained.
+
+“Protestants?” Her brow was still a network. “What things are they?”
+
+“They are things--or perhaps it would be less invidious to say
+people--who are not Catholics--who repudiate Catholicism as a deadly and
+soul-destroying error.”
+
+“Jews?” asked Marietta.
+
+“No--not exactly. They are generally classified as Christians. But
+they protest, you know. Protesto, protestare, verb, active, first
+conjugation. 'Mi pare che la donna protesta troppo,' as the poet
+sings. They're Christians, but they protest against the Pope and the
+Pretender.”
+
+“The Signorino means Freemasons,” said Marietta.
+
+“No, he does n't,” said Peter. “He means Protestants.”
+
+“But pardon, Signorino,” she insisted; “if they are not Catholics,
+they must be Freemasons or Jews. They cannot be Christians.
+Christian--Catholic: it is the same. All Christians are Catholics.”
+
+“Tu quoque!” he cried. “You regard the terms as interchangeable? I 've
+heard the identical sentiment similarly enunciated by another. Do I look
+like a Freemason?”
+
+She bent her sharp old eyes upon him studiously for a moment. Then she
+shook her head.
+
+“No,” she answered slowly. “I do not think that the Signorino looks like
+a Freemason.”
+
+“A Jew, then?”
+
+“Mache! A Jew? The Signorino!” She shrugged derision.
+
+“And yet I'm what they call a Protestant,” he said.
+
+“No,” said she.
+
+“Yes,” said he. “I refer you to my sponsors in baptism. A regular, true
+blue moderate High Churchman and Tory, British and Protestant to the
+backbone, with 'Frustrate their Popish tricks' writ large all over me.
+You have never by any chance married a Protestant yourself?” he asked.
+
+“No, Signorino. I have never married any one. But it was not for the
+lack of occasions. Twenty, thirty young men courted me when I was a
+girl. But--mica!--I would not look at them. When men are young they are
+too unsteady for husbands; when they are old they have the rheumatism.”
+
+“Admirably philosophised,” he approved. “But it sometimes happens that
+men are neither young nor old. There are men of thirty-five--I have even
+heard that there are men of forty. What of them?”
+
+“There is a proverb, Signorino, which says, Sposi di quarant' anni son
+mai sempre tiranni,” she informed him.
+
+“For the matter of that,” he retorted, “there is a proverb which says,
+Love laughs at locksmiths.”
+
+“Non capisco,” said Marietta.
+
+“That's merely because it's English,” said he. “You'd understand fast
+enough if I should put it in Italian. But I only quoted it to show the
+futility of proverbs. Laugh at locksmiths, indeed! Why, it can't even
+laugh at such an insignificant detail as a Papist's prejudices. But
+I wish I were a duke and a millionaire. Do you know any one who could
+create me a duke and endow me with a million?”
+
+“No, Signorino,” she answered, shaking her head.
+
+“Fragrant Cytherea, foam-born Venus, deathless Aphrodite, cannot,
+goddess though she is,” he complained. “The fact is, I 'm feeling
+rather undone. I think I will ask you to bring me a bottle of
+Asti-spumante--some of the dry kind, with the white seal. I 'll try
+to pretend that it's champagne. To tell or not to tell--that is the
+question.
+
+           'A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
+            With the dream of, meet death with--
+
+And yet, if you can believe me, the man who penned those lines had never
+seen her. He penned another line equally pat to the situation, though he
+had never seen me, either
+
+           'Is there no method to tell her in Spanish?”
+
+But you can't imagine how I detest that vulgar use of 'pen' for
+'write'--as if literature were a kind of pig. However, it's perhaps
+no worse than the use of Asti for champagne. One should n't be too
+fastidious. I must really try to think of some method of telling her in
+Spanish.”
+
+Marietta went to fetch the Asti.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+When Peter rose next morning, he pulled a grimace at the departed night.
+
+“You are a detected cheat,” he cried, “an unmasked impostor. You live
+upon your reputation as a counsellor--'tis the only reason why we bear
+with you. La nuit porte conseil! Yet what counsel have you brought to
+me?--and I at the pass where my need is uttermost. Shall I go to her
+this afternoon, and unburden my soul--or shall I not? You have left
+me where you found me--in the same fine, free, and liberal state of
+vacillation. Discredited oracle!”
+
+He was standing before his dressing-table, brushing his hair. The image
+in the glass frowned back at him. Then something struck him.
+
+“At all events, we'll go this morning to Spiaggia, and have our hair
+cut,” he resolved.
+
+So he walked to the village, and caught the ten o'clock omnibus for
+Spiaggia. And after he had had his hair cut, he went to the Hotel de
+Russie, and lunched in the garden. And after luncheon, of course, he
+entered the grounds of the Casino, and strolled backwards and forwards,
+one of a merry procession, on the terrace by the lakeside. The gay
+toilets of the women, their bright-coloured hats and sunshades, made
+the terrace look like a great bank of monstrous moving flowers. The band
+played brisk accompaniments to the steady babble of voices, Italian,
+English, German. The pure air was shot with alien scents--the women's
+perfumery, the men's cigarette-smoke. The marvellous blue waters crisped
+in the breeze, and sparkled in the sun; and the smooth snows of Monte
+Sfiorito loomed so near, one felt one could almost put out one's stick
+and scratch one's name upon them.... And here, as luck would have it,
+Peter came face to face with Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+
+“How do you do?” said she, offering her hand.
+
+“How do you do?” said he.
+
+“It's a fine day,” said she.
+
+“Very,” said he.
+
+“Shall I make you a confidence?” she asked.
+
+“Do,” he answered.
+
+“Are you sure I can trust you?” She scanned his face dubiously.
+
+“Try it and see,” he urged.
+
+“Well, then, if you must know, I was thirsting to take a table and call
+for coffee; but having no man at hand to chaperon me, I dared not.”
+
+“Je vous en prie,” cried Peter, with a gesture of gallantry; and he
+led her to one of the round marble tables. “Due caffe,” he said to the
+brilliant creature (chains, buckles, ear-rings, of silver filigree,
+and head-dress and apron of flame-red silk) who came to learn their
+pleasure.
+
+“Softly, softly,” put in Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. “Not a drop of
+coffee for me. An orange-sherbet, if you please. Coffee was a figure of
+speech--a generic term for light refreshments.”
+
+Peter laughed, and amended his order.
+
+“Do you see those three innocent darlings playing together, under the
+eye of their governess, by the Wellingtonia yonder?” enquired the lady.
+
+“The little girl in white and the two boys?” asked Peter.
+
+“Precisely,” said she. “Such as they are, they're me own.”
+
+“Really?” he responded, in the tone of profound and sympathetic interest
+we are apt to affect when parents begin about their children.
+
+“I give you my word for it,” she assured him. “But I mention the fact,
+not in a spirit of boastfulness, but merely to show you that I 'm not
+entirely alone and unprotected. There's an American at our hotel, by the
+bye, who goes up and down telling every one who'll listen that it ought
+to be Washingtonia, and declaiming with tears in his eyes against the
+arrogance of the English in changing Washington to Wellington. As he's
+a respectable-looking man with grown-up daughters, I should think very
+likely he's right.”
+
+“Very likely,” said Peter. “It's an American tree, is n't it?”
+
+“Whether it is n't or whether it is,” said she, “one thing is
+undeniable: you English are the coldest-blooded animals south of the
+Arctic Circle.”
+
+“Oh--? Are we?” he doubted.
+
+“You are that,” she affirmed, with sorrowing emphasis.
+
+“Ah, well,” he reflected, “the temperature of our blood does n't matter.
+We're, at any rate, notoriously warm-hearted.”
+
+“Are you indeed?” she exclaimed. “If you are, it's a mighty quiet kind
+of notoriety, let me tell you, and a mighty cold kind of warmth.”
+
+Peter laughed.
+
+“You're all for prudence and expediency. You're the slaves of your
+reason. You're dominated by the head, not by the heart. You're little
+better than calculating-machines. Are you ever known, now, for instance,
+to risk earth and heaven, and all things between them, on a sudden
+unthinking impulse?”
+
+“Not often, I daresay,” he admitted.
+
+“And you sit there as serene as a brazen statue, and own it without a
+quaver,” she reproached him.
+
+“Surely,” he urged, “in my character of Englishman, it behooves me to
+appear smug and self-satisfied?”
+
+“You're right,” she agreed. “I wonder,” she continued, after a moment's
+pause, during which her eyes looked thoughtful, “I wonder whether you
+would fall upon and annihilate a person who should venture to offer you
+a word of well-meant advice.”
+
+“I should sit as serene as a brazen statue, and receive it without a
+quaver,” he promised.
+
+“Well, then,” said she, leaning forward a little, and dropping her
+voice, “why don't you take your courage in both hands, and ask her?”
+
+Peter stared.
+
+“Be guided by me--and do it,” she said.
+
+“Do what?” he puzzled.
+
+“Ask her to marry you, of course,” she returned amiably. Then, without
+allowing him time to shape an answer, “Touche!” she cried, in triumph.
+“I 've brought the tell-tale colour to your cheek. And you a brazen
+statue! 'They do not love who do not show their love.' But, in faith,
+you show yours to any one who'll be at pains to watch you. Your eyes
+betray you as often as ever you look at her. I had n't observed you for
+two minutes by the clock, when I knew your secret as well as if you 'd
+chosen me for your confessor. But what's holding you back? You
+can't expect her to do the proposing. Now curse me for a meddlesome
+Irishwoman, if you will--but why don't you throw yourself at her feet,
+and ask her, like a man?”
+
+“How can I?” said Peter, abandoning any desire he may have felt to beat
+about the bush. Nay, indeed, it is very possible he welcomed, rather
+than resented, the Irishwoman's meddling.
+
+“What's to prevent you?” said she.
+
+“Everything,” said he.
+
+“Everything is nothing. That?”
+
+“Dear lady! She is hideously rich, for one thing.”
+
+“Getaway with you!” was the dear lady's warm expostulation. “What
+has money to do with the question, if a man's in love? But that's the
+English of it--there you are with your cold-blooded calculation. You
+chain up your natural impulses as if they were dangerous beasts. Her
+money never saved you from succumbing to her enchantments. Why should it
+bar you from declaring your passion.”
+
+“There's a sort of tendency in society,” said Peter, “to look upon the
+poor man who seeks the hand of a rich woman as a fortunehunter.”
+
+“A fig for the opinion of society,” she cried. “The only opinion you
+should consider is the opinion of the woman you adore. I was an heiress
+myself; and when Teddy O'Donovan proposed to me, upon my conscience
+I believe the sole piece of property he possessed in the world was a
+corkscrew. So much for her ducats!”
+
+Peter laughed.
+
+“Men, after coffee, are frequently in the habit of smoking,” said she.
+“You have my sanction for a cigarette. It will keep you in countenance.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Peter, and lit his cigarette.
+
+“And surely, it's a countenance you'll need, to be going on like that
+about her money. However--if you can find a ray of comfort in the
+information--small good will her future husband get of it, even if he is
+a fortunehunter: for she gives the bulk of it away in charity, and I 'm
+doubtful if she keeps two thousand a year for her own spending.”
+
+“Really?” said Peter; and for a breathing-space it seemed to him that
+there was a ray of comfort in the information.
+
+“Yes, you may rate her at two thousand a year,” said Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence. “I suppose you can match that yourself. So the disparity
+disappears.”
+
+The ray of comfort had flickered for a second, and gone out.
+
+“There are unfortunately other disparities,” he remarked gloomily.
+
+“Put a name on them,” said she.
+
+“There's her rank.”
+
+His impetuous adviser flung up a hand of scorn.
+
+“Her rank, do you say?” she cried. “To the mischief with her rank.
+What's rank to love? A woman is only a woman, whether she calls herself
+a duchess or a dairy-maid. A woman with any spirit would marry a bank
+manager, if she loved him. A man's a man. You should n't care that for
+her rank.”
+
+“That,” was a snap of Mrs. O' Donovan Florence's fingers.
+
+“I suppose you know,” said Peter, “that I am a Protestant.”
+
+“Are you--you poor benighted creature? Well, that's easily remedied. Go
+and get yourself baptised directly.”
+
+She waved her hand towards the town, as if to recommend his immediate
+procedure in quest of a baptistery.
+
+Peter laughed again.
+
+“I 'm afraid that's more easily said than done.”
+
+“Easy!” she exclaimed. “Why, you've only to stand still and let yourself
+be sprinkled. It's the priest who does the work. Don't tell me,” she
+added, with persuasive inconsequence, “that you'll allow a little thing
+like being in love with a woman to keep you back from professing the
+true faith.”
+
+“Ah, if I were convinced that it is true,” he sighed, still laughing.
+
+“What call have you to doubt it? And anyhow, what does it matter whether
+you 're convinced or not? I remember, when I was a school-girl, I never
+was myself convinced of the theorems of Euclid; but I professed them
+gladly, for the sake of the marks they brought; and the eternal verities
+of mathematics remained unshaken by my scepticism.”
+
+“Your reasoning is subtle,” laughed Peter. “But the worst of it is, if I
+were ten times a Catholic, she wouldn't have me. So what's the use?”
+
+“You never can tell whether a woman will have you or not, until you
+offer yourself. And even if she refuses you, is that a ground for
+despair? My own husband asked me three times, and three times I said no.
+And then he took to writing verses--and I saw there was but one way to
+stop him. So we were married. Ask her; ask her again--and again. You can
+always resort in the end to versification. And now,” the lady concluded,
+rising, “I have spoken, and I leave you to your fate. I'm obliged
+to return to the hotel, to hold a bed of justice. It appears that my
+innocent darlings, beyond there, innocent as they look, have managed
+among them to break the electric light in my sitting-room. They're to be
+arraigned before me at three for an instruction criminelle. Put what I
+'ve said in your pipe, and smoke it--'tis a mother's last request. If
+I 've not succeeded in determining you, don't pretend, at least, that I
+haven't encouraged you a bit. Put what I 've said in your pipe, and see
+whether, by vigorous drawing, you can't fan the smouldering fires of
+encouragement into a small blaze of determination.”
+
+Peter resumed his stroll backwards and forwards by the lakeside.
+Encouragement was all very well; but... “Shall I--shall I not? Shall
+I--shall I not? Shall I--shall I not?” The eternal question went
+tick-tack, tick-tack, to the rhythm of his march. He glared at vacancy,
+and tried hard to make up his mind.
+
+“I'm afraid I must be somewhat lacking in decision of character,” he
+said, with pathetic wonder.
+
+Then suddenly he stamped his foot.
+
+“Come! An end to this tergiversation. Do it. Do it,” cried his manlier
+soul.
+
+“I will,” he resolved all at once, drawing a deep breath, and clenching
+his fists.
+
+He left the Casino, and set forth to walk to Ventirose. He could not
+wait for the omnibus, which would not leave till four. He must strike
+while his will was hot.
+
+He walked rapidly; in less than an hour he had reached the tall gilded
+grille of the park. He stopped for an instant, and looked up the
+straight avenue of chestnuts, to the western front of the castle, softly
+alight in the afternoon sun. He put his hand upon the pendent bell-pull
+of twisted iron, to summon the porter. In another second he would have
+rung, he would have been admitted.... And just then one of the little
+demons that inhabit the circumambient air, called his attention to an
+aspect of the situation which he had not thought of.
+
+“Wait a bit,” it whispered in his ear. “You were there only yesterday.
+It can't fail, therefore, to seem extraordinary, your calling again
+to-day. You must be prepared with an excuse, an explanation. But
+suppose, when you arrive, suppose that (like the lady in the ballad) she
+greets you with 'a glance of cold surprise'--what then, my dear? Why,
+then, it's obvious, you can't allege the true explanation--can you?
+If she greets you with a glance of cold, surprise, you 'll have your
+answer, as it were, before the fact you 'll know that there's no manner
+of hope for you; and the time for passionate avowals will automatically
+defer itself. But then--? How will you justify your visit? What face can
+you put on?”
+
+“H'm,” assented Peter, “there's something in that.”
+
+“There's a great deal in that,” said the demon. “You must have an excuse
+up your sleeve, a pretext. A true excuse is a fine thing in its way;
+but when you come to a serious emergency, an alternative false excuse is
+indispensable.”
+
+“H'm,” said Peter.
+
+However, if there are demons in the atmosphere, there are gods in the
+machine--(“Paraschkine even goes so far as to maintain that there are
+more gods in the machine than have ever been taken from it.”)
+While Peter stood still, pondering the demon's really rather cogent
+intervention, his eye was caught by something that glittered in the
+grass at the roadside.
+
+“The Cardinal's snuff-box,” he exclaimed, picking it up.
+
+The Cardinal had dropped his snuff-box. Here was an excuse, and to
+spare. Peter rang the bell.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+And, like the lady in the ballad, sure enough, she greeted his arrival
+with a glance of cold surprise.
+
+At all events, eyebrows raised, face unsmiling, it was a glance that
+clearly supplemented her spoken “How do you do?” by a tacit (perhaps
+self-addressed?) “What can bring him here?”
+
+You or I, indeed, or Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, in the fulness of our
+knowledge, might very likely have interpreted it rather as a glance of
+nervous apprehension. Anyhow, it was a glance that perfectly checked the
+impetus of his intent. Something snapped and gave way within him; and
+he needed no further signal that the occasion for passionate avowals was
+not the present.
+
+And thereupon befell a scene that was really quite too absurd, that was
+really childish, a scene over the memory of which, I must believe, they
+themselves have sometimes laughed together; though, at the moment, its
+absurdity held, for him at least, elements of the tragic.
+
+He met her in the broad gravelled carriage-sweep, before the great
+hall-door. She had on her hat and gloves, as if she were just going out.
+It seemed to him that she was a little pale; her eyes seemed darker than
+usual, and graver. Certainly--cold surprise, or nervous apprehension, as
+you will--her attitude was by no means cordial. It was not oncoming. It
+showed none of her accustomed easy, half-humorous, wholly good-humoured
+friendliness. It was decidedly the attitude of a person standing off,
+shut in, withheld.
+
+“I have never seen her in the least like this before,” he thought, as
+he looked at her pale face, her dark, grave eyes; “I have never seen her
+more beautiful. And there is not one single atom of hope for me.”
+
+“How do you do?” she said, unsmiling and waited, as who should invite
+him to state his errand. She did not offer him her hand but, for that
+matter, (she might have pleaded), she could not, very well: for one of
+her hands held her sunshade, and the other held an embroidered silk bag,
+woman's makeshift for a pocket.
+
+And then, capping the first pang of his disappointment, a kind of
+anger seized him. After all, what right had she to receive him in this
+fashion?--as if he were an intrusive stranger. In common civility, in
+common justice, she owed it to him to suppose that he would not be there
+without abundant reason.
+
+And now, with Peter angry, the absurd little scene began.
+
+Assuming an attitude designed to be, in its own way, as reticent as
+hers, “I was passing your gate,” he explained, “when I happened to find
+this, lying by the roadside. I took the liberty of bringing it to you.”
+
+He gave her the Cardinal's snuff box, which, in spite of her hands'
+preoccupation, she was able to accept.
+
+“A liberty!” he thought, grinding his teeth. “Yes! No doubt she would
+have wished me to leave it with the porter at the lodge. No doubt she
+deems it an act of officiousness on my part to have found it at all.”
+
+And his anger mounted.
+
+“How very good of you,” she said. “My uncle could not think where he had
+mislaid it.”
+
+“I am very fortunate to be the means of restoring it,” said he.
+
+Then, after a second's suspension, as she said nothing (she kept her
+eyes on the snuffbox, examining it as if it were quite new to her), he
+lifted his hat, and bowed, preparatory to retiring down the avenue.
+
+“Oh, but my uncle will wish to thank you,” she exclaimed, looking up,
+with a kind of start. “Will you not come in? I--I will see whether he is
+disengaged.”
+
+She made a tentative movement towards the door. She had thawed
+perceptibly.
+
+But even as she thawed, Peter, in his anger, froze and stiffened. “I
+will see whether he is disengaged.” The expression grated. And perhaps,
+in effect, it was not a particularly felicitous expression. But if the
+poor woman was suffering from nervous apprehension--?
+
+“I beg you on no account to disturb Cardinal Udeschini,” he returned
+loftily. “It is not a matter of the slightest consequence.”
+
+And even as he stiffened, she unbent.
+
+“But it is a matter of consequence to him, to us,” she said, faintly
+smiling. “We have hunted high and low for it. We feared it was lost for
+good. It must have fallen from his pocket when he was walking. He will
+wish to thank you.”
+
+“I am more than thanked already,” said Peter. Alas (as Monsieur de la
+Pallisse has sagely noted), when we aim to appear dignified, how often
+do we just succeed in appearing churlish.
+
+And to put a seal upon this ridiculous encounter, to make it
+irrevocable, he lifted his hat again, and turned away.
+
+“Oh, very well,” murmured the Duchessa, in a voice that did not reach
+him. If it had reached him, perhaps he would have come back, perhaps
+things might have happened. I think there was regret in her voice, as
+well as despite. She stood for a minute, as he tramped down the avenue,
+and looked after him, with those unusually dark, grave eyes. At last,
+making a little gesture--as of regret? despite? impatience?--she went
+into the house.
+
+“Here is your snuff-box,” she said to the Cardinal.
+
+The old man put down his Breviary (he was seated by an open window,
+getting through his office), and smiled at the snuff box fondly,
+caressing it with his finger. Afterwards, he shook it, opened it, and
+took a pinch of snuff.
+
+“Where did you find it?” he enquired.
+
+“It was found by that Mr. Marchdale,” she said, “in the road, outside
+the gate. You must have let it drop this morning, when you were walking
+with Emilia.”
+
+“That Mr. Marchdale?” exclaimed the Cardinal. “What a coincidence.”
+
+“A coincidence--?” questioned Beatrice.
+
+“To be sure,” said he. “Was it not to Mr. Marchdale that I owed it in
+the first instance?”
+
+“Oh--? Was it? I had fancied that you owed it to me.”
+
+“Yes--but,” he reminded her, whilst the lines deepened about his
+humorous old mouth, “but as a reward of my virtue in conspiring with you
+to convert him. And, by the way, how is his conversion progressing?”
+
+The Cardinal looked up, with interest.
+
+“It is not progressing at all. I think there is no chance of it,”
+ answered Beatrice, in a tone that seemed to imply a certain irritation.
+
+“Oh--?” said the Cardinal.
+
+“No,” said she.
+
+“I thought he had shown 'dispositions'?” said the Cardinal.
+
+“That was a mistake. He has shown none. He is a very tiresome and silly
+person. He is not worth converting,” she declared succinctly.
+
+“Good gracious!” said the Cardinal.
+
+He resumed his office. But every now and again he would pause, and look
+out of the window, with the frown of a man meditating something; then he
+would shake his head significantly, and take snuff.
+
+Peter tramped down the avenue, angry and sick.
+
+Her reception of him had not only administered an instant death-blow
+to his hopes as a lover, but in its ungenial aloofness it had cruelly
+wounded his pride as a man. He felt snubbed and humiliated. Oh, true
+enough, she had unbent a little, towards the end. But it was the look
+with which she had first greeted him--it was the air with which she had
+waited for him to state his errand--that stung, and rankled, and would
+not be forgotten.
+
+He was angry with her, angry with circumstances, with life, angry with
+himself.
+
+“I am a fool--and a double fool--and a triple fool,” he said. “I am
+a fool ever to have thought of her at all; a double fool ever to have
+allowed myself to think so much of her; a triple and quadruple and
+quintuple idiot ever to have imagined for a moment that anything could
+come of it. I have wasted time enough. The next best thing to winning is
+to know when you are beaten. I acknowledge myself beaten. I will go back
+to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed.”
+
+He gazed darkly round the familiar valley, with eyes that abjured it.
+
+Olympus, no doubt, laughed.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+“I shall go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed.”
+
+But he took no immediate steps to get them packed.
+
+“Hope,” observes the clear-sighted French publicist quoted in the
+preceding chapter, “hope dies hard.”
+
+Hope, Peter fancied, had received its death-blow that afternoon.
+Already, that evening, it began to revive a little. It was very much
+enfeebled; it was very indefinite and diffident; but it was not dead. It
+amounted, perhaps, to nothing more than a vague kind of feeling that
+he would not, on the whole, make his departure for England quite so
+precipitate as, in the first heat of his anger, the first chill of his
+despair, he had intended. Piano, piano! He would move slowly, he would
+do nothing rash.
+
+But he was not happy, he was very far from happy. He spent a wretched
+night, a wretched, restless morrow. He walked about a great deal--about
+his garden, and afterwards, when the damnable iteration of his garden
+had become unbearable, he walked to the village, and took the riverside
+path, under the poplars, along the racing Aco, and followed it, as
+the waters paled and broadened, for I forget how many joyless,
+unremunerative miles.
+
+When he came home, fagged out and dusty, at dinner time, Marietta
+presented a visiting card to him, on her handsomest salver. She
+presented it with a flourish that was almost a swagger.
+
+Twice the size of an ordinary visiting-card, the fashion of it was
+roughly thus:
+
+                   IL CARDLE UDESCHINI
+          Sacr: Congr: Archiv: et Inscript: Praef:
+
+          Palazzo Udeschini.
+
+And above the legend, was pencilled, in a small oldfashioned hand,
+wonderfully neat and pretty:--
+
+“To thank Mr. Marchdale for his courtesy in returning my snuff-box.”
+
+“The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here,” said Marietta. There was
+a swagger in her accent. There was also something in her accent that
+seemed to rebuke Peter for his absence.
+
+“I had inferred as much from this,” said he, tapping the card. “We
+English, you know, are great at putting two and two together.”
+
+“He came in a carriage,” said Marietta.
+
+“Not really?” said her master.
+
+“Ang--veramente,” she affirmed.
+
+“Was--was he alone?” Peter asked, an obscure little twinge of hope
+stirring in his heart.
+
+“No. Signorino.” And then she generalised, with untranslatable
+magniloquence: “Un amplissimo porporato non va mai solo.”
+
+Peter ought to have hugged her for that amplissimo porporato. But he was
+selfishly engrossed in his emotions.
+
+“Who was with him?” He tried to throw the question out with a casual
+effect, an effect of unconcern.
+
+“The Signorina Emelia Manfredi was with him,” answered Marietta, little
+recking how mere words can stab.
+
+“Oh,” said Peter.
+
+“The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was very sorry not to see the
+Signorino,” continued Marietta.
+
+“Poor man--was he? Let us trust that time will console him,” said Peter,
+callously.
+
+But, “I wonder,” he asked himself, “I wonder whether perhaps I was the
+least bit hasty yesterday? If I had stopped, I should have saved the
+Cardinal a journey here to-day--I might have known that he would come,
+these Italians are so punctilious--and then, if I had stopped--if I had
+stopped--possibly--possibly--”
+
+Possibly what? Oh, nothing. And yet, if he had stopped... well, at any
+rate, he would have gained time. The Duchessa had already begun to thaw.
+If he had stopped... He could formulate no precise conclusion to that
+if; but he felt dimly remorseful that he had not stopped, he felt that
+he had indeed been the least bit hasty. And his remorse was somehow
+medicine to his reviving hope.
+
+“After all, I scarcely gave things a fair trial yesterday,” he said.
+
+And the corollary of that, of course, was that he might give things a
+further and fairer trial some other day.
+
+But his hope was still hard hurt; he was still in a profound dejection.
+
+“The Signorino is not eating his dinner,” cried Marietta, fixing him
+with suspicious, upbraiding eyes.
+
+“I never said I was,” he retorted.
+
+“The Signorino is not well?” she questioned, anxious.
+
+“Oh, yes--cosi, cosi; the Signorino is well enough,” he answered.
+
+“The dinner”--you could perceive that she brought herself with
+difficulty to frame the dread hypothesis--“the dinner is not good?” Her
+voice sank. She waited, tense, for his reply.
+
+“The dinner,” said he, “if one may criticise without eating it, the
+dinner is excellent. I will have no aspersions cast upon my cook.”
+
+“Ah-h-h!” breathed Marietta, a tremulous sigh of relief.
+
+“It is not the Signorino, it is not the dinner, it is the world that is
+awry,” Peter went on, in reflective melancholy. “'T is the times that
+are out of joint. 'T is the sex, the Sex, that is not well, that is not
+good, that needs a thorough overhauling and reforming.”
+
+“Which sex?” asked Marietta.
+
+“The sex,” said Peter. “By the unanimous consent of rhetoricians, there
+is but one sex the sex, the fair sex, the unfair sex, the gentle sex,
+the barbaric sex. We men do not form a sex, we do not even form a sect.
+We are your mere hangers-on, camp-followers, satellites--your things,
+your playthings--we are the mere shuttlecocks which you toss hither and
+thither with your battledores, as the wanton mood impels you. We are
+born of woman, we are swaddled and nursed by woman, we are governessed
+by woman; subsequently, we are beguiled by woman, fooled by woman, led
+on, put off, tantalised by woman, fretted and bullied by her; finally,
+last scene of all, we are wrapped in our cerements by woman. Man's
+life, birth, death, turn upon woman, as upon a hinge. I have ever been a
+misanthrope, but now I am seriously thinking of becoming a misogynist as
+well. Would you advise me to-do so?”
+
+“A misogynist? What is that, Signorino?” asked Marietta.
+
+“A woman-hater,” he explained; “one who abhors and forswears the sex;
+one who has dashed his rose-coloured spectacles from his eyes, and sees
+woman as she really is, with no illusive glamour; one who has found her
+out. Yes, I think I shall become a misogynist. It is the only way of
+rendering yourself invulnerable, 't is the only safe course. During my
+walk this afternoon, I recollected, from the scattered pigeon-holes of
+memory, and arranged in consequent order, at least a score of good old
+apothegmatic shafts against the sex. Was it not, for example, in the
+grey beginning of days, was it not woman whose mortal taste brought
+sin into the world and all our woe? Was not that Pandora a woman, who
+liberated, from the box wherein they were confined, the swarm of
+winged evils that still afflict us? I will not remind you of St.
+John Chrysostom's golden parable about a temple and the thing it is
+constructed over. But I will come straight to the point, and ask whether
+this is truth the poet sings, when he informs us roundly that 'every
+woman is a scold at heart'?”
+
+Marietta was gazing patiently at the sky. She did not answer.
+
+“The tongue,” Peter resumed, “is woman's weapon, even as the fist is
+man's. And it is a far deadlier weapon. Words break no bones--they break
+hearts, instead. Yet were men one-tenth part so ready with their fists,
+as women are with their barbed and envenomed tongues, what savage
+brutes you would think us--would n't you?--and what a rushing trade
+the police-courts would drive, to be sure. That is one of the good
+old cliches that came back to me during my walk. All women are
+alike--there's no choice amongst animated fashion-plates: that is
+another. A woman is the creature of her temper; her husband, her
+children, and her servants are its victims: that is a third. Woman is a
+bundle of pins; man is her pin-cushion. When woman loves, 't is not the
+man she loves, but the man's flattery; woman's love is reflex self-love.
+The man who marries puts himself in irons. Marriage is a bird-cage in
+a garden. The birds without hanker to get in; but the birds within know
+that there is no condition so enviable as that of the birds without.
+Well, speak up. What do you think? Do you advise me to become a
+misogynist?”
+
+“I do not understand, Signorino,” said Marietta.
+
+“Of course, you don't,” said Peter. “Who ever could understand
+such stuff and nonsense? That's the worst of it. If only one could
+understand, if only one could believe it, one might find peace, one
+might resign oneself. But alas and alas! I have never had any real faith
+in human wickedness; and now, try as I will, I cannot imbue my mind with
+any real faith in the undesirability of woman. That is why you see
+me dissolved in tears, and unable to eat my dinner. Oh, to think, to
+think,” he cried with passion, suddenly breaking into English, “to think
+that less than a fortnight ago, less than one little brief fortnight
+ago, she was seated in your kitchen, seated there familiarly, in her wet
+clothes, pouring tea, for all the world as if she was the mistress of
+the house!”
+
+Days passed. He could not go to Ventirose--or, anyhow, he thought
+he could not. He reverted to his old habit of living in his garden,
+haunting the riverside, keeping watchful, covetous eyes turned towards
+the castle. The river bubbled and babbled; the sun shone strong and
+clear; his fountain tinkled; his birds flew about their affairs; his
+flowers breathed forth their perfumes; the Gnisi frowned, the uplands
+westward laughed, the snows of Monte Sfiorito sailed under every colour
+of the calendar except their native white. All was as it had ever
+been--but oh, the difference to him. A week passed. He caught no glimpse
+of the Duchessa. Yet he took no steps to get his boxes packed.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+And then Marietta fell ill.
+
+One morning, when she came into his room, to bring his tea, and to open
+the Venetian blinds that shaded his windows, she failed to salute him
+with her customary brisk “Buon giorno, Signorino.”
+
+Noticing which, and wondering, he, from his pillow, called out, “Buon'
+giorno, Marietta.”
+
+“Buon' giorno, Signorino,” she returned but in a whisper.
+
+“What's the matter? Is there cause for secrecy?” Peter asked.
+
+“I have a cold, Signorino,” she whispered, pointing to her chest. “I
+cannot speak.”
+
+The Venetian blinds were up by this time; the room was full of sun. He
+looked at her. Something in her face alarmed him. It seemed drawn and
+set, it seemed flushed.
+
+“Come here,” he said, with a certain peremptoriness. “Give me your
+hand.”
+
+She wiped her brown old hand backwards and forwards across her apron;
+then gave it to him.
+
+It was hot and dry.
+
+“Your cold is feverish,” he said. “You must go to bed, and stay there
+till the fever has passed.”
+
+“I cannot go to bed, Signorino,” she replied.
+
+“Can't you? Have you tried?” asked he.
+
+“No, Signorino,” she admitted.
+
+“Well, you never can tell whether you can do a thing or not, until you
+try,” said he. “Try to go to bed; and if at first you don't succeed,
+try, try again.”
+
+“I cannot go to bed. Who would do the Signorino's work?” was her
+whispered objection.
+
+“Hang the Signorino's work. The Signorino's work will do itself. Have
+you never observed that if you conscientiously neglect to do your work,
+it somehow manages to get done without you? You have a feverish cold;
+you must keep out of draughts; and the only place where you can be sure
+of keeping out of draughts, is bed. Go to bed at once.”
+
+She left the room.
+
+But when Peter came downstairs, half an hour later, he heard her moving
+in her kitchen.
+
+“Marietta!” he cried, entering that apartment with the mien of Nemesis.
+“I thought I told you to go to bed.”
+
+Marietta cowered a little, and looked sheepish, as one surprised in the
+flagrant fact of misdemeanour.
+
+“Yes, Signorino,” she whispered.
+
+“Well--? Do you call this bed?” he demanded.
+
+“No, Signorino,” she acknowledged.
+
+“Do you wish to oblige me to put you to bed?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, no, Signorino,” she protested, horror in her whisper.
+
+“Then go to bed directly. If you delay any longer, I shall accuse you of
+wilful insubordination.”
+
+“Bene, Signorino,” reluctantly consented Marietta.
+
+Peter strolled into his garden. Gigi, the gardener, was working there.
+
+“The very man I most desired to meet,” said Peter, and beckoned to
+him. “Is there a doctor in the village?” he enquired, when Gigi had
+approached.
+
+“Yes, Signorino. The Syndic is a doctor--Dr. Carretaji.”
+
+“Good,” said Peter. “Will you go to the village, please, and ask Dr.
+Carretaji if he can make it convenient to call here to-day? Marietta is
+not well.”
+
+“Yes, Signorino.”
+
+“And stop a bit,” said Peter. “Are there such things as women in the
+village?'
+
+“Ah, mache, Signorino! But many, many,” answered Gigi, rolling his dark
+eyes sympathetically, and waving his hands.
+
+“I need but one,” said Peter. “A woman to come and do Marietta's work
+for a day or two--cook, and clean up, and that sort of thing. Do you
+think you could procure me such a woman?”
+
+“There is my wife, Signorino,” suggested Gigi. “If she would content the
+Signorino?”
+
+“Oh? I was n't aware that you were married. A hundred felicitations.
+Yes, your wife, by all means. Ask her to come and rule as Marietta's
+vicereine.”
+
+Gigi started for the village.
+
+Peter went into the house, and knocked at Marietta's bed-room door. He
+found her in bed, with her rosary in her hands. If she could not work,
+she would not waste her time. In Marietta's simple scheme of life,
+work and prayer, prayer and work, stood, no doubt, as alternative and
+complementary duties.
+
+“But you are not half warmly enough covered up,” said Peter.
+
+He fetched his travelling-rug, and spread it over her. Then he went to
+the kitchen, where she had left a fire burning, and filled a bottle with
+hot water.
+
+“Put this at your feet,” he said, returning to Marietta.
+
+“Oh, I cannot allow the Signorino to wait on me like this,” the old
+woman mustered voice to murmur.
+
+“The Signorino likes it--it affords him healthful exercise,” Peter
+assured her.
+
+Dr. Carretaji came about noon, a fat middleaged man, with a fringe of
+black hair round an ivory-yellow scalp, a massive watch-chain (adorned
+by the inevitable pointed bit of coral), and podgy, hairy hands. But he
+seemed kind and honest, and he seemed to know his business.
+
+“She has a catarrh of the larynx, with, I am afraid, a beginning of
+bronchitis,” was his verdict.
+
+“Is there any danger?” Peter asked.
+
+“Not the slightest. She must remain in bed, and take frequent
+nourishment. Hot milk, and now and then beef-tea. I will send some
+medicine. But the great things are nourishment and warmth. I will call
+again to-morrow.”
+
+Gigi's wife came. She was a tall, stalwart, blackbrowed, red-cheeked
+young woman, and her name (Gigi's eyes flashed proudly, as he announced
+it) her name was Carolina Maddalena.
+
+Peter had to be in and out of Marietta's room all day, to see that
+she took her beef-tea and milk and medicine regularly. She dozed a good
+deal. When she was awake, she said her rosary.
+
+But next day she was manifestly worse.
+
+“Yes--bronchitis, as I feared,” said the doctor. “Danger? No--none, if
+properly looked after. Add a little brandy to her milk, and see that she
+has at least a small cupful every half-hour. I think it would be easier
+for you if you had a nurse. Someone should be with her at night. There
+is a Convent of Mercy at Venzona. If you like, I will telephone for a
+sister.”
+
+“Thank you very much. I hope you will,” said Peter.
+
+And that afternoon Sister Scholastica arrived, and established herself
+in the sick-room. Sister Scholastica was young, pale, serene, competent.
+But sometimes she had to send for Peter.
+
+“She refuses to take her milk. Possibly she will take it from you,” the
+sister said.
+
+Then Peter would assume a half-bluff (perhaps half-wheedling?) tone of
+mastery.
+
+“Come, Marietta! You must take your milk. The Signorino wishes it. You
+must not disobey the Signorino.”
+
+And Marietta, with a groan, would rouse herself, and take it, Peter
+holding the cup to her lips.
+
+On the third day, in the morning, Sister Scholastica said, “She imagines
+that she is worse. I do not think so myself. But she keeps repeating
+that she is going to die. She wishes to see a priest. I think it would
+make her feel easier. Can you send for the Parrocco? Please let him know
+that it is not an occasion for the Sacraments. But it would do her good
+if he would come and talk with her.”
+
+And the doctor, who arrived just then, having visited Marietta,
+confirmed the sister's opinion.
+
+“She is no worse--she is, if anything, rather better. Her malady is
+taking its natural course. But people of her class always fancy they are
+going to die, if they are ill enough to stay in bed. It is the panic of
+ignorance. Yes, I think it would do her good to see a priest. But there
+is not the slightest occasion for the Sacraments.”
+
+So Peter sent Gigi to the village for the Parrocco. And Gigi came back
+with the intelligence that the Parrocco was away, making a retreat, and
+would not return till Saturday. To-day was Wednesday.
+
+“What shall we do now?” Peter asked of Sister Scholastica.
+
+“There is Monsignor Langshawe, at Castel Ventirose,” said the sister.
+
+“Could I ask him to come?” Peter doubted.
+
+“Certainly,” said the sister. “In a case of illness, the nearest priest
+will always gladly come.”
+
+So Peter despatched Gigi with a note to Monsignor Langshawe.
+
+And presently up drove a brougham, with Gigi on the box beside the
+coachman. And from the brougham descended, not Monsignor Langshawe, but
+Cardinal Udeschini, followed by Emilia Manfredi.
+
+The Cardinal gave Peter his hand, with a smile so sweet, so benign, so
+sunny-bright--it was like music, Peter thought; it was like a silent
+anthem.
+
+“Monsignor Langshawe has gone to Scotland, for his holiday. I have come
+in his place. Your man told me of your need,” the Cardinal explained.
+
+“I don't know how to thank your Eminence,” Peter murmured, and conducted
+him to Marietta's room.
+
+Sister Scholastica genuflected, and kissed the Cardinal's ring, and
+received his Benediction. Then she and Peter withdrew, and went into the
+garden.
+
+The sister joined Emilia, and they walked backwards and forwards
+together, talking. Peter sat on his rustic bench, smoked cigarettes, and
+waited.
+
+Nearly an hour passed.
+
+At length the Cardinal came out.
+
+Peter rose, and went forward to meet him.
+
+The Cardinal was smiling; but about his eyes there was a suggestive
+redness.
+
+“Mr. Marchdale,” he said, “your housekeeper is in great distress of
+conscience touching one or two offences she feels she has been guilty
+of towards you. They seem to me, in frankness, somewhat trifling. But
+I cannot persuade her to accept my view. She will not be happy till she
+has asked and received your pardon for them.”
+
+“Offences towards me?” Peter wondered. “Unless excess of patience with
+a very trying employer constitutes an offence, she has been guilty of
+none.”
+
+“Never mind,” said the Cardinal. “Her conscience accuses her--she must
+satisfy it. Will you come?”
+
+The Cardinal sat down at the head of Marietta's bed, and took her hand.
+
+“Now, dear,” he said, with the gentleness, the tenderness, of one
+speaking to a beloved child, “here is Mr. Marchdale. Tell him what you
+have on your mind. He is ready to hear and to forgive you.”
+
+Marietta fixed her eyes anxiously on Peter's face.
+
+“First,” she whispered, “I wish to beg the Signorino to pardon all this
+trouble I am making for him. I am the Signorino's servant; but instead
+of serving, I make trouble for him.”
+
+She paused. The Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+
+Peter answered, “Marietta, if you talk like that, you will make the
+Signorino cry. You are the best servant that ever lived. You are putting
+me to no trouble at all. You are giving me a chance--which I should be
+glad of, except that it involves your suffering--to show my affection
+for you, and my gratitude.”
+
+“There, dear,” said the Cardinal to her, “you see the Signorino makes
+nothing of that. Now the next thing. Go on.”
+
+“I have to ask the Signorino's forgiveness for my impertinence,”
+ whispered Marietta.
+
+“Impertinence--?” faltered Peter. “You have never been impertinent.”
+
+“Scusi, Signorino,” she went on, in her whisper. “I have sometimes
+contradicted the Signorino. I contradicted the Signorino when he told
+me that St. Anthony of Padua was born in Lisbon. It is impertinent of
+a servant to contradict her master. And now his most high Eminence says
+the Signorino was right. I beg the Signorino to forgive me.”
+
+Again the Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+
+“You dear old woman,” Peter half laughed, half sobbed, “how can you ask
+me to forgive a mere difference of opinion? You--you dear old thing.”
+
+The Cardinal smiled, and patted Marietta's hand.
+
+“The Signorino is too good,” Marietta sighed.
+
+“Go on, dear,” said the Cardinal.
+
+“I have been guilty of the deadly sin of evil speaking. I have spoken
+evil of the Signorino,” she went on. “I said--I said to people--that the
+Signorino was simple--that he was simple and natural. I thought so
+then. Now I know it is not so. I know it is only that the Signorino is
+English.”
+
+Once more the Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+
+Again Peter half laughed, half sobbed.
+
+“Marietta! Of course I am simple and natural. At least, I try to be.
+Come! Look up. Smile. Promise you will not worry about these things any
+more.”
+
+She looked up, she smiled faintly.
+
+“The Signorino is too good,” she whispered.
+
+After a little interval of silence, “Now, dear,” said the Cardinal, “the
+last thing of all.”
+
+Marietta gave a groan, turning her head from side to side on her pillow.
+
+“You need not be afraid,” said the Cardinal. “Mr. Marchdale will
+certainly forgive you.”
+
+“Oh-h-h,” groaned Marietta. She stared at the ceiling for an instant.
+
+The Cardinal patted her hand. “Courage, courage,” he said.
+
+“Oh--Signorino mio,” she groaned again, “this you never can forgive me.
+It is about the little pig, the porcellino. The Signorino remembers the
+little pig, which he called Francesco?”
+
+“Yes,” answered Peter.
+
+“The Signorino told me to take the little pig away, to find a home for
+him. And I told the Signorino that I would take him to my nephew, who is
+a farmer, towards Fogliamo. The Signorino remembers?”
+
+“Yes,” answered Peter. “Yes, you dear old thing. I remember.”
+
+Marietta drew a deep breath, summoned her utmost fortitude.
+
+“Well, I did not take him to my nephew. The--the Signorino ate him.”
+
+Peter could hardly keep from laughing. He could only utter a kind of
+half-choked “Oh?”
+
+“Yes,” whispered Marietta. “He was bought with the Signorino's money.
+I did not like to see the Signorino's money wasted. So I deceived the
+Signorino. You ate him as a chicken-pasty.”
+
+This time Peter did laugh, I am afraid. Even the Cardinal--well, his
+smile was perilously near a titter. He took a big pinch of snuff.
+
+“I killed Francesco, and I deceived the Signorino. I am very sorry,”
+ Marietta said.
+
+Peter knelt down at her bedside.
+
+“Marietta! Your conscience is too sensitive. As for killing
+Francesco--we are all mortal, he could not have lived forever. And as
+for deceiving the Signorino, you did it for his own good. I remember
+that chicken-pasty. It was the best chicken-pasty I have ever tasted.
+You must not worry any more about the little pig.”
+
+Marietta turned her face towards him, and smiled.
+
+“The Signorino forgives his servant?” she whispered.
+
+Peter could not help it. He bent forward, and kissed her brown old
+cheek.
+
+“She will be easier now,” said the Cardinal. “I will stay with her a
+little longer.”
+
+Peter went out. The scene had been childish--do you say?--ridiculous,
+almost farcical indeed? And yet, somehow, it seemed to Peter that his
+heart was full of unshed tears. At the same time, as he thought of the
+Cardinal, as he saw his face, his smile, as he heard the intonations of
+his voice, the words he had spoken, as he thought of the way he had held
+Marietta's hand and patted it--at the same time a kind of strange
+joy seemed to fill his heart, a strange feeling of exaltation, of
+enthusiasm.
+
+“What a heavenly old man,” he said.
+
+In the garden Sister Scholastica and Emilia were still walking together.
+
+They halted, when Peter came out; and Emilia said, “With your consent,
+Signore, Sister Scholastica has accepted me as her lieutenant. I will
+come every morning, and sit with Marietta during the day. That will
+relieve the sister, who has to be up with her at night.”
+
+And every morning after that, Emilia came, walking through the park,
+and crossing the river by the ladder-bridge, which Peter left now
+permanently in its position. And once or twice a week, in the afternoon,
+the Cardinal would drive up in the brougham, and, having paid a little
+visit to Marietta, would drive Emilia home.
+
+In the sick-room Emilia would read to Marietta, or say the rosary for
+her.
+
+Marietta mended steadily day by day. At the end of a fortnight she was
+able to leave her bed for an hour or two in the afternoon, and sit in
+the sun in the garden. Then Sister Scholastica went back to her convent
+at Venzona. At the end of the third week Marietta could be up all day.
+But Gigi's stalwart Carolina Maddalena continued to rule as vicereine in
+the kitchen. And Emilia continued to come every morning.
+
+“Why does the Duchessa never come?” Peter wondered. “It would be decent
+of her to come and see the poor old woman.”
+
+Whenever he thought of Cardinal Udeschini, the same strange feeling of
+joy would spring up in his heart, which he had felt when he had left the
+beautiful old man with Marietta, on the day of his first visit. In the
+beginning he could only give this feeling a very general and indefinite
+expression. “He is a man who renews one's faith in things, who renews
+one's faith in human nature.” But gradually, I suppose, the feeling
+crystallised; and at last, in due season, it found for itself an
+expression that was not so indefinite.
+
+It was in the afternoon, and he had just conducted the Cardinal and
+Emilia to their carriage. He stood at his gate for a minute, and watched
+the carriage as it rolled away.
+
+“What a heavenly old man, what a heavenly old man,” he thought.
+
+Then, still looking after the carriage, before turning back into his
+garden, he heard himself repeat, half aloud
+
+       “Nor knowest thou what argument
+        Thy life to thy neighbour's creed hath lent.”
+
+The words had come to his lips, and were pronounced, were addressed to
+his mental image of the Cardinal, without any conscious act of volition
+on his part. He heard them with a sort of surprise, almost as if some
+one else had spoken them. He could not in the least remember what poem
+they were from, he could not even remember what poet they were by. Were
+they by Emerson? It was years since he had read a line of Emerson's.
+
+All that evening the couplet kept running in his head. And the feeling
+of joy, of enthusiasm, in his heart, was not so strange now. But I think
+it was intensified.
+
+The next time the Cardinal arrived at Villa Floriano, and gave Peter his
+hand, Peter did not merely shake it, English fashion, as he had hitherto
+done.
+
+The Cardinal looked startled.
+
+Then his eyes searched Peter's face for a second, keenly interrogative.
+Then they softened; and a wonderful clear light shone in them, a
+wonderful pure, sweet light.
+
+“Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus, Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus,”
+ he said, making the Sign of the Cross.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+Up at the castle, Cardinal Udeschini was walking backwards and forwards
+on the terrace, reading his Breviary.
+
+Beatrice was seated under the white awning, at the terrace-end, doing
+some kind of needlework.
+
+Presently the Cardinal came to a standstill near her, and closed his
+book, putting his finger in it, to keep the place.
+
+“It will be, of course, a great loss to Casa Udeschini, when you marry,”
+ he remarked.
+
+Beatrice looked up, astonishment on her brow.
+
+“When I marry?” she exclaimed. “Well, if ever there was a thunderbolt
+from a clear sky!”
+
+And she laughed.
+
+“Yes-when you marry,” the Cardinal repeated, with conviction. “You are a
+young woman--you are twenty-eight years old. You will, marry. It is only
+right that you should marry. You have not the vocation for a religious.
+Therefore you must marry. But it will be a great loss to the house of
+Udeschini.”
+
+“Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof,” said Beatrice, laughing
+again. “I haven't the remotest thought of marrying. I shall never
+marry.”
+
+“Il ne faut jamais dire a la fontaine, je ne boirai pas de ton eau,”
+ his Eminence cautioned her, whilst the lines of humour about his mouth
+emphasised themselves, and his grey eyes twinkled. “Other things equal,
+marriage is as much the proper state for the laity, as celibacy is the
+proper state for the clergy. You will marry. It would be selfish of us
+to oppose your marrying. You ought to marry. But it will be a great loss
+to the family--it will be a great personal loss to me. You are as dear
+to me as any of my blood. I am always forgetting that we are uncle and
+niece by courtesy only.”
+
+“I shall never marry. But nothing that can happen to me can ever make
+the faintest difference in my feeling for you. I hope you know how much
+I love you?” She looked into his eyes, smiling her love. “You are only
+my uncle by courtesy? But you are more than an uncle--you have been like
+a father to me, ever since I left my convent.”
+
+The Cardinal returned her smile.
+
+“Carissima,” he murmured. Then, “It will be a matter of the utmost
+importance to me, however,” he went on, “that, when the time comes, you
+should marry a good man, a suitable man--a man who will love you, whom
+you will love--and, if possible, a man who will not altogether separate
+you from me, who will perhaps love me a little too. It would send me
+in sorrow to my grave, if you should marry a man who was not worthy of
+you.”
+
+“I will guard against that danger by not marrying at all,” laughed
+Beatrice.
+
+“No--you will marry, some day,” said the Cardinal. “And I wish you to
+remember that I shall not oppose your marrying--provided the man is a
+good man. Felipe will not like it--Guido will pull a long nose--but I,
+at least, will take your part, if I can feel that the man is good. Good
+men are rare, my dear; good husbands are rarer still. I can think, for
+instance, of no man in our Roman nobility, whom I should be content to
+see you marry. Therefore I hope you will not marry a Roman. You would be
+more likely to marry one of your own countrymen. That, of course,
+would double the loss to us, if it should take you away from Italy. But
+remember, if he is a man whom I can think worthy of you, you may count
+upon me as an ally.”
+
+He resumed his walk, reopening his Breviary.
+
+Beatrice resumed her needlework. But she found it difficult to fix her
+attention on it. Every now and then, she would leave her needle stuck
+across its seam, let the work drop to her lap, and, with eyes turned
+vaguely up the valley, fall, apparently, into a muse.
+
+“I wonder why he said all that to me?” was the question that kept posing
+itself.
+
+By and by the Cardinal closed his Breviary, and put it in his pocket.
+I suppose he had finished his office for the day. Then he came and sat
+down in one of the wicker chairs, under the awning. On the table, among
+the books and things, stood a carafe of water, some tumblers, a silver
+sugar-bowl, and a crystal dish full of fresh pomegranate seeds. It
+looked like a dish full of unset rubies. The Cardinal poured some water
+into a tumbler, added a lump of sugar and a spoonful of pomegranate
+seeds, stirred the mixture till it became rose-coloured, and drank it
+off in a series of little sips.
+
+“What is the matter, Beatrice?” he asked, all at once.
+
+Beatrice raised her eyes, perplexed.
+
+“The matter--? Is anything the matter?”
+
+“Yes,” said the Cardinal; “something is the matter. You are depressed,
+you are nervous, you are not yourself. I have noticed it for many days.
+Have you something on, your mind?”
+
+“Nothing in the world,” Beatrice answered, with an appearance of great
+candour. “I had not noticed that I was nervous or depressed.”
+
+“We are entering October,” said the Cardinal. “I must return to Rome. I
+have been absent too long already. I must return next week. But I should
+not like to go away with the feeling that you are unhappy.”
+
+“If a thing were needed to make me unhappy, it would be the announcement
+of your intended departure,” Beatrice said, smiling. “But otherwise,
+I am no more unhappy than it is natural to be. Life, after all, is n't
+such a furiously gay business as to keep one perpetually singing and
+dancing--is it? But I am not especially unhappy.”
+
+“H'm,” said the Cardinal. Then, in a minute, “You will come to Rome in
+November, I suppose?” he asked.
+
+“Yes--towards the end of November, I think,” said Beatrice.
+
+The Cardinal rose, and began to walk backwards and forwards again.
+
+In a little while the sound of carriage-wheels could be heard, in the
+sweep, round the corner of the house.
+
+The Cardinal looked at his watch.
+
+“Here is the carriage,” he said. “I must go down and see that poor old
+woman.... Do you know,” he added, after a moment's hesitation, “I think
+it would be well if you were to go with me.”
+
+A shadow came into Beatrice's eyes.
+
+“What good would that do?” she asked.
+
+“It would give her pleasure, no doubt. And besides, she is one of your
+parishioners, as it were. I think you ought to go. You have never been
+to see her since she fell ill.”
+
+“Oh--well,” said Beatrice.
+
+She was plainly unwilling. But she went to put on her things.
+
+In the carriage, when they had passed the village and crossed the
+bridge, as they were bowling along the straight white road that led
+to the villa, “What a long time it is since Mr. Marchdale has been at
+Ventirose,” remarked the Cardinal.
+
+“Oh--? Is it?” responded Beatrice, with indifference.
+
+“It is more than three weeks, I think--it is nearly a month,” the
+Cardinal said.
+
+“Oh--?” said she.
+
+“He has had his hands full, of course; he has had little leisure,” the
+Cardinal pursued. “His devotion to his poor old servant has been quite
+admirable. But now that she is practically recovered, he will be freer.”
+
+“Yes,” said Beatrice.
+
+“He is a young man whom I like very much,” said the Cardinal. “He is
+intelligent; he has good manners; and he has a fine sense of the droll.
+Yes, he has wit--a wit that you seldom find in an Anglo-Saxon, a wit
+that is almost Latin. But you have lost your interest in him? That is
+because you despair of his conversion?”
+
+“I confess I am not greatly interested in him,” Beatrice answered. “And
+I certainly have no hopes of his conversion.”
+
+The Cardinal smiled at his ring. He opened his snuffbox, and inhaled a
+long deliberate pinch of snuff.
+
+“Ah, well--who can tell?” he said. “But--he will be free now, and it is
+so long since he has been at the castle--had you not better ask him to
+luncheon or dinner?”
+
+“Why should I?” answered Beatrice. “If he does not come to Ventirose, it
+is presumably because he does not care to come. If he does care to come,
+he needs no invitation. He knows that he is at liberty to call whenever
+he likes.”
+
+“But it would be civil, it would be neighbourly, to ask him to a meal,”
+ the Cardinal submitted.
+
+“And it would put him in the embarrassing predicament of having either
+to accept against his will, or to decline and appear ungracious,”
+ submitted Beatrice. “No, it is evident that Ventirose does not amuse
+him.”
+
+“Bene,” said the Cardinal. “Be it as you wish.”
+
+But when they reached Villa Floriano, Peter was not at home.
+
+“He has gone to Spiaggia for the day,” Emilia informed them.
+
+Beatrice, the Cardinal fancied, looked at once relieved and
+disappointed.
+
+Marietta was seated in the sun, in a sheltered corner of the garden.
+
+While Beatrice talked with her, the Cardinal walked about.
+
+Now it so happened that on Peter's rustic table a book lay open, face
+downwards.
+
+The Cardinal saw the book. He halted in his walk, and glanced round
+the garden, as if to make sure that he was not observed. He tapped his
+snuff--box, and took a pinch of snuff. Then he appeared to meditate for
+an instant, the lines about his mouth becoming very marked indeed.
+At last, swiftly, stealthily, almost with the air of a man committing
+felony, he slipped his snuff-box under the open book, well under it, so
+that it was completely covered up.
+
+On the way back to Ventirose, the Cardinal put his hand in his pocket.
+
+“Dear me!” he suddenly exclaimed. “I have lost my snuff box again.” He
+shook his head, as one who recognises a fatality. “I am always losing
+it.”
+
+“Are you sure you had it with you?” Beatrice asked.
+
+“Oh, yes, I think I had it with me. I should have missed it before this,
+if I had left it at home. I must have dropped it in Mr. Marchdale's
+garden.”
+
+“In that case it will probably be found,” said Beatrice.
+
+
+Peter had gone to Spiaggia, I imagine, in the hope of meeting Mrs.
+O'Donovan Florence; but the printed visitors' list there told him that
+she had left nearly a fortnight since. On his return to the villa, he
+was greeted by Marietta with the proud tidings that her Excellency the
+Duchessa di Santangiolo had been to see her.
+
+“Oh--? Really?” he questioned lightly. (His heart, I think, dropped a
+beat, all the same.)
+
+“Ang,” said Marietta. “She came with the most Eminent Prince Cardinal.
+They came in the carriage. She stayed half an hour. She was very
+gracious.”
+
+“Ah?” said Peter. “I am glad to hear it.”
+
+“She was beautifully dressed,” said Marietta.
+
+“Of that I have not the shadow of a doubt,” said he.
+
+“The Signorina Emilia drove away with them,” said she.
+
+“Dear, dear! What a chapter of adventures,” was his comment.
+
+He went to his rustic table, and picked up his book.
+
+“How the deuce did that come there?” he wondered, discovering the snuff
+box.
+
+It was, in truth, an odd place for it. A cardinal may inadvertently
+drop his snuff box, to be sure. But if the whole College of Cardinals
+together had dropped a snuff box, it would hardly have fallen, of
+its own weight, through the covers of an open book, to the under-side
+thereof, and have left withal no trace of its passage.
+
+“Solid matter will not pass through solid matter, without fraction--I
+learned that at school,” said Peter.
+
+The inference would be that someone had purposely put the snuff box
+there.
+
+But who?
+
+The Cardinal himself? In the name of reason, why?
+
+Emilia? Nonsense.
+
+Marietta? Absurd.
+
+The Du--
+
+A wild surmise darted through Peter's soul. Could it be? Could it
+conceivably be? Was it possible that--that--was it possible, in fine,
+that this was a kind of signal, a kind of summons?
+
+Oh, no, no, no. And yet--and yet--
+
+No, certainly not. The idea was preposterous. It deserved, and (I trust)
+obtained, summary deletion.
+
+“Nevertheless,” said Peter, “it's a long while since I have darkened the
+doors of Ventirose. And a poor excuse is better than none. And anyhow,
+the Cardinal will be glad to have his snuff.”
+
+The ladder-bridge was in its place.
+
+He crossed the Aco.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+He crossed the Aco, and struck bravely forward, up the smooth lawns,
+under the bending trees, towards the castle.
+
+The sun was setting. The irregular mass of buildings stood out in
+varying shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of red.
+
+Half way there, Peter stopped, and looked back.
+
+The level sunshine turned the black forests of the Gnisi to shining
+forests of bronze, and the foaming cascade that leapt down its side to
+a cascade of liquid gold. The lake, for the greater part, lay in shadow,
+violet-grey through a pearl-grey veil of mist; but along the opposite
+shore it caught the light, and gleamed a crescent of quicksilver, with
+roseate reflections. The three snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito, at the
+valley's end, seemed almost insubstantial--floating forms of luminous
+pink vapour, above the hazy horizon, in a pure sky intensely blue.
+
+A familiar verse came into Peter's mind.
+
+“Really,”' he said to himself, “down to the very 'cataract leaping in
+glory,' I believe they must have pre-arranged the scene, feature for
+feature, to illustrate it.” And he began to repeat the vivid, musical
+lines, under his breath...
+
+But about midway of them he was interrupted.
+
+“It's not altogether a bad sort of view--is it?” a voice asked, behind
+him.
+
+Peter faced about.
+
+On a marble bench, under a feathery acacia; a few yards away, a lady was
+seated, looking at him, smiling.
+
+Peter's eyes met hers--and suddenly his heart gave a jump. Then it stood
+dead still for a second. Then it flew off, racing perilously. Oh, for
+the best reasons in the world. There was something in her eyes, there
+was a glow, a softness, that seemed--that seemed... But thereby hangs my
+tale.
+
+She was dressed in white. She had some big bright-yellow chrysanthemums
+stuck in her belt. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow,
+sparkled, where the sun touched it, transparent and iridescent, like
+crinkly threads of glass.
+
+“You do not think it altogether bad--I hope?” she questioned, arching
+her eyebrows slightly, with a droll little assumption of concern.
+
+Peter's heart was racing--but he must answer her.
+
+“I was just wondering,” he answered, with a tolerably successful feint
+of composure, “whether one might not safely call it altogether good.”
+
+“Oh--?” she exclaimed.
+
+She threw back her head, and examined the prospect critically.
+Afterwards, she returned her gaze to Peter, with an air of polite
+readiness to defer to his opinion.
+
+“It is not too sensational? Not too much like a landscape on the stage?”
+
+“We must judge it leniently,” said he; “we must remember that it is only
+unaided Nature. Besides,” he added, “to be meticulously truthful, there
+is a spaciousness, there is a vivacity in the light and colour, there
+is a sense of depth and atmosphere, that we should hardly find in a
+landscape on the stage.”
+
+“Yes--perhaps there is,” she admitted thoughtfully.
+
+And with that, they looked into each other's eyes, and laughed.
+
+“Are you aware,” the lady asked, after a brief silence, “that it is a
+singularly lovely evening.”
+
+“I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so,” Peter answered, with the
+least approach to a meaning bow.
+
+In the lady's face there flickered, perhaps, for half a second, the
+faintest light, as of a comprehending and unresentful smile. But she
+went on, with fine detachment
+
+“How calm and still it is. The wonderful peace of the day's compline. It
+seems as if the earth had stopped breathing--does n't it? The birds have
+already gone to bed, though the sun is only just setting. It is the
+hour when they are generally noisiest; but they have gone to bed--the
+sparrows and the finches, the snatchers and the snatched-from, are equal
+in the article of sleep. That is because they feel the touch of autumn.
+How beautiful it is, in spite of its sadness, this first touch of
+autumn--it is like sad distant music. Can you analyse it, can you
+explain it? There is no chill, it is quite warm, and yet one knows
+somehow that autumn is here. The birds know it, and have gone to bed.
+In another month they will be flying away, to Africa and the
+Hesperides--all of them except the sparrows, who stay all winter. I
+wonder how they get on during the winter, with no goldfinches to snatch
+from?”
+
+She turned to Peter with a look of respectful enquiry, as one appealing
+to an authority for information.
+
+“Oh, they snatch from each other, during the winter,” he explained. “It
+is thief rob thief, when honest victims are not forthcoming. And--what
+is more to the point--they must keep their beaks in, against the return
+of the goldfinches with the spring.”
+
+The Duchessa--for I scorn to deceive the trustful reader longer; and (as
+certain fines mouches, despite my efforts at concealment, may ere this
+have suspected) the mysterious lady was no one else--the Duchessa gaily
+laughed.
+
+“Yes,” she said, “the goldfinches will return with the spring. But isn't
+that rather foolish of them? If I were a goldfinch, I think I should
+make my abode permanent in the sparrowless south.”
+
+“There is no sparrowless south,” said Peter. “Sparrows, alas, abound in
+every latitude; and the farther south you go, the fiercer and bolder and
+more impudent they become. In Africa and the Hesperides, which you have
+mentioned, they not infrequently attack the caravans, peck the eyes out
+of the camels, and are sometimes even known to carry off a man, a
+whole man, vainly struggling in their inexorable talons. There is no
+sparrowless south. But as for the goldfinches returning--it is the
+instinct of us bipeds to return. Plumed and plumeless, we all return to
+something, what though we may have registered the most solemn vows to
+remain away.”
+
+He delivered his last phrases with an accent, he punctuated them with a
+glance, in which there may have lurked an intention.
+
+But the Duchessa did not appear to notice it.
+
+“Yes--true--so we do,” she assented vaguely. “And what you tell me of
+the sparrows in the Hesperides is very novel and impressive--unless,
+indeed, it is a mere traveller's tale, with which you are seeking to
+practise upon my credulity. But since I find you in this communicative
+vein, will you not push complaisance a half-inch further, and tell me
+what that thing is, suspended there in the sky above the crest of the
+Cornobastone--that pale round thing, that looks like the spectre of a
+magnified half-crown?”
+
+Peter turned to the quarter her gaze indicated.
+
+“Oh, that,” he said, “is nothing. In frankness, it is only what the
+vulgar style the moon.”
+
+“How odd,” said she. “I thought it was what the vulgar style the moon.”
+
+And they both laughed again.
+
+The Duchessa moved a little; and thus she uncovered, carved on the back
+of her marble bench, and blazoned in red and gold, a coat of arms.
+
+She touched the shield with her finger.
+
+“Are you interested in canting heraldry?” she asked. “There is no
+country so rich in it as Italy. These are the arms of the Farfalla, the
+original owners of this property. Or, seme of twenty roses gules; the
+crest, on a rose gules, a butterfly or, with wings displayed; and the
+motto--how could the heralds ever have sanctioned such an unheraldic and
+unheroic motto?
+
+                      Rosa amorosa,
+                      Farfalla giojosa,
+                      Mi cantano al cuore
+                      La gioja e l' amore.
+
+They were the great people of this region for countless generations, the
+Farfalla. They were Princes of Ventirose and Patricians of Milan. And
+then the last of them was ruined at Monte Carlo, and killed himself
+there, twenty-odd years ago. That is how all their gioja and amore
+ended. It was the case of a butterfly literally broken upon a wheel. The
+estate fell into the hands of the Jews, as everything more or less does
+sooner or later; and they--if you can believe me--they were going
+to turn the castle into an hotel, into one of those monstrous modern
+hotels, for other Jews to come to, when I happened to hear of it, and
+bought it. Fancy turning that splendid old castle into a Jew-infested
+hotel! It is one of the few castles in Italy that have a ghost. Oh, but
+a quite authentic ghost. It is called the White Page--il Paggio Bianco
+di Ventirose. It is the ghost of a boy about sixteen. He walks on the
+ramparts of the old keep, and looks off towards the lake, as if he
+were watching a boat, and sometimes he waves his arms, as if he were
+signalling. And from head to foot he is perfectly white, like a statue.
+I have never seen him myself; but so many people say they have, I cannot
+doubt he is authentic. And the Jews wanted to turn this haunted castle
+into an hotel... As a tribute to the memory of the Farfalla, I take
+pains to see that their arms, which are carved, as you see them here, in
+at least a hundred different places, are remetalled and retinctured as
+often as time and the weather render it necessary.”
+
+She looked towards the castle, while she spoke; and now she rose, with
+the design, perhaps, of moving in that direction.
+
+Peter felt that the moment had come for actualities.
+
+“It seems improbable,” he began,--“and I 'm afraid you will think there
+is a tiresome monotony in my purposes; but I am here again to return
+Cardinal Udeschini's snuff box. He left it in my garden.”
+
+“Oh--?” said the Duchessa. “Yes, he thought he must have left it there.
+He is always mislaying it. Happily, he has another, for emergencies. It
+was very good of you to trouble to bring it back.”
+
+She gave a light little laugh..
+
+“I may also improve this occasion,” Peter abruptly continued, “to make
+my adieux. I shall be leaving for England in a few days now.”
+
+The Duchessa raised her eyebrows.
+
+“Really?” she said. “Oh, that is too bad,” she added, by way of comment.
+“October, you know, is regarded as the best month of all the twelve, in
+this lake country.”
+
+“Yes, I know it,” Peter responded regretfully.
+
+“And it is a horrid month in England,” she went on.
+
+“It is an abominable month in England,” he acknowledged.
+
+“Here it is blue, like larkspur, and all fragrant of the vintage,
+and joyous with the songs of the vintagers,” she said. “There it is
+dingy-brown, and songless, and it smells of smoke.”
+
+“Yes,” he agreed.
+
+“But you are a sportsman? You go in for shooting?” she conjectured.
+
+“No,” he answered. “I gave up shooting years ago.”
+
+“Oh--? Hunting, then?”
+
+“I hate hunting. One is always getting rolled on by one's horse.”
+
+“Ah, I see. It--it will be golf, perhaps?”
+
+“No, it is not even golf.”
+
+“Don't tell me it is football?”
+
+“Do I look as if it were football?”
+
+“It is sheer homesickness, in fine? You are grieving for the purple of
+your native heather?”
+
+“There is scarcely any heather in my native county. No,” said Peter,
+“no. To tell you the truth, it is the usual thing. It is an histoire de
+femme.”
+
+“I 'might have guessed it,” she exclaimed. “It is still that everlasting
+woman.”
+
+“That everlasting woman--?” Peter faltered.
+
+“To be sure,” said she. “The woman you are always going on about. The
+woman of your novel. This woman, in short.”
+
+And she produced from behind her back a hand that she had kept there,
+and held up for his inspection a grey-and-gold bound book.
+
+“MY novel--?” faltered he. (But the sight of it, in her possession, in
+these particular circumstances, gave him a thrill that was not a thrill
+of despair.)
+
+“Your novel,” she repeated, smiling sweetly, and mimicking his tone.
+Then she made a little moue. “Of course, I have known that you were your
+friend Felix Wildmay, from the outset.”
+
+“Oh,” said Peter, in a feeble sort of gasp, looking bewildered. “You
+have known that from the outset?” And his brain seemed to reel.
+
+“Yes,” said she, “of course. Where would the fun have been, otherwise?
+And now you are going away, back to her shrine, to renew your worship. I
+hope you will find the courage to offer her your hand.”
+
+Peter's brain was reeling. But here was the opportunity of his life.
+
+“You give me courage,” he pronounced, with sudden daring. “You are in a
+position to help me with her. And since you know so much, I should like
+you to know more. I should like to tell you who she is.”
+
+“One should be careful where one bestows one's confidences,” she warned
+him; but there was something in her eyes, there was a glow, a softness,
+that seemed at the same time to invite them.
+
+“No,” he said, “better than telling you who she is, I will tell you
+where I first saw her. It was at the Francais, in December, four years
+ago, a Thursday night, a subscription night. She sat in one of the
+middle boxes of the first tier. She was dressed in white. Her companions
+were an elderly woman, English I think, in black, who wore a cap; and an
+old man, with white moustache and imperial, who looked as if he might be
+a French officer. And the play--.”
+
+He broke off, and looked at the Duchessa. She kept her eyes down.
+
+“Yes--the play?” she questioned, in a low voice, after a little wait.
+
+“The play was Monsieur Pailleron's 'Le monde ou l'on s'ennuie',” he
+said.
+
+“Oh,” said she, still keeping her eyes down. Her voice was still very
+low. But there was something in it that made Peter's heart leap.
+
+“The next time I saw her,” he began...
+
+But then he had to stop. He felt as if the beating of his heart must
+suffocate him.
+
+“Yes--the next time?” she questioned.
+
+He drew a deep breath. He began anew--
+
+“The next time was a week later, at the Opera. They were giving
+Lohengrin. She was with the same man and woman, and there was another,
+younger man. She had pearls round her neck and in her hair, and she had
+a cloak lined with white fur. She left before the opera was over. I did
+not see her again until the following May, when I saw her once or twice
+in London, driving in the Park. She was always with the same elderly
+Englishwoman, but the military-looking old Frenchman had disappeared.
+And then I saw her once more, a year later, in Paris, driving in the
+Bois.”
+
+The Duchessa kept her eyes down. She did not speak.
+
+Peter waited as long as flesh-and-blood could wait, looking at her.
+
+“Well?” he pleaded, at last. “That is all. Have you nothing to say to
+me?”
+
+She raised her eyes, and for the tiniest fraction of a second they gave
+themselves to his. Then she dropped them again.
+
+“You are sure,” she asked, “you are perfectly sure that when,
+afterwards, you met her, and came to know her as she really is--you are
+perfectly sure there was no disappointment?”
+
+“Disappointment!” cried Peter. “She is in every way immeasurably beyond
+anything that I was capable of dreaming. Oh, if you could see her, if
+you could hear her speak, if you could look into her eyes--if you
+could see her as others see her--you would not ask whether there was a
+disappointment. She is... No; the language is not yet invented, in which
+I could describe her.”
+
+The Duchessa smiled, softly, to herself.
+
+“And you are in love with her--more or less?” she asked.
+
+“I love her so that the bare imagination of being allowed to tell her of
+my love almost makes me faint with joy. But it is like the story of the
+poor squire who loved his queen. She is the greatest of great ladies.
+I am nobody. She is so beautiful, so splendid, and so high above me, it
+would be the maddest presumption for me to ask her for her love. To ask
+for the love of my Queen! And yet--Oh, I can say no more. God sees my
+heart. God knows how I love her.”
+
+“And it is on her account--because you think your love is hopeless--that
+you are going away, that you are going back to England?”
+
+“Yes,” said he.
+
+She raised her eyes again, and again they gave themselves to his. There
+was something in them, there was a glow, a softness ...
+
+“Don't go,” she said.
+
+
+Up at the castle--Peter had hurried down to the villa, dressed, and
+returned to the castle to dine--he restored the snuff-box to Cardinal
+Udeschini.
+
+“I am trebly your debtor for it,” said the Cardinal.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Cardinal's Snuff-Box, by Henry Harland
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diff --git a/5610-0.zip b/5610-0.zip
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Cardinal's Snuff-box, by Henry Harland
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cardinal's Snuff-Box, by Henry Harland
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Cardinal's Snuff-Box
+
+Author: Henry Harland
+
+Release Date: March 25, 2009 [EBook #5610]
+Last Updated: March 13, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Henry Harland
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> V </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> VI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> VII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> VIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> IX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> X </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> XI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> XII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> XIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> XIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> XV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> XVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> XVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> XVIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> XIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> XX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> XXI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> XXII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> XXIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> XXIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> XXV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> XXVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> XXVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> XXVIII </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino will take coffee?&rdquo; old Marietta asked, as she set the fruit
+      before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter deliberated for a moment; then burned his ships.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But in the garden, perhaps?&rdquo; the little brown old woman suggested, with a
+      persuasive flourish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he corrected her, gently smiling, and shaking his head, &ldquo;not perhaps&mdash;certainly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her small, sharp old black Italian eyes twinkled, responsive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino will find a rustic table, under the big willow-tree, at the
+      water's edge,&rdquo; she informed him, with a good deal of gesture. &ldquo;Shall I
+      serve it there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where you will. I leave myself entirely in your hands,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he sat by the rustic table, on a rustic bench, under the willow, sipped
+      his coffee, smoked his cigarette, and gazed in contemplation at the view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of its kind, it was rather a striking view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the immediate foreground&mdash;at his feet, indeed&mdash;there was the
+      river, the narrow Aco, peacock-green, a dark file of poplars on either
+      bank, rushing pell-mell away from the quiet waters of the lake. Then, just
+      across the river, at his left, stretched the smooth lawns of the park of
+      Ventirose, with glimpses of the many-pinnacled castle through the trees;
+      and, beyond, undulating country, flourishing, friendly, a perspective of
+      vineyards, cornfields, groves, and gardens, pointed by numberless white
+      villas. At his right loomed the gaunt mass of the Gnisi, with its black
+      forests, its bare crags, its foaming ascade, and the crenelated range of
+      the Cornobastone; and finally, climax and cynosure, at the valley's end,
+      Monte Sfiorito, its three snow-covered summits almost
+      insubstantial-seeming, floating forms of luminous pink vapour, in the
+      evening sunshine, against the intense blue of the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A familiar verse had come into Peter's mind, and kept running there
+      obstinately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really,&rdquo; he said to himself, &ldquo;feature for feature, down to the very
+      'cataract leaping in glory,' the scene might have been got up, apres coup,
+      to illustrate it.&rdquo; And he began to repeat the beautiful hackneyed words,
+      under his breath....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But about midway of the third line he was interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not altogether a bad sort of view&mdash;is it?&rdquo; some one said, in
+      English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice was a woman's. It was clear and smooth; it was crisp-cut,
+      distinguished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter glanced about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the opposite bank of the Aco, in the grounds of Ventirose, five or six
+      yards away, a lady was standing, looking at him, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter's eyes met hers, took in her face.... And suddenly his heart gave a
+      jump. Then it stopped dead still, tingling, for a second. Then it flew
+      off, racing perilously.&mdash;Oh, for reasons&mdash;for the best reasons
+      in the world: but thereby hangs my tale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was a young woman, tall, slender, in a white frock, with a white
+      cloak, an indescribable complexity of soft lace and airy ruffles, round
+      her shoulders. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow,
+      sparkled, where it caught the light, in a kind of crinkly iridescence,
+      like threads of glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter's heart (for the best reasons in the world) was racing perilously.
+      &ldquo;It's impossible&mdash;impossible&mdash;impossible&rdquo;&mdash;the words
+      strummed themselves to its rhythm. Peter's wits (for had not the
+      impossible come to pass?) were in a perilous confusion. But he managed to
+      rise from his rustic bench, and to achieve a bow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She inclined her head graciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not think it altogether bad&mdash;I hope?&rdquo; she questioned, in her
+      crisp-cut voice, raising her eyebrows slightly, with a droll little
+      assumption of solicitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter's wits were in confusion; but he must answer her. An automatic
+      second-self, summoned by the emergency, answered for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think one might safely call it altogether good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;?&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyebrows went up again, but now they expressed a certain whimsical
+      surprise. She threw back her head, and regarded the prospect critically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not, then, too spectacular, too violent?&rdquo; she wondered, returning
+      her gaze to Peter, with an air of polite readiness to defer to his
+      opinion. &ldquo;Not too much like a decor de theatre?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One should judge it,&rdquo; his automatic second-self submitted, &ldquo;with some
+      leniency. It is, after all, only unaided Nature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A spark flickered in her eyes, while she appeared to ponder. (But I am not
+      sure whether she was pondering the speech or its speaker.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really?&rdquo; she said, in the end. &ldquo;Did did Nature build the villas, and
+      plant the cornfields?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But his automatic second-self was on its mettle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; it asserted boldly; &ldquo;the kind of men who build villas and plant
+      cornfields must be classified as natural forces.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gave a light little laugh&mdash;and again appeared to ponder for a
+      moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, with another gracious inclination of the head, and an interrogative
+      brightening of the eyes, &ldquo;Mr. Marchdale no doubt?&rdquo; she hazarded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter bowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very glad if, on the whole, you like our little effect,&rdquo; she went
+      on, glancing in the direction of Monte Sfiorito. &ldquo;I&rdquo;&mdash;there was the
+      briefest suspension&mdash;&ldquo;I am your landlady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a third time Peter bowed, a rather more elaborate bow than his earlier
+      ones, a bow of respectful enlightenment, of feudal homage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You arrived this afternoon?&rdquo; she conjectured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By the five-twenty-five from Bergamo,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A very convenient train,&rdquo; she remarked; and then, in the pleasantest
+      manner, whereby the unusual mode of valediction was carried off, &ldquo;Good
+      evening.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good evening,&rdquo; responded Peter, and accomplished his fourth bow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved away from the river, up the smooth lawns, between the trees,
+      towards Castel Ventirose, a flitting whiteness amid the surrounding green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter stood still, looking after her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when she was out of sight, he sank back upon his rustic bench, like a
+      man exhausted, and breathed a prodigious sigh. He was absurdly pale. All
+      the same, clenching his fists, and softly pounding the table with them, he
+      muttered exultantly, between his teeth, &ldquo;What luck! What incredible luck!
+      It's she&mdash;it's she, as I 'm a heathen. Oh, what supernatural luck!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Old Marietta&mdash;the bravest of small figures, in her neat
+      black-and-white peasant dress, with her silver ornaments, and her red silk
+      coif and apron&mdash;came for the coffee things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But at sight of Peter, she abruptly halted. She struck an attitude of
+      alarm. She fixed him with her fiery little black eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino is not well!&rdquo; she cried, in the tones of one launching a
+      denunciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter roused himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Er&mdash;yes&mdash;I 'm pretty well, thank you,&rdquo; he reassured her. &ldquo;I&mdash;I
+      'm only dying,&rdquo; he added, sweetly, after an instant's hesitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dying&mdash;!&rdquo; echoed Marietta, wild, aghast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but you can save my life&mdash;you come in the very nick of time,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;I'm dying of curiosity&mdash;dying to know something that you can
+      tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her stare dissolved, her attitude relaxed. She smiled&mdash;relief,
+      rebuke. She shook her finger at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, the Signorino gave me a fine fright,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A thousand regrets,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;Now be a succouring angel, and make a
+      clean breast of it. Who is my landlady?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta drew back a little. Her brown old visage wrinkled up, perplexed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is the Signorino's landlady?&rdquo; she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ang,&rdquo; said he, imitating the characteristic nasalised eh of Italian
+      affirmation, and accompanying it by the characteristic Italian jerk of the
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta eyed him, still perplexed&mdash;even (one might have fancied) a
+      bit suspicious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But is it not in the Signorino's lease?&rdquo; she asked, with caution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course it is,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;That's just the point. Who is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if it is in your lease!&rdquo; she expostulated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the more reason why you should make no secret of it,&rdquo; he argued
+      plausibly. &ldquo;Come! Out with it! Who is my landlady?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta exchanged a glance with heaven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino's landlady is the Duchessa di Santangiolo,&rdquo; she answered,
+      in accents of resignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then the name seemed to stimulate her; and she went on &ldquo;She lives
+      there&mdash;at Castel Ventirose.&rdquo; Marietta pointed towards the castle.
+      &ldquo;She owns all, all this country, all these houses&mdash;all, all.&rdquo;
+       Marietta joined her brown old hands together, and separated them, like a
+      swimmer, in a gesture that swept the horizon. Her eyes snapped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All Lombardy?&rdquo; said Peter, without emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta stared again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All Lombardy? Mache!&rdquo; was her scornful remonstrance. &ldquo;Nobody owns all
+      Lombardy. All these lands, these houses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is she?&rdquo; Peter asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta's eyes blinked, in stupefaction before such stupidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I have just told you,&rdquo; she cried &ldquo;She is the Duchessa di
+      Santangiolo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is the Duchessa di Santangiolo?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta, blinking harder, shrugged her shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&rdquo;&mdash;she raised her voice, screamed almost, as to one deaf&mdash;&ldquo;but
+      the Duchessa di Santangiolo is the Signorino's landlady la, proprietaria
+      di tutte queste terre, tutte queste case, tutte, tutte.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And she twice, with some violence, reacted her comprehensive gesture, like
+      a swimmer's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You evade me by a vicious circle,&rdquo; Peter murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta made a mighty effort-brought all her faculties to a focus&mdash;studied
+      Peter's countenance intently. Her own was suddenly illumined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I understand,&rdquo; she proclaimed, vigorously nodding. &ldquo;The Signorino
+      desires to know who she is personally!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I express myself in obscure paraphrases,&rdquo; said he; &ldquo;but you, with your
+      unfailing Italian simpatia, have divined the exact shade of my intention.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is the widow of the Duca di Santangiolo,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Enfin vous entrez dans la voie des aveux,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scusi?&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad to hear she's a widow,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;She&mdash;she might strike a
+      casual observer as somewhat young, for a widow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is not very old,&rdquo; agreed Marietta; &ldquo;only twenty-six, twenty-seven.
+      She was married from the convent. That was eight, nine years ago. The Duca
+      has been dead five or six.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And was he also young and lovely?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Young and lovely! Mache!&rdquo; derided Marietta. &ldquo;He was past forty. He was
+      fat. But he was a good man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So much the better for him now,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gia,&rdquo; approved Marietta, and solemnly made the Sign of the Cross.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But will you have the kindness to explain to me,&rdquo; the young man
+      continued, &ldquo;how it happens that the Duchessa di Santangiolo speaks English
+      as well as I do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old woman frowned surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come? She speaks English?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For all the world like an Englishman,&rdquo; asseverated Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, well,&rdquo; Marietta reflected, &ldquo;she was English, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oho!&rdquo; exclaimed Peter. &ldquo;She was English! Was she?&rdquo; He bore a little on
+      the tense of the verb. &ldquo;That lets in a flood of light. And&mdash;and what,
+      by the bye, is she now?&rdquo; he questioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ma! Italian, naturally, since she married the Duca,&rdquo; Marietta replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed? Then the leopard can change his spots?&rdquo; was Peter's inference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The leopard?&rdquo; said Marietta, at a loss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the Devil may quote Scripture for his purpose, why may n't I?&rdquo; Peter
+      demanded. &ldquo;At all events, the Duchessa di Santangiolo is a very beautiful
+      woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino has seen her?&rdquo; Marietta asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have grounds for believing so. An apparition&mdash;a phantom of delight&mdash;appeared
+      on the opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco, and announced herself as my
+      landlady. Of course, she may have been an impostor&mdash;but she made no
+      attempt to get the rent. A tall woman, in white, with hair, and a figure,
+      and a voice like cooling streams, and an eye that can speak volumes with a
+      look.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta nodded recognition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That would be the Duchessa.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's a very beautiful duchessa,&rdquo; reiterated Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta was Italian. So, Italian&mdash;wise, she answered, &ldquo;We are all as
+      God makes us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For years I have thought her the most beautiful woman in Europe,&rdquo; Peter
+      averred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta opened her eyes wide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For years? The Signorino knows her? The Signorino has seen her before?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A phrase came back to him from a novel he had been reading that afternoon
+      in the train. He adapted it to the occasion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I rather think she is my long-lost brother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brother&mdash;?&rdquo; faltered Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, certainly not sister,&rdquo; said Peter, with determination. &ldquo;You have my
+      permission to take away the coffee things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Up at the castle, in her rose-and-white boudoir, Beatrice was writing a
+      letter to a friend in England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Villa Floriano,&rdquo; she wrote, among other words, &ldquo;has been let to an
+      Englishman&mdash;a youngish, presentable-looking creature, in a dinner
+      jacket, with a tongue in his head, and an indulgent eye for Nature&mdash;named
+      Peter Marchdale. Do you happen by any chance to know who he is, or
+      anything about him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Peter very likely slept but little, that first night at the villa; and
+      more than once, I fancy, he repeated to his pillow his pious ejaculation
+      of the afternoon: &ldquo;What luck! What supernatural luck!&rdquo; He was up, in any
+      case, at an unconscionable hour next morning, up, and down in his garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It really is a surprisingly jolly garden,&rdquo; he confessed. &ldquo;The agent was
+      guiltless of exaggeration, and the photographs were not the perjuries one
+      feared.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There were some fine old trees, lindens, acacias, chestnuts, a flat-topped
+      Lombardy pine, a darkling ilex, besides the willow that overhung the
+      river, and the poplars that stiffly stood along its border. Then there was
+      the peacock-blue river itself, dancing and singing as it sped away, with a
+      thousand diamonds flashing on its surface&mdash;floating, sinking, rising&mdash;where
+      the sun caught its ripples. There were some charming bits of greensward.
+      There was a fountain, plashing melodious coolness, in a nimbus of spray
+      which the sun touched to rainbow pinks and yellows. There were vivid
+      parterres of flowers, begonia and geranium. There were oleanders, with
+      their heady southern perfume; there were pomegranate-blossoms, like knots
+      of scarlet crepe; there were white carnations, sweet-peas, heliotrope,
+      mignonette; there were endless roses. And there were birds, birds, birds.
+      Everywhere you heard their joyous piping, the busy flutter of their wings.
+      There were goldfinches, blackbirds, thrushes, with their young&mdash;the
+      plumpest, clumsiest, ruffle-feathered little blunderers, at the age
+      ingrat, just beginning to fly, a terrible anxiety to their parents&mdash;and
+      there were also (I regret to own) a good many rowdy sparrows. There were
+      bees and bumblebees; there were brilliant, dangerous-looking dragonflies;
+      there were butterflies, blue ones and white ones, fluttering in couples;
+      there were also (I am afraid) a good many gadflies&mdash;but che volete?
+      Who minds a gadfly or two in Italy? On the other side of the house there
+      were fig-trees and peach-trees, and artichokes holding their heads high in
+      rigid rows; and a vine, heavy with great clusters of yellow grapes, was
+      festooned upon the northern wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The morning air was ineffably sweet and keen&mdash;penetrant, tonic, with
+      moist, racy smells, the smell of the good brown earth, the smell of green
+      things and growing things. The dew was spread over the grass like a veil
+      of silver gossamer, spangled with crystals. The friendly country westward,
+      vineyards and white villas, laughed in the sun at the Gnisi, sulking black
+      in shadow to the east. The lake lay deep and still, a dark sapphire. And
+      away at the valley's end, Monte Sfiorito, always insubstantial-seeming,
+      showed pale blue-grey, upon a sky in which still lingered some of the
+      flush of dawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a surprisingly jolly garden, true enough. But though Peter remained
+      in it all day long&mdash;though he haunted the riverside, and cast a
+      million desirous glances, between the trees, and up the lawns, towards
+      Castel Ventirose&mdash;he enjoyed no briefest vision of the Duchessa di
+      Santangiolo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor the next day; nor the next.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why does n't that old dowager ever come down and look after her river?&rdquo;
+       he asked Marietta. &ldquo;For all the attention she gives it, the water might be
+      undermining her property on both sides.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That old dowager&mdash;?&rdquo; repeated Marietta, blank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That old widow woman&mdash;my landlady&mdash;the Duchessa Vedova di
+      Santangiolo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is not very old&mdash;only twenty-six, twenty-seven,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't try to persuade me that she is n't old enough to know better,&rdquo;
+       retorted Peter, sternly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But she has her guards, her keepers, to look after her property,&rdquo; said
+      Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Guards and keepers are mere mercenaries. If you want a thing well done,
+      you should do it yourself,&rdquo; said Peter, with gloomy sententiousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Sunday he went to the little grey rococo parish church. There were two
+      Masses, one at eight o'clock, one at ten&mdash;and the church was quite a
+      mile from Villa Floriano, and up a hill; and the Italian sun was hot&mdash;but
+      the devoted young man went to both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa was at neither.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does she think will become of her immortal soul?&rdquo; he asked Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Monday he went to the pink-stuccoed village post-office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the post-office door a smart little victoria, with a pair of
+      sprightly, fine-limbed French bays, was drawn up, ducal coronets
+      emblazoned on its panels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter's heart began to beat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And while he was hesitating on the doorstep, the door opened, and the
+      Duchessa came forth&mdash;tall, sumptuous, in white, with a wonderful
+      black-plumed hat, and a wonderful white-frilled sunshade. She was followed
+      by a young girl&mdash;a pretty, dark-complexioned girl, of fourteen,
+      fifteen perhaps, with pleasant brown eyes (that lucent Italian brown), and
+      in her cheeks a pleasant hint of red (that covert Italian red, which seems
+      to glow through the thinnest film of satin).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter bowed, standing aside to let them pass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when he looked up, the Duchessa had stopped, and was smiling on him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His heart beat harder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A lovely day,&rdquo; said the Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Delightful,&rdquo; agreed Peter, between two heart-beats.&mdash;Yet he looked,
+      in his grey flannels, with his straw-hat and his eyeglass, with his lean
+      face, his even colour, his slightly supercilious moustaches&mdash;he
+      looked a very embodiment of cool-blooded English equanimity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A trifle warm, perhaps?&rdquo; the Duchessa suggested, with her air of polite
+      (or was it in some part humorous?) readiness to defer to his opinion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But surely,&rdquo; suggested he, &ldquo;in Italy, in summer, it is its bounden duty
+      to be a trifle warm?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You like it? So do I. But what the country really needs is rain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then let us hope,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;that the country's real needs may remain
+      unsatisfied.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa tittered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think of the poor farmers,&rdquo; she said reproachfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's vain to think of them,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;'T is an ascertained fact that
+      no condition of the weather ever contents the farmers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, well,&rdquo; she consented, &ldquo;then I 'll join in your hope that the fine
+      weather may last. I&mdash;I trust,&rdquo; she was so good as to add, &ldquo;that
+      you're not entirely uncomfortable at Villa Floriano?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare n't allow myself to speak of Villa Floriano,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;I
+      should become dithyrambic. It's too adorable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has a pretty garden, and&mdash;I remember&mdash;you admired the view,&rdquo;
+       the Duchessa said. &ldquo;And that old Marietta? I trust she does for you fairly
+      well?&rdquo; Her raised eyebrows expressed benevolent (or was it in some part
+      humorous?) concern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She does for me to perfection. That old Marietta is a priceless old
+      jewel,&rdquo; Peter vowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A good cook?&rdquo; questioned the Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A good cook&mdash;but also a counsellor and friend. And with a flow of
+      language!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, these Lombard peasant women. They are untiring chatterers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 'm not sure,&rdquo; Peter felt himself in justice bound to confess, &ldquo;that
+      Marietta is n't equally untiring as a listener. In fact, there's only one
+      respect in which she has disappointed me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;?&rdquo; said the Duchessa. And her raised eyebrows demanded
+      particulars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She swears she does n't wear a dagger in her garter&mdash;has never heard
+      of such a practice,&rdquo; Peter explained. &ldquo;And now,&rdquo; he whispered to his soul,
+      &ldquo;we 'll see whether our landlady is up in modern literature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still again the Duchessa laughed. And, apparently, she was up in modern
+      literature. At any rate&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those are Lombard country-girls along the coast,&rdquo; she reminded him. &ldquo;We
+      are peaceful inland folk, miles from the sea. But you had best be on your
+      guard, none the less.&rdquo; She shook her head, in warning. &ldquo;Through all this
+      country-side that old Marietta is reputed to be a witch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If she's a witch,&rdquo; said Peter, undismayed, &ldquo;her usefulness will be
+      doubled. I shall put her to the test directly I get home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sprinkle her with holy water?&rdquo; laughed the Duchessa. &ldquo;Have a care. If she
+      should turn into a black cat, and fly away on a broomstick, you'd never
+      forgive yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Wherewith she swept on to her carriage, followed by her young companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sprightly French bays tossed their heads, making the harness tinkle.
+      The footman mounted the box. The carriage rolled away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Peter remained for quite a minute motionless on the door-step, gazing,
+      bemused, down the long, straight, improbable village street, with its
+      poplars, its bridge, its ancient stone cross, its irregular pink and
+      yellow houses&mdash;as improbable as a street in opera-bouffe. A thin
+      cloud of dust floated after the carriage, a thin screen of white dust,
+      which, in the sun, looked like a fume of silver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I could put my finger on a witch worth two of Marietta,&rdquo; he said,
+      in the end. &ldquo;And thus we see,&rdquo; he added, struck by something perhaps not
+      altogether novel in his own reflection, &ldquo;how the primary emotions, being
+      perennial, tend to express themselves in perennial formulae.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Back at the villa, he enquired of Marietta who the pretty brown-eyed young
+      girl might have been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorina Emilia,&rdquo; Marietta promptly informed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really and truly?&rdquo; questioned he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ang,&rdquo; affirmed Marietta, with the national jerk of the head; &ldquo;the
+      Signorina Emilia Manfredi&mdash;the daughter of the Duca.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;? Then the Duca was married before?&rdquo; concluded Peter, with
+      simplicity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Che-e-e!&rdquo; scoffed Marietta, on her highest note. &ldquo;Married? He?&rdquo; Then she
+      winked and nodded&mdash;as one man of the world to another. &ldquo;Ma molto
+      porn! La mamma fu robaccia di Milano. But after his death, the Duchessa
+      had her brought to the castle. She is the same as adopted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That looks as if your Duchessa's heart were in the right place, after
+      all,&rdquo; commented Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gia,&rdquo; agreed Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hang the right place!&rdquo; cried he. &ldquo;What's the good of telling me her heart
+      is in the right place, if the right place is inaccessible?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Marietta only looked bewildered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lived in his garden, he haunted the riverside, he made a daily
+      pilgrimage to the village post, he thoroughly neglected the work he had
+      come to this quiet spot to do. But a week passed, during which he never
+      once beheld so much as the shadow of the Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Sunday he trudged his mile, through the sun, and up the hill, not only
+      to both Masses, but to Vespers and Benediction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was present at none of these offices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Pagan!&rdquo; he exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Up at the castle, on the broad marble terrace, where clematis and
+      jessamine climbed over the balustrade and twined about its pilasters,
+      where oleanders grew in tall marble urns and shed their roseate petals on
+      the pavement, Beatrice, dressed for dinner, in white, with pearls in her
+      hair, and pearls round her throat, was walking slowly backwards and
+      forwards, reading a letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a Peter Marchdale&mdash;I don't know whether he will be your
+      Peter Marchdale or not, my dear; though the name seems hardly likely to be
+      common&mdash;son of the late Mr. Archibald Marchdale, Q. C., and nephew of
+      old General Marchdale, of Whitstoke. A highly respectable and stodgy
+      Norfolk family. I've never happened to meet the man myself, but I'm told
+      he's a bit of an eccentric, who amuses himself globe-trotting, and writing
+      books (novels, I believe) which nobody, so far as I am aware, ever reads.
+      He writes under a pseudonym, Felix&mdash;I 'm not sure whether it's
+      Mildmay or Wildmay. He began life, by the bye, in the Diplomatic, and was
+      attache for a while at Berlin, or Petersburg, or somewhere; but whether
+      (in the elegant language of Diplomacy) he 'chucked it up,' or failed to
+      pass his exams, I'm not in a position to say. He will be near thirty, and
+      ought to have a couple of thousand a year&mdash;more or less. His father,
+      at any rate, was a great man at the bar, and must have left something
+      decent. And the only other thing in the world I know about him is that
+      he's a great friend of that clever gossip Margaret Winchfield&mdash;which
+      goes to show that however obscure he may be as a scribbler of fiction, he
+      must possess some redeeming virtues as a social being&mdash;for Mrs.
+      Winchfield is by no means the sort that falls in love with bores. As you
+      're not, either&mdash;well, verbum sap., as my little brother Freddie
+      says.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice gazed off, over the sunny lawn, with its trees and their long
+      shadows, with its shrubberies, its bright flower-beds, its marble benches,
+      its artificial ruin; over the lake, with its coloured sails, its
+      incongruous puffing steamboats; down the valley, away to the rosy peaks of
+      Monte Sfiorito, and the deep blue sky behind them. She plucked a spray of
+      jessamine, and brushed the cool white blossoms across her cheek, and
+      inhaled their fairy fragrance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An obscure scribbler of fiction,&rdquo; she mused. &ldquo;Ah, well, one is an obscure
+      reader of fiction oneself. We must send to London for Mr. Felix Mildmay
+      Wildmay's works.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On Monday evening, at the end of dinner, as she set the fruit before him,
+      &ldquo;The Signorino will take coffee?&rdquo; old Marietta asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter frowned at the fruit, figs and peaches&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Figs imperial purple, and blushing peaches&rdquo;&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      ranged alternately, with fine precision, in a circle, round a central heap
+      of translucent yellow grapes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is this the produce of my own vine and fig-tree?&rdquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Signorino; and also peach-tree,&rdquo; replied Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peaches do not grow on fig-trees?&rdquo; he enquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Signorino,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor figs on thistles. I wonder why not,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is n't Nature,&rdquo; was Marietta's confident generalisation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marietta Cignolesi,&rdquo; Peter pronounced severely, looking her hard in the
+      eyes, &ldquo;I am told you are a witch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Marietta, simply, without surprise, without emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I quite understand,&rdquo; he genially persisted. &ldquo;It's a part of the game to
+      deny it. But I have no intention of sprinkling you with holy water-so
+      don't be frightened. Besides, if you should do anything outrageous&mdash;if
+      you should turn into a black cat, and fly away on a broomstick, for
+      example&mdash;I could never forgive myself. But I'll thank you to employ a
+      little of your witchcraft on my behalf, all the same. I have lost
+      something&mdash;something very precious&mdash;more precious than rubies&mdash;more
+      precious than fine gold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta's brown old wrinkles fell into an expression of alarm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the villa? In the garden?&rdquo; she exclaimed, anxiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you conscientious old thing you,&rdquo; Peter hastened to relieve her.
+      &ldquo;Nowhere in your jurisdiction&mdash;so don't distress yourself: Laggiu,
+      laggiu.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he waved a vague hand, to indicate outer space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino should put up a candle to St. Anthony of Padua,&rdquo; counselled
+      this Catholic witch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;St. Anthony of Padua? Why of Padua?&rdquo; asked Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;St. Anthony of Padua,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean of Lisbon,&rdquo; corrected Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; insisted the old woman, with energy. &ldquo;St. Anthony of Padua.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he was born in Lisbon;&rdquo; insisted Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;parola d' onore. And, what's more to the purpose, he died
+      in Lisbon. You clearly mean St. Anthony of Lisbon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; Marietta raised her voice, for his speedier conviction. &ldquo;There is no
+      St. Anthony of Lisbon. St. Anthony of Padua.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the use of sticking to your guns in that obstinate fashion?&rdquo; Peter
+      complained. &ldquo;It's mere pride of opinion. Don't you know that the ready
+      concession of minor points is a part of the grace of life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you lose an object, you put up a candle to St. Anthony of Padua,&rdquo;
+       said Marietta, weary but resolved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not unless you wish to recover the object,&rdquo; contended Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta stared at him, blinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no wish to recover the object I have lost,&rdquo; he continued blandly.
+      &ldquo;The loss of it is a new, thrilling, humanising experience. It will make a
+      man of me&mdash;and, let us hope, a better man. Besides, in a sense, I
+      lost it long ago&mdash;'when first my smitten eyes beat full on her,' one
+      evening at the Francais, three, four years ago. But it's essential to my
+      happiness that I should see the person into whose possession it has
+      fallen. That is why I am not angry with you for being a witch. It suits my
+      convenience. Please arrange with the powers of darkness to the end that I
+      may meet the person in question tomorrow at the latest. No!&rdquo; He raised a
+      forbidding hand. &ldquo;I will listen to no protestations. And, for the rest,
+      you may count upon my absolute discretion.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+           'She is the darling of my heart
+            And she lives in our valley,'&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      he carolled softly.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+           &ldquo;E del mio cuore la carina,
+            E dimor' nella nostra vallettina,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      he obligingly translated. &ldquo;But for all the good I get of her, she might as
+      well live on the top of the Cornobastone,&rdquo; he added dismally. &ldquo;Yes, now
+      you may bring me my coffee&mdash;only, let it be tea. When your coffee is
+      coffee it keeps me awake at night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta trudged back to her kitchen, nodding at the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next afternoon, however, the Duchessa di Santangiolo appeared on the
+      opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Peter happened to be engaged in the amiable pastime of tossing
+      bread-crumbs to his goldfinches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a score or so of sparrows, vulture-like, lurked under cover of the
+      neighbouring foliage, to dash in viciously, at the critical moment, and
+      snatch the food from the finches' very mouths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa watched this little drama for a minute, smiling, in silent
+      meditation: while Peter&mdash;who, for a wonder, had his back turned to
+      the park of Ventirose, and, for a greater wonder still perhaps, felt no
+      pricking in his thumbs&mdash;remained unconscious of her presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, sorrowfully, (but there was always a smile at the back of her
+      eyes), she shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the pirates, the daredevils,&rdquo; she sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter started; faced about; saluted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The brigands,&rdquo; said she, with a glance towards the sparrows' outposts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, poor things,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor things?&rdquo; cried she, indignant. &ldquo;The unprincipled little monsters!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They can't help it,&rdquo; he pleaded for them. &ldquo;'It is their nature to.' They
+      were born so. They had no choice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You actually defend them!&rdquo; she marvelled, rebukefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, dear, no,&rdquo; he disclaimed. &ldquo;I don't defend them. I defend nothing. I
+      merely recognise and accept. Sparrows&mdash;finches. It's the way of the
+      world&mdash;the established division of the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She frowned incomprehension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The established division of the world&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Sparrows&mdash;finches the snatchers and the
+      snatched-from. Everything that breathes is either a sparrow or a finch. 'T
+      is the universal war&mdash;the struggle for existence&mdash;the survival
+      of the most unscrupulous. 'T is a miniature presentment of what's going on
+      everywhere in earth and sky.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;YOU see the earth and sky through black spectacles, I 'm afraid,&rdquo; she
+      remarked, with a long face. But there was still an underglow of amusement
+      in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;because there's a compensation. As you rise in the
+      scale of moral development, it is true, you pass from the category of the
+      snatchers to the category of the snatched-from, and your ultimate
+      extinction is assured. But, on the other hand, you gain talents and
+      sensibilities. You do not live by bread alone. These goldfinches, for a
+      case in point, can sing&mdash;and they have your sympathy. The sparrows
+      can only make a horrid noise&mdash;and you contemn them. That is the
+      compensation. The snatchers can never know the joy of singing&mdash;or of
+      being pitied by ladies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;N... o, perhaps not,&rdquo; she consented doubtfully. The underglow of
+      amusement in her eyes shone nearer to the surface. &ldquo;But&mdash;but they can
+      never know, either, the despair of the singer when his songs won't come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or when the ladies are pitiless. That is true,&rdquo; consented Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And meanwhile they get the bread, crumbs,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They certainly get the bread-crumbs,&rdquo; he admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 'm afraid &ldquo;&mdash;she smiled, as one who has conducted a syllogism
+      safely to its conclusion&mdash;&ldquo;I 'm afraid I do not think your
+      compensation compensates.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be quite honest, I daresay it does n't,&rdquo; he confessed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And anyhow&rdquo;&mdash;she followed her victory up&mdash;&ldquo;I should not wish my
+      garden to represent the universal war. I should not wish my garden to be a
+      battle-field. I should wish it to be a retreat from the battle&mdash;an
+      abode of peace&mdash;a happy valley&mdash;a sanctuary for the
+      snatched-from.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why distress one's soul with wishes that are vain?&rdquo; asked he. &ldquo;What
+      could one do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One could keep a dragon,&rdquo; she answered promptly. &ldquo;If I were you, I should
+      keep a sparrow-devouring, finch-respecting dragon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would do no good,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;You'd get rid of one species of snatcher,
+      but some other species of snatcher would instantly pop UP.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gazed at him with those amused eyes of hers, and still again, slowly,
+      sorrowfully, shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, your spectacles are black&mdash;black,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope not,&rdquo; said he; &ldquo;but such as they are, they show me the inevitable
+      conditions of our planet. The snatcher, here below, is ubiquitous and
+      eternal&mdash;as ubiquitous, as eternal, as the force of gravitation. He
+      is likewise protean. Banish him&mdash;he takes half a minute to change his
+      visible form, and returns au galop. Sometimes he's an ugly little
+      cacophonous brown sparrow; sometimes he's a splendid florid money-lender,
+      or an aproned and obsequious greengrocer, or a trusted friend, hearty and
+      familiar. But he 's always there; and he's always&mdash;if you don't mind
+      the vernacular&mdash;'on the snatch.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa arched her eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If things are really at such a sorry pass,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I will commend my
+      former proposal to you with increased confidence. You should keep a
+      dragon. After all, you only wish to protect your garden; and that&rdquo;&mdash;she
+      embraced it with her glance&mdash;&ldquo;is not so very big. You could teach
+      your dragon, if you procured one of an intelligent breed, to devour
+      greengrocers, trusted friends, and even moneylenders too (tough though no
+      doubt they are), as well as sparrows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your proposal is a surrender to my contention,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;You would
+      set a snatcher to catch the snatchers. Other heights in other lives,
+      perhaps. But in the dark backward and abysm of space to which our lives
+      are confined, the snatcher is indigenous and inexpugnable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa looked at the sunny landscape, the bright lawns, the high
+      bending trees, with the light caught in the network of their million
+      leaves; she looked at the laughing white villas westward, the pale-green
+      vineyards, the yellow cornfields; she looked at the rushing river, with
+      the diamonds sparkling on its surface, at the far-away gleaming snows of
+      Monte Sfiorito, at the scintillant blue shy overhead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she looked at Peter, a fine admixture of mirth with something like
+      gravity in her smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The dark backward and abysm of space?&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;And you do not wear
+      black spectacles? Then it must be that your eyes themselves are just a
+      pair of black-seeing pessimists.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the contrary,&rdquo; triumphed Peter, &ldquo;it is because they are optimists,
+      that they suspect there must be forwarder and more luminous regions than
+      the Solar System.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you have the prettiest mouth, and the most exquisite little
+      teeth, and the eyes richest in promise, and the sweetest laughter, of any
+      woman out of Paradise,&rdquo; said Peter, in the silence of his soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is clear I shall never be your match in debate,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter made a gesture of deprecating modesty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I wonder,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;whether you would put me down as 'another
+      species of snatcher,' if I should ask you to spare me just the merest end
+      of a crust of bread?&rdquo; And she lifted those eyes rich in promise
+      appealingly to his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I beg of you&mdash;take all I have,&rdquo; he responded, with effusion.
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;but how&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Toss,&rdquo; she commanded tersely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he tossed what was left of his bread into the air, above the river; and
+      the Duchessa, easily, deftly, threw up a hand, and caught it on the wing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you very much,&rdquo; she laughed, with a little bow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she crumbled the bread, and began to sprinkle the ground with it; and
+      in an instant she was the centre of a cloud of birds. Peter was at liberty
+      to watch her, to admire the swift grace of her motions, their suggestion
+      of delicate strength, of joy in things physical, and the lithe elasticity
+      of her figure, against the background of satiny lawn, and the further
+      vistas of lofty sunlit trees. She was dressed in white, as always&mdash;a
+      frock of I know not what supple fabric, that looked as if you might have
+      passed it through your ring, and fell in multitudes of small soft creases.
+      Two big red roses drooped from her bodice. She wore a garden-hat, of white
+      straw, with a big daring rose-red bow, under which the dense meshes of her
+      hair, warmly dark, dimly bright, shimmered in a blur of brownish gold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What vigour, what verve, what health,&rdquo; thought Peter, watching her, &ldquo;what&mdash;lean,
+      fresh, fragrant health!&rdquo; And he had, no doubt, his emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She bestowed her bread crumbs on the birds; but she was able, somehow, to
+      discriminate mightily in favour of the goldfinches. She would make a
+      diversion, the semblance of a fling, with her empty right hand; and the
+      too-greedy sparrows would dart off, avid, on that false lead. Whereupon,
+      quickly, stealthily, she would rain a little shower of crumbs, from her
+      left hand, on the grass beside her, to a confiding group of finches
+      assembled there. And if ever a sparrow ventured to intrude his ruffianly
+      black beak into this sacred quarter, she would manage, with a kind of
+      restrained ferocity, to &ldquo;shoo&rdquo; him away, without thereby frightening the
+      finches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And all the while her eyes laughed; and there was colour in her cheeks;
+      and there was the forceful, graceful action of her body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the bread was finished, she clapped her hands together gently, to
+      dust the last mites from them, and looked over at Peter, and smiled
+      significantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he acknowledged, &ldquo;you outwitted them very skilfully. You, at any
+      rate, have no need of a dragon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, in default of a dragon, one can do dragon's work oneself,&rdquo; she
+      answered lightly. &ldquo;Or, rather, one can make oneself an instrument of
+      justice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the same, I should call it uncommonly hard luck to be born a sparrow&mdash;within
+      your jurisdiction,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not an affair of luck,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;One is born a sparrow&mdash;within
+      my jurisdiction&mdash;for one's sins in a former state.&mdash;No, you
+      little dovelings&rdquo;&mdash;she turned to a pair of finches on the greensward
+      near her, who were lingering, and gazing up into her face with hungry,
+      expectant eyes&mdash;&ldquo;I have no more. I have given you my all.&rdquo; And she
+      stretched out her open hands, palms downwards, to convince them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sparrows got nothing; and the goldfinches, who got 'your all,'
+      grumble because you gave so little,&rdquo; said Peter, sadly. &ldquo;That is what
+      comes of interfering with the laws of Nature.&rdquo; And then, as the two birds
+      flew away, &ldquo;See the dark, doubtful, reproachful glances with which they
+      cover you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think they are ungrateful?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;No&mdash;listen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She held up a finger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For, at that moment, on the branch of an acacia, just over her head, a
+      goldfinch began to sing&mdash;his thin, sweet, crystalline trill of song.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you call that grumbling?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It implies a grumble,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;like the 'thank you' of a servant
+      dissatisfied with his tip. It's the very least he can do. It's perfunctory&mdash;I
+      'm not sure it is n't even ironical.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perfunctory! Ironical!&rdquo; cried the Duchessa. &ldquo;Look at him! He's warbling
+      his delicious little soul out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They both paused to look and listen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bird's gold-red bosom palpitated. He marked his modulations by sudden
+      emphatic movements of the head. His eyes were fixed intently before him,
+      as if he could actually see and follow the shining thread of his song, as
+      it wound away through the air. His performance had all the effect of a
+      spontaneous rhapsody. When it was terminated, he looked down at his
+      auditors, eager, inquisitive, as who should say, &ldquo;I hope you liked it?&rdquo;&mdash;and
+      then, with a nod clearly meant as a farewell, flew out of sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa smiled again at Peter, with intention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must really try to take a cheerier view of things,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And next instant she too was off, walking slowly, lightly, up the green
+      lawns, between the trees, towards the castle, her gown fluttering in the
+      breeze, now dazzling white as she came into the sun, now pearly grey as
+      she passed into the shade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a woman it is,&rdquo; said Peter to himself, looking after her. &ldquo;What
+      vigour, what verve, what sex! What a woman!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And, indeed, there was nothing of the too-prevalent epicene in the
+      Duchessa's aspect; she was very certainly a woman. &ldquo;Heavens, how she
+      walks!&rdquo; he cried in a deep whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then a sudden wave of dejection swept over him. At first he could not
+      account for it. By and by, however, a malicious little voice began to
+      repeat and repeat within him, &ldquo;Oh, the futile impression you must have
+      made upon her! Oh, the ineptitudes you uttered! Oh, the precious
+      opportunity you have misemployed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a witch,&rdquo; he said to Marietta. &ldquo;You've proved it to the hilt. I
+      've seen the person, and the object is more desperately lost than ever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That evening, among the letters Peter received from England, there was one
+      from his friend Mrs. Winchfield, which contained certain statistics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your Duchessa di Santangiolo 'was' indeed, as your funny old servant told
+      you, English: the only child and heiress of the last Lord Belfont. The
+      Belfonts of Lancashire (now, save for your Duchessa, extinct) were the
+      most bigoted sort of Roman Catholics, and always educated their daughters
+      in foreign convents, and as often as not married them to foreigners. The
+      Belfont men, besides, were ever and anon marrying foreign wives; so there
+      will be a goodish deal of un-English blood in your Duchessa's own
+      ci-devant English veins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was born, as I learn from an indiscretion of my Peerage, in 1870, and
+      is, therefore, as near to thirty (the dangerous age!) as to the
+      six-and-twenty your droll old Marietta gives her. Her Christian names are
+      Beatrice Antonia Teresa Mary&mdash;faites en votre choix. She was married
+      at nineteen to Baldassarre Agosto, Principe Udeschini, Duca di
+      Santangiolo, Marchese di Castellofranco, Count of the Holy Roman Empire,
+      Knight of the Holy Ghost and of St. Gregory, (does it take your breath
+      away?), who, according to Frontin, died in '93; and as there were no
+      children, his brother Felipe Lorenzo succeeded to the titles. A younger
+      brother still is Bishop of Sardagna. Cardinal Udeschini is the uncle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That, dear child, empties my sack of information. But perhaps I have a
+      bigger sack, full of good advice, which I have not yet opened. And
+      perhaps, on the whole, I will not open it at all. Only, remember that in
+      yonder sentimental Italian lake country, in this summer weather, a
+      solitary young man's fancy might be much inclined to turn to thoughts of&mdash;folly;
+      and keep an eye on my friend Peter Marchdale.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Our solitary young man brooded over Mrs. Winchfield's letter for a long
+      while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The daughter of a lord, and the widow of a duke, and the niece-in-law of
+      a cardinal,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And, as if that were not enough, a bigoted Roman
+      Catholic into the bargain.... And yet&mdash;and yet,&rdquo; he went on, taking
+      heart a little, &ldquo;as for her bigotry, to judge by her assiduity in
+      attending the village church, that factor, at least, thank goodness, would
+      appear to be static, rather than dynamic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After another longish interval of brooding, he sauntered down to the
+      riverside, through his fragrant garden, fragrant and fresh with the cool
+      odours of the night, and peered into the darkness, towards Castel
+      Ventirose. Here and there he could discern a gleam of yellow, where some
+      lighted window was not entirely hidden by the trees. Thousands and
+      thousands of insects were threading the silence with their shrill
+      insistent voices. The repeated wail, harsh, prolonged, eerie, of some
+      strange wild creature, bird or beast, came down from the forest of the
+      Gnisi. At his feet, on the troubled surface of the Aco, the stars,
+      reflected and distorted, shone like broken spearheads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lighted a cigarette, and stood there till he had consumed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heigh-ho!&rdquo; he sighed at last, and turned back towards the villa. And
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he concluded, &ldquo;I must certainly keep an eye on our friend Peter
+      Marchdale.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I 'm doubting it's a bit too late&mdash;troppo tardo,&rdquo; he said to
+      Marietta, whom he found bringing hot water to his dressing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not very late,&rdquo; said Marietta. &ldquo;Only half-past ten.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is a woman&mdash;therefore to be loved; she is a duchess&mdash;therefore
+      to be lost,&rdquo; he explained, in his native tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cosa.&rdquo; questioned Marietta, in hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice and Emilia, strolling together in one of the flowery lanes up the
+      hillside, between ranks of the omnipresent poplar, and rose-bush hedges,
+      or crumbling pink-stuccoed walls that dripped with cyclamen and
+      snapdragon, met old Marietta descending, with a basket on her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta courtesied to the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you do, Marietta?&rdquo; Beatrice asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't complain, thank your Grandeur. I have the lumbago on and off
+      pretty constantly, and last week I broke a tooth. But I can't complain.
+      And your Highness?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta returned, with brisk aplomb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice smiled. &ldquo;Bene, grazie. Your new master&mdash;that young
+      Englishman,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;I hope you find him kind, and easy to do
+      for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kind&mdash;yes, Excellency. Also easy to do for. But&mdash;!&rdquo; Marietta
+      shrugged her shoulders, and gave her head two meaning oscillations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;?&rdquo; wondered Beatrice, knitting puzzled brows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very amiable, your Greatness; but simple, simple,&rdquo; Marietta explained,
+      and tapped her brown old forehead with a brown forefinger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really&mdash;?&rdquo; wondered Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Nobility,&rdquo; said Marietta. &ldquo;Gentle as a canarybird, but innocent,
+      innocent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You astonish me,&rdquo; Beatrice avowed. &ldquo;How does he show it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The questions he asks, Most Illustrious, the things he says.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For example&mdash;?&rdquo; pursued Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For example, your Serenity&mdash;&rdquo; Marietta paused, to search her memory.&mdash;
+      &ldquo;Well, for one example, he calls roast veal a fowl. I give him roast veal
+      for his luncheon, and he says to me, 'Marietta, this fowl has no wings.'
+      But everyone knows, your Mercy, that veal is not a fowl. How should veal
+      have wings?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How indeed?&rdquo; assented Beatrice, on a note of commiseration. And if the
+      corners of her mouth betrayed a tendency to curve upwards, she immediately
+      compelled them down. &ldquo;But perhaps he does not speak Italian very well?&rdquo;
+       she suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mache, Potenza! Everyone speaks Italian,&rdquo; cried Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed?&rdquo; said Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally, your Grace&mdash;all Christians,&rdquo; Marietta declared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I did n't know,&rdquo; said Beatrice, meekly. &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she acknowledged,
+      &ldquo;since he speaks Italian, it is certainly unreasonable of him to call veal
+      a fowl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that, Magnificence,&rdquo; Marietta went on, warming to her theme, &ldquo;that is
+      only one of his simplicities. He asks me, 'Who puts the whitewash on Monte
+      Sfiorito? 'And when I tell him that it is not whitewash, but snow, he
+      says, 'How do you know?' But everyone knows that it is snow. Whitewash!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The sprightly old woman gave her whole body a shake, for the better
+      exposition of her state of mind. And thereupon, from the interior of her
+      basket, issued a plaintive little squeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you in your basket?&rdquo; Beatrice asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little piglet, Nobility&mdash;un piccolo porcellino,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And lifting the cover an inch or two, she displayed the anxious face of a
+      poor little sucking pig.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;E carino?&rdquo; she demanded, whilst her eyes beamed with a pride that almost
+      seemed maternal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What on earth are you going to do with him?&rdquo; Beatrice gasped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The light of pride gave place to a light of resolution, in Marietta's
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kill him, Mightiness,&rdquo; was her grim response; &ldquo;stuff him with almonds,
+      raisins, rosemary, and onions; cook him sweet and sour; and serve him,
+      garnished with rosettes of beet-root, for my Signorino's Sunday dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh-h-h!&rdquo; shuddered Beatrice and Emilia, in a breath; and they resumed
+      their walk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Francois was dining&mdash;with an appearance of great fervour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter sat on his rustic bench, by the riverside, and watched him, smoking
+      a cigarette the while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa di Santangiolo stood screened by a tree in the park of
+      Ventirose, and watched them both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Francois wore a wide blue ribbon round his pink and chubby neck; and his
+      dinner consisted of a big bowlful of bread and milk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently the Duchessa stepped forth from her ambush, into the sun, and
+      laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a sweetly pretty scene,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Pastoral&mdash;idyllic&mdash;it
+      reminds one of Theocritus&mdash;it reminds one of Watteau.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter threw his cigarette into the river, and made an obeisance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very glad you feel the charm of it,&rdquo; he responded. &ldquo;May I be
+      permitted to present Master Francois Vllon?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have met before,&rdquo; said the Duchessa, graciously smiling upon Francois,
+      and inclining her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I did n't know,&rdquo; said Peter, apologetic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Duchessa, &ldquo;and in rather tragical circumstances. But at
+      that time he was anonymous. Why&mdash;if you won't think my curiosity
+      impertinent&mdash;why Francois Villon?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;He made such a tremendous outcry when he was
+      condemned to death, for one thing. You should have heard him. He has a
+      voice! Then, for another, he takes such a passionate interest in his meat
+      and drink. And then, if you come to that, I really had n't the heart to
+      call him Pauvre Lelian.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa raised amused eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You felt that Pauvre Lelian was the only alternative?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had in mind a remark of Pauvre Lilian's friend and confrere, the
+      cryptic Stephane,&rdquo; Peter answered. &ldquo;You will remember it. 'L'ame d'un
+      poete dans le corps d'un&mdash;' I&mdash;I forget the last word,&rdquo; he
+      faltered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall we say 'little pig'?&rdquo; suggested the Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, please don't,&rdquo; cried Peter, hastily, with a gesture of supplication.
+      &ldquo;Don't say 'pig' in his presence. You'll wound his feelings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew he was condemned to death,&rdquo; she owned. &ldquo;Indeed, it was in his
+      condemned cell that I made his acquaintance. Your Marietta Cignolesi
+      introduced us. Her air was so inexorable, I 'm a good deal surprised to
+      see him alive to-day. There was some question of a stuffing of rosemary
+      and onions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I see,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;I see that you're familiar with the whole
+      disgraceful story. Yes, Marietta, the unspeakable old Tartar, was all for
+      stuffing him with rosemary and onions. But he could not bring himself to
+      share her point of view. He screamed his protest, like a man, in twenty
+      different octaves. You really should have heard him. His voice is of a
+      compass, of a timbre, of an expressiveness! Passive endurance, I fear, is
+      not his forte. For the sake of peace and silence, I intervened,
+      interceded. She had her knife at his very throat. I was not an instant too
+      soon. So, of course, I 've had to adopt him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, poor man,&rdquo; sympathised the Duchessa. &ldquo;It's a recognised
+      principle that if you save a fellow's life, you 're bound to him for the
+      rest of yours. But&mdash;but won't you find him rather a burdensome
+      responsibility when he's grownup?&rdquo; she reflected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&mdash;Que voulez-vous?&rdquo; reflected Peter. &ldquo;Burdensome responsibilities
+      are the appointed accompaniments of man's pilgrimage. Why not Francois
+      Villon, as well as another? And besides, as the world is at present
+      organised, a member of the class vulgarly styled 'the rich' can generally
+      manage to shift his responsibilities, when they become too irksome, upon
+      the backs of the poor. For example&mdash;Marietta! Marietta!&rdquo; he called,
+      raising his voice a little, and clapping his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta came. When she had made her courtesy to the Duchessa, and a
+      polite enquiry as to her Excellency's health, Peter said, with an
+      indicative nod of the head, &ldquo;Will you be so good as to remove my
+      responsibility?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Il porcellino?&rdquo; questioned Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ang,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when Marietta had borne Francois, struggling and squealing in her
+      arms, from the foreground&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&mdash;you see how it is done,&rdquo; he remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An object-lesson,&rdquo; she agreed. &ldquo;An object-lesson in&mdash;might n't one
+      call it the science of Applied Cynicism?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Science!&rdquo; Peter plaintively repudiated the word. &ldquo;No, no. I was rather
+      flattering myself it was an art.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Apropos of art&mdash;&rdquo; said the Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came down two or three steps nearer to the brink of the river. She
+      produced from behind her back a hand that she had kept there, and held up
+      for Peter's inspection a grey-and-gold bound book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Apropos of art, I've been reading a novel. Do you know it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter glanced at the grey-and-gold binding&mdash;and dissembled the
+      emotion that suddenly swelled big in his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He screwed his eyeglass into his eye, and gave an intent look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't make out the title,&rdquo; he temporised, shaking his head, and letting
+      his eyeglass drop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the whole, it was very well acted; and I hope the occult little smile
+      that played about the Duchessa's lips was a smile of appreciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has a highly appropriate title,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It is called 'A Man of
+      Words,' by an author I've never happened to hear of before, named Felix
+      Wildmay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes. How very odd,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;By a curious chance, I know it very
+      well. But I 'm surprised to discover that you do. How on earth did it fall
+      into your hands?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why on earth shouldn't it?&rdquo; wondered she. &ldquo;Novels are intended to fall
+      into people's hands, are they not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe so,&rdquo; he assented. &ldquo;But intentions, in this vale of tears, are
+      not always realised, are they? Anyhow, 'A Man of Words' is not like other
+      novels. It's peculiar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peculiar&mdash;?&rdquo; she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of a peculiar, of an unparalleled obscurity,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;There has
+      been no failure approaching it since What's-his-name invented printing. I
+      hadn't supposed that seven copies of it were in circulation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really?&rdquo; said the Duchessa. &ldquo;A correspondent of mine in London
+      recommended it. But&mdash;in view of its unparalleled obscurity is n't it
+      almost equally a matter for surprise that you should know it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be, sure enough,&rdquo; consented Peter, &ldquo;if it weren't that I just
+      happen also to know the author.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;? You know the author?&rdquo; cried the Duchessa, with animation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Comme ma poche,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;We were boys together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really?&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;What a coincidence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And&mdash;and his book?&rdquo; Her eyebrows went up, interrogative. &ldquo;I expect,
+      as you know the man, you think rather poorly of it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the contrary, in the teeth of verisimilitude, I think extremely well
+      of it,&rdquo; he answered firmly. &ldquo;I admire it immensely. I think it's an
+      altogether ripping little book. I think it's one of the nicest little
+      books I've read for ages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How funny,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why funny?&rdquo; asked he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's so unlikely that one should seem a genius to one's old familiar
+      friends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did I say he seemed a genius to me? I misled you. He does n't. In fact,
+      he very frequently seems&mdash;but, for Charity's sake, I 'd best forbear
+      to tell. However, I admire his book. And&mdash;to be entirely frank&mdash;it's
+      a constant source of astonishment to me that he should ever have been able
+      to do anything one-tenth so good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa smiled pensively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, well,&rdquo; she mused, &ldquo;we must assume that he has happy moments&mdash;or,
+      perhaps, two soul-sides, one to face the world with, one to show his
+      manuscripts when he's writing. You hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.
+      That, indeed, is only natural, on the part of an old friend. But you pique
+      my interest. What is the trouble with him? Is&mdash;is he conceited, for
+      example?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The trouble with him?&rdquo; Peter pondered. &ldquo;Oh, it would be too long and too
+      sad a story. Should I anatomise him to you as he is, I must blush and
+      weep, and you must look pale and wonder. He has pretty nearly every
+      weakness, not to mention vices, that flesh is heir to. But as for
+      conceit... let me see. He concurs in my own high opinion of his work, I
+      believe; but I don't know whether, as literary men go, it would be fair to
+      call him conceited. He belongs, at any rate, to the comparatively modest
+      minority who do not secretly fancy that Shakespeare has come back to
+      life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That Shakespeare has come back to life!&rdquo; marvelled the Duchessa. &ldquo;Do you
+      mean to say that most literary men fancy that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think perhaps I am acquainted with three who don't,&rdquo; Peter replied;
+      &ldquo;but one of them merely wears his rue with a difference. He fancies that
+      it's Goethe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How extravagantly&mdash;how exquisitely droll!&rdquo; she laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I confess, it struck me so, until I got accustomed to it,&rdquo; said he,
+      &ldquo;until I learned that it was one of the commonplaces, one of the normal
+      attributes of the literary temperament. It's as much to be taken for
+      granted, when you meet an author, as the tail is to be taken for granted,
+      when you meet a cat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm vastly your debtor for the information&mdash;it will stand me in
+      stead with the next author who comes my way. But, in that case, your
+      friend Mr. Felix Wildmay will be, as it were, a sort of Manx cat?&rdquo; was her
+      smiling deduction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, if you like, in that particular, a sort of Manx cat,&rdquo; acquiesced
+      Peter, with a laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa laughed too; and then there was a little pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Overhead, never so light a breeze lisped never so faintly in the
+      tree-tops; here and there bird-notes fell, liquid, desultory, like drops
+      of rain after a shower; and constantly one heard the cool music of the
+      river. The sun, filtering through worlds and worlds of leaves, shed upon
+      everything a green-gold penumbra. The air, warm and still, was sweet with
+      garden-scents. The lake, according to its habit at this hour of the
+      afternoon, had drawn a grey veil over its face, a thin grey veil, through
+      which its sapphire-blue shone furtively. Far away, in the summer haze,
+      Monte Sfiorito seemed a mere dim spectre of itself&mdash;a stranger might
+      easily have mistaken it for a vague mass of cloud floating above the
+      horizon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you aware that it 's a singularly lovely afternoon?&rdquo; the Duchessa
+      asked, by and by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so,&rdquo; Peter hazarded, with the
+      least perceptible approach to a meaning bow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Duchessa's face, perhaps, there flickered, for half-a-second, the
+      least perceptible light, as of a comprehending and unresentful smile. But
+      she went on, with fine aloofness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I rather envy you your river, you know. We are too far from it at the
+      castle. Is n't the sound, the murmur, of it delicious? And its colour&mdash;how
+      does it come by such a subtle colour? Is it green? Is it blue? And the
+      diamonds on its surface&mdash;see how they glitter. You know, of course,&rdquo;
+       she questioned, &ldquo;who the owner is of those unequalled gems?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely,&rdquo; Peter answered, &ldquo;the lady paramount of this demesne?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no.&rdquo; She shook her head, smiling. &ldquo;Undine. They are Undine's&mdash;her
+      necklaces and tiaras. No mortal woman's jewel-case contains anything half
+      so brilliant. But look at them&mdash;look at the long chains of them&mdash;how
+      they float for a minute&mdash;and are then drawn down. They are Undine's&mdash;Undine
+      and her companions are sporting with them just below the surface. A moment
+      ago I caught a glimpse of a white arm.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said Peter, nodding thoughtfully, &ldquo;that's what it is to have 'the
+      seeing eye.' But I'm grieved to hear of Undine in such a wanton mood. I
+      had hoped she would still be weeping her unhappy love-affair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! with that horrid, stolid German&mdash;Hildebrandt, was his name?&rdquo;
+       cried the Duchessa. &ldquo;Not she! Long ago, I'm glad to say, she learned to
+      laugh at that, as a mere caprice of her immaturity. However, this is a
+      digression. I want to return to our 'Man of Words.' Tell me&mdash;what is
+      the quality you especially like in it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like its every quality,&rdquo; Peter affirmed, unblushing. &ldquo;Its style, its
+      finish, its concentration; its wit, humour, sentiment; its texture, tone,
+      atmosphere; its scenes, its subject; the paper it's printed on, the type,
+      the binding. But above all, I like its heroine. I think Pauline de
+      Fleuvieres the pearl of human women&mdash;the cleverest, the loveliest,
+      the most desirable, the most exasperating. And also the most feminine. I
+      can't think of her at all as a mere fiction, a mere shadow on paper. I
+      think of her as a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood woman, whom I have
+      actually known. I can see her before me now&mdash;I can see her eyes, full
+      of mystery and mischief&mdash;I can see her exquisite little teeth, as she
+      smiles&mdash;I can see her hair, her hands&mdash;I can almost catch the
+      perfume of her garments. I 'm utterly infatuated with her&mdash;I could
+      commit a hundred follies for her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mercy!&rdquo; exclaimed the Duchessa. &ldquo;You are enthusiastic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The book's admirers are so few, they must endeavour to make up in
+      enthusiasm what they lack in numbers,&rdquo; he submitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;at that rate&mdash;why are they so few?&rdquo; she puzzled. &ldquo;If the
+      book is all you think it, how do you account for its unpopularity?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It could never conceivably be anything but unpopular,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;It has
+      the fatal gift of beauty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa laughed surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is beauty a fatal gift&mdash;in works of art?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;in England,&rdquo; he declared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In England? Why especially in England?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In English-speaking&mdash;in Anglo-Saxon lands, if you prefer. The
+      Anglo-Saxon public is beauty-blind. They have fifty religions&mdash;only
+      one sauce&mdash;and no sense of beauty whatsoever. They can see the nose
+      on one's face&mdash;the mote in their neighbour's eye; they can see when a
+      bargain is good, when a war will be expedient. But the one thing they can
+      never see is beauty. And when, by some rare chance, you catch them in the
+      act of admiring a beautiful object, it will never be for its beauty&mdash;it
+      will be in spite of its beauty for some other, some extra-aesthetic
+      interest it possesses&mdash;some topical or historical interest. Beauty is
+      necessarily detached from all that is topical or historical, or
+      documentary or actual. It is also necessarily an effect of fine shades,
+      delicate values, vanishing distinctions, of evasiveness, inconsequence,
+      suggestion. It is also absolute, unrelated&mdash;it is positive or
+      negative or superlative&mdash;it is never comparative. Well, the
+      Anglo-Saxon public is totally insensible to such things. They can no more
+      feel them, than a blind worm can feel the colours of the rainbow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed again, and regarded him with an air of humorous meditation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that accounts for the unsuccess of 'A Man of Words'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You might as well offer Francois Villon a banquet of Orient pearls.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are bitterly hard on the Anglo-Saxon public.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; he disclaimed, &ldquo;not hard&mdash;but just. I wish them all sorts
+      of prosperity, with a little more taste.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, but surely,&rdquo; she caught him up, &ldquo;if their taste were greater, their
+      prosperity would be less?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;The Greeks were fairly prosperous, were n't
+      they? And the Venetians? And the French are not yet quite bankrupt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still again she laughed&mdash;always with that little air of humorous
+      meditation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&mdash;you don't exactly overwhelm one with compliments,&rdquo; she
+      observed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked alarm, anxiety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't I? What have I neglected?&rdquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You 've never once evinced the slightest curiosity to learn what I think
+      of the book in question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I'm sure you like it,&rdquo; he rejoined hardily. &ldquo;You have 'the seeing
+      eye.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet I'm just a humble member of the Anglo-Saxon public.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;you're a distinguished member of the Anglo-Saxon 'remnant.'
+      Thank heaven, there's a remnant, a little scattered remnant. I'm perfectly
+      sure you like 'A Man of Words.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Like it' is a proposition so general. Perhaps I am burning to tell
+      someone what I think of it in detail.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled into his eyes, a trifle oddly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you are, then I know someone who is burning to hear you,&rdquo; he avowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, I think&mdash;I think...&rdquo; she began, on a note of
+      deliberation. &ldquo;But I 'm afraid, just now, it would take too long to
+      formulate my thought. Perhaps I'll try another day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gave him a derisory little nod&mdash;and in a minute was well up the
+      lawn, towards the castle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter glared after her, his fists clenched, teeth set.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You fiend!&rdquo; he muttered. Then, turning savagely upon himself, &ldquo;You
+      duffer!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, that evening, he said to Marietta, &ldquo;The plot thickens. We've
+      advanced a step. We've reached what the vulgar call a psychological
+      moment. She's seen my Portrait of a Lady. But as yet, if you can believe
+      me, she doesn't dream who painted it; and she has n't recognised the
+      subject. As if one were to face one's image in the glass, and take it for
+      another's! 3&mdash;I 'll&mdash;I 'll double your wages&mdash;if you will
+      induce events to hurry up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      However, as he spoke English, Marietta was in no position to profit by his
+      offer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Peter was walking in the high-road, on the other side of the river&mdash;the
+      great high-road that leads from Bergamo to Milan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was late in the afternoon, and already, in the west, the sky was
+      beginning to put on some of its sunset splendours. In the east, framed to
+      Peter's vision by parallel lines of poplars, it hung like a curtain of
+      dark-blue velvet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter sat on the grass, by the roadside, in the shadow of a hedge&mdash;a
+      rose-bush hedge, of course&mdash;and lighted a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Far down the long white road, against the blue velvet sky, between the
+      poplars, two little spots of black, two small human figures, were moving
+      towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Half absently, he let his eyes accompany them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As they came nearer, they defined themselves as a boy and a girl. Nearer
+      still, he saw that they were ragged and dusty and barefoot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy had three or four gaudy-hued wicker baskets slung over his
+      shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vaguely, tacitly, Peter supposed that they would be the children of some
+      of the peasants of the countryside, on their way home from the village.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As they arrived abreast of him, they paid him the usual peasants' salute.
+      The boy lifted a tattered felt hat from his head, the girl bobbed a
+      courtesy, and &ldquo;Buona sera, Eccellenza,&rdquo; they said in concert, without,
+      however, pausing in their march.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter put his hand in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here, little girl,&rdquo; he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little girl glanced at him, doubting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come here,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face a question, she came up to him; and he gave her a few coppers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To buy sweetmeats,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A thousand thanks; Excellency,&rdquo; said she, bobbing another courtesy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A thousand thanks, Excellency,&rdquo; said the boy, from his distance, again
+      lifting his rag of a hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And they trudged on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Peter looked after them&mdash;and his heart smote him. They were
+      clearly of the poorest of the poor. He thought of Hansel and Gretel. Why
+      had he given them so little? He called to them to stop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little girl came running back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter rose to meet her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may as well buy some ribbons too,&rdquo; he said, and gave her a couple of
+      lire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at the money with surprise&mdash;even with an appearance of
+      hesitation. Plainly, it was a sum, in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all right. Now run along,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A thousand thanks, Excellency,&rdquo; said she, with a third courtesy, and
+      rejoined her brother....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are they going?&rdquo; asked a voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter faced about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There stood the Duchessa, in a bicycling costume, her bicycle beside her.
+      Her bicycling costume was of blue serge, and she wore a jaunty sailor-hat
+      with a blue ribbon. Peter (in spite of the commotion in his breast) was
+      able to remember that this was the first time he had seen her in anything
+      but white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her attention was all upon the children, whom he, perhaps, had more or
+      less banished to Cracklimbo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are they going?&rdquo; she repeated, trouble in her voice and in her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter collected himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The children? I don't know&mdash;I didn't ask. Home, aren't they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Home? Oh, no. They don't live hereabouts,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I know all the poor
+      of this neighbourhood.&mdash;Ohe there! Children! Children!&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But they were quite a hundred yards away, and did not hear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you wish them to come back?&rdquo; asked Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;of course,&rdquo; she answered, with a shade of impatience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his fingers to his lips (you know the schoolboy accomplishment),
+      and gave a long whistle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the children did hear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They halted, and turned round, looking, enquiring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come back&mdash;come back!&rdquo; called the Duchessa, raising her hand, and
+      beckoning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They came back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The pathetic little imps,&rdquo; she murmured while they were on the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was a sturdy, square-built fellow, of twelve, thirteen, with a
+      shock of brown hair, brown cheeks, and sunny brown eyes; with a precocious
+      air of doggedness, of responsibility. He wore an old tail-coat, the
+      tail-coat of a man, ragged, discoloured, falling to his ankles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl was ten or eleven, pale, pinched; hungry, weary, and sorry
+      looking. Her hair too had been brown, upon a time; but now it was faded to
+      something near the tint of ashes, and had almost the effect of being grey.
+      Her pale little forehead was crossed by thin wrinkles, lines of pain, of
+      worry, like an old woman's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa, pushing her bicycle, and followed by Peter, moved down the
+      road, to meet them. Peter had never been so near to her before&mdash;at
+      moments her arm all but brushed his sleeve. I think he blessed the
+      children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are you going?&rdquo; the Duchessa asked, softly, smiling into the girl's
+      sad little face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl had shown no fear of Peter; but apparently she was somewhat
+      frightened by this grand lady. The toes of her bare feet worked nervously
+      in the dust. She hung her head shyly, and eyed her brother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the brother, removing his hat, with the bow of an Italian peasant&mdash;and
+      that is to say, the bow of a courtier&mdash;spoke up bravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Turin, Nobility.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He said it in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, quite as he might have said,
+      &ldquo;To the next farm-house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa, however, had not bargained for an answer of this measure.
+      Startled, doubting her ears perhaps, &ldquo;To&mdash;Turin&mdash;!&rdquo; she
+      exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Excellency,&rdquo; said the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;but Turin&mdash;Turin is hundreds of kilometres from here,&rdquo; she
+      said, in a kind of gasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Excellency,&rdquo; said the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going to Turin&mdash;you two children&mdash;walking&mdash;like
+      that!&rdquo; she persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Excellency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;but it will take you a month.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon, noble lady,&rdquo; said the boy. &ldquo;With your Excellency's permission, we
+      were told it should take fifteen days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where do you come from?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From Bergamo, Excellency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When did you leave Bergamo?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yesterday morning, Excellency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The little girl is your sister?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Excellency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you a mother and father?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A father, Excellency. The mother is dead.&rdquo; Each of the children made the
+      Sign of the Cross; and Peter was somewhat surprised, no doubt, to see the
+      Duchessa do likewise. He had yet to learn the beautiful custom of that
+      pious Lombard land, whereby, when the Dead are mentioned, you make the
+      Sign of the Cross, and, pausing reverently for a moment, say in silence
+      the traditional prayer of the Church:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the
+      Mercy of God, rest in peace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And where is your father?&rdquo; the Duchessa asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Turin, Excellency,&rdquo; answered the boy. &ldquo;He is a glass-blower. After the
+      strike at Bergamo, he went to Turin to seek work. Now he has found it. So
+      he has sent for us to come to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you two children&mdash;alone&mdash;are going to walk all the way to
+      Turin!&rdquo; She could not get over the pitiful wonder of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Excellency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The heart-rending little waifs,&rdquo; she said, in English, with something
+      like a sob. Then, in Italian, &ldquo;But&mdash;but how do you live by the way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy touched his shoulder-load of baskets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We sell these, Excellency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is their price?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thirty soldi, Excellency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you sold many since you started?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy looked away; and now it was his turn to hang his head, and to let
+      his toes work nervously in the dust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't you sold any?&rdquo; she exclaimed, drawing her conclusions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Excellency. The people would not buy,&rdquo; he owned, in a dull voice,
+      keeping his eyes down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poverino,&rdquo; she murmured. &ldquo;Where are you going to sleep to-night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a house, Excellency,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that seemed to strike the Duchessa as somewhat vague.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In what house?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not know, Excellency,&rdquo; he confessed. &ldquo;We will find a house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you like to come back with me, and sleep at my house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy and girl looked at each other, taking mute counsel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, &ldquo;Pardon, noble lady&mdash;with your Excellency's permission, is it
+      far?&rdquo; the boy questioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid it is not very near&mdash;three or four kilometres.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the children looked at each other, conferring. Afterwards, the boy
+      shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A thousand thanks, Excellency. With your permission, we must not turn
+      back. We must walk on till later. At night we will find a house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are too proud to own that their house will be a hedge,&rdquo; she said to
+      Peter, again in English. &ldquo;Aren't you hungry?&rdquo; she asked the children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Excellency. We had bread in the village, below there,&rdquo; answered the
+      boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will not come home with me, and have a good dinner, and a good
+      night's sleep?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon, Excellency. With your favour, the father would not wish us to
+      turn back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa looked at the little girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little girl wore a medal of the Immaculate Conception on a ribbon
+      round her neck&mdash;a forlorn blue ribbon, soiled and frayed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you have a holy medal,&rdquo; said the Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, noble lady,&rdquo; said the girl, dropping a courtesy, and lifting up her
+      sad little weazened face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has been saying her prayers all along the road,&rdquo; the boy volunteered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is right,&rdquo; approved the Duchessa. &ldquo;You have not made your First
+      Communion yet, have you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Excellency,&rdquo; said the girl. &ldquo;I shall make it next year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you?&rdquo; the Duchessa asked the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I made mine at Corpus Christi,&rdquo; said the boy, with a touch of pride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa turned to Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know, I haven't a penny in my pocket. I have come out without my
+      purse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How much ought one to give them?&rdquo; Peter asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, there is the fear that they might be robbed,&rdquo; she reflected.
+      &ldquo;If one should give them a note of any value, they would have to change
+      it; and they would probably be robbed. What to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will speak to the boy,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;Would you like to go to Turin by
+      train?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy and girl looked at each other. &ldquo;Yes, Excellency,&rdquo; said the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if I give you money for your fare, will you know how to take care of
+      it&mdash;how to prevent people from robbing you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, Excellency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could take the train this evening, at Venzona, about two kilometres
+      from here, in the direction you are walking. In an hour or two you would
+      arrive at Milan; there you would change into the train for Turin. You
+      would be at Turin to-morrow morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Excellency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if I give you money, you will not let people rob you? If I give you a
+      hundred lire?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy drew back, stared, as if frightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A hundred lire&mdash;?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy looked at his sister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon, Nobility,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;With your condescension, does it cost a
+      hundred lire to go to Turin by train?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no. I think it costs eight or ten.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the boy looked at his sister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon, Nobility. With your Excellency's permission, we should not desire
+      a hundred lire then,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter and the Duchessa were not altogether to be blamed, I hope, if they
+      exchanged the merest hint of a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, if I should give you fifty?&rdquo; Peter asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fifty lire, Excellency?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still again the boy sought counsel of his sister, with his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Excellency,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are sure you will be able to take care of it&mdash;you will not let
+      people rob you,&rdquo; the Duchessa put in, anxious. &ldquo;They will wish to rob you.
+      If you go to sleep in the train, they will try to pick your pocket.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will hide it, noble lady. No one shall rob me. If I go to sleep in the
+      train, I will sit on it, and my sister will watch. If she goes to sleep, I
+      will watch,&rdquo; the boy promised confidently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must give it to him in the smallest change you can possibly scrape
+      together,&rdquo; she advised Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And with one-lira, two-lira, ten-lira notes, and with a little silver and
+      copper, he made up the amount.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A thousand thanks, Excellency,&rdquo; said the boy, with a bow that was
+      magnificent; and he proceeded to distribute the money between various
+      obscure pockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A thousand thanks, Excellency,&rdquo; said the girl, with a courtesy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Addio, a buon' viaggio,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Addio, Eccellenze,&rdquo; said the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Addio, Eccellenze,&rdquo; said the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Duchessa impulsively stooped down, and kissed the girl on her poor
+      little wrinkled brow. And when she stood up, Peter saw that her eyes were
+      wet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The children moved off. They moved off, whispering together, and
+      gesticulating, after the manner of their race: discussing something.
+      Presently they stopped; and the boy came running back, while his sister
+      waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He doffed his hat, and said, &ldquo;A thousand pardons, Excellency-&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes? What is it?&rdquo; Peter asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With your Excellency's favour&mdash;is it obligatory that we should take
+      the train?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Obligatory?&rdquo; puzzled Peter. &ldquo;How do you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it is not obligatory, we would prefer, with the permission of your
+      Excellency, to save the money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;but then you will have to walk!&rdquo; cried Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if it is not obligatory to take the train, we would pray your
+      Excellency's permission to save the money. We should like to save the
+      money, to give it to the father. The father is very poor. Fifty lire is so
+      much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This time it was Peter who looked for counsel to the Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes, still bright with tears, responded, &ldquo;Let them do as they will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it is not obligatory&mdash;it is only recommended,&rdquo; he said to the
+      boy, with a smile that he could n't help. &ldquo;Do as you will. But if I were
+      you, I should spare my poor little feet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mille grazie, Eccellenze,&rdquo; the boy said, with a final sweep of his
+      tattered hat. He ran back to his sister; and next moment they were walking
+      resolutely on, westward, &ldquo;into the great red light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa and Peter were silent for a while, looking after them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They dwindled to dots in the distance, and then, where the road turned,
+      disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the Duchessa spoke&mdash;but almost as if speaking to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There, Felix Wildmay, you writer of tales, is a subject made to your
+      hand,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may guess whether Peter was startled. Was it possible that she had
+      found him out? A sound, confused, embarrassed, something composite,
+      between an oh and ayes, seemed to expire in his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Duchessa did n't appear to heed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think it would be a touching episode for your friend to write a
+      story round?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may guess whether he was relieved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;oh, yes,&rdquo; he agreed, with the precipitancy of a man who, in his
+      relief, would agree to anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you ever seen such courage?&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;The wonderful babies!
+      Fancy fifteen days, fifteen days and nights, alone, unprotected, on the
+      highway, those poor little atoms! Down in their hearts they are really
+      filled with terror. Who would n't be, with such a journey before him? But
+      how finely they concealed it, mastered it! Oh, I hope they won't be
+      robbed. God help them&mdash;God help them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God help them, indeed,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the little girl, with her medal of the Immaculate Conception. The
+      father, after all, can hardly be the brute one might suspect, since he has
+      given them a religious education. Oh, I am sure, I am sure, it was the
+      Blessed Virgin herself who sent us across their path, in answer to that
+      poor little creature's prayers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Peter, ambiguously perhaps. But he liked the way in which she
+      united him to herself in the pronoun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which, of course,&rdquo; she added, smiling gravely into his eyes, &ldquo;seems the
+      height of absurdity to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should it seem the height of absurdity to me?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a Protestant, I suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose so. But what of that? At all events, I believe there are more
+      things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the usual philosophies.
+      And I see no reason why it should not have been the Blessed Virgin who
+      sent us across their path.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would your Protestant pastors and masters do, if they heard you?
+      Isn't that what they call Popish superstition?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I daresay. But I'm not sure that there's any such thing as superstition.
+      Superstition, in its essence, is merely a recognition of the truth that in
+      a universe of mysteries and contradictions, like ours, nothing conceivable
+      or inconceivable is impossible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no, no,&rdquo; she objected. &ldquo;Superstition is the belief in something that
+      is ugly and bad and unmeaning. That is the difference between superstition
+      and religion. Religion is the belief in something that is beautiful and
+      good and significant&mdash;something that throws light into the dark
+      places of life&mdash;that helps us to see and to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;I admit the distinction.&rdquo; After a little suspension,
+      &ldquo;I thought,&rdquo; he questioned, &ldquo;that all Catholics were required to go to
+      Mass on Sunday?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course&mdash;so they are,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;but you&mdash;&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hear Mass not on Sunday only&mdash;I hear it every morning of my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh? Indeed? I beg your pardon,&rdquo; he stumbled. &ldquo;I&mdash;one&mdash;one never
+      sees you at the village church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. We have a chapel and a chaplain at the castle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She mounted her bicycle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye,&rdquo; she said, and lightly rode away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So-ho! Her bigotry is not such a negligible quantity, after all,&rdquo; Peter
+      concluded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what,&rdquo; he demanded of Marietta, as she ministered to his wants at
+      dinner, &ldquo;what does one barrier more or less matter, when people are
+      already divided by a gulf that never can be traversed? You see that
+      river?&rdquo; He pointed through his open window to the Aco. &ldquo;It is a symbol.
+      She stands on one side of it, I stand on the other, and we exchange little
+      jokes. But the river is always there, flowing between us, separating us.
+      She is the daughter of a lord, and the widow of a duke, and the fairest of
+      her sex, and a millionaire, and a Roman Catholic. What am I? Oh, I don't
+      deny I 'm clever. But for the rest? ... My dear Marietta, I am simply, in
+      one word, the victim of a misplaced attachment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Non capisco Francese,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      And after that, for I forget how many days, Peter and the Duchessa did not
+      meet; and so he sank low and lower in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing that can befall us, optimists aver, is without its value; and
+      this, I have heard, is especially true if we happen to be literary men.
+      All is grist that comes to a writer's mill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By his present experience, accordingly, Peter learned&mdash;and in the
+      regretful prose of some future masterpiece will perhaps be enabled to
+      remember&mdash;how exceeding great is the impatience of the lovesick, with
+      what febrile vehemence the smitten heart can burn, and to what improbable
+      lengths hours and minutes can on occasions stretch themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried many methods of distraction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was always the panorama of his valley&mdash;the dark-blue lake, pale
+      Monte Sfiorito, the frowning Gnisi, the smiling uplands westward. There
+      were always the sky, the clouds, the clear sunshine, the crisp-etched
+      shadows; and in the afternoon there was always the wondrous opalescent
+      haze of August, filling every distance. There was always his garden&mdash;there
+      were the great trees, with the light sifting through high spaces of
+      feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees, the
+      butterflies, with their colour, and their fragrance, and their music;
+      there was his tinkling fountain, in its nimbus of prismatic spray; there
+      was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a half-hour's walk, there was
+      the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top church, its odd little
+      shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded frescoed house-fronts, its
+      busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian life:&mdash;the cobbler tapping in
+      his stall; women gossiping at their toilets; children sprawling in the
+      dirt, chasing each other, shouting; men drinking, playing mora,
+      quarrelling, laughing, singing, twanging mandolines, at the tables under
+      the withered bush of the wine-shop; and two or three more pensive citizens
+      swinging their legs from the parapet of the bridge, and angling for fish
+      that never bit, in the impetuous stream below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter looked at these things; and, it is to be presumed, he saw them. But,
+      for all the joy they gave him, he, this cultivator of the sense of beauty,
+      might have been the basest unit of his own purblind Anglo-Saxon public.
+      They were the background for an absent figure. They were the
+      stage-accessories of a drama whose action was arrested. They were an empty
+      theatre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to read. He had brought a trunkful of books to Villa Floriano;
+      but that book had been left behind which could fix his interest now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to write&mdash;and wondered, in a kind of daze, that any man
+      should ever have felt the faintest ambition to do a thing so thankless and
+      so futile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall never write again. Writing,&rdquo; he generalised, and possibly not
+      without some reason, &ldquo;when it is n't the sordidest of trades, is a mere
+      fatuous assertion of one's egotism. Breaking stones in the street were a
+      nobler occupation; weaving ropes of sand were better sport. The only
+      things that are worth writing are inexpressible, and can't be written. The
+      only things that can be written are obvious and worthless&mdash;the very
+      crackling of thorns under a pot. Oh, why does n't she turn up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the worst of it was that at any moment, for aught he knew, she might
+      turn up. That was the worst of it, and the best. It kept hope alive, only
+      to torture hope. It encouraged him to wait, to watch, to expect; to linger
+      in his garden, gazing hungry-eyed up the lawns of Ventirose, striving to
+      pierce the foliage that embowered the castle; to wander the country
+      round-about, scanning every vista, scrutinising every shape and shadow, a
+      tweed-clad Gastibelza. At any moment, indeed, she might turn up; but the
+      days passed&mdash;the hypocritic days&mdash;and she did not turn up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta, the kind soul, noticing his despondency, sought in divers
+      artless ways to cheer him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening she burst into his sitting-room with the effect of a small
+      explosion, excitement in every line of her brown old face and wiry little
+      figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The fireflies! The fireflies, Signorino!&rdquo; she cried, with strenuous
+      gestures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What fireflies?&rdquo; asked he, with phlegm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the feast of St. Dominic. The fireflies have arrived. They arrive
+      every year on the feast of St. Dominic. They are the beads of his rosary.
+      They are St. Dominic's Aves. There are thousands of them. Come, Signorino,
+      Come and see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her black eyes snapped. She waved her hands urgently towards the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter languidly got up, languidly crossed the room, looked out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were, in truth, thousands of them, thousands and thousands of tiny
+      primrose flames, circling, fluttering, rising, sinking, in the purple
+      blackness of the night, like snowflakes in a wind, palpitating like hearts
+      of living gold&mdash;Jove descending upon Danae invisible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Son carin', eh?&rdquo; cried eager Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hum&mdash;yes&mdash;pretty enough,&rdquo; he grudgingly acknowledged. &ldquo;But even
+      so?&rdquo; the ingrate added, as he turned away, and let himself drop back into
+      his lounging-chair. &ldquo;My dear good woman, no amount of prettiness can
+      disguise the fundamental banality of things. Your fireflies&mdash;St.
+      Dominic's beads, if you like&mdash;and, apropos of that, do you know what
+      they call them in America?&mdash;they call them lightning-bugs, if you can
+      believe me&mdash;remark the difference between southern euphuism and
+      western bluntness&mdash;your fireflies are pretty enough, I grant. But
+      they are tinsel pasted on the Desert of Sahara. They are condiments added
+      to a dinner of dust and ashes. Life, trick it out as you will, is just an
+      incubus&mdash;is just the Old Man of the Sea. Language fails me to convey
+      to you any notion how heavily he sits on my poor shoulders. I thought I
+      had suffered from ennui in my youth. But the malady merely plays with the
+      green fruit; it reserves its serious ravages for the ripe. I can promise
+      you 't is not a laughing matter. Have you ever had a fixed idea? Have you
+      ever spent days and nights racking your brain, importuning the unanswering
+      Powers, to learn whether there was&mdash;well, whether there was Another
+      Man, for instance? Oh, bring me drink. Bring me Seltzer water and
+      Vermouth. I will seek nepenthe at the bottom of the wine-cup.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Was there another man? Why should there not be? And yet was there? In her
+      continued absence, the question came back persistently, and scarcely
+      contributed to his peace of mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few days later, nothing discouraged, &ldquo;Would you like to have a good
+      laugh, Signorino?&rdquo; Marietta enquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he answered, apathetic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then do me the favour to come,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She led him out of his garden, to the gate of a neighbouring meadow. A
+      beautiful black-horned white cow stood there, her head over the bars,
+      looking up and down the road, and now and then uttering a low distressful
+      &ldquo;moo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See her,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see her. Well&mdash;?&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This morning they took her calf from her&mdash;to wean it,&rdquo; said
+      Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did they, the cruel things? Well&mdash;?&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And ever since, she has stood there by the gate, looking down the road,
+      waiting, calling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The poor dear. Well&mdash;?&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But do you not see, Signorino? Look at her eyes. She is weeping&mdash;weeping
+      like a Christian.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter looked-and, sure enough, from the poor cow's eyes tears were
+      falling, steadily, rapidly: big limpid tears that trickled down her cheek,
+      her great homely hairy cheek, and dropped on the grass: tears of helpless
+      pain, uncomprehending endurance. &ldquo;Why have they done this thing to me?&rdquo;
+       they seemed dumbly to cry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you ever seen a cow weep before? Is it comical, at least?&rdquo; demanded
+      Marietta, exultant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Comical&mdash;?&rdquo; Peter gasped. &ldquo;Comical&mdash;!&rdquo; he groaned....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then he spoke to the cow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor dear&mdash;poor dear,&rdquo; he repeated. He patted her soft warm neck,
+      and scratched her between the horns and along the dewlap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor dear&mdash;poor dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The cow lifted up her head, and rested her great chin on Peter's shoulder,
+      breathing upon his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you know that we are companions in misery, don't you?&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;They have taken my calf from me too&mdash;though my calf, indeed, was
+      only a calf in an extremely metaphorical sense&mdash;and it never was
+      exactly mine, anyhow&mdash;I daresay it's belonged from the beginning to
+      another man. You, at least, have n't that gall and wormwood added to your
+      cup. And now you must really try to pull yourself together. It's no good
+      crying. And besides, there are more calves in the sea than have ever been
+      taken from it. You'll have a much handsomer and fatter one next time. And
+      besides, you must remember that your loss subserves someone else's gain&mdash;the
+      farmer would never have done it if it hadn't been to his advantage. If you
+      're an altruist, that should comfort you. And you must n't mind Marietta,&mdash;you
+      must n't mind her laughter. Marietta is a Latin. The Latin conception of
+      what is laughable differs by the whole span of heaven from the Teuton. You
+      and I are Teutons.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Teutons&mdash;?&rdquo; questioned Marietta wrinkling her brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;Germanic,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I thought the Signorino was English?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So he is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the cow is not Germanic. White, with black horns, that is the purest
+      Roman breed, Signorino.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fa niente,&rdquo; he instructed her. &ldquo;Cows and Englishmen, and all such
+      sentimental cattle, including Germans, are Germanic. Italians are Latin&mdash;with
+      a touch of the Goth and Vandal. Lions and tigers growl and fight because
+      they're Mohammedans. Dogs still bear without abuse the grand old name of
+      Sycophant. Cats are of the princely line of Persia, and worship fire,
+      fish, and flattery&mdash;as you may have noticed. Geese belong
+      indifferently to any race you like&mdash;they are cosmopolitans; and I've
+      known here and there a person who, without distinction of nationality, was
+      a duck. In fact, you're rather by way of being a duck yourself: And now,&rdquo;
+       he perorated, &ldquo;never deny again that I can talk nonsense with an aching
+      heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the same,&rdquo; insisted Marietta, &ldquo;it is very comical to see a cow weep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At any rate,&rdquo; retorted Peter, &ldquo;it is not in the least comical to hear a
+      hyaena laugh.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never heard one,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pray that you never may. The sound would make an old woman of you. It's
+      quite blood-curdling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Davvero?&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Davvero,&rdquo; he assured her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And meanwhile the cow stood there, with her head on his shoulder, silently
+      weeping, weeping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave her a farewell rub along the nose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Your breath is like meadowsweet. So dry your tears,
+      and set your hopes upon the future. I 'll come and see you again
+      to-morrow, and I 'll bring you some nice coarse salt. Good-bye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But when he went to see her on the morrow, she was grazing peacefully; and
+      she ate the salt he brought her with heart-whole bovine relish&mdash;putting
+      out her soft white pad of a tongue, licking it deliberately from his hand,
+      savouring it tranquilly, and crunching the bigger grains with ruminative
+      enjoyment between her teeth. So soon consoled! They were companions in
+      misery no longer. &ldquo;I 'm afraid you are a Latin, after all,&rdquo; he said, and
+      left her with a sense of disappointment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That afternoon Marietta asked, &ldquo;Would you care to visit the castle,
+      Signorino?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was seated under his willow-tree, by the river, smoking cigarettes&mdash;burning
+      superfluous time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta pointed towards Ventirose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The family are away. In the absence of the family, the public are
+      admitted, upon presentation of their cards.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oho!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;So the family are away, are they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Signorino.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha!&rdquo; cried he. &ldquo;The family are away. That explains everything. Have&mdash;have
+      they been gone long?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since a week, ten days, Signorino.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A week! Ten days!&rdquo; He started up, indignant. &ldquo;You secretive wretch! Why
+      have you never breathed a word of this to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta looked rather frightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not know it myself, Signorino,&rdquo; was her meek apology. &ldquo;I heard it
+      in the village this morning, when the Signorino sent me to buy coarse
+      salt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I see.&rdquo; He sank back upon his rustic bench. &ldquo;You are forgiven.&rdquo; He
+      extended his hand in sign of absolution. &ldquo;Are they ever coming back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally, Signorino.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What makes you think so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they will naturally come back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I felicitate you upon your simple faith. When?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, fra poco. They have gone to Rome.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Rome? You're trifling with me. People do not go to Rome in August.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon, Signorino. People go to Rome for the feast of the Assumption.
+      That is the 15th. Afterwards they come back,&rdquo; said Marietta, firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I withdraw my protest,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;They have gone to Rome for the feast
+      of the Assumption. Afterwards they will come back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely, Signorino. But you have now the right to visit the castle,
+      upon presentation of your card. You address yourself to the porter at the
+      lodge. The castle is grand, magnificent. The Court of Honour alone is
+      thirty metres long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta stretched her hands to right and left as far as they would go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marietta,&rdquo; Peter enquired solemnly, &ldquo;are you familiar with the tragedy of
+      'Hamlet'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta blinked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Signorino.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have never read it,&rdquo; he pursued, &ldquo;in that famous edition from which
+      the character of the Prince of Denmark happened to be omitted?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta shook her head, wearily, patiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wearily, patiently, &ldquo;No, Signorino,&rdquo; she replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Neither have I,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;and I don't desire to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta shrugged her shoulders; then returned gallantly to her charge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you would care to visit the castle, Signorino, you could see the crypt
+      which contains the tombs of the family of Farfalla, the former owners.
+      They are of black marble and alabaster, with gilding&mdash;very rich. You
+      could also see the wine-cellars. Many years ago a tun there burst, and a
+      serving man was drowned in the wine. You could also see the bed in which
+      Nabulione, the Emperor of Europe, slept, when he was in this country. Also
+      the ancient kitchen. Many years ago, in a storm, the skeleton of a man
+      fell down the chimney, out upon the hearth. Also what is called the Court
+      of Foxes. Many years ago there was a plague of foxes; and the foxes came
+      down from the forest like a great army, thousands of them. And the lords
+      of the castle, and the peasants, and the village people, all, all, had to
+      run away like rabbits&mdash;or the foxes would have eaten them. It was in
+      what they call the Court of Foxes that the King of the foxes held his
+      court. There is also the park. In the park there are statues, ruins, and
+      white peacocks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have I in common with ruins and white peacocks?&rdquo; Peter demanded
+      tragically, when Marietta had brought her much-gesticulated exposition to
+      a close. &ldquo;Let me impress upon you once for all that I am not a tripper. As
+      for your castle&mdash;you invite me to a banquet-hall deserted. As for
+      your park, I see quite as much of it as I wish to see, from the seclusion
+      of my own pleached garden. I learned long ago the folly of investigating
+      things too closely, the wisdom of leaving things in the vague. At present
+      the park of Ventirose provides me with the raw material for day-dreams. It
+      is a sort of looking-glass country,&mdash;I can see just so far into it,
+      and no farther&mdash;that lies beyond is mystery, is potentiality&mdash;terra
+      incognita, which I can populate with monsters or pleasant phantoms, at my
+      whim. Why should you attempt to deprive me of so innocent a recreation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After the return of the family,&rdquo; said Marietta, &ldquo;the public will no
+      longer be admitted. Meantime&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Upon presentation of my card, the porter will conduct me from
+      disenchantment to disenchantment. No, thank you. Now, if it were the other
+      way round, it would be different. If it were the castle and the park that
+      had gone to Rome, and if the family could be visited on presentation of my
+      card, I might be tempted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that would be impossible, Signorino,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice walking with a priest&mdash;ay, I am not sure it would n't be
+      more accurate to say conspiring with a priest: but you shall judge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were in a room of the Palazzo Udeschini, at Rome&mdash;a reception
+      room, on the piano nobile. Therefore you see it: for are not all
+      reception-rooms in Roman palaces alike?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vast, lofty, sombre; the walls hung with dark-green tapestry&mdash;a
+      pattern of vertical stripes, dark green and darker green; here and there a
+      great dark painting, a Crucifixion, a Holy Family, in a massive dim-gold
+      frame; dark-hued rugs on the tiled floor; dark pieces of furniture,
+      tables, cabinets, dark and heavy; and tall windows, bare of curtains at
+      this season, opening upon a court&mdash;a wide stone-eaved court, planted
+      with fantastic-leaved eucalyptus-trees, in the midst of which a brown old
+      fountain, indefatigable, played its sibilant monotone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the streets there were the smells, the noises, the heat, the glare of
+      August of August in Rome, &ldquo;the most Roman of the months,&rdquo; they say;
+      certainly the hottest, noisiest, noisomest, and most glaring. But here all
+      was shadow, coolness, stillness, fragrance-the fragrance of the clean air
+      coming in from among the eucalyptus-trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice, critical-eyed, stood before a pier-glass, between two of the
+      tall windows, turning her head from side to side, craning her neck a
+      little&mdash;examining (if I must confess it) the effect of a new hat. It
+      was a very stunning hat&mdash;if a man's opinion hath any pertinence; it
+      was beyond doubt very complicated. There was an upward-springing black
+      brim; there was a downward-sweeping black feather; there was a defiant
+      white aigrette not unlike the Shah of Persia's; there were glints of red.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest sat in an arm-chair&mdash;one of those stiff, upright Roman
+      arm-chairs, which no one would ever dream of calling easy-chairs,
+      high-backed, covered with hard leather, studded with steel nails&mdash;and
+      watched her, smiling amusement, indulgence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was an oldish priest&mdash;sixty, sixty-five. He was small, lightly
+      built, lean-faced, with delicate-strong features: a prominent, delicate
+      nose; a well-marked, delicate jaw-bone, ending in a prominent, delicate
+      chin; a large, humorous mouth, the full lips delicately chiselled; a high,
+      delicate, perhaps rather narrow brow, rising above humorous grey eyes,
+      rather deep-set. Then he had silky-soft smooth white hair, and, topping
+      the occiput, a tonsure that might have passed for a natural bald spot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was decidedly clever-looking; he was aristocratic-looking,
+      distinguished-looking; but he was, above all, pleasant-looking,
+      kindly-looking, sweet-looking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wore a plain black cassock, by no means in its first youth&mdash;brown
+      along the seams, and, at the salient angles, at the shoulders, at the
+      elbows, shining with the lustre of hard service. Even without his cassock,
+      I imagine, you would have divined him for a clergyman&mdash;he bore the
+      clerical impress, that odd indefinable air of clericism which everyone
+      recognises, though it might not be altogether easy to tell just where or
+      from what it takes its origin. In the garb of an Anglican&mdash;there
+      being nothing, at first blush, necessarily Italian, necessarily
+      un-English, in his face&mdash;he would have struck you, I think, as a
+      pleasant, shrewd old parson of the scholarly&mdash;earnest type, mildly
+      donnish, with a fondness for gentle mirth. What, however, you would
+      scarcely have divined&mdash;unless you had chanced to notice,
+      inconspicuous in this sober light, the red sash round his waist, or the
+      amethyst on the third finger of his right hand&mdash;was his rank in the
+      Roman hierarchy. I have the honour of presenting his Eminence Egidio Maria
+      Cardinal Udeschini, formerly Bishop of Cittareggio, Prefect of the
+      Congregation of Archives and Inscriptions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was his title ecclesiastical. He had two other titles. He was a
+      Prince of the Udeschini by accident of birth. But his third title was
+      perhaps his most curious. It had been conferred upon him informally by the
+      populace of the Roman slum in which his titular church, St. Mary of the
+      Lilies, was situated: the little Uncle of the Poor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Italians measure wealth, Cardinal Udeschini was a wealthy man. What
+      with his private fortune and official stipends, he commanded an income of
+      something like a hundred thousand lire. He allowed himself five thousand
+      lire a year for food, clothing, and general expenses. Lodging and service
+      he had for nothing in the palace of his family. The remaining ninety-odd
+      thousand lire of his budget... Well, we all know that titles can be
+      purchased in Italy; and that was no doubt the price he paid for the title
+      I have mentioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, it was not in money only that Cardinal Udeschim paid. He paid
+      also in labour. I have said that his titular church was in a slum. Rome
+      surely contained no slum more fetid, none more perilous&mdash;a region of
+      cut-throat alleys, south of the Ghetto, along the Tiber bank. Night after
+      night, accompanied by his stout young vicar, Don Giorgio Appolloni, the
+      Cardinal worked there as hard as any hard-working curate: visiting the
+      sick, comforting the afflicted, admonishing the knavish, persuading the
+      drunken from their taverns, making peace between the combative. Not
+      infrequently, when he came home, he would add a pair of stilettos to his
+      already large collection of such relics. And his homecomings were apt to
+      be late&mdash;oftener than not, after midnight; and sometimes, indeed, in
+      the vague twilight of morning, at the hour when, as he once expressed it
+      to Don Giorgio, &ldquo;the tired burglar is just lying down to rest.&rdquo; And every
+      Saturday evening the Cardinal Prefect of Archives and Inscriptions sat for
+      three hours boxed up in his confessional, like any parish priest&mdash;in
+      his confessional at St. Mary of the Lilies, where the penitents who
+      breathed their secrets into his ears, and received his fatherly
+      counsels... I beg your pardon. One must not, of course, remember his rags
+      or his sores, when Lazarus approaches that tribunal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I don't pretend that the Cardinal was a saint; I am sure he was not a
+      prig. For all his works of supererogation, his life was a life of pomp and
+      luxury, compared to the proper saint's life. He wore no hair shirt; I
+      doubt if he knew the taste of the Discipline. He had his weaknesses, his
+      foibles&mdash;even, if you will, his vices. I have intimated that he was
+      fond of a jest. &ldquo;The Sacred College,&rdquo; I heard him remark one day, &ldquo;has
+      fifty centres of gravity. I sometimes fear that I am its centre of
+      levity.&rdquo; He was also fond of music. He was also fond of snuff:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'T is an abominable habit,&rdquo; he admitted. &ldquo;I can't tolerate it at all&mdash;in
+      others. When I was Bishop of Cittareggio, I discountenanced it utterly
+      among my clergy. But for myself&mdash;I need not say there are special
+      circumstances. Oddly enough, by the bye, at Cittareggio each separate
+      member of my clergy was able to plead special circumstances for himself I
+      have tried to give it up, and the effort has spoiled my temper&mdash;turned
+      me into a perfect old shrew. For my friends' sake, therefore, I appease
+      myself with an occasional pinch. You see, tobacco is antiseptic. It's an
+      excellent preservative of the milk of human kindness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The friends in question kept him supplied with sound rappee. Jests and
+      music he was abundantly competent to supply himself. He played the piano
+      and the organ, and he sang&mdash;in a clear, sweet, slightly faded tenor.
+      Of secular composers his favourites were &ldquo;the lucid Scarlatti, the
+      luminous Bach.&rdquo; But the music that roused him to enthusiasm was Gregorian.
+      He would have none other at St. Mary of the Lilies. He had trained his
+      priests and his people there to sing it admirably&mdash;you should have
+      heard them sing Vespers; and he sang it admirably himself&mdash;you should
+      have heard him sing a Mass&mdash;you should have heard that sweet old
+      tenor voice of his in the Preface and the Pater Noster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So, then, Beatrice stood before a pier-glass, and studied her new hat;
+      whilst the Cardinal, amused, indulgent, sat in his high-backed armchair,
+      and watched her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;? What do you think?&rdquo; she asked, turning towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You appeal to me as an expert?&rdquo; he questioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His speaking-voice, as well as his singing-voice, was sweet, but with a
+      kind of trenchant edge upon it, a genial asperity, that gave it character,
+      tang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As one who should certainly be able to advise,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then&mdash;&rdquo; said he. He took his chin into his hand, as if it were
+      a beard, and looked up at her, considering; and the lines of amusement&mdash;the
+      &ldquo;parentheses&rdquo;&mdash;deepened at either side of his mouth. &ldquo;Well, then, I
+      think if the feather were to be lifted a little higher in front, and
+      brought down a little lower behind&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good gracious, I don't mean my hat,&rdquo; cried Beatrice. &ldquo;What in the world
+      can an old dear like you know about hats?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a further deepening of the parentheses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely,&rdquo; he contended, &ldquo;a cardinal should know much. Is it not 'the badge
+      of all our tribe,' as your poet Byron says?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice laughed. Then, &ldquo;Byron&mdash;?&rdquo; she doubted, with a look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal waved his hand&mdash;a gesture of amiable concession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, if you prefer, Shakespeare. Everything in English is one or the
+      other. We will not fall out, like the Morellists, over an attribution. The
+      point is that I should be a good judge of hats.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took snuff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a shame you haven't a decent snuff-box,&rdquo; Beatrice observed, with an
+      eye on the enamelled wooden one, cheap and shabby, from which he helped
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The box is but the guinea-stamp; the snuff's the thing.&mdash;Was it
+      Shakespeare or Byron who said that?&rdquo; enquired the Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think it must have been Pulcinella. I'll give you a lovely silver one,
+      if you'll accept it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you? Really?&rdquo; asked the Cardinal, alert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I will. It's a shame you haven't one already.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would a lovely silver one cost?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. It does n't matter,&rdquo; answered she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But approximately? More or less?&rdquo; he pursued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, a couple of hundred lire, more or less, I daresay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A couple of hundred lire?&rdquo; He glanced up, alerter. &ldquo;Do you happen to have
+      that amount of money on your person?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice (the unwary woman) hunted for her pocket&mdash;took out her purse&mdash;computed
+      its contents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she innocently answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal chuckled&mdash;the satisfied chuckle of one whose unsuspected
+      tactics have succeeded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then give me the couple of hundred lire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put forth his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Beatrice held back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What for?&rdquo; she asked, suspicion waking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I shall have uses for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His outstretched hand&mdash;a slim old tapering, bony hand, in colour like
+      dusky ivory&mdash;closed peremptorily, in a dumb-show of receiving; and
+      now, by the bye, you could not have failed to notice the big lucent
+      amethyst, in its setting of elaborately-wrought pale gold, on the third
+      finger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come! Give!&rdquo; he insisted, imperative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rueful but resigned, Beatrice shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have caught me finely,&rdquo; she sighed, and gave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You should n't have jingled your purse&mdash;you should n't have flaunted
+      your wealth in my face,&rdquo; laughed the Cardinal, putting away the notes. He
+      took snuff again. &ldquo;I think I honestly earned that pinch,&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At any rate,&rdquo; said Beatrice, laying what unction she could to her soul,
+      &ldquo;I am acquainted with a dignitary of the Church, who has lost a handsome
+      silver snuffbox&mdash;beautiful repousse work, with his arms engraved on
+      the lid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I,&rdquo; retaliated he, &ldquo;I am acquainted with a broken-down old doctor and
+      his wife, in Trastevere, who shall have meat and wine at dinner for the
+      next two months&mdash;at the expense of a niece of mine. 'I am so glad,'
+      as Alice of Wonderland says, 'that you married into our family.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alice of Wonderland&mdash;?&rdquo; doubted Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal waved his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, if you prefer, Punch. Everything in English is one or the other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice laughed. &ldquo;It was the I of which especially surprised my English
+      ear,&rdquo; she explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am your debtor for two hundred lire. I cannot quarrel with you over a
+      particle,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why,&rdquo; asked she, &ldquo;why did you give yourself such superfluous pains?
+      Why couldn't you ask me for the money point-blank? Why lure it from me, by
+      trick and device?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal chuckled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, one must keep one's hand in. And one must not look like a Jesuit for
+      nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you look like a Jesuit?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been told so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By whom&mdash;for mercy's sake?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By a gentleman I had the pleasure of meeting not long ago in the train&mdash;a
+      very gorgeous gentleman, with gold chains and diamonds flashing from every
+      corner of his person, and a splendid waxed moustache, and a bald head
+      which, I think, was made of polished pink coral. He turned to me in the
+      most affable manner, and said, 'I see, Reverend Sir, that you are a
+      Jesuit. There should be a fellow-feeling between you and me. I am a Jew.
+      Jews and Jesuits have an almost equally bad name!'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal's humorous grey eyes swam in a glow of delighted merriment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could have hugged him for his 'almost.' I have been wondering ever
+      since whether in his mind it was the Jews or the Jesuits who benefited by
+      that reservation. I have been wondering also what I ought to have
+      replied.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you reply?&rdquo; asked Beatrice, curious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; said the Cardinal. &ldquo;With sentiments of the highest
+      consideration, I must respectfully decline to tell you. It was too flat. I
+      am humiliated whenever I recall it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You might have replied that the Jews, at least, have the advantage of
+      meriting their bad name,&rdquo; she suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my dear child!&rdquo; objected he. &ldquo;My reply was flat&mdash;you would have
+      had it sharp. I should have hurt the poor well-meaning man's feelings, and
+      perhaps have burdened my own soul with a falsehood, into the bargain. Who
+      are we, to judge whether people merit their bad name or not? No, no. The
+      humiliating circumstance is, that if I had possessed the substance as well
+      as the show, if I had really been a son of St. Ignatius, I should have
+      found a retort that would have effected the Jew's conversion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And apropos of conversions,&rdquo; said Beatrice, &ldquo;see how far we have strayed
+      from our muttons.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our muttons&mdash;?&rdquo; The Cardinal looked up, enquiring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to know what you think&mdash;not of my hat&mdash;but of my man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;ah, yes; your Englishman, your tenant.&rdquo; The Cardinal nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My Englishman&mdash;my tenant&mdash;my heretic,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said he, pondering, while the parentheses became marked again,&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      should think, from what you tell me, that you would find him a useful
+      neighbour. Let me see... You got fifty lire out of him, for a word; and
+      the children went off, blessing you as their benefactress. I should think
+      that you would find him a valuable neighbour&mdash;and that he, on his
+      side, might find you an expensive one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice, with a gesture, implored him to be serious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, please don't tease about this,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I want to know what you
+      think of his conversion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The conversion of a heretic is always 'a consummation devoutly to be
+      desired,' as well, you may settle it between Shakespeare and Byron, to
+      suit yourself. And there are none so devoutly desirous of such
+      consummations as you Catholics of England&mdash;especially you women. It
+      is said that a Catholic Englishwoman once tried to convert the Pope.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, there have been popes whom it would n't have hurt,&rdquo; commented
+      Beatrice. &ldquo;And as for Mr. Marchdale,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;he has shown
+      'dispositions.' He admitted that he could see no reason why it should not
+      have been Our Blessed Lady who sent us to the children's aid. Surely, from
+      a Protestant, that is an extraordinary admission?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Cardinal. &ldquo;And if he meant it, one may conclude that he
+      has a philosophic mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If he meant it?&rdquo; Beatrice cried. &ldquo;Why should he not have meant it? Why
+      should he have said it if he did not mean it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, don't ask me,&rdquo; protested the Cardinal. &ldquo;There is a thing the French
+      call politesse. I can conceive a young man professing to agree with a lady
+      for the sake of what the French might call her beaux yeux.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I give you my word,&rdquo; said Beatrice, &ldquo;that my beaux yeux had nothing to do
+      with the case. He said it in the most absolute good faith. He said he
+      believed that in a universe like ours nothing was impossible&mdash;that
+      there were more things in heaven and earth than people generally dreamed
+      of&mdash;that he could see no reason why the Blessed Virgin should not
+      have sent us across the children's path. Oh, he meant it. I am perfectly
+      sure he meant it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal smiled&mdash;at her eagerness, perhaps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; he repeated, &ldquo;we must conclude that he has a philosophic
+      mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what is one to do?&rdquo; asked she. &ldquo;Surely one ought to do something? One
+      ought to follow such an admission up? When a man is so far on the way to
+      the light, it is surely one's duty to lead him farther?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Without doubt,&rdquo; said the Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;? What can one do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal looked grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One can pray,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Emilia and I pray for his conversion night and morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is good,&rdquo; he approved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that is surely not enough?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One can have Masses said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monsignor Langshawe, at the castle, says a Mass for him twice a week.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is good,&rdquo; approved the Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But is that enough?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why doesn't Monsignor Langshawe call upon him&mdash;cultivate his
+      acquaintance&mdash;talk with him&mdash;set him thinking?&rdquo; the Cardinal
+      enquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Monsignor Langshawe!&rdquo; Beatrice sighed, with a gesture. &ldquo;He is
+      interested in nothing but geology&mdash;he would talk to him of nothing
+      but moraines&mdash;he would set him thinking of nothing but the march of
+      glaciers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hum,&rdquo; said the Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then&mdash;?&rdquo; questioned Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, Carissima, why do you not take the affair in hand yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that is just the difficulty. What can I what can a mere woman&mdash;do
+      in such a case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal looked into his amethyst, as a crystal-gazer into his
+      crystal; and the lines about his humorous old mouth deepened and quivered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will lend you the works of Bellarmine in I forget how many volumes. You
+      can prime yourself with them, and then invite your heretic to a course of
+      instructions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I wish you would n't turn it to a joke,&rdquo; said Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bellarmine&mdash;a joke!&rdquo; exclaimed the Cardinal. &ldquo;It is the first time I
+      have ever heard him called so. However, I will not press the suggestion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But then&mdash;? Oh, please advise me seriously. What can I do? What can
+      a mere unlearned woman do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal took snuff. He gazed into his amethyst again, beaming at it,
+      as if he could descry something deliciously comical in its depths. He gave
+      a soft little laugh. At last he looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he responded slowly, &ldquo;in an extremity, I should think that a mere
+      unlearned woman might, if she made an effort, ask the heretic to dinner. I
+      'll come down and stay with you for a day or two, and you can ask him to
+      dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're a perfect old darling,&rdquo; cried Beatrice, with rapture. &ldquo;He'll never
+      be able to resist you.&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I 'm not undertaking to discuss theology with him,&rdquo; said the
+      Cardinal. &ldquo;But one must do something in exchange for a couple of hundred
+      lire&mdash;so I'll come and give you my moral support.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shall have your lovely silver snuffbox, all the same,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark the predestination!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVI
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                      &ldquo;CASTEL VENTIROSE,
+                                          &ldquo;August 21 st.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;DEAR Mr. Marchdale: It will give me great pleasure if you can dine with
+      us on Thursday evening next, at eight o'clock, to meet my uncle, Cardinal
+      Udeschini, who is staying here for a few days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been re-reading 'A Man of Words.' I want you to tell me a great
+      deal more about your friend, the author.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                        Yours sincerely,
+                                     BEATRICE DI SANTANGIOLO.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      It is astonishing, what men will prize, what men will treasure. Peter
+      Marchdale, for example, prizes, treasures, (and imagines that he will
+      always prize and treasure), the perfectly conventional, the perfectly
+      commonplace little document, of which the foregoing is a copy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The original is written in rather a small, concentrated hand, not
+      overwhelmingly legible perhaps, but, as we say, &ldquo;full of character,&rdquo; on
+      paper lightly blueish, in the prescribed corner of which a tiny ducal
+      coronet is embossed, above the initials &ldquo;B. S.&rdquo; curiously interlaced in a
+      cypher.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Peter received it, and (need I mention?) approached it to his face,
+      he fancied he could detect just a trace, just the faintest reminder, of a
+      perfume&mdash;something like an afterthought of orris. It was by no means
+      anodyne. It was a breath, a whisper, vague, elusive, hinting of things
+      exquisite, intimate of things intimately feminine, exquisitely personal. I
+      don't know how many times he repeated that manoeuvre of conveying the
+      letter to his face; but I do know that when I was privileged to inspect
+      it, a few months later, the only perfume it retained was an unmistakable
+      perfume of tobacco.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't know, either, how many times he read it, searched it, as if
+      secrets might lie perdu between the lines, as if his gaze could warm into
+      evidence some sympathetic ink, or compel a cryptic sub-intention from the
+      text itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, to be sure, the text had cryptic subintentions; but these were as
+      far as may be from any that Peter was in a position to conjecture. How
+      could he guess, for instance, that the letter was an instrument, and he
+      the victim, of a Popish machination? How could he guess that its writer
+      knew as well as he did who was the author of &ldquo;A Man of Words&rdquo;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, all at once, a shade of trouble of quite another nature fell
+      upon his mind. He frowned for a while in silent perplexity. At last he
+      addressed himself to Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you ever dined with a cardinal?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Signorino,&rdquo; that patient sufferer replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm in the very dickens of a quandary&mdash;son' proprio nel
+      dickens d'un imbarazzo.&rdquo; he informed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dickens&mdash;?&rdquo; she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Si&mdash;Dickens, Carlo, celebre autore inglese. Why not?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta gazed with long-suffering eyes at the horizon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or, to put it differently,&rdquo; Peter resumed, &ldquo;I've come all the way from
+      London with nothing better than a dinner jacket in my kit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dina giacca? Cosa e?&rdquo; questioned Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No matter what it is&mdash;the important thing is what it is n't. It is
+      n't a dress-coat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Non e un abito nero,&rdquo; said Marietta, seeing that he expected her to say
+      something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;? You perceive my difficulty. Do you think you could make me
+      one?&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make the Signorino a dress-coat? I? Oh, no, Signorino.&rdquo; Marietta shook
+      her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feared as much,&rdquo; he acknowledged. &ldquo;Is there a decent tailor in the
+      village?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Signorino.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor in the whole length and breadth of this peninsula, if you come to
+      that. Well, what am I to do? How am I to dine with a cardinal? Do you
+      think a cardinal would have a fit if a man were to dine with him in a dina
+      giacca?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have a fit? Why should he have a fit, Signorino?&rdquo; Marietta blinked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would he do anything to the man? Would he launch the awful curses of the
+      Church at him, for instance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mache, Signorino!&rdquo; She struck an attitude that put to scorn his
+      apprehensions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;You think there is no danger? You advise me to
+      brazen the dina giacca out, to swagger it off?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand, Signorino,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To understand is to forgive,&rdquo; said he; &ldquo;and yet you can't trifle with
+      English servants like this, though they ought to understand, ought n't
+      they? In any case, I 'll be guided by your judgment. I'll wear my dina
+      giacca, but I'll wear it with an air! I 'll confer upon it the dignity of
+      a court-suit. Is that a gardener&mdash;that person working over there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta looked in the quarter indicated by Peter's nod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Signorino; ha is the same gardener who works here three days every
+      week,&rdquo; she answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is he, really? He looks like a pirate,&rdquo; Peter murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like a pirate? Luigi?&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; affirmed her master. &ldquo;He wears green corduroy trousers, and a red
+      belt, and a blue shirt. That is the pirate uniform. He has a swarthy skin,
+      and a piercing eye, and hair as black as the Jolly Roger. Those are the
+      marks by which you recognise a pirate, even when in mufti. I believe you
+      said his name is Luigi?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Signorino&mdash;Luigi Maroni. We call him Gigi.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is Gigi versatile?&rdquo; asked Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Versatile&mdash;?&rdquo; puzzled Marietta. But then, risking her own
+      interpretation of the recondite word, &ldquo;Oh, no, Signorino. He is of the
+      country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, he's of the country, is he? So much the better. Then he will know the
+      way to Castel Ventirose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But naturally, Signorino.&rdquo; Marietta nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And do you think, for once in a way, though not versatile, he could be
+      prevailed upon to divert his faculties from the work of a gardener to that
+      of a messenger?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A messenger, Signorino?&rdquo; Marietta wrinkled up her brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ang&mdash;an unofficial postman. Do you think he could be induced to
+      carry a letter for me to the castle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But certainly, Signorino. He is here to obey the Signorino's orders.&rdquo;
+       Marietta shrugged her shoulders, and waved her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then tell him, please, to go and put the necessary touches to his
+      toilet,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;Meanwhile I'll indite the letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When his letter was indited, he found the piratical-looking Gigi in
+      attendance, and he gave it to him, with instructions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereupon Gigi (with a smile of sympathetic intelligence, inimitably
+      Italian) put the letter in his hat, put his hat upon his head, and started
+      briskly off&mdash;but not in the proper direction: not in the direction of
+      the road, which led to the village, and across the bridge, and then round
+      upon itself to the gates of the park. He started briskly off towards
+      Peter's own toolhouse, a low red-tiled pavilion, opposite the door of
+      Marietta's kitchen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was on the point of calling to him, of remonstrating. Then he
+      thought better of it. He would wait a bit, and watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He waited and watched; and this was what he saw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gigi entered the tool-house, and presently brought out a ladder, which he
+      carried down to the riverside, and left there. Then he returned to the
+      tool-house, and came back bearing an armful of planks, each perhaps a foot
+      wide by five or six feet long. Now he raised his ladder to the
+      perpendicular, and let it descend before him, so that, one extremity
+      resting upon the nearer bank, one attained the further, and it spanned the
+      flood. Finally he laid a plank lengthwise upon the hithermost rungs, and
+      advanced to the end of it; then another plank; then a third: and he stood
+      in the grounds of Ventirose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had improvised a bridge&mdash;a bridge that swayed upwards and
+      downwards more or less dizzily about the middle, if you will&mdash;but an
+      entirely practicable bridge, for all that. And he had saved himself at
+      least a good three miles, to the castle and back, by the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter watched, and admired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I asked whether he was versatile!&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;Trust an Italian for
+      economising labour. It looks like unwarrantable invasion of friendly
+      territory&mdash;but it's a dodge worth remembering, all the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew the Duchessa's letter from his pocket, and read it again, and
+      again approached it to his face, communing with that ghost of a perfume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heavens! how it makes one think of chiffons,&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;Thursday&mdash;Thursday&mdash;help
+      me to live till Thursday!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But he had n't to live till Thursday&mdash;he was destined to see her not
+      later than the next afternoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You know with what abruptness, with how brief a warning, storms will
+      spring from the blue, in that land of lakes and mountains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was three o'clock or thereabouts; and Peter was reading in his garden;
+      and the whole world lay basking in unmitigated sunshine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, all at once, somehow, you felt a change in things: the sunshine
+      seemed less brilliant, the shadows less solid, less sharply outlined. Oh,
+      it was very slight, very uncertain; you had to look twice to assure
+      yourself that it was n't a mere fancy. It seemed as if never so thin a
+      gauze had been drawn over the face of the sun, just faintly bedimming,
+      without obscuring it. You could have ransacked the sky in vain to discover
+      the smallest shred of cloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the same time, the air, which had been hot all day&mdash;hot, but
+      buoyant, but stimulant, but quick with oxygen&mdash;seemed to become
+      thick, sluggish, suffocating, seemed to yield up its vital principle, and
+      to fall a dead weight upon the earth. And this effect was accompanied by a
+      sudden silence&mdash;the usual busy out-of-door country noises were
+      suddenly suspended: the locusts stopped their singing; not a bird
+      twittered; not a leaf rustled: the world held its breath. And if the river
+      went on babbling, babbling, that was a very part of the silence&mdash;accented,
+      underscored it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet still you could not discern a rack of cloud anywhere in the sky&mdash;still,
+      for a minute or two.... Then, before you knew how it had happened, the
+      snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito were completely lapped in cloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now the cloud spread with astonishing rapidity&mdash;spread and sank,
+      cancelling the sun, shrouding the Gnisi to its waist, curling in smoky
+      wreaths among the battlements of the Cornobastone, turning the lake from
+      sapphire to sombre steel, filling the entire valley with a strange mixture
+      of darkness and an uncanny pallid light. Overhead it hung like a vast
+      canopy of leaden-hued cotton-wool; at the west it had a fringe of fiery
+      crimson, beyond which a strip of clear sky on the horizon diffused a dull
+      metallic yellow, like tarnished brass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently, in the distance, there was a low growl of thunder; in a minute,
+      a louder, angrier growl&mdash;as if the first were a menace which had not
+      been heeded. Then there was a violent gush of wind&mdash;cold; smelling of
+      the forests from which it came; scattering everything before it, dust,
+      dead leaves, the fallen petals of flowers; making the trees writhe and
+      labour, like giants wrestling with invisible giants; making the short
+      grass shudder; corrugating the steel surface of the lake. Then two or
+      three big raindrops fell&mdash;and then, the deluge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter climbed up to his observatory&mdash;a square four-windowed turret,
+      at the top of the house&mdash;thence to watch the storm and exult in it.
+      Really it was splendid&mdash;to see, to hear; its immense wild force, its
+      immense reckless fury. Rain had never rained so hard, he thought. Already,
+      the lake, the mountain slopes, the villas and vineyards westward, were
+      totally blotted out, hidden behind walls and walls of water; and even the
+      neighbouring lawns of Ventirose, the confines of his own garden, were
+      barely distinguishable, blurred as by a fog. The big drops pelted the
+      river like bullets, sending up splashes bigger than themselves. And the
+      tiled roof just above his head resounded with a continual loud
+      crepitation, as if a multitude of iron-shod elves were dancing on it. The
+      thunder crashed, roared, reverberated, like the toppling of great
+      edifices. The lightning tore through the black cloud-canopy in long
+      blinding zig-zags. The wind moaned, howled, hooted&mdash;and the square
+      chamber where Peter stood shook and rattled under its buffetings, and was
+      full of the chill and the smell of it. Really the whole thing was
+      splendid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His garden-paths ran with muddy brooklets; the high-road beyond his hedge
+      was transformed to a shallow torrent.... And, just at that moment, looking
+      off along the highroad, he saw something that brought his heart into his
+      throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three figures were hurrying down it, half-drowned in the rain&mdash;the
+      Duchessa di Santangiolo, Emilia Manfredi, and a priest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a twinkling, Peter, bareheaded, was at his gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in&mdash;come in,&rdquo; he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are simply drenched&mdash;we shall inundate your house,&rdquo; the Duchessa
+      said, as he showed them into his sitting-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were indeed dripping with water, soiled to their knees with mud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good heavens!&rdquo; gasped Peter, stupid. &ldquo;How were you ever out in such a
+      downpour?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled, rather forlornly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one told us that it was going to rain, and we were off for a good long
+      walk&mdash;for pleasure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must be wet to the bone&mdash;you must be perishing with cold,&rdquo; he
+      cried, looking from one to another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I daresay we are perishing with cold,&rdquo; she admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I have no means of offering you a fire&mdash;there are no
+      fireplaces,&rdquo; he groaned, with a gesture round the bleak Italian room, to
+      certify their absence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is n't there a kitchen?&rdquo; asked the Duchessa, a faint spark of raillery
+      kindling amid the forlornness of her smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter threw up his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had lost my head. The kitchen, of course. I 'll tell Marietta to light
+      a fire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He excused himself, and sought out Marietta. He found her in her
+      housekeeper's room, on her knees, saying her rosary, in obvious terror. I
+      'm afraid he interrupted her orisons somewhat brusquely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you be so good as to start a rousing fire in the kitchen&mdash;as
+      quickly as ever it can be done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he rejoined his guests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you will come this way&mdash;&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta had a fire of logs and pine-cones blazing in no time. She
+      courtesied low to the Duchessa, lower still to the priest&mdash;in fact,
+      Peter was n't sure that she did n't genuflect before him, while he made a
+      rapid movement with his hand over her head: the Sign of the Cross,
+      perhaps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a little, unassuming-looking, white haired priest, with a
+      remarkably clever, humorous, kindly face; and he wore a remarkably shabby
+      cassock. The Duchessa's chaplain, Peter supposed. How should it occur to
+      him that this was Cardinal Udeschini? Do Cardinals (in one's antecedent
+      notion of them) wear shabby cassocks, and look humorous and unassuming? Do
+      they go tramping about the country in the rain, attended by no retinue
+      save a woman and a fourteen-year-old girl? And are they little men&mdash;in
+      one's antecedent notion? True, his shabby cassock had red buttons, and
+      there was a red sash round his waist, and a big amethyst glittered in a
+      setting of pale gold on his annular finger. But Peter was not sufficiently
+      versed in fashions canonical, to recognise the meaning of these insignia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How, on the other hand, should it occur to the Duchessa that Peter needed
+      enlightenment? At all events, she said to him, &ldquo;Let me introduce you;&rdquo; and
+      then, to the priest, &ldquo;Let me present Mr. Marchdale&mdash;of whom you have
+      heard before now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The white-haired old man smiled sweetly into Peter's eyes, and gave him a
+      slender, sensitive old hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;E cattivo vento che non e buono per qualcuno&mdash;debbo a questa
+      burrasca la pregustazione d' un piacere,&rdquo; he said, with a mingling of
+      ceremonious politeness and sunny geniality that was of his age and race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter&mdash;instinctively&mdash;he could not have told why&mdash;put a
+      good deal more deference into his bow, than men of his age and race
+      commonly put into their bows, and murmured something about &ldquo;grand' onore.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta placed a row of chairs before the raised stone hearth, and
+      afterwards, at her master's request, busied herself preparing tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I think you would all be wise to take a little brandy first,&rdquo; Peter
+      suggested. &ldquo;It is my despair that I am not able to provide you with a
+      change of raiment. Brandy will be the best substitute, perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old priest laughed, and put his hand upon the shoulder of Emilia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have spared this young lady an embarrassing avowal. Brandy is exactly
+      what she was screwing her courage to the point of asking for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no!&rdquo; protested Emilia, in a deep Italian voice, with passionate
+      seriousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Peter fetched a decanter, and poured brandy for everyone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I drink to your health&mdash;c'est bien le cas de le dire. I hope you
+      will not have caught your deaths of cold,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, we are quite warm now,&rdquo; said the Duchessa. &ldquo;We are snug in an ingle
+      on Mount Ararat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our wetting will have done us good&mdash;it will make us grow. You and I
+      will never regret that, will we, Emilietta?&rdquo; said the priest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A lively colour had come into the Duchessa's cheeks; her eyes seemed
+      unusually bright. Her hair was in some disorder, drooping at the sides,
+      and blown over her brow in fine free wavelets. It was dark in the kitchen,
+      save for the firelight, which danced fantastically on the walls and
+      ceiling, and struck a ruddy glow from Marietta's copper pots and pans. The
+      rain pattered lustily without; the wind wailed in the chimney; the
+      lightning flashed, the thunder volleyed. And Peter looked at the Duchessa&mdash;and
+      blessed the elements. To see her seated there, in her wet gown, seated
+      familiarly, at her ease, before his fire, in his kitchen, with that colour
+      in her cheeks, that brightness in her eyes, and her hair in that disarray&mdash;it
+      was unspeakable; his heart closed in a kind of delicious spasm. And the
+      fragrance, subtle, secret, evasive, that hovered in the air near her, did
+      not diminish his emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; she asked, with a comical little glance upwards at him,
+      &ldquo;whether you would resent it very much if I should take off my hat&mdash;because
+      it's a perfect reservoir, and the water will keep trickling down my neck.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His joy needed but this culmination that she should take off her hat!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I beg of you&mdash;&rdquo; he returned fervently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had better take yours off too, Emilia,&rdquo; said the Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Admire masculine foresight,&rdquo; said the priest. &ldquo;I took mine off when I
+      came in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me hang them up,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was wonderful to hold her hat in his hand&mdash;it was like holding a
+      part of herself. He brushed it surreptitiously against his face, as he
+      hung it up. Its fragrance&mdash;which met him like an answering caress,
+      almost&mdash;did not lessen his emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Marietta brought the tea, with bread-and-butter, and toast, and
+      cakes, and pretty blue china cups and saucers, and silver that glittered
+      in the firelight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you do me the honour of pouring the tea?&rdquo; Peter asked the Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So she poured the tea, and Peter passed it. As he stood close to her, to
+      take it&mdash;oh, but his heart beat, believe me! And once, when she was
+      giving him a cup, the warm tips of her fingers lightly touched his hand.
+      Believe me, the touch had its effect. And always there was that heady
+      fragrance in the air, like a mysterious little voice, singing secrets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; the old priest said, &ldquo;why tea is not more generally drunk by
+      us Italians. I never taste it without resolving to acquire the habit. I
+      remember, when I was a child, our mothers used to keep it as a medicine;
+      and you could only buy it at the chemists' shops.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's coming in, you know, at Rome&mdash;among the Whites,&rdquo; said the
+      Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Among the Whites!&rdquo; cried he, with a jocular simulation of disquiet. &ldquo;You
+      should not have told me that, till I had finished my cup. Now I shall feel
+      that I am sharing a dissipation with our spoliators.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That should give an edge to its aroma,&rdquo; laughed she. &ldquo;And besides, the
+      Whites aren't all responsible for our spoliation&mdash;some of them are
+      not so white as your fancy paints them. They'd be very decent people, for
+      the most part&mdash;if they were n't so vulgar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you stick up for the Whites like that when I am Pope, I shall
+      excommunicate you,&rdquo; the priest threatened. &ldquo;Meanwhile, what have you to
+      say against the Blacks?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Blacks, with few exceptions, are even blacker than they're painted;
+      but they too would be fairly decent people in their way&mdash;if they were
+      n't so respectable. That is what makes Rome impossible as a residence for
+      any one who cares for human society. White society is so vulgar&mdash;Black
+      society is so deadly dull.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is rather curious,&rdquo; said the priest, &ldquo;that the chief of each party
+      should wear the colour of his adversary. Our chief dresses in white, and
+      their chief can be seen any day driving about the streets in black.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Peter, during this interchange of small-talk, was at liberty to feast
+      his eyes upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you have not yet reached the time of life where men begin to find
+      a virtue in snuff?&rdquo; the priest said, producing a smart silver snuff box,
+      tapping the lid, and proffering it to Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the contrary&mdash;thank you,&rdquo; Peter answered, and absorbed his pinch
+      like an adept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How on earth have you learned to take it without a paroxysm?&rdquo; cried the
+      surprised Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, a thousand years ago I was in the Diplomatic Service,&rdquo; he explained.
+      &ldquo;It is one of the requirements.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Emilia Manfredi lifted her big brown eyes, filled with girlish wonder, to
+      his face, and exclaimed, &ldquo;How extraordinary!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is n't half so extraordinary as it would be if it were true, my dear,&rdquo;
+       said the Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh? Non e poi vero?&rdquo; murmured Emilia, and her eyes darkened with
+      disappointment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter meanwhile was looking at the snuffbox, which the priest still held
+      in his hand, and admiring its brave repousse work of leaves and flowers,
+      and the escutcheon engraved on the lid. But what if he could have guessed
+      the part he had passively played in obtaining it for its possessor&mdash;or
+      the part that it was still to play in his own epopee? Mark again the
+      predestination!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The storm is passing,&rdquo; said the priest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Worse luck!&rdquo; thought Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For indeed the rain and the wind were moderating, the thunder had rolled
+      farther away, the sky was becoming lighter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there's a mighty problem before us still,&rdquo; said the Duchessa. &ldquo;How
+      are we to get to Ventirose? The roads will, be ankle-deep with mud.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you wish to do me a very great kindness&mdash;&rdquo; Peter began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;?&rdquo; she encouraged him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will allow me to go before you, and tell them to come for you with a
+      carriage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall certainly allow you to do nothing of the sort,&rdquo; she replied
+      severely. &ldquo;I suppose there is no one whom you could send?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should hardly like to send Marietta. I 'm afraid there is no one else.
+      But upon my word, I should enjoy going myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head, smiling at him with mock compassion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you? Poor man, poor man! That is an enjoyment which you will have
+      to renounce. One must n't expect too much in this sad life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;I have an expedient. If you can walk a somewhat
+      narrow plank&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;?&rdquo; questioned she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I can improvise a bridge across the river.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe the rain has stopped,&rdquo; said the priest, looking towards the
+      window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, manning his soul for the inevitable, got up, went to the door,
+      opened it, stuck out his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he acknowledged, while his heart sank within him, &ldquo;the rain has
+      stopped.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And now the storm departed almost as rapidly as it had arrived. In the
+      north the sky was already clear, blue and hard-looking&mdash;a wall of
+      lapis-lazuli. The dark cloud-canopy was drifting to the south. Suddenly
+      the sun came out, flashing first from the snows of Monte Sfiorito, then,
+      in an instant, flooding the entire prospect with a marvellous yellow
+      light, ethereal amber; whilst long streamers of tinted vapour&mdash;columns
+      of pearl-dust, one might have fancied&mdash;rose to meet it; and all wet
+      surfaces, leaves, lawns, tree-trunks, housetops, the bare crags of the
+      Gnisi, gleamed in a wash of gold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Puffs of fresh air blew into the kitchen, filling it with the keen sweet
+      odour of wet earth. The priest and the Duchessa and Emilia joined Peter at
+      the open door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, your poor, poor garden!&rdquo; the Duchessa cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His garden had suffered a good deal, to be sure. The flowers lay supine,
+      their faces beaten into the mud; the greensward was littered with fallen
+      leaves and twigs&mdash;and even in one or two places whole branches had
+      been broken from the trees; on the ground about each rose-bush a snow of
+      pink rose-petals lay scattered; in the paths there were hundreds of little
+      pools, shining in the sun like pools of fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's nothing a gardener can't set right,&rdquo; said Peter, feeling no doubt
+      that here was a trifling tax upon the delights the storm had procured him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And oh, our poor, poor hats!&rdquo; said the Duchessa, eyeing ruefully those
+      damaged pieces of finery. &ldquo;I fear no gardener can ever set them right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It sounds inhospitable,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;but I suppose I had better go and
+      build your bridge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So he threw a ladder athwart the river, and laid the planks in place, as
+      he had seen Gigi do the day before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How ingenious&mdash;and, like all great things, how simple,&rdquo; laughed the
+      Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter waved his hand, as who should modestly deprecate applause. But, I 'm
+      ashamed to own, he didn't disclaim the credit of the invention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will require some nerve,&rdquo; she reflected, looking at the narrow planks,
+      the foaming green water. &ldquo;However&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And gathering in her skirts, she set bravely forward, and made the transit
+      without mishap. The priest and Emilia, gathering in their skirts, made it
+      after her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused on the other side, and looked back, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since you have discovered so efficacious a means of cutting short the
+      distance between our places of abode,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I hope you will not fail
+      to profit by it whenever you may have occasion&mdash;on Thursday, for
+      example.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you very much,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;we may all die of our wetting yet. It would
+      perhaps show a neighbourly interest if you were to come up to-morrow, and
+      take our news. Come at four o'clock; and if we're alive... you shall have
+      another pinch of snuff,&rdquo; she promised, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I adore you,&rdquo; said Peter, under his breath. &ldquo;I'll come with great
+      pleasure,&rdquo; he said aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marietta,&rdquo; he observed, that evening, as he dined, &ldquo;I would have you to
+      know that the Aco is bridged. Hence, there is one symbol the fewer in
+      Lombardy. But why does&mdash;you mustn't mind the Ollendorfian form of my
+      enquiry&mdash;why does the chaplain of the Duchessa wear red stockings?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The chaplain of the Duchessa&mdash;?&rdquo; repeated Marietta, wrinkling up her
+      brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ang&mdash;of the Duchessa di Santangiolo. He wore red stockings, and
+      shoes with silver buckles. Do you think that's precisely decorous&mdash;don't
+      you think it 's the least bit light-minded&mdash;in an ecclesiastic?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&mdash;? Who&mdash;?&rdquo; questioned Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the chaplain of the Duchessa&mdash;when he was here this afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The chaplain of the Duchessa!&rdquo; exclaimed Marietta. &ldquo;Here this afternoon?
+      The chaplain of the Duchessa was not here this afternoon. His Eminence the
+      Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here this afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; gasped Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ang,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was Cardinal Udeschini&mdash;that little harmless-looking,
+      sweet-faced old man!&rdquo; Peter wondered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sicuro&mdash;the uncle of the Duca,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good heavens!&rdquo; sighed he. &ldquo;And I allowed myself to hobnob with him like a
+      boon-companion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gia,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You need n't rub it in,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;For the matter of that, you yourself
+      entertained him in your kitchen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scusi?&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, well&mdash;it was probably for the best,&rdquo; he concluded. &ldquo;I daresay I
+      should n't have behaved much better if I had known.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was his coming which saved this house from being struck by lightning,&rdquo;
+       announced Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;? Was it?&rdquo; exclaimed Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Signorino. The lightning would never strike a house that the Lord
+      Prince Cardinal was in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see&mdash;it would n't venture&mdash;it would n't presume. Did&mdash;did
+      it strike all the houses that the Lord Prince Cardinal was n't in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not think so, Signorino. Ma non fa niente. It was a terrible storm&mdash;terrible,
+      terrible. The lightning was going to strike this house, when the Lord
+      Prince Cardinal arrived.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hum,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;Then you, as well as I, have reason for regarding his
+      arrival as providential.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think something must have happened to my watch,&rdquo; Peter said, next day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, its hands moved with extraordinary, with exasperating slowness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems absurd that it should do no good to push them on,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would force himself, between twice ascertaining their position, to wait
+      for a period that felt like an eternity, walking about miserably, and
+      smoking flavourless cigarettes;&mdash;then he would stand amazed,
+      incredulous, when, with a smirk (as it almost struck him) of ironical
+      complacence, they would attest that his eternity had lasted something near
+      a quarter of an hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I had professed myself a Kantian, and made light of the objective
+      reality of Time! thou laggard, Time!&rdquo; he cried, and shook his fist at
+      Space, Time's unoffending consort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe it will never be four o'clock again,&rdquo; he said, in despair,
+      finally; and once more had out his watch. It was half-past three. He
+      scowled at the instrument's bland white face. &ldquo;You have no bowels, no
+      sensibilities&mdash;nothing but dry little methodical jog-trot wheels and
+      pivots!&rdquo; he exclaimed, flying to insult for relief. &ldquo;You're as inhuman as
+      a French functionary. Do you call yourself a sympathetic comrade for an
+      impatient man?&rdquo; He laid it open on his rustic table, and waited through a
+      last eternity. At a quarter to four he crossed the river. &ldquo;If I am early&mdash;tant
+      pis!&rdquo; he decided, choosing the lesser of two evils, and challenging Fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He crossed the river, and stood for the first time in the grounds of
+      Ventirose&mdash;stood where she had been in the habit of standing, during
+      their water-side colloquies. He glanced back at his house and garden,
+      envisaging them for the first time, as it were, from her point of view.
+      They had a queer air of belonging to an era that had passed, to a
+      yesterday already remote. They looked, somehow, curiously small, moreover&mdash;the
+      garden circumscribed, the two-storied house, with its striped sunblinds,
+      poor and petty. He turned his back upon them&mdash;left them behind. He
+      would have to come home to them later in the day, to be sure; but then
+      everything would be different. A chapter would have added itself to the
+      history of the world; a great event, a great step forward, would have
+      definitely taken place. He would have been received at Ventirose as a
+      friend. He would be no longer a mere nodding acquaintance, owing even that
+      meagre relationship to the haphazard of propinquity. The ice-broken, if
+      you will, but still present in abundance&mdash;would have been gently
+      thawed away. One era had passed; but then a new era would have begun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he turned his back upon Villa F'loriano, and set off, high-hearted, up
+      the wide lawns, under the bending trees&mdash;whither, on four red-marked
+      occasions, he had watched her disappear&mdash;towards the castle, which
+      faced him in its vast irregular picturesqueness. There were the oldest
+      portions, grimly mediaeval, a lakeside fortress, with ponderous round
+      towers, meurtrieres, machiolations, its grey stone walls discoloured in
+      fantastic streaks and patches by weather-stains and lichens, or else
+      shaggily overgrown by creepers. Then there were later portions,
+      rectangular, pink-stuccoed, with rusticated work at the corners, and, on
+      the blank spaces between the windows, quaint allegorical frescoes, faded,
+      half washed-out. And then there were entirely modern-looking portions, of
+      gleaming marble, with numberless fanciful carvings, spires, pinnacles,
+      reliefs&mdash;wonderfully light, gay, habitable, and (Peter thought)
+      beautiful, in the clear Italian atmosphere, against the blue Italian sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a perfect house for her,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It suits her&mdash;like an
+      appropriate garment; it almost seems to express her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And all the while, as he proceeded, her voice kept sounding in his ears;
+      scraps of her conversation, phrases that she had spoken, kept coming back
+      to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One end of the long, wide marble terrace had been arranged as a sort of
+      out-of-door living-room. A white awning was stretched overhead; warm-hued
+      rugs were laid on the pavement; there were wicker lounging-chairs, with
+      bright cushions, and a little table, holding books and things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa rose from one of the lounging-chairs, and came forward,
+      smiling, to meet him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She gave him her hand&mdash;for the first time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was warm&mdash;electrically warm; and it was soft&mdash;womanly soft;
+      and it was firm, alive&mdash;it spoke of a vitality, a temperament. Peter
+      was sure, besides, that it would be sweet to smell; and he longed to bend
+      over it, and press it with his lips. He might almost have done so,
+      according to Italian etiquette. But, of course, he simply bowed over it,
+      and let it go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mi trova abbandonata,&rdquo; she said, leading the way back to the terrace-end.
+      There were notes of a peculiar richness in her voice, when she spoke
+      Italian; and she dwelt languorously on the vowels, and rather slurred the
+      consonants, lazily, in the manner Italian women have, whereby they give
+      the quality of velvet to their tongue. She was not an Italian woman;
+      Heaven be praised, she was English: so this was just pure gain to the
+      sum-total of her graces. &ldquo;My uncle and my niece have gone to the village.
+      But I 'm expecting them to come home at any moment now&mdash;and you'll
+      not have long, I hope, to wait for your snuff.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She flashed a whimsical little smile into his eyes. Then she returned to
+      her wicker chair, glancing an invitation at Peter to place himself in the
+      one facing her. She leaned back, resting her head on a pink silk cushion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, no doubt, sent up a silent prayer that her uncle and her niece
+      might be detained at the village for the rest of the afternoon. By her
+      niece he took her to mean Emilia: he liked her for the kindly euphemism.
+      &ldquo;What hair she has!&rdquo; he thought, admiring the loose brown masses, warm
+      upon their background of pink silk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I'm inured to waiting,&rdquo; he replied, with a retrospective mind for the
+      interminable waits of that interminable day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa had taken a fan from the table, and was playing with it,
+      opening and shutting it slowly, in her lap. Now she caught Peter's eyes
+      examining it, and she gave it to him. (My own suspicion is that Peter's
+      eyes had been occupied rather with the hands that held the fan, than with
+      the fan itself&mdash;but that's a detail.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I picked it up the other day, in Rome,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Of course, it's an
+      imitation of the French fans of the last century, but I thought it
+      pretty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was of white silk, that had been thinly stained a soft yellow, like the
+      yellow of faded yellow rose-leaves. It was painted with innumerable plump
+      little cupids, flying among pale clouds. The sticks were of
+      mother-of=pearl. The end-sticks were elaborately incised, and in the
+      incisions opals were set, big ones and small ones, smouldering with green
+      and scarlet fires.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very pretty indeed,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;and very curious. It's like a great
+      butterfly's wing is n't it? But are n't you afraid of opals?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Afraid of opals?&rdquo; she wondered. &ldquo;Why should one be?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless your birthday happens to fall in October, they're reputed to bring
+      bad luck,&rdquo; he reminded her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My birthday happens to fall in June but I 'll never believe that such
+      pretty things as opals can bring bad luck,&rdquo; she laughed, taking the fan,
+      which he returned to her, and stroking one of the bigger opals with her
+      finger tip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you no superstitions?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope not&mdash;I don't think I have,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;We're not allowed
+      to have superstitions, you know&mdash;nous autres Catholiques.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh?&rdquo; he said, with surprise. &ldquo;No, I did n't know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, they're a forbidden luxury. But you&mdash;? Are you superstitious?
+      Would you be afraid of opals?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I doubt if I should have the courage to wear one. At all events, I don't
+      regard superstitions in the light of a luxury. I should be glad to be rid
+      of those I have. They're a horrible inconvenience. But I can't get it out
+      of my head that the air is filled with a swarm of malignant little devils,
+      who are always watching their chance to do us an ill turn. We don't in the
+      least know the conditions under which they can bring it off; but it's
+      legendary that if we wear opals, or sit thirteen at table, or start an
+      enterprise on Friday, or what not, we somehow give them their opportunity.
+      And one naturally wishes to be on the safe side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him with doubt, considering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't seriously believe all that?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I don't seriously believe it. But one breathes it in with the air of
+      one's nursery, and it sticks. I don't believe it, but I fear it just
+      enough to be made uneasy. The evil eye, for instance. How can one spend
+      any time in Italy, where everybody goes loaded with charms against it, and
+      help having a sort of sneaking half-belief in the evil eye?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 've spent a good deal of time in Italy, but I have n't so much as a
+      sneaking quarter-belief in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I envy you your strength of mind,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;But surely, though
+      superstition is a luxury forbidden to Catholics, there are plenty of good
+      Catholics who indulge in it, all the same?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are never plenty of good Catholics,&rdquo; said sire. &ldquo;You employ a
+      much-abused expression. To profess the Catholic faith, to go to Mass on
+      Sunday and abstain from meat on Friday, that is by no means sufficient to
+      constitute a good Catholic. To be a good Catholic one would have to be a
+      saint, nothing less&mdash;and not a mere formal saint, either, but a very
+      real saint, a saint in thought and feeling, as well as in speech and
+      action. Just in so far as one is superstitious, one is a bad Catholic. Oh,
+      if the world were populated by good Catholics, it would be the Millennium
+      come to pass.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be that, if it were populated by good Christians&mdash;wouldn't
+      it?&rdquo; asked Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The terms are interchangeable,&rdquo; she answered sweetly, with a half-comical
+      look of defiance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mercy!&rdquo; cried he. &ldquo;Can't a Protestant be a good Christian too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;because a Protestant can be a Catholic without knowing
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;?&rdquo; he puzzled, frowning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's quite simple,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;You can't be a Christian unless
+      you're a Catholic. But if you believe as much of Christian truth as you've
+      ever had a fair opportunity of learning, and if you try to live in
+      accordance with Christian morals, you are a Catholic, you're a member of
+      the Catholic Church, whether you know it or not. You can't be deprived of
+      your birthright, you see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That seems rather broad,&rdquo; said Peter; &ldquo;and one had always heard that
+      Catholicism was nothing if not narrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How could it be Catholic if it were narrow?&rdquo; asked she. &ldquo;However, if a
+      Protestant uses his intelligence, and is logical, he'll not remain an
+      unconscious Catholic long. If he studies the matter, and is logical, he'll
+      wish to unite himself to the Church in her visible body. Look at England.
+      See how logic is multiplying converts year by year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it's the glory of Englishmen to be illogical,&rdquo; said Peter, with a
+      laugh. &ldquo;Our capacity for not following premisses to their logical
+      consequences is the principal source of our national greatness. So the
+      bulk of the English are likely to resist conversion for centuries to come&mdash;are
+      they not? And then, nowadays, one is so apt to be an indifferentist in
+      matters of religion&mdash;and Catholicism is so exacting. One remains a
+      Protestant from the love of ease.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And from the desire, on the part of a good many Englishmen at least, to
+      sail in a boat of their own&mdash;not to get mixed up with a lot of
+      foreign publicans and sinners&mdash;no?&rdquo; she suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, of course, we're insular and we're Pharisaical,&rdquo; admitted Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And as for one's indifference,&rdquo; she smiled, &ldquo;that is most probably due to
+      one's youth and inexperience. One can't come to close quarters with the
+      realities of life&mdash;with sorrow, with great joy, with temptation, with
+      sin or with heroic virtue, with death, with the birth of a new soul, with
+      any of the awful, wonderful realities of life&mdash;and continue to be an
+      indifferentist in matters of religion, do you think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When one comes to close quarters with the awful, wonderful realities of
+      life, one has religious moments,&rdquo; he acknowledged. &ldquo;But they're generally
+      rather fugitive, are n't they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One can cultivate them&mdash;one can encourage them,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;If you
+      would care to know a good Catholic,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;my niece, my little ward,
+      Emilia is one. She wants to become a Sister of Mercy, to spend her life
+      nursing the poor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh? Would n't that be rather a pity?&rdquo; Peter said. &ldquo;She's so extremely
+      pretty. I don't know when I have seen prettier brown eyes than hers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, in a few years, I expect we shall see those pretty brown eyes
+      looking out from under a sister's coif. No, I don't think it will be a
+      pity. Nuns and sisters, I think, are the happiest people in the world&mdash;and
+      priests. Have you ever met any one who seemed happier than my uncle, for
+      example?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have certainly never met any one who seemed sweeter, kinder,&rdquo; Peter
+      confessed. &ldquo;He has a wonderful old face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's a wonderful old man,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;I 'm going to try to keep him a
+      prisoner here for the rest of the summer&mdash;though he will have it that
+      he's just run down for a week. He works a great deal too hard when he's in
+      Rome. He's the only Cardinal I've ever heard of, who takes practical
+      charge of his titular church. But here in the country he's out-of-doors
+      all the blessed day, hand in hand with Emilia. He's as young as she is, I
+      believe. They play together like children&mdash;and make&mdash;me feel as
+      staid and solemn and grown-up as one of Mr. Kenneth Grahame's Olympians.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter laughed. Then, in the moment of silence that followed, he happened
+      to let his eyes stray up the valley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello!&rdquo; he suddenly exclaimed. &ldquo;Someone has been painting our mountain
+      green.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa turned, to look; and she too uttered an exclamation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By some accident of reflection or refraction, the snows of Monte Sfiorito
+      had become bright green, as if the light that fell on them had passed
+      through emeralds. They both paused, to gaze and marvel for a little.
+      Indeed, the prospect was a pleasing one, as well as a surprising&mdash;the
+      sunny lawns, the high trees, the blue lake, and then that bright green
+      mountain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never known anything like those snow-peaks for sailing under false
+      colours,&rdquo; Peter said. &ldquo;I have seen them every colour of the calendar,
+      except their native white.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must n't blame the poor things,&rdquo; pleaded the Duchessa. &ldquo;They can't
+      help it. It's all along o' the distance and the atmosphere and the sun.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She closed her fan, with which she had been more or less idly playing
+      throughout their dialogue, and replaced it on the table. Among the books
+      there&mdash;French books, for the most part, in yellow paper&mdash;Peter
+      saw, with something of a flutter (he could never see it without something
+      of a flutter), the grey-and-gold binding of &ldquo;A Man of Words.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa caught his glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;your friend's novel. I told you I had been re-reading
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And&mdash;do you know&mdash;I 'm inclined to agree with your own
+      enthusiastic estimate of it?&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;I think it's extremely&mdash;but
+      extremely&mdash;clever; and more&mdash;very charming, very beautiful. The
+      fatal gift of beauty!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And her smile reminded him that the application of the tag was his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Its beauty, though,&rdquo; she reflected, &ldquo;is n't exactly of the obvious sort&mdash;is
+      it? It does n't jump at you, for instance. It is rather in the texture of
+      the work, than on the surface. One has to look, to see it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One always has to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing,&rdquo; he safely
+      generalised. But then&mdash;he had put his foot in the stirrup&mdash;his
+      hobby bolted with him. &ldquo;It takes two to make a beautiful object. The eye
+      of the beholder is every bit as indispensable as the hand of the artist.
+      The artist does his work&mdash;the beholder must do his. They are
+      collaborators. Each must be the other's equal; and they must also be like
+      each other&mdash;with the likeness of opposites, of complements. Art, in
+      short, is entirely a matter of reciprocity. The kind of beauty that jumps
+      at you is the kind you end by getting heartily tired of&mdash;is the
+      skin-deep kind; and therefore it is n't really beauty at all&mdash;it is
+      only an approximation to beauty&mdash;it may be only a simulacrum of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes were smiling, her face was glowing, softly, with interest, with
+      friendliness and perhaps with the least suspicion of something else&mdash;perhaps
+      with the faintest glimmer of suppressed amusement; but interest was easily
+      predominant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she assented.... But then she pursued her own train of ideas. &ldquo;And&mdash;with
+      you&mdash;I particularly like the woman&mdash;Pauline. I can't tell you
+      how much I like her. I&mdash;it sounds extravagant, but it's true&mdash;I
+      can think of no other woman in the whole of fiction whom I like so well&mdash;who
+      makes so curiously personal an appeal to me. Her wit&mdash;her waywardness&mdash;her
+      tenderness&mdash;her generosity&mdash;everything. How did your friend come
+      by his conception of her? She's as real to me as any woman I have ever
+      known she's more real to me than most of the women I know&mdash;she's
+      absolutely real, she lives, she breathes. Yet I have never known a woman
+      resembling her. Life would be a merrier business if one did know women
+      resembling her. She seems to me all that a woman ought ideally to be. Does
+      your friend know women like that&mdash;the lucky man? Or is Pauline, for
+      all her convincingness, a pure creature of imagination?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said Peter, laughing, &ldquo;you touch the secret springs of my friend's
+      inspiration. That is a story in itself. Felix Wildmay is a perfectly
+      commonplace Englishman. How could a woman like Pauline be the creature of
+      his imagination? No&mdash;she was a 'thing seen.' God made her. Wildmay
+      was a mere copyist. He drew her, tant bien que mal, from the life from a
+      woman who's actually alive on this dull globe to-day. But that's the
+      story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa's eyes were intent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The story-? Tell me the story,&rdquo; she pronounced in a breath, with
+      imperious eagerness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And her eyes waited, intently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;it's one of those stories that can scarcely be told.
+      There's hardly any thing to take hold of. It's without incident, without
+      progression&mdash;it's all subjective&mdash;it's a drama in states of
+      mind. Pauline was a 'thing seen,' indeed; but she wasn't a thing known:
+      she was a thing divined. Wildmay never knew her&mdash;never even knew who
+      she was&mdash;never knew her name&mdash;never even knew her nationality,
+      though, as the book shows, he guessed her to be an Englishwoman, married
+      to a Frenchman. He simply saw her, from a distance, half-a-dozen times
+      perhaps. He saw her in Paris, once or twice, at the theatre, at the opera;
+      and then later again, once or twice, in London; and then, once more, in
+      Paris, in the Bois. That was all, but that was enough. Her appearance&mdash;her
+      face, her eyes, her smile, her way of carrying herself, her way of
+      carrying her head, her gestures, her movements, her way of dressing&mdash;he
+      never so much as heard her voice&mdash;her mere appearance made an
+      impression on him such as all the rest of womankind had totally failed to
+      make. She was exceedingly lovely, of course, exceedingly distinguished,
+      noble-looking; but she was infinitely more. Her face her whole person&mdash;had
+      an expression! A spirit burned in her&mdash;a prismatic, aromatic fire.
+      Other women seemed dust, seemed dead, beside her. She was a garden,
+      inexhaustible, of promises, of suggestions. Wit, capriciousness,
+      generosity, emotion&mdash;you have said it&mdash;they were all there. Race
+      was there, nerve. Sex was there&mdash;all the mystery, magic, all the
+      essential, elemental principles of the Feminine, were there: she was a
+      woman. A wonderful, strenuous soul was there: Wildmay saw it, felt it. He
+      did n't know her&mdash;he had no hope of ever knowing her&mdash;but he
+      knew her better than he knew any one else in the world. She became the
+      absorbing subject of his thoughts, the heroine of his dreams. She became,
+      in fact, the supreme influence of his life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa's eyes had not lost their intentness, while he was speaking.
+      Now that he had finished, she looked down at her hands, folded in her lap,
+      and mused for a moment in silence. At last she looked up again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's as strange as anything I have ever heard,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;it's furiously
+      strange&mdash;and romantic&mdash;and interesting. But&mdash;but&mdash;&rdquo;
+       She frowned a little, hesitating between a choice of questions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it's a story all compact of 'buts,'&rdquo; Peter threw out laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She let the remark pass her&mdash;she had settled upon her question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how could he endure such a situation?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;How could he sit
+      still under it? Did n't he try in any way&mdash;did n't he make any effort
+      at all&mdash;to&mdash;to find her out&mdash;to discover who she was&mdash;to
+      get introduced to her? I should think he could never have rested&mdash;I
+      should think he would have moved heaven and earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What could he do? Tell me a single thing he could have done,&rdquo; said Peter.
+      &ldquo;Society has made no provision for a case like his. It 's absurd&mdash;but
+      there it is. You see a woman somewhere; you long to make her acquaintance;
+      and there's no natural bar to your doing so&mdash;you 're a presentable
+      man she's what they call a lady&mdash;you're both, more or less, of the
+      same monde. Yet there 's positively no way known by which you can contrive
+      it&mdash;unless chance, mere fortuitous chance, just happens to drop a
+      common acquaintance between you, at the right time and place. Chance, in
+      Wildmay's case, happened to drop all the common acquaintances they may
+      possibly have had at a deplorable distance. He was alone on each of the
+      occasions when he saw her. There was no one he could ask to introduce him;
+      there was no one he could apply to for information concerning her. He
+      could n't very well follow her carriage through the streets&mdash;dog her
+      to her lair, like a detective. Well&mdash;what then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa was playing with her fan again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she agreed; &ldquo;I suppose it was hopeless. But it seems rather hard on
+      the poor man&mdash;rather baffling and tantalising.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The poor man thought it so, to be sure,&rdquo; said Peter; &ldquo;he fretted and
+      fumed a good deal, and kicked against the pricks. Here, there, now, anon,
+      he would enjoy his brief little vision of her&mdash;then she would vanish
+      into the deep inane. So, in the end&mdash;he had to take it out in
+      something&mdash;he took it out in writing a book about her. He propped up
+      a mental portrait of her on his desk before him, and translated it into
+      the character of Pauline. In that way he was able to spend long delightful
+      hours alone with her every day, in a kind of metaphysical intimacy. He had
+      never heard her voice&mdash;but now he heard it as often as Pauline opened
+      her lips. He owned her&mdash;he possessed her&mdash;she lived under his
+      roof&mdash;she was always waiting for him in his study. She is real to
+      you? She was inexpressibly, miraculously real to him. He saw her, knew
+      her, felt her, realised her, in every detail of her mind, her soul, her
+      person&mdash;down to the very intonations of her speech&mdash;down to the
+      veins in her hands, the rings on her fingers&mdash;down to her very furs
+      and laces, the frou-frou of her skirts, the scent upon her
+      pocket-handkerchief. He had numbered the hairs of her head, almost.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the Duchessa mused for a while in silence, opening and shutting her
+      fan, and gazing into its opals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am thinking of it from the woman's point of view,&rdquo; she said, by and by.
+      &ldquo;To have played such a part in a man's life&mdash;and never to have
+      dreamed it! Never even, very likely, to have dreamed that such a man
+      existed&mdash;for it's entirely possible she didn't notice him, on those
+      occasions when he saw her. And to have been the subject of such a novel&mdash;and
+      never to have dreamed that, either! To have read the novel perhaps&mdash;without
+      dreaming for an instant that there was any sort of connection between
+      Pauline and herself! Or else&mdash;what would almost be stranger still&mdash;not
+      to have read the novel, not to have heard of it! To have inspired such a
+      book, such a beautiful book&mdash;yet to remain in sheer unconscious
+      ignorance that there was such a book! Oh, I think it is even more
+      extraordinary from the woman's point of view than from the man's. There is
+      something almost terrifying about it. To have had such an influence on the
+      destiny of someone you've never heard of! There's a kind of intangible
+      sense of a responsibility.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is also, perhaps,&rdquo; laughed Peter, &ldquo;a kind of intangible sense of a
+      liberty taken. I'm bound to say I think Wildmay was decidedly at his ease.
+      To appropriate in that cool fashion the personality of a total stranger!
+      But artists are the most unprincipled folk unhung. Ils prennent leur bien
+      la, ou ils le trouvent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; said the Duchessa, &ldquo;I think she was fair game. One can carry
+      delicacy too far. He was entitled to the benefits of his discovery&mdash;for,
+      after all, it was a discovery, was n't it? You have said yourself how
+      indispensable the eye of the beholder is&mdash;'the seeing eye.' I think,
+      indeed, the whole affair speaks extremely well for Mr. Wildmay. It is not
+      every man who would be capable of so purely intellectual a passion. I
+      suppose one must call his feeling for her a passion? It indicates a
+      distinction in his nature. He can hardly be a mere materialist. But&mdash;but
+      I think it's heart-rending that he never met her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, but that's the continuation of the story,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;He did meet
+      her in the end, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He did meet her!&rdquo; cried the Duchessa, starting up, with a sudden access
+      of interest, whilst her eyes lightened. &ldquo;He did meet her? Oh, you must
+      tell me about that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And just at this crisis the Cardinal and Emilia appeared, climbing the
+      terrace steps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bother!&rdquo; exclaimed the Duchessa, under her breath. Then, to Peter, &ldquo;It
+      will have to be for another time&mdash;unless I die of the suspense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After the necessary greetings were transacted, another elderly priest
+      joined the company; a tall, burly, rather florid man, mentioned, when
+      Peter was introduced to him, as Monsignor Langshawe. &ldquo;This really is her
+      chaplain,&rdquo; Peter concluded. Then a servant brought tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, Diamond, Diamond, you little know what mischief you might have
+      wrought,&rdquo; he admonished himself, as he walked home through the level
+      sunshine. &ldquo;In another instant, if we'd not been interrupted, you would
+      have let the cat out of the bag. The premature escape of the cat from the
+      bag would spoil everything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he hugged himself, as one snatched from peril, in a qualm of
+      retroactive terror. At the same time he was filled with a kind of
+      exultancy. All that he had hoped had come to pass, and more, vastly more.
+      Not only had he been received as a friend at Ventirose, but he had been
+      encouraged to tell her a part at least of the story by which her life and
+      his were so curiously connected; and he had been snatched from the peril
+      of telling her too much. The day was not yet when he could safely say,
+      &ldquo;Mutato nomine.....&rdquo; Would the day ever be? But, meanwhile, just to have
+      told her the first ten lines of that story, he could not help feeling,
+      somehow advanced matters tremendously, somehow put a new face on matters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The hour for which the ages sighed may not be so far away as you think,&rdquo;
+       he said to Marietta. &ldquo;The curtain has risen upon Act Three. I fancy I can
+      perceive faint glimmerings of the beginning of the end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      All that evening, something which he had not been conscious of noticing
+      especially when it was present to him&mdash;certainly he had paid no
+      conscious attention to its details&mdash;kept recurring and recurring to
+      Peter's memory: the appearance of the prettily-arranged terrace-end at
+      Ventirose: the white awning, with the blue sky at its edges, the sunny
+      park beyond; the warm-hued carpets on the marble pavement; the wicker
+      chairs, with their bright cushions; the table, with its books and bibelots&mdash;the
+      yellow French books, a tortoise-shell paperknife, a silver paperweight, a
+      crystal smelling-bottle, a bowlful of drooping poppies; and the marble
+      balustrade, with its delicate tracery of leaves and tendrils, where the
+      jessamine twined round its pillars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This kept recurring, recurring, vividly, a picture that he could see
+      without closing his eyes, a picture with a very decided sentiment. Like
+      the gay and gleaming many-pinnacled facade of her house, it seemed
+      appropriate to her; it seemed in its fashion to express her. Nay, it
+      seemed to do more. It was a corner of her every-day environment; these
+      things were the companions, the witnesses, of moments of her life, phases
+      of herself, which were hidden from Peter; they were the companions and
+      witnesses of her solitude, her privacy; they were her confidants, in a
+      way. They seemed not merely to express her, therefore, but to be
+      continually on the point&mdash;I had almost said of betraying her. At all
+      events, if he could only understand their silent language, they would
+      prove rich in precious revelations. So he welcomed their recurrences,
+      dwelt upon them, pondered them, and got a deep if somewhat inarticulate
+      pleasure from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Thursday, as he approached the castle, the last fires of sunset were
+      burning in the sky behind it&mdash;the long irregular mass of buildings
+      stood out in varying shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of red:
+      the grey stone, dark, velvety indigo; the pink stucco, pink still, but
+      with a transparent blue penumbra over it; the white marble, palely,
+      scintillantly amethystine. And if he was interested in her environment,
+      now he could study it to his heart's content: the wide marble staircase,
+      up which he was shown, with its crimson carpet, and the big mellow
+      painting, that looked as if it might be a Titian, at the top; the great
+      saloon, in which he was received, with its polished mosaic floor, its
+      frescoed ceiling, its white-and-gold panelling, its hangings and
+      upholsteries of yellow brocade, its satinwood chairs and tables, its
+      bronzes, porcelains, embroideries, its screens and mirrors; the long
+      dining-hall, with its high pointed windows, its slender marble columns
+      supporting a vaulted roof, its twinkling candles in chandeliers and
+      sconces of cloudy Venetian glass, its brilliant table, its flowers and
+      their colours and their scents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could study her environment to his heart's content, indeed&mdash;or to
+      his heart's despair. For all this had rather the effect of chilling, of
+      depressing him. It was very splendid; it was very luxurious and cheerful;
+      it was appropriate and personal to her, if you like; no doubt, in its
+      fashion, in its measure, it, too, expressed her. But, at that rate, it
+      expressed her in an aspect which Peter had instinctively made it his habit
+      to forget, which he by no means found it inspiriting to remember. It
+      expressed, it emphasised, her wealth, her rank; it emphasised the
+      distance, in a worldly sense, between her and himself, the conventional
+      barriers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she was all that
+      she had ever been&mdash;and yet&mdash;and yet&mdash;Well, somehow, she
+      seemed indefinably different. Somehow, again, the distance, the barriers,
+      were emphasised. She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly,
+      she was all that she had ever been; but, somehow, to-night, she seemed
+      very much the great lady, very much the duchess....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear man,&rdquo; he said to himself, &ldquo;you were mad to dream for a single
+      instant that there was the remotest possibility of anything ever
+      happening.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The only other guests, besides the Cardinal and Monsignor Langshawe, were
+      an old Frenchwoman, with beautiful white hair, from one of the
+      neighbouring villas, Madame de Lafere, and a young, pretty, witty, and
+      voluble Irishwoman, Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, from an hotel at Spiaggia. In
+      deference, perhaps, to the cloth of the two ecclesiastics, none of the
+      women were in full evening-dress, and there was no arm-taking when they
+      went in to dinner. The dinner itself was of a simplicity which Peter
+      thought admirable, and which, of course, he attributed to his Duchessa's
+      own good taste. He was not yet familiar enough with the Black aristocracy
+      of Italy, to be aware that in the matter of food and drink simplicity is
+      as much the criterion of good form amongst them, as lavish complexity is
+      the criterion of good form amongst the English-imitating Whites.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation, I believe, took its direction chiefly from the
+      initiative of Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. With great sprightliness and
+      humour, and with an astonishing light-hearted courage, she rallied the
+      Cardinal upon the neglect in which her native island was allowed to
+      languish by the powers at Rome. &ldquo;The most Catholic country in three
+      hemispheres, to be sure,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;every inch of its soil soaked with
+      the blood of martyrs. Yet you've not added an Irish saint to the Calendar
+      for I see you're blushing to think how many ages; and you've taken sides
+      with the heretic Saxon against us in our struggle for Home Rule&mdash;which
+      I blame you for, though, being a landowner and a bit of an absentee, I 'm
+      a traitorous Unionist myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal laughingly retorted that the Irish were far too fine, too
+      imaginative and poetical a race, to be bothered with material questions of
+      government and administration. They should leave such cares to the stolid,
+      practical English, and devote the leisure they would thus obtain to the
+      further exercise and development of what someone had called &ldquo;the starfire
+      of the Celtic nature.&rdquo; Ireland should look upon England as her
+      working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of Irish saints to the
+      Calendar, the stumbling-block was their excessive number. &ldquo;'T is an
+      embarrassment of riches. If we were once to begin, we could never leave
+      off till we had canonised nine-tenths of the dead population.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Monsignor Langshawe, at this (making jest the cue for earnest), spoke up
+      for Scotland, and deplored the delay in the beatification of Blessed Mary.
+      &ldquo;The official beatification,&rdquo; he discriminated, &ldquo;for she was beatified in
+      the heart of every true Catholic Scot on the day when Bloody Elizabeth
+      murdered her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Madame de Lafere put in a plea for Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and
+      the little Dauphin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Blessed Mary&mdash;Bloody Elizabeth,&rdquo; laughed the Duchessa, in an aside
+      to Peter; &ldquo;here is language to use in the presence of a Protestant
+      Englishman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I'm accustomed to 'Bloody Elizabeth,'&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Was n't it a word of
+      Cardinal Newman's?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think so,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;And since every one is naming his candidate;
+      for the Calendar, you have named mine. I think there never was a saintlier
+      saint than Cardinal Newman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is your Eminence's attitude towards the question of mixed
+      marriages?&rdquo; Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter pricked up his ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in England,&rdquo; his
+      Eminence replied; &ldquo;but in the abstract, and other things equal, my
+      attitude would of course be one of disapproval.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet surely,&rdquo; contended she, &ldquo;if a pious Catholic girl marries a
+      Protestant man, she has a hundred chances of converting him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; said the Cardinal. &ldquo;Would n't it be safer to let the
+      conversion precede the marriage? Afterwards, I 'm afraid, he would have a
+      hundred chances of inducing her to apostatise, or, at least, of rendering
+      her lukewarm.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not if she had a spark of the true zeal,&rdquo; said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+      &ldquo;Any wife can make her husband's life a burden to him, if she will
+      conscientiously lay herself out to do so. The man would be glad to submit,
+      for the sake of peace in his household. I often sigh for the good old days
+      of the Inquisition; but it's still possible, in the blessed seclusion of
+      the family circle, to apply the rack and the thumbscrew in a modified
+      form. I know a dozen fine young Protestant men in London whom I'm
+      labouring to convert, and I feel I 'm defeated only by the circumstance
+      that I'm not in a position to lead them to the altar in the full meaning
+      of the expression.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A dozen?&rdquo; the Cardinal laughed. &ldquo;Aren't you complicating the question of
+      mixed marriages with that of plural marriage?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'T was merely a little Hibernicism, for which I beg your Eminence's
+      indulgence,&rdquo; laughed she. &ldquo;But what puts the most spokes in a
+      proselytiser's wheel is the Faith itself. If we only deserved the
+      reputation for sharp practice and double dealing which the Protestants
+      have foisted upon us, it would be roses, roses, all the way. Why are we
+      forbidden to let the end justify the means? And where are those
+      accommodements avec le ciel of which we've heard? We're not even permitted
+      a few poor accommodements avec le monde.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look at my uncle's face,&rdquo; whispered the Duchessa to Peter. The Cardinal's
+      fine old face was all alight with amusement. &ldquo;In his fondness for taking
+      things by their humorous end, he has met an affinity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be a grand day for the Church and the nations, when we have an
+      Irish Pope,&rdquo; Mrs. O'Donovan Florence continued. &ldquo;A good, stalwart,
+      militant Irishman is what's needed to set everything right. With a sweet
+      Irish tongue, he'd win home the wandering sheep; and with a strong Irish
+      arm, he'd drive the wolves from the fold. It's he that would soon sweep
+      the Italians out of Rome.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Italians will soon be swept out of Rome by the natural current of
+      events,&rdquo; said the Cardinal. &ldquo;But an Irish bishop of my acquaintance
+      insists that we have already had many Irish Popes, without knowing it. Of
+      all the greatest Popes he cries, 'Surely, they must have had Irish blood.'
+      He's perfectly convinced that Pius the Ninth was Irish. His very name, his
+      family-name, Ferretti, was merely the Irish name, Farrity, Italianised,
+      the good bishop says. No one but an Irishman, he insists, could have been
+      so witty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. O'Donovan Florence looked intensely thoughtful for a moment.... Then,
+      &ldquo;I 'm trying to think of the original Irish form of Udeschini,&rdquo; she
+      declared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At which there was a general laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you say 'soon,' Eminence, do you mean that we may hope to see the
+      Italians driven from Rome in our time?&rdquo; enquired Madame de Lafere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are on the verge of bankruptcy&mdash;for their sins,&rdquo; the Cardinal
+      answered. &ldquo;When the crash comes&mdash;and it can't fail to come before
+      many years&mdash;there will necessarily be a readjustment. I do not
+      believe that the conscience of Christendom will again allow Peter to be
+      deprived of his inheritance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God hasten the good day,&rdquo; said Monsignor Langshawe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I can live to see Rome restored to the Pope, I shall die content, even
+      though I cannot live to see France restored to the King,&rdquo; said the old
+      Frenchwoman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I&mdash;even though I cannot live to see Britain restored to the
+      Faith,&rdquo; said the Monsignore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa smiled at Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a hotbed of Ultramontanes and reactionaries you have fallen into,&rdquo;
+       she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is exhilarating,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;to meet people who have convictions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even when you regard their convictions as erroneous?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, even then,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;But I'm not sure I regard as erroneous the
+      convictions I have heard expressed to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;?&rdquo; she wondered. &ldquo;Would you like to see Rome restored to the
+      Pope?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;decidedly&mdash;for aesthetic reasons, if for no others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose there are aesthetic reasons,&rdquo; she assented. &ldquo;But we, of course,
+      think there are conclusive reasons in mere justice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't doubt there are conclusive reasons in mere justice, too,&rdquo; said
+      he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner, at the Cardinal's invitation, the Duchessa went to the
+      piano, and played Bach and Scarlatti. Her face, in the soft candlelight,
+      as she discoursed that &ldquo;luminous, lucid&rdquo; music, Peter thought... But what
+      do lovers always think of their ladies' faces, when they look up from
+      their pianos, in soft candlelight?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, taking her departure, said to the Cardinal, &ldquo;I
+      owe your Eminence the two proudest days of my life. The first was when I
+      read in the paper that you had received the hat, and I was able to boast
+      to all my acquaintances that I had been in the convent with your niece by
+      marriage. And the second is now, when I can boast forevermore hereafter
+      that I've enjoyed the honour of making my courtesy to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So,&rdquo; said Peter, as he walked home through the dew and the starlight of
+      the park, amid the phantom perfumes of the night, &ldquo;so the Cardinal does
+      n't approve of mixed marriages and, of course, his niece does n't, either.
+      But what can it matter to me? For alas and alas&mdash;as he truly said&mdash;it's
+      hardly a question of actuality.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he lit a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So he did meet her, after all?&rdquo; the Duchessa said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, he met her in the end,&rdquo; Peter answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were seated under the gay white awning, against the bright
+      perspective of lawn, lake, and mountains, on the terrace at Ventirose,
+      where Peter was paying his dinner-call. The August day was hot and still
+      and beautiful&mdash;a day made of gold and velvet and sweet odours. The
+      Duchessa lay back languidly, among the crisp silk cushions, in her low,
+      lounging chair; and Peter, as he looked at her, told himself that he must
+      be cautious, cautious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, he met her in the end,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;? And then&mdash;?&rdquo; she questioned, with a show of eagerness,
+      smiling into his eyes. &ldquo;What happened? Did she come up to his
+      expectations? Or was she just the usual disappointment? I have been pining&mdash;oh,
+      but pining&mdash;to hear the continuation of the story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled into his eyes, and his heart fluttered. &ldquo;I must be cautious,&rdquo;
+       he told himself. &ldquo;In more ways than one, this is a crucial moment.&rdquo; At the
+      same time, as a very part of his caution, he must appear entirely
+      nonchalant and candid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no&mdash;tutt' altro,&rdquo; he said, with an assumption of nonchalant
+      airiness and candid promptness. &ldquo;She 'better bettered' his expectations&mdash;she
+      surpassed his fondest. She was a thousand times more delightful than he
+      had dreamed&mdash;though, as you know, he had dreamed a good deal. Pauline
+      de Fleuvieres turned out to be the feeblest, faintest echo of her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa meditated for an instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems impossible. It's one of those situations in which a
+      disenchantment seems the foregone conclusion,&rdquo; she said, at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems so, indeed,&rdquo; assented Peter; &ldquo;but disenchantment, there was
+      none. She was all that he had imagined, and infinitely more. She was the
+      substance&mdash;he had imagined the shadow. He had divined her, as it
+      were, from a single angle, and there were many angles. Pauline was the
+      pale reflection of one side of her&mdash;a pencil-sketch in profile.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa shook her head, marvelling, and smiled again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You pile wonder upon wonder,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;That the reality should excel
+      the poet's ideal! That the cloud-capped towers which looked splendid from
+      afar, with all the glamour of distance, should prove to be more splendid
+      still, on close inspection! It's dead against the accepted theory of
+      things. And that any woman should be nicer than that adorable Pauline! You
+      tax belief. But I want to know what happened. Had she read his book?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing happened,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;I warned you that it was a drama without
+      action. A good deal happened, no doubt, in Wildmay's secret soul. But
+      externally, nothing. They simply chatted together&mdash;exchanged the time
+      o' day&mdash;like any pair of acquaintances. No, I don't think she had
+      read his book. She did read it afterwards, though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And liked it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;she said she liked it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;? But then-?&rdquo; the Duchessa pressed him, insistently. &ldquo;When she
+      discovered the part she had had in its composition&mdash;? Was n't she
+      overwhelmed? Wasn't she immensely interested&mdash;surprised&mdash;moved?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned forward a little. Her eyes were shining. Her lips were slightly
+      parted, so that between their warm rosiness Peter could see the exquisite
+      white line of her teeth. His heart fluttered again. &ldquo;I must be cautious,
+      cautious,&rdquo; he remembered, and made a strenuous &ldquo;act of will&rdquo; to steady
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, she never discovered that,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; exclaimed the Duchessa. Her face fell. Her eyes darkened&mdash;with
+      dismay, with incomprehension. &ldquo;Do you&mdash;you don't&mdash;mean to say
+      that he didn't tell her?&rdquo; There was reluctance to believe, there was a
+      conditional implication of deep reproach, in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had to repeat his act of will.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How could he tell her?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She frowned at him, with reproach that was explicit now, and a kind of
+      pained astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How could he help telling her?&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;But&mdash;but it was the one
+      great fact between them. But it was a fact that intimately concerned her&mdash;it
+      was a fact of her own destiny. But it was her right to be told. Do you
+      seriously mean that he did n't tell her? But why did n't he? What could
+      have possessed him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something like a tremor in her voice. &ldquo;I must appear entirely
+      nonchalant and candid,&rdquo; Peter remembered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fancy he was possessed, in some measure, by a sense of the liberty he
+      had taken by a sense of what one might, perhaps, venture to qualify as his
+      'cheek.' For, if it was n't already a liberty to embody his notion of her
+      in a novel&mdash;in a published book, for daws to peck at&mdash;it would
+      have become a liberty the moment he informed her that he had done so. That
+      would have had the effect of making her a kind of involuntary particeps
+      criminis.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the foolish man!&rdquo; sighed the Duchessa, with a rueful shake of the
+      head. &ldquo;His foolish British self-consciousness! His British inability to
+      put himself in another person's place, to see things from another's point
+      of view! Could n't he see, from her point of view, from any point of view
+      but his own, that it was her right to be told? That the matter affected
+      her in one way, as much as it affected him in another? That since she had
+      influenced&mdash;since she had contributed to&mdash;his life and his art
+      as she had, it was her right to know it? Couldn't he see that his 'cheek,'
+      his real 'cheek,' began when he withheld from her that great strange
+      chapter of her own history? Oh, he ought to have told her, he ought to
+      have told her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sank back in her chair, giving her head another rueful shake, and
+      gazed ruefully away, over the sunny landscape, through the mellow
+      atmosphere, into the golden-hazy distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter looked at her&mdash;and then, quickly, for caution's sake, looked
+      elsewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there were other things to be taken into account,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa raised her eyes. &ldquo;What other things?&rdquo; they gravely
+      questioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would n't his telling her have been equivalent to a declaration of love?&rdquo;
+       questioned he, looking at the signet-ring on the little finger of his left
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A declaration of love?&rdquo; She considered for a moment. &ldquo;Yes, I suppose in a
+      way it would,&rdquo; she acknowledged. &ldquo;But even so?&rdquo; she asked, after another
+      moment of consideration. &ldquo;Why should he not have made her a declaration of
+      love? He was in love with her, wasn't he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The point of frank interrogation in her eyes showed clearly, showed
+      cruelly, how detached, how impersonal, her interest was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frantically,&rdquo; said Peter. For caution's sake, he kept HIS eyes on the
+      golden-hazy peaks of Monte Sfionto. &ldquo;He had been in love with her, in a
+      fashion, of course, from the beginning. But after he met her, he fell in
+      love with her anew. His mind, his imagination, had been in love with its
+      conception of her. But now he, the man, loved her, the woman herself,
+      frantically, with just a downright common human love. There were
+      circumstances, however, which made it impossible for him to tell her so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What circumstances?&rdquo; There was the same frank look of interrogation. &ldquo;Do
+      you mean that she was married?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not that. By the mercy of heaven,&rdquo; he pronounced, with energy, &ldquo;she
+      was a widow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa broke into an amused laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Permit me to admire your piety,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Peter, as his somewhat outrageous ejaculation came back to him,
+      laughed vaguely too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But then&mdash;?&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;What else? By the mercy of heaven, she
+      was a widow. What other circumstance could have tied his tongue?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; he answered, a trifle uneasily, &ldquo;a multitude of circumstances.
+      Pretty nearly every conventional barrier the world has invented, existed
+      between him and her. She was a frightful swell, for one thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A frightful swell&mdash;?&rdquo; The Duchessa raised her eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;at a vertiginous height above him&mdash;horribly
+      'aloft and lone' in the social hierarchy.&rdquo; He tried to smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What could that matter?&rdquo; the Duchessa objected simply. &ldquo;Mr. Wildmay is a
+      gentleman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know he is?&rdquo; Peter asked, thinking to create a diversion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, he is. He must be. No one but a gentleman could have had such
+      an experience, could have written such a book. And besides, he's a friend
+      of yours. Of course he's a gentleman,&rdquo; returned the adroit Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there are degrees of gentleness, I believe,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;She was at
+      the topmost top. He&mdash;well, at all events, he knew his place. He had
+      too much humour, too just a sense of proportion, to contemplate offering
+      her his hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman&mdash;under royalty,&rdquo; said
+      the Duchessa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He can, to be sure&mdash;and he can also see it declined with thanks,&rdquo;
+       Peter answered. &ldquo;But it wasn't merely her rank. She was horribly rich,
+      besides. And then&mdash;and then&mdash;! There were ten thousand other
+      impediments. But the chief of them all, I daresay, was Wildmay's fear lest
+      an avowal of his attachment should lead to his exile from her presence&mdash;and
+      he naturally did not wish to be exiled.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Faint heart!&rdquo; the Duchessa said. &ldquo;He ought to have told her. The case was
+      peculiar, was unique. Ordinary rules could n't apply to it. And how could
+      he be sure, after all, that she would n't have despised the conventional
+      barriers, as you call them? Every man gets the wife he deserves&mdash;and
+      certainly he had gone a long way towards deserving her. She could n't have
+      felt quite indifferent to him&mdash;if he had told her; quite indifferent
+      to the man who had drawn that magnificent Pauline from his vision of her.
+      No woman could be entirely proof against a compliment like that. And I
+      insist that it was her right to know. He should simply have told her the
+      story of his book and of her part in it. She would have inferred the rest.
+      He needn't have mentioned love&mdash;the word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;it is not always too late to mend. He may tell her
+      some fine day yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And in his soul two voices were contending.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell her&mdash;tell her&mdash;tell her! Tell her now, at once, and abide
+      your chances,&rdquo; urged one. &ldquo;No&mdash;no&mdash;no&mdash;do nothing of the
+      kind,&rdquo; protested the second. &ldquo;She is arguing the point for its abstract
+      interest. She is a hundred miles from dreaming that you are the man&mdash;hundreds
+      of miles from dreaming that she is the woman. If she had the least
+      suspicion of that, she would sing a song as different as may be. Caution,
+      caution.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her&mdash;warm and fragrant and radiant, in her soft, white
+      gown, in her low lounging-chair, so near, so near to him&mdash;he looked
+      at her glowing eyes, her red lips, her rich brown hair, at the
+      white-and-rose of her skin, at the delicate blue veins in her forehead, at
+      her fine white hands, clasped loosely together in her lap, at the flowing
+      lines of her figure, with its supple grace and strength; and behind her,
+      surrounding her, accessory to her, he was conscious of the golden August
+      world, in the golden August weather&mdash;of the green park, and the pure
+      sunshine, and the sweet, still air, of the blue lake, and the blue sky,
+      and the mountains with their dark-blue shadows, of the long marble
+      terrace, and the gleaming marble facade of the house, and the marble
+      balustrade, with the jessamine twining round its columns. The picture was
+      very beautiful&mdash;but something was wanting to perfect its beauty; and
+      the name of the something that was wanting sang itself in poignant
+      iteration to the beating of his pulses. And he longed and longed to tell
+      her; and he dared not; and he hesitated....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And while he was hesitating, the pounding of hoofs and the grinding of
+      carriage-wheels on gravel reached his ears&mdash;and so the situation was
+      saved, or the opportunity lost, as you choose to think it. For next minute
+      a servant appeared on the terrace, and announced Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And shortly after that lady's arrival, Peter took his leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Trixie, and is one to congratulate you?&rdquo; asked Mrs. O'Donovan
+      Florence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Congratulate me&mdash;? On what?&rdquo; asked Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On what, indeed!&rdquo; cried the vivacious Irishwoman. &ldquo;Don't try to pull the
+      wool over the eyes of an old campaigner like me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice looked blank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't in the least think what you mean,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get along with you,&rdquo; cried Mrs. O'Donovan Florence; and she brandished
+      her sunshade threateningly. &ldquo;On your engagement to Mr.&mdash;what's this
+      his name is?&mdash;to be sure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced indicatively down the lawn, in the direction of Peter's
+      retreating tweeds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice had looked blank. But now she looked&mdash;first, perhaps, for a
+      tiny fraction of a second, startled&mdash;then gently, compassionately
+      ironical.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My poor Kate! Are you out of your senses?&rdquo; she enquired, in accents of
+      concern, nodding her head, with a feint of pensive pity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not I,&rdquo; returned Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, cheerfully confident. &ldquo;But I 'm
+      thinking I could lay my finger on a long-limbed young Englishman less than
+      a mile from here, who very nearly is. Hasn't he asked you yet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Es-to bete?&rdquo; Beatrice murmured, pitifully nodding again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, well, if he has n't, it's merely a question of time when he will,&rdquo;
+       said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. &ldquo;You've only to notice the famished gaze
+      with which he devours you, to see his condition. But don't try to hoodwink
+      me. Don't pretend that this is news to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;News!&rdquo; scoffed Beatrice. &ldquo;It's news and nonsense&mdash;the product of
+      your irrepressible imagination. Mr. What's-this-his-name-is, as you call
+      him, and I are the barest acquaintances. He's our temporary neighbour&mdash;the
+      tenant for the season of Villa Floriano&mdash;the house you can catch a
+      glimpse of, below there, through the trees, on the other side of the
+      river.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is he, now, really? And that's very interesting too. But I wasn't denying
+      it.&rdquo; Mrs. O'Donovan Florence smiled, with derisive sweetness. &ldquo;The fact of
+      his being the tenant of the house I can catch a glimpse of, through the
+      trees, on the other side of the river, though a valuable acquisition to my
+      stores of knowledge, does n't explain away his famished glance unless,
+      indeed, he's behind with the rent: but even then, it's not famished he'd
+      look, but merely anxious and persuasive. I'm a landlord myself. No,
+      Trixie, dear, you've made roast meat of the poor fellow's heart, as the
+      poetical Persians express it; and if he has n't told you so yet with his
+      tongue, he tells the whole world so with his eyes as often as he allows
+      them to rest on their loadstone, your face. You can see the sparks and the
+      smoke escaping from them, as though they were chimneys. If you've not
+      observed that for yourself, it can only be that excessive modesty has
+      rendered you blind. The man is head over ears in love with you. Nonsense
+      or bonsense, that is the sober truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 'm sorry to destroy a romance, Kate,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;but alas for the
+      pretty one you 've woven, I happen to know that, so far from being in love
+      with me, Mr. Marchdale is quite desperately in love with another woman. He
+      was talking to me about her the moment before you arrived.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was he, indeed?&mdash;and you the barest acquaintances!&rdquo; quizzed Mrs.
+      O'Donovan Florence, pulling a face. &ldquo;Well, well,&rdquo; she went on
+      thoughtfully, &ldquo;if he's in love with another woman, that settles my last
+      remaining doubt. It can only be that the other woman's yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice shook her head, and laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that what they call an Irishism?&rdquo; she asked, with polite curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And an Irishism is a very good thing, too&mdash;when employed with
+      intention,&rdquo; retorted her friend. &ldquo;Did he just chance, now, in a casual
+      way, to mention the other woman's name, I wonder?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you perverse and stiff-necked generation!&rdquo; Beatrice laughed. &ldquo;What
+      can his mentioning or not mentioning her name signify? For since he's in
+      love with her, it's hardly likely that he's in love with you or me at the
+      same time, is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's as may be. But I'll wager I could make a shrewd guess at her name
+      myself. And what else did he tell you about her? He's told me nothing; but
+      I'll warrant I could paint her portrait. She's a fine figure of a young
+      Englishwoman, brown-haired, grey-eyed, and she stands about
+      five-feet-eight in her shoes. There's an expression of great malice and
+      humour in her physiognomy, and a kind of devil-may-care haughtiness in the
+      poise of her head. She's a bit of a grande dame, into the bargain&mdash;something
+      like an Anglo-Italian duchess, for example; she's monstrously rich; and
+      she adds, you'll be surprised to learn, to her other fascinations that of
+      being a widow. Faith, the men are so fond of widows, it's a marvel to me
+      that we're ever married at all until we reach that condition;&mdash;and
+      there, if you like, is another Irishism for you. But what's this? Methinks
+      a rosy blush mantles my lady's brow. Have I touched the heel of Achilles?
+      She IS a widow? He TOLD you she was a widow?... But&mdash;bless us and
+      save us!&mdash;what's come to you now? You're as white as a sheet. What is
+      it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good heavens!&rdquo; gasped Beatrice. She lay back in her chair, and stared
+      with horrified eyes into space. &ldquo;Good&mdash;good heavens!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. O' Donovan Florence leaned forward and took her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it, my dear? What's come to you?&rdquo; she asked, in alarm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice gave a kind of groan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's absurd&mdash;it's impossible,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;and yet, if by any
+      ridiculous chance you should be right, it's too horribly horrible.&rdquo; She
+      repeated her groan. &ldquo;If by any ridiculous chance you are right, the man
+      will think that I have been leading him on!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;LEADING HIM ON!&rdquo; Mrs. O'Donovan Florence suppressed a shriek of ecstatic
+      mirth. &ldquo;There's no question about my being right,&rdquo; she averred soberly.
+      &ldquo;He wears his heart behind his eyeglass; and whoso runs may read it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then&mdash;&rdquo; began Beatrice, with an air of desperation... &ldquo;But
+      no,&rdquo; she broke off. &ldquo;YOU CAN'T be right. It's impossible, impossible.
+      Wait. I'll tell you the whole story. You shall see for yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, assuming an attitude of devout
+      attention, which she retained while Beatrice (not without certain starts
+      and hesitations) recounted the fond tale of Peter's novel, and of the
+      woman who had suggested the character of Pauline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But OF COURSE!&rdquo; cried the Irishwoman, when the tale was finished; and
+      this time her shriek of mirth, of glee, was not suppressed. &ldquo;Of course&mdash;you
+      miracle of unsuspecting innocence! The man would never have breathed a
+      whisper of the affair to any soul alive, save to his heroine herself&mdash;let
+      alone to you, if you and she were not the same. Couple that with the eyes
+      he makes at you, and you've got assurance twice assured. You ought to have
+      guessed it from the first syllable he uttered. And when he went on about
+      her exalted station and her fabulous wealth! Oh, my ingenue! Oh, my
+      guileless lambkin! And you Trixie Belfont! Where's your famous wit? Where
+      are your famous intuitions?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;BUT DON'T YOU SEE,&rdquo; wailed Beatrice, &ldquo;don't you see the utterly odious
+      position this leaves me in? I've been urging him with all my might to tell
+      her! I said... oh, the things I said!&rdquo; She shuddered visibly. &ldquo;I said that
+      differences of rank and fortune could n't matter.&rdquo; She gave a melancholy
+      laugh. &ldquo;I said that very likely she'd accept him. I said she couldn't help
+      being... Oh, my dear, my dear! He'll think&mdash;of course, he can't help
+      thinking&mdash;that I was encouraging him&mdash;that I was coming halfway
+      to meet him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush, hush! It's not so bad as that,&rdquo; said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence,
+      soothingly. &ldquo;For surely, as I understand it, the man doesn't dream that
+      you knew it was about himself he was speaking. He always talked of the
+      book as by a friend of his; and you never let him suspect that you had
+      pierced his subterfuge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice frowned for an instant, putting this consideration in its place,
+      in her troubled mind. Then suddenly a light of intense, of immense relief
+      broke in her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank goodness!&rdquo; she sighed. &ldquo;I had forgotten. No, he does n't dream
+      that. But oh, the fright I had!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He'll tell you, all the same,&rdquo; said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, he'll never tell me now. I am forewarned, forearmed. I 'll give him
+      no chance,&rdquo; Beatrice answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; and what's more, you'll marry him,&rdquo; said her friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kate! Don't descend to imbecilities,&rdquo; cried Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll marry him,&rdquo; reiterated Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, calmly. &ldquo;You'll
+      end by marrying him&mdash;if you're human; and I've seldom known a human
+      being who was more so. It's not in flesh and blood to remain unmoved by a
+      tribute such as that man has paid you. The first thing you'll do will be
+      to re-read the novel. Otherwise, I'd request the loan of it myself, for I
+      'm naturally curious to compare the wrought ring with the virgin gold&mdash;but
+      I know it's the wrought ring the virgin gold will itself be wanting,
+      directly it's alone. And then the poison will work. And you'll end by
+      marrying him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the first place,&rdquo; replied Beatrice, firmly, &ldquo;I shall never marry any
+      one. That is absolutely certain. In the next place, I shall not re-read
+      the novel; and to prove that I shan't, I shall insist on your taking it
+      with you when you leave to-day. And finally, I'm nowhere near convinced
+      that you're right about my being... well, you might as well say the raw
+      material, the rough ore, as the virgin gold. It's only a bare possibility.
+      But even the possibility had not occurred to me before. Now that it has, I
+      shall be on my guard. I shall know how to prevent any possible
+      developments.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the first place,&rdquo; said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, with equal firmness,
+      &ldquo;wild horses couldn't induce me to take the novel. Wait till you're alone.
+      A hundred questions about it will come flocking to your mind; you'd be
+      miserable if you had n't it to refer to. In the next place, the poison
+      will work and work. Say what you will, it's flattery that wins us. In the
+      third place, he'll tell you. Finally, you'll make a good Catholic of him,
+      and marry him. It's absurd, it's iniquitous, anyhow, for a young and
+      beautiful woman like you to remain a widow. And your future husband is a
+      man of talent and distinction, and he's not bad-looking, either. Will you
+      stick to your title, now, I wonder? Or will you step down, and be plain
+      Mrs. Marchdale? No&mdash;the Honourable Mrs.&mdash;excuse me&mdash;'Mr.
+      and the Honourable Mrs. Marchdale.' I see you in the 'Morning Post'
+      already. And will you continue to live in Italy? Or will you come back to
+      England?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my good Kate, my sweet Kate, my incorrigible Kate, what an
+      extravagantly silly Kate you can be when the mood takes you,&rdquo; Beatrice
+      laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kate me as many Kates as you like, the man is really not bad-looking. He
+      has a nice lithe springy figure, and a clean complexion, and an open brow.
+      And if there's a suggestion of superciliousness in the tilt of his nose,
+      of scepticism in the twirl of his moustaches, and of obstinacy in the
+      squareness of his chin&mdash;ma foi, you must take the bitter with the
+      sweet. Besides, he has decent hair, and plenty of it&mdash;he'll not go
+      bald. And he dresses well, and wears his clothes with an air. In short,
+      you'll make a very handsome couple. Anyhow, when your family are gathered
+      round the evening lamp to-night, I 'll stake my fortune on it, but I can
+      foretell the name of the book they'll find Trixie Belfont reading,&rdquo;
+       laughed Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a few minutes, after her friend had left her, Beatrice sat still, her
+      head resting on her hand, and gazed with fixed eyes at Monte Sfiorito.
+      Then she rose, and walked briskly backwards and forwards, for a while, up
+      and down the terrace. Presently she came to a standstill, and leaning on
+      the balustrade, while one of her feet kept lightly tapping the pavement,
+      looked off again towards the mountain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prospect was well worth her attention, with its blue and green and
+      gold, its wood and water, its misty-blushing snows, its spaciousness and
+      its atmosphere. In the sky a million fluffy little cloudlets floated like
+      a flock of fantastic birds, with mother-of-pearl tinted plumage. The
+      shadows were lengthening now. The sunshine glanced from the smooth surface
+      of the lake as from burnished metal, and falling on the coloured sails of
+      the fishing-boats, made them gleam like sails of crimson silk. But I
+      wonder how much of this Beatrice really saw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She plucked an oleander from one of the tall marble urns set along the
+      balustrade, and pressed the pink blossom against her face, and, closing
+      her eyes, breathed in its perfume; then, absent-minded, she let it drop,
+      over the terrace, upon the path below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's impossible,&rdquo; she said suddenly, aloud. At last she went into the
+      house, and up to her rose-and-white retiring-room. There she took a book
+      from the table, and sank into a deep easy-chair, and began to turn the
+      pages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when, by and by, approaching footsteps became audible in the
+      stone-floored corridor without, Beatrice hastily shut the book, thrust it
+      back upon the table, and caught up another so that Emilia Manfredi,
+      entering, found her reading Monsieur Anatole France's &ldquo;Etui de nacre.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Emilia,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I wish you would translate the I Jongleur de Notre
+      Dame' into Italian.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Peter, we may suppose, returned to Villa Floriano that afternoon in a
+      state of some excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He ought to have told her&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was her right to be told&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What could her rank matter&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She would have despised the conventional barriers&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No woman could be proof against such a compliment&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The case was peculiar&mdash;ordinary rules could not apply to it&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Every man gets the wife he deserves&mdash;and he had certainly gone a
+      long way towards deserving her&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He should simply have told her the story of his book and of her part in
+      it&mdash;he need n't have mentioned love&mdash;she would have understood&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa's voice, clear and cool and crisp-cut, sounded perpetually in
+      his ears; the words she had spoken, the arguments she had urged, repeated
+      and repeated themselves, danced round and round, in his memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ought I to have told her&mdash;then and there? Shall I go to her and tell
+      her to-morrow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to think; but he could not think. His faculties were in a whirl&mdash;he
+      could by no means command them. He could only wait, inert, while the dance
+      went on. It was an extremely riotous dance. The Duchessa's conversation
+      was reproduced without sequence, without coherence&mdash;scattered
+      fragments of it were flashed before him fitfully, in swift disorder. If he
+      would attempt to seize upon one of those fragments, to detain and fix it,
+      for consideration&mdash;a speech of hers, a look, an inflection&mdash;then
+      the whole experience suddenly lost its outlines, his recollection of it
+      became a jumble, and he was left, as it were, intellectually gasping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked about his garden, he went into the house, he came out, he walked
+      about again, he went in and dressed for dinner, he sat on his rustic
+      bench, he smoked cigarette after cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ought I to have told her? Ought I to tell her to-morrow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At moments there would come a lull in the turmoil, an interval of quiet,
+      of apparent clearness; and the answer would seem perfectly plain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, you ought to tell her. Tell her&mdash;and all will be well.
+      She has put herself in the supposititious woman's place, and she says, 'He
+      ought to tell her.' She says it earnestly, vehemently. That means that if
+      she were the woman, she would wish to be told. She will despise the
+      conventional barriers&mdash;she will be touched, she will be moved. 'No
+      woman could be proof against such a compliment.' Go to her to-morrow, and
+      tell her&mdash;and all will be well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At these moments he would look up towards the castle, and picture the
+      morrow's consummation; and his heart would have a convulsion. Imagination
+      flew on the wings of his desire. She stood before him in all her sumptuous
+      womanhood, tender and strong and glowing. As he spoke, her eyes lightened,
+      her eyes burned, the blood came and went in her cheeks; her lips parted.
+      Then she whispered something; and his heart leapt terribly; and he called
+      her name&mdash;&ldquo;Beatrice! Beatrice!&rdquo; Her name expressed the inexpressible&mdash;the
+      adoring passion, the wild hunger and wild triumph of his soul. But now she
+      was moving towards him&mdash;she was holding out her hands. He caught her
+      in his arms&mdash;he held her yielding body in his arms. And his heart
+      leapt terribly, terribly. And he wondered how he could endure, how he
+      could live through, the hateful hours that must elapse before tomorrow
+      would be to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But &ldquo;hearts, after leaps, ache.&rdquo; Presently the whirl would begin again;
+      and then, by and by, in another lull, a contrary answer would seem equally
+      plain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell her, indeed? My dear man, are you mad? She would simply be amazed,
+      struck dumb, by your presumption. I can see from here her incredulity&mdash;I
+      can see the scorn with which she would wither you. It has never dimly
+      occurred to her as conceivable that you would venture to be in love with
+      her, that you would dare to lift your eyes to her&mdash;you who are
+      nothing, to her who is all. Yes&mdash;nothing, nobody. In her view, you
+      are just a harmless nobody, whose society she tolerates for kindness' sake&mdash;and
+      faute de mieux. It is precisely because she deems you a nobody&mdash;because
+      she is profoundly conscious of the gulf that separates you from her&mdash;that
+      she can condescend to be amiably familiar. If you were of a rank even
+      remotely approximating to her own, she would be a thousand times more
+      circumspect. Remember&mdash;she does not dream that you are Felix Wildmay.
+      He is a mere name to her; and his story is an amusing little romance,
+      perfectly external to herself, which she discusses with entirely
+      impersonal interest. Tell her by all means, if you like Say, 'I am Wildmay&mdash;you
+      are Pauline.' And see how amazed she will be, and how incensed, and how
+      indignant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he would look up at the castle stonily, in a mood of desperate
+      renunciation, and vaguely meditate packing his belongings, and going home
+      to England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At other moments a third answer would seem the plain one: something
+      between these extremes of optimism and pessimism, a compromise, it not a
+      reconciliation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come! Let us be calm, let us be judicial. The consequences of our
+      actions, here below, if hardly ever so good as we could hope, are hardly
+      ever so bad as we might fear. Let us regard this matter in the light of
+      that guiding principle. True, she does n't dream that you are Wildmay.
+      True, if you were abruptly to say to her, 'I am Wildmay&mdash;you are the
+      woman,' she would be astonished&mdash;even, if you will, at first, more or
+      less taken aback, disconcerted. But indignant? Why? What is this gulf that
+      separates you from her? What are these conventional barriers of which you
+      make so much? She is a duchess, she is the daughter of a lord, and she is
+      rich. Well, all that is to be regretted. But you are neither a plebeian
+      nor a pauper yourself. You are a man of good birth, you are a man of some
+      parts, and you have a decent income. It amounts to this&mdash;she is a
+      great lady, you are a small gentleman. In ordinary circumstances, to be
+      sure, so small a gentleman could not ask so great a lady to become his
+      wife. But here the circumstances are not ordinary. Destiny has meddled in
+      the business. Small gentleman though you are, an unusual and subtle
+      relation-ship has been established between you and your great lady. She
+      herself says, 'Ordinary rules cannot apply&mdash;he ought to tell her.'
+      Very good: tell her. She will be astonished, but she will see that there
+      is no occasion for resentment. And though the odds are, of course, a
+      hundred to one that she will not accept you, still she must treat you as
+      an honourable suitor. And whether she accepts you or rejects you, it is
+      better to tell her and to have it over, than to go on forever dangling
+      this way, like the poor cat in the adage. Tell her&mdash;put your fate to
+      the touch&mdash;hope nothing, fear nothing&mdash;and bow to the event.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But even this temperate answer provoked its counter-answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The odds are a hundred to one, a thousand to one, that she will not
+      accept you. And if you tell her, and she does not accept you, she will not
+      allow you to see her any more, you will be exiled from her presence. And I
+      thought, you did not wish to be exiled from her presence, You would stake,
+      then, this great privilege, the privilege of seeing her, of knowing her,
+      upon a. chance that has a thousand to one against it. You make light of
+      the conventional barriers&mdash;but the principal barrier of them all, you
+      are forgetting. She is a Roman Catholic, and a devout one. Marry a
+      Protestant? She would as soon think of marrying a Paynim Turk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the end, no doubt, a kind of exhaustion followed upon his excitement.
+      Questions and answers suspended themselves; and he could only look up
+      towards Ventirose, and dumbly wish that he was there. The distance was so
+      trifling&mdash;in five minutes he could traverse it&mdash;the law seemed
+      absurd and arbitrary, which condemned him to sit apart, free only to look
+      and wish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in this condition of mind that Marietta found him, when she came to
+      announce dinner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter gave himself a shake. The sight of the brown old woman, with her
+      homely, friendly face, brought him back to small things, to actual things;
+      and that, if it was n't a comfort, was, at any rate, a relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dinner?&rdquo; he questioned. &ldquo;Do peris at the gates of Eden DINE?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The soup is on the table,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose, casting a last glance towards the castle.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+            Towers and battlements...
+            Bosomed high in tufted trees,
+            Where perhaps some beauty lies,
+            The cynosure of neighbouring eyes.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He repeated the lines in an undertone, and went in to dinner. And then the
+      restorative spirit of nonsense descended upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marietta,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;what is your attitude towards the question of mixed
+      marriages?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta wrinkled her brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mixed marriages? What is that, Signorino?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marriages between Catholics and Protestants,&rdquo; he explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Protestants?&rdquo; Her brow was still a network. &ldquo;What things are they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are things&mdash;or perhaps it would be less invidious to say people&mdash;who
+      are not Catholics&mdash;who repudiate Catholicism as a deadly and
+      soul-destroying error.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jews?&rdquo; asked Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;not exactly. They are generally classified as Christians. But
+      they protest, you know. Protesto, protestare, verb, active, first
+      conjugation. 'Mi pare che la donna protesta troppo,' as the poet sings.
+      They're Christians, but they protest against the Pope and the Pretender.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino means Freemasons,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, he does n't,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;He means Protestants.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But pardon, Signorino,&rdquo; she insisted; &ldquo;if they are not Catholics, they
+      must be Freemasons or Jews. They cannot be Christians. Christian&mdash;Catholic:
+      it is the same. All Christians are Catholics.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tu quoque!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;You regard the terms as interchangeable? I 've
+      heard the identical sentiment similarly enunciated by another. Do I look
+      like a Freemason?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She bent her sharp old eyes upon him studiously for a moment. Then she
+      shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she answered slowly. &ldquo;I do not think that the Signorino looks like a
+      Freemason.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Jew, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mache! A Jew? The Signorino!&rdquo; She shrugged derision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet I'm what they call a Protestant,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;I refer you to my sponsors in baptism. A regular, true
+      blue moderate High Churchman and Tory, British and Protestant to the
+      backbone, with 'Frustrate their Popish tricks' writ large all over me. You
+      have never by any chance married a Protestant yourself?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Signorino. I have never married any one. But it was not for the lack
+      of occasions. Twenty, thirty young men courted me when I was a girl. But&mdash;mica!&mdash;I
+      would not look at them. When men are young they are too unsteady for
+      husbands; when they are old they have the rheumatism.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Admirably philosophised,&rdquo; he approved. &ldquo;But it sometimes happens that men
+      are neither young nor old. There are men of thirty-five&mdash;I have even
+      heard that there are men of forty. What of them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a proverb, Signorino, which says, Sposi di quarant' anni son mai
+      sempre tiranni,&rdquo; she informed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the matter of that,&rdquo; he retorted, &ldquo;there is a proverb which says,
+      Love laughs at locksmiths.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Non capisco,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's merely because it's English,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;You'd understand fast
+      enough if I should put it in Italian. But I only quoted it to show the
+      futility of proverbs. Laugh at locksmiths, indeed! Why, it can't even
+      laugh at such an insignificant detail as a Papist's prejudices. But I wish
+      I were a duke and a millionaire. Do you know any one who could create me a
+      duke and endow me with a million?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Signorino,&rdquo; she answered, shaking her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fragrant Cytherea, foam-born Venus, deathless Aphrodite, cannot, goddess
+      though she is,&rdquo; he complained. &ldquo;The fact is, I 'm feeling rather undone. I
+      think I will ask you to bring me a bottle of Asti-spumante&mdash;some of
+      the dry kind, with the white seal. I 'll try to pretend that it's
+      champagne. To tell or not to tell&mdash;that is the question.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+           'A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
+            With the dream of, meet death with&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      And yet, if you can believe me, the man who penned those lines had never
+      seen her. He penned another line equally pat to the situation, though he
+      had never seen me, either
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+           'Is there no method to tell her in Spanish?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      But you can't imagine how I detest that vulgar use of 'pen' for 'write'&mdash;as
+      if literature were a kind of pig. However, it's perhaps no worse than the
+      use of Asti for champagne. One should n't be too fastidious. I must really
+      try to think of some method of telling her in Spanish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta went to fetch the Asti.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Peter rose next morning, he pulled a grimace at the departed night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a detected cheat,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;an unmasked impostor. You live upon
+      your reputation as a counsellor&mdash;'tis the only reason why we bear
+      with you. La nuit porte conseil! Yet what counsel have you brought to me?&mdash;and
+      I at the pass where my need is uttermost. Shall I go to her this
+      afternoon, and unburden my soul&mdash;or shall I not? You have left me
+      where you found me&mdash;in the same fine, free, and liberal state of
+      vacillation. Discredited oracle!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was standing before his dressing-table, brushing his hair. The image in
+      the glass frowned back at him. Then something struck him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At all events, we'll go this morning to Spiaggia, and have our hair cut,&rdquo;
+       he resolved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he walked to the village, and caught the ten o'clock omnibus for
+      Spiaggia. And after he had had his hair cut, he went to the Hotel de
+      Russie, and lunched in the garden. And after luncheon, of course, he
+      entered the grounds of the Casino, and strolled backwards and forwards,
+      one of a merry procession, on the terrace by the lakeside. The gay toilets
+      of the women, their bright-coloured hats and sunshades, made the terrace
+      look like a great bank of monstrous moving flowers. The band played brisk
+      accompaniments to the steady babble of voices, Italian, English, German.
+      The pure air was shot with alien scents&mdash;the women's perfumery, the
+      men's cigarette-smoke. The marvellous blue waters crisped in the breeze,
+      and sparkled in the sun; and the smooth snows of Monte Sfiorito loomed so
+      near, one felt one could almost put out one's stick and scratch one's name
+      upon them.... And here, as luck would have it, Peter came face to face
+      with Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you do?&rdquo; said she, offering her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you do?&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a fine day,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I make you a confidence?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you sure I can trust you?&rdquo; She scanned his face dubiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Try it and see,&rdquo; he urged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, if you must know, I was thirsting to take a table and call
+      for coffee; but having no man at hand to chaperon me, I dared not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Je vous en prie,&rdquo; cried Peter, with a gesture of gallantry; and he led
+      her to one of the round marble tables. &ldquo;Due caffe,&rdquo; he said to the
+      brilliant creature (chains, buckles, ear-rings, of silver filigree, and
+      head-dress and apron of flame-red silk) who came to learn their pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Softly, softly,&rdquo; put in Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. &ldquo;Not a drop of coffee
+      for me. An orange-sherbet, if you please. Coffee was a figure of speech&mdash;a
+      generic term for light refreshments.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter laughed, and amended his order.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you see those three innocent darlings playing together, under the eye
+      of their governess, by the Wellingtonia yonder?&rdquo; enquired the lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The little girl in white and the two boys?&rdquo; asked Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;Such as they are, they're me own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really?&rdquo; he responded, in the tone of profound and sympathetic interest
+      we are apt to affect when parents begin about their children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I give you my word for it,&rdquo; she assured him. &ldquo;But I mention the fact, not
+      in a spirit of boastfulness, but merely to show you that I 'm not entirely
+      alone and unprotected. There's an American at our hotel, by the bye, who
+      goes up and down telling every one who'll listen that it ought to be
+      Washingtonia, and declaiming with tears in his eyes against the arrogance
+      of the English in changing Washington to Wellington. As he's a
+      respectable-looking man with grown-up daughters, I should think very
+      likely he's right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very likely,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;It's an American tree, is n't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whether it is n't or whether it is,&rdquo; said she, &ldquo;one thing is undeniable:
+      you English are the coldest-blooded animals south of the Arctic Circle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;? Are we?&rdquo; he doubted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are that,&rdquo; she affirmed, with sorrowing emphasis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, well,&rdquo; he reflected, &ldquo;the temperature of our blood does n't matter.
+      We're, at any rate, notoriously warm-hearted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you indeed?&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;If you are, it's a mighty quiet kind of
+      notoriety, let me tell you, and a mighty cold kind of warmth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're all for prudence and expediency. You're the slaves of your reason.
+      You're dominated by the head, not by the heart. You're little better than
+      calculating-machines. Are you ever known, now, for instance, to risk earth
+      and heaven, and all things between them, on a sudden unthinking impulse?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not often, I daresay,&rdquo; he admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you sit there as serene as a brazen statue, and own it without a
+      quaver,&rdquo; she reproached him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely,&rdquo; he urged, &ldquo;in my character of Englishman, it behooves me to
+      appear smug and self-satisfied?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're right,&rdquo; she agreed. &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; she continued, after a moment's
+      pause, during which her eyes looked thoughtful, &ldquo;I wonder whether you
+      would fall upon and annihilate a person who should venture to offer you a
+      word of well-meant advice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should sit as serene as a brazen statue, and receive it without a
+      quaver,&rdquo; he promised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; said she, leaning forward a little, and dropping her voice,
+      &ldquo;why don't you take your courage in both hands, and ask her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter stared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be guided by me&mdash;and do it,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do what?&rdquo; he puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask her to marry you, of course,&rdquo; she returned amiably. Then, without
+      allowing him time to shape an answer, &ldquo;Touche!&rdquo; she cried, in triumph. &ldquo;I
+      've brought the tell-tale colour to your cheek. And you a brazen statue!
+      'They do not love who do not show their love.' But, in faith, you show
+      yours to any one who'll be at pains to watch you. Your eyes betray you as
+      often as ever you look at her. I had n't observed you for two minutes by
+      the clock, when I knew your secret as well as if you 'd chosen me for your
+      confessor. But what's holding you back? You can't expect her to do the
+      proposing. Now curse me for a meddlesome Irishwoman, if you will&mdash;but
+      why don't you throw yourself at her feet, and ask her, like a man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I?&rdquo; said Peter, abandoning any desire he may have felt to beat
+      about the bush. Nay, indeed, it is very possible he welcomed, rather than
+      resented, the Irishwoman's meddling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's to prevent you?&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything is nothing. That?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear lady! She is hideously rich, for one thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Getaway with you!&rdquo; was the dear lady's warm expostulation. &ldquo;What has
+      money to do with the question, if a man's in love? But that's the English
+      of it&mdash;there you are with your cold-blooded calculation. You chain up
+      your natural impulses as if they were dangerous beasts. Her money never
+      saved you from succumbing to her enchantments. Why should it bar you from
+      declaring your passion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a sort of tendency in society,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;to look upon the
+      poor man who seeks the hand of a rich woman as a fortunehunter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A fig for the opinion of society,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;The only opinion you
+      should consider is the opinion of the woman you adore. I was an heiress
+      myself; and when Teddy O'Donovan proposed to me, upon my conscience I
+      believe the sole piece of property he possessed in the world was a
+      corkscrew. So much for her ducats!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men, after coffee, are frequently in the habit of smoking,&rdquo; said she.
+      &ldquo;You have my sanction for a cigarette. It will keep you in countenance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; said Peter, and lit his cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And surely, it's a countenance you'll need, to be going on like that
+      about her money. However&mdash;if you can find a ray of comfort in the
+      information&mdash;small good will her future husband get of it, even if he
+      is a fortunehunter: for she gives the bulk of it away in charity, and I 'm
+      doubtful if she keeps two thousand a year for her own spending.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really?&rdquo; said Peter; and for a breathing-space it seemed to him that
+      there was a ray of comfort in the information.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you may rate her at two thousand a year,&rdquo; said Mrs. O'Donovan
+      Florence. &ldquo;I suppose you can match that yourself. So the disparity
+      disappears.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The ray of comfort had flickered for a second, and gone out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are unfortunately other disparities,&rdquo; he remarked gloomily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put a name on them,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's her rank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His impetuous adviser flung up a hand of scorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her rank, do you say?&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;To the mischief with her rank. What's
+      rank to love? A woman is only a woman, whether she calls herself a duchess
+      or a dairy-maid. A woman with any spirit would marry a bank manager, if
+      she loved him. A man's a man. You should n't care that for her rank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; was a snap of Mrs. O' Donovan Florence's fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you know,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;that I am a Protestant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you&mdash;you poor benighted creature? Well, that's easily remedied.
+      Go and get yourself baptised directly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She waved her hand towards the town, as if to recommend his immediate
+      procedure in quest of a baptistery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 'm afraid that's more easily said than done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Easy!&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;Why, you've only to stand still and let yourself
+      be sprinkled. It's the priest who does the work. Don't tell me,&rdquo; she
+      added, with persuasive inconsequence, &ldquo;that you'll allow a little thing
+      like being in love with a woman to keep you back from professing the true
+      faith.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, if I were convinced that it is true,&rdquo; he sighed, still laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What call have you to doubt it? And anyhow, what does it matter whether
+      you 're convinced or not? I remember, when I was a school-girl, I never
+      was myself convinced of the theorems of Euclid; but I professed them
+      gladly, for the sake of the marks they brought; and the eternal verities
+      of mathematics remained unshaken by my scepticism.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your reasoning is subtle,&rdquo; laughed Peter. &ldquo;But the worst of it is, if I
+      were ten times a Catholic, she wouldn't have me. So what's the use?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You never can tell whether a woman will have you or not, until you offer
+      yourself. And even if she refuses you, is that a ground for despair? My
+      own husband asked me three times, and three times I said no. And then he
+      took to writing verses&mdash;and I saw there was but one way to stop him.
+      So we were married. Ask her; ask her again&mdash;and again. You can always
+      resort in the end to versification. And now,&rdquo; the lady concluded, rising,
+      &ldquo;I have spoken, and I leave you to your fate. I'm obliged to return to the
+      hotel, to hold a bed of justice. It appears that my innocent darlings,
+      beyond there, innocent as they look, have managed among them to break the
+      electric light in my sitting-room. They're to be arraigned before me at
+      three for an instruction criminelle. Put what I 've said in your pipe, and
+      smoke it&mdash;'tis a mother's last request. If I 've not succeeded in
+      determining you, don't pretend, at least, that I haven't encouraged you a
+      bit. Put what I 've said in your pipe, and see whether, by vigorous
+      drawing, you can't fan the smouldering fires of encouragement into a small
+      blaze of determination.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter resumed his stroll backwards and forwards by the lakeside.
+      Encouragement was all very well; but... &ldquo;Shall I&mdash;shall I not? Shall
+      I&mdash;shall I not? Shall I&mdash;shall I not?&rdquo; The eternal question went
+      tick-tack, tick-tack, to the rhythm of his march. He glared at vacancy,
+      and tried hard to make up his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid I must be somewhat lacking in decision of character,&rdquo; he said,
+      with pathetic wonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly he stamped his foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come! An end to this tergiversation. Do it. Do it,&rdquo; cried his manlier
+      soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will,&rdquo; he resolved all at once, drawing a deep breath, and clenching
+      his fists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He left the Casino, and set forth to walk to Ventirose. He could not wait
+      for the omnibus, which would not leave till four. He must strike while his
+      will was hot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked rapidly; in less than an hour he had reached the tall gilded
+      grille of the park. He stopped for an instant, and looked up the straight
+      avenue of chestnuts, to the western front of the castle, softly alight in
+      the afternoon sun. He put his hand upon the pendent bell-pull of twisted
+      iron, to summon the porter. In another second he would have rung, he would
+      have been admitted.... And just then one of the little demons that inhabit
+      the circumambient air, called his attention to an aspect of the situation
+      which he had not thought of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait a bit,&rdquo; it whispered in his ear. &ldquo;You were there only yesterday. It
+      can't fail, therefore, to seem extraordinary, your calling again to-day.
+      You must be prepared with an excuse, an explanation. But suppose, when you
+      arrive, suppose that (like the lady in the ballad) she greets you with 'a
+      glance of cold surprise'&mdash;what then, my dear? Why, then, it's
+      obvious, you can't allege the true explanation&mdash;can you? If she
+      greets you with a glance of cold, surprise, you 'll have your answer, as
+      it were, before the fact you 'll know that there's no manner of hope for
+      you; and the time for passionate avowals will automatically defer itself.
+      But then&mdash;? How will you justify your visit? What face can you put
+      on?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H'm,&rdquo; assented Peter, &ldquo;there's something in that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a great deal in that,&rdquo; said the demon. &ldquo;You must have an excuse
+      up your sleeve, a pretext. A true excuse is a fine thing in its way; but
+      when you come to a serious emergency, an alternative false excuse is
+      indispensable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H'm,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, if there are demons in the atmosphere, there are gods in the
+      machine&mdash;(&ldquo;Paraschkine even goes so far as to maintain that there are
+      more gods in the machine than have ever been taken from it.&rdquo;) While Peter
+      stood still, pondering the demon's really rather cogent intervention, his
+      eye was caught by something that glittered in the grass at the roadside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Cardinal's snuff-box,&rdquo; he exclaimed, picking it up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal had dropped his snuff-box. Here was an excuse, and to spare.
+      Peter rang the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      And, like the lady in the ballad, sure enough, she greeted his arrival
+      with a glance of cold surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At all events, eyebrows raised, face unsmiling, it was a glance that
+      clearly supplemented her spoken &ldquo;How do you do?&rdquo; by a tacit (perhaps
+      self-addressed?) &ldquo;What can bring him here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      You or I, indeed, or Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, in the fulness of our
+      knowledge, might very likely have interpreted it rather as a glance of
+      nervous apprehension. Anyhow, it was a glance that perfectly checked the
+      impetus of his intent. Something snapped and gave way within him; and he
+      needed no further signal that the occasion for passionate avowals was not
+      the present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thereupon befell a scene that was really quite too absurd, that was
+      really childish, a scene over the memory of which, I must believe, they
+      themselves have sometimes laughed together; though, at the moment, its
+      absurdity held, for him at least, elements of the tragic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He met her in the broad gravelled carriage-sweep, before the great
+      hall-door. She had on her hat and gloves, as if she were just going out.
+      It seemed to him that she was a little pale; her eyes seemed darker than
+      usual, and graver. Certainly&mdash;cold surprise, or nervous apprehension,
+      as you will&mdash;her attitude was by no means cordial. It was not
+      oncoming. It showed none of her accustomed easy, half-humorous, wholly
+      good-humoured friendliness. It was decidedly the attitude of a person
+      standing off, shut in, withheld.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never seen her in the least like this before,&rdquo; he thought, as he
+      looked at her pale face, her dark, grave eyes; &ldquo;I have never seen her more
+      beautiful. And there is not one single atom of hope for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you do?&rdquo; she said, unsmiling and waited, as who should invite him
+      to state his errand. She did not offer him her hand but, for that matter,
+      (she might have pleaded), she could not, very well: for one of her hands
+      held her sunshade, and the other held an embroidered silk bag, woman's
+      makeshift for a pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, capping the first pang of his disappointment, a kind of anger
+      seized him. After all, what right had she to receive him in this fashion?&mdash;as
+      if he were an intrusive stranger. In common civility, in common justice,
+      she owed it to him to suppose that he would not be there without abundant
+      reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now, with Peter angry, the absurd little scene began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Assuming an attitude designed to be, in its own way, as reticent as hers,
+      &ldquo;I was passing your gate,&rdquo; he explained, &ldquo;when I happened to find this,
+      lying by the roadside. I took the liberty of bringing it to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave her the Cardinal's snuff box, which, in spite of her hands'
+      preoccupation, she was able to accept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A liberty!&rdquo; he thought, grinding his teeth. &ldquo;Yes! No doubt she would have
+      wished me to leave it with the porter at the lodge. No doubt she deems it
+      an act of officiousness on my part to have found it at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And his anger mounted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How very good of you,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;My uncle could not think where he had
+      mislaid it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very fortunate to be the means of restoring it,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, after a second's suspension, as she said nothing (she kept her eyes
+      on the snuffbox, examining it as if it were quite new to her), he lifted
+      his hat, and bowed, preparatory to retiring down the avenue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, but my uncle will wish to thank you,&rdquo; she exclaimed, looking up, with
+      a kind of start. &ldquo;Will you not come in? I&mdash;I will see whether he is
+      disengaged.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a tentative movement towards the door. She had thawed
+      perceptibly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But even as she thawed, Peter, in his anger, froze and stiffened. &ldquo;I will
+      see whether he is disengaged.&rdquo; The expression grated. And perhaps, in
+      effect, it was not a particularly felicitous expression. But if the poor
+      woman was suffering from nervous apprehension&mdash;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg you on no account to disturb Cardinal Udeschini,&rdquo; he returned
+      loftily. &ldquo;It is not a matter of the slightest consequence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And even as he stiffened, she unbent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it is a matter of consequence to him, to us,&rdquo; she said, faintly
+      smiling. &ldquo;We have hunted high and low for it. We feared it was lost for
+      good. It must have fallen from his pocket when he was walking. He will
+      wish to thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am more than thanked already,&rdquo; said Peter. Alas (as Monsieur de la
+      Pallisse has sagely noted), when we aim to appear dignified, how often do
+      we just succeed in appearing churlish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And to put a seal upon this ridiculous encounter, to make it irrevocable,
+      he lifted his hat again, and turned away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, very well,&rdquo; murmured the Duchessa, in a voice that did not reach him.
+      If it had reached him, perhaps he would have come back, perhaps things
+      might have happened. I think there was regret in her voice, as well as
+      despite. She stood for a minute, as he tramped down the avenue, and looked
+      after him, with those unusually dark, grave eyes. At last, making a little
+      gesture&mdash;as of regret? despite? impatience?&mdash;she went into the
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is your snuff-box,&rdquo; she said to the Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man put down his Breviary (he was seated by an open window,
+      getting through his office), and smiled at the snuff box fondly, caressing
+      it with his finger. Afterwards, he shook it, opened it, and took a pinch
+      of snuff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where did you find it?&rdquo; he enquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was found by that Mr. Marchdale,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;in the road, outside the
+      gate. You must have let it drop this morning, when you were walking with
+      Emilia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That Mr. Marchdale?&rdquo; exclaimed the Cardinal. &ldquo;What a coincidence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A coincidence&mdash;?&rdquo; questioned Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be sure,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Was it not to Mr. Marchdale that I owed it in the
+      first instance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;? Was it? I had fancied that you owed it to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;but,&rdquo; he reminded her, whilst the lines deepened about his
+      humorous old mouth, &ldquo;but as a reward of my virtue in conspiring with you
+      to convert him. And, by the way, how is his conversion progressing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal looked up, with interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not progressing at all. I think there is no chance of it,&rdquo; answered
+      Beatrice, in a tone that seemed to imply a certain irritation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;?&rdquo; said the Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought he had shown 'dispositions'?&rdquo; said the Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was a mistake. He has shown none. He is a very tiresome and silly
+      person. He is not worth converting,&rdquo; she declared succinctly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good gracious!&rdquo; said the Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He resumed his office. But every now and again he would pause, and look
+      out of the window, with the frown of a man meditating something; then he
+      would shake his head significantly, and take snuff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter tramped down the avenue, angry and sick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her reception of him had not only administered an instant death-blow to
+      his hopes as a lover, but in its ungenial aloofness it had cruelly wounded
+      his pride as a man. He felt snubbed and humiliated. Oh, true enough, she
+      had unbent a little, towards the end. But it was the look with which she
+      had first greeted him&mdash;it was the air with which she had waited for
+      him to state his errand&mdash;that stung, and rankled, and would not be
+      forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was angry with her, angry with circumstances, with life, angry with
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am a fool&mdash;and a double fool&mdash;and a triple fool,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I
+      am a fool ever to have thought of her at all; a double fool ever to have
+      allowed myself to think so much of her; a triple and quadruple and
+      quintuple idiot ever to have imagined for a moment that anything could
+      come of it. I have wasted time enough. The next best thing to winning is
+      to know when you are beaten. I acknowledge myself beaten. I will go back
+      to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gazed darkly round the familiar valley, with eyes that abjured it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Olympus, no doubt, laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he took no immediate steps to get them packed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hope,&rdquo; observes the clear-sighted French publicist quoted in the
+      preceding chapter, &ldquo;hope dies hard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hope, Peter fancied, had received its death-blow that afternoon. Already,
+      that evening, it began to revive a little. It was very much enfeebled; it
+      was very indefinite and diffident; but it was not dead. It amounted,
+      perhaps, to nothing more than a vague kind of feeling that he would not,
+      on the whole, make his departure for England quite so precipitate as, in
+      the first heat of his anger, the first chill of his despair, he had
+      intended. Piano, piano! He would move slowly, he would do nothing rash.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he was not happy, he was very far from happy. He spent a wretched
+      night, a wretched, restless morrow. He walked about a great deal&mdash;about
+      his garden, and afterwards, when the damnable iteration of his garden had
+      become unbearable, he walked to the village, and took the riverside path,
+      under the poplars, along the racing Aco, and followed it, as the waters
+      paled and broadened, for I forget how many joyless, unremunerative miles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he came home, fagged out and dusty, at dinner time, Marietta
+      presented a visiting card to him, on her handsomest salver. She presented
+      it with a flourish that was almost a swagger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Twice the size of an ordinary visiting-card, the fashion of it was roughly
+      thus:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                   IL CARDLE UDESCHINI
+          Sacr: Congr: Archiv: et Inscript: Praef:
+
+          Palazzo Udeschini.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      And above the legend, was pencilled, in a small oldfashioned hand,
+      wonderfully neat and pretty:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To thank Mr. Marchdale for his courtesy in returning my snuff-box.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here,&rdquo; said Marietta. There was a
+      swagger in her accent. There was also something in her accent that seemed
+      to rebuke Peter for his absence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had inferred as much from this,&rdquo; said he, tapping the card. &ldquo;We
+      English, you know, are great at putting two and two together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He came in a carriage,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not really?&rdquo; said her master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ang&mdash;veramente,&rdquo; she affirmed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was&mdash;was he alone?&rdquo; Peter asked, an obscure little twinge of hope
+      stirring in his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Signorino.&rdquo; And then she generalised, with untranslatable
+      magniloquence: &ldquo;Un amplissimo porporato non va mai solo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter ought to have hugged her for that amplissimo porporato. But he was
+      selfishly engrossed in his emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who was with him?&rdquo; He tried to throw the question out with a casual
+      effect, an effect of unconcern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorina Emelia Manfredi was with him,&rdquo; answered Marietta, little
+      recking how mere words can stab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was very sorry not to see the
+      Signorino,&rdquo; continued Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor man&mdash;was he? Let us trust that time will console him,&rdquo; said
+      Peter, callously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; he asked himself, &ldquo;I wonder whether perhaps I was the
+      least bit hasty yesterday? If I had stopped, I should have saved the
+      Cardinal a journey here to-day&mdash;I might have known that he would
+      come, these Italians are so punctilious&mdash;and then, if I had stopped&mdash;if
+      I had stopped&mdash;possibly&mdash;possibly&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Possibly what? Oh, nothing. And yet, if he had stopped... well, at any
+      rate, he would have gained time. The Duchessa had already begun to thaw.
+      If he had stopped... He could formulate no precise conclusion to that if;
+      but he felt dimly remorseful that he had not stopped, he felt that he had
+      indeed been the least bit hasty. And his remorse was somehow medicine to
+      his reviving hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all, I scarcely gave things a fair trial yesterday,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the corollary of that, of course, was that he might give things a
+      further and fairer trial some other day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his hope was still hard hurt; he was still in a profound dejection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino is not eating his dinner,&rdquo; cried Marietta, fixing him with
+      suspicious, upbraiding eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never said I was,&rdquo; he retorted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino is not well?&rdquo; she questioned, anxious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes&mdash;cosi, cosi; the Signorino is well enough,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The dinner&rdquo;&mdash;you could perceive that she brought herself with
+      difficulty to frame the dread hypothesis&mdash;&ldquo;the dinner is not good?&rdquo;
+       Her voice sank. She waited, tense, for his reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The dinner,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;if one may criticise without eating it, the dinner
+      is excellent. I will have no aspersions cast upon my cook.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah-h-h!&rdquo; breathed Marietta, a tremulous sigh of relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not the Signorino, it is not the dinner, it is the world that is
+      awry,&rdquo; Peter went on, in reflective melancholy. &ldquo;'T is the times that are
+      out of joint. 'T is the sex, the Sex, that is not well, that is not good,
+      that needs a thorough overhauling and reforming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which sex?&rdquo; asked Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sex,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;By the unanimous consent of rhetoricians, there is
+      but one sex the sex, the fair sex, the unfair sex, the gentle sex, the
+      barbaric sex. We men do not form a sex, we do not even form a sect. We are
+      your mere hangers-on, camp-followers, satellites&mdash;your things, your
+      playthings&mdash;we are the mere shuttlecocks which you toss hither and
+      thither with your battledores, as the wanton mood impels you. We are born
+      of woman, we are swaddled and nursed by woman, we are governessed by
+      woman; subsequently, we are beguiled by woman, fooled by woman, led on,
+      put off, tantalised by woman, fretted and bullied by her; finally, last
+      scene of all, we are wrapped in our cerements by woman. Man's life, birth,
+      death, turn upon woman, as upon a hinge. I have ever been a misanthrope,
+      but now I am seriously thinking of becoming a misogynist as well. Would
+      you advise me to-do so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A misogynist? What is that, Signorino?&rdquo; asked Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A woman-hater,&rdquo; he explained; &ldquo;one who abhors and forswears the sex; one
+      who has dashed his rose-coloured spectacles from his eyes, and sees woman
+      as she really is, with no illusive glamour; one who has found her out.
+      Yes, I think I shall become a misogynist. It is the only way of rendering
+      yourself invulnerable, 't is the only safe course. During my walk this
+      afternoon, I recollected, from the scattered pigeon-holes of memory, and
+      arranged in consequent order, at least a score of good old apothegmatic
+      shafts against the sex. Was it not, for example, in the grey beginning of
+      days, was it not woman whose mortal taste brought sin into the world and
+      all our woe? Was not that Pandora a woman, who liberated, from the box
+      wherein they were confined, the swarm of winged evils that still afflict
+      us? I will not remind you of St. John Chrysostom's golden parable about a
+      temple and the thing it is constructed over. But I will come straight to
+      the point, and ask whether this is truth the poet sings, when he informs
+      us roundly that 'every woman is a scold at heart'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta was gazing patiently at the sky. She did not answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The tongue,&rdquo; Peter resumed, &ldquo;is woman's weapon, even as the fist is
+      man's. And it is a far deadlier weapon. Words break no bones&mdash;they
+      break hearts, instead. Yet were men one-tenth part so ready with their
+      fists, as women are with their barbed and envenomed tongues, what savage
+      brutes you would think us&mdash;would n't you?&mdash;and what a rushing
+      trade the police-courts would drive, to be sure. That is one of the good
+      old cliches that came back to me during my walk. All women are alike&mdash;there's
+      no choice amongst animated fashion-plates: that is another. A woman is the
+      creature of her temper; her husband, her children, and her servants are
+      its victims: that is a third. Woman is a bundle of pins; man is her
+      pin-cushion. When woman loves, 't is not the man she loves, but the man's
+      flattery; woman's love is reflex self-love. The man who marries puts
+      himself in irons. Marriage is a bird-cage in a garden. The birds without
+      hanker to get in; but the birds within know that there is no condition so
+      enviable as that of the birds without. Well, speak up. What do you think?
+      Do you advise me to become a misogynist?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not understand, Signorino,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, you don't,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;Who ever could understand such stuff
+      and nonsense? That's the worst of it. If only one could understand, if
+      only one could believe it, one might find peace, one might resign oneself.
+      But alas and alas! I have never had any real faith in human wickedness;
+      and now, try as I will, I cannot imbue my mind with any real faith in the
+      undesirability of woman. That is why you see me dissolved in tears, and
+      unable to eat my dinner. Oh, to think, to think,&rdquo; he cried with passion,
+      suddenly breaking into English, &ldquo;to think that less than a fortnight ago,
+      less than one little brief fortnight ago, she was seated in your kitchen,
+      seated there familiarly, in her wet clothes, pouring tea, for all the
+      world as if she was the mistress of the house!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Days passed. He could not go to Ventirose&mdash;or, anyhow, he thought he
+      could not. He reverted to his old habit of living in his garden, haunting
+      the riverside, keeping watchful, covetous eyes turned towards the castle.
+      The river bubbled and babbled; the sun shone strong and clear; his
+      fountain tinkled; his birds flew about their affairs; his flowers breathed
+      forth their perfumes; the Gnisi frowned, the uplands westward laughed, the
+      snows of Monte Sfiorito sailed under every colour of the calendar except
+      their native white. All was as it had ever been&mdash;but oh, the
+      difference to him. A week passed. He caught no glimpse of the Duchessa.
+      Yet he took no steps to get his boxes packed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      And then Marietta fell ill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One morning, when she came into his room, to bring his tea, and to open
+      the Venetian blinds that shaded his windows, she failed to salute him with
+      her customary brisk &ldquo;Buon giorno, Signorino.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Noticing which, and wondering, he, from his pillow, called out, &ldquo;Buon'
+      giorno, Marietta.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Buon' giorno, Signorino,&rdquo; she returned but in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter? Is there cause for secrecy?&rdquo; Peter asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a cold, Signorino,&rdquo; she whispered, pointing to her chest. &ldquo;I
+      cannot speak.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetian blinds were up by this time; the room was full of sun. He
+      looked at her. Something in her face alarmed him. It seemed drawn and set,
+      it seemed flushed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come here,&rdquo; he said, with a certain peremptoriness. &ldquo;Give me your hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She wiped her brown old hand backwards and forwards across her apron; then
+      gave it to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was hot and dry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your cold is feverish,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You must go to bed, and stay there till
+      the fever has passed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot go to bed, Signorino,&rdquo; she replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't you? Have you tried?&rdquo; asked he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Signorino,&rdquo; she admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you never can tell whether you can do a thing or not, until you
+      try,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Try to go to bed; and if at first you don't succeed, try,
+      try again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot go to bed. Who would do the Signorino's work?&rdquo; was her whispered
+      objection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hang the Signorino's work. The Signorino's work will do itself. Have you
+      never observed that if you conscientiously neglect to do your work, it
+      somehow manages to get done without you? You have a feverish cold; you
+      must keep out of draughts; and the only place where you can be sure of
+      keeping out of draughts, is bed. Go to bed at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She left the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when Peter came downstairs, half an hour later, he heard her moving in
+      her kitchen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marietta!&rdquo; he cried, entering that apartment with the mien of Nemesis. &ldquo;I
+      thought I told you to go to bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta cowered a little, and looked sheepish, as one surprised in the
+      flagrant fact of misdemeanour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Signorino,&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;? Do you call this bed?&rdquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Signorino,&rdquo; she acknowledged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you wish to oblige me to put you to bed?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no, Signorino,&rdquo; she protested, horror in her whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then go to bed directly. If you delay any longer, I shall accuse you of
+      wilful insubordination.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bene, Signorino,&rdquo; reluctantly consented Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter strolled into his garden. Gigi, the gardener, was working there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The very man I most desired to meet,&rdquo; said Peter, and beckoned to him.
+      &ldquo;Is there a doctor in the village?&rdquo; he enquired, when Gigi had approached.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Signorino. The Syndic is a doctor&mdash;Dr. Carretaji.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;Will you go to the village, please, and ask Dr.
+      Carretaji if he can make it convenient to call here to-day? Marietta is
+      not well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Signorino.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And stop a bit,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;Are there such things as women in the
+      village?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, mache, Signorino! But many, many,&rdquo; answered Gigi, rolling his dark
+      eyes sympathetically, and waving his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I need but one,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;A woman to come and do Marietta's work for
+      a day or two&mdash;cook, and clean up, and that sort of thing. Do you
+      think you could procure me such a woman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is my wife, Signorino,&rdquo; suggested Gigi. &ldquo;If she would content the
+      Signorino?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh? I was n't aware that you were married. A hundred felicitations. Yes,
+      your wife, by all means. Ask her to come and rule as Marietta's
+      vicereine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gigi started for the village.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter went into the house, and knocked at Marietta's bed-room door. He
+      found her in bed, with her rosary in her hands. If she could not work, she
+      would not waste her time. In Marietta's simple scheme of life, work and
+      prayer, prayer and work, stood, no doubt, as alternative and complementary
+      duties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are not half warmly enough covered up,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fetched his travelling-rug, and spread it over her. Then he went to the
+      kitchen, where she had left a fire burning, and filled a bottle with hot
+      water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put this at your feet,&rdquo; he said, returning to Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I cannot allow the Signorino to wait on me like this,&rdquo; the old woman
+      mustered voice to murmur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino likes it&mdash;it affords him healthful exercise,&rdquo; Peter
+      assured her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Carretaji came about noon, a fat middleaged man, with a fringe of
+      black hair round an ivory-yellow scalp, a massive watch-chain (adorned by
+      the inevitable pointed bit of coral), and podgy, hairy hands. But he
+      seemed kind and honest, and he seemed to know his business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has a catarrh of the larynx, with, I am afraid, a beginning of
+      bronchitis,&rdquo; was his verdict.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there any danger?&rdquo; Peter asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not the slightest. She must remain in bed, and take frequent nourishment.
+      Hot milk, and now and then beef-tea. I will send some medicine. But the
+      great things are nourishment and warmth. I will call again to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gigi's wife came. She was a tall, stalwart, blackbrowed, red-cheeked young
+      woman, and her name (Gigi's eyes flashed proudly, as he announced it) her
+      name was Carolina Maddalena.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had to be in and out of Marietta's room all day, to see that she
+      took her beef-tea and milk and medicine regularly. She dozed a good deal.
+      When she was awake, she said her rosary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But next day she was manifestly worse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;bronchitis, as I feared,&rdquo; said the doctor. &ldquo;Danger? No&mdash;none,
+      if properly looked after. Add a little brandy to her milk, and see that
+      she has at least a small cupful every half-hour. I think it would be
+      easier for you if you had a nurse. Someone should be with her at night.
+      There is a Convent of Mercy at Venzona. If you like, I will telephone for
+      a sister.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you very much. I hope you will,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that afternoon Sister Scholastica arrived, and established herself in
+      the sick-room. Sister Scholastica was young, pale, serene, competent. But
+      sometimes she had to send for Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She refuses to take her milk. Possibly she will take it from you,&rdquo; the
+      sister said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Peter would assume a half-bluff (perhaps half-wheedling?) tone of
+      mastery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, Marietta! You must take your milk. The Signorino wishes it. You
+      must not disobey the Signorino.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Marietta, with a groan, would rouse herself, and take it, Peter
+      holding the cup to her lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the third day, in the morning, Sister Scholastica said, &ldquo;She imagines
+      that she is worse. I do not think so myself. But she keeps repeating that
+      she is going to die. She wishes to see a priest. I think it would make her
+      feel easier. Can you send for the Parrocco? Please let him know that it is
+      not an occasion for the Sacraments. But it would do her good if he would
+      come and talk with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the doctor, who arrived just then, having visited Marietta, confirmed
+      the sister's opinion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is no worse&mdash;she is, if anything, rather better. Her malady is
+      taking its natural course. But people of her class always fancy they are
+      going to die, if they are ill enough to stay in bed. It is the panic of
+      ignorance. Yes, I think it would do her good to see a priest. But there is
+      not the slightest occasion for the Sacraments.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So Peter sent Gigi to the village for the Parrocco. And Gigi came back
+      with the intelligence that the Parrocco was away, making a retreat, and
+      would not return till Saturday. To-day was Wednesday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What shall we do now?&rdquo; Peter asked of Sister Scholastica.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is Monsignor Langshawe, at Castel Ventirose,&rdquo; said the sister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could I ask him to come?&rdquo; Peter doubted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; said the sister. &ldquo;In a case of illness, the nearest priest
+      will always gladly come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So Peter despatched Gigi with a note to Monsignor Langshawe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And presently up drove a brougham, with Gigi on the box beside the
+      coachman. And from the brougham descended, not Monsignor Langshawe, but
+      Cardinal Udeschini, followed by Emilia Manfredi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal gave Peter his hand, with a smile so sweet, so benign, so
+      sunny-bright&mdash;it was like music, Peter thought; it was like a silent
+      anthem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monsignor Langshawe has gone to Scotland, for his holiday. I have come in
+      his place. Your man told me of your need,&rdquo; the Cardinal explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know how to thank your Eminence,&rdquo; Peter murmured, and conducted
+      him to Marietta's room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sister Scholastica genuflected, and kissed the Cardinal's ring, and
+      received his Benediction. Then she and Peter withdrew, and went into the
+      garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sister joined Emilia, and they walked backwards and forwards together,
+      talking. Peter sat on his rustic bench, smoked cigarettes, and waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nearly an hour passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length the Cardinal came out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter rose, and went forward to meet him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal was smiling; but about his eyes there was a suggestive
+      redness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Marchdale,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;your housekeeper is in great distress of
+      conscience touching one or two offences she feels she has been guilty of
+      towards you. They seem to me, in frankness, somewhat trifling. But I
+      cannot persuade her to accept my view. She will not be happy till she has
+      asked and received your pardon for them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Offences towards me?&rdquo; Peter wondered. &ldquo;Unless excess of patience with a
+      very trying employer constitutes an offence, she has been guilty of none.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind,&rdquo; said the Cardinal. &ldquo;Her conscience accuses her&mdash;she
+      must satisfy it. Will you come?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal sat down at the head of Marietta's bed, and took her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, dear,&rdquo; he said, with the gentleness, the tenderness, of one speaking
+      to a beloved child, &ldquo;here is Mr. Marchdale. Tell him what you have on your
+      mind. He is ready to hear and to forgive you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta fixed her eyes anxiously on Peter's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First,&rdquo; she whispered, &ldquo;I wish to beg the Signorino to pardon all this
+      trouble I am making for him. I am the Signorino's servant; but instead of
+      serving, I make trouble for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused. The Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter answered, &ldquo;Marietta, if you talk like that, you will make the
+      Signorino cry. You are the best servant that ever lived. You are putting
+      me to no trouble at all. You are giving me a chance&mdash;which I should
+      be glad of, except that it involves your suffering&mdash;to show my
+      affection for you, and my gratitude.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There, dear,&rdquo; said the Cardinal to her, &ldquo;you see the Signorino makes
+      nothing of that. Now the next thing. Go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have to ask the Signorino's forgiveness for my impertinence,&rdquo; whispered
+      Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Impertinence&mdash;?&rdquo; faltered Peter. &ldquo;You have never been impertinent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scusi, Signorino,&rdquo; she went on, in her whisper. &ldquo;I have sometimes
+      contradicted the Signorino. I contradicted the Signorino when he told me
+      that St. Anthony of Padua was born in Lisbon. It is impertinent of a
+      servant to contradict her master. And now his most high Eminence says the
+      Signorino was right. I beg the Signorino to forgive me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You dear old woman,&rdquo; Peter half laughed, half sobbed, &ldquo;how can you ask me
+      to forgive a mere difference of opinion? You&mdash;you dear old thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal smiled, and patted Marietta's hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino is too good,&rdquo; Marietta sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on, dear,&rdquo; said the Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been guilty of the deadly sin of evil speaking. I have spoken evil
+      of the Signorino,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;I said&mdash;I said to people&mdash;that
+      the Signorino was simple&mdash;that he was simple and natural. I thought
+      so then. Now I know it is not so. I know it is only that the Signorino is
+      English.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more the Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Peter half laughed, half sobbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marietta! Of course I am simple and natural. At least, I try to be. Come!
+      Look up. Smile. Promise you will not worry about these things any more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up, she smiled faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino is too good,&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a little interval of silence, &ldquo;Now, dear,&rdquo; said the Cardinal, &ldquo;the
+      last thing of all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta gave a groan, turning her head from side to side on her pillow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You need not be afraid,&rdquo; said the Cardinal. &ldquo;Mr. Marchdale will certainly
+      forgive you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh-h-h,&rdquo; groaned Marietta. She stared at the ceiling for an instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal patted her hand. &ldquo;Courage, courage,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;Signorino mio,&rdquo; she groaned again, &ldquo;this you never can forgive
+      me. It is about the little pig, the porcellino. The Signorino remembers
+      the little pig, which he called Francesco?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; answered Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino told me to take the little pig away, to find a home for
+      him. And I told the Signorino that I would take him to my nephew, who is a
+      farmer, towards Fogliamo. The Signorino remembers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; answered Peter. &ldquo;Yes, you dear old thing. I remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta drew a deep breath, summoned her utmost fortitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I did not take him to my nephew. The&mdash;the Signorino ate him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter could hardly keep from laughing. He could only utter a kind of
+      half-choked &ldquo;Oh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; whispered Marietta. &ldquo;He was bought with the Signorino's money. I
+      did not like to see the Signorino's money wasted. So I deceived the
+      Signorino. You ate him as a chicken-pasty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This time Peter did laugh, I am afraid. Even the Cardinal&mdash;well, his
+      smile was perilously near a titter. He took a big pinch of snuff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I killed Francesco, and I deceived the Signorino. I am very sorry,&rdquo;
+       Marietta said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter knelt down at her bedside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marietta! Your conscience is too sensitive. As for killing Francesco&mdash;we
+      are all mortal, he could not have lived forever. And as for deceiving the
+      Signorino, you did it for his own good. I remember that chicken-pasty. It
+      was the best chicken-pasty I have ever tasted. You must not worry any more
+      about the little pig.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta turned her face towards him, and smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorino forgives his servant?&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter could not help it. He bent forward, and kissed her brown old cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will be easier now,&rdquo; said the Cardinal. &ldquo;I will stay with her a
+      little longer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter went out. The scene had been childish&mdash;do you say?&mdash;ridiculous,
+      almost farcical indeed? And yet, somehow, it seemed to Peter that his
+      heart was full of unshed tears. At the same time, as he thought of the
+      Cardinal, as he saw his face, his smile, as he heard the intonations of
+      his voice, the words he had spoken, as he thought of the way he had held
+      Marietta's hand and patted it&mdash;at the same time a kind of strange joy
+      seemed to fill his heart, a strange feeling of exaltation, of enthusiasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a heavenly old man,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the garden Sister Scholastica and Emilia were still walking together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They halted, when Peter came out; and Emilia said, &ldquo;With your consent,
+      Signore, Sister Scholastica has accepted me as her lieutenant. I will come
+      every morning, and sit with Marietta during the day. That will relieve the
+      sister, who has to be up with her at night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And every morning after that, Emilia came, walking through the park, and
+      crossing the river by the ladder-bridge, which Peter left now permanently
+      in its position. And once or twice a week, in the afternoon, the Cardinal
+      would drive up in the brougham, and, having paid a little visit to
+      Marietta, would drive Emilia home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the sick-room Emilia would read to Marietta, or say the rosary for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta mended steadily day by day. At the end of a fortnight she was
+      able to leave her bed for an hour or two in the afternoon, and sit in the
+      sun in the garden. Then Sister Scholastica went back to her convent at
+      Venzona. At the end of the third week Marietta could be up all day. But
+      Gigi's stalwart Carolina Maddalena continued to rule as vicereine in the
+      kitchen. And Emilia continued to come every morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why does the Duchessa never come?&rdquo; Peter wondered. &ldquo;It would be decent of
+      her to come and see the poor old woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whenever he thought of Cardinal Udeschini, the same strange feeling of joy
+      would spring up in his heart, which he had felt when he had left the
+      beautiful old man with Marietta, on the day of his first visit. In the
+      beginning he could only give this feeling a very general and indefinite
+      expression. &ldquo;He is a man who renews one's faith in things, who renews
+      one's faith in human nature.&rdquo; But gradually, I suppose, the feeling
+      crystallised; and at last, in due season, it found for itself an
+      expression that was not so indefinite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in the afternoon, and he had just conducted the Cardinal and Emilia
+      to their carriage. He stood at his gate for a minute, and watched the
+      carriage as it rolled away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a heavenly old man, what a heavenly old man,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, still looking after the carriage, before turning back into his
+      garden, he heard himself repeat, half aloud
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;Nor knowest thou what argument
+        Thy life to thy neighbour's creed hath lent.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The words had come to his lips, and were pronounced, were addressed to his
+      mental image of the Cardinal, without any conscious act of volition on his
+      part. He heard them with a sort of surprise, almost as if some one else
+      had spoken them. He could not in the least remember what poem they were
+      from, he could not even remember what poet they were by. Were they by
+      Emerson? It was years since he had read a line of Emerson's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All that evening the couplet kept running in his head. And the feeling of
+      joy, of enthusiasm, in his heart, was not so strange now. But I think it
+      was intensified.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next time the Cardinal arrived at Villa Floriano, and gave Peter his
+      hand, Peter did not merely shake it, English fashion, as he had hitherto
+      done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal looked startled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then his eyes searched Peter's face for a second, keenly interrogative.
+      Then they softened; and a wonderful clear light shone in them, a wonderful
+      pure, sweet light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus, Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus,&rdquo; he
+      said, making the Sign of the Cross.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Up at the castle, Cardinal Udeschini was walking backwards and forwards on
+      the terrace, reading his Breviary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice was seated under the white awning, at the terrace-end, doing some
+      kind of needlework.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently the Cardinal came to a standstill near her, and closed his book,
+      putting his finger in it, to keep the place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be, of course, a great loss to Casa Udeschini, when you marry,&rdquo;
+       he remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice looked up, astonishment on her brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I marry?&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;Well, if ever there was a thunderbolt from
+      a clear sky!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And she laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes-when you marry,&rdquo; the Cardinal repeated, with conviction. &ldquo;You are a
+      young woman&mdash;you are twenty-eight years old. You will, marry. It is
+      only right that you should marry. You have not the vocation for a
+      religious. Therefore you must marry. But it will be a great loss to the
+      house of Udeschini.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof,&rdquo; said Beatrice, laughing
+      again. &ldquo;I haven't the remotest thought of marrying. I shall never marry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Il ne faut jamais dire a la fontaine, je ne boirai pas de ton eau,&rdquo; his
+      Eminence cautioned her, whilst the lines of humour about his mouth
+      emphasised themselves, and his grey eyes twinkled. &ldquo;Other things equal,
+      marriage is as much the proper state for the laity, as celibacy is the
+      proper state for the clergy. You will marry. It would be selfish of us to
+      oppose your marrying. You ought to marry. But it will be a great loss to
+      the family&mdash;it will be a great personal loss to me. You are as dear
+      to me as any of my blood. I am always forgetting that we are uncle and
+      niece by courtesy only.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall never marry. But nothing that can happen to me can ever make the
+      faintest difference in my feeling for you. I hope you know how much I love
+      you?&rdquo; She looked into his eyes, smiling her love. &ldquo;You are only my uncle
+      by courtesy? But you are more than an uncle&mdash;you have been like a
+      father to me, ever since I left my convent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal returned her smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Carissima,&rdquo; he murmured. Then, &ldquo;It will be a matter of the utmost
+      importance to me, however,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;that, when the time comes, you
+      should marry a good man, a suitable man&mdash;a man who will love you,
+      whom you will love&mdash;and, if possible, a man who will not altogether
+      separate you from me, who will perhaps love me a little too. It would send
+      me in sorrow to my grave, if you should marry a man who was not worthy of
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will guard against that danger by not marrying at all,&rdquo; laughed
+      Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;you will marry, some day,&rdquo; said the Cardinal. &ldquo;And I wish you to
+      remember that I shall not oppose your marrying&mdash;provided the man is a
+      good man. Felipe will not like it&mdash;Guido will pull a long nose&mdash;but
+      I, at least, will take your part, if I can feel that the man is good. Good
+      men are rare, my dear; good husbands are rarer still. I can think, for
+      instance, of no man in our Roman nobility, whom I should be content to see
+      you marry. Therefore I hope you will not marry a Roman. You would be more
+      likely to marry one of your own countrymen. That, of course, would double
+      the loss to us, if it should take you away from Italy. But remember, if he
+      is a man whom I can think worthy of you, you may count upon me as an
+      ally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He resumed his walk, reopening his Breviary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice resumed her needlework. But she found it difficult to fix her
+      attention on it. Every now and then, she would leave her needle stuck
+      across its seam, let the work drop to her lap, and, with eyes turned
+      vaguely up the valley, fall, apparently, into a muse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder why he said all that to me?&rdquo; was the question that kept posing
+      itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By and by the Cardinal closed his Breviary, and put it in his pocket. I
+      suppose he had finished his office for the day. Then he came and sat down
+      in one of the wicker chairs, under the awning. On the table, among the
+      books and things, stood a carafe of water, some tumblers, a silver
+      sugar-bowl, and a crystal dish full of fresh pomegranate seeds. It looked
+      like a dish full of unset rubies. The Cardinal poured some water into a
+      tumbler, added a lump of sugar and a spoonful of pomegranate seeds,
+      stirred the mixture till it became rose-coloured, and drank it off in a
+      series of little sips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the matter, Beatrice?&rdquo; he asked, all at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice raised her eyes, perplexed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The matter&mdash;? Is anything the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Cardinal; &ldquo;something is the matter. You are depressed, you
+      are nervous, you are not yourself. I have noticed it for many days. Have
+      you something on, your mind?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing in the world,&rdquo; Beatrice answered, with an appearance of great
+      candour. &ldquo;I had not noticed that I was nervous or depressed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are entering October,&rdquo; said the Cardinal. &ldquo;I must return to Rome. I
+      have been absent too long already. I must return next week. But I should
+      not like to go away with the feeling that you are unhappy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If a thing were needed to make me unhappy, it would be the announcement
+      of your intended departure,&rdquo; Beatrice said, smiling. &ldquo;But otherwise, I am
+      no more unhappy than it is natural to be. Life, after all, is n't such a
+      furiously gay business as to keep one perpetually singing and dancing&mdash;is
+      it? But I am not especially unhappy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H'm,&rdquo; said the Cardinal. Then, in a minute, &ldquo;You will come to Rome in
+      November, I suppose?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;towards the end of November, I think,&rdquo; said Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal rose, and began to walk backwards and forwards again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a little while the sound of carriage-wheels could be heard, in the
+      sweep, round the corner of the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal looked at his watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is the carriage,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I must go down and see that poor old
+      woman.... Do you know,&rdquo; he added, after a moment's hesitation, &ldquo;I think it
+      would be well if you were to go with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A shadow came into Beatrice's eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What good would that do?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would give her pleasure, no doubt. And besides, she is one of your
+      parishioners, as it were. I think you ought to go. You have never been to
+      see her since she fell ill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;well,&rdquo; said Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was plainly unwilling. But she went to put on her things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the carriage, when they had passed the village and crossed the bridge,
+      as they were bowling along the straight white road that led to the villa,
+      &ldquo;What a long time it is since Mr. Marchdale has been at Ventirose,&rdquo;
+       remarked the Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;? Is it?&rdquo; responded Beatrice, with indifference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is more than three weeks, I think&mdash;it is nearly a month,&rdquo; the
+      Cardinal said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;?&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has had his hands full, of course; he has had little leisure,&rdquo; the
+      Cardinal pursued. &ldquo;His devotion to his poor old servant has been quite
+      admirable. But now that she is practically recovered, he will be freer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is a young man whom I like very much,&rdquo; said the Cardinal. &ldquo;He is
+      intelligent; he has good manners; and he has a fine sense of the droll.
+      Yes, he has wit&mdash;a wit that you seldom find in an Anglo-Saxon, a wit
+      that is almost Latin. But you have lost your interest in him? That is
+      because you despair of his conversion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I confess I am not greatly interested in him,&rdquo; Beatrice answered. &ldquo;And I
+      certainly have no hopes of his conversion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal smiled at his ring. He opened his snuffbox, and inhaled a
+      long deliberate pinch of snuff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, well&mdash;who can tell?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But&mdash;he will be free now,
+      and it is so long since he has been at the castle&mdash;had you not better
+      ask him to luncheon or dinner?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should I?&rdquo; answered Beatrice. &ldquo;If he does not come to Ventirose, it
+      is presumably because he does not care to come. If he does care to come,
+      he needs no invitation. He knows that he is at liberty to call whenever he
+      likes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it would be civil, it would be neighbourly, to ask him to a meal,&rdquo;
+       the Cardinal submitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it would put him in the embarrassing predicament of having either to
+      accept against his will, or to decline and appear ungracious,&rdquo; submitted
+      Beatrice. &ldquo;No, it is evident that Ventirose does not amuse him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bene,&rdquo; said the Cardinal. &ldquo;Be it as you wish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But when they reached Villa Floriano, Peter was not at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has gone to Spiaggia for the day,&rdquo; Emilia informed them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beatrice, the Cardinal fancied, looked at once relieved and disappointed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta was seated in the sun, in a sheltered corner of the garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While Beatrice talked with her, the Cardinal walked about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now it so happened that on Peter's rustic table a book lay open, face
+      downwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal saw the book. He halted in his walk, and glanced round the
+      garden, as if to make sure that he was not observed. He tapped his snuff&mdash;box,
+      and took a pinch of snuff. Then he appeared to meditate for an instant,
+      the lines about his mouth becoming very marked indeed. At last, swiftly,
+      stealthily, almost with the air of a man committing felony, he slipped his
+      snuff-box under the open book, well under it, so that it was completely
+      covered up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the way back to Ventirose, the Cardinal put his hand in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear me!&rdquo; he suddenly exclaimed. &ldquo;I have lost my snuff box again.&rdquo; He
+      shook his head, as one who recognises a fatality. &ldquo;I am always losing it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you sure you had it with you?&rdquo; Beatrice asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, I think I had it with me. I should have missed it before this,
+      if I had left it at home. I must have dropped it in Mr. Marchdale's
+      garden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In that case it will probably be found,&rdquo; said Beatrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had gone to Spiaggia, I imagine, in the hope of meeting Mrs.
+      O'Donovan Florence; but the printed visitors' list there told him that she
+      had left nearly a fortnight since. On his return to the villa, he was
+      greeted by Marietta with the proud tidings that her Excellency the
+      Duchessa di Santangiolo had been to see her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;? Really?&rdquo; he questioned lightly. (His heart, I think, dropped a
+      beat, all the same.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ang,&rdquo; said Marietta. &ldquo;She came with the most Eminent Prince Cardinal.
+      They came in the carriage. She stayed half an hour. She was very
+      gracious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah?&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;I am glad to hear it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was beautifully dressed,&rdquo; said Marietta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of that I have not the shadow of a doubt,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signorina Emilia drove away with them,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear, dear! What a chapter of adventures,&rdquo; was his comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went to his rustic table, and picked up his book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How the deuce did that come there?&rdquo; he wondered, discovering the snuff
+      box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was, in truth, an odd place for it. A cardinal may inadvertently drop
+      his snuff box, to be sure. But if the whole College of Cardinals together
+      had dropped a snuff box, it would hardly have fallen, of its own weight,
+      through the covers of an open book, to the under-side thereof, and have
+      left withal no trace of its passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Solid matter will not pass through solid matter, without fraction&mdash;I
+      learned that at school,&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The inference would be that someone had purposely put the snuff box there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But who?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal himself? In the name of reason, why?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emilia? Nonsense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marietta? Absurd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Du&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A wild surmise darted through Peter's soul. Could it be? Could it
+      conceivably be? Was it possible that&mdash;that&mdash;was it possible, in
+      fine, that this was a kind of signal, a kind of summons?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, no, no, no. And yet&mdash;and yet&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, certainly not. The idea was preposterous. It deserved, and (I trust)
+      obtained, summary deletion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nevertheless,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;it's a long while since I have darkened the
+      doors of Ventirose. And a poor excuse is better than none. And anyhow, the
+      Cardinal will be glad to have his snuff.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The ladder-bridge was in its place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He crossed the Aco.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He crossed the Aco, and struck bravely forward, up the smooth lawns, under
+      the bending trees, towards the castle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sun was setting. The irregular mass of buildings stood out in varying
+      shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of red.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Half way there, Peter stopped, and looked back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The level sunshine turned the black forests of the Gnisi to shining
+      forests of bronze, and the foaming cascade that leapt down its side to a
+      cascade of liquid gold. The lake, for the greater part, lay in shadow,
+      violet-grey through a pearl-grey veil of mist; but along the opposite
+      shore it caught the light, and gleamed a crescent of quicksilver, with
+      roseate reflections. The three snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito, at the
+      valley's end, seemed almost insubstantial&mdash;floating forms of luminous
+      pink vapour, above the hazy horizon, in a pure sky intensely blue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A familiar verse came into Peter's mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really,&rdquo;' he said to himself, &ldquo;down to the very 'cataract leaping in
+      glory,' I believe they must have pre-arranged the scene, feature for
+      feature, to illustrate it.&rdquo; And he began to repeat the vivid, musical
+      lines, under his breath...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But about midway of them he was interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not altogether a bad sort of view&mdash;is it?&rdquo; a voice asked,
+      behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter faced about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On a marble bench, under a feathery acacia; a few yards away, a lady was
+      seated, looking at him, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter's eyes met hers&mdash;and suddenly his heart gave a jump. Then it
+      stood dead still for a second. Then it flew off, racing perilously. Oh,
+      for the best reasons in the world. There was something in her eyes, there
+      was a glow, a softness, that seemed&mdash;that seemed... But thereby hangs
+      my tale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was dressed in white. She had some big bright-yellow chrysanthemums
+      stuck in her belt. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow,
+      sparkled, where the sun touched it, transparent and iridescent, like
+      crinkly threads of glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not think it altogether bad&mdash;I hope?&rdquo; she questioned, arching
+      her eyebrows slightly, with a droll little assumption of concern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter's heart was racing&mdash;but he must answer her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was just wondering,&rdquo; he answered, with a tolerably successful feint of
+      composure, &ldquo;whether one might not safely call it altogether good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;?&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She threw back her head, and examined the prospect critically. Afterwards,
+      she returned her gaze to Peter, with an air of polite readiness to defer
+      to his opinion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not too sensational? Not too much like a landscape on the stage?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must judge it leniently,&rdquo; said he; &ldquo;we must remember that it is only
+      unaided Nature. Besides,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;to be meticulously truthful, there is
+      a spaciousness, there is a vivacity in the light and colour, there is a
+      sense of depth and atmosphere, that we should hardly find in a landscape
+      on the stage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;perhaps there is,&rdquo; she admitted thoughtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And with that, they looked into each other's eyes, and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you aware,&rdquo; the lady asked, after a brief silence, &ldquo;that it is a
+      singularly lovely evening.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so,&rdquo; Peter answered, with the
+      least approach to a meaning bow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the lady's face there flickered, perhaps, for half a second, the
+      faintest light, as of a comprehending and unresentful smile. But she went
+      on, with fine detachment
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How calm and still it is. The wonderful peace of the day's compline. It
+      seems as if the earth had stopped breathing&mdash;does n't it? The birds
+      have already gone to bed, though the sun is only just setting. It is the
+      hour when they are generally noisiest; but they have gone to bed&mdash;the
+      sparrows and the finches, the snatchers and the snatched-from, are equal
+      in the article of sleep. That is because they feel the touch of autumn.
+      How beautiful it is, in spite of its sadness, this first touch of autumn&mdash;it
+      is like sad distant music. Can you analyse it, can you explain it? There
+      is no chill, it is quite warm, and yet one knows somehow that autumn is
+      here. The birds know it, and have gone to bed. In another month they will
+      be flying away, to Africa and the Hesperides&mdash;all of them except the
+      sparrows, who stay all winter. I wonder how they get on during the winter,
+      with no goldfinches to snatch from?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned to Peter with a look of respectful enquiry, as one appealing to
+      an authority for information.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, they snatch from each other, during the winter,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;It is
+      thief rob thief, when honest victims are not forthcoming. And&mdash;what
+      is more to the point&mdash;they must keep their beaks in, against the
+      return of the goldfinches with the spring.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa&mdash;for I scorn to deceive the trustful reader longer; and
+      (as certain fines mouches, despite my efforts at concealment, may ere this
+      have suspected) the mysterious lady was no one else&mdash;the Duchessa
+      gaily laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;the goldfinches will return with the spring. But isn't
+      that rather foolish of them? If I were a goldfinch, I think I should make
+      my abode permanent in the sparrowless south.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no sparrowless south,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;Sparrows, alas, abound in
+      every latitude; and the farther south you go, the fiercer and bolder and
+      more impudent they become. In Africa and the Hesperides, which you have
+      mentioned, they not infrequently attack the caravans, peck the eyes out of
+      the camels, and are sometimes even known to carry off a man, a whole man,
+      vainly struggling in their inexorable talons. There is no sparrowless
+      south. But as for the goldfinches returning&mdash;it is the instinct of us
+      bipeds to return. Plumed and plumeless, we all return to something, what
+      though we may have registered the most solemn vows to remain away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He delivered his last phrases with an accent, he punctuated them with a
+      glance, in which there may have lurked an intention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Duchessa did not appear to notice it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;true&mdash;so we do,&rdquo; she assented vaguely. &ldquo;And what you tell
+      me of the sparrows in the Hesperides is very novel and impressive&mdash;unless,
+      indeed, it is a mere traveller's tale, with which you are seeking to
+      practise upon my credulity. But since I find you in this communicative
+      vein, will you not push complaisance a half-inch further, and tell me what
+      that thing is, suspended there in the sky above the crest of the
+      Cornobastone&mdash;that pale round thing, that looks like the spectre of a
+      magnified half-crown?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter turned to the quarter her gaze indicated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is nothing. In frankness, it is only what the vulgar
+      style the moon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How odd,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;I thought it was what the vulgar style the moon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And they both laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa moved a little; and thus she uncovered, carved on the back of
+      her marble bench, and blazoned in red and gold, a coat of arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She touched the shield with her finger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you interested in canting heraldry?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;There is no country
+      so rich in it as Italy. These are the arms of the Farfalla, the original
+      owners of this property. Or, seme of twenty roses gules; the crest, on a
+      rose gules, a butterfly or, with wings displayed; and the motto&mdash;how
+      could the heralds ever have sanctioned such an unheraldic and unheroic
+      motto?
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                      Rosa amorosa,
+                      Farfalla giojosa,
+                      Mi cantano al cuore
+                      La gioja e l' amore.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      They were the great people of this region for countless generations, the
+      Farfalla. They were Princes of Ventirose and Patricians of Milan. And then
+      the last of them was ruined at Monte Carlo, and killed himself there,
+      twenty-odd years ago. That is how all their gioja and amore ended. It was
+      the case of a butterfly literally broken upon a wheel. The estate fell
+      into the hands of the Jews, as everything more or less does sooner or
+      later; and they&mdash;if you can believe me&mdash;they were going to turn
+      the castle into an hotel, into one of those monstrous modern hotels, for
+      other Jews to come to, when I happened to hear of it, and bought it. Fancy
+      turning that splendid old castle into a Jew-infested hotel! It is one of
+      the few castles in Italy that have a ghost. Oh, but a quite authentic
+      ghost. It is called the White Page&mdash;il Paggio Bianco di Ventirose. It
+      is the ghost of a boy about sixteen. He walks on the ramparts of the old
+      keep, and looks off towards the lake, as if he were watching a boat, and
+      sometimes he waves his arms, as if he were signalling. And from head to
+      foot he is perfectly white, like a statue. I have never seen him myself;
+      but so many people say they have, I cannot doubt he is authentic. And the
+      Jews wanted to turn this haunted castle into an hotel... As a tribute to
+      the memory of the Farfalla, I take pains to see that their arms, which are
+      carved, as you see them here, in at least a hundred different places, are
+      remetalled and retinctured as often as time and the weather render it
+      necessary.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked towards the castle, while she spoke; and now she rose, with the
+      design, perhaps, of moving in that direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter felt that the moment had come for actualities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems improbable,&rdquo; he began,&mdash;&ldquo;and I 'm afraid you will think
+      there is a tiresome monotony in my purposes; but I am here again to return
+      Cardinal Udeschini's snuff box. He left it in my garden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;?&rdquo; said the Duchessa. &ldquo;Yes, he thought he must have left it
+      there. He is always mislaying it. Happily, he has another, for
+      emergencies. It was very good of you to trouble to bring it back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gave a light little laugh..
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I may also improve this occasion,&rdquo; Peter abruptly continued, &ldquo;to make my
+      adieux. I shall be leaving for England in a few days now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa raised her eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Oh, that is too bad,&rdquo; she added, by way of comment.
+      &ldquo;October, you know, is regarded as the best month of all the twelve, in
+      this lake country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know it,&rdquo; Peter responded regretfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it is a horrid month in England,&rdquo; she went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is an abominable month in England,&rdquo; he acknowledged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here it is blue, like larkspur, and all fragrant of the vintage, and
+      joyous with the songs of the vintagers,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;There it is
+      dingy-brown, and songless, and it smells of smoke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are a sportsman? You go in for shooting?&rdquo; she conjectured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;I gave up shooting years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;? Hunting, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hate hunting. One is always getting rolled on by one's horse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I see. It&mdash;it will be golf, perhaps?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it is not even golf.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't tell me it is football?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do I look as if it were football?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is sheer homesickness, in fine? You are grieving for the purple of
+      your native heather?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is scarcely any heather in my native county. No,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;no.
+      To tell you the truth, it is the usual thing. It is an histoire de femme.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 'might have guessed it,&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;It is still that everlasting
+      woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That everlasting woman&mdash;?&rdquo; Peter faltered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be sure,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;The woman you are always going on about. The
+      woman of your novel. This woman, in short.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And she produced from behind her back a hand that she had kept there, and
+      held up for his inspection a grey-and-gold bound book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MY novel&mdash;?&rdquo; faltered he. (But the sight of it, in her possession,
+      in these particular circumstances, gave him a thrill that was not a thrill
+      of despair.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your novel,&rdquo; she repeated, smiling sweetly, and mimicking his tone. Then
+      she made a little moue. &ldquo;Of course, I have known that you were your friend
+      Felix Wildmay, from the outset.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; said Peter, in a feeble sort of gasp, looking bewildered. &ldquo;You have
+      known that from the outset?&rdquo; And his brain seemed to reel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said she, &ldquo;of course. Where would the fun have been, otherwise? And
+      now you are going away, back to her shrine, to renew your worship. I hope
+      you will find the courage to offer her your hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter's brain was reeling. But here was the opportunity of his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You give me courage,&rdquo; he pronounced, with sudden daring. &ldquo;You are in a
+      position to help me with her. And since you know so much, I should like
+      you to know more. I should like to tell you who she is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One should be careful where one bestows one's confidences,&rdquo; she warned
+      him; but there was something in her eyes, there was a glow, a softness,
+      that seemed at the same time to invite them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;better than telling you who she is, I will tell you where
+      I first saw her. It was at the Francais, in December, four years ago, a
+      Thursday night, a subscription night. She sat in one of the middle boxes
+      of the first tier. She was dressed in white. Her companions were an
+      elderly woman, English I think, in black, who wore a cap; and an old man,
+      with white moustache and imperial, who looked as if he might be a French
+      officer. And the play&mdash;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He broke off, and looked at the Duchessa. She kept her eyes down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;the play?&rdquo; she questioned, in a low voice, after a little wait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The play was Monsieur Pailleron's 'Le monde ou l'on s'ennuie',&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; said she, still keeping her eyes down. Her voice was still very low.
+      But there was something in it that made Peter's heart leap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The next time I saw her,&rdquo; he began...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then he had to stop. He felt as if the beating of his heart must
+      suffocate him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;the next time?&rdquo; she questioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew a deep breath. He began anew&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The next time was a week later, at the Opera. They were giving Lohengrin.
+      She was with the same man and woman, and there was another, younger man.
+      She had pearls round her neck and in her hair, and she had a cloak lined
+      with white fur. She left before the opera was over. I did not see her
+      again until the following May, when I saw her once or twice in London,
+      driving in the Park. She was always with the same elderly Englishwoman,
+      but the military-looking old Frenchman had disappeared. And then I saw her
+      once more, a year later, in Paris, driving in the Bois.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa kept her eyes down. She did not speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter waited as long as flesh-and-blood could wait, looking at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he pleaded, at last. &ldquo;That is all. Have you nothing to say to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised her eyes, and for the tiniest fraction of a second they gave
+      themselves to his. Then she dropped them again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are sure,&rdquo; she asked, &ldquo;you are perfectly sure that when, afterwards,
+      you met her, and came to know her as she really is&mdash;you are perfectly
+      sure there was no disappointment?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Disappointment!&rdquo; cried Peter. &ldquo;She is in every way immeasurably beyond
+      anything that I was capable of dreaming. Oh, if you could see her, if you
+      could hear her speak, if you could look into her eyes&mdash;if you could
+      see her as others see her&mdash;you would not ask whether there was a
+      disappointment. She is... No; the language is not yet invented, in which I
+      could describe her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchessa smiled, softly, to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you are in love with her&mdash;more or less?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love her so that the bare imagination of being allowed to tell her of
+      my love almost makes me faint with joy. But it is like the story of the
+      poor squire who loved his queen. She is the greatest of great ladies. I am
+      nobody. She is so beautiful, so splendid, and so high above me, it would
+      be the maddest presumption for me to ask her for her love. To ask for the
+      love of my Queen! And yet&mdash;Oh, I can say no more. God sees my heart.
+      God knows how I love her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it is on her account&mdash;because you think your love is hopeless&mdash;that
+      you are going away, that you are going back to England?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised her eyes again, and again they gave themselves to his. There
+      was something in them, there was a glow, a softness ...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't go,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up at the castle&mdash;Peter had hurried down to the villa, dressed, and
+      returned to the castle to dine&mdash;he restored the snuff-box to Cardinal
+      Udeschini.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am trebly your debtor for it,&rdquo; said the Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cardinal's Snuff-Box, by Henry Harland
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Cardinal's Snuff-Box
+
+Author: Henry Harland
+
+Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5610]
+Posting Date: March 25, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX
+
+By Henry Harland
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"The Signorino will take coffee?" old Marietta asked, as she set the
+fruit before him.
+
+Peter deliberated for a moment; then burned his ships.
+
+"Yes," he answered.
+
+"But in the garden, perhaps?" the little brown old woman suggested, with
+a persuasive flourish.
+
+"No," he corrected her, gently smiling, and shaking his head, "not
+perhaps--certainly."
+
+Her small, sharp old black Italian eyes twinkled, responsive.
+
+"The Signorino will find a rustic table, under the big willow-tree, at
+the water's edge," she informed him, with a good deal of gesture. "Shall
+I serve it there?"
+
+"Where you will. I leave myself entirely in your hands," he said.
+
+So he sat by the rustic table, on a rustic bench, under the willow,
+sipped his coffee, smoked his cigarette, and gazed in contemplation at
+the view.
+
+Of its kind, it was rather a striking view.
+
+In the immediate foreground--at his feet, indeed--there was the river,
+the narrow Aco, peacock-green, a dark file of poplars on either bank,
+rushing pell-mell away from the quiet waters of the lake. Then, just
+across the river, at his left, stretched the smooth lawns of the park of
+Ventirose, with glimpses of the many-pinnacled castle through the trees;
+and, beyond, undulating country, flourishing, friendly, a perspective of
+vineyards, cornfields, groves, and gardens, pointed by numberless white
+villas. At his right loomed the gaunt mass of the Gnisi, with its black
+forests, its bare crags, its foaming ascade, and the crenelated range of
+the Cornobastone; and finally, climax and cynosure, at the valley's
+end, Monte Sfiorito, its three snow-covered summits almost
+insubstantial-seeming, floating forms of luminous pink vapour, in the
+evening sunshine, against the intense blue of the sky.
+
+A familiar verse had come into Peter's mind, and kept running there
+obstinately.
+
+"Really," he said to himself, "feature for feature, down to the very
+'cataract leaping in glory,' the scene might have been got up, apres
+coup, to illustrate it." And he began to repeat the beautiful hackneyed
+words, under his breath....
+
+But about midway of the third line he was interrupted.
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+"It's not altogether a bad sort of view--is it?" some one said, in
+English.
+
+The voice was a woman's. It was clear and smooth; it was crisp-cut,
+distinguished.
+
+Peter glanced about him.
+
+On the opposite bank of the Aco, in the grounds of Ventirose, five or
+six yards away, a lady was standing, looking at him, smiling.
+
+Peter's eyes met hers, took in her face.... And suddenly his heart gave
+a jump. Then it stopped dead still, tingling, for a second. Then it flew
+off, racing perilously.--Oh, for reasons--for the best reasons in the
+world: but thereby hangs my tale.
+
+She was a young woman, tall, slender, in a white frock, with a white
+cloak, an indescribable complexity of soft lace and airy ruffles, round
+her shoulders. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow,
+sparkled, where it caught the light, in a kind of crinkly iridescence,
+like threads of glass.
+
+Peter's heart (for the best reasons in the world) was racing perilously.
+"It's impossible--impossible--impossible"--the words strummed themselves
+to its rhythm. Peter's wits (for had not the impossible come to pass?)
+were in a perilous confusion. But he managed to rise from his rustic
+bench, and to achieve a bow.
+
+She inclined her head graciously.
+
+"You do not think it altogether bad--I hope?" she questioned, in her
+crisp-cut voice, raising her eyebrows slightly, with a droll little
+assumption of solicitude.
+
+Peter's wits were in confusion; but he must answer her. An automatic
+second-self, summoned by the emergency, answered for him.
+
+"I think one might safely call it altogether good."
+
+"Oh--?" she exclaimed.
+
+Her eyebrows went up again, but now they expressed a certain whimsical
+surprise. She threw back her head, and regarded the prospect critically.
+
+"It is not, then, too spectacular, too violent?" she wondered, returning
+her gaze to Peter, with an air of polite readiness to defer to his
+opinion. "Not too much like a decor de theatre?"
+
+"One should judge it," his automatic second-self submitted, "with some
+leniency. It is, after all, only unaided Nature."
+
+A spark flickered in her eyes, while she appeared to ponder. (But I am
+not sure whether she was pondering the speech or its speaker.)
+
+"Really?" she said, in the end. "Did did Nature build the villas, and
+plant the cornfields?"
+
+But his automatic second-self was on its mettle.
+
+"Yes," it asserted boldly; "the kind of men who build villas and plant
+cornfields must be classified as natural forces."
+
+She gave a light little laugh--and again appeared to ponder for a
+moment.
+
+Then, with another gracious inclination of the head, and an
+interrogative brightening of the eyes, "Mr. Marchdale no doubt?" she
+hazarded.
+
+Peter bowed.
+
+"I am very glad if, on the whole, you like our little effect," she went
+on, glancing in the direction of Monte Sfiorito. "I"--there was the
+briefest suspension--"I am your landlady."
+
+For a third time Peter bowed, a rather more elaborate bow than his
+earlier ones, a bow of respectful enlightenment, of feudal homage.
+
+"You arrived this afternoon?" she conjectured.
+
+"By the five-twenty-five from Bergamo," said he.
+
+"A very convenient train," she remarked; and then, in the pleasantest
+manner, whereby the unusual mode of valediction was carried off, "Good
+evening."
+
+"Good evening," responded Peter, and accomplished his fourth bow.
+
+She moved away from the river, up the smooth lawns, between the trees,
+towards Castel Ventirose, a flitting whiteness amid the surrounding
+green.
+
+Peter stood still, looking after her.
+
+But when she was out of sight, he sank back upon his rustic bench, like
+a man exhausted, and breathed a prodigious sigh. He was absurdly pale.
+All the same, clenching his fists, and softly pounding the table with
+them, he muttered exultantly, between his teeth, "What luck! What
+incredible luck! It's she--it's she, as I 'm a heathen. Oh, what
+supernatural luck!"
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Old Marietta--the bravest of small figures, in her neat black-and-white
+peasant dress, with her silver ornaments, and her red silk coif and
+apron--came for the coffee things.
+
+But at sight of Peter, she abruptly halted. She struck an attitude of
+alarm. She fixed him with her fiery little black eyes.
+
+"The Signorino is not well!" she cried, in the tones of one launching a
+denunciation.
+
+Peter roused himself.
+
+"Er--yes--I 'm pretty well, thank you," he reassured her. "I--I 'm only
+dying," he added, sweetly, after an instant's hesitation.
+
+"Dying--!" echoed Marietta, wild, aghast.
+
+"Ah, but you can save my life--you come in the very nick of time," he
+said. "I'm dying of curiosity--dying to know something that you can tell
+me."
+
+Her stare dissolved, her attitude relaxed. She smiled--relief, rebuke.
+She shook her finger at him.
+
+"Ah, the Signorino gave me a fine fright," she said.
+
+"A thousand regrets," said Peter. "Now be a succouring angel, and make a
+clean breast of it. Who is my landlady?"
+
+Marietta drew back a little. Her brown old visage wrinkled up,
+perplexed.
+
+"Who is the Signorino's landlady?" she repeated.
+
+"Ang," said he, imitating the characteristic nasalised eh of Italian
+affirmation, and accompanying it by the characteristic Italian jerk of
+the head.
+
+Marietta eyed him, still perplexed--even (one might have fancied) a bit
+suspicious.
+
+"But is it not in the Signorino's lease?" she asked, with caution.
+
+"Of course it is," said he. "That's just the point. Who is she?"
+
+"But if it is in your lease!" she expostulated.
+
+"All the more reason why you should make no secret of it," he argued
+plausibly. "Come! Out with it! Who is my landlady?"
+
+Marietta exchanged a glance with heaven.
+
+"The Signorino's landlady is the Duchessa di Santangiolo," she answered,
+in accents of resignation.
+
+But then the name seemed to stimulate her; and she went on "She lives
+there--at Castel Ventirose." Marietta pointed towards the castle. "She
+owns all, all this country, all these houses--all, all." Marietta joined
+her brown old hands together, and separated them, like a swimmer, in a
+gesture that swept the horizon. Her eyes snapped.
+
+"All Lombardy?" said Peter, without emotion.
+
+Marietta stared again.
+
+"All Lombardy? Mache!" was her scornful remonstrance. "Nobody owns all
+Lombardy. All these lands, these houses."
+
+"Who is she?" Peter asked.
+
+Marietta's eyes blinked, in stupefaction before such stupidity.
+
+"But I have just told you," she cried "She is the Duchessa di
+Santangiolo."
+
+"Who is the Duchessa di Santangiolo?" he asked.
+
+Marietta, blinking harder, shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"But"--she raised her voice, screamed almost, as to one deaf--"but the
+Duchessa di Santangiolo is the Signorino's landlady la, proprietaria di
+tutte queste terre, tutte queste case, tutte, tutte."
+
+And she twice, with some violence, reacted her comprehensive gesture,
+like a swimmer's.
+
+"You evade me by a vicious circle," Peter murmured.
+
+Marietta made a mighty effort-brought all her faculties to a
+focus--studied Peter's countenance intently. Her own was suddenly
+illumined.
+
+"Ah, I understand," she proclaimed, vigorously nodding. "The Signorino
+desires to know who she is personally!"
+
+"I express myself in obscure paraphrases," said he; "but you, with
+your unfailing Italian simpatia, have divined the exact shade of my
+intention."
+
+"She is the widow of the Duca di Santangiolo," said Marietta.
+
+"Enfin vous entrez dans la voie des aveux," said Peter.
+
+"Scusi?" said Marietta.
+
+"I am glad to hear she's a widow," said he. "She--she might strike a
+casual observer as somewhat young, for a widow."
+
+"She is not very old," agreed Marietta; "only twenty-six, twenty-seven.
+She was married from the convent. That was eight, nine years ago. The
+Duca has been dead five or six."
+
+"And was he also young and lovely?"
+
+Peter asked.
+
+"Young and lovely! Mache!" derided Marietta. "He was past forty. He was
+fat. But he was a good man."
+
+"So much the better for him now," said Peter.
+
+"Gia," approved Marietta, and solemnly made the Sign of the Cross.
+
+"But will you have the kindness to explain to me," the young man
+continued, "how it happens that the Duchessa di Santangiolo speaks
+English as well as I do?"
+
+The old woman frowned surprise.
+
+"Come? She speaks English?"
+
+"For all the world like an Englishman," asseverated Peter.
+
+"Ah, well," Marietta reflected, "she was English, you know."
+
+"Oho!" exclaimed Peter. "She was English! Was she?" He bore a little on
+the tense of the verb. "That lets in a flood of light. And--and what, by
+the bye, is she now?" he questioned.
+
+"Ma! Italian, naturally, since she married the Duca," Marietta replied.
+
+"Indeed? Then the leopard can change his spots?" was Peter's inference.
+
+"The leopard?" said Marietta, at a loss.
+
+"If the Devil may quote Scripture for his purpose, why may n't I?"
+Peter demanded. "At all events, the Duchessa di Santangiolo is a very
+beautiful woman."
+
+"The Signorino has seen her?" Marietta asked.
+
+"I have grounds for believing so. An apparition--a phantom of
+delight--appeared on the opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco, and
+announced herself as my landlady. Of course, she may have been an
+impostor--but she made no attempt to get the rent. A tall woman, in
+white, with hair, and a figure, and a voice like cooling streams, and an
+eye that can speak volumes with a look."
+
+Marietta nodded recognition.
+
+"That would be the Duchessa."
+
+"She's a very beautiful duchessa," reiterated Peter.
+
+Marietta was Italian. So, Italian--wise, she answered, "We are all as
+God makes us."
+
+"For years I have thought her the most beautiful woman in Europe," Peter
+averred.
+
+Marietta opened her eyes wide.
+
+"For years? The Signorino knows her? The Signorino has seen her before?"
+
+A phrase came back to him from a novel he had been reading that
+afternoon in the train. He adapted it to the occasion.
+
+"I rather think she is my long-lost brother."
+
+"Brother--?" faltered Marietta.
+
+"Well, certainly not sister," said Peter, with determination. "You have
+my permission to take away the coffee things."
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Up at the castle, in her rose-and-white boudoir, Beatrice was writing a
+letter to a friend in England.
+
+"Villa Floriano," she wrote, among other words, "has been let to an
+Englishman--a youngish, presentable-looking creature, in a dinner
+jacket, with a tongue in his head, and an indulgent eye for
+Nature--named Peter Marchdale. Do you happen by any chance to know who
+he is, or anything about him?"
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Peter very likely slept but little, that first night at the villa; and
+more than once, I fancy, he repeated to his pillow his pious ejaculation
+of the afternoon: "What luck! What supernatural luck!" He was up, in
+any case, at an unconscionable hour next morning, up, and down in his
+garden.
+
+"It really is a surprisingly jolly garden," he confessed. "The agent was
+guiltless of exaggeration, and the photographs were not the perjuries
+one feared."
+
+There were some fine old trees, lindens, acacias, chestnuts, a
+flat-topped Lombardy pine, a darkling ilex, besides the willow that
+overhung the river, and the poplars that stiffly stood along its border.
+Then there was the peacock-blue river itself, dancing and singing as it
+sped away, with a thousand diamonds flashing on its surface--floating,
+sinking, rising--where the sun caught its ripples. There were some
+charming bits of greensward. There was a fountain, plashing melodious
+coolness, in a nimbus of spray which the sun touched to rainbow
+pinks and yellows. There were vivid parterres of flowers, begonia and
+geranium. There were oleanders, with their heady southern perfume; there
+were pomegranate-blossoms, like knots of scarlet crepe; there were
+white carnations, sweet-peas, heliotrope, mignonette; there were endless
+roses. And there were birds, birds, birds. Everywhere you heard their
+joyous piping, the busy flutter of their wings. There were goldfinches,
+blackbirds, thrushes, with their young--the plumpest, clumsiest,
+ruffle-feathered little blunderers, at the age ingrat, just beginning to
+fly, a terrible anxiety to their parents--and there were also (I regret
+to own) a good many rowdy sparrows. There were bees and bumblebees;
+there were brilliant, dangerous-looking dragonflies; there were
+butterflies, blue ones and white ones, fluttering in couples; there were
+also (I am afraid) a good many gadflies--but che volete? Who minds
+a gadfly or two in Italy? On the other side of the house there were
+fig-trees and peach-trees, and artichokes holding their heads high in
+rigid rows; and a vine, heavy with great clusters of yellow grapes, was
+festooned upon the northern wall.
+
+The morning air was ineffably sweet and keen--penetrant, tonic, with
+moist, racy smells, the smell of the good brown earth, the smell of
+green things and growing things. The dew was spread over the grass like
+a veil of silver gossamer, spangled with crystals. The friendly country
+westward, vineyards and white villas, laughed in the sun at the Gnisi,
+sulking black in shadow to the east. The lake lay deep and still, a
+dark sapphire. And away at the valley's end, Monte Sfiorito, always
+insubstantial-seeming, showed pale blue-grey, upon a sky in which still
+lingered some of the flush of dawn.
+
+It was a surprisingly jolly garden, true enough. But though Peter
+remained in it all day long--though he haunted the riverside, and cast
+a million desirous glances, between the trees, and up the lawns, towards
+Castel Ventirose--he enjoyed no briefest vision of the Duchessa di
+Santangiolo.
+
+Nor the next day; nor the next.
+
+"Why does n't that old dowager ever come down and look after her river?"
+he asked Marietta. "For all the attention she gives it, the water might
+be undermining her property on both sides."
+
+"That old dowager--?" repeated Marietta, blank.
+
+"That old widow woman--my landlady--the Duchessa Vedova di Santangiolo."
+
+"She is not very old--only twenty-six, twenty-seven," said Marietta.
+
+"Don't try to persuade me that she is n't old enough to know better,"
+retorted Peter, sternly.
+
+"But she has her guards, her keepers, to look after her property," said
+Marietta.
+
+"Guards and keepers are mere mercenaries. If you want a thing well done,
+you should do it yourself," said Peter, with gloomy sententiousness.
+
+On Sunday he went to the little grey rococo parish church. There were
+two Masses, one at eight o'clock, one at ten--and the church was quite
+a mile from Villa Floriano, and up a hill; and the Italian sun was
+hot--but the devoted young man went to both.
+
+The Duchessa was at neither.
+
+"What does she think will become of her immortal soul?" he asked
+Marietta.
+
+On Monday he went to the pink-stuccoed village post-office.
+
+Before the post-office door a smart little victoria, with a pair
+of sprightly, fine-limbed French bays, was drawn up, ducal coronets
+emblazoned on its panels.
+
+Peter's heart began to beat.
+
+And while he was hesitating on the doorstep, the door opened, and
+the Duchessa came forth--tall, sumptuous, in white, with a wonderful
+black-plumed hat, and a wonderful white-frilled sunshade. She was
+followed by a young girl--a pretty, dark-complexioned girl, of fourteen,
+fifteen perhaps, with pleasant brown eyes (that lucent Italian brown),
+and in her cheeks a pleasant hint of red (that covert Italian red, which
+seems to glow through the thinnest film of satin).
+
+Peter bowed, standing aside to let them pass.
+
+But when he looked up, the Duchessa had stopped, and was smiling on him.
+
+His heart beat harder.
+
+"A lovely day," said the Duchessa.
+
+"Delightful," agreed Peter, between two heart-beats.--Yet he looked, in
+his grey flannels, with his straw-hat and his eyeglass, with his lean
+face, his even colour, his slightly supercilious moustaches--he looked a
+very embodiment of cool-blooded English equanimity.
+
+"A trifle warm, perhaps?" the Duchessa suggested, with her air of polite
+(or was it in some part humorous?) readiness to defer to his opinion.
+
+"But surely," suggested he, "in Italy, in summer, it is its bounden duty
+to be a trifle warm?"
+
+The Duchessa smiled.
+
+"You like it? So do I. But what the country really needs is rain."
+
+"Then let us hope," said he, "that the country's real needs may remain
+unsatisfied."
+
+The Duchessa tittered.
+
+"Think of the poor farmers," she said reproachfully.
+
+"It's vain to think of them," he answered. "'T is an ascertained fact
+that no condition of the weather ever contents the farmers."
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+"Ah, well," she consented, "then I 'll join in your hope that the fine
+weather may last. I--I trust," she was so good as to add, "that you're
+not entirely uncomfortable at Villa Floriano?"
+
+"I dare n't allow myself to speak of Villa Floriano," he replied. "I
+should become dithyrambic. It's too adorable."
+
+"It has a pretty garden, and--I remember--you admired the view," the
+Duchessa said. "And that old Marietta? I trust she does for you fairly
+well?" Her raised eyebrows expressed benevolent (or was it in some part
+humorous?) concern.
+
+"She does for me to perfection. That old Marietta is a priceless old
+jewel," Peter vowed.
+
+"A good cook?" questioned the Duchessa.
+
+"A good cook--but also a counsellor and friend. And with a flow of
+language!"
+
+The Duchessa laughed again.
+
+"Oh, these Lombard peasant women. They are untiring chatterers."
+
+"I 'm not sure," Peter felt himself in justice bound to confess, "that
+Marietta is n't equally untiring as a listener. In fact, there's only
+one respect in which she has disappointed me."
+
+"Oh--?" said the Duchessa. And her raised eyebrows demanded particulars.
+
+"She swears she does n't wear a dagger in her garter--has never heard of
+such a practice," Peter explained. "And now," he whispered to his soul,
+"we 'll see whether our landlady is up in modern literature."
+
+Still again the Duchessa laughed. And, apparently, she was up in modern
+literature. At any rate--
+
+"Those are Lombard country-girls along the coast," she reminded him.
+"We are peaceful inland folk, miles from the sea. But you had best be on
+your guard, none the less." She shook her head, in warning. "Through all
+this country-side that old Marietta is reputed to be a witch."
+
+"If she's a witch," said Peter, undismayed, "her usefulness will be
+doubled. I shall put her to the test directly I get home."
+
+"Sprinkle her with holy water?" laughed the Duchessa. "Have a care. If
+she should turn into a black cat, and fly away on a broomstick, you'd
+never forgive yourself."
+
+Wherewith she swept on to her carriage, followed by her young companion.
+
+The sprightly French bays tossed their heads, making the harness tinkle.
+The footman mounted the box. The carriage rolled away.
+
+But Peter remained for quite a minute motionless on the door-step,
+gazing, bemused, down the long, straight, improbable village street,
+with its poplars, its bridge, its ancient stone cross, its irregular
+pink and yellow houses--as improbable as a street in opera-bouffe. A
+thin cloud of dust floated after the carriage, a thin screen of white
+dust, which, in the sun, looked like a fume of silver.
+
+"I think I could put my finger on a witch worth two of Marietta," he
+said, in the end. "And thus we see," he added, struck by something
+perhaps not altogether novel in his own reflection, "how the primary
+emotions, being perennial, tend to express themselves in perennial
+formulae."
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Back at the villa, he enquired of Marietta who the pretty brown-eyed
+young girl might have been.
+
+"The Signorina Emilia," Marietta promptly informed him.
+
+"Really and truly?" questioned he.
+
+"Ang," affirmed Marietta, with the national jerk of the head; "the
+Signorina Emilia Manfredi--the daughter of the Duca."
+
+"Oh--? Then the Duca was married before?" concluded Peter, with
+simplicity.
+
+"Che-e-e!" scoffed Marietta, on her highest note. "Married? He?" Then
+she winked and nodded--as one man of the world to another. "Ma molto
+porn! La mamma fu robaccia di Milano. But after his death, the Duchessa
+had her brought to the castle. She is the same as adopted."
+
+"That looks as if your Duchessa's heart were in the right place, after
+all," commented Peter.
+
+"Gia," agreed Marietta.
+
+"Hang the right place!" cried he. "What's the good of telling me her
+heart is in the right place, if the right place is inaccessible?"
+
+But Marietta only looked bewildered.
+
+He lived in his garden, he haunted the riverside, he made a daily
+pilgrimage to the village post, he thoroughly neglected the work he had
+come to this quiet spot to do. But a week passed, during which he never
+once beheld so much as the shadow of the Duchessa.
+
+On Sunday he trudged his mile, through the sun, and up the hill, not
+only to both Masses, but to Vespers and Benediction.
+
+She was present at none of these offices.
+
+"The Pagan!" he exclaimed.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Up at the castle, on the broad marble terrace, where clematis and
+jessamine climbed over the balustrade and twined about its pilasters,
+where oleanders grew in tall marble urns and shed their roseate petals
+on the pavement, Beatrice, dressed for dinner, in white, with pearls in
+her hair, and pearls round her throat, was walking slowly backwards and
+forwards, reading a letter.
+
+"There is a Peter Marchdale--I don't know whether he will be your Peter
+Marchdale or not, my dear; though the name seems hardly likely to be
+common--son of the late Mr. Archibald Marchdale, Q. C., and nephew of
+old General Marchdale, of Whitstoke. A highly respectable and stodgy
+Norfolk family. I've never happened to meet the man myself, but I'm
+told he's a bit of an eccentric, who amuses himself globe-trotting, and
+writing books (novels, I believe) which nobody, so far as I am aware,
+ever reads. He writes under a pseudonym, Felix--I 'm not sure whether
+it's Mildmay or Wildmay. He began life, by the bye, in the Diplomatic,
+and was attache for a while at Berlin, or Petersburg, or somewhere; but
+whether (in the elegant language of Diplomacy) he 'chucked it up,' or
+failed to pass his exams, I'm not in a position to say. He will be near
+thirty, and ought to have a couple of thousand a year--more or less.
+His father, at any rate, was a great man at the bar, and must have left
+something decent. And the only other thing in the world I know about
+him is that he's a great friend of that clever gossip Margaret
+Winchfield--which goes to show that however obscure he may be as a
+scribbler of fiction, he must possess some redeeming virtues as a social
+being--for Mrs. Winchfield is by no means the sort that falls in love
+with bores. As you 're not, either--well, verbum sap., as my little
+brother Freddie says."
+
+Beatrice gazed off, over the sunny lawn, with its trees and their
+long shadows, with its shrubberies, its bright flower-beds, its marble
+benches, its artificial ruin; over the lake, with its coloured sails,
+its incongruous puffing steamboats; down the valley, away to the rosy
+peaks of Monte Sfiorito, and the deep blue sky behind them. She plucked
+a spray of jessamine, and brushed the cool white blossoms across her
+cheek, and inhaled their fairy fragrance.
+
+"An obscure scribbler of fiction," she mused. "Ah, well, one is an
+obscure reader of fiction oneself. We must send to London for Mr. Felix
+Mildmay Wildmay's works."
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+On Monday evening, at the end of dinner, as she set the fruit before
+him, "The Signorino will take coffee?" old Marietta asked.
+
+Peter frowned at the fruit, figs and peaches--
+
+    "Figs imperial purple, and blushing peaches"--
+
+ranged alternately, with fine precision, in a circle, round a central
+heap of translucent yellow grapes.
+
+"Is this the produce of my own vine and fig-tree?" he demanded.
+
+"Yes, Signorino; and also peach-tree," replied Marietta.
+
+"Peaches do not grow on fig-trees?" he enquired.
+
+"No, Signorino," said Marietta.
+
+"Nor figs on thistles. I wonder why not," said he.
+
+"It is n't Nature," was Marietta's confident generalisation.
+
+"Marietta Cignolesi," Peter pronounced severely, looking her hard in the
+eyes, "I am told you are a witch."
+
+"No," said Marietta, simply, without surprise, without emotion.
+
+"I quite understand," he genially persisted. "It's a part of the game
+to deny it. But I have no intention of sprinkling you with holy water-so
+don't be frightened. Besides, if you should do anything outrageous--if
+you should turn into a black cat, and fly away on a broomstick, for
+example--I could never forgive myself. But I'll thank you to employ
+a little of your witchcraft on my behalf, all the same. I have lost
+something--something very precious--more precious than rubies--more
+precious than fine gold."
+
+Marietta's brown old wrinkles fell into an expression of alarm.
+
+"In the villa? In the garden?" she exclaimed, anxiously.
+
+"No, you conscientious old thing you," Peter hastened to relieve her.
+"Nowhere in your jurisdiction--so don't distress yourself: Laggiu,
+laggiu."
+
+And he waved a vague hand, to indicate outer space.
+
+"The Signorino should put up a candle to St. Anthony of Padua,"
+counselled this Catholic witch.
+
+"St. Anthony of Padua? Why of Padua?" asked Peter.
+
+"St. Anthony of Padua," said Marietta.
+
+"You mean of Lisbon," corrected Peter.
+
+"No," insisted the old woman, with energy. "St. Anthony of Padua."
+
+"But he was born in Lisbon;" insisted Peter.
+
+"No," said Marietta.
+
+"Yes," said he, "parola d' onore. And, what's more to the purpose, he
+died in Lisbon. You clearly mean St. Anthony of Lisbon."
+
+"No!" Marietta raised her voice, for his speedier conviction. "There is
+no St. Anthony of Lisbon. St. Anthony of Padua."
+
+"What's the use of sticking to your guns in that obstinate fashion?"
+Peter complained. "It's mere pride of opinion. Don't you know that the
+ready concession of minor points is a part of the grace of life?"
+
+"When you lose an object, you put up a candle to St. Anthony of Padua,"
+said Marietta, weary but resolved.
+
+"Not unless you wish to recover the object," contended Peter.
+
+Marietta stared at him, blinking.
+
+"I have no wish to recover the object I have lost," he continued
+blandly. "The loss of it is a new, thrilling, humanising experience.
+It will make a man of me--and, let us hope, a better man. Besides, in
+a sense, I lost it long ago--'when first my smitten eyes beat full
+on her,' one evening at the Francais, three, four years ago. But it's
+essential to my happiness that I should see the person into whose
+possession it has fallen. That is why I am not angry with you for being
+a witch. It suits my convenience. Please arrange with the powers of
+darkness to the end that I may meet the person in question tomorrow
+at the latest. No!" He raised a forbidding hand. "I will listen to
+no protestations. And, for the rest, you may count upon my absolute
+discretion.
+
+           'She is the darling of my heart
+            And she lives in our valley,'"
+
+he carolled softly.
+
+           "E del mio cuore la carina,
+            E dimor' nella nostra vallettina,"
+
+he obligingly translated. "But for all the good I get of her, she might
+as well live on the top of the Cornobastone," he added dismally. "Yes,
+now you may bring me my coffee--only, let it be tea. When your coffee is
+coffee it keeps me awake at night."
+
+Marietta trudged back to her kitchen, nodding at the sky.
+
+The next afternoon, however, the Duchessa di Santangiolo appeared on the
+opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco.
+
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Peter happened to be engaged in the amiable pastime of tossing
+bread-crumbs to his goldfinches.
+
+But a score or so of sparrows, vulture-like, lurked under cover of the
+neighbouring foliage, to dash in viciously, at the critical moment, and
+snatch the food from the finches' very mouths.
+
+The Duchessa watched this little drama for a minute, smiling, in silent
+meditation: while Peter--who, for a wonder, had his back turned to the
+park of Ventirose, and, for a greater wonder still perhaps, felt no
+pricking in his thumbs--remained unconscious of her presence.
+
+At last, sorrowfully, (but there was always a smile at the back of her
+eyes), she shook her head.
+
+"Oh, the pirates, the daredevils," she sighed.
+
+Peter started; faced about; saluted.
+
+"The brigands," said she, with a glance towards the sparrows' outposts.
+
+"Yes, poor things," said he.
+
+"Poor things?" cried she, indignant. "The unprincipled little monsters!"
+
+"They can't help it," he pleaded for them. "'It is their nature to.'
+They were born so. They had no choice."
+
+"You actually defend them!" she marvelled, rebukefully.
+
+"Oh, dear, no," he disclaimed. "I don't defend them. I defend nothing.
+I merely recognise and accept. Sparrows--finches. It's the way of the
+world--the established division of the world."
+
+She frowned incomprehension.
+
+"The established division of the world--?"
+
+"Exactly," said he. "Sparrows--finches the snatchers and the
+snatched-from. Everything that breathes is either a sparrow or a finch.
+'T is the universal war--the struggle for existence--the survival of
+the most unscrupulous. 'T is a miniature presentment of what's going on
+everywhere in earth and sky."
+
+She shook her head again.
+
+"YOU see the earth and sky through black spectacles, I 'm afraid,"
+she remarked, with a long face. But there was still an underglow of
+amusement in her eyes.
+
+"No," he answered, "because there's a compensation. As you rise in the
+scale of moral development, it is true, you pass from the category of
+the snatchers to the category of the snatched-from, and your ultimate
+extinction is assured. But, on the other hand, you gain talents and
+sensibilities. You do not live by bread alone. These goldfinches, for a
+case in point, can sing--and they have your sympathy. The sparrows
+can only make a horrid noise--and you contemn them. That is the
+compensation. The snatchers can never know the joy of singing--or of
+being pitied by ladies."
+
+"N... o, perhaps not," she consented doubtfully. The underglow of
+amusement in her eyes shone nearer to the surface. "But--but they can
+never know, either, the despair of the singer when his songs won't
+come."
+
+"Or when the ladies are pitiless. That is true," consented Peter.
+
+"And meanwhile they get the bread, crumbs," she said.
+
+"They certainly get the bread-crumbs," he admitted.
+
+"I 'm afraid "--she smiled, as one who has conducted a syllogism
+safely to its conclusion--"I 'm afraid I do not think your compensation
+compensates."
+
+"To be quite honest, I daresay it does n't," he confessed.
+
+"And anyhow"--she followed her victory up--"I should not wish my garden
+to represent the universal war. I should not wish my garden to be a
+battle-field. I should wish it to be a retreat from the battle--an abode
+of peace--a happy valley--a sanctuary for the snatched-from."
+
+"But why distress one's soul with wishes that are vain?" asked he. "What
+could one do?"
+
+"One could keep a dragon," she answered promptly. "If I were you, I
+should keep a sparrow-devouring, finch-respecting dragon."
+
+"It would do no good," said he. "You'd get rid of one species of
+snatcher, but some other species of snatcher would instantly pop UP."
+
+She gazed at him with those amused eyes of hers, and still again,
+slowly, sorrowfully, shook her head.
+
+"Oh, your spectacles are black--black," she murmured.
+
+"I hope not," said he; "but such as they are, they show me the
+inevitable conditions of our planet. The snatcher, here below, is
+ubiquitous and eternal--as ubiquitous, as eternal, as the force of
+gravitation. He is likewise protean. Banish him--he takes half a minute
+to change his visible form, and returns au galop. Sometimes he's an
+ugly little cacophonous brown sparrow; sometimes he's a splendid florid
+money-lender, or an aproned and obsequious greengrocer, or a trusted
+friend, hearty and familiar. But he 's always there; and he's always--if
+you don't mind the vernacular--'on the snatch.'"
+
+The Duchessa arched her eyebrows.
+
+"If things are really at such a sorry pass," she said, "I will commend
+my former proposal to you with increased confidence. You should keep a
+dragon. After all, you only wish to protect your garden; and that"--she
+embraced it with her glance--"is not so very big. You could teach
+your dragon, if you procured one of an intelligent breed, to devour
+greengrocers, trusted friends, and even moneylenders too (tough though
+no doubt they are), as well as sparrows."
+
+"Your proposal is a surrender to my contention," said Peter. "You would
+set a snatcher to catch the snatchers. Other heights in other lives,
+perhaps. But in the dark backward and abysm of space to which our lives
+are confined, the snatcher is indigenous and inexpugnable."
+
+The Duchessa looked at the sunny landscape, the bright lawns, the high
+bending trees, with the light caught in the network of their million
+leaves; she looked at the laughing white villas westward, the pale-green
+vineyards, the yellow cornfields; she looked at the rushing river, with
+the diamonds sparkling on its surface, at the far-away gleaming snows of
+Monte Sfiorito, at the scintillant blue shy overhead.
+
+Then she looked at Peter, a fine admixture of mirth with something like
+gravity in her smile.
+
+"The dark backward and abysm of space?" she repeated. "And you do not
+wear black spectacles? Then it must be that your eyes themselves are
+just a pair of black-seeing pessimists."
+
+"On the contrary," triumphed Peter, "it is because they are optimists,
+that they suspect there must be forwarder and more luminous regions than
+the Solar System."
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+"I think you have the prettiest mouth, and the most exquisite little
+teeth, and the eyes richest in promise, and the sweetest laughter, of
+any woman out of Paradise," said Peter, in the silence of his soul.
+
+"It is clear I shall never be your match in debate," said she.
+
+Peter made a gesture of deprecating modesty.
+
+"But I wonder," she went on, "whether you would put me down as 'another
+species of snatcher,' if I should ask you to spare me just the merest
+end of a crust of bread?" And she lifted those eyes rich in promise
+appealingly to his.
+
+"Oh, I beg of you--take all I have," he responded, with effusion.
+"But--but how--?"
+
+"Toss," she commanded tersely.
+
+So he tossed what was left of his bread into the air, above the river;
+and the Duchessa, easily, deftly, threw up a hand, and caught it on the
+wing.
+
+"Thank you very much," she laughed, with a little bow.
+
+Then she crumbled the bread, and began to sprinkle the ground with it;
+and in an instant she was the centre of a cloud of birds. Peter was at
+liberty to watch her, to admire the swift grace of her motions, their
+suggestion of delicate strength, of joy in things physical, and the
+lithe elasticity of her figure, against the background of satiny lawn,
+and the further vistas of lofty sunlit trees. She was dressed in white,
+as always--a frock of I know not what supple fabric, that looked as if
+you might have passed it through your ring, and fell in multitudes of
+small soft creases. Two big red roses drooped from her bodice. She wore
+a garden-hat, of white straw, with a big daring rose-red bow, under
+which the dense meshes of her hair, warmly dark, dimly bright, shimmered
+in a blur of brownish gold.
+
+"What vigour, what verve, what health," thought Peter, watching
+her, "what--lean, fresh, fragrant health!" And he had, no doubt, his
+emotions.
+
+She bestowed her bread crumbs on the birds; but she was able, somehow,
+to discriminate mightily in favour of the goldfinches. She would make a
+diversion, the semblance of a fling, with her empty right hand; and the
+too-greedy sparrows would dart off, avid, on that false lead. Whereupon,
+quickly, stealthily, she would rain a little shower of crumbs, from
+her left hand, on the grass beside her, to a confiding group of finches
+assembled there. And if ever a sparrow ventured to intrude his ruffianly
+black beak into this sacred quarter, she would manage, with a kind of
+restrained ferocity, to "shoo" him away, without thereby frightening the
+finches.
+
+And all the while her eyes laughed; and there was colour in her cheeks;
+and there was the forceful, graceful action of her body.
+
+When the bread was finished, she clapped her hands together gently,
+to dust the last mites from them, and looked over at Peter, and smiled
+significantly.
+
+"Yes," he acknowledged, "you outwitted them very skilfully. You, at any
+rate, have no need of a dragon."
+
+"Oh, in default of a dragon, one can do dragon's work oneself," she
+answered lightly. "Or, rather, one can make oneself an instrument of
+justice."
+
+"All the same, I should call it uncommonly hard luck to be born a
+sparrow--within your jurisdiction," he said.
+
+"It is not an affair of luck," said she. "One is born a sparrow--within
+my jurisdiction--for one's sins in a former state.--No, you little
+dovelings"--she turned to a pair of finches on the greensward near her,
+who were lingering, and gazing up into her face with hungry, expectant
+eyes--"I have no more. I have given you my all." And she stretched out
+her open hands, palms downwards, to convince them.
+
+"The sparrows got nothing; and the goldfinches, who got 'your all,'
+grumble because you gave so little," said Peter, sadly. "That is what
+comes of interfering with the laws of Nature." And then, as the two
+birds flew away, "See the dark, doubtful, reproachful glances with which
+they cover you."
+
+"You think they are ungrateful?" she said. "No--listen."
+
+She held up a finger.
+
+For, at that moment, on the branch of an acacia, just over her head, a
+goldfinch began to sing--his thin, sweet, crystalline trill of song.
+
+"Do you call that grumbling?" she asked.
+
+"It implies a grumble," said Peter, "like the 'thank you' of a
+servant dissatisfied with his tip. It's the very least he can do. It's
+perfunctory--I 'm not sure it is n't even ironical."
+
+"Perfunctory! Ironical!" cried the Duchessa. "Look at him! He's warbling
+his delicious little soul out."
+
+They both paused to look and listen.
+
+The bird's gold-red bosom palpitated. He marked his modulations by
+sudden emphatic movements of the head. His eyes were fixed intently
+before him, as if he could actually see and follow the shining thread of
+his song, as it wound away through the air. His performance had all the
+effect of a spontaneous rhapsody. When it was terminated, he looked
+down at his auditors, eager, inquisitive, as who should say, "I hope you
+liked it?"--and then, with a nod clearly meant as a farewell, flew out
+of sight.
+
+The Duchessa smiled again at Peter, with intention.
+
+"You must really try to take a cheerier view of things," she said.
+
+And next instant she too was off, walking slowly, lightly, up the green
+lawns, between the trees, towards the castle, her gown fluttering in the
+breeze, now dazzling white as she came into the sun, now pearly grey as
+she passed into the shade.
+
+"What a woman it is," said Peter to himself, looking after her. "What
+vigour, what verve, what sex! What a woman!"
+
+And, indeed, there was nothing of the too-prevalent epicene in the
+Duchessa's aspect; she was very certainly a woman. "Heavens, how she
+walks!" he cried in a deep whisper.
+
+But then a sudden wave of dejection swept over him. At first he could
+not account for it. By and by, however, a malicious little voice began
+to repeat and repeat within him, "Oh, the futile impression you must
+have made upon her! Oh, the ineptitudes you uttered! Oh, the precious
+opportunity you have misemployed!"
+
+"You are a witch," he said to Marietta. "You've proved it to the hilt. I
+'ve seen the person, and the object is more desperately lost than ever."
+
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+That evening, among the letters Peter received from England, there was
+one from his friend Mrs. Winchfield, which contained certain statistics.
+
+"Your Duchessa di Santangiolo 'was' indeed, as your funny old servant
+told you, English: the only child and heiress of the last Lord Belfont.
+The Belfonts of Lancashire (now, save for your Duchessa, extinct) were
+the most bigoted sort of Roman Catholics, and always educated their
+daughters in foreign convents, and as often as not married them to
+foreigners. The Belfont men, besides, were ever and anon marrying
+foreign wives; so there will be a goodish deal of un-English blood in
+your Duchessa's own ci-devant English veins.
+
+"She was born, as I learn from an indiscretion of my Peerage, in 1870,
+and is, therefore, as near to thirty (the dangerous age!) as to the
+six-and-twenty your droll old Marietta gives her. Her Christian names
+are Beatrice Antonia Teresa Mary--faites en votre choix. She was
+married at nineteen to Baldassarre Agosto, Principe Udeschini, Duca di
+Santangiolo, Marchese di Castellofranco, Count of the Holy Roman Empire,
+Knight of the Holy Ghost and of St. Gregory, (does it take your breath
+away?), who, according to Frontin, died in '93; and as there were no
+children, his brother Felipe Lorenzo succeeded to the titles. A younger
+brother still is Bishop of Sardagna. Cardinal Udeschini is the uncle.
+
+"That, dear child, empties my sack of information. But perhaps I have
+a bigger sack, full of good advice, which I have not yet opened. And
+perhaps, on the whole, I will not open it at all. Only, remember that
+in yonder sentimental Italian lake country, in this summer weather, a
+solitary young man's fancy might be much inclined to turn to thoughts
+of--folly; and keep an eye on my friend Peter Marchdale."
+
+Our solitary young man brooded over Mrs. Winchfield's letter for a long
+while.
+
+"The daughter of a lord, and the widow of a duke, and the niece-in-law
+of a cardinal," he said. "And, as if that were not enough, a bigoted
+Roman Catholic into the bargain.... And yet--and yet," he went on,
+taking heart a little, "as for her bigotry, to judge by her assiduity
+in attending the village church, that factor, at least, thank goodness,
+would appear to be static, rather than dynamic."
+
+After another longish interval of brooding, he sauntered down to the
+riverside, through his fragrant garden, fragrant and fresh with the
+cool odours of the night, and peered into the darkness, towards Castel
+Ventirose. Here and there he could discern a gleam of yellow, where
+some lighted window was not entirely hidden by the trees. Thousands
+and thousands of insects were threading the silence with their shrill
+insistent voices. The repeated wail, harsh, prolonged, eerie, of some
+strange wild creature, bird or beast, came down from the forest of
+the Gnisi. At his feet, on the troubled surface of the Aco, the stars,
+reflected and distorted, shone like broken spearheads.
+
+He lighted a cigarette, and stood there till he had consumed it.
+
+"Heigh-ho!" he sighed at last, and turned back towards the villa. And
+"Yes," he concluded, "I must certainly keep an eye on our friend Peter
+Marchdale."
+
+"But I 'm doubting it's a bit too late--troppo tardo," he said to
+Marietta, whom he found bringing hot water to his dressing-room.
+
+"It is not very late," said Marietta. "Only half-past ten."
+
+"She is a woman--therefore to be loved; she is a duchess--therefore to
+be lost," he explained, in his native tongue.
+
+"Cosa." questioned Marietta, in hers.
+
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Beatrice and Emilia, strolling together in one of the flowery lanes up
+the hillside, between ranks of the omnipresent poplar, and rose-bush
+hedges, or crumbling pink-stuccoed walls that dripped with cyclamen and
+snapdragon, met old Marietta descending, with a basket on her arm.
+
+Marietta courtesied to the ground.
+
+"How do you do, Marietta?" Beatrice asked.
+
+"I can't complain, thank your Grandeur. I have the lumbago on and off
+pretty constantly, and last week I broke a tooth. But I can't complain.
+And your Highness?"
+
+Marietta returned, with brisk aplomb.
+
+Beatrice smiled. "Bene, grazie. Your new master--that young Englishman,"
+she continued, "I hope you find him kind, and easy to do for?"
+
+"Kind--yes, Excellency. Also easy to do for. But--!" Marietta shrugged
+her shoulders, and gave her head two meaning oscillations.
+
+"Oh--?" wondered Beatrice, knitting puzzled brows.
+
+"Very amiable, your Greatness; but simple, simple," Marietta explained,
+and tapped her brown old forehead with a brown forefinger.
+
+"Really--?" wondered Beatrice.
+
+"Yes, Nobility," said Marietta. "Gentle as a canarybird, but innocent,
+innocent."
+
+"You astonish me," Beatrice avowed. "How does he show it?"
+
+"The questions he asks, Most Illustrious, the things he says."
+
+"For example--?" pursued Beatrice.
+
+"For example, your Serenity--" Marietta paused, to search her memory.--
+"Well, for one example, he calls roast veal a fowl. I give him roast veal
+for his luncheon, and he says to me, 'Marietta, this fowl has no wings.'
+But everyone knows, your Mercy, that veal is not a fowl. How should veal
+have wings?"
+
+"How indeed?" assented Beatrice, on a note of commiseration. And if
+the corners of her mouth betrayed a tendency to curve upwards, she
+immediately compelled them down. "But perhaps he does not speak Italian
+very well?" she suggested.
+
+"Mache, Potenza! Everyone speaks Italian," cried Marietta.
+
+"Indeed?" said Beatrice.
+
+"Naturally, your Grace--all Christians," Marietta declared.
+
+"Oh, I did n't know," said Beatrice, meekly. "Well," she acknowledged,
+"since he speaks Italian, it is certainly unreasonable of him to call
+veal a fowl."
+
+"But that, Magnificence," Marietta went on, warming to her theme, "that
+is only one of his simplicities. He asks me, 'Who puts the whitewash on
+Monte Sfiorito? 'And when I tell him that it is not whitewash, but
+snow, he says, 'How do you know?' But everyone knows that it is snow.
+Whitewash!"
+
+The sprightly old woman gave her whole body a shake, for the better
+exposition of her state of mind. And thereupon, from the interior of her
+basket, issued a plaintive little squeal.
+
+"What have you in your basket?" Beatrice asked.
+
+"A little piglet, Nobility--un piccolo porcellino," said Marietta.
+
+And lifting the cover an inch or two, she displayed the anxious face of
+a poor little sucking pig.
+
+"E carino?" she demanded, whilst her eyes beamed with a pride that
+almost seemed maternal.
+
+"What on earth are you going to do with him?" Beatrice gasped.
+
+The light of pride gave place to a light of resolution, in Marietta's
+eyes.
+
+"Kill him, Mightiness," was her grim response; "stuff him with almonds,
+raisins, rosemary, and onions; cook him sweet and sour; and serve him,
+garnished with rosettes of beet-root, for my Signorino's Sunday dinner."
+
+"Oh-h-h!" shuddered Beatrice and Emilia, in a breath; and they resumed
+their walk.
+
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+Francois was dining--with an appearance of great fervour.
+
+Peter sat on his rustic bench, by the riverside, and watched him,
+smoking a cigarette the while.
+
+The Duchessa di Santangiolo stood screened by a tree in the park of
+Ventirose, and watched them both.
+
+Francois wore a wide blue ribbon round his pink and chubby neck; and his
+dinner consisted of a big bowlful of bread and milk.
+
+Presently the Duchessa stepped forth from her ambush, into the sun, and
+laughed.
+
+"What a sweetly pretty scene," she said. "Pastoral--idyllic--it reminds
+one of Theocritus--it reminds one of Watteau."
+
+Peter threw his cigarette into the river, and made an obeisance.
+
+"I am very glad you feel the charm of it," he responded. "May I be
+permitted to present Master Francois Vllon?"
+
+"We have met before," said the Duchessa, graciously smiling upon
+Francois, and inclining her head.
+
+"Oh, I did n't know," said Peter, apologetic.
+
+"Yes," said the Duchessa, "and in rather tragical circumstances. But
+at that time he was anonymous. Why--if you won't think my curiosity
+impertinent--why Francois Villon?"
+
+"Why not?" said Peter. "He made such a tremendous outcry when he was
+condemned to death, for one thing. You should have heard him. He has
+a voice! Then, for another, he takes such a passionate interest in his
+meat and drink. And then, if you come to that, I really had n't the
+heart to call him Pauvre Lelian."
+
+The Duchessa raised amused eyebrows.
+
+"You felt that Pauvre Lelian was the only alternative?"
+
+"I had in mind a remark of Pauvre Lilian's friend and confrere, the
+cryptic Stephane," Peter answered. "You will remember it. 'L'ame d'un
+poete dans le corps d'un--' I--I forget the last word," he faltered.
+
+"Shall we say 'little pig'?" suggested the Duchessa.
+
+"Oh, please don't," cried Peter, hastily, with a gesture of
+supplication. "Don't say 'pig' in his presence. You'll wound his
+feelings."
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+"I knew he was condemned to death," she owned. "Indeed, it was in his
+condemned cell that I made his acquaintance. Your Marietta Cignolesi
+introduced us. Her air was so inexorable, I 'm a good deal surprised to
+see him alive to-day. There was some question of a stuffing of rosemary
+and onions."
+
+"Ah, I see," said Peter, "I see that you're familiar with the whole
+disgraceful story. Yes, Marietta, the unspeakable old Tartar, was
+all for stuffing him with rosemary and onions. But he could not bring
+himself to share her point of view. He screamed his protest, like a man,
+in twenty different octaves. You really should have heard him. His voice
+is of a compass, of a timbre, of an expressiveness! Passive endurance, I
+fear, is not his forte. For the sake of peace and silence, I intervened,
+interceded. She had her knife at his very throat. I was not an instant
+too soon. So, of course, I 've had to adopt him."
+
+"Of course, poor man," sympathised the Duchessa. "It's a recognised
+principle that if you save a fellow's life, you 're bound to him for
+the rest of yours. But--but won't you find him rather a burdensome
+responsibility when he's grownup?" she reflected.
+
+"--Que voulez-vous?" reflected Peter. "Burdensome responsibilities
+are the appointed accompaniments of man's pilgrimage. Why not Francois
+Villon, as well as another? And besides, as the world is at present
+organised, a member of the class vulgarly styled 'the rich' can
+generally manage to shift his responsibilities, when they become too
+irksome, upon the backs of the poor. For example--Marietta! Marietta!"
+he called, raising his voice a little, and clapping his hands.
+
+Marietta came. When she had made her courtesy to the Duchessa, and
+a polite enquiry as to her Excellency's health, Peter said, with
+an indicative nod of the head, "Will you be so good as to remove my
+responsibility?"
+
+"Il porcellino?" questioned Marietta.
+
+"Ang," said he.
+
+And when Marietta had borne Francois, struggling and squealing in her
+arms, from the foreground--
+
+"There--you see how it is done," he remarked.
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+"An object-lesson," she agreed. "An object-lesson in--might n't one call
+it the science of Applied Cynicism?"
+
+"Science!" Peter plaintively repudiated the word. "No, no. I was rather
+flattering myself it was an art."
+
+"Apropos of art--" said the Duchessa.
+
+She came down two or three steps nearer to the brink of the river. She
+produced from behind her back a hand that she had kept there, and held
+up for Peter's inspection a grey-and-gold bound book.
+
+"Apropos of art, I've been reading a novel. Do you know it?"
+
+Peter glanced at the grey-and-gold binding--and dissembled the emotion
+that suddenly swelled big in his heart.
+
+He screwed his eyeglass into his eye, and gave an intent look.
+
+"I can't make out the title," he temporised, shaking his head, and
+letting his eyeglass drop.
+
+On the whole, it was very well acted; and I hope the occult little smile
+that played about the Duchessa's lips was a smile of appreciation.
+
+"It has a highly appropriate title," she said. "It is called 'A Man of
+Words,' by an author I've never happened to hear of before, named Felix
+Wildmay."
+
+"Oh, yes. How very odd," said Peter. "By a curious chance, I know it
+very well. But I 'm surprised to discover that you do. How on earth did
+it fall into your hands?"
+
+"Why on earth shouldn't it?" wondered she. "Novels are intended to fall
+into people's hands, are they not?"
+
+"I believe so," he assented. "But intentions, in this vale of tears,
+are not always realised, are they? Anyhow, 'A Man of Words' is not like
+other novels. It's peculiar."
+
+"Peculiar--?" she repeated.
+
+"Of a peculiar, of an unparalleled obscurity," he explained. "There has
+been no failure approaching it since What's-his-name invented printing.
+I hadn't supposed that seven copies of it were in circulation."
+
+"Really?" said the Duchessa. "A correspondent of mine in London
+recommended it. But--in view of its unparalleled obscurity is n't it
+almost equally a matter for surprise that you should know it?"
+
+"It would be, sure enough," consented Peter, "if it weren't that I just
+happen also to know the author."
+
+"Oh--? You know the author?" cried the Duchessa, with animation.
+
+"Comme ma poche," said Peter. "We were boys together."
+
+"Really?" said she. "What a coincidence."
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+"And--and his book?" Her eyebrows went up, interrogative. "I expect, as
+you know the man, you think rather poorly of it?"
+
+"On the contrary, in the teeth of verisimilitude, I think extremely
+well of it," he answered firmly. "I admire it immensely. I think it's
+an altogether ripping little book. I think it's one of the nicest little
+books I've read for ages.
+
+"How funny," said she.
+
+"Why funny?" asked he.
+
+"It's so unlikely that one should seem a genius to one's old familiar
+friends."
+
+"Did I say he seemed a genius to me? I misled you. He does n't. In fact,
+he very frequently seems--but, for Charity's sake, I 'd best forbear
+to tell. However, I admire his book. And--to be entirely frank--it's a
+constant source of astonishment to me that he should ever have been able
+to do anything one-tenth so good."
+
+The Duchessa smiled pensively.
+
+"Ah, well," she mused, "we must assume that he has happy moments--or,
+perhaps, two soul-sides, one to face the world with, one to show his
+manuscripts when he's writing. You hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.
+That, indeed, is only natural, on the part of an old friend. But you
+pique my interest. What is the trouble with him? Is--is he conceited,
+for example?"
+
+"The trouble with him?" Peter pondered. "Oh, it would be too long and
+too sad a story. Should I anatomise him to you as he is, I must blush
+and weep, and you must look pale and wonder. He has pretty nearly
+every weakness, not to mention vices, that flesh is heir to. But as for
+conceit... let me see. He concurs in my own high opinion of his work, I
+believe; but I don't know whether, as literary men go, it would be fair
+to call him conceited. He belongs, at any rate, to the comparatively
+modest minority who do not secretly fancy that Shakespeare has come back
+to life."
+
+"That Shakespeare has come back to life!" marvelled the Duchessa. "Do
+you mean to say that most literary men fancy that?"
+
+"I think perhaps I am acquainted with three who don't," Peter replied;
+"but one of them merely wears his rue with a difference. He fancies that
+it's Goethe."
+
+"How extravagantly--how exquisitely droll!" she laughed.
+
+"I confess, it struck me so, until I got accustomed to it," said he,
+"until I learned that it was one of the commonplaces, one of the normal
+attributes of the literary temperament. It's as much to be taken
+for granted, when you meet an author, as the tail is to be taken for
+granted, when you meet a cat."
+
+"I'm vastly your debtor for the information--it will stand me in stead
+with the next author who comes my way. But, in that case, your friend
+Mr. Felix Wildmay will be, as it were, a sort of Manx cat?" was her
+smiling deduction.
+
+"Yes, if you like, in that particular, a sort of Manx cat," acquiesced
+Peter, with a laugh.
+
+The Duchessa laughed too; and then there was a little pause.
+
+Overhead, never so light a breeze lisped never so faintly in the
+tree-tops; here and there bird-notes fell, liquid, desultory, like drops
+of rain after a shower; and constantly one heard the cool music of the
+river. The sun, filtering through worlds and worlds of leaves, shed upon
+everything a green-gold penumbra. The air, warm and still, was sweet
+with garden-scents. The lake, according to its habit at this hour of
+the afternoon, had drawn a grey veil over its face, a thin grey veil,
+through which its sapphire-blue shone furtively. Far away, in the summer
+haze, Monte Sfiorito seemed a mere dim spectre of itself--a stranger
+might easily have mistaken it for a vague mass of cloud floating above
+the horizon.
+
+"Are you aware that it 's a singularly lovely afternoon?" the Duchessa
+asked, by and by.
+
+"I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so," Peter hazarded, with the
+least perceptible approach to a meaning bow.
+
+In the Duchessa's face, perhaps, there flickered, for half-a-second, the
+least perceptible light, as of a comprehending and unresentful smile.
+But she went on, with fine aloofness.
+
+"I rather envy you your river, you know. We are too far from it at
+the castle. Is n't the sound, the murmur, of it delicious? And its
+colour--how does it come by such a subtle colour? Is it green? Is it
+blue? And the diamonds on its surface--see how they glitter. You know,
+of course," she questioned, "who the owner is of those unequalled gems?"
+
+"Surely," Peter answered, "the lady paramount of this demesne?"
+
+"No, no." She shook her head, smiling. "Undine. They are Undine's--her
+necklaces and tiaras. No mortal woman's jewel-case contains anything
+half so brilliant. But look at them--look at the long chains of
+them--how they float for a minute--and are then drawn down. They are
+Undine's--Undine and her companions are sporting with them just below
+the surface. A moment ago I caught a glimpse of a white arm."
+
+"Ah," said Peter, nodding thoughtfully, "that's what it is to have 'the
+seeing eye.' But I'm grieved to hear of Undine in such a wanton mood. I
+had hoped she would still be weeping her unhappy love-affair."
+
+"What! with that horrid, stolid German--Hildebrandt, was his name?"
+cried the Duchessa. "Not she! Long ago, I'm glad to say, she learned to
+laugh at that, as a mere caprice of her immaturity. However, this is a
+digression. I want to return to our 'Man of Words.' Tell me--what is the
+quality you especially like in it?"
+
+"I like its every quality," Peter affirmed, unblushing. "Its style,
+its finish, its concentration; its wit, humour, sentiment; its texture,
+tone, atmosphere; its scenes, its subject; the paper it's printed
+on, the type, the binding. But above all, I like its heroine. I think
+Pauline de Fleuvieres the pearl of human women--the cleverest, the
+loveliest, the most desirable, the most exasperating. And also the most
+feminine. I can't think of her at all as a mere fiction, a mere shadow
+on paper. I think of her as a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood woman,
+whom I have actually known. I can see her before me now--I can see
+her eyes, full of mystery and mischief--I can see her exquisite little
+teeth, as she smiles--I can see her hair, her hands--I can almost catch
+the perfume of her garments. I 'm utterly infatuated with her--I could
+commit a hundred follies for her."
+
+"Mercy!" exclaimed the Duchessa. "You are enthusiastic."
+
+"The book's admirers are so few, they must endeavour to make up in
+enthusiasm what they lack in numbers," he submitted.
+
+"But--at that rate--why are they so few?" she puzzled. "If the book is
+all you think it, how do you account for its unpopularity?"
+
+"It could never conceivably be anything but unpopular," said he. "It has
+the fatal gift of beauty."
+
+The Duchessa laughed surprise.
+
+"Is beauty a fatal gift--in works of art?"
+
+"Yes--in England," he declared.
+
+"In England? Why especially in England?"
+
+"In English-speaking--in Anglo-Saxon lands, if you prefer. The
+Anglo-Saxon public is beauty-blind. They have fifty religions--only one
+sauce--and no sense of beauty whatsoever. They can see the nose on one's
+face--the mote in their neighbour's eye; they can see when a bargain is
+good, when a war will be expedient. But the one thing they can never see
+is beauty. And when, by some rare chance, you catch them in the act of
+admiring a beautiful object, it will never be for its beauty--it will be
+in spite of its beauty for some other, some extra-aesthetic interest it
+possesses--some topical or historical interest. Beauty is necessarily
+detached from all that is topical or historical, or documentary or
+actual. It is also necessarily an effect of fine shades, delicate
+values, vanishing distinctions, of evasiveness, inconsequence,
+suggestion. It is also absolute, unrelated--it is positive or negative
+or superlative--it is never comparative. Well, the Anglo-Saxon public
+is totally insensible to such things. They can no more feel them, than a
+blind worm can feel the colours of the rainbow."
+
+She laughed again, and regarded him with an air of humorous meditation.
+
+"And that accounts for the unsuccess of 'A Man of Words'?"
+
+"You might as well offer Francois Villon a banquet of Orient pearls."
+
+"You are bitterly hard on the Anglo-Saxon public."
+
+"Oh, no," he disclaimed, "not hard--but just. I wish them all sorts of
+prosperity, with a little more taste."
+
+"Oh, but surely," she caught him up, "if their taste were greater, their
+prosperity would be less?"
+
+"I don't know," said he. "The Greeks were fairly prosperous, were n't
+they? And the Venetians? And the French are not yet quite bankrupt."
+
+Still again she laughed--always with that little air of humorous
+meditation.
+
+"You--you don't exactly overwhelm one with compliments," she observed.
+
+He looked alarm, anxiety.
+
+"Don't I? What have I neglected?" he cried.
+
+"You 've never once evinced the slightest curiosity to learn what I
+think of the book in question."
+
+"Oh, I'm sure you like it," he rejoined hardily. "You have 'the seeing
+eye.'"
+
+"And yet I'm just a humble member of the Anglo-Saxon public."
+
+"No--you're a distinguished member of the Anglo-Saxon 'remnant.' Thank
+heaven, there's a remnant, a little scattered remnant. I'm perfectly
+sure you like 'A Man of Words.'"
+
+"'Like it' is a proposition so general. Perhaps I am burning to tell
+someone what I think of it in detail."
+
+She smiled into his eyes, a trifle oddly.
+
+"If you are, then I know someone who is burning to hear you," he avowed.
+
+"Well, then, I think--I think..." she began, on a note of deliberation.
+"But I 'm afraid, just now, it would take too long to formulate my
+thought. Perhaps I'll try another day."
+
+She gave him a derisory little nod--and in a minute was well up the
+lawn, towards the castle.
+
+Peter glared after her, his fists clenched, teeth set.
+
+"You fiend!" he muttered. Then, turning savagely upon himself, "You
+duffer!"
+
+Nevertheless, that evening, he said to Marietta, "The plot thickens.
+We've advanced a step. We've reached what the vulgar call a
+psychological moment. She's seen my Portrait of a Lady. But as yet, if
+you can believe me, she doesn't dream who painted it; and she has n't
+recognised the subject. As if one were to face one's image in the glass,
+and take it for another's! 3--I 'll--I 'll double your wages--if you
+will induce events to hurry up."
+
+However, as he spoke English, Marietta was in no position to profit by
+his offer.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Peter was walking in the high-road, on the other side of the river--the
+great high-road that leads from Bergamo to Milan.
+
+It was late in the afternoon, and already, in the west, the sky was
+beginning to put on some of its sunset splendours. In the east, framed
+to Peter's vision by parallel lines of poplars, it hung like a curtain
+of dark-blue velvet.
+
+Peter sat on the grass, by the roadside, in the shadow of a hedge--a
+rose-bush hedge, of course--and lighted a cigarette.
+
+Far down the long white road, against the blue velvet sky, between the
+poplars, two little spots of black, two small human figures, were moving
+towards him.
+
+Half absently, he let his eyes accompany them.
+
+As they came nearer, they defined themselves as a boy and a girl.
+Nearer still, he saw that they were ragged and dusty and barefoot.
+
+The boy had three or four gaudy-hued wicker baskets slung over his
+shoulder.
+
+Vaguely, tacitly, Peter supposed that they would be the children of some
+of the peasants of the countryside, on their way home from the village.
+
+As they arrived abreast of him, they paid him the usual peasants'
+salute. The boy lifted a tattered felt hat from his head, the girl
+bobbed a courtesy, and "Buona sera, Eccellenza," they said in concert,
+without, however, pausing in their march.
+
+Peter put his hand in his pocket.
+
+"Here, little girl," he called.
+
+The little girl glanced at him, doubting.
+
+"Come here," he said.
+
+Her face a question, she came up to him; and he gave her a few coppers.
+
+"To buy sweetmeats," he said.
+
+"A thousand thanks; Excellency," said she, bobbing another courtesy.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency," said the boy, from his distance, again
+lifting his rag of a hat.
+
+And they trudged on.
+
+But Peter looked after them--and his heart smote him. They were clearly
+of the poorest of the poor. He thought of Hansel and Gretel. Why had he
+given them so little? He called to them to stop.
+
+The little girl came running back.
+
+Peter rose to meet her.
+
+"You may as well buy some ribbons too," he said, and gave her a couple
+of lire.
+
+She looked at the money with surprise--even with an appearance of
+hesitation. Plainly, it was a sum, in her eyes.
+
+"It's all right. Now run along," said Peter.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency," said she, with a third courtesy, and
+rejoined her brother....
+
+"Where are they going?" asked a voice.
+
+Peter faced about.
+
+There stood the Duchessa, in a bicycling costume, her bicycle beside
+her. Her bicycling costume was of blue serge, and she wore a jaunty
+sailor-hat with a blue ribbon. Peter (in spite of the commotion in his
+breast) was able to remember that this was the first time he had seen
+her in anything but white.
+
+Her attention was all upon the children, whom he, perhaps, had more or
+less banished to Cracklimbo.
+
+"Where are they going?" she repeated, trouble in her voice and in her
+eyes.
+
+Peter collected himself.
+
+"The children? I don't know--I didn't ask. Home, aren't they?"
+
+"Home? Oh, no. They don't live hereabouts," she said. "I know all the
+poor of this neighbourhood.--Ohe there! Children! Children!" she cried.
+
+But they were quite a hundred yards away, and did not hear.
+
+"Do you wish them to come back?" asked Peter.
+
+"Yes--of course," she answered, with a shade of impatience.
+
+He put his fingers to his lips (you know the schoolboy accomplishment),
+and gave a long whistle.
+
+That the children did hear.
+
+They halted, and turned round, looking, enquiring.
+
+"Come back--come back!" called the Duchessa, raising her hand, and
+beckoning.
+
+They came back.
+
+"The pathetic little imps," she murmured while they were on the way.
+
+The boy was a sturdy, square-built fellow, of twelve, thirteen, with
+a shock of brown hair, brown cheeks, and sunny brown eyes; with
+a precocious air of doggedness, of responsibility. He wore an old
+tail-coat, the tail-coat of a man, ragged, discoloured, falling to his
+ankles.
+
+The girl was ten or eleven, pale, pinched; hungry, weary, and sorry
+looking. Her hair too had been brown, upon a time; but now it was faded
+to something near the tint of ashes, and had almost the effect of being
+grey. Her pale little forehead was crossed by thin wrinkles, lines of
+pain, of worry, like an old woman's.
+
+The Duchessa, pushing her bicycle, and followed by Peter, moved down
+the road, to meet them. Peter had never been so near to her before--at
+moments her arm all but brushed his sleeve. I think he blessed the
+children.
+
+"Where are you going?" the Duchessa asked, softly, smiling into the
+girl's sad little face.
+
+The girl had shown no fear of Peter; but apparently she was somewhat
+frightened by this grand lady. The toes of her bare feet worked
+nervously in the dust. She hung her head shyly, and eyed her brother.
+
+But the brother, removing his hat, with the bow of an Italian
+peasant--and that is to say, the bow of a courtier--spoke up bravely.
+
+"To Turin, Nobility."
+
+He said it in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, quite as he might have
+said, "To the next farm-house."
+
+The Duchessa, however, had not bargained for an answer of this measure.
+Startled, doubting her ears perhaps, "To--Turin--!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, Excellency," said the boy.
+
+"But--but Turin--Turin is hundreds of kilometres from here," she said,
+in a kind of gasp.
+
+"Yes, Excellency," said the boy.
+
+"You are going to Turin--you two children--walking--like that!" she
+persisted.
+
+"Yes, Excellency."
+
+"But--but it will take you a month."
+
+"Pardon, noble lady," said the boy. "With your Excellency's permission,
+we were told it should take fifteen days."
+
+"Where do you come from?" she asked.
+
+"From Bergamo, Excellency."
+
+"When did you leave Bergamo?"
+
+"Yesterday morning, Excellency."
+
+"The little girl is your sister?"
+
+"Yes, Excellency."
+
+"Have you a mother and father?"
+
+"A father, Excellency. The mother is dead." Each of the children made
+the Sign of the Cross; and Peter was somewhat surprised, no doubt, to
+see the Duchessa do likewise. He had yet to learn the beautiful custom
+of that pious Lombard land, whereby, when the Dead are mentioned, you
+make the Sign of the Cross, and, pausing reverently for a moment, say in
+silence the traditional prayer of the Church:
+
+"May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the
+Mercy of God, rest in peace."
+
+"And where is your father?" the Duchessa asked.
+
+"In Turin, Excellency," answered the boy. "He is a glass-blower. After
+the strike at Bergamo, he went to Turin to seek work. Now he has found
+it. So he has sent for us to come to him."
+
+"And you two children--alone--are going to walk all the way to Turin!"
+She could not get over the pitiful wonder of it.
+
+"Yes, Excellency."
+
+"The heart-rending little waifs," she said, in English, with something
+like a sob. Then, in Italian, "But--but how do you live by the way?"
+
+The boy touched his shoulder-load of baskets.
+
+"We sell these, Excellency."
+
+"What is their price?" she asked.
+
+"Thirty soldi, Excellency."
+
+"Have you sold many since you started?"
+
+The boy looked away; and now it was his turn to hang his head, and to
+let his toes work nervously in the dust.
+
+"Haven't you sold any?" she exclaimed, drawing her conclusions.
+
+"No, Excellency. The people would not buy," he owned, in a dull voice,
+keeping his eyes down.
+
+"Poverino," she murmured. "Where are you going to sleep to-night?"
+
+"In a house, Excellency," said he.
+
+But that seemed to strike the Duchessa as somewhat vague.
+
+"In what house?" she asked.
+
+"I do not know, Excellency," he confessed. "We will find a house."
+
+"Would you like to come back with me, and sleep at my house?"
+
+The boy and girl looked at each other, taking mute counsel.
+
+Then, "Pardon, noble lady--with your Excellency's permission, is it
+far?" the boy questioned.
+
+"I am afraid it is not very near--three or four kilometres."
+
+Again the children looked at each other, conferring. Afterwards, the boy
+shook his head.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency. With your permission, we must not turn
+back. We must walk on till later. At night we will find a house."
+
+"They are too proud to own that their house will be a hedge," she said
+to Peter, again in English. "Aren't you hungry?" she asked the children.
+
+"No, Excellency. We had bread in the village, below there," answered the
+boy.
+
+"You will not come home with me, and have a good dinner, and a good
+night's sleep?"
+
+"Pardon, Excellency. With your favour, the father would not wish us to
+turn back."
+
+The Duchessa looked at the little girl.
+
+The little girl wore a medal of the Immaculate Conception on a ribbon
+round her neck--a forlorn blue ribbon, soiled and frayed.
+
+"Oh, you have a holy medal," said the Duchessa.
+
+"Yes, noble lady," said the girl, dropping a courtesy, and lifting up
+her sad little weazened face.
+
+"She has been saying her prayers all along the road," the boy
+volunteered.
+
+"That is right," approved the Duchessa. "You have not made your First
+Communion yet, have you?"
+
+"No, Excellency," said the girl. "I shall make it next year."
+
+"And you?" the Duchessa asked the boy.
+
+"I made mine at Corpus Christi," said the boy, with a touch of pride.
+
+The Duchessa turned to Peter.
+
+"Do you know, I haven't a penny in my pocket. I have come out without my
+purse."
+
+"How much ought one to give them?" Peter asked.
+
+"Of course, there is the fear that they might be robbed," she reflected.
+"If one should give them a note of any value, they would have to change
+it; and they would probably be robbed. What to do?"
+
+"I will speak to the boy," said Peter. "Would you like to go to Turin by
+train?" he asked.
+
+The boy and girl looked at each other. "Yes, Excellency," said the boy.
+
+"But if I give you money for your fare, will you know how to take care
+of it--how to prevent people from robbing you?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Excellency."
+
+"You could take the train this evening, at Venzona, about two kilometres
+from here, in the direction you are walking. In an hour or two you would
+arrive at Milan; there you would change into the train for Turin. You
+would be at Turin to-morrow morning."
+
+"Yes, Excellency."
+
+"But if I give you money, you will not let people rob you? If I give you
+a hundred lire?"
+
+The boy drew back, stared, as if frightened.
+
+"A hundred lire--?" he said.
+
+"Yes," said Peter.
+
+The boy looked at his sister.
+
+"Pardon, Nobility," he said. "With your condescension, does it cost a
+hundred lire to go to Turin by train?"
+
+"Oh, no. I think it costs eight or ten."
+
+Again the boy looked at his sister.
+
+"Pardon, Nobility. With your Excellency's permission, we should not
+desire a hundred lire then," he said.
+
+Peter and the Duchessa were not altogether to be blamed, I hope, if they
+exchanged the merest hint of a smile.
+
+"Well, if I should give you fifty?" Peter asked.
+
+"Fifty lire, Excellency?"
+
+Peter nodded.
+
+Still again the boy sought counsel of his sister, with his eyes.
+
+"Yes, Excellency," he said.
+
+"You are sure you will be able to take care of it--you will not let
+people rob you," the Duchessa put in, anxious. "They will wish to
+rob you. If you go to sleep in the train, they will try to pick your
+pocket."
+
+"I will hide it, noble lady. No one shall rob me. If I go to sleep in
+the train, I will sit on it, and my sister will watch. If she goes to
+sleep, I will watch," the boy promised confidently.
+
+"You must give it to him in the smallest change you can possibly scrape
+together," she advised Peter.
+
+And with one-lira, two-lira, ten-lira notes, and with a little silver
+and copper, he made up the amount.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency," said the boy, with a bow that was
+magnificent; and he proceeded to distribute the money between various
+obscure pockets.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency," said the girl, with a courtesy.
+
+"Addio, a buon' viaggio," said Peter.
+
+"Addio, Eccellenze," said the boy.
+
+"Addio, Eccellenze," said the girl.
+
+But the Duchessa impulsively stooped down, and kissed the girl on her
+poor little wrinkled brow. And when she stood up, Peter saw that her
+eyes were wet.
+
+The children moved off. They moved off, whispering together, and
+gesticulating, after the manner of their race: discussing something.
+Presently they stopped; and the boy came running back, while his sister
+waited.
+
+He doffed his hat, and said, "A thousand pardons, Excellency-"
+
+"Yes? What is it?" Peter asked.
+
+"With your Excellency's favour--is it obligatory that we should take the
+train?"
+
+"Obligatory?" puzzled Peter. "How do you mean?"
+
+"If it is not obligatory, we would prefer, with the permission of your
+Excellency, to save the money."
+
+"But--but then you will have to walk!" cried Peter.
+
+"But if it is not obligatory to take the train, we would pray your
+Excellency's permission to save the money. We should like to save the
+money, to give it to the father. The father is very poor. Fifty lire is
+so much."
+
+This time it was Peter who looked for counsel to the Duchessa.
+
+Her eyes, still bright with tears, responded, "Let them do as they
+will."
+
+"No, it is not obligatory--it is only recommended," he said to the boy,
+with a smile that he could n't help. "Do as you will. But if I were you,
+I should spare my poor little feet."
+
+"Mille grazie, Eccellenze," the boy said, with a final sweep of his
+tattered hat. He ran back to his sister; and next moment they were
+walking resolutely on, westward, "into the great red light."
+
+
+The Duchessa and Peter were silent for a while, looking after them.
+
+They dwindled to dots in the distance, and then, where the road turned,
+disappeared.
+
+At last the Duchessa spoke--but almost as if speaking to herself.
+
+"There, Felix Wildmay, you writer of tales, is a subject made to your
+hand," she said.
+
+We may guess whether Peter was startled. Was it possible that she had
+found him out? A sound, confused, embarrassed, something composite,
+between an oh and ayes, seemed to expire in his throat.
+
+But the Duchessa did n't appear to heed it.
+
+"Don't you think it would be a touching episode for your friend to write
+a story round?" she asked.
+
+We may guess whether he was relieved.
+
+"Oh--oh, yes," he agreed, with the precipitancy of a man who, in his
+relief, would agree to anything.
+
+"Have you ever seen such courage?" she went on. "The wonderful babies!
+Fancy fifteen days, fifteen days and nights, alone, unprotected, on the
+highway, those poor little atoms! Down in their hearts they are really
+filled with terror. Who would n't be, with such a journey before him?
+But how finely they concealed it, mastered it! Oh, I hope they won't be
+robbed. God help them--God help them!"
+
+"God help them, indeed," said Peter.
+
+"And the little girl, with her medal of the Immaculate Conception. The
+father, after all, can hardly be the brute one might suspect, since he
+has given them a religious education. Oh, I am sure, I am sure, it was
+the Blessed Virgin herself who sent us across their path, in answer to
+that poor little creature's prayers."
+
+"Yes," said Peter, ambiguously perhaps. But he liked the way in which
+she united him to herself in the pronoun.
+
+"Which, of course," she added, smiling gravely into his eyes, "seems the
+height of absurdity to you?"
+
+"Why should it seem the height of absurdity to me?" he asked.
+
+"You are a Protestant, I suppose?"
+
+"I suppose so. But what of that? At all events, I believe there are
+more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the usual
+philosophies. And I see no reason why it should not have been the
+Blessed Virgin who sent us across their path."
+
+"What would your Protestant pastors and masters do, if they heard you?
+Isn't that what they call Popish superstition?"
+
+"I daresay. But I'm not sure that there's any such thing as
+superstition. Superstition, in its essence, is merely a recognition of
+the truth that in a universe of mysteries and contradictions, like ours,
+nothing conceivable or inconceivable is impossible."
+
+"Oh, no, no," she objected. "Superstition is the belief in something
+that is ugly and bad and unmeaning. That is the difference between
+superstition and religion. Religion is the belief in something that is
+beautiful and good and significant--something that throws light into the
+dark places of life--that helps us to see and to live."
+
+"Yes," said Peter, "I admit the distinction." After a little suspension,
+"I thought," he questioned, "that all Catholics were required to go to
+Mass on Sunday?"
+
+"Of course--so they are," said she.
+
+"But--but you--" he began.
+
+"I hear Mass not on Sunday only--I hear it every morning of my life."
+
+"Oh? Indeed? I beg your pardon," he stumbled. "I--one--one never sees
+you at the village church."
+
+"No. We have a chapel and a chaplain at the castle."
+
+She mounted her bicycle.
+
+"Good-bye," she said, and lightly rode away.
+
+"So-ho! Her bigotry is not such a negligible quantity, after all," Peter
+concluded.
+
+"But what," he demanded of Marietta, as she ministered to his wants
+at dinner, "what does one barrier more or less matter, when people are
+already divided by a gulf that never can be traversed? You see that
+river?" He pointed through his open window to the Aco. "It is a symbol.
+She stands on one side of it, I stand on the other, and we exchange
+little jokes. But the river is always there, flowing between us,
+separating us. She is the daughter of a lord, and the widow of a duke,
+and the fairest of her sex, and a millionaire, and a Roman Catholic.
+What am I? Oh, I don't deny I 'm clever. But for the rest? ... My
+dear Marietta, I am simply, in one word, the victim of a misplaced
+attachment."
+
+"Non capisco Francese," said Marietta.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+And after that, for I forget how many days, Peter and the Duchessa did
+not meet; and so he sank low and lower in his mind.
+
+Nothing that can befall us, optimists aver, is without its value; and
+this, I have heard, is especially true if we happen to be literary men.
+All is grist that comes to a writer's mill.
+
+By his present experience, accordingly, Peter learned--and in the
+regretful prose of some future masterpiece will perhaps be enabled to
+remember--how exceeding great is the impatience of the lovesick,
+with what febrile vehemence the smitten heart can burn, and to
+what improbable lengths hours and minutes can on occasions stretch
+themselves.
+
+He tried many methods of distraction.
+
+There was always the panorama of his valley--the dark-blue lake, pale
+Monte Sfiorito, the frowning Gnisi, the smiling uplands westward. There
+were always the sky, the clouds, the clear sunshine, the crisp-etched
+shadows; and in the afternoon there was always the wondrous opalescent
+haze of August, filling every distance. There was always his
+garden--there were the great trees, with the light sifting through high
+spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees,
+the butterflies, with their colour, and their fragrance, and their
+music; there was his tinkling fountain, in its nimbus of prismatic
+spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a half-hour's
+walk, there was the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top
+church, its odd little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded
+frescoed house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian
+life:--the cobbler tapping in his stall; women gossiping at their
+toilets; children sprawling in the dirt, chasing each other, shouting;
+men drinking, playing mora, quarrelling, laughing, singing, twanging
+mandolines, at the tables under the withered bush of the wine-shop; and
+two or three more pensive citizens swinging their legs from the parapet
+of the bridge, and angling for fish that never bit, in the impetuous
+stream below.
+
+Peter looked at these things; and, it is to be presumed, he saw them.
+But, for all the joy they gave him, he, this cultivator of the sense of
+beauty, might have been the basest unit of his own purblind Anglo-Saxon
+public. They were the background for an absent figure. They were the
+stage-accessories of a drama whose action was arrested. They were an
+empty theatre.
+
+He tried to read. He had brought a trunkful of books to Villa Floriano;
+but that book had been left behind which could fix his interest now.
+
+He tried to write--and wondered, in a kind of daze, that any man should
+ever have felt the faintest ambition to do a thing so thankless and so
+futile.
+
+"I shall never write again. Writing," he generalised, and possibly not
+without some reason, "when it is n't the sordidest of trades, is a mere
+fatuous assertion of one's egotism. Breaking stones in the street were
+a nobler occupation; weaving ropes of sand were better sport. The only
+things that are worth writing are inexpressible, and can't be written.
+The only things that can be written are obvious and worthless--the very
+crackling of thorns under a pot. Oh, why does n't she turn up?"
+
+And the worst of it was that at any moment, for aught he knew, she might
+turn up. That was the worst of it, and the best. It kept hope alive,
+only to torture hope. It encouraged him to wait, to watch, to expect;
+to linger in his garden, gazing hungry-eyed up the lawns of Ventirose,
+striving to pierce the foliage that embowered the castle; to wander the
+country round-about, scanning every vista, scrutinising every shape and
+shadow, a tweed-clad Gastibelza. At any moment, indeed, she might turn
+up; but the days passed--the hypocritic days--and she did not turn up.
+
+
+Marietta, the kind soul, noticing his despondency, sought in divers
+artless ways to cheer him.
+
+One evening she burst into his sitting-room with the effect of a small
+explosion, excitement in every line of her brown old face and wiry
+little figure.
+
+"The fireflies! The fireflies, Signorino!" she cried, with strenuous
+gestures.
+
+"What fireflies?" asked he, with phlegm.
+
+"It is the feast of St. Dominic. The fireflies have arrived. They
+arrive every year on the feast of St. Dominic. They are the beads of his
+rosary. They are St. Dominic's Aves. There are thousands of them. Come,
+Signorino, Come and see."
+
+Her black eyes snapped. She waved her hands urgently towards the window.
+
+Peter languidly got up, languidly crossed the room, looked out.
+
+There were, in truth, thousands of them, thousands and thousands of tiny
+primrose flames, circling, fluttering, rising, sinking, in the purple
+blackness of the night, like snowflakes in a wind, palpitating like
+hearts of living gold--Jove descending upon Danae invisible.
+
+"Son carin', eh?" cried eager Marietta.
+
+"Hum--yes--pretty enough," he grudgingly acknowledged. "But even so?"
+the ingrate added, as he turned away, and let himself drop back into
+his lounging-chair. "My dear good woman, no amount of prettiness
+can disguise the fundamental banality of things. Your fireflies--St.
+Dominic's beads, if you like--and, apropos of that, do you know what
+they call them in America?--they call them lightning-bugs, if you can
+believe me--remark the difference between southern euphuism and western
+bluntness--your fireflies are pretty enough, I grant. But they are
+tinsel pasted on the Desert of Sahara. They are condiments added to a
+dinner of dust and ashes. Life, trick it out as you will, is just an
+incubus--is just the Old Man of the Sea. Language fails me to convey to
+you any notion how heavily he sits on my poor shoulders. I thought I had
+suffered from ennui in my youth. But the malady merely plays with the
+green fruit; it reserves its serious ravages for the ripe. I can promise
+you 't is not a laughing matter. Have you ever had a fixed idea? Have
+you ever spent days and nights racking your brain, importuning the
+unanswering Powers, to learn whether there was--well, whether there was
+Another Man, for instance? Oh, bring me drink. Bring me Seltzer water
+and Vermouth. I will seek nepenthe at the bottom of the wine-cup."
+
+Was there another man? Why should there not be? And yet was there? In
+her continued absence, the question came back persistently, and scarcely
+contributed to his peace of mind.
+
+
+A few days later, nothing discouraged, "Would you like to have a good
+laugh, Signorino?" Marietta enquired.
+
+"Yes," he answered, apathetic.
+
+"Then do me the favour to come," she said.
+
+She led him out of his garden, to the gate of a neighbouring meadow. A
+beautiful black-horned white cow stood there, her head over the
+bars, looking up and down the road, and now and then uttering a low
+distressful "moo."
+
+"See her," said Marietta.
+
+"I see her. Well--?" said Peter.
+
+"This morning they took her calf from her--to wean it," said Marietta.
+
+"Did they, the cruel things? Well--?" said he.
+
+"And ever since, she has stood there by the gate, looking down the road,
+waiting, calling."
+
+"The poor dear. Well--?" said he.
+
+"But do you not see, Signorino? Look at her eyes. She is
+weeping--weeping like a Christian."
+
+Peter looked-and, sure enough, from the poor cow's eyes tears were
+falling, steadily, rapidly: big limpid tears that trickled down her
+cheek, her great homely hairy cheek, and dropped on the grass: tears of
+helpless pain, uncomprehending endurance. "Why have they done this thing
+to me?" they seemed dumbly to cry.
+
+"Have you ever seen a cow weep before? Is it comical, at least?"
+demanded Marietta, exultant.
+
+"Comical--?" Peter gasped. "Comical--!" he groaned....
+
+But then he spoke to the cow.
+
+"Poor dear--poor dear," he repeated. He patted her soft warm neck, and
+scratched her between the horns and along the dewlap.
+
+"Poor dear--poor dear."
+
+The cow lifted up her head, and rested her great chin on Peter's
+shoulder, breathing upon his face.
+
+"Yes, you know that we are companions in misery, don't you?" he said.
+"They have taken my calf from me too--though my calf, indeed, was only a
+calf in an extremely metaphorical sense--and it never was exactly mine,
+anyhow--I daresay it's belonged from the beginning to another man. You,
+at least, have n't that gall and wormwood added to your cup. And now
+you must really try to pull yourself together. It's no good crying. And
+besides, there are more calves in the sea than have ever been taken from
+it. You'll have a much handsomer and fatter one next time. And besides,
+you must remember that your loss subserves someone else's gain--the
+farmer would never have done it if it hadn't been to his advantage.
+If you 're an altruist, that should comfort you. And you must n't mind
+Marietta,--you must n't mind her laughter. Marietta is a Latin. The
+Latin conception of what is laughable differs by the whole span of
+heaven from the Teuton. You and I are Teutons."
+
+"Teutons--?" questioned Marietta wrinkling her brow.
+
+"Yes--Germanic," said he.
+
+"But I thought the Signorino was English?"
+
+"So he is."
+
+"But the cow is not Germanic. White, with black horns, that is the
+purest Roman breed, Signorino."
+
+"Fa niente," he instructed her. "Cows and Englishmen, and all such
+sentimental cattle, including Germans, are Germanic. Italians are
+Latin--with a touch of the Goth and Vandal. Lions and tigers growl and
+fight because they're Mohammedans. Dogs still bear without abuse the
+grand old name of Sycophant. Cats are of the princely line of Persia,
+and worship fire, fish, and flattery--as you may have noticed. Geese
+belong indifferently to any race you like--they are cosmopolitans;
+and I've known here and there a person who, without distinction of
+nationality, was a duck. In fact, you're rather by way of being a duck
+yourself: And now," he perorated, "never deny again that I can talk
+nonsense with an aching heart."
+
+"All the same," insisted Marietta, "it is very comical to see a cow
+weep."
+
+"At any rate," retorted Peter, "it is not in the least comical to hear a
+hyaena laugh."
+
+"I have never heard one," said she.
+
+"Pray that you never may. The sound would make an old woman of you. It's
+quite blood-curdling."
+
+"Davvero?" said Marietta.
+
+"Davvero," he assured her.
+
+And meanwhile the cow stood there, with her head on his shoulder,
+silently weeping, weeping.
+
+He gave her a farewell rub along the nose.
+
+"Good-bye," he said. "Your breath is like meadowsweet. So dry your
+tears, and set your hopes upon the future. I 'll come and see you again
+to-morrow, and I 'll bring you some nice coarse salt. Good-bye."
+
+But when he went to see her on the morrow, she was grazing peacefully;
+and she ate the salt he brought her with heart-whole bovine
+relish--putting out her soft white pad of a tongue, licking it
+deliberately from his hand, savouring it tranquilly, and crunching
+the bigger grains with ruminative enjoyment between her teeth. So soon
+consoled! They were companions in misery no longer. "I 'm afraid you
+are a Latin, after all," he said, and left her with a sense of
+disappointment.
+
+That afternoon Marietta asked, "Would you care to visit the castle,
+Signorino?"
+
+He was seated under his willow-tree, by the river, smoking
+cigarettes--burning superfluous time.
+
+Marietta pointed towards Ventirose.
+
+"Why?" said he.
+
+"The family are away. In the absence of the family, the public are
+admitted, upon presentation of their cards."
+
+"Oho!" he cried. "So the family are away, are they?"
+
+"Yes, Signorino."
+
+"Aha!" cried he. "The family are away. That explains everything.
+Have--have they been gone long?"
+
+"Since a week, ten days, Signorino."
+
+"A week! Ten days!" He started up, indignant. "You secretive wretch! Why
+have you never breathed a word of this to me?"
+
+Marietta looked rather frightened.
+
+"I did not know it myself, Signorino," was her meek apology. "I heard
+it in the village this morning, when the Signorino sent me to buy coarse
+salt."
+
+"Oh, I see." He sank back upon his rustic bench. "You are forgiven." He
+extended his hand in sign of absolution. "Are they ever coming back?"
+
+"Naturally, Signorino."
+
+"What makes you think so?"
+
+"But they will naturally come back."
+
+"I felicitate you upon your simple faith. When?"
+
+"Oh, fra poco. They have gone to Rome."
+
+"To Rome? You're trifling with me. People do not go to Rome in August."
+
+"Pardon, Signorino. People go to Rome for the feast of the Assumption.
+That is the 15th. Afterwards they come back," said Marietta, firmly.
+
+"I withdraw my protest," said Peter. "They have gone to Rome for the
+feast of the Assumption. Afterwards they will come back."
+
+"Precisely, Signorino. But you have now the right to visit the castle,
+upon presentation of your card. You address yourself to the porter at
+the lodge. The castle is grand, magnificent. The Court of Honour alone
+is thirty metres long."
+
+Marietta stretched her hands to right and left as far as they would go.
+
+"Marietta," Peter enquired solemnly, "are you familiar with the tragedy
+of 'Hamlet'?"
+
+Marietta blinked.
+
+"No, Signorino."
+
+"You have never read it," he pursued, "in that famous edition from which
+the character of the Prince of Denmark happened to be omitted?"
+
+Marietta shook her head, wearily, patiently.
+
+Wearily, patiently, "No, Signorino," she replied.
+
+"Neither have I," said he, "and I don't desire to."
+
+Marietta shrugged her shoulders; then returned gallantly to her charge.
+
+"If you would care to visit the castle, Signorino, you could see the
+crypt which contains the tombs of the family of Farfalla, the former
+owners. They are of black marble and alabaster, with gilding--very rich.
+You could also see the wine-cellars. Many years ago a tun there burst,
+and a serving man was drowned in the wine. You could also see the bed
+in which Nabulione, the Emperor of Europe, slept, when he was in this
+country. Also the ancient kitchen. Many years ago, in a storm, the
+skeleton of a man fell down the chimney, out upon the hearth. Also
+what is called the Court of Foxes. Many years ago there was a plague
+of foxes; and the foxes came down from the forest like a great army,
+thousands of them. And the lords of the castle, and the peasants, and
+the village people, all, all, had to run away like rabbits--or the foxes
+would have eaten them. It was in what they call the Court of Foxes that
+the King of the foxes held his court. There is also the park. In the
+park there are statues, ruins, and white peacocks."
+
+"What have I in common with ruins and white peacocks?" Peter demanded
+tragically, when Marietta had brought her much-gesticulated exposition
+to a close. "Let me impress upon you once for all that I am not a
+tripper. As for your castle--you invite me to a banquet-hall deserted.
+As for your park, I see quite as much of it as I wish to see, from the
+seclusion of my own pleached garden. I learned long ago the folly of
+investigating things too closely, the wisdom of leaving things in
+the vague. At present the park of Ventirose provides me with the raw
+material for day-dreams. It is a sort of looking-glass country,--I can
+see just so far into it, and no farther--that lies beyond is mystery,
+is potentiality--terra incognita, which I can populate with monsters or
+pleasant phantoms, at my whim. Why should you attempt to deprive me of
+so innocent a recreation?"
+
+"After the return of the family," said Marietta, "the public will no
+longer be admitted. Meantime--"
+
+"Upon presentation of my card, the porter will conduct me from
+disenchantment to disenchantment. No, thank you. Now, if it were the
+other way round, it would be different. If it were the castle and
+the park that had gone to Rome, and if the family could be visited on
+presentation of my card, I might be tempted."
+
+"But that would be impossible, Signorino," said Marietta.
+
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+
+Beatrice walking with a priest--ay, I am not sure it would n't be
+more accurate to say conspiring with a priest: but you shall judge.
+
+They were in a room of the Palazzo Udeschini, at Rome--a reception
+room, on the piano nobile. Therefore you see it: for are not all
+reception-rooms in Roman palaces alike?
+
+Vast, lofty, sombre; the walls hung with dark-green tapestry--a pattern
+of vertical stripes, dark green and darker green; here and there a
+great dark painting, a Crucifixion, a Holy Family, in a massive dim-gold
+frame; dark-hued rugs on the tiled floor; dark pieces of furniture,
+tables, cabinets, dark and heavy; and tall windows, bare of curtains
+at this season, opening upon a court--a wide stone-eaved court, planted
+with fantastic-leaved eucalyptus-trees, in the midst of which a brown
+old fountain, indefatigable, played its sibilant monotone.
+
+In the streets there were the smells, the noises, the heat, the glare
+of August of August in Rome, "the most Roman of the months," they say;
+certainly the hottest, noisiest, noisomest, and most glaring. But here
+all was shadow, coolness, stillness, fragrance-the fragrance of the
+clean air coming in from among the eucalyptus-trees.
+
+Beatrice, critical-eyed, stood before a pier-glass, between two of the
+tall windows, turning her head from side to side, craning her neck a
+little--examining (if I must confess it) the effect of a new hat. It
+was a very stunning hat--if a man's opinion hath any pertinence; it was
+beyond doubt very complicated. There was an upward-springing black brim;
+there was a downward-sweeping black feather; there was a defiant white
+aigrette not unlike the Shah of Persia's; there were glints of red.
+
+The priest sat in an arm-chair--one of those stiff, upright Roman
+arm-chairs, which no one would ever dream of calling easy-chairs,
+high-backed, covered with hard leather, studded with steel nails--and
+watched her, smiling amusement, indulgence.
+
+He was an oldish priest--sixty, sixty-five. He was small, lightly built,
+lean-faced, with delicate-strong features: a prominent, delicate nose; a
+well-marked, delicate jaw-bone, ending in a prominent, delicate chin;
+a large, humorous mouth, the full lips delicately chiselled; a high,
+delicate, perhaps rather narrow brow, rising above humorous grey eyes,
+rather deep-set. Then he had silky-soft smooth white hair, and, topping
+the occiput, a tonsure that might have passed for a natural bald spot.
+
+He was decidedly clever-looking; he was aristocratic-looking,
+distinguished-looking; but he was, above all, pleasant-looking,
+kindly-looking, sweet-looking.
+
+He wore a plain black cassock, by no means in its first youth--brown
+along the seams, and, at the salient angles, at the shoulders, at
+the elbows, shining with the lustre of hard service. Even without his
+cassock, I imagine, you would have divined him for a clergyman--he
+bore the clerical impress, that odd indefinable air of clericism which
+everyone recognises, though it might not be altogether easy to tell
+just where or from what it takes its origin. In the garb of an
+Anglican--there being nothing, at first blush, necessarily Italian,
+necessarily un-English, in his face--he would have struck you, I think,
+as a pleasant, shrewd old parson of the scholarly--earnest type, mildly
+donnish, with a fondness for gentle mirth. What, however, you would
+scarcely have divined--unless you had chanced to notice, inconspicuous
+in this sober light, the red sash round his waist, or the amethyst on
+the third finger of his right hand--was his rank in the Roman hierarchy.
+I have the honour of presenting his Eminence Egidio Maria Cardinal
+Udeschini, formerly Bishop of Cittareggio, Prefect of the Congregation
+of Archives and Inscriptions.
+
+That was his title ecclesiastical. He had two other titles. He was a
+Prince of the Udeschini by accident of birth. But his third title was
+perhaps his most curious. It had been conferred upon him informally by
+the populace of the Roman slum in which his titular church, St. Mary of
+the Lilies, was situated: the little Uncle of the Poor.
+
+As Italians measure wealth, Cardinal Udeschini was a wealthy man. What
+with his private fortune and official stipends, he commanded an income
+of something like a hundred thousand lire. He allowed himself five
+thousand lire a year for food, clothing, and general expenses. Lodging
+and service he had for nothing in the palace of his family. The
+remaining ninety-odd thousand lire of his budget... Well, we all know
+that titles can be purchased in Italy; and that was no doubt the price
+he paid for the title I have mentioned.
+
+However, it was not in money only that Cardinal Udeschim paid. He paid
+also in labour. I have said that his titular church was in a slum. Rome
+surely contained no slum more fetid, none more perilous--a region of
+cut-throat alleys, south of the Ghetto, along the Tiber bank. Night
+after night, accompanied by his stout young vicar, Don Giorgio
+Appolloni, the Cardinal worked there as hard as any hard-working curate:
+visiting the sick, comforting the afflicted, admonishing the knavish,
+persuading the drunken from their taverns, making peace between the
+combative. Not infrequently, when he came home, he would add a pair
+of stilettos to his already large collection of such relics. And his
+homecomings were apt to be late--oftener than not, after midnight; and
+sometimes, indeed, in the vague twilight of morning, at the hour when,
+as he once expressed it to Don Giorgio, "the tired burglar is just
+lying down to rest." And every Saturday evening the Cardinal Prefect
+of Archives and Inscriptions sat for three hours boxed up in his
+confessional, like any parish priest--in his confessional at St. Mary
+of the Lilies, where the penitents who breathed their secrets into his
+ears, and received his fatherly counsels... I beg your pardon. One must
+not, of course, remember his rags or his sores, when Lazarus approaches
+that tribunal.
+
+But I don't pretend that the Cardinal was a saint; I am sure he was not
+a prig. For all his works of supererogation, his life was a life of pomp
+and luxury, compared to the proper saint's life. He wore no hair shirt;
+I doubt if he knew the taste of the Discipline. He had his weaknesses,
+his foibles--even, if you will, his vices. I have intimated that he was
+fond of a jest. "The Sacred College," I heard him remark one day, "has
+fifty centres of gravity. I sometimes fear that I am its centre of
+levity." He was also fond of music. He was also fond of snuff:
+
+"'T is an abominable habit," he admitted. "I can't tolerate it at
+all--in others. When I was Bishop of Cittareggio, I discountenanced
+it utterly among my clergy. But for myself--I need not say there are
+special circumstances. Oddly enough, by the bye, at Cittareggio each
+separate member of my clergy was able to plead special circumstances
+for himself I have tried to give it up, and the effort has spoiled
+my temper--turned me into a perfect old shrew. For my friends' sake,
+therefore, I appease myself with an occasional pinch. You see, tobacco
+is antiseptic. It's an excellent preservative of the milk of human
+kindness."
+
+The friends in question kept him supplied with sound rappee. Jests and
+music he was abundantly competent to supply himself. He played the piano
+and the organ, and he sang--in a clear, sweet, slightly faded tenor. Of
+secular composers his favourites were "the lucid Scarlatti, the luminous
+Bach." But the music that roused him to enthusiasm was Gregorian. He
+would have none other at St. Mary of the Lilies. He had trained his
+priests and his people there to sing it admirably--you should have heard
+them sing Vespers; and he sang it admirably himself--you should have
+heard him sing a Mass--you should have heard that sweet old tenor voice
+of his in the Preface and the Pater Noster.
+
+
+So, then, Beatrice stood before a pier-glass, and studied her new hat;
+whilst the Cardinal, amused, indulgent, sat in his high-backed armchair,
+and watched her.
+
+"Well--? What do you think?" she asked, turning towards him.
+
+"You appeal to me as an expert?" he questioned.
+
+His speaking-voice, as well as his singing-voice, was sweet, but with
+a kind of trenchant edge upon it, a genial asperity, that gave it
+character, tang.
+
+"As one who should certainly be able to advise," said she.
+
+"Well, then--" said he. He took his chin into his hand, as if it were
+a beard, and looked up at her, considering; and the lines of
+amusement--the "parentheses"--deepened at either side of his mouth.
+"Well, then, I think if the feather were to be lifted a little higher in
+front, and brought down a little lower behind--"
+
+"Good gracious, I don't mean my hat," cried Beatrice. "What in the world
+can an old dear like you know about hats?"
+
+There was a further deepening of the parentheses.
+
+"Surely," he contended, "a cardinal should know much. Is it not 'the
+badge of all our tribe,' as your poet Byron says?"
+
+Beatrice laughed. Then, "Byron--?" she doubted, with a look.
+
+The Cardinal waved his hand--a gesture of amiable concession.
+
+"Oh, if you prefer, Shakespeare. Everything in English is one or the
+other. We will not fall out, like the Morellists, over an attribution.
+The point is that I should be a good judge of hats."
+
+He took snuff.
+
+"It's a shame you haven't a decent snuff-box," Beatrice observed, with
+an eye on the enamelled wooden one, cheap and shabby, from which he
+helped himself.
+
+"The box is but the guinea-stamp; the snuff's the thing.--Was it
+Shakespeare or Byron who said that?" enquired the Cardinal.
+
+Beatrice laughed again.
+
+"I think it must have been Pulcinella. I'll give you a lovely silver
+one, if you'll accept it."
+
+"Will you? Really?" asked the Cardinal, alert.
+
+"Of course I will. It's a shame you haven't one already."
+
+"What would a lovely silver one cost?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know. It does n't matter," answered she.
+
+"But approximately? More or less?" he pursued.
+
+"Oh, a couple of hundred lire, more or less, I daresay."
+
+"A couple of hundred lire?" He glanced up, alerter. "Do you happen to
+have that amount of money on your person?"
+
+Beatrice (the unwary woman) hunted for her pocket--took out her
+purse--computed its contents.
+
+"Yes," she innocently answered.
+
+The Cardinal chuckled--the satisfied chuckle of one whose unsuspected
+tactics have succeeded.
+
+"Then give me the couple of hundred lire."
+
+He put forth his hand.
+
+But Beatrice held back.
+
+"What for?" she asked, suspicion waking.
+
+"Oh, I shall have uses for it."
+
+His outstretched hand--a slim old tapering, bony hand, in colour like
+dusky ivory--closed peremptorily, in a dumb-show of receiving; and now,
+by the bye, you could not have failed to notice the big lucent amethyst,
+in its setting of elaborately-wrought pale gold, on the third finger.
+
+"Come! Give!" he insisted, imperative.
+
+Rueful but resigned, Beatrice shook her head.
+
+"You have caught me finely," she sighed, and gave.
+
+"You should n't have jingled your purse--you should n't have flaunted
+your wealth in my face," laughed the Cardinal, putting away the
+notes. He took snuff again. "I think I honestly earned that pinch," he
+murmured.
+
+"At any rate," said Beatrice, laying what unction she could to her soul,
+"I am acquainted with a dignitary of the Church, who has lost a handsome
+silver snuffbox--beautiful repousse work, with his arms engraved on the
+lid."
+
+"And I," retaliated he, "I am acquainted with a broken-down old doctor
+and his wife, in Trastevere, who shall have meat and wine at dinner for
+the next two months--at the expense of a niece of mine. 'I am so glad,'
+as Alice of Wonderland says, 'that you married into our family.'"
+
+"Alice of Wonderland--?" doubted Beatrice.
+
+The Cardinal waved his hand.
+
+"Oh, if you prefer, Punch. Everything in English is one or the other."
+
+Beatrice laughed. "It was the I of which especially surprised my English
+ear," she explained.
+
+"I am your debtor for two hundred lire. I cannot quarrel with you over a
+particle," said he.
+
+"But why," asked she, "why did you give yourself such superfluous pains?
+Why couldn't you ask me for the money point-blank? Why lure it from me,
+by trick and device?"
+
+The Cardinal chuckled.
+
+"Ah, one must keep one's hand in. And one must not look like a Jesuit
+for nothing."
+
+"Do you look like a Jesuit?"
+
+"I have been told so."
+
+"By whom--for mercy's sake?"
+
+"By a gentleman I had the pleasure of meeting not long ago in the
+train--a very gorgeous gentleman, with gold chains and diamonds flashing
+from every corner of his person, and a splendid waxed moustache, and a
+bald head which, I think, was made of polished pink coral. He turned to
+me in the most affable manner, and said, 'I see, Reverend Sir, that you
+are a Jesuit. There should be a fellow-feeling between you and me. I am
+a Jew. Jews and Jesuits have an almost equally bad name!'"
+
+The Cardinal's humorous grey eyes swam in a glow of delighted merriment.
+
+"I could have hugged him for his 'almost.' I have been wondering ever
+since whether in his mind it was the Jews or the Jesuits who benefited
+by that reservation. I have been wondering also what I ought to have
+replied."
+
+"What did you reply?" asked Beatrice, curious.
+
+"No, no," said the Cardinal. "With sentiments of the highest
+consideration, I must respectfully decline to tell you. It was too flat.
+I am humiliated whenever I recall it."
+
+"You might have replied that the Jews, at least, have the advantage of
+meriting their bad name," she suggested.
+
+"Oh, my dear child!" objected he. "My reply was flat--you would have had
+it sharp. I should have hurt the poor well-meaning man's feelings, and
+perhaps have burdened my own soul with a falsehood, into the bargain.
+Who are we, to judge whether people merit their bad name or not? No, no.
+The humiliating circumstance is, that if I had possessed the substance
+as well as the show, if I had really been a son of St. Ignatius,
+I should have found a retort that would have effected the Jew's
+conversion."
+
+"And apropos of conversions," said Beatrice, "see how far we have
+strayed from our muttons."
+
+"Our muttons--?" The Cardinal looked up, enquiring.
+
+"I want to know what you think--not of my hat--but of my man."
+
+"Oh--ah, yes; your Englishman, your tenant." The Cardinal nodded.
+
+"My Englishman--my tenant--my heretic," said she.
+
+"Well," said he, pondering, while the parentheses became marked
+again,--"I should think, from what you tell me, that you would find him
+a useful neighbour. Let me see... You got fifty lire out of him, for a
+word; and the children went off, blessing you as their benefactress. I
+should think that you would find him a valuable neighbour--and that he,
+on his side, might find you an expensive one."
+
+Beatrice, with a gesture, implored him to be serious.
+
+"Ah, please don't tease about this," she said. "I want to know what you
+think of his conversion?"
+
+"The conversion of a heretic is always 'a consummation devoutly to be
+desired,' as well, you may settle it between Shakespeare and Byron,
+to suit yourself. And there are none so devoutly desirous of such
+consummations as you Catholics of England--especially you women. It is
+said that a Catholic Englishwoman once tried to convert the Pope."
+
+"Well, there have been popes whom it would n't have hurt," commented
+Beatrice. "And as for Mr. Marchdale," she continued, "he has shown
+'dispositions.' He admitted that he could see no reason why it should
+not have been Our Blessed Lady who sent us to the children's aid.
+Surely, from a Protestant, that is an extraordinary admission?"
+
+"Yes," said the Cardinal. "And if he meant it, one may conclude that he
+has a philosophic mind."
+
+"If he meant it?" Beatrice cried. "Why should he not have meant it? Why
+should he have said it if he did not mean it?"
+
+"Oh, don't ask me," protested the Cardinal. "There is a thing the French
+call politesse. I can conceive a young man professing to agree with a
+lady for the sake of what the French might call her beaux yeux."
+
+"I give you my word," said Beatrice, "that my beaux yeux had nothing to
+do with the case. He said it in the most absolute good faith. He said he
+believed that in a universe like ours nothing was impossible--that
+there were more things in heaven and earth than people generally dreamed
+of--that he could see no reason why the Blessed Virgin should not have
+sent us across the children's path. Oh, he meant it. I am perfectly sure
+he meant it."
+
+The Cardinal smiled--at her eagerness, perhaps.
+
+"Well, then," he repeated, "we must conclude that he has a philosophic
+mind."
+
+"But what is one to do?" asked she. "Surely one ought to do something?
+One ought to follow such an admission up? When a man is so far on the
+way to the light, it is surely one's duty to lead him farther?"
+
+"Without doubt," said the Cardinal.
+
+"Well--? What can one do?"
+
+The Cardinal looked grave.
+
+"One can pray," he said.
+
+"Emilia and I pray for his conversion night and morning."
+
+"That is good," he approved.
+
+"But that is surely not enough?"
+
+"One can have Masses said."
+
+"Monsignor Langshawe, at the castle, says a Mass for him twice a week."
+
+"That is good," approved the Cardinal.
+
+"But is that enough?"
+
+"Why doesn't Monsignor Langshawe call upon him--cultivate his
+acquaintance--talk with him--set him thinking?" the Cardinal enquired.
+
+"Oh, Monsignor Langshawe!" Beatrice sighed, with a gesture. "He is
+interested in nothing but geology--he would talk to him of nothing
+but moraines--he would set him thinking of nothing but the march of
+glaciers."
+
+"Hum," said the Cardinal.
+
+"Well, then--?" questioned Beatrice.
+
+"Well, then, Carissima, why do you not take the affair in hand
+yourself?"
+
+"But that is just the difficulty. What can I what can a mere woman--do
+in such a case?"
+
+The Cardinal looked into his amethyst, as a crystal-gazer into his
+crystal; and the lines about his humorous old mouth deepened and
+quivered.
+
+"I will lend you the works of Bellarmine in I forget how many volumes.
+You can prime yourself with them, and then invite your heretic to a
+course of instructions."
+
+"Oh, I wish you would n't turn it to a joke," said Beatrice.
+
+"Bellarmine--a joke!" exclaimed the Cardinal. "It is the first time
+I have ever heard him called so. However, I will not press the
+suggestion."
+
+"But then--? Oh, please advise me seriously. What can I do? What can a
+mere unlearned woman do?"
+
+The Cardinal took snuff. He gazed into his amethyst again, beaming at
+it, as if he could descry something deliciously comical in its depths.
+He gave a soft little laugh. At last he looked up.
+
+"Well," he responded slowly, "in an extremity, I should think that a
+mere unlearned woman might, if she made an effort, ask the heretic to
+dinner. I 'll come down and stay with you for a day or two, and you can
+ask him to dinner."
+
+"You're a perfect old darling," cried Beatrice, with rapture. "He'll
+never be able to resist you."'
+
+"Oh, I 'm not undertaking to discuss theology with him," said the
+Cardinal. "But one must do something in exchange for a couple of hundred
+lire--so I'll come and give you my moral support."
+
+"You shall have your lovely silver snuffbox, all the same," said she.
+
+Mark the predestination!
+
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+                                      "CASTEL VENTIROSE,
+                                          "August 21 st.
+
+"DEAR Mr. Marchdale: It will give me great pleasure if you can dine
+with us on Thursday evening next, at eight o'clock, to meet my uncle,
+Cardinal Udeschini, who is staying here for a few days.
+
+"I have been re-reading 'A Man of Words.' I want you to tell me a great
+deal more about your friend, the author.
+
+                                        Yours sincerely,
+                                     BEATRICE DI SANTANGIOLO."
+
+It is astonishing, what men will prize, what men will treasure. Peter
+Marchdale, for example, prizes, treasures, (and imagines that he will
+always prize and treasure), the perfectly conventional, the perfectly
+commonplace little document, of which the foregoing is a copy.
+
+The original is written in rather a small, concentrated hand, not
+overwhelmingly legible perhaps, but, as we say, "full of character," on
+paper lightly blueish, in the prescribed corner of which a tiny ducal
+coronet is embossed, above the initials "B. S." curiously interlaced in
+a cypher.
+
+When Peter received it, and (need I mention?) approached it to his face,
+he fancied he could detect just a trace, just the faintest reminder, of
+a perfume--something like an afterthought of orris. It was by no means
+anodyne. It was a breath, a whisper, vague, elusive, hinting of things
+exquisite, intimate of things intimately feminine, exquisitely personal.
+I don't know how many times he repeated that manoeuvre of conveying the
+letter to his face; but I do know that when I was privileged to inspect
+it, a few months later, the only perfume it retained was an unmistakable
+perfume of tobacco.
+
+I don't know, either, how many times he read it, searched it, as if
+secrets might lie perdu between the lines, as if his gaze could warm
+into evidence some sympathetic ink, or compel a cryptic sub-intention
+from the text itself.
+
+Well, to be sure, the text had cryptic subintentions; but these were as
+far as may be from any that Peter was in a position to conjecture. How
+could he guess, for instance, that the letter was an instrument, and he
+the victim, of a Popish machination? How could he guess that its writer
+knew as well as he did who was the author of "A Man of Words"?
+
+And then, all at once, a shade of trouble of quite another nature fell
+upon his mind. He frowned for a while in silent perplexity. At last he
+addressed himself to Marietta.
+
+"Have you ever dined with a cardinal?" he asked.
+
+"No, Signorino," that patient sufferer replied.
+
+"Well, I'm in the very dickens of a quandary--son' proprio nel dickens
+d'un imbarazzo." he informed her.
+
+"Dickens--?" she repeated.
+
+"Si--Dickens, Carlo, celebre autore inglese. Why not?" he asked.
+
+Marietta gazed with long-suffering eyes at the horizon.
+
+"Or, to put it differently," Peter resumed, "I've come all the way from
+London with nothing better than a dinner jacket in my kit."
+
+"Dina giacca? Cosa e?" questioned Marietta.
+
+"No matter what it is--the important thing is what it is n't. It is n't
+a dress-coat."
+
+"Non e un abito nero," said Marietta, seeing that he expected her to say
+something.
+
+"Well--? You perceive my difficulty. Do you think you could make me
+one?" said Peter.
+
+"Make the Signorino a dress-coat? I? Oh, no, Signorino." Marietta shook
+her head.
+
+"I feared as much," he acknowledged. "Is there a decent tailor in the
+village?"
+
+"No, Signorino."
+
+"Nor in the whole length and breadth of this peninsula, if you come to
+that. Well, what am I to do? How am I to dine with a cardinal? Do you
+think a cardinal would have a fit if a man were to dine with him in a
+dina giacca?"
+
+"Have a fit? Why should he have a fit, Signorino?" Marietta blinked.
+
+"Would he do anything to the man? Would he launch the awful curses of
+the Church at him, for instance?"
+
+"Mache, Signorino!" She struck an attitude that put to scorn his
+apprehensions.
+
+"I see," said Peter. "You think there is no danger? You advise me to
+brazen the dina giacca out, to swagger it off?"
+
+"I don't understand, Signorino," said Marietta.
+
+"To understand is to forgive," said he; "and yet you can't trifle with
+English servants like this, though they ought to understand, ought n't
+they? In any case, I 'll be guided by your judgment. I'll wear my dina
+giacca, but I'll wear it with an air! I 'll confer upon it the dignity
+of a court-suit. Is that a gardener--that person working over there?"
+
+Marietta looked in the quarter indicated by Peter's nod.
+
+"Yes, Signorino; ha is the same gardener who works here three days every
+week," she answered.
+
+"Is he, really? He looks like a pirate," Peter murmured.
+
+"Like a pirate? Luigi?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes," affirmed her master. "He wears green corduroy trousers, and a
+red belt, and a blue shirt. That is the pirate uniform. He has a swarthy
+skin, and a piercing eye, and hair as black as the Jolly Roger. Those
+are the marks by which you recognise a pirate, even when in mufti. I
+believe you said his name is Luigi?"
+
+"Yes, Signorino--Luigi Maroni. We call him Gigi."
+
+"Is Gigi versatile?" asked Peter.
+
+"Versatile--?" puzzled Marietta. But then, risking her own
+interpretation of the recondite word, "Oh, no, Signorino. He is of the
+country."
+
+"Ah, he's of the country, is he? So much the better. Then he will know
+the way to Castel Ventirose?"
+
+"But naturally, Signorino." Marietta nodded.
+
+"And do you think, for once in a way, though not versatile, he could be
+prevailed upon to divert his faculties from the work of a gardener to
+that of a messenger?"
+
+"A messenger, Signorino?" Marietta wrinkled up her brow.
+
+"Ang--an unofficial postman. Do you think he could be induced to carry a
+letter for me to the castle?"
+
+"But certainly, Signorino. He is here to obey the Signorino's orders."
+Marietta shrugged her shoulders, and waved her hands.
+
+"Then tell him, please, to go and put the necessary touches to his
+toilet," said Peter. "Meanwhile I'll indite the letter."
+
+When his letter was indited, he found the piratical-looking Gigi in
+attendance, and he gave it to him, with instructions.
+
+Thereupon Gigi (with a smile of sympathetic intelligence, inimitably
+Italian) put the letter in his hat, put his hat upon his head, and
+started briskly off--but not in the proper direction: not in the
+direction of the road, which led to the village, and across the bridge,
+and then round upon itself to the gates of the park. He started briskly
+off towards Peter's own toolhouse, a low red-tiled pavilion, opposite
+the door of Marietta's kitchen.
+
+Peter was on the point of calling to him, of remonstrating. Then he
+thought better of it. He would wait a bit, and watch.
+
+He waited and watched; and this was what he saw.
+
+Gigi entered the tool-house, and presently brought out a ladder, which
+he carried down to the riverside, and left there. Then he returned to
+the tool-house, and came back bearing an armful of planks, each perhaps
+a foot wide by five or six feet long. Now he raised his ladder to the
+perpendicular, and let it descend before him, so that, one extremity
+resting upon the nearer bank, one attained the further, and it spanned
+the flood. Finally he laid a plank lengthwise upon the hithermost rungs,
+and advanced to the end of it; then another plank; then a third: and he
+stood in the grounds of Ventirose.
+
+He had improvised a bridge--a bridge that swayed upwards and downwards
+more or less dizzily about the middle, if you will--but an entirely
+practicable bridge, for all that. And he had saved himself at least a
+good three miles, to the castle and back, by the road.
+
+Peter watched, and admired.
+
+"And I asked whether he was versatile!" he muttered. "Trust an Italian
+for economising labour. It looks like unwarrantable invasion of friendly
+territory--but it's a dodge worth remembering, all the same."
+
+He drew the Duchessa's letter from his pocket, and read it again, and
+again approached it to his face, communing with that ghost of a perfume.
+
+"Heavens! how it makes one think of chiffons," he exclaimed.
+"Thursday--Thursday--help me to live till Thursday!"
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+But he had n't to live till Thursday--he was destined to see her not
+later than the next afternoon.
+
+You know with what abruptness, with how brief a warning, storms will
+spring from the blue, in that land of lakes and mountains.
+
+It was three o'clock or thereabouts; and Peter was reading in his
+garden; and the whole world lay basking in unmitigated sunshine.
+
+Then, all at once, somehow, you felt a change in things: the sunshine
+seemed less brilliant, the shadows less solid, less sharply outlined.
+Oh, it was very slight, very uncertain; you had to look twice to assure
+yourself that it was n't a mere fancy. It seemed as if never so thin a
+gauze had been drawn over the face of the sun, just faintly bedimming,
+without obscuring it. You could have ransacked the sky in vain to
+discover the smallest shred of cloud.
+
+At the same time, the air, which had been hot all day--hot, but buoyant,
+but stimulant, but quick with oxygen--seemed to become thick, sluggish,
+suffocating, seemed to yield up its vital principle, and to fall a
+dead weight upon the earth. And this effect was accompanied by a
+sudden silence--the usual busy out-of-door country noises were suddenly
+suspended: the locusts stopped their singing; not a bird twittered;
+not a leaf rustled: the world held its breath. And if the river went
+on babbling, babbling, that was a very part of the silence--accented,
+underscored it.
+
+Yet still you could not discern a rack of cloud anywhere in the
+sky--still, for a minute or two.... Then, before you knew how it had
+happened, the snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito were completely lapped in
+cloud.
+
+And now the cloud spread with astonishing rapidity--spread and sank,
+cancelling the sun, shrouding the Gnisi to its waist, curling in smoky
+wreaths among the battlements of the Cornobastone, turning the lake
+from sapphire to sombre steel, filling the entire valley with a strange
+mixture of darkness and an uncanny pallid light. Overhead it hung like
+a vast canopy of leaden-hued cotton-wool; at the west it had a fringe of
+fiery crimson, beyond which a strip of clear sky on the horizon diffused
+a dull metallic yellow, like tarnished brass.
+
+Presently, in the distance, there was a low growl of thunder; in a
+minute, a louder, angrier growl--as if the first were a menace which had
+not been heeded. Then there was a violent gush of wind--cold; smelling
+of the forests from which it came; scattering everything before it,
+dust, dead leaves, the fallen petals of flowers; making the trees writhe
+and labour, like giants wrestling with invisible giants; making the
+short grass shudder; corrugating the steel surface of the lake. Then two
+or three big raindrops fell--and then, the deluge.
+
+Peter climbed up to his observatory--a square four-windowed turret, at
+the top of the house--thence to watch the storm and exult in it. Really
+it was splendid--to see, to hear; its immense wild force, its immense
+reckless fury. Rain had never rained so hard, he thought. Already,
+the lake, the mountain slopes, the villas and vineyards westward, were
+totally blotted out, hidden behind walls and walls of water; and even
+the neighbouring lawns of Ventirose, the confines of his own garden,
+were barely distinguishable, blurred as by a fog. The big drops pelted
+the river like bullets, sending up splashes bigger than themselves.
+And the tiled roof just above his head resounded with a continual loud
+crepitation, as if a multitude of iron-shod elves were dancing on it.
+The thunder crashed, roared, reverberated, like the toppling of great
+edifices. The lightning tore through the black cloud-canopy in long
+blinding zig-zags. The wind moaned, howled, hooted--and the square
+chamber where Peter stood shook and rattled under its buffetings, and
+was full of the chill and the smell of it. Really the whole thing was
+splendid.
+
+His garden-paths ran with muddy brooklets; the high-road beyond his
+hedge was transformed to a shallow torrent.... And, just at that moment,
+looking off along the highroad, he saw something that brought his heart
+into his throat.
+
+Three figures were hurrying down it, half-drowned in the rain--the
+Duchessa di Santangiolo, Emilia Manfredi, and a priest.
+
+In a twinkling, Peter, bareheaded, was at his gate.
+
+"Come in--come in," he called.
+
+"We are simply drenched--we shall inundate your house," the Duchessa
+said, as he showed them into his sitting-room.
+
+They were indeed dripping with water, soiled to their knees with mud.
+
+"Good heavens!" gasped Peter, stupid. "How were you ever out in such a
+downpour?"
+
+She smiled, rather forlornly.
+
+"No one told us that it was going to rain, and we were off for a good
+long walk--for pleasure."
+
+"You must be wet to the bone--you must be perishing with cold," he
+cried, looking from one to another.
+
+"Yes, I daresay we are perishing with cold," she admitted.
+
+"And I have no means of offering you a fire--there are no fireplaces,"
+he groaned, with a gesture round the bleak Italian room, to certify
+their absence.
+
+"Is n't there a kitchen?" asked the Duchessa, a faint spark of raillery
+kindling amid the forlornness of her smile.
+
+Peter threw up his hands.
+
+"I had lost my head. The kitchen, of course. I 'll tell Marietta to
+light a fire."
+
+He excused himself, and sought out Marietta. He found her in her
+housekeeper's room, on her knees, saying her rosary, in obvious terror.
+I 'm afraid he interrupted her orisons somewhat brusquely.
+
+"Will you be so good as to start a rousing fire in the kitchen--as
+quickly as ever it can be done?"
+
+And he rejoined his guests.
+
+"If you will come this way--" he said.
+
+Marietta had a fire of logs and pine-cones blazing in no time. She
+courtesied low to the Duchessa, lower still to the priest--in fact,
+Peter was n't sure that she did n't genuflect before him, while he made
+a rapid movement with his hand over her head: the Sign of the Cross,
+perhaps.
+
+He was a little, unassuming-looking, white haired priest, with a
+remarkably clever, humorous, kindly face; and he wore a remarkably
+shabby cassock. The Duchessa's chaplain, Peter supposed. How should it
+occur to him that this was Cardinal Udeschini? Do Cardinals (in one's
+antecedent notion of them) wear shabby cassocks, and look humorous and
+unassuming? Do they go tramping about the country in the rain, attended
+by no retinue save a woman and a fourteen-year-old girl? And are they
+little men--in one's antecedent notion? True, his shabby cassock had red
+buttons, and there was a red sash round his waist, and a big amethyst
+glittered in a setting of pale gold on his annular finger. But Peter was
+not sufficiently versed in fashions canonical, to recognise the meaning
+of these insignia.
+
+How, on the other hand, should it occur to the Duchessa that Peter
+needed enlightenment? At all events, she said to him, "Let me introduce
+you;" and then, to the priest, "Let me present Mr. Marchdale--of whom
+you have heard before now."
+
+The white-haired old man smiled sweetly into Peter's eyes, and gave him
+a slender, sensitive old hand.
+
+"E cattivo vento che non e buono per qualcuno--debbo a questa burrasca
+la pregustazione d' un piacere," he said, with a mingling of ceremonious
+politeness and sunny geniality that was of his age and race.
+
+Peter--instinctively--he could not have told why--put a good deal more
+deference into his bow, than men of his age and race commonly put into
+their bows, and murmured something about "grand' onore."
+
+Marietta placed a row of chairs before the raised stone hearth, and
+afterwards, at her master's request, busied herself preparing tea.
+
+"But I think you would all be wise to take a little brandy first," Peter
+suggested. "It is my despair that I am not able to provide you with a
+change of raiment. Brandy will be the best substitute, perhaps."
+
+The old priest laughed, and put his hand upon the shoulder of Emilia.
+
+"You have spared this young lady an embarrassing avowal. Brandy is
+exactly what she was screwing her courage to the point of asking for."
+
+"Oh, no!" protested Emilia, in a deep Italian voice, with passionate
+seriousness.
+
+But Peter fetched a decanter, and poured brandy for everyone.
+
+"I drink to your health--c'est bien le cas de le dire. I hope you will
+not have caught your deaths of cold," he said.
+
+"Oh, we are quite warm now," said the Duchessa. "We are snug in an ingle
+on Mount Ararat."
+
+"Our wetting will have done us good--it will make us grow. You and I
+will never regret that, will we, Emilietta?" said the priest.
+
+A lively colour had come into the Duchessa's cheeks; her eyes seemed
+unusually bright. Her hair was in some disorder, drooping at the sides,
+and blown over her brow in fine free wavelets. It was dark in the
+kitchen, save for the firelight, which danced fantastically on the walls
+and ceiling, and struck a ruddy glow from Marietta's copper pots and
+pans. The rain pattered lustily without; the wind wailed in the chimney;
+the lightning flashed, the thunder volleyed. And Peter looked at the
+Duchessa--and blessed the elements. To see her seated there, in her wet
+gown, seated familiarly, at her ease, before his fire, in his kitchen,
+with that colour in her cheeks, that brightness in her eyes, and her
+hair in that disarray--it was unspeakable; his heart closed in a kind
+of delicious spasm. And the fragrance, subtle, secret, evasive, that
+hovered in the air near her, did not diminish his emotion.
+
+"I wonder," she asked, with a comical little glance upwards at
+him, "whether you would resent it very much if I should take off my
+hat--because it's a perfect reservoir, and the water will keep trickling
+down my neck."
+
+His joy needed but this culmination that she should take off her hat!
+
+"Oh, I beg of you--" he returned fervently.
+
+"You had better take yours off too, Emilia," said the Duchessa.
+
+"Admire masculine foresight," said the priest. "I took mine off when I
+came in."
+
+"Let me hang them up," said Peter.
+
+It was wonderful to hold her hat in his hand--it was like holding a part
+of herself. He brushed it surreptitiously against his face, as he
+hung it up. Its fragrance--which met him like an answering caress,
+almost--did not lessen his emotion.
+
+Then Marietta brought the tea, with bread-and-butter, and toast, and
+cakes, and pretty blue china cups and saucers, and silver that glittered
+in the firelight.
+
+"Will you do me the honour of pouring the tea?" Peter asked the
+Duchessa.
+
+So she poured the tea, and Peter passed it. As he stood close to her,
+to take it--oh, but his heart beat, believe me! And once, when she was
+giving him a cup, the warm tips of her fingers lightly touched his hand.
+Believe me, the touch had its effect. And always there was that heady
+fragrance in the air, like a mysterious little voice, singing secrets.
+
+"I wonder," the old priest said, "why tea is not more generally drunk by
+us Italians. I never taste it without resolving to acquire the habit. I
+remember, when I was a child, our mothers used to keep it as a medicine;
+and you could only buy it at the chemists' shops."
+
+"It's coming in, you know, at Rome--among the Whites," said the
+Duchessa.
+
+"Among the Whites!" cried he, with a jocular simulation of disquiet.
+"You should not have told me that, till I had finished my cup. Now I
+shall feel that I am sharing a dissipation with our spoliators."
+
+"That should give an edge to its aroma," laughed she. "And besides, the
+Whites aren't all responsible for our spoliation--some of them are not
+so white as your fancy paints them. They'd be very decent people, for
+the most part--if they were n't so vulgar."
+
+"If you stick up for the Whites like that when I am Pope, I shall
+excommunicate you," the priest threatened. "Meanwhile, what have you to
+say against the Blacks?"
+
+"The Blacks, with few exceptions, are even blacker than they're painted;
+but they too would be fairly decent people in their way--if they were
+n't so respectable. That is what makes Rome impossible as a residence
+for any one who cares for human society. White society is so
+vulgar--Black society is so deadly dull."
+
+"It is rather curious," said the priest, "that the chief of each party
+should wear the colour of his adversary. Our chief dresses in white, and
+their chief can be seen any day driving about the streets in black."
+
+And Peter, during this interchange of small-talk, was at liberty to
+feast his eyes upon her.
+
+"Perhaps you have not yet reached the time of life where men begin to
+find a virtue in snuff?" the priest said, producing a smart silver snuff
+box, tapping the lid, and proffering it to Peter.
+
+"On the contrary--thank you," Peter answered, and absorbed his pinch
+like an adept.
+
+"How on earth have you learned to take it without a paroxysm?" cried the
+surprised Duchessa.
+
+"Oh, a thousand years ago I was in the Diplomatic Service," he
+explained. "It is one of the requirements."
+
+Emilia Manfredi lifted her big brown eyes, filled with girlish wonder,
+to his face, and exclaimed, "How extraordinary!"
+
+"It is n't half so extraordinary as it would be if it were true, my
+dear," said the Duchessa.
+
+"Oh? Non e poi vero?" murmured Emilia, and her eyes darkened with
+disappointment.
+
+Peter meanwhile was looking at the snuffbox, which the priest still held
+in his hand, and admiring its brave repousse work of leaves and flowers,
+and the escutcheon engraved on the lid. But what if he could have
+guessed the part he had passively played in obtaining it for its
+possessor--or the part that it was still to play in his own epopee? Mark
+again the predestination!
+
+"The storm is passing," said the priest.
+
+"Worse luck!" thought Peter.
+
+For indeed the rain and the wind were moderating, the thunder had rolled
+farther away, the sky was becoming lighter.
+
+"But there's a mighty problem before us still," said the Duchessa. "How
+are we to get to Ventirose? The roads will, be ankle-deep with mud."
+
+"If you wish to do me a very great kindness--" Peter began.
+
+"Yes--?" she encouraged him.
+
+"You will allow me to go before you, and tell them to come for you with
+a carriage."
+
+"I shall certainly allow you to do nothing of the sort," she replied
+severely. "I suppose there is no one whom you could send?"
+
+"I should hardly like to send Marietta. I 'm afraid there is no one
+else. But upon my word, I should enjoy going myself."
+
+She shook her head, smiling at him with mock compassion.
+
+"Would you? Poor man, poor man! That is an enjoyment which you will have
+to renounce. One must n't expect too much in this sad life."
+
+"Well, then," said Peter, "I have an expedient. If you can walk a
+somewhat narrow plank--?"
+
+"Yes--?" questioned she.
+
+"I think I can improvise a bridge across the river."
+
+"I believe the rain has stopped," said the priest, looking towards the
+window.
+
+Peter, manning his soul for the inevitable, got up, went to the door,
+opened it, stuck out his head.
+
+"Yes," he acknowledged, while his heart sank within him, "the rain has
+stopped."
+
+And now the storm departed almost as rapidly as it had arrived. In
+the north the sky was already clear, blue and hard-looking--a wall of
+lapis-lazuli. The dark cloud-canopy was drifting to the south. Suddenly
+the sun came out, flashing first from the snows of Monte Sfiorito, then,
+in an instant, flooding the entire prospect with a marvellous yellow
+light, ethereal amber; whilst long streamers of tinted vapour--columns
+of pearl-dust, one might have fancied--rose to meet it; and all wet
+surfaces, leaves, lawns, tree-trunks, housetops, the bare crags of the
+Gnisi, gleamed in a wash of gold.
+
+Puffs of fresh air blew into the kitchen, filling it with the keen sweet
+odour of wet earth. The priest and the Duchessa and Emilia joined Peter
+at the open door.
+
+"Oh, your poor, poor garden!" the Duchessa cried.
+
+His garden had suffered a good deal, to be sure. The flowers lay supine,
+their faces beaten into the mud; the greensward was littered with fallen
+leaves and twigs--and even in one or two places whole branches had been
+broken from the trees; on the ground about each rose-bush a snow of pink
+rose-petals lay scattered; in the paths there were hundreds of little
+pools, shining in the sun like pools of fire.
+
+"There's nothing a gardener can't set right," said Peter, feeling no
+doubt that here was a trifling tax upon the delights the storm had
+procured him.
+
+"And oh, our poor, poor hats!" said the Duchessa, eyeing ruefully those
+damaged pieces of finery. "I fear no gardener can ever set them right."
+
+"It sounds inhospitable," said Peter, "but I suppose I had better go and
+build your bridge."
+
+So he threw a ladder athwart the river, and laid the planks in place, as
+he had seen Gigi do the day before.
+
+"How ingenious--and, like all great things, how simple," laughed the
+Duchessa.
+
+Peter waved his hand, as who should modestly deprecate applause. But, I
+'m ashamed to own, he didn't disclaim the credit of the invention.
+
+"It will require some nerve," she reflected, looking at the narrow
+planks, the foaming green water. "However--"
+
+And gathering in her skirts, she set bravely forward, and made the
+transit without mishap. The priest and Emilia, gathering in their
+skirts, made it after her.
+
+She paused on the other side, and looked back, smiling.
+
+"Since you have discovered so efficacious a means of cutting short the
+distance between our places of abode," she said, "I hope you will not
+fail to profit by it whenever you may have occasion--on Thursday, for
+example."
+
+"Thank you very much," said Peter.
+
+"Of course," she went on, "we may all die of our wetting yet. It would
+perhaps show a neighbourly interest if you were to come up to-morrow,
+and take our news. Come at four o'clock; and if we're alive... you shall
+have another pinch of snuff," she promised, laughing.
+
+"I adore you," said Peter, under his breath. "I'll come with great
+pleasure," he said aloud.
+
+
+"Marietta," he observed, that evening, as he dined, "I would have you
+to know that the Aco is bridged. Hence, there is one symbol the fewer
+in Lombardy. But why does--you mustn't mind the Ollendorfian form of my
+enquiry--why does the chaplain of the Duchessa wear red stockings?"
+
+"The chaplain of the Duchessa--?" repeated Marietta, wrinkling up her
+brow.
+
+"Ang--of the Duchessa di Santangiolo. He wore red stockings, and shoes
+with silver buckles. Do you think that's precisely decorous--don't you
+think it 's the least bit light-minded--in an ecclesiastic?"
+
+"He--? Who--?" questioned Marietta.
+
+"But the chaplain of the Duchessa--when he was here this afternoon."
+
+"The chaplain of the Duchessa!" exclaimed Marietta. "Here this
+afternoon? The chaplain of the Duchessa was not here this afternoon. His
+Eminence the Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here this afternoon."
+
+"What!" gasped Peter.
+
+"Ang," said Marietta.
+
+"That was Cardinal Udeschini--that little harmless-looking, sweet-faced
+old man!" Peter wondered.
+
+"Sicuro--the uncle of the Duca," said she.
+
+"Good heavens!" sighed he. "And I allowed myself to hobnob with him like
+a boon-companion."
+
+"Gia," said she.
+
+"You need n't rub it in," said he. "For the matter of that, you yourself
+entertained him in your kitchen."
+
+"Scusi?" said she.
+
+"Ah, well--it was probably for the best," he concluded. "I daresay I
+should n't have behaved much better if I had known."
+
+"It was his coming which saved this house from being struck by
+lightning," announced Marietta.
+
+"Oh--? Was it?" exclaimed Peter.
+
+"Yes, Signorino. The lightning would never strike a house that the Lord
+Prince Cardinal was in."
+
+"I see--it would n't venture--it would n't presume. Did--did it strike
+all the houses that the Lord Prince Cardinal was n't in?"
+
+"I do not think so, Signorino. Ma non fa niente. It was a terrible
+storm--terrible, terrible. The lightning was going to strike this house,
+when the Lord Prince Cardinal arrived."
+
+"Hum," said Peter. "Then you, as well as I, have reason for regarding
+his arrival as providential."
+
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+"I think something must have happened to my watch," Peter said, next
+day.
+
+Indeed, its hands moved with extraordinary, with exasperating slowness.
+
+"It seems absurd that it should do no good to push them on," he thought.
+
+He would force himself, between twice ascertaining their position, to
+wait for a period that felt like an eternity, walking about miserably,
+and smoking flavourless cigarettes;--then he would stand amazed,
+incredulous, when, with a smirk (as it almost struck him) of ironical
+complacence, they would attest that his eternity had lasted something
+near a quarter of an hour.
+
+"And I had professed myself a Kantian, and made light of the objective
+reality of Time! thou laggard, Time!" he cried, and shook his fist at
+Space, Time's unoffending consort.
+
+"I believe it will never be four o'clock again," he said, in despair,
+finally; and once more had out his watch. It was half-past three. He
+scowled at the instrument's bland white face. "You have no bowels, no
+sensibilities--nothing but dry little methodical jog-trot wheels and
+pivots!" he exclaimed, flying to insult for relief. "You're as inhuman
+as a French functionary. Do you call yourself a sympathetic comrade
+for an impatient man?" He laid it open on his rustic table, and waited
+through a last eternity. At a quarter to four he crossed the river. "If
+I am early--tant pis!" he decided, choosing the lesser of two evils, and
+challenging Fate.
+
+He crossed the river, and stood for the first time in the grounds of
+Ventirose--stood where she had been in the habit of standing, during
+their water-side colloquies. He glanced back at his house and garden,
+envisaging them for the first time, as it were, from her point of
+view. They had a queer air of belonging to an era that had passed, to
+a yesterday already remote. They looked, somehow, curiously small,
+moreover--the garden circumscribed, the two-storied house, with its
+striped sunblinds, poor and petty. He turned his back upon them--left
+them behind. He would have to come home to them later in the day, to be
+sure; but then everything would be different. A chapter would have added
+itself to the history of the world; a great event, a great step forward,
+would have definitely taken place. He would have been received
+at Ventirose as a friend. He would be no longer a mere nodding
+acquaintance, owing even that meagre relationship to the haphazard
+of propinquity. The ice-broken, if you will, but still present in
+abundance--would have been gently thawed away. One era had passed; but
+then a new era would have begun.
+
+So he turned his back upon Villa F'loriano, and set off, high-hearted,
+up the wide lawns, under the bending trees--whither, on four red-marked
+occasions, he had watched her disappear--towards the castle, which
+faced him in its vast irregular picturesqueness. There were the oldest
+portions, grimly mediaeval, a lakeside fortress, with ponderous round
+towers, meurtrieres, machiolations, its grey stone walls discoloured
+in fantastic streaks and patches by weather-stains and lichens, or
+else shaggily overgrown by creepers. Then there were later portions,
+rectangular, pink-stuccoed, with rusticated work at the corners, and,
+on the blank spaces between the windows, quaint allegorical frescoes,
+faded, half washed-out. And then there were entirely modern-looking
+portions, of gleaming marble, with numberless fanciful carvings, spires,
+pinnacles, reliefs--wonderfully light, gay, habitable, and (Peter
+thought) beautiful, in the clear Italian atmosphere, against the blue
+Italian sky.
+
+"It's a perfect house for her," he said. "It suits her--like an
+appropriate garment; it almost seems to express her."
+
+And all the while, as he proceeded, her voice kept sounding in his ears;
+scraps of her conversation, phrases that she had spoken, kept coming
+back to him.
+
+
+One end of the long, wide marble terrace had been arranged as a sort
+of out-of-door living-room. A white awning was stretched overhead;
+warm-hued rugs were laid on the pavement; there were wicker
+lounging-chairs, with bright cushions, and a little table, holding books
+and things.
+
+The Duchessa rose from one of the lounging-chairs, and came forward,
+smiling, to meet him.
+
+She gave him her hand--for the first time.
+
+It was warm--electrically warm; and it was soft--womanly soft; and it
+was firm, alive--it spoke of a vitality, a temperament. Peter was sure,
+besides, that it would be sweet to smell; and he longed to bend over it,
+and press it with his lips. He might almost have done so, according to
+Italian etiquette. But, of course, he simply bowed over it, and let it
+go.
+
+"Mi trova abbandonata," she said, leading the way back to the
+terrace-end. There were notes of a peculiar richness in her voice, when
+she spoke Italian; and she dwelt languorously on the vowels, and rather
+slurred the consonants, lazily, in the manner Italian women have,
+whereby they give the quality of velvet to their tongue. She was not an
+Italian woman; Heaven be praised, she was English: so this was just pure
+gain to the sum-total of her graces. "My uncle and my niece have gone to
+the village. But I 'm expecting them to come home at any moment now--and
+you'll not have long, I hope, to wait for your snuff."
+
+She flashed a whimsical little smile into his eyes. Then she returned
+to her wicker chair, glancing an invitation at Peter to place himself
+in the one facing her. She leaned back, resting her head on a pink silk
+cushion.
+
+Peter, no doubt, sent up a silent prayer that her uncle and her niece
+might be detained at the village for the rest of the afternoon. By her
+niece he took her to mean Emilia: he liked her for the kindly euphemism.
+"What hair she has!" he thought, admiring the loose brown masses, warm
+upon their background of pink silk.
+
+"Oh, I'm inured to waiting," he replied, with a retrospective mind for
+the interminable waits of that interminable day.
+
+The Duchessa had taken a fan from the table, and was playing with it,
+opening and shutting it slowly, in her lap. Now she caught Peter's eyes
+examining it, and she gave it to him. (My own suspicion is that Peter's
+eyes had been occupied rather with the hands that held the fan, than
+with the fan itself--but that's a detail.)
+
+"I picked it up the other day, in Rome," she said. "Of course, it's
+an imitation of the French fans of the last century, but I thought it
+pretty."
+
+It was of white silk, that had been thinly stained a soft yellow, like
+the yellow of faded yellow rose-leaves. It was painted with innumerable
+plump little cupids, flying among pale clouds. The sticks were of
+mother-of=pearl. The end-sticks were elaborately incised, and in the
+incisions opals were set, big ones and small ones, smouldering with
+green and scarlet fires.
+
+"Very pretty indeed," said Peter, "and very curious. It's like a great
+butterfly's wing is n't it? But are n't you afraid of opals?"
+
+"Afraid of opals?" she wondered. "Why should one be?"
+
+"Unless your birthday happens to fall in October, they're reputed to
+bring bad luck," he reminded her.
+
+"My birthday happens to fall in June but I 'll never believe that such
+pretty things as opals can bring bad luck," she laughed, taking the fan,
+which he returned to her, and stroking one of the bigger opals with her
+finger tip.
+
+"Have you no superstitions?" he asked.
+
+"I hope not--I don't think I have," she answered. "We're not allowed to
+have superstitions, you know--nous autres Catholiques."
+
+"Oh?" he said, with surprise. "No, I did n't know."
+
+"Yes, they're a forbidden luxury. But you--? Are you superstitious?
+Would you be afraid of opals?"
+
+"I doubt if I should have the courage to wear one. At all events, I
+don't regard superstitions in the light of a luxury. I should be glad
+to be rid of those I have. They're a horrible inconvenience. But I can't
+get it out of my head that the air is filled with a swarm of malignant
+little devils, who are always watching their chance to do us an ill
+turn. We don't in the least know the conditions under which they can
+bring it off; but it's legendary that if we wear opals, or sit thirteen
+at table, or start an enterprise on Friday, or what not, we somehow
+give them their opportunity. And one naturally wishes to be on the safe
+side."
+
+She looked at him with doubt, considering.
+
+"You don't seriously believe all that?" she said.
+
+"No, I don't seriously believe it. But one breathes it in with the air
+of one's nursery, and it sticks. I don't believe it, but I fear it just
+enough to be made uneasy. The evil eye, for instance. How can one spend
+any time in Italy, where everybody goes loaded with charms against it,
+and help having a sort of sneaking half-belief in the evil eye?"
+
+She shook her head, laughing.
+
+"I 've spent a good deal of time in Italy, but I have n't so much as a
+sneaking quarter-belief in it."
+
+"I envy you your strength of mind," said he. "But surely, though
+superstition is a luxury forbidden to Catholics, there are plenty of
+good Catholics who indulge in it, all the same?"
+
+"There are never plenty of good Catholics," said sire. "You employ a
+much-abused expression. To profess the Catholic faith, to go to Mass on
+Sunday and abstain from meat on Friday, that is by no means sufficient
+to constitute a good Catholic. To be a good Catholic one would have to
+be a saint, nothing less--and not a mere formal saint, either, but a
+very real saint, a saint in thought and feeling, as well as in speech
+and action. Just in so far as one is superstitious, one is a bad
+Catholic. Oh, if the world were populated by good Catholics, it would be
+the Millennium come to pass."
+
+"It would be that, if it were populated by good Christians--wouldn't
+it?" asked Peter.
+
+"The terms are interchangeable," she answered sweetly, with a
+half-comical look of defiance.
+
+"Mercy!" cried he. "Can't a Protestant be a good Christian too?"
+
+"Yes," she said, "because a Protestant can be a Catholic without knowing
+it."
+
+"Oh--?" he puzzled, frowning.
+
+"It's quite simple," she explained. "You can't be a Christian unless
+you're a Catholic. But if you believe as much of Christian truth as
+you've ever had a fair opportunity of learning, and if you try to live
+in accordance with Christian morals, you are a Catholic, you're a
+member of the Catholic Church, whether you know it or not. You can't be
+deprived of your birthright, you see."
+
+"That seems rather broad," said Peter; "and one had always heard that
+Catholicism was nothing if not narrow."
+
+"How could it be Catholic if it were narrow?" asked she. "However, if
+a Protestant uses his intelligence, and is logical, he'll not remain
+an unconscious Catholic long. If he studies the matter, and is logical,
+he'll wish to unite himself to the Church in her visible body. Look at
+England. See how logic is multiplying converts year by year."
+
+"But it's the glory of Englishmen to be illogical," said Peter, with
+a laugh. "Our capacity for not following premisses to their logical
+consequences is the principal source of our national greatness. So the
+bulk of the English are likely to resist conversion for centuries
+to come--are they not? And then, nowadays, one is so apt to be an
+indifferentist in matters of religion--and Catholicism is so exacting.
+One remains a Protestant from the love of ease."
+
+"And from the desire, on the part of a good many Englishmen at least, to
+sail in a boat of their own--not to get mixed up with a lot of foreign
+publicans and sinners--no?" she suggested.
+
+"Oh, of course, we're insular and we're Pharisaical," admitted Peter.
+
+"And as for one's indifference," she smiled, "that is most probably due
+to one's youth and inexperience. One can't come to close quarters with
+the realities of life--with sorrow, with great joy, with temptation,
+with sin or with heroic virtue, with death, with the birth of a new
+soul, with any of the awful, wonderful realities of life--and continue
+to be an indifferentist in matters of religion, do you think?"
+
+"When one comes to close quarters with the awful, wonderful realities
+of life, one has religious moments," he acknowledged. "But they're
+generally rather fugitive, are n't they?"
+
+"One can cultivate them--one can encourage them," she said. "If you
+would care to know a good Catholic," she added, "my niece, my little
+ward, Emilia is one. She wants to become a Sister of Mercy, to spend her
+life nursing the poor."
+
+"Oh? Would n't that be rather a pity?" Peter said. "She's so extremely
+pretty. I don't know when I have seen prettier brown eyes than hers."
+
+"Well, in a few years, I expect we shall see those pretty brown eyes
+looking out from under a sister's coif. No, I don't think it will be
+a pity. Nuns and sisters, I think, are the happiest people in the
+world--and priests. Have you ever met any one who seemed happier than my
+uncle, for example?"
+
+"I have certainly never met any one who seemed sweeter, kinder," Peter
+confessed. "He has a wonderful old face."
+
+"He's a wonderful old man," said she. "I 'm going to try to keep him a
+prisoner here for the rest of the summer--though he will have it that
+he's just run down for a week. He works a great deal too hard when he's
+in Rome. He's the only Cardinal I've ever heard of, who takes practical
+charge of his titular church. But here in the country he's out-of-doors
+all the blessed day, hand in hand with Emilia. He's as young as she is,
+I believe. They play together like children--and make--me feel as staid
+and solemn and grown-up as one of Mr. Kenneth Grahame's Olympians."
+
+Peter laughed. Then, in the moment of silence that followed, he happened
+to let his eyes stray up the valley.
+
+"Hello!" he suddenly exclaimed. "Someone has been painting our mountain
+green."
+
+The Duchessa turned, to look; and she too uttered an exclamation.
+
+By some accident of reflection or refraction, the snows of Monte
+Sfiorito had become bright green, as if the light that fell on them
+had passed through emeralds. They both paused, to gaze and marvel for
+a little. Indeed, the prospect was a pleasing one, as well as a
+surprising--the sunny lawns, the high trees, the blue lake, and then
+that bright green mountain.
+
+"I have never known anything like those snow-peaks for sailing under
+false colours," Peter said. "I have seen them every colour of the
+calendar, except their native white."
+
+"You must n't blame the poor things," pleaded the Duchessa. "They can't
+help it. It's all along o' the distance and the atmosphere and the sun."
+
+She closed her fan, with which she had been more or less idly playing
+throughout their dialogue, and replaced it on the table. Among the books
+there--French books, for the most part, in yellow paper--Peter saw, with
+something of a flutter (he could never see it without something of a
+flutter), the grey-and-gold binding of "A Man of Words."
+
+The Duchessa caught his glance.
+
+"Yes," she said; "your friend's novel. I told you I had been re-reading
+it."
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+"And--do you know--I 'm inclined to agree with your own enthusiastic
+estimate of it?" she went on. "I think it's extremely--but
+extremely--clever; and more--very charming, very beautiful. The fatal
+gift of beauty!"
+
+And her smile reminded him that the application of the tag was his own.
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+"Its beauty, though," she reflected, "is n't exactly of the obvious
+sort--is it? It does n't jump at you, for instance. It is rather in the
+texture of the work, than on the surface. One has to look, to see it."
+
+"One always has to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing," he safely
+generalised. But then--he had put his foot in the stirrup--his hobby
+bolted with him. "It takes two to make a beautiful object. The eye of
+the beholder is every bit as indispensable as the hand of the
+artist. The artist does his work--the beholder must do his. They are
+collaborators. Each must be the other's equal; and they must also be
+like each other--with the likeness of opposites, of complements. Art,
+in short, is entirely a matter of reciprocity. The kind of beauty that
+jumps at you is the kind you end by getting heartily tired of--is the
+skin-deep kind; and therefore it is n't really beauty at all--it is only
+an approximation to beauty--it may be only a simulacrum of it."
+
+Her eyes were smiling, her face was glowing, softly, with interest,
+with friendliness and perhaps with the least suspicion of something
+else--perhaps with the faintest glimmer of suppressed amusement; but
+interest was easily predominant.
+
+"Yes," she assented.... But then she pursued her own train of ideas.
+"And--with you--I particularly like the woman--Pauline. I can't tell
+you how much I like her. I--it sounds extravagant, but it's true--I can
+think of no other woman in the whole of fiction whom I like so
+well--who makes so curiously personal an appeal to me. Her wit--her
+waywardness--her tenderness--her generosity--everything. How did your
+friend come by his conception of her? She's as real to me as any woman
+I have ever known she's more real to me than most of the women I
+know--she's absolutely real, she lives, she breathes. Yet I have never
+known a woman resembling her. Life would be a merrier business if one
+did know women resembling her. She seems to me all that a woman ought
+ideally to be. Does your friend know women like that--the lucky man? Or
+is Pauline, for all her convincingness, a pure creature of imagination?"
+
+"Ah," said Peter, laughing, "you touch the secret springs of my friend's
+inspiration. That is a story in itself. Felix Wildmay is a perfectly
+commonplace Englishman. How could a woman like Pauline be the creature
+of his imagination? No--she was a 'thing seen.' God made her. Wildmay
+was a mere copyist. He drew her, tant bien que mal, from the life from
+a woman who's actually alive on this dull globe to-day. But that's the
+story."
+
+The Duchessa's eyes were intent.
+
+"The story-? Tell me the story," she pronounced in a breath, with
+imperious eagerness.
+
+And her eyes waited, intently.
+
+"Oh," said Peter, "it's one of those stories that can scarcely be told.
+There's hardly any thing to take hold of. It's without incident, without
+progression--it's all subjective--it's a drama in states of mind.
+Pauline was a 'thing seen,' indeed; but she wasn't a thing known: she
+was a thing divined. Wildmay never knew her--never even knew who she
+was--never knew her name--never even knew her nationality, though,
+as the book shows, he guessed her to be an Englishwoman, married to
+a Frenchman. He simply saw her, from a distance, half-a-dozen times
+perhaps. He saw her in Paris, once or twice, at the theatre, at the
+opera; and then later again, once or twice, in London; and then, once
+more, in Paris, in the Bois. That was all, but that was enough. Her
+appearance--her face, her eyes, her smile, her way of carrying herself,
+her way of carrying her head, her gestures, her movements, her way of
+dressing--he never so much as heard her voice--her mere appearance
+made an impression on him such as all the rest of womankind had totally
+failed to make. She was exceedingly lovely, of course, exceedingly
+distinguished, noble-looking; but she was infinitely more. Her face her
+whole person--had an expression! A spirit burned in her--a prismatic,
+aromatic fire. Other women seemed dust, seemed dead, beside her. She
+was a garden, inexhaustible, of promises, of suggestions. Wit,
+capriciousness, generosity, emotion--you have said it--they were all
+there. Race was there, nerve. Sex was there--all the mystery, magic, all
+the essential, elemental principles of the Feminine, were there: she was
+a woman. A wonderful, strenuous soul was there: Wildmay saw it, felt it.
+He did n't know her--he had no hope of ever knowing her--but he knew her
+better than he knew any one else in the world. She became the absorbing
+subject of his thoughts, the heroine of his dreams. She became, in fact,
+the supreme influence of his life."
+
+The Duchessa's eyes had not lost their intentness, while he was
+speaking. Now that he had finished, she looked down at her hands, folded
+in her lap, and mused for a moment in silence. At last she looked up
+again.
+
+"It's as strange as anything I have ever heard," she said, "it's
+furiously strange--and romantic--and interesting. But--but--" She
+frowned a little, hesitating between a choice of questions.
+
+"Oh, it's a story all compact of 'buts,'" Peter threw out laughing.
+
+She let the remark pass her--she had settled upon her question.
+
+"But how could he endure such a situation?" she asked. "How could he sit
+still under it? Did n't he try in any way--did n't he make any effort at
+all--to--to find her out--to discover who she was--to get introduced to
+her? I should think he could never have rested--I should think he would
+have moved heaven and earth."
+
+"What could he do? Tell me a single thing he could have done," said
+Peter. "Society has made no provision for a case like his. It 's
+absurd--but there it is. You see a woman somewhere; you long to make
+her acquaintance; and there's no natural bar to your doing so--you 're a
+presentable man she's what they call a lady--you're both, more or less,
+of the same monde. Yet there 's positively no way known by which you can
+contrive it--unless chance, mere fortuitous chance, just happens to drop
+a common acquaintance between you, at the right time and place. Chance,
+in Wildmay's case, happened to drop all the common acquaintances they
+may possibly have had at a deplorable distance. He was alone on each
+of the occasions when he saw her. There was no one he could ask to
+introduce him; there was no one he could apply to for information
+concerning her. He could n't very well follow her carriage through the
+streets--dog her to her lair, like a detective. Well--what then?"
+
+The Duchessa was playing with her fan again.
+
+"No," she agreed; "I suppose it was hopeless. But it seems rather hard
+on the poor man--rather baffling and tantalising."
+
+"The poor man thought it so, to be sure," said Peter; "he fretted and
+fumed a good deal, and kicked against the pricks. Here, there, now,
+anon, he would enjoy his brief little vision of her--then she would
+vanish into the deep inane. So, in the end--he had to take it out in
+something--he took it out in writing a book about her. He propped up a
+mental portrait of her on his desk before him, and translated it
+into the character of Pauline. In that way he was able to spend long
+delightful hours alone with her every day, in a kind of metaphysical
+intimacy. He had never heard her voice--but now he heard it as often as
+Pauline opened her lips. He owned her--he possessed her--she lived under
+his roof--she was always waiting for him in his study. She is real to
+you? She was inexpressibly, miraculously real to him. He saw her, knew
+her, felt her, realised her, in every detail of her mind, her soul, her
+person--down to the very intonations of her speech--down to the veins
+in her hands, the rings on her fingers--down to her very furs and laces,
+the frou-frou of her skirts, the scent upon her pocket-handkerchief. He
+had numbered the hairs of her head, almost."
+
+Again the Duchessa mused for a while in silence, opening and shutting
+her fan, and gazing into its opals.
+
+"I am thinking of it from the woman's point of view," she said, by
+and by. "To have played such a part in a man's life--and never to have
+dreamed it! Never even, very likely, to have dreamed that such a man
+existed--for it's entirely possible she didn't notice him, on those
+occasions when he saw her. And to have been the subject of such a
+novel--and never to have dreamed that, either! To have read the novel
+perhaps--without dreaming for an instant that there was any sort of
+connection between Pauline and herself! Or else--what would almost be
+stranger still--not to have read the novel, not to have heard of it! To
+have inspired such a book, such a beautiful book--yet to remain in sheer
+unconscious ignorance that there was such a book! Oh, I think it is even
+more extraordinary from the woman's point of view than from the man's.
+There is something almost terrifying about it. To have had such an
+influence on the destiny of someone you've never heard of! There's a
+kind of intangible sense of a responsibility."
+
+"There is also, perhaps," laughed Peter, "a kind of intangible sense of
+a liberty taken. I'm bound to say I think Wildmay was decidedly at his
+ease. To appropriate in that cool fashion the personality of a total
+stranger! But artists are the most unprincipled folk unhung. Ils
+prennent leur bien la, ou ils le trouvent."
+
+"Oh, no," said the Duchessa, "I think she was fair game. One can carry
+delicacy too far. He was entitled to the benefits of his discovery--for,
+after all, it was a discovery, was n't it? You have said yourself how
+indispensable the eye of the beholder is--'the seeing eye.' I think,
+indeed, the whole affair speaks extremely well for Mr. Wildmay. It is
+not every man who would be capable of so purely intellectual a passion.
+I suppose one must call his feeling for her a passion? It indicates a
+distinction in his nature. He can hardly be a mere materialist. But--but
+I think it's heart-rending that he never met her."
+
+"Oh, but that's the continuation of the story," said Peter. "He did meet
+her in the end, you know."
+
+"He did meet her!" cried the Duchessa, starting up, with a sudden access
+of interest, whilst her eyes lightened. "He did meet her? Oh, you must
+tell me about that."
+
+And just at this crisis the Cardinal and Emilia appeared, climbing the
+terrace steps.
+
+"Bother!" exclaimed the Duchessa, under her breath. Then, to Peter, "It
+will have to be for another time--unless I die of the suspense."
+
+After the necessary greetings were transacted, another elderly priest
+joined the company; a tall, burly, rather florid man, mentioned, when
+Peter was introduced to him, as Monsignor Langshawe. "This really is her
+chaplain," Peter concluded. Then a servant brought tea.
+
+"Ah, Diamond, Diamond, you little know what mischief you might have
+wrought," he admonished himself, as he walked home through the level
+sunshine. "In another instant, if we'd not been interrupted, you would
+have let the cat out of the bag. The premature escape of the cat from
+the bag would spoil everything."
+
+And he hugged himself, as one snatched from peril, in a qualm of
+retroactive terror. At the same time he was filled with a kind of
+exultancy. All that he had hoped had come to pass, and more, vastly
+more. Not only had he been received as a friend at Ventirose, but he had
+been encouraged to tell her a part at least of the story by which her
+life and his were so curiously connected; and he had been snatched from
+the peril of telling her too much. The day was not yet when he could
+safely say, "Mutato nomine....." Would the day ever be? But, meanwhile,
+just to have told her the first ten lines of that story, he could not
+help feeling, somehow advanced matters tremendously, somehow put a new
+face on matters.
+
+"The hour for which the ages sighed may not be so far away as you
+think," he said to Marietta. "The curtain has risen upon Act Three. I
+fancy I can perceive faint glimmerings of the beginning of the end."
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+All that evening, something which he had not been conscious of noticing
+especially when it was present to him--certainly he had paid no
+conscious attention to its details--kept recurring and recurring to
+Peter's memory: the appearance of the prettily-arranged terrace-end at
+Ventirose: the white awning, with the blue sky at its edges, the sunny
+park beyond; the warm-hued carpets on the marble pavement; the wicker
+chairs, with their bright cushions; the table, with its books and
+bibelots--the yellow French books, a tortoise-shell paperknife, a silver
+paperweight, a crystal smelling-bottle, a bowlful of drooping poppies;
+and the marble balustrade, with its delicate tracery of leaves and
+tendrils, where the jessamine twined round its pillars.
+
+This kept recurring, recurring, vividly, a picture that he could see
+without closing his eyes, a picture with a very decided sentiment.
+Like the gay and gleaming many-pinnacled facade of her house, it seemed
+appropriate to her; it seemed in its fashion to express her. Nay, it
+seemed to do more. It was a corner of her every-day environment; these
+things were the companions, the witnesses, of moments of her life,
+phases of herself, which were hidden from Peter; they were the
+companions and witnesses of her solitude, her privacy; they were her
+confidants, in a way. They seemed not merely to express her, therefore,
+but to be continually on the point--I had almost said of betraying her.
+At all events, if he could only understand their silent language,
+they would prove rich in precious revelations. So he welcomed their
+recurrences, dwelt upon them, pondered them, and got a deep if somewhat
+inarticulate pleasure from them.
+
+On Thursday, as he approached the castle, the last fires of sunset were
+burning in the sky behind it--the long irregular mass of buildings stood
+out in varying shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of red: the
+grey stone, dark, velvety indigo; the pink stucco, pink still, but
+with a transparent blue penumbra over it; the white marble, palely,
+scintillantly amethystine. And if he was interested in her environment,
+now he could study it to his heart's content: the wide marble staircase,
+up which he was shown, with its crimson carpet, and the big mellow
+painting, that looked as if it might be a Titian, at the top; the great
+saloon, in which he was received, with its polished mosaic floor,
+its frescoed ceiling, its white-and-gold panelling, its hangings and
+upholsteries of yellow brocade, its satinwood chairs and tables, its
+bronzes, porcelains, embroideries, its screens and mirrors; the long
+dining-hall, with its high pointed windows, its slender marble columns
+supporting a vaulted roof, its twinkling candles in chandeliers and
+sconces of cloudy Venetian glass, its brilliant table, its flowers and
+their colours and their scents.
+
+He could study her environment to his heart's content, indeed--or to
+his heart's despair. For all this had rather the effect of chilling,
+of depressing him. It was very splendid; it was very luxurious and
+cheerful; it was appropriate and personal to her, if you like; no doubt,
+in its fashion, in its measure, it, too, expressed her. But, at that
+rate, it expressed her in an aspect which Peter had instinctively made
+it his habit to forget, which he by no means found it inspiriting
+to remember. It expressed, it emphasised, her wealth, her rank; it
+emphasised the distance, in a worldly sense, between her and himself,
+the conventional barriers.
+
+And she...
+
+She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she was all
+that she had ever been--and yet--and yet--Well, somehow, she seemed
+indefinably different. Somehow, again, the distance, the barriers, were
+emphasised. She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she
+was all that she had ever been; but, somehow, to-night, she seemed very
+much the great lady, very much the duchess....
+
+"My dear man," he said to himself, "you were mad to dream for a single
+instant that there was the remotest possibility of anything ever
+happening."
+
+The only other guests, besides the Cardinal and Monsignor Langshawe,
+were an old Frenchwoman, with beautiful white hair, from one of the
+neighbouring villas, Madame de Lafere, and a young, pretty, witty, and
+voluble Irishwoman, Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, from an hotel at Spiaggia.
+In deference, perhaps, to the cloth of the two ecclesiastics, none of
+the women were in full evening-dress, and there was no arm-taking when
+they went in to dinner. The dinner itself was of a simplicity which
+Peter thought admirable, and which, of course, he attributed to his
+Duchessa's own good taste. He was not yet familiar enough with the Black
+aristocracy of Italy, to be aware that in the matter of food and drink
+simplicity is as much the criterion of good form amongst them, as lavish
+complexity is the criterion of good form amongst the English-imitating
+Whites.
+
+The conversation, I believe, took its direction chiefly from the
+initiative of Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. With great sprightliness and
+humour, and with an astonishing light-hearted courage, she rallied the
+Cardinal upon the neglect in which her native island was allowed to
+languish by the powers at Rome. "The most Catholic country in three
+hemispheres, to be sure," she said; "every inch of its soil soaked
+with the blood of martyrs. Yet you've not added an Irish saint to the
+Calendar for I see you're blushing to think how many ages; and you've
+taken sides with the heretic Saxon against us in our struggle for Home
+Rule--which I blame you for, though, being a landowner and a bit of an
+absentee, I 'm a traitorous Unionist myself."
+
+The Cardinal laughingly retorted that the Irish were far too fine, too
+imaginative and poetical a race, to be bothered with material questions
+of government and administration. They should leave such cares to the
+stolid, practical English, and devote the leisure they would thus obtain
+to the further exercise and development of what someone had called "the
+starfire of the Celtic nature." Ireland should look upon England as
+her working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of Irish saints to
+the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their excessive number. "'T is an
+embarrassment of riches. If we were once to begin, we could never leave
+off till we had canonised nine-tenths of the dead population."
+
+Monsignor Langshawe, at this (making jest the cue for earnest), spoke
+up for Scotland, and deplored the delay in the beatification of Blessed
+Mary. "The official beatification," he discriminated, "for she was
+beatified in the heart of every true Catholic Scot on the day when
+Bloody Elizabeth murdered her."
+
+And Madame de Lafere put in a plea for Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and
+the little Dauphin.
+
+"Blessed Mary--Bloody Elizabeth," laughed the Duchessa, in an aside
+to Peter; "here is language to use in the presence of a Protestant
+Englishman."
+
+"Oh, I'm accustomed to 'Bloody Elizabeth,'" said he. "Was n't it a word
+of Cardinal Newman's?"
+
+"Yes, I think so," said she. "And since every one is naming his
+candidate; for the Calendar, you have named mine. I think there never
+was a saintlier saint than Cardinal Newman."
+
+"What is your Eminence's attitude towards the question of mixed
+marriages?" Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.
+
+Peter pricked up his ears.
+
+"It is not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in England,"
+his Eminence replied; "but in the abstract, and other things equal, my
+attitude would of course be one of disapproval."
+
+"And yet surely," contended she, "if a pious Catholic girl marries a
+Protestant man, she has a hundred chances of converting him?"
+
+"I don't know," said the Cardinal. "Would n't it be safer to let the
+conversion precede the marriage? Afterwards, I 'm afraid, he would
+have a hundred chances of inducing her to apostatise, or, at least, of
+rendering her lukewarm."
+
+"Not if she had a spark of the true zeal," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+"Any wife can make her husband's life a burden to him, if she will
+conscientiously lay herself out to do so. The man would be glad to
+submit, for the sake of peace in his household. I often sigh for the
+good old days of the Inquisition; but it's still possible, in the
+blessed seclusion of the family circle, to apply the rack and the
+thumbscrew in a modified form. I know a dozen fine young Protestant men
+in London whom I'm labouring to convert, and I feel I 'm defeated only
+by the circumstance that I'm not in a position to lead them to the altar
+in the full meaning of the expression."
+
+"A dozen?" the Cardinal laughed. "Aren't you complicating the question
+of mixed marriages with that of plural marriage?"
+
+"'T was merely a little Hibernicism, for which I beg your Eminence's
+indulgence," laughed she. "But what puts the most spokes in a
+proselytiser's wheel is the Faith itself. If we only deserved the
+reputation for sharp practice and double dealing which the Protestants
+have foisted upon us, it would be roses, roses, all the way. Why are
+we forbidden to let the end justify the means? And where are those
+accommodements avec le ciel of which we've heard? We're not even
+permitted a few poor accommodements avec le monde."
+
+"Look at my uncle's face," whispered the Duchessa to Peter. The
+Cardinal's fine old face was all alight with amusement. "In his fondness
+for taking things by their humorous end, he has met an affinity."
+
+"It will be a grand day for the Church and the nations, when we have
+an Irish Pope," Mrs. O'Donovan Florence continued. "A good, stalwart,
+militant Irishman is what's needed to set everything right. With a sweet
+Irish tongue, he'd win home the wandering sheep; and with a strong Irish
+arm, he'd drive the wolves from the fold. It's he that would soon sweep
+the Italians out of Rome."
+
+"The Italians will soon be swept out of Rome by the natural current
+of events," said the Cardinal. "But an Irish bishop of my acquaintance
+insists that we have already had many Irish Popes, without knowing it.
+Of all the greatest Popes he cries, 'Surely, they must have had Irish
+blood.' He's perfectly convinced that Pius the Ninth was Irish. His very
+name, his family-name, Ferretti, was merely the Irish name, Farrity,
+Italianised, the good bishop says. No one but an Irishman, he insists,
+could have been so witty."
+
+Mrs. O'Donovan Florence looked intensely thoughtful for a moment....
+Then, "I 'm trying to think of the original Irish form of Udeschini,"
+she declared.
+
+At which there was a general laugh.
+
+"When you say 'soon,' Eminence, do you mean that we may hope to see the
+Italians driven from Rome in our time?" enquired Madame de Lafere.
+
+"They are on the verge of bankruptcy--for their sins," the Cardinal
+answered. "When the crash comes--and it can't fail to come before many
+years--there will necessarily be a readjustment. I do not believe that
+the conscience of Christendom will again allow Peter to be deprived of
+his inheritance."
+
+"God hasten the good day," said Monsignor Langshawe.
+
+"If I can live to see Rome restored to the Pope, I shall die content,
+even though I cannot live to see France restored to the King," said the
+old Frenchwoman.
+
+"And I--even though I cannot live to see Britain restored to the Faith,"
+said the Monsignore.
+
+The Duchessa smiled at Peter.
+
+"What a hotbed of Ultramontanes and reactionaries you have fallen into,"
+she murmured.
+
+"It is exhilarating," said he, "to meet people who have convictions."
+
+"Even when you regard their convictions as erroneous?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, even then," he answered. "But I'm not sure I regard as erroneous
+the convictions I have heard expressed to-night."
+
+"Oh--?" she wondered. "Would you like to see Rome restored to the Pope?"
+
+"Yes," said he, "decidedly--for aesthetic reasons, if for no others."
+
+"I suppose there are aesthetic reasons," she assented. "But we, of
+course, think there are conclusive reasons in mere justice."
+
+"I don't doubt there are conclusive reasons in mere justice, too," said
+he.
+
+After dinner, at the Cardinal's invitation, the Duchessa went to the
+piano, and played Bach and Scarlatti. Her face, in the soft candlelight,
+as she discoursed that "luminous, lucid" music, Peter thought... But
+what do lovers always think of their ladies' faces, when they look up
+from their pianos, in soft candlelight?
+
+Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, taking her departure, said to the Cardinal, "I
+owe your Eminence the two proudest days of my life. The first was when I
+read in the paper that you had received the hat, and I was able to boast
+to all my acquaintances that I had been in the convent with your
+niece by marriage. And the second is now, when I can boast forevermore
+hereafter that I've enjoyed the honour of making my courtesy to you."
+
+"So," said Peter, as he walked home through the dew and the starlight of
+the park, amid the phantom perfumes of the night, "so the Cardinal
+does n't approve of mixed marriages and, of course, his niece does n't,
+either. But what can it matter to me? For alas and alas--as he truly
+said--it's hardly a question of actuality."
+
+And he lit a cigarette.
+
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+"So he did meet her, after all?" the Duchessa said.
+
+"Yes, he met her in the end," Peter answered.
+
+They were seated under the gay white awning, against the bright
+perspective of lawn, lake, and mountains, on the terrace at Ventirose,
+where Peter was paying his dinner-call. The August day was hot and
+still and beautiful--a day made of gold and velvet and sweet odours. The
+Duchessa lay back languidly, among the crisp silk cushions, in her low,
+lounging chair; and Peter, as he looked at her, told himself that he
+must be cautious, cautious.
+
+"Yes, he met her in the end," he said.
+
+"Well--? And then--?" she questioned, with a show of eagerness, smiling
+into his eyes. "What happened? Did she come up to his expectations?
+Or was she just the usual disappointment? I have been pining--oh, but
+pining--to hear the continuation of the story."
+
+She smiled into his eyes, and his heart fluttered. "I must be cautious,"
+he told himself. "In more ways than one, this is a crucial moment." At
+the same time, as a very part of his caution, he must appear entirely
+nonchalant and candid.
+
+"Oh, no--tutt' altro," he said, with an assumption of nonchalant
+airiness and candid promptness. "She 'better bettered' his
+expectations--she surpassed his fondest. She was a thousand times more
+delightful than he had dreamed--though, as you know, he had dreamed a
+good deal. Pauline de Fleuvieres turned out to be the feeblest, faintest
+echo of her."
+
+The Duchessa meditated for an instant.
+
+"It seems impossible. It's one of those situations in which a
+disenchantment seems the foregone conclusion," she said, at last.
+
+"It seems so, indeed," assented Peter; "but disenchantment, there was
+none. She was all that he had imagined, and infinitely more. She was the
+substance--he had imagined the shadow. He had divined her, as it were,
+from a single angle, and there were many angles. Pauline was the pale
+reflection of one side of her--a pencil-sketch in profile."
+
+The Duchessa shook her head, marvelling, and smiled again.
+
+"You pile wonder upon wonder," she said. "That the reality should excel
+the poet's ideal! That the cloud-capped towers which looked splendid
+from afar, with all the glamour of distance, should prove to be more
+splendid still, on close inspection! It's dead against the accepted
+theory of things. And that any woman should be nicer than that adorable
+Pauline! You tax belief. But I want to know what happened. Had she read
+his book?"
+
+"Nothing happened," said Peter. "I warned you that it was a drama
+without action. A good deal happened, no doubt, in Wildmay's secret
+soul. But externally, nothing. They simply chatted together--exchanged
+the time o' day--like any pair of acquaintances. No, I don't think she
+had read his book. She did read it afterwards, though."
+
+"And liked it?"
+
+"Yes--she said she liked it."
+
+"Well--? But then-?" the Duchessa pressed him, insistently. "When
+she discovered the part she had had in its composition--? Was n't she
+overwhelmed? Wasn't she immensely interested--surprised--moved?"
+
+She leaned forward a little. Her eyes were shining. Her lips were
+slightly parted, so that between their warm rosiness Peter could see the
+exquisite white line of her teeth. His heart fluttered again. "I must be
+cautious, cautious," he remembered, and made a strenuous "act of will"
+to steady himself.
+
+"Oh, she never discovered that," he said.
+
+"What!" exclaimed the Duchessa. Her face fell. Her eyes darkened--with
+dismay, with incomprehension. "Do you--you don't--mean to say that
+he didn't tell her?" There was reluctance to believe, there was a
+conditional implication of deep reproach, in her voice.
+
+Peter had to repeat his act of will.
+
+"How could he tell her?" he asked.
+
+She frowned at him, with reproach that was explicit now, and a kind of
+pained astonishment.
+
+"How could he help telling her?" she cried. "But--but it was the one
+great fact between them. But it was a fact that intimately concerned
+her--it was a fact of her own destiny. But it was her right to be told.
+Do you seriously mean that he did n't tell her? But why did n't he? What
+could have possessed him?"
+
+There was something like a tremor in her voice. "I must appear entirely
+nonchalant and candid," Peter remembered.
+
+"I fancy he was possessed, in some measure, by a sense of the liberty he
+had taken by a sense of what one might, perhaps, venture to qualify as
+his 'cheek.' For, if it was n't already a liberty to embody his notion
+of her in a novel--in a published book, for daws to peck at--it would
+have become a liberty the moment he informed her that he had done so.
+That would have had the effect of making her a kind of involuntary
+particeps criminis."
+
+"Oh, the foolish man!" sighed the Duchessa, with a rueful shake of the
+head. "His foolish British self-consciousness! His British inability
+to put himself in another person's place, to see things from another's
+point of view! Could n't he see, from her point of view, from any point
+of view but his own, that it was her right to be told? That the matter
+affected her in one way, as much as it affected him in another? That
+since she had influenced--since she had contributed to--his life and his
+art as she had, it was her right to know it? Couldn't he see that his
+'cheek,' his real 'cheek,' began when he withheld from her that great
+strange chapter of her own history? Oh, he ought to have told her, he
+ought to have told her."
+
+She sank back in her chair, giving her head another rueful shake,
+and gazed ruefully away, over the sunny landscape, through the mellow
+atmosphere, into the golden-hazy distance.
+
+Peter looked at her--and then, quickly, for caution's sake, looked
+elsewhere.
+
+"But there were other things to be taken into account," he said.
+
+The Duchessa raised her eyes. "What other things?" they gravely
+questioned.
+
+"Would n't his telling her have been equivalent to a declaration of
+love?" questioned he, looking at the signet-ring on the little finger of
+his left hand.
+
+"A declaration of love?" She considered for a moment. "Yes, I suppose
+in a way it would," she acknowledged. "But even so?" she asked, after
+another moment of consideration. "Why should he not have made her a
+declaration of love? He was in love with her, wasn't he?"
+
+The point of frank interrogation in her eyes showed clearly, showed
+cruelly, how detached, how impersonal, her interest was.
+
+"Frantically," said Peter. For caution's sake, he kept HIS eyes on the
+golden-hazy peaks of Monte Sfionto. "He had been in love with her, in a
+fashion, of course, from the beginning. But after he met her, he fell in
+love with her anew. His mind, his imagination, had been in love with its
+conception of her. But now he, the man, loved her, the woman herself,
+frantically, with just a downright common human love. There were
+circumstances, however, which made it impossible for him to tell her
+so."
+
+"What circumstances?" There was the same frank look of interrogation.
+"Do you mean that she was married?"
+
+"No, not that. By the mercy of heaven," he pronounced, with energy, "she
+was a widow."
+
+The Duchessa broke into an amused laugh.
+
+"Permit me to admire your piety," she said.
+
+And Peter, as his somewhat outrageous ejaculation came back to him,
+laughed vaguely too.
+
+"But then--?" she went on. "What else? By the mercy of heaven, she was a
+widow. What other circumstance could have tied his tongue?"
+
+"Oh," he answered, a trifle uneasily, "a multitude of circumstances.
+Pretty nearly every conventional barrier the world has invented, existed
+between him and her. She was a frightful swell, for one thing."
+
+"A frightful swell--?" The Duchessa raised her eyebrows.
+
+"Yes," said Peter, "at a vertiginous height above him--horribly 'aloft
+and lone' in the social hierarchy." He tried to smile.
+
+"What could that matter?" the Duchessa objected simply. "Mr. Wildmay is
+a gentleman."
+
+"How do you know he is?" Peter asked, thinking to create a diversion.
+
+"Of course, he is. He must be. No one but a gentleman could have had
+such an experience, could have written such a book. And besides, he's
+a friend of yours. Of course he's a gentleman," returned the adroit
+Duchessa.
+
+"But there are degrees of gentleness, I believe," said Peter. "She was
+at the topmost top. He--well, at all events, he knew his place. He had
+too much humour, too just a sense of proportion, to contemplate offering
+her his hand."
+
+"A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman--under royalty," said the
+Duchessa.
+
+"He can, to be sure--and he can also see it declined with thanks,"
+Peter answered. "But it wasn't merely her rank. She was horribly
+rich, besides. And then--and then--! There were ten thousand other
+impediments. But the chief of them all, I daresay, was Wildmay's fear
+lest an avowal of his attachment should lead to his exile from her
+presence--and he naturally did not wish to be exiled."
+
+"Faint heart!" the Duchessa said. "He ought to have told her. The case
+was peculiar, was unique. Ordinary rules could n't apply to it. And
+how could he be sure, after all, that she would n't have despised the
+conventional barriers, as you call them? Every man gets the wife he
+deserves--and certainly he had gone a long way towards deserving her.
+She could n't have felt quite indifferent to him--if he had told her;
+quite indifferent to the man who had drawn that magnificent Pauline from
+his vision of her. No woman could be entirely proof against a compliment
+like that. And I insist that it was her right to know. He should simply
+have told her the story of his book and of her part in it. She would
+have inferred the rest. He needn't have mentioned love--the word."
+
+"Well," said Peter, "it is not always too late to mend. He may tell her
+some fine day yet."
+
+And in his soul two voices were contending.
+
+"Tell her--tell her--tell her! Tell her now, at once, and abide your
+chances," urged one. "No--no--no--do nothing of the kind," protested the
+second. "She is arguing the point for its abstract interest. She is a
+hundred miles from dreaming that you are the man--hundreds of miles from
+dreaming that she is the woman. If she had the least suspicion of that,
+she would sing a song as different as may be. Caution, caution."
+
+He looked at her--warm and fragrant and radiant, in her soft, white
+gown, in her low lounging-chair, so near, so near to him--he looked
+at her glowing eyes, her red lips, her rich brown hair, at the
+white-and-rose of her skin, at the delicate blue veins in her forehead,
+at her fine white hands, clasped loosely together in her lap, at the
+flowing lines of her figure, with its supple grace and strength; and
+behind her, surrounding her, accessory to her, he was conscious of the
+golden August world, in the golden August weather--of the green park,
+and the pure sunshine, and the sweet, still air, of the blue lake, and
+the blue sky, and the mountains with their dark-blue shadows, of the
+long marble terrace, and the gleaming marble facade of the house, and
+the marble balustrade, with the jessamine twining round its columns.
+The picture was very beautiful--but something was wanting to perfect its
+beauty; and the name of the something that was wanting sang itself
+in poignant iteration to the beating of his pulses. And he longed and
+longed to tell her; and he dared not; and he hesitated....
+
+And while he was hesitating, the pounding of hoofs and the grinding of
+carriage-wheels on gravel reached his ears--and so the situation was
+saved, or the opportunity lost, as you choose to think it. For next
+minute a servant appeared on the terrace, and announced Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence.
+
+And shortly after that lady's arrival, Peter took his leave.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+"Well, Trixie, and is one to congratulate you?" asked Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence.
+
+"Congratulate me--? On what?" asked Beatrice.
+
+"On what, indeed!" cried the vivacious Irishwoman. "Don't try to pull
+the wool over the eyes of an old campaigner like me."
+
+Beatrice looked blank.
+
+"I can't in the least think what you mean," she said.
+
+"Get along with you," cried Mrs. O'Donovan Florence; and she brandished
+her sunshade threateningly. "On your engagement to Mr.--what's this his
+name is?--to be sure."
+
+She glanced indicatively down the lawn, in the direction of Peter's
+retreating tweeds.
+
+Beatrice had looked blank. But now she looked--first, perhaps, for
+a tiny fraction of a second, startled--then gently, compassionately
+ironical.
+
+"My poor Kate! Are you out of your senses?" she enquired, in accents of
+concern, nodding her head, with a feint of pensive pity.
+
+"Not I," returned Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, cheerfully confident. "But I
+'m thinking I could lay my finger on a long-limbed young Englishman less
+than a mile from here, who very nearly is. Hasn't he asked you yet?"
+
+"Es-to bete?" Beatrice murmured, pitifully nodding again.
+
+"Ah, well, if he has n't, it's merely a question of time when he will,"
+said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. "You've only to notice the famished
+gaze with which he devours you, to see his condition. But don't try to
+hoodwink me. Don't pretend that this is news to you."
+
+"News!" scoffed Beatrice. "It's news and nonsense--the product of your
+irrepressible imagination. Mr. What's-this-his-name-is, as you call him,
+and I are the barest acquaintances. He's our temporary neighbour--the
+tenant for the season of Villa Floriano--the house you can catch a
+glimpse of, below there, through the trees, on the other side of the
+river."
+
+"Is he, now, really? And that's very interesting too. But I wasn't
+denying it." Mrs. O'Donovan Florence smiled, with derisive sweetness.
+"The fact of his being the tenant of the house I can catch a glimpse
+of, through the trees, on the other side of the river, though a valuable
+acquisition to my stores of knowledge, does n't explain away his
+famished glance unless, indeed, he's behind with the rent: but even
+then, it's not famished he'd look, but merely anxious and persuasive.
+I'm a landlord myself. No, Trixie, dear, you've made roast meat of the
+poor fellow's heart, as the poetical Persians express it; and if he has
+n't told you so yet with his tongue, he tells the whole world so with
+his eyes as often as he allows them to rest on their loadstone, your
+face. You can see the sparks and the smoke escaping from them, as though
+they were chimneys. If you've not observed that for yourself, it can
+only be that excessive modesty has rendered you blind. The man is head
+over ears in love with you. Nonsense or bonsense, that is the sober
+truth."
+
+Beatrice laughed.
+
+"I 'm sorry to destroy a romance, Kate," she said; "but alas for the
+pretty one you 've woven, I happen to know that, so far from being in
+love with me, Mr. Marchdale is quite desperately in love with another
+woman. He was talking to me about her the moment before you arrived."
+
+"Was he, indeed?--and you the barest acquaintances!" quizzed Mrs.
+O'Donovan Florence, pulling a face. "Well, well," she went on
+thoughtfully, "if he's in love with another woman, that settles my last
+remaining doubt. It can only be that the other woman's yourself."
+
+Beatrice shook her head, and laughed again.
+
+"Is that what they call an Irishism?" she asked, with polite curiosity.
+
+"And an Irishism is a very good thing, too--when employed with
+intention," retorted her friend. "Did he just chance, now, in a casual
+way, to mention the other woman's name, I wonder?"
+
+"Oh, you perverse and stiff-necked generation!" Beatrice laughed. "What
+can his mentioning or not mentioning her name signify? For since he's
+in love with her, it's hardly likely that he's in love with you or me at
+the same time, is it?"
+
+"That's as may be. But I'll wager I could make a shrewd guess at her
+name myself. And what else did he tell you about her? He's told me
+nothing; but I'll warrant I could paint her portrait. She's a fine
+figure of a young Englishwoman, brown-haired, grey-eyed, and she stands
+about five-feet-eight in her shoes. There's an expression of great
+malice and humour in her physiognomy, and a kind of devil-may-care
+haughtiness in the poise of her head. She's a bit of a grande dame, into
+the bargain--something like an Anglo-Italian duchess, for example; she's
+monstrously rich; and she adds, you'll be surprised to learn, to her
+other fascinations that of being a widow. Faith, the men are so fond
+of widows, it's a marvel to me that we're ever married at all until we
+reach that condition;--and there, if you like, is another Irishism for
+you. But what's this? Methinks a rosy blush mantles my lady's brow. Have
+I touched the heel of Achilles? She IS a widow? He TOLD you she was a
+widow?... But--bless us and save us!--what's come to you now? You're as
+white as a sheet. What is it?"
+
+"Good heavens!" gasped Beatrice. She lay back in her chair, and stared
+with horrified eyes into space. "Good--good heavens!"
+
+Mrs. O' Donovan Florence leaned forward and took her hand.
+
+"What is it, my dear? What's come to you?" she asked, in alarm.
+
+Beatrice gave a kind of groan.
+
+"It's absurd--it's impossible," she said; "and yet, if by any ridiculous
+chance you should be right, it's too horribly horrible." She repeated
+her groan. "If by any ridiculous chance you are right, the man will
+think that I have been leading him on!"
+
+"LEADING HIM ON!" Mrs. O'Donovan Florence suppressed a shriek of
+ecstatic mirth. "There's no question about my being right," she averred
+soberly. "He wears his heart behind his eyeglass; and whoso runs may
+read it."
+
+"Well, then--" began Beatrice, with an air of desperation... "But no,"
+she broke off. "YOU CAN'T be right. It's impossible, impossible. Wait.
+I'll tell you the whole story. You shall see for yourself."
+
+"Go on," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, assuming an attitude of devout
+attention, which she retained while Beatrice (not without certain starts
+and hesitations) recounted the fond tale of Peter's novel, and of the
+woman who had suggested the character of Pauline.
+
+"But OF COURSE!" cried the Irishwoman, when the tale was finished;
+and this time her shriek of mirth, of glee, was not suppressed. "Of
+course--you miracle of unsuspecting innocence! The man would never have
+breathed a whisper of the affair to any soul alive, save to his heroine
+herself--let alone to you, if you and she were not the same. Couple that
+with the eyes he makes at you, and you've got assurance twice assured.
+You ought to have guessed it from the first syllable he uttered. And
+when he went on about her exalted station and her fabulous wealth! Oh,
+my ingenue! Oh, my guileless lambkin! And you Trixie Belfont! Where's
+your famous wit? Where are your famous intuitions?"
+
+"BUT DON'T YOU SEE," wailed Beatrice, "don't you see the utterly odious
+position this leaves me in? I've been urging him with all my might to
+tell her! I said... oh, the things I said!" She shuddered visibly. "I
+said that differences of rank and fortune could n't matter." She gave a
+melancholy laugh. "I said that very likely she'd accept him. I said she
+couldn't help being... Oh, my dear, my dear! He'll think--of course,
+he can't help thinking--that I was encouraging him--that I was coming
+halfway to meet him."
+
+"Hush, hush! It's not so bad as that," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence,
+soothingly. "For surely, as I understand it, the man doesn't dream that
+you knew it was about himself he was speaking. He always talked of the
+book as by a friend of his; and you never let him suspect that you had
+pierced his subterfuge."
+
+Beatrice frowned for an instant, putting this consideration in its
+place, in her troubled mind. Then suddenly a light of intense, of
+immense relief broke in her face.
+
+"Thank goodness!" she sighed. "I had forgotten. No, he does n't dream
+that. But oh, the fright I had!"
+
+"He'll tell you, all the same," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+
+"No, he'll never tell me now. I am forewarned, forearmed. I 'll give him
+no chance," Beatrice answered.
+
+"Yes; and what's more, you'll marry him," said her friend.
+
+"Kate! Don't descend to imbecilities," cried Beatrice.
+
+"You'll marry him," reiterated Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, calmly. "You'll
+end by marrying him--if you're human; and I've seldom known a human
+being who was more so. It's not in flesh and blood to remain unmoved by
+a tribute such as that man has paid you. The first thing you'll do will
+be to re-read the novel. Otherwise, I'd request the loan of it myself,
+for I 'm naturally curious to compare the wrought ring with the virgin
+gold--but I know it's the wrought ring the virgin gold will itself be
+wanting, directly it's alone. And then the poison will work. And you'll
+end by marrying him."
+
+"In the first place," replied Beatrice, firmly, "I shall never marry any
+one. That is absolutely certain. In the next place, I shall not re-read
+the novel; and to prove that I shan't, I shall insist on your taking it
+with you when you leave to-day. And finally, I'm nowhere near convinced
+that you're right about my being... well, you might as well say the
+raw material, the rough ore, as the virgin gold. It's only a bare
+possibility. But even the possibility had not occurred to me before.
+Now that it has, I shall be on my guard. I shall know how to prevent any
+possible developments."
+
+"In the first place," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, with equal firmness,
+"wild horses couldn't induce me to take the novel. Wait till you're
+alone. A hundred questions about it will come flocking to your mind;
+you'd be miserable if you had n't it to refer to. In the next place, the
+poison will work and work. Say what you will, it's flattery that wins
+us. In the third place, he'll tell you. Finally, you'll make a good
+Catholic of him, and marry him. It's absurd, it's iniquitous, anyhow,
+for a young and beautiful woman like you to remain a widow. And
+your future husband is a man of talent and distinction, and he's not
+bad-looking, either. Will you stick to your title, now, I wonder? Or
+will you step down, and be plain Mrs. Marchdale? No--the Honourable
+Mrs.--excuse me--'Mr. and the Honourable Mrs. Marchdale.' I see you in
+the 'Morning Post' already. And will you continue to live in Italy? Or
+will you come back to England?"
+
+"Oh, my good Kate, my sweet Kate, my incorrigible Kate, what an
+extravagantly silly Kate you can be when the mood takes you," Beatrice
+laughed.
+
+"Kate me as many Kates as you like, the man is really not bad-looking.
+He has a nice lithe springy figure, and a clean complexion, and an open
+brow. And if there's a suggestion of superciliousness in the tilt of his
+nose, of scepticism in the twirl of his moustaches, and of obstinacy in
+the squareness of his chin--ma foi, you must take the bitter with the
+sweet. Besides, he has decent hair, and plenty of it--he'll not go bald.
+And he dresses well, and wears his clothes with an air. In short, you'll
+make a very handsome couple. Anyhow, when your family are gathered
+round the evening lamp to-night, I 'll stake my fortune on it, but I
+can foretell the name of the book they'll find Trixie Belfont reading,"
+laughed Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+
+
+For a few minutes, after her friend had left her, Beatrice sat still,
+her head resting on her hand, and gazed with fixed eyes at Monte
+Sfiorito. Then she rose, and walked briskly backwards and forwards, for
+a while, up and down the terrace. Presently she came to a standstill,
+and leaning on the balustrade, while one of her feet kept lightly
+tapping the pavement, looked off again towards the mountain.
+
+The prospect was well worth her attention, with its blue and green and
+gold, its wood and water, its misty-blushing snows, its spaciousness
+and its atmosphere. In the sky a million fluffy little cloudlets floated
+like a flock of fantastic birds, with mother-of-pearl tinted plumage.
+The shadows were lengthening now. The sunshine glanced from the smooth
+surface of the lake as from burnished metal, and falling on the coloured
+sails of the fishing-boats, made them gleam like sails of crimson silk.
+But I wonder how much of this Beatrice really saw.
+
+She plucked an oleander from one of the tall marble urns set along the
+balustrade, and pressed the pink blossom against her face, and, closing
+her eyes, breathed in its perfume; then, absent-minded, she let it drop,
+over the terrace, upon the path below.
+
+"It's impossible," she said suddenly, aloud. At last she went into the
+house, and up to her rose-and-white retiring-room. There she took a book
+from the table, and sank into a deep easy-chair, and began to turn the
+pages.
+
+But when, by and by, approaching footsteps became audible in the
+stone-floored corridor without, Beatrice hastily shut the book, thrust
+it back upon the table, and caught up another so that Emilia Manfredi,
+entering, found her reading Monsieur Anatole France's "Etui de nacre."
+
+"Emilia," she said, "I wish you would translate the I Jongleur de Notre
+Dame' into Italian."
+
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+Peter, we may suppose, returned to Villa Floriano that afternoon in a
+state of some excitement.
+
+"He ought to have told her--"
+
+"It was her right to be told--"
+
+"What could her rank matter--"
+
+"A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman--"
+
+"She would have despised the conventional barriers--"
+
+"No woman could be proof against such a compliment--"
+
+"The case was peculiar--ordinary rules could not apply to it--"
+
+"Every man gets the wife he deserves--and he had certainly gone a long
+way towards deserving her--"
+
+"He should simply have told her the story of his book and of her part in
+it--he need n't have mentioned love--she would have understood--"
+
+The Duchessa's voice, clear and cool and crisp-cut, sounded perpetually
+in his ears; the words she had spoken, the arguments she had urged,
+repeated and repeated themselves, danced round and round, in his memory.
+
+"Ought I to have told her--then and there? Shall I go to her and tell
+her to-morrow?"
+
+He tried to think; but he could not think. His faculties were in a
+whirl--he could by no means command them. He could only wait, inert,
+while the dance went on. It was an extremely riotous dance. The
+Duchessa's conversation was reproduced without sequence, without
+coherence--scattered fragments of it were flashed before him fitfully,
+in swift disorder. If he would attempt to seize upon one of those
+fragments, to detain and fix it, for consideration--a speech of hers,
+a look, an inflection--then the whole experience suddenly lost its
+outlines, his recollection of it became a jumble, and he was left, as it
+were, intellectually gasping.
+
+He walked about his garden, he went into the house, he came out, he
+walked about again, he went in and dressed for dinner, he sat on his
+rustic bench, he smoked cigarette after cigarette.
+
+"Ought I to have told her? Ought I to tell her to-morrow?"
+
+At moments there would come a lull in the turmoil, an interval of quiet,
+of apparent clearness; and the answer would seem perfectly plain.
+
+"Of course, you ought to tell her. Tell her--and all will be well. She
+has put herself in the supposititious woman's place, and she says, 'He
+ought to tell her.' She says it earnestly, vehemently. That means that
+if she were the woman, she would wish to be told. She will despise the
+conventional barriers--she will be touched, she will be moved. 'No woman
+could be proof against such a compliment.' Go to her to-morrow, and tell
+her--and all will be well."
+
+At these moments he would look up towards the castle, and picture
+the morrow's consummation; and his heart would have a convulsion.
+Imagination flew on the wings of his desire. She stood before him in all
+her sumptuous womanhood, tender and strong and glowing. As he spoke, her
+eyes lightened, her eyes burned, the blood came and went in her cheeks;
+her lips parted. Then she whispered something; and his heart leapt
+terribly; and he called her name--"Beatrice! Beatrice!" Her name
+expressed the inexpressible--the adoring passion, the wild hunger and
+wild triumph of his soul. But now she was moving towards him--she was
+holding out her hands. He caught her in his arms--he held her yielding
+body in his arms. And his heart leapt terribly, terribly. And he
+wondered how he could endure, how he could live through, the hateful
+hours that must elapse before tomorrow would be to-day.
+
+But "hearts, after leaps, ache." Presently the whirl would begin again;
+and then, by and by, in another lull, a contrary answer would seem
+equally plain.
+
+"Tell her, indeed? My dear man, are you mad? She would simply be amazed,
+struck dumb, by your presumption. I can see from here her incredulity--I
+can see the scorn with which she would wither you. It has never dimly
+occurred to her as conceivable that you would venture to be in love with
+her, that you would dare to lift your eyes to her--you who are nothing,
+to her who is all. Yes--nothing, nobody. In her view, you are just a
+harmless nobody, whose society she tolerates for kindness' sake--and
+faute de mieux. It is precisely because she deems you a nobody--because
+she is profoundly conscious of the gulf that separates you from
+her--that she can condescend to be amiably familiar. If you were of a
+rank even remotely approximating to her own, she would be a thousand
+times more circumspect. Remember--she does not dream that you are Felix
+Wildmay. He is a mere name to her; and his story is an amusing little
+romance, perfectly external to herself, which she discusses with
+entirely impersonal interest. Tell her by all means, if you like Say,
+'I am Wildmay--you are Pauline.' And see how amazed she will be, and how
+incensed, and how indignant."
+
+Then he would look up at the castle stonily, in a mood of desperate
+renunciation, and vaguely meditate packing his belongings, and going
+home to England.
+
+At other moments a third answer would seem the plain one: something
+between these extremes of optimism and pessimism, a compromise, it not a
+reconciliation.
+
+"Come! Let us be calm, let us be judicial. The consequences of our
+actions, here below, if hardly ever so good as we could hope, are hardly
+ever so bad as we might fear. Let us regard this matter in the light of
+that guiding principle. True, she does n't dream that you are Wildmay.
+True, if you were abruptly to say to her, 'I am Wildmay--you are the
+woman,' she would be astonished--even, if you will, at first, more or
+less taken aback, disconcerted. But indignant? Why? What is this gulf
+that separates you from her? What are these conventional barriers of
+which you make so much? She is a duchess, she is the daughter of a lord,
+and she is rich. Well, all that is to be regretted. But you are neither
+a plebeian nor a pauper yourself. You are a man of good birth, you are a
+man of some parts, and you have a decent income. It amounts to this--she
+is a great lady, you are a small gentleman. In ordinary circumstances,
+to be sure, so small a gentleman could not ask so great a lady to become
+his wife. But here the circumstances are not ordinary. Destiny has
+meddled in the business. Small gentleman though you are, an unusual and
+subtle relation-ship has been established between you and your great
+lady. She herself says, 'Ordinary rules cannot apply--he ought to tell
+her.' Very good: tell her. She will be astonished, but she will see that
+there is no occasion for resentment. And though the odds are, of course,
+a hundred to one that she will not accept you, still she must treat you
+as an honourable suitor. And whether she accepts you or rejects you,
+it is better to tell her and to have it over, than to go on forever
+dangling this way, like the poor cat in the adage. Tell her--put your
+fate to the touch--hope nothing, fear nothing--and bow to the event."
+
+But even this temperate answer provoked its counter-answer.
+
+"The odds are a hundred to one, a thousand to one, that she will not
+accept you. And if you tell her, and she does not accept you, she will
+not allow you to see her any more, you will be exiled from her presence.
+And I thought, you did not wish to be exiled from her presence, You
+would stake, then, this great privilege, the privilege of seeing her, of
+knowing her, upon a. chance that has a thousand to one against it. You
+make light of the conventional barriers--but the principal barrier of
+them all, you are forgetting. She is a Roman Catholic, and a devout one.
+Marry a Protestant? She would as soon think of marrying a Paynim Turk."
+
+In the end, no doubt, a kind of exhaustion followed upon his excitement.
+Questions and answers suspended themselves; and he could only look up
+towards Ventirose, and dumbly wish that he was there. The distance was
+so trifling--in five minutes he could traverse it--the law seemed absurd
+and arbitrary, which condemned him to sit apart, free only to look and
+wish.
+
+It was in this condition of mind that Marietta found him, when she came
+to announce dinner.
+
+Peter gave himself a shake. The sight of the brown old woman, with
+her homely, friendly face, brought him back to small things, to actual
+things; and that, if it was n't a comfort, was, at any rate, a relief.
+
+"Dinner?" he questioned. "Do peris at the gates of Eden DINE?"
+
+"The soup is on the table," said Marietta.
+
+He rose, casting a last glance towards the castle.
+
+            Towers and battlements...
+            Bosomed high in tufted trees,
+            Where perhaps some beauty lies,
+            The cynosure of neighbouring eyes."
+
+He repeated the lines in an undertone, and went in to dinner. And then
+the restorative spirit of nonsense descended upon him.
+
+"Marietta," he asked, "what is your attitude towards the question of
+mixed marriages?"
+
+Marietta wrinkled her brow.
+
+"Mixed marriages? What is that, Signorino?"
+
+"Marriages between Catholics and Protestants," he explained.
+
+"Protestants?" Her brow was still a network. "What things are they?"
+
+"They are things--or perhaps it would be less invidious to say
+people--who are not Catholics--who repudiate Catholicism as a deadly and
+soul-destroying error."
+
+"Jews?" asked Marietta.
+
+"No--not exactly. They are generally classified as Christians. But
+they protest, you know. Protesto, protestare, verb, active, first
+conjugation. 'Mi pare che la donna protesta troppo,' as the poet
+sings. They're Christians, but they protest against the Pope and the
+Pretender."
+
+"The Signorino means Freemasons," said Marietta.
+
+"No, he does n't," said Peter. "He means Protestants."
+
+"But pardon, Signorino," she insisted; "if they are not Catholics,
+they must be Freemasons or Jews. They cannot be Christians.
+Christian--Catholic: it is the same. All Christians are Catholics."
+
+"Tu quoque!" he cried. "You regard the terms as interchangeable? I 've
+heard the identical sentiment similarly enunciated by another. Do I look
+like a Freemason?"
+
+She bent her sharp old eyes upon him studiously for a moment. Then she
+shook her head.
+
+"No," she answered slowly. "I do not think that the Signorino looks like
+a Freemason."
+
+"A Jew, then?"
+
+"Mache! A Jew? The Signorino!" She shrugged derision.
+
+"And yet I'm what they call a Protestant," he said.
+
+"No," said she.
+
+"Yes," said he. "I refer you to my sponsors in baptism. A regular, true
+blue moderate High Churchman and Tory, British and Protestant to the
+backbone, with 'Frustrate their Popish tricks' writ large all over me.
+You have never by any chance married a Protestant yourself?" he asked.
+
+"No, Signorino. I have never married any one. But it was not for the
+lack of occasions. Twenty, thirty young men courted me when I was a
+girl. But--mica!--I would not look at them. When men are young they are
+too unsteady for husbands; when they are old they have the rheumatism."
+
+"Admirably philosophised," he approved. "But it sometimes happens that
+men are neither young nor old. There are men of thirty-five--I have even
+heard that there are men of forty. What of them?"
+
+"There is a proverb, Signorino, which says, Sposi di quarant' anni son
+mai sempre tiranni," she informed him.
+
+"For the matter of that," he retorted, "there is a proverb which says,
+Love laughs at locksmiths."
+
+"Non capisco," said Marietta.
+
+"That's merely because it's English," said he. "You'd understand fast
+enough if I should put it in Italian. But I only quoted it to show the
+futility of proverbs. Laugh at locksmiths, indeed! Why, it can't even
+laugh at such an insignificant detail as a Papist's prejudices. But
+I wish I were a duke and a millionaire. Do you know any one who could
+create me a duke and endow me with a million?"
+
+"No, Signorino," she answered, shaking her head.
+
+"Fragrant Cytherea, foam-born Venus, deathless Aphrodite, cannot,
+goddess though she is," he complained. "The fact is, I 'm feeling
+rather undone. I think I will ask you to bring me a bottle of
+Asti-spumante--some of the dry kind, with the white seal. I 'll try
+to pretend that it's champagne. To tell or not to tell--that is the
+question.
+
+           'A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
+            With the dream of, meet death with--
+
+And yet, if you can believe me, the man who penned those lines had never
+seen her. He penned another line equally pat to the situation, though he
+had never seen me, either
+
+           'Is there no method to tell her in Spanish?"
+
+But you can't imagine how I detest that vulgar use of 'pen' for
+'write'--as if literature were a kind of pig. However, it's perhaps
+no worse than the use of Asti for champagne. One should n't be too
+fastidious. I must really try to think of some method of telling her in
+Spanish."
+
+Marietta went to fetch the Asti.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+When Peter rose next morning, he pulled a grimace at the departed night.
+
+"You are a detected cheat," he cried, "an unmasked impostor. You live
+upon your reputation as a counsellor--'tis the only reason why we bear
+with you. La nuit porte conseil! Yet what counsel have you brought to
+me?--and I at the pass where my need is uttermost. Shall I go to her
+this afternoon, and unburden my soul--or shall I not? You have left
+me where you found me--in the same fine, free, and liberal state of
+vacillation. Discredited oracle!"
+
+He was standing before his dressing-table, brushing his hair. The image
+in the glass frowned back at him. Then something struck him.
+
+"At all events, we'll go this morning to Spiaggia, and have our hair
+cut," he resolved.
+
+So he walked to the village, and caught the ten o'clock omnibus for
+Spiaggia. And after he had had his hair cut, he went to the Hotel de
+Russie, and lunched in the garden. And after luncheon, of course, he
+entered the grounds of the Casino, and strolled backwards and forwards,
+one of a merry procession, on the terrace by the lakeside. The gay
+toilets of the women, their bright-coloured hats and sunshades, made
+the terrace look like a great bank of monstrous moving flowers. The band
+played brisk accompaniments to the steady babble of voices, Italian,
+English, German. The pure air was shot with alien scents--the women's
+perfumery, the men's cigarette-smoke. The marvellous blue waters crisped
+in the breeze, and sparkled in the sun; and the smooth snows of Monte
+Sfiorito loomed so near, one felt one could almost put out one's stick
+and scratch one's name upon them.... And here, as luck would have it,
+Peter came face to face with Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+
+"How do you do?" said she, offering her hand.
+
+"How do you do?" said he.
+
+"It's a fine day," said she.
+
+"Very," said he.
+
+"Shall I make you a confidence?" she asked.
+
+"Do," he answered.
+
+"Are you sure I can trust you?" She scanned his face dubiously.
+
+"Try it and see," he urged.
+
+"Well, then, if you must know, I was thirsting to take a table and call
+for coffee; but having no man at hand to chaperon me, I dared not."
+
+"Je vous en prie," cried Peter, with a gesture of gallantry; and he
+led her to one of the round marble tables. "Due caffe," he said to the
+brilliant creature (chains, buckles, ear-rings, of silver filigree,
+and head-dress and apron of flame-red silk) who came to learn their
+pleasure.
+
+"Softly, softly," put in Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. "Not a drop of
+coffee for me. An orange-sherbet, if you please. Coffee was a figure of
+speech--a generic term for light refreshments."
+
+Peter laughed, and amended his order.
+
+"Do you see those three innocent darlings playing together, under the
+eye of their governess, by the Wellingtonia yonder?" enquired the lady.
+
+"The little girl in white and the two boys?" asked Peter.
+
+"Precisely," said she. "Such as they are, they're me own."
+
+"Really?" he responded, in the tone of profound and sympathetic interest
+we are apt to affect when parents begin about their children.
+
+"I give you my word for it," she assured him. "But I mention the fact,
+not in a spirit of boastfulness, but merely to show you that I 'm not
+entirely alone and unprotected. There's an American at our hotel, by the
+bye, who goes up and down telling every one who'll listen that it ought
+to be Washingtonia, and declaiming with tears in his eyes against the
+arrogance of the English in changing Washington to Wellington. As he's
+a respectable-looking man with grown-up daughters, I should think very
+likely he's right."
+
+"Very likely," said Peter. "It's an American tree, is n't it?"
+
+"Whether it is n't or whether it is," said she, "one thing is
+undeniable: you English are the coldest-blooded animals south of the
+Arctic Circle."
+
+"Oh--? Are we?" he doubted.
+
+"You are that," she affirmed, with sorrowing emphasis.
+
+"Ah, well," he reflected, "the temperature of our blood does n't matter.
+We're, at any rate, notoriously warm-hearted."
+
+"Are you indeed?" she exclaimed. "If you are, it's a mighty quiet kind
+of notoriety, let me tell you, and a mighty cold kind of warmth."
+
+Peter laughed.
+
+"You're all for prudence and expediency. You're the slaves of your
+reason. You're dominated by the head, not by the heart. You're little
+better than calculating-machines. Are you ever known, now, for instance,
+to risk earth and heaven, and all things between them, on a sudden
+unthinking impulse?"
+
+"Not often, I daresay," he admitted.
+
+"And you sit there as serene as a brazen statue, and own it without a
+quaver," she reproached him.
+
+"Surely," he urged, "in my character of Englishman, it behooves me to
+appear smug and self-satisfied?"
+
+"You're right," she agreed. "I wonder," she continued, after a moment's
+pause, during which her eyes looked thoughtful, "I wonder whether you
+would fall upon and annihilate a person who should venture to offer you
+a word of well-meant advice."
+
+"I should sit as serene as a brazen statue, and receive it without a
+quaver," he promised.
+
+"Well, then," said she, leaning forward a little, and dropping her
+voice, "why don't you take your courage in both hands, and ask her?"
+
+Peter stared.
+
+"Be guided by me--and do it," she said.
+
+"Do what?" he puzzled.
+
+"Ask her to marry you, of course," she returned amiably. Then, without
+allowing him time to shape an answer, "Touche!" she cried, in triumph.
+"I 've brought the tell-tale colour to your cheek. And you a brazen
+statue! 'They do not love who do not show their love.' But, in faith,
+you show yours to any one who'll be at pains to watch you. Your eyes
+betray you as often as ever you look at her. I had n't observed you for
+two minutes by the clock, when I knew your secret as well as if you 'd
+chosen me for your confessor. But what's holding you back? You
+can't expect her to do the proposing. Now curse me for a meddlesome
+Irishwoman, if you will--but why don't you throw yourself at her feet,
+and ask her, like a man?"
+
+"How can I?" said Peter, abandoning any desire he may have felt to beat
+about the bush. Nay, indeed, it is very possible he welcomed, rather
+than resented, the Irishwoman's meddling.
+
+"What's to prevent you?" said she.
+
+"Everything," said he.
+
+"Everything is nothing. That?"
+
+"Dear lady! She is hideously rich, for one thing."
+
+"Getaway with you!" was the dear lady's warm expostulation. "What
+has money to do with the question, if a man's in love? But that's the
+English of it--there you are with your cold-blooded calculation. You
+chain up your natural impulses as if they were dangerous beasts. Her
+money never saved you from succumbing to her enchantments. Why should it
+bar you from declaring your passion."
+
+"There's a sort of tendency in society," said Peter, "to look upon the
+poor man who seeks the hand of a rich woman as a fortunehunter."
+
+"A fig for the opinion of society," she cried. "The only opinion you
+should consider is the opinion of the woman you adore. I was an heiress
+myself; and when Teddy O'Donovan proposed to me, upon my conscience
+I believe the sole piece of property he possessed in the world was a
+corkscrew. So much for her ducats!"
+
+Peter laughed.
+
+"Men, after coffee, are frequently in the habit of smoking," said she.
+"You have my sanction for a cigarette. It will keep you in countenance."
+
+"Thank you," said Peter, and lit his cigarette.
+
+"And surely, it's a countenance you'll need, to be going on like that
+about her money. However--if you can find a ray of comfort in the
+information--small good will her future husband get of it, even if he is
+a fortunehunter: for she gives the bulk of it away in charity, and I 'm
+doubtful if she keeps two thousand a year for her own spending."
+
+"Really?" said Peter; and for a breathing-space it seemed to him that
+there was a ray of comfort in the information.
+
+"Yes, you may rate her at two thousand a year," said Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence. "I suppose you can match that yourself. So the disparity
+disappears."
+
+The ray of comfort had flickered for a second, and gone out.
+
+"There are unfortunately other disparities," he remarked gloomily.
+
+"Put a name on them," said she.
+
+"There's her rank."
+
+His impetuous adviser flung up a hand of scorn.
+
+"Her rank, do you say?" she cried. "To the mischief with her rank.
+What's rank to love? A woman is only a woman, whether she calls herself
+a duchess or a dairy-maid. A woman with any spirit would marry a bank
+manager, if she loved him. A man's a man. You should n't care that for
+her rank."
+
+"That," was a snap of Mrs. O' Donovan Florence's fingers.
+
+"I suppose you know," said Peter, "that I am a Protestant."
+
+"Are you--you poor benighted creature? Well, that's easily remedied. Go
+and get yourself baptised directly."
+
+She waved her hand towards the town, as if to recommend his immediate
+procedure in quest of a baptistery.
+
+Peter laughed again.
+
+"I 'm afraid that's more easily said than done."
+
+"Easy!" she exclaimed. "Why, you've only to stand still and let yourself
+be sprinkled. It's the priest who does the work. Don't tell me," she
+added, with persuasive inconsequence, "that you'll allow a little thing
+like being in love with a woman to keep you back from professing the
+true faith."
+
+"Ah, if I were convinced that it is true," he sighed, still laughing.
+
+"What call have you to doubt it? And anyhow, what does it matter whether
+you 're convinced or not? I remember, when I was a school-girl, I never
+was myself convinced of the theorems of Euclid; but I professed them
+gladly, for the sake of the marks they brought; and the eternal verities
+of mathematics remained unshaken by my scepticism."
+
+"Your reasoning is subtle," laughed Peter. "But the worst of it is, if I
+were ten times a Catholic, she wouldn't have me. So what's the use?"
+
+"You never can tell whether a woman will have you or not, until you
+offer yourself. And even if she refuses you, is that a ground for
+despair? My own husband asked me three times, and three times I said no.
+And then he took to writing verses--and I saw there was but one way to
+stop him. So we were married. Ask her; ask her again--and again. You can
+always resort in the end to versification. And now," the lady concluded,
+rising, "I have spoken, and I leave you to your fate. I'm obliged
+to return to the hotel, to hold a bed of justice. It appears that my
+innocent darlings, beyond there, innocent as they look, have managed
+among them to break the electric light in my sitting-room. They're to be
+arraigned before me at three for an instruction criminelle. Put what I
+'ve said in your pipe, and smoke it--'tis a mother's last request. If
+I 've not succeeded in determining you, don't pretend, at least, that I
+haven't encouraged you a bit. Put what I 've said in your pipe, and see
+whether, by vigorous drawing, you can't fan the smouldering fires of
+encouragement into a small blaze of determination."
+
+Peter resumed his stroll backwards and forwards by the lakeside.
+Encouragement was all very well; but... "Shall I--shall I not? Shall
+I--shall I not? Shall I--shall I not?" The eternal question went
+tick-tack, tick-tack, to the rhythm of his march. He glared at vacancy,
+and tried hard to make up his mind.
+
+"I'm afraid I must be somewhat lacking in decision of character," he
+said, with pathetic wonder.
+
+Then suddenly he stamped his foot.
+
+"Come! An end to this tergiversation. Do it. Do it," cried his manlier
+soul.
+
+"I will," he resolved all at once, drawing a deep breath, and clenching
+his fists.
+
+He left the Casino, and set forth to walk to Ventirose. He could not
+wait for the omnibus, which would not leave till four. He must strike
+while his will was hot.
+
+He walked rapidly; in less than an hour he had reached the tall gilded
+grille of the park. He stopped for an instant, and looked up the
+straight avenue of chestnuts, to the western front of the castle, softly
+alight in the afternoon sun. He put his hand upon the pendent bell-pull
+of twisted iron, to summon the porter. In another second he would have
+rung, he would have been admitted.... And just then one of the little
+demons that inhabit the circumambient air, called his attention to an
+aspect of the situation which he had not thought of.
+
+"Wait a bit," it whispered in his ear. "You were there only yesterday.
+It can't fail, therefore, to seem extraordinary, your calling again
+to-day. You must be prepared with an excuse, an explanation. But
+suppose, when you arrive, suppose that (like the lady in the ballad) she
+greets you with 'a glance of cold surprise'--what then, my dear? Why,
+then, it's obvious, you can't allege the true explanation--can you?
+If she greets you with a glance of cold, surprise, you 'll have your
+answer, as it were, before the fact you 'll know that there's no manner
+of hope for you; and the time for passionate avowals will automatically
+defer itself. But then--? How will you justify your visit? What face can
+you put on?"
+
+"H'm," assented Peter, "there's something in that."
+
+"There's a great deal in that," said the demon. "You must have an excuse
+up your sleeve, a pretext. A true excuse is a fine thing in its way;
+but when you come to a serious emergency, an alternative false excuse is
+indispensable."
+
+"H'm," said Peter.
+
+However, if there are demons in the atmosphere, there are gods in the
+machine--("Paraschkine even goes so far as to maintain that there are
+more gods in the machine than have ever been taken from it.")
+While Peter stood still, pondering the demon's really rather cogent
+intervention, his eye was caught by something that glittered in the
+grass at the roadside.
+
+"The Cardinal's snuff-box," he exclaimed, picking it up.
+
+The Cardinal had dropped his snuff-box. Here was an excuse, and to
+spare. Peter rang the bell.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+And, like the lady in the ballad, sure enough, she greeted his arrival
+with a glance of cold surprise.
+
+At all events, eyebrows raised, face unsmiling, it was a glance that
+clearly supplemented her spoken "How do you do?" by a tacit (perhaps
+self-addressed?) "What can bring him here?"
+
+You or I, indeed, or Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, in the fulness of our
+knowledge, might very likely have interpreted it rather as a glance of
+nervous apprehension. Anyhow, it was a glance that perfectly checked the
+impetus of his intent. Something snapped and gave way within him; and
+he needed no further signal that the occasion for passionate avowals was
+not the present.
+
+And thereupon befell a scene that was really quite too absurd, that was
+really childish, a scene over the memory of which, I must believe, they
+themselves have sometimes laughed together; though, at the moment, its
+absurdity held, for him at least, elements of the tragic.
+
+He met her in the broad gravelled carriage-sweep, before the great
+hall-door. She had on her hat and gloves, as if she were just going out.
+It seemed to him that she was a little pale; her eyes seemed darker than
+usual, and graver. Certainly--cold surprise, or nervous apprehension, as
+you will--her attitude was by no means cordial. It was not oncoming. It
+showed none of her accustomed easy, half-humorous, wholly good-humoured
+friendliness. It was decidedly the attitude of a person standing off,
+shut in, withheld.
+
+"I have never seen her in the least like this before," he thought, as
+he looked at her pale face, her dark, grave eyes; "I have never seen her
+more beautiful. And there is not one single atom of hope for me."
+
+"How do you do?" she said, unsmiling and waited, as who should invite
+him to state his errand. She did not offer him her hand but, for that
+matter, (she might have pleaded), she could not, very well: for one of
+her hands held her sunshade, and the other held an embroidered silk bag,
+woman's makeshift for a pocket.
+
+And then, capping the first pang of his disappointment, a kind of
+anger seized him. After all, what right had she to receive him in this
+fashion?--as if he were an intrusive stranger. In common civility, in
+common justice, she owed it to him to suppose that he would not be there
+without abundant reason.
+
+And now, with Peter angry, the absurd little scene began.
+
+Assuming an attitude designed to be, in its own way, as reticent as
+hers, "I was passing your gate," he explained, "when I happened to find
+this, lying by the roadside. I took the liberty of bringing it to you."
+
+He gave her the Cardinal's snuff box, which, in spite of her hands'
+preoccupation, she was able to accept.
+
+"A liberty!" he thought, grinding his teeth. "Yes! No doubt she would
+have wished me to leave it with the porter at the lodge. No doubt she
+deems it an act of officiousness on my part to have found it at all."
+
+And his anger mounted.
+
+"How very good of you," she said. "My uncle could not think where he had
+mislaid it."
+
+"I am very fortunate to be the means of restoring it," said he.
+
+Then, after a second's suspension, as she said nothing (she kept her
+eyes on the snuffbox, examining it as if it were quite new to her), he
+lifted his hat, and bowed, preparatory to retiring down the avenue.
+
+"Oh, but my uncle will wish to thank you," she exclaimed, looking up,
+with a kind of start. "Will you not come in? I--I will see whether he is
+disengaged."
+
+She made a tentative movement towards the door. She had thawed
+perceptibly.
+
+But even as she thawed, Peter, in his anger, froze and stiffened. "I
+will see whether he is disengaged." The expression grated. And perhaps,
+in effect, it was not a particularly felicitous expression. But if the
+poor woman was suffering from nervous apprehension--?
+
+"I beg you on no account to disturb Cardinal Udeschini," he returned
+loftily. "It is not a matter of the slightest consequence."
+
+And even as he stiffened, she unbent.
+
+"But it is a matter of consequence to him, to us," she said, faintly
+smiling. "We have hunted high and low for it. We feared it was lost for
+good. It must have fallen from his pocket when he was walking. He will
+wish to thank you."
+
+"I am more than thanked already," said Peter. Alas (as Monsieur de la
+Pallisse has sagely noted), when we aim to appear dignified, how often
+do we just succeed in appearing churlish.
+
+And to put a seal upon this ridiculous encounter, to make it
+irrevocable, he lifted his hat again, and turned away.
+
+"Oh, very well," murmured the Duchessa, in a voice that did not reach
+him. If it had reached him, perhaps he would have come back, perhaps
+things might have happened. I think there was regret in her voice, as
+well as despite. She stood for a minute, as he tramped down the avenue,
+and looked after him, with those unusually dark, grave eyes. At last,
+making a little gesture--as of regret? despite? impatience?--she went
+into the house.
+
+"Here is your snuff-box," she said to the Cardinal.
+
+The old man put down his Breviary (he was seated by an open window,
+getting through his office), and smiled at the snuff box fondly,
+caressing it with his finger. Afterwards, he shook it, opened it, and
+took a pinch of snuff.
+
+"Where did you find it?" he enquired.
+
+"It was found by that Mr. Marchdale," she said, "in the road, outside
+the gate. You must have let it drop this morning, when you were walking
+with Emilia."
+
+"That Mr. Marchdale?" exclaimed the Cardinal. "What a coincidence."
+
+"A coincidence--?" questioned Beatrice.
+
+"To be sure," said he. "Was it not to Mr. Marchdale that I owed it in
+the first instance?"
+
+"Oh--? Was it? I had fancied that you owed it to me."
+
+"Yes--but," he reminded her, whilst the lines deepened about his
+humorous old mouth, "but as a reward of my virtue in conspiring with you
+to convert him. And, by the way, how is his conversion progressing?"
+
+The Cardinal looked up, with interest.
+
+"It is not progressing at all. I think there is no chance of it,"
+answered Beatrice, in a tone that seemed to imply a certain irritation.
+
+"Oh--?" said the Cardinal.
+
+"No," said she.
+
+"I thought he had shown 'dispositions'?" said the Cardinal.
+
+"That was a mistake. He has shown none. He is a very tiresome and silly
+person. He is not worth converting," she declared succinctly.
+
+"Good gracious!" said the Cardinal.
+
+He resumed his office. But every now and again he would pause, and look
+out of the window, with the frown of a man meditating something; then he
+would shake his head significantly, and take snuff.
+
+Peter tramped down the avenue, angry and sick.
+
+Her reception of him had not only administered an instant death-blow
+to his hopes as a lover, but in its ungenial aloofness it had cruelly
+wounded his pride as a man. He felt snubbed and humiliated. Oh, true
+enough, she had unbent a little, towards the end. But it was the look
+with which she had first greeted him--it was the air with which she had
+waited for him to state his errand--that stung, and rankled, and would
+not be forgotten.
+
+He was angry with her, angry with circumstances, with life, angry with
+himself.
+
+"I am a fool--and a double fool--and a triple fool," he said. "I am
+a fool ever to have thought of her at all; a double fool ever to have
+allowed myself to think so much of her; a triple and quadruple and
+quintuple idiot ever to have imagined for a moment that anything could
+come of it. I have wasted time enough. The next best thing to winning is
+to know when you are beaten. I acknowledge myself beaten. I will go back
+to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed."
+
+He gazed darkly round the familiar valley, with eyes that abjured it.
+
+Olympus, no doubt, laughed.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+"I shall go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed."
+
+But he took no immediate steps to get them packed.
+
+"Hope," observes the clear-sighted French publicist quoted in the
+preceding chapter, "hope dies hard."
+
+Hope, Peter fancied, had received its death-blow that afternoon.
+Already, that evening, it began to revive a little. It was very much
+enfeebled; it was very indefinite and diffident; but it was not dead. It
+amounted, perhaps, to nothing more than a vague kind of feeling that
+he would not, on the whole, make his departure for England quite so
+precipitate as, in the first heat of his anger, the first chill of his
+despair, he had intended. Piano, piano! He would move slowly, he would
+do nothing rash.
+
+But he was not happy, he was very far from happy. He spent a wretched
+night, a wretched, restless morrow. He walked about a great deal--about
+his garden, and afterwards, when the damnable iteration of his garden
+had become unbearable, he walked to the village, and took the riverside
+path, under the poplars, along the racing Aco, and followed it, as
+the waters paled and broadened, for I forget how many joyless,
+unremunerative miles.
+
+When he came home, fagged out and dusty, at dinner time, Marietta
+presented a visiting card to him, on her handsomest salver. She
+presented it with a flourish that was almost a swagger.
+
+Twice the size of an ordinary visiting-card, the fashion of it was
+roughly thus:
+
+                   IL CARDLE UDESCHINI
+          Sacr: Congr: Archiv: et Inscript: Praef:
+
+          Palazzo Udeschini.
+
+And above the legend, was pencilled, in a small oldfashioned hand,
+wonderfully neat and pretty:--
+
+"To thank Mr. Marchdale for his courtesy in returning my snuff-box."
+
+"The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here," said Marietta. There was
+a swagger in her accent. There was also something in her accent that
+seemed to rebuke Peter for his absence.
+
+"I had inferred as much from this," said he, tapping the card. "We
+English, you know, are great at putting two and two together."
+
+"He came in a carriage," said Marietta.
+
+"Not really?" said her master.
+
+"Ang--veramente," she affirmed.
+
+"Was--was he alone?" Peter asked, an obscure little twinge of hope
+stirring in his heart.
+
+"No. Signorino." And then she generalised, with untranslatable
+magniloquence: "Un amplissimo porporato non va mai solo."
+
+Peter ought to have hugged her for that amplissimo porporato. But he was
+selfishly engrossed in his emotions.
+
+"Who was with him?" He tried to throw the question out with a casual
+effect, an effect of unconcern.
+
+"The Signorina Emelia Manfredi was with him," answered Marietta, little
+recking how mere words can stab.
+
+"Oh," said Peter.
+
+"The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was very sorry not to see the
+Signorino," continued Marietta.
+
+"Poor man--was he? Let us trust that time will console him," said Peter,
+callously.
+
+But, "I wonder," he asked himself, "I wonder whether perhaps I was the
+least bit hasty yesterday? If I had stopped, I should have saved the
+Cardinal a journey here to-day--I might have known that he would come,
+these Italians are so punctilious--and then, if I had stopped--if I had
+stopped--possibly--possibly--"
+
+Possibly what? Oh, nothing. And yet, if he had stopped... well, at any
+rate, he would have gained time. The Duchessa had already begun to thaw.
+If he had stopped... He could formulate no precise conclusion to that
+if; but he felt dimly remorseful that he had not stopped, he felt that
+he had indeed been the least bit hasty. And his remorse was somehow
+medicine to his reviving hope.
+
+"After all, I scarcely gave things a fair trial yesterday," he said.
+
+And the corollary of that, of course, was that he might give things a
+further and fairer trial some other day.
+
+But his hope was still hard hurt; he was still in a profound dejection.
+
+"The Signorino is not eating his dinner," cried Marietta, fixing him
+with suspicious, upbraiding eyes.
+
+"I never said I was," he retorted.
+
+"The Signorino is not well?" she questioned, anxious.
+
+"Oh, yes--cosi, cosi; the Signorino is well enough," he answered.
+
+"The dinner"--you could perceive that she brought herself with
+difficulty to frame the dread hypothesis--"the dinner is not good?" Her
+voice sank. She waited, tense, for his reply.
+
+"The dinner," said he, "if one may criticise without eating it, the
+dinner is excellent. I will have no aspersions cast upon my cook."
+
+"Ah-h-h!" breathed Marietta, a tremulous sigh of relief.
+
+"It is not the Signorino, it is not the dinner, it is the world that is
+awry," Peter went on, in reflective melancholy. "'T is the times that
+are out of joint. 'T is the sex, the Sex, that is not well, that is not
+good, that needs a thorough overhauling and reforming."
+
+"Which sex?" asked Marietta.
+
+"The sex," said Peter. "By the unanimous consent of rhetoricians, there
+is but one sex the sex, the fair sex, the unfair sex, the gentle sex,
+the barbaric sex. We men do not form a sex, we do not even form a sect.
+We are your mere hangers-on, camp-followers, satellites--your things,
+your playthings--we are the mere shuttlecocks which you toss hither and
+thither with your battledores, as the wanton mood impels you. We are
+born of woman, we are swaddled and nursed by woman, we are governessed
+by woman; subsequently, we are beguiled by woman, fooled by woman, led
+on, put off, tantalised by woman, fretted and bullied by her; finally,
+last scene of all, we are wrapped in our cerements by woman. Man's
+life, birth, death, turn upon woman, as upon a hinge. I have ever been a
+misanthrope, but now I am seriously thinking of becoming a misogynist as
+well. Would you advise me to-do so?"
+
+"A misogynist? What is that, Signorino?" asked Marietta.
+
+"A woman-hater," he explained; "one who abhors and forswears the sex;
+one who has dashed his rose-coloured spectacles from his eyes, and sees
+woman as she really is, with no illusive glamour; one who has found her
+out. Yes, I think I shall become a misogynist. It is the only way of
+rendering yourself invulnerable, 't is the only safe course. During my
+walk this afternoon, I recollected, from the scattered pigeon-holes of
+memory, and arranged in consequent order, at least a score of good old
+apothegmatic shafts against the sex. Was it not, for example, in the
+grey beginning of days, was it not woman whose mortal taste brought
+sin into the world and all our woe? Was not that Pandora a woman, who
+liberated, from the box wherein they were confined, the swarm of
+winged evils that still afflict us? I will not remind you of St.
+John Chrysostom's golden parable about a temple and the thing it is
+constructed over. But I will come straight to the point, and ask whether
+this is truth the poet sings, when he informs us roundly that 'every
+woman is a scold at heart'?"
+
+Marietta was gazing patiently at the sky. She did not answer.
+
+"The tongue," Peter resumed, "is woman's weapon, even as the fist is
+man's. And it is a far deadlier weapon. Words break no bones--they break
+hearts, instead. Yet were men one-tenth part so ready with their fists,
+as women are with their barbed and envenomed tongues, what savage
+brutes you would think us--would n't you?--and what a rushing trade
+the police-courts would drive, to be sure. That is one of the good
+old cliches that came back to me during my walk. All women are
+alike--there's no choice amongst animated fashion-plates: that is
+another. A woman is the creature of her temper; her husband, her
+children, and her servants are its victims: that is a third. Woman is a
+bundle of pins; man is her pin-cushion. When woman loves, 't is not the
+man she loves, but the man's flattery; woman's love is reflex self-love.
+The man who marries puts himself in irons. Marriage is a bird-cage in
+a garden. The birds without hanker to get in; but the birds within know
+that there is no condition so enviable as that of the birds without.
+Well, speak up. What do you think? Do you advise me to become a
+misogynist?"
+
+"I do not understand, Signorino," said Marietta.
+
+"Of course, you don't," said Peter. "Who ever could understand
+such stuff and nonsense? That's the worst of it. If only one could
+understand, if only one could believe it, one might find peace, one
+might resign oneself. But alas and alas! I have never had any real faith
+in human wickedness; and now, try as I will, I cannot imbue my mind with
+any real faith in the undesirability of woman. That is why you see
+me dissolved in tears, and unable to eat my dinner. Oh, to think, to
+think," he cried with passion, suddenly breaking into English, "to think
+that less than a fortnight ago, less than one little brief fortnight
+ago, she was seated in your kitchen, seated there familiarly, in her wet
+clothes, pouring tea, for all the world as if she was the mistress of
+the house!"
+
+Days passed. He could not go to Ventirose--or, anyhow, he thought
+he could not. He reverted to his old habit of living in his garden,
+haunting the riverside, keeping watchful, covetous eyes turned towards
+the castle. The river bubbled and babbled; the sun shone strong and
+clear; his fountain tinkled; his birds flew about their affairs; his
+flowers breathed forth their perfumes; the Gnisi frowned, the uplands
+westward laughed, the snows of Monte Sfiorito sailed under every colour
+of the calendar except their native white. All was as it had ever
+been--but oh, the difference to him. A week passed. He caught no glimpse
+of the Duchessa. Yet he took no steps to get his boxes packed.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+And then Marietta fell ill.
+
+One morning, when she came into his room, to bring his tea, and to open
+the Venetian blinds that shaded his windows, she failed to salute him
+with her customary brisk "Buon giorno, Signorino."
+
+Noticing which, and wondering, he, from his pillow, called out, "Buon'
+giorno, Marietta."
+
+"Buon' giorno, Signorino," she returned but in a whisper.
+
+"What's the matter? Is there cause for secrecy?" Peter asked.
+
+"I have a cold, Signorino," she whispered, pointing to her chest. "I
+cannot speak."
+
+The Venetian blinds were up by this time; the room was full of sun. He
+looked at her. Something in her face alarmed him. It seemed drawn and
+set, it seemed flushed.
+
+"Come here," he said, with a certain peremptoriness. "Give me your
+hand."
+
+She wiped her brown old hand backwards and forwards across her apron;
+then gave it to him.
+
+It was hot and dry.
+
+"Your cold is feverish," he said. "You must go to bed, and stay there
+till the fever has passed."
+
+"I cannot go to bed, Signorino," she replied.
+
+"Can't you? Have you tried?" asked he.
+
+"No, Signorino," she admitted.
+
+"Well, you never can tell whether you can do a thing or not, until you
+try," said he. "Try to go to bed; and if at first you don't succeed,
+try, try again."
+
+"I cannot go to bed. Who would do the Signorino's work?" was her
+whispered objection.
+
+"Hang the Signorino's work. The Signorino's work will do itself. Have
+you never observed that if you conscientiously neglect to do your work,
+it somehow manages to get done without you? You have a feverish cold;
+you must keep out of draughts; and the only place where you can be sure
+of keeping out of draughts, is bed. Go to bed at once."
+
+She left the room.
+
+But when Peter came downstairs, half an hour later, he heard her moving
+in her kitchen.
+
+"Marietta!" he cried, entering that apartment with the mien of Nemesis.
+"I thought I told you to go to bed."
+
+Marietta cowered a little, and looked sheepish, as one surprised in the
+flagrant fact of misdemeanour.
+
+"Yes, Signorino," she whispered.
+
+"Well--? Do you call this bed?" he demanded.
+
+"No, Signorino," she acknowledged.
+
+"Do you wish to oblige me to put you to bed?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, no, Signorino," she protested, horror in her whisper.
+
+"Then go to bed directly. If you delay any longer, I shall accuse you of
+wilful insubordination."
+
+"Bene, Signorino," reluctantly consented Marietta.
+
+Peter strolled into his garden. Gigi, the gardener, was working there.
+
+"The very man I most desired to meet," said Peter, and beckoned to
+him. "Is there a doctor in the village?" he enquired, when Gigi had
+approached.
+
+"Yes, Signorino. The Syndic is a doctor--Dr. Carretaji."
+
+"Good," said Peter. "Will you go to the village, please, and ask Dr.
+Carretaji if he can make it convenient to call here to-day? Marietta is
+not well."
+
+"Yes, Signorino."
+
+"And stop a bit," said Peter. "Are there such things as women in the
+village?'
+
+"Ah, mache, Signorino! But many, many," answered Gigi, rolling his dark
+eyes sympathetically, and waving his hands.
+
+"I need but one," said Peter. "A woman to come and do Marietta's work
+for a day or two--cook, and clean up, and that sort of thing. Do you
+think you could procure me such a woman?"
+
+"There is my wife, Signorino," suggested Gigi. "If she would content the
+Signorino?"
+
+"Oh? I was n't aware that you were married. A hundred felicitations.
+Yes, your wife, by all means. Ask her to come and rule as Marietta's
+vicereine."
+
+Gigi started for the village.
+
+Peter went into the house, and knocked at Marietta's bed-room door. He
+found her in bed, with her rosary in her hands. If she could not work,
+she would not waste her time. In Marietta's simple scheme of life,
+work and prayer, prayer and work, stood, no doubt, as alternative and
+complementary duties.
+
+"But you are not half warmly enough covered up," said Peter.
+
+He fetched his travelling-rug, and spread it over her. Then he went to
+the kitchen, where she had left a fire burning, and filled a bottle with
+hot water.
+
+"Put this at your feet," he said, returning to Marietta.
+
+"Oh, I cannot allow the Signorino to wait on me like this," the old
+woman mustered voice to murmur.
+
+"The Signorino likes it--it affords him healthful exercise," Peter
+assured her.
+
+Dr. Carretaji came about noon, a fat middleaged man, with a fringe of
+black hair round an ivory-yellow scalp, a massive watch-chain (adorned
+by the inevitable pointed bit of coral), and podgy, hairy hands. But he
+seemed kind and honest, and he seemed to know his business.
+
+"She has a catarrh of the larynx, with, I am afraid, a beginning of
+bronchitis," was his verdict.
+
+"Is there any danger?" Peter asked.
+
+"Not the slightest. She must remain in bed, and take frequent
+nourishment. Hot milk, and now and then beef-tea. I will send some
+medicine. But the great things are nourishment and warmth. I will call
+again to-morrow."
+
+Gigi's wife came. She was a tall, stalwart, blackbrowed, red-cheeked
+young woman, and her name (Gigi's eyes flashed proudly, as he announced
+it) her name was Carolina Maddalena.
+
+Peter had to be in and out of Marietta's room all day, to see that
+she took her beef-tea and milk and medicine regularly. She dozed a good
+deal. When she was awake, she said her rosary.
+
+But next day she was manifestly worse.
+
+"Yes--bronchitis, as I feared," said the doctor. "Danger? No--none, if
+properly looked after. Add a little brandy to her milk, and see that she
+has at least a small cupful every half-hour. I think it would be easier
+for you if you had a nurse. Someone should be with her at night. There
+is a Convent of Mercy at Venzona. If you like, I will telephone for a
+sister."
+
+"Thank you very much. I hope you will," said Peter.
+
+And that afternoon Sister Scholastica arrived, and established herself
+in the sick-room. Sister Scholastica was young, pale, serene, competent.
+But sometimes she had to send for Peter.
+
+"She refuses to take her milk. Possibly she will take it from you," the
+sister said.
+
+Then Peter would assume a half-bluff (perhaps half-wheedling?) tone of
+mastery.
+
+"Come, Marietta! You must take your milk. The Signorino wishes it. You
+must not disobey the Signorino."
+
+And Marietta, with a groan, would rouse herself, and take it, Peter
+holding the cup to her lips.
+
+On the third day, in the morning, Sister Scholastica said, "She imagines
+that she is worse. I do not think so myself. But she keeps repeating
+that she is going to die. She wishes to see a priest. I think it would
+make her feel easier. Can you send for the Parrocco? Please let him know
+that it is not an occasion for the Sacraments. But it would do her good
+if he would come and talk with her."
+
+And the doctor, who arrived just then, having visited Marietta,
+confirmed the sister's opinion.
+
+"She is no worse--she is, if anything, rather better. Her malady is
+taking its natural course. But people of her class always fancy they are
+going to die, if they are ill enough to stay in bed. It is the panic of
+ignorance. Yes, I think it would do her good to see a priest. But there
+is not the slightest occasion for the Sacraments."
+
+So Peter sent Gigi to the village for the Parrocco. And Gigi came back
+with the intelligence that the Parrocco was away, making a retreat, and
+would not return till Saturday. To-day was Wednesday.
+
+"What shall we do now?" Peter asked of Sister Scholastica.
+
+"There is Monsignor Langshawe, at Castel Ventirose," said the sister.
+
+"Could I ask him to come?" Peter doubted.
+
+"Certainly," said the sister. "In a case of illness, the nearest priest
+will always gladly come."
+
+So Peter despatched Gigi with a note to Monsignor Langshawe.
+
+And presently up drove a brougham, with Gigi on the box beside the
+coachman. And from the brougham descended, not Monsignor Langshawe, but
+Cardinal Udeschini, followed by Emilia Manfredi.
+
+The Cardinal gave Peter his hand, with a smile so sweet, so benign, so
+sunny-bright--it was like music, Peter thought; it was like a silent
+anthem.
+
+"Monsignor Langshawe has gone to Scotland, for his holiday. I have come
+in his place. Your man told me of your need," the Cardinal explained.
+
+"I don't know how to thank your Eminence," Peter murmured, and conducted
+him to Marietta's room.
+
+Sister Scholastica genuflected, and kissed the Cardinal's ring, and
+received his Benediction. Then she and Peter withdrew, and went into the
+garden.
+
+The sister joined Emilia, and they walked backwards and forwards
+together, talking. Peter sat on his rustic bench, smoked cigarettes, and
+waited.
+
+Nearly an hour passed.
+
+At length the Cardinal came out.
+
+Peter rose, and went forward to meet him.
+
+The Cardinal was smiling; but about his eyes there was a suggestive
+redness.
+
+"Mr. Marchdale," he said, "your housekeeper is in great distress of
+conscience touching one or two offences she feels she has been guilty
+of towards you. They seem to me, in frankness, somewhat trifling. But
+I cannot persuade her to accept my view. She will not be happy till she
+has asked and received your pardon for them."
+
+"Offences towards me?" Peter wondered. "Unless excess of patience with
+a very trying employer constitutes an offence, she has been guilty of
+none."
+
+"Never mind," said the Cardinal. "Her conscience accuses her--she must
+satisfy it. Will you come?"
+
+The Cardinal sat down at the head of Marietta's bed, and took her hand.
+
+"Now, dear," he said, with the gentleness, the tenderness, of one
+speaking to a beloved child, "here is Mr. Marchdale. Tell him what you
+have on your mind. He is ready to hear and to forgive you."
+
+Marietta fixed her eyes anxiously on Peter's face.
+
+"First," she whispered, "I wish to beg the Signorino to pardon all this
+trouble I am making for him. I am the Signorino's servant; but instead
+of serving, I make trouble for him."
+
+She paused. The Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+
+Peter answered, "Marietta, if you talk like that, you will make the
+Signorino cry. You are the best servant that ever lived. You are putting
+me to no trouble at all. You are giving me a chance--which I should be
+glad of, except that it involves your suffering--to show my affection
+for you, and my gratitude."
+
+"There, dear," said the Cardinal to her, "you see the Signorino makes
+nothing of that. Now the next thing. Go on."
+
+"I have to ask the Signorino's forgiveness for my impertinence,"
+whispered Marietta.
+
+"Impertinence--?" faltered Peter. "You have never been impertinent."
+
+"Scusi, Signorino," she went on, in her whisper. "I have sometimes
+contradicted the Signorino. I contradicted the Signorino when he told
+me that St. Anthony of Padua was born in Lisbon. It is impertinent of
+a servant to contradict her master. And now his most high Eminence says
+the Signorino was right. I beg the Signorino to forgive me."
+
+Again the Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+
+"You dear old woman," Peter half laughed, half sobbed, "how can you ask
+me to forgive a mere difference of opinion? You--you dear old thing."
+
+The Cardinal smiled, and patted Marietta's hand.
+
+"The Signorino is too good," Marietta sighed.
+
+"Go on, dear," said the Cardinal.
+
+"I have been guilty of the deadly sin of evil speaking. I have spoken
+evil of the Signorino," she went on. "I said--I said to people--that the
+Signorino was simple--that he was simple and natural. I thought so
+then. Now I know it is not so. I know it is only that the Signorino is
+English."
+
+Once more the Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+
+Again Peter half laughed, half sobbed.
+
+"Marietta! Of course I am simple and natural. At least, I try to be.
+Come! Look up. Smile. Promise you will not worry about these things any
+more."
+
+She looked up, she smiled faintly.
+
+"The Signorino is too good," she whispered.
+
+After a little interval of silence, "Now, dear," said the Cardinal, "the
+last thing of all."
+
+Marietta gave a groan, turning her head from side to side on her pillow.
+
+"You need not be afraid," said the Cardinal. "Mr. Marchdale will
+certainly forgive you."
+
+"Oh-h-h," groaned Marietta. She stared at the ceiling for an instant.
+
+The Cardinal patted her hand. "Courage, courage," he said.
+
+"Oh--Signorino mio," she groaned again, "this you never can forgive me.
+It is about the little pig, the porcellino. The Signorino remembers the
+little pig, which he called Francesco?"
+
+"Yes," answered Peter.
+
+"The Signorino told me to take the little pig away, to find a home for
+him. And I told the Signorino that I would take him to my nephew, who is
+a farmer, towards Fogliamo. The Signorino remembers?"
+
+"Yes," answered Peter. "Yes, you dear old thing. I remember."
+
+Marietta drew a deep breath, summoned her utmost fortitude.
+
+"Well, I did not take him to my nephew. The--the Signorino ate him."
+
+Peter could hardly keep from laughing. He could only utter a kind of
+half-choked "Oh?"
+
+"Yes," whispered Marietta. "He was bought with the Signorino's money.
+I did not like to see the Signorino's money wasted. So I deceived the
+Signorino. You ate him as a chicken-pasty."
+
+This time Peter did laugh, I am afraid. Even the Cardinal--well, his
+smile was perilously near a titter. He took a big pinch of snuff.
+
+"I killed Francesco, and I deceived the Signorino. I am very sorry,"
+Marietta said.
+
+Peter knelt down at her bedside.
+
+"Marietta! Your conscience is too sensitive. As for killing
+Francesco--we are all mortal, he could not have lived forever. And as
+for deceiving the Signorino, you did it for his own good. I remember
+that chicken-pasty. It was the best chicken-pasty I have ever tasted.
+You must not worry any more about the little pig."
+
+Marietta turned her face towards him, and smiled.
+
+"The Signorino forgives his servant?" she whispered.
+
+Peter could not help it. He bent forward, and kissed her brown old
+cheek.
+
+"She will be easier now," said the Cardinal. "I will stay with her a
+little longer."
+
+Peter went out. The scene had been childish--do you say?--ridiculous,
+almost farcical indeed? And yet, somehow, it seemed to Peter that his
+heart was full of unshed tears. At the same time, as he thought of the
+Cardinal, as he saw his face, his smile, as he heard the intonations of
+his voice, the words he had spoken, as he thought of the way he had held
+Marietta's hand and patted it--at the same time a kind of strange
+joy seemed to fill his heart, a strange feeling of exaltation, of
+enthusiasm.
+
+"What a heavenly old man," he said.
+
+In the garden Sister Scholastica and Emilia were still walking together.
+
+They halted, when Peter came out; and Emilia said, "With your consent,
+Signore, Sister Scholastica has accepted me as her lieutenant. I will
+come every morning, and sit with Marietta during the day. That will
+relieve the sister, who has to be up with her at night."
+
+And every morning after that, Emilia came, walking through the park,
+and crossing the river by the ladder-bridge, which Peter left now
+permanently in its position. And once or twice a week, in the afternoon,
+the Cardinal would drive up in the brougham, and, having paid a little
+visit to Marietta, would drive Emilia home.
+
+In the sick-room Emilia would read to Marietta, or say the rosary for
+her.
+
+Marietta mended steadily day by day. At the end of a fortnight she was
+able to leave her bed for an hour or two in the afternoon, and sit in
+the sun in the garden. Then Sister Scholastica went back to her convent
+at Venzona. At the end of the third week Marietta could be up all day.
+But Gigi's stalwart Carolina Maddalena continued to rule as vicereine in
+the kitchen. And Emilia continued to come every morning.
+
+"Why does the Duchessa never come?" Peter wondered. "It would be decent
+of her to come and see the poor old woman."
+
+Whenever he thought of Cardinal Udeschini, the same strange feeling of
+joy would spring up in his heart, which he had felt when he had left the
+beautiful old man with Marietta, on the day of his first visit. In the
+beginning he could only give this feeling a very general and indefinite
+expression. "He is a man who renews one's faith in things, who renews
+one's faith in human nature." But gradually, I suppose, the feeling
+crystallised; and at last, in due season, it found for itself an
+expression that was not so indefinite.
+
+It was in the afternoon, and he had just conducted the Cardinal and
+Emilia to their carriage. He stood at his gate for a minute, and watched
+the carriage as it rolled away.
+
+"What a heavenly old man, what a heavenly old man," he thought.
+
+Then, still looking after the carriage, before turning back into his
+garden, he heard himself repeat, half aloud
+
+       "Nor knowest thou what argument
+        Thy life to thy neighbour's creed hath lent."
+
+The words had come to his lips, and were pronounced, were addressed to
+his mental image of the Cardinal, without any conscious act of volition
+on his part. He heard them with a sort of surprise, almost as if some
+one else had spoken them. He could not in the least remember what poem
+they were from, he could not even remember what poet they were by. Were
+they by Emerson? It was years since he had read a line of Emerson's.
+
+All that evening the couplet kept running in his head. And the feeling
+of joy, of enthusiasm, in his heart, was not so strange now. But I think
+it was intensified.
+
+The next time the Cardinal arrived at Villa Floriano, and gave Peter his
+hand, Peter did not merely shake it, English fashion, as he had hitherto
+done.
+
+The Cardinal looked startled.
+
+Then his eyes searched Peter's face for a second, keenly interrogative.
+Then they softened; and a wonderful clear light shone in them, a
+wonderful pure, sweet light.
+
+"Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus, Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus,"
+he said, making the Sign of the Cross.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+Up at the castle, Cardinal Udeschini was walking backwards and forwards
+on the terrace, reading his Breviary.
+
+Beatrice was seated under the white awning, at the terrace-end, doing
+some kind of needlework.
+
+Presently the Cardinal came to a standstill near her, and closed his
+book, putting his finger in it, to keep the place.
+
+"It will be, of course, a great loss to Casa Udeschini, when you marry,"
+he remarked.
+
+Beatrice looked up, astonishment on her brow.
+
+"When I marry?" she exclaimed. "Well, if ever there was a thunderbolt
+from a clear sky!"
+
+And she laughed.
+
+"Yes-when you marry," the Cardinal repeated, with conviction. "You are a
+young woman--you are twenty-eight years old. You will, marry. It is only
+right that you should marry. You have not the vocation for a religious.
+Therefore you must marry. But it will be a great loss to the house of
+Udeschini."
+
+"Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof," said Beatrice, laughing
+again. "I haven't the remotest thought of marrying. I shall never
+marry."
+
+"Il ne faut jamais dire a la fontaine, je ne boirai pas de ton eau,"
+his Eminence cautioned her, whilst the lines of humour about his mouth
+emphasised themselves, and his grey eyes twinkled. "Other things equal,
+marriage is as much the proper state for the laity, as celibacy is the
+proper state for the clergy. You will marry. It would be selfish of us
+to oppose your marrying. You ought to marry. But it will be a great loss
+to the family--it will be a great personal loss to me. You are as dear
+to me as any of my blood. I am always forgetting that we are uncle and
+niece by courtesy only."
+
+"I shall never marry. But nothing that can happen to me can ever make
+the faintest difference in my feeling for you. I hope you know how much
+I love you?" She looked into his eyes, smiling her love. "You are only
+my uncle by courtesy? But you are more than an uncle--you have been like
+a father to me, ever since I left my convent."
+
+The Cardinal returned her smile.
+
+"Carissima," he murmured. Then, "It will be a matter of the utmost
+importance to me, however," he went on, "that, when the time comes, you
+should marry a good man, a suitable man--a man who will love you, whom
+you will love--and, if possible, a man who will not altogether separate
+you from me, who will perhaps love me a little too. It would send me
+in sorrow to my grave, if you should marry a man who was not worthy of
+you."
+
+"I will guard against that danger by not marrying at all," laughed
+Beatrice.
+
+"No--you will marry, some day," said the Cardinal. "And I wish you to
+remember that I shall not oppose your marrying--provided the man is a
+good man. Felipe will not like it--Guido will pull a long nose--but I,
+at least, will take your part, if I can feel that the man is good. Good
+men are rare, my dear; good husbands are rarer still. I can think, for
+instance, of no man in our Roman nobility, whom I should be content to
+see you marry. Therefore I hope you will not marry a Roman. You would be
+more likely to marry one of your own countrymen. That, of course,
+would double the loss to us, if it should take you away from Italy. But
+remember, if he is a man whom I can think worthy of you, you may count
+upon me as an ally."
+
+He resumed his walk, reopening his Breviary.
+
+Beatrice resumed her needlework. But she found it difficult to fix her
+attention on it. Every now and then, she would leave her needle stuck
+across its seam, let the work drop to her lap, and, with eyes turned
+vaguely up the valley, fall, apparently, into a muse.
+
+"I wonder why he said all that to me?" was the question that kept posing
+itself.
+
+By and by the Cardinal closed his Breviary, and put it in his pocket.
+I suppose he had finished his office for the day. Then he came and sat
+down in one of the wicker chairs, under the awning. On the table, among
+the books and things, stood a carafe of water, some tumblers, a silver
+sugar-bowl, and a crystal dish full of fresh pomegranate seeds. It
+looked like a dish full of unset rubies. The Cardinal poured some water
+into a tumbler, added a lump of sugar and a spoonful of pomegranate
+seeds, stirred the mixture till it became rose-coloured, and drank it
+off in a series of little sips.
+
+"What is the matter, Beatrice?" he asked, all at once.
+
+Beatrice raised her eyes, perplexed.
+
+"The matter--? Is anything the matter?"
+
+"Yes," said the Cardinal; "something is the matter. You are depressed,
+you are nervous, you are not yourself. I have noticed it for many days.
+Have you something on, your mind?"
+
+"Nothing in the world," Beatrice answered, with an appearance of great
+candour. "I had not noticed that I was nervous or depressed."
+
+"We are entering October," said the Cardinal. "I must return to Rome. I
+have been absent too long already. I must return next week. But I should
+not like to go away with the feeling that you are unhappy."
+
+"If a thing were needed to make me unhappy, it would be the announcement
+of your intended departure," Beatrice said, smiling. "But otherwise,
+I am no more unhappy than it is natural to be. Life, after all, is n't
+such a furiously gay business as to keep one perpetually singing and
+dancing--is it? But I am not especially unhappy."
+
+"H'm," said the Cardinal. Then, in a minute, "You will come to Rome in
+November, I suppose?" he asked.
+
+"Yes--towards the end of November, I think," said Beatrice.
+
+The Cardinal rose, and began to walk backwards and forwards again.
+
+In a little while the sound of carriage-wheels could be heard, in the
+sweep, round the corner of the house.
+
+The Cardinal looked at his watch.
+
+"Here is the carriage," he said. "I must go down and see that poor old
+woman.... Do you know," he added, after a moment's hesitation, "I think
+it would be well if you were to go with me."
+
+A shadow came into Beatrice's eyes.
+
+"What good would that do?" she asked.
+
+"It would give her pleasure, no doubt. And besides, she is one of your
+parishioners, as it were. I think you ought to go. You have never been
+to see her since she fell ill."
+
+"Oh--well," said Beatrice.
+
+She was plainly unwilling. But she went to put on her things.
+
+In the carriage, when they had passed the village and crossed the
+bridge, as they were bowling along the straight white road that led
+to the villa, "What a long time it is since Mr. Marchdale has been at
+Ventirose," remarked the Cardinal.
+
+"Oh--? Is it?" responded Beatrice, with indifference.
+
+"It is more than three weeks, I think--it is nearly a month," the
+Cardinal said.
+
+"Oh--?" said she.
+
+"He has had his hands full, of course; he has had little leisure," the
+Cardinal pursued. "His devotion to his poor old servant has been quite
+admirable. But now that she is practically recovered, he will be freer."
+
+"Yes," said Beatrice.
+
+"He is a young man whom I like very much," said the Cardinal. "He is
+intelligent; he has good manners; and he has a fine sense of the droll.
+Yes, he has wit--a wit that you seldom find in an Anglo-Saxon, a wit
+that is almost Latin. But you have lost your interest in him? That is
+because you despair of his conversion?"
+
+"I confess I am not greatly interested in him," Beatrice answered. "And
+I certainly have no hopes of his conversion."
+
+The Cardinal smiled at his ring. He opened his snuffbox, and inhaled a
+long deliberate pinch of snuff.
+
+"Ah, well--who can tell?" he said. "But--he will be free now, and it is
+so long since he has been at the castle--had you not better ask him to
+luncheon or dinner?"
+
+"Why should I?" answered Beatrice. "If he does not come to Ventirose, it
+is presumably because he does not care to come. If he does care to come,
+he needs no invitation. He knows that he is at liberty to call whenever
+he likes."
+
+"But it would be civil, it would be neighbourly, to ask him to a meal,"
+the Cardinal submitted.
+
+"And it would put him in the embarrassing predicament of having either
+to accept against his will, or to decline and appear ungracious,"
+submitted Beatrice. "No, it is evident that Ventirose does not amuse
+him."
+
+"Bene," said the Cardinal. "Be it as you wish."
+
+But when they reached Villa Floriano, Peter was not at home.
+
+"He has gone to Spiaggia for the day," Emilia informed them.
+
+Beatrice, the Cardinal fancied, looked at once relieved and
+disappointed.
+
+Marietta was seated in the sun, in a sheltered corner of the garden.
+
+While Beatrice talked with her, the Cardinal walked about.
+
+Now it so happened that on Peter's rustic table a book lay open, face
+downwards.
+
+The Cardinal saw the book. He halted in his walk, and glanced round
+the garden, as if to make sure that he was not observed. He tapped his
+snuff--box, and took a pinch of snuff. Then he appeared to meditate for
+an instant, the lines about his mouth becoming very marked indeed.
+At last, swiftly, stealthily, almost with the air of a man committing
+felony, he slipped his snuff-box under the open book, well under it, so
+that it was completely covered up.
+
+On the way back to Ventirose, the Cardinal put his hand in his pocket.
+
+"Dear me!" he suddenly exclaimed. "I have lost my snuff box again." He
+shook his head, as one who recognises a fatality. "I am always losing
+it."
+
+"Are you sure you had it with you?" Beatrice asked.
+
+"Oh, yes, I think I had it with me. I should have missed it before this,
+if I had left it at home. I must have dropped it in Mr. Marchdale's
+garden."
+
+"In that case it will probably be found," said Beatrice.
+
+
+Peter had gone to Spiaggia, I imagine, in the hope of meeting Mrs.
+O'Donovan Florence; but the printed visitors' list there told him that
+she had left nearly a fortnight since. On his return to the villa, he
+was greeted by Marietta with the proud tidings that her Excellency the
+Duchessa di Santangiolo had been to see her.
+
+"Oh--? Really?" he questioned lightly. (His heart, I think, dropped a
+beat, all the same.)
+
+"Ang," said Marietta. "She came with the most Eminent Prince Cardinal.
+They came in the carriage. She stayed half an hour. She was very
+gracious."
+
+"Ah?" said Peter. "I am glad to hear it."
+
+"She was beautifully dressed," said Marietta.
+
+"Of that I have not the shadow of a doubt," said he.
+
+"The Signorina Emilia drove away with them," said she.
+
+"Dear, dear! What a chapter of adventures," was his comment.
+
+He went to his rustic table, and picked up his book.
+
+"How the deuce did that come there?" he wondered, discovering the snuff
+box.
+
+It was, in truth, an odd place for it. A cardinal may inadvertently
+drop his snuff box, to be sure. But if the whole College of Cardinals
+together had dropped a snuff box, it would hardly have fallen, of
+its own weight, through the covers of an open book, to the under-side
+thereof, and have left withal no trace of its passage.
+
+"Solid matter will not pass through solid matter, without fraction--I
+learned that at school," said Peter.
+
+The inference would be that someone had purposely put the snuff box
+there.
+
+But who?
+
+The Cardinal himself? In the name of reason, why?
+
+Emilia? Nonsense.
+
+Marietta? Absurd.
+
+The Du--
+
+A wild surmise darted through Peter's soul. Could it be? Could it
+conceivably be? Was it possible that--that--was it possible, in fine,
+that this was a kind of signal, a kind of summons?
+
+Oh, no, no, no. And yet--and yet--
+
+No, certainly not. The idea was preposterous. It deserved, and (I trust)
+obtained, summary deletion.
+
+"Nevertheless," said Peter, "it's a long while since I have darkened the
+doors of Ventirose. And a poor excuse is better than none. And anyhow,
+the Cardinal will be glad to have his snuff."
+
+The ladder-bridge was in its place.
+
+He crossed the Aco.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+He crossed the Aco, and struck bravely forward, up the smooth lawns,
+under the bending trees, towards the castle.
+
+The sun was setting. The irregular mass of buildings stood out in
+varying shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of red.
+
+Half way there, Peter stopped, and looked back.
+
+The level sunshine turned the black forests of the Gnisi to shining
+forests of bronze, and the foaming cascade that leapt down its side to
+a cascade of liquid gold. The lake, for the greater part, lay in shadow,
+violet-grey through a pearl-grey veil of mist; but along the opposite
+shore it caught the light, and gleamed a crescent of quicksilver, with
+roseate reflections. The three snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito, at the
+valley's end, seemed almost insubstantial--floating forms of luminous
+pink vapour, above the hazy horizon, in a pure sky intensely blue.
+
+A familiar verse came into Peter's mind.
+
+"Really,"' he said to himself, "down to the very 'cataract leaping in
+glory,' I believe they must have pre-arranged the scene, feature for
+feature, to illustrate it." And he began to repeat the vivid, musical
+lines, under his breath...
+
+But about midway of them he was interrupted.
+
+"It's not altogether a bad sort of view--is it?" a voice asked, behind
+him.
+
+Peter faced about.
+
+On a marble bench, under a feathery acacia; a few yards away, a lady was
+seated, looking at him, smiling.
+
+Peter's eyes met hers--and suddenly his heart gave a jump. Then it stood
+dead still for a second. Then it flew off, racing perilously. Oh, for
+the best reasons in the world. There was something in her eyes, there
+was a glow, a softness, that seemed--that seemed... But thereby hangs my
+tale.
+
+She was dressed in white. She had some big bright-yellow chrysanthemums
+stuck in her belt. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow,
+sparkled, where the sun touched it, transparent and iridescent, like
+crinkly threads of glass.
+
+"You do not think it altogether bad--I hope?" she questioned, arching
+her eyebrows slightly, with a droll little assumption of concern.
+
+Peter's heart was racing--but he must answer her.
+
+"I was just wondering," he answered, with a tolerably successful feint
+of composure, "whether one might not safely call it altogether good."
+
+"Oh--?" she exclaimed.
+
+She threw back her head, and examined the prospect critically.
+Afterwards, she returned her gaze to Peter, with an air of polite
+readiness to defer to his opinion.
+
+"It is not too sensational? Not too much like a landscape on the stage?"
+
+"We must judge it leniently," said he; "we must remember that it is only
+unaided Nature. Besides," he added, "to be meticulously truthful, there
+is a spaciousness, there is a vivacity in the light and colour, there
+is a sense of depth and atmosphere, that we should hardly find in a
+landscape on the stage."
+
+"Yes--perhaps there is," she admitted thoughtfully.
+
+And with that, they looked into each other's eyes, and laughed.
+
+"Are you aware," the lady asked, after a brief silence, "that it is a
+singularly lovely evening."
+
+"I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so," Peter answered, with the
+least approach to a meaning bow.
+
+In the lady's face there flickered, perhaps, for half a second, the
+faintest light, as of a comprehending and unresentful smile. But she
+went on, with fine detachment
+
+"How calm and still it is. The wonderful peace of the day's compline. It
+seems as if the earth had stopped breathing--does n't it? The birds have
+already gone to bed, though the sun is only just setting. It is the
+hour when they are generally noisiest; but they have gone to bed--the
+sparrows and the finches, the snatchers and the snatched-from, are equal
+in the article of sleep. That is because they feel the touch of autumn.
+How beautiful it is, in spite of its sadness, this first touch of
+autumn--it is like sad distant music. Can you analyse it, can you
+explain it? There is no chill, it is quite warm, and yet one knows
+somehow that autumn is here. The birds know it, and have gone to bed.
+In another month they will be flying away, to Africa and the
+Hesperides--all of them except the sparrows, who stay all winter. I
+wonder how they get on during the winter, with no goldfinches to snatch
+from?"
+
+She turned to Peter with a look of respectful enquiry, as one appealing
+to an authority for information.
+
+"Oh, they snatch from each other, during the winter," he explained. "It
+is thief rob thief, when honest victims are not forthcoming. And--what
+is more to the point--they must keep their beaks in, against the return
+of the goldfinches with the spring."
+
+The Duchessa--for I scorn to deceive the trustful reader longer; and (as
+certain fines mouches, despite my efforts at concealment, may ere this
+have suspected) the mysterious lady was no one else--the Duchessa gaily
+laughed.
+
+"Yes," she said, "the goldfinches will return with the spring. But isn't
+that rather foolish of them? If I were a goldfinch, I think I should
+make my abode permanent in the sparrowless south."
+
+"There is no sparrowless south," said Peter. "Sparrows, alas, abound in
+every latitude; and the farther south you go, the fiercer and bolder and
+more impudent they become. In Africa and the Hesperides, which you have
+mentioned, they not infrequently attack the caravans, peck the eyes out
+of the camels, and are sometimes even known to carry off a man, a
+whole man, vainly struggling in their inexorable talons. There is no
+sparrowless south. But as for the goldfinches returning--it is the
+instinct of us bipeds to return. Plumed and plumeless, we all return to
+something, what though we may have registered the most solemn vows to
+remain away."
+
+He delivered his last phrases with an accent, he punctuated them with a
+glance, in which there may have lurked an intention.
+
+But the Duchessa did not appear to notice it.
+
+"Yes--true--so we do," she assented vaguely. "And what you tell me of
+the sparrows in the Hesperides is very novel and impressive--unless,
+indeed, it is a mere traveller's tale, with which you are seeking to
+practise upon my credulity. But since I find you in this communicative
+vein, will you not push complaisance a half-inch further, and tell me
+what that thing is, suspended there in the sky above the crest of the
+Cornobastone--that pale round thing, that looks like the spectre of a
+magnified half-crown?"
+
+Peter turned to the quarter her gaze indicated.
+
+"Oh, that," he said, "is nothing. In frankness, it is only what the
+vulgar style the moon."
+
+"How odd," said she. "I thought it was what the vulgar style the moon."
+
+And they both laughed again.
+
+The Duchessa moved a little; and thus she uncovered, carved on the back
+of her marble bench, and blazoned in red and gold, a coat of arms.
+
+She touched the shield with her finger.
+
+"Are you interested in canting heraldry?" she asked. "There is no
+country so rich in it as Italy. These are the arms of the Farfalla, the
+original owners of this property. Or, seme of twenty roses gules; the
+crest, on a rose gules, a butterfly or, with wings displayed; and the
+motto--how could the heralds ever have sanctioned such an unheraldic and
+unheroic motto?
+
+                      Rosa amorosa,
+                      Farfalla giojosa,
+                      Mi cantano al cuore
+                      La gioja e l' amore.
+
+They were the great people of this region for countless generations, the
+Farfalla. They were Princes of Ventirose and Patricians of Milan. And
+then the last of them was ruined at Monte Carlo, and killed himself
+there, twenty-odd years ago. That is how all their gioja and amore
+ended. It was the case of a butterfly literally broken upon a wheel. The
+estate fell into the hands of the Jews, as everything more or less does
+sooner or later; and they--if you can believe me--they were going
+to turn the castle into an hotel, into one of those monstrous modern
+hotels, for other Jews to come to, when I happened to hear of it, and
+bought it. Fancy turning that splendid old castle into a Jew-infested
+hotel! It is one of the few castles in Italy that have a ghost. Oh, but
+a quite authentic ghost. It is called the White Page--il Paggio Bianco
+di Ventirose. It is the ghost of a boy about sixteen. He walks on the
+ramparts of the old keep, and looks off towards the lake, as if he
+were watching a boat, and sometimes he waves his arms, as if he were
+signalling. And from head to foot he is perfectly white, like a statue.
+I have never seen him myself; but so many people say they have, I cannot
+doubt he is authentic. And the Jews wanted to turn this haunted castle
+into an hotel... As a tribute to the memory of the Farfalla, I take
+pains to see that their arms, which are carved, as you see them here, in
+at least a hundred different places, are remetalled and retinctured as
+often as time and the weather render it necessary."
+
+She looked towards the castle, while she spoke; and now she rose, with
+the design, perhaps, of moving in that direction.
+
+Peter felt that the moment had come for actualities.
+
+"It seems improbable," he began,--"and I 'm afraid you will think there
+is a tiresome monotony in my purposes; but I am here again to return
+Cardinal Udeschini's snuff box. He left it in my garden."
+
+"Oh--?" said the Duchessa. "Yes, he thought he must have left it there.
+He is always mislaying it. Happily, he has another, for emergencies. It
+was very good of you to trouble to bring it back."
+
+She gave a light little laugh..
+
+"I may also improve this occasion," Peter abruptly continued, "to make
+my adieux. I shall be leaving for England in a few days now."
+
+The Duchessa raised her eyebrows.
+
+"Really?" she said. "Oh, that is too bad," she added, by way of comment.
+"October, you know, is regarded as the best month of all the twelve, in
+this lake country."
+
+"Yes, I know it," Peter responded regretfully.
+
+"And it is a horrid month in England," she went on.
+
+"It is an abominable month in England," he acknowledged.
+
+"Here it is blue, like larkspur, and all fragrant of the vintage,
+and joyous with the songs of the vintagers," she said. "There it is
+dingy-brown, and songless, and it smells of smoke."
+
+"Yes," he agreed.
+
+"But you are a sportsman? You go in for shooting?" she conjectured.
+
+"No," he answered. "I gave up shooting years ago."
+
+"Oh--? Hunting, then?"
+
+"I hate hunting. One is always getting rolled on by one's horse."
+
+"Ah, I see. It--it will be golf, perhaps?"
+
+"No, it is not even golf."
+
+"Don't tell me it is football?"
+
+"Do I look as if it were football?"
+
+"It is sheer homesickness, in fine? You are grieving for the purple of
+your native heather?"
+
+"There is scarcely any heather in my native county. No," said Peter,
+"no. To tell you the truth, it is the usual thing. It is an histoire de
+femme."
+
+"I 'might have guessed it," she exclaimed. "It is still that everlasting
+woman."
+
+"That everlasting woman--?" Peter faltered.
+
+"To be sure," said she. "The woman you are always going on about. The
+woman of your novel. This woman, in short."
+
+And she produced from behind her back a hand that she had kept there,
+and held up for his inspection a grey-and-gold bound book.
+
+"MY novel--?" faltered he. (But the sight of it, in her possession, in
+these particular circumstances, gave him a thrill that was not a thrill
+of despair.)
+
+"Your novel," she repeated, smiling sweetly, and mimicking his tone.
+Then she made a little moue. "Of course, I have known that you were your
+friend Felix Wildmay, from the outset."
+
+"Oh," said Peter, in a feeble sort of gasp, looking bewildered. "You
+have known that from the outset?" And his brain seemed to reel.
+
+"Yes," said she, "of course. Where would the fun have been, otherwise?
+And now you are going away, back to her shrine, to renew your worship. I
+hope you will find the courage to offer her your hand."
+
+Peter's brain was reeling. But here was the opportunity of his life.
+
+"You give me courage," he pronounced, with sudden daring. "You are in a
+position to help me with her. And since you know so much, I should like
+you to know more. I should like to tell you who she is."
+
+"One should be careful where one bestows one's confidences," she warned
+him; but there was something in her eyes, there was a glow, a softness,
+that seemed at the same time to invite them.
+
+"No," he said, "better than telling you who she is, I will tell you
+where I first saw her. It was at the Francais, in December, four years
+ago, a Thursday night, a subscription night. She sat in one of the
+middle boxes of the first tier. She was dressed in white. Her companions
+were an elderly woman, English I think, in black, who wore a cap; and an
+old man, with white moustache and imperial, who looked as if he might be
+a French officer. And the play--."
+
+He broke off, and looked at the Duchessa. She kept her eyes down.
+
+"Yes--the play?" she questioned, in a low voice, after a little wait.
+
+"The play was Monsieur Pailleron's 'Le monde ou l'on s'ennuie'," he
+said.
+
+"Oh," said she, still keeping her eyes down. Her voice was still very
+low. But there was something in it that made Peter's heart leap.
+
+"The next time I saw her," he began...
+
+But then he had to stop. He felt as if the beating of his heart must
+suffocate him.
+
+"Yes--the next time?" she questioned.
+
+He drew a deep breath. He began anew--
+
+"The next time was a week later, at the Opera. They were giving
+Lohengrin. She was with the same man and woman, and there was another,
+younger man. She had pearls round her neck and in her hair, and she had
+a cloak lined with white fur. She left before the opera was over. I did
+not see her again until the following May, when I saw her once or twice
+in London, driving in the Park. She was always with the same elderly
+Englishwoman, but the military-looking old Frenchman had disappeared.
+And then I saw her once more, a year later, in Paris, driving in the
+Bois."
+
+The Duchessa kept her eyes down. She did not speak.
+
+Peter waited as long as flesh-and-blood could wait, looking at her.
+
+"Well?" he pleaded, at last. "That is all. Have you nothing to say to
+me?"
+
+She raised her eyes, and for the tiniest fraction of a second they gave
+themselves to his. Then she dropped them again.
+
+"You are sure," she asked, "you are perfectly sure that when,
+afterwards, you met her, and came to know her as she really is--you are
+perfectly sure there was no disappointment?"
+
+"Disappointment!" cried Peter. "She is in every way immeasurably beyond
+anything that I was capable of dreaming. Oh, if you could see her, if
+you could hear her speak, if you could look into her eyes--if you
+could see her as others see her--you would not ask whether there was a
+disappointment. She is... No; the language is not yet invented, in which
+I could describe her."
+
+The Duchessa smiled, softly, to herself.
+
+"And you are in love with her--more or less?" she asked.
+
+"I love her so that the bare imagination of being allowed to tell her of
+my love almost makes me faint with joy. But it is like the story of the
+poor squire who loved his queen. She is the greatest of great ladies.
+I am nobody. She is so beautiful, so splendid, and so high above me, it
+would be the maddest presumption for me to ask her for her love. To ask
+for the love of my Queen! And yet--Oh, I can say no more. God sees my
+heart. God knows how I love her."
+
+"And it is on her account--because you think your love is hopeless--that
+you are going away, that you are going back to England?"
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+She raised her eyes again, and again they gave themselves to his. There
+was something in them, there was a glow, a softness ...
+
+"Don't go," she said.
+
+
+Up at the castle--Peter had hurried down to the villa, dressed, and
+returned to the castle to dine--he restored the snuff-box to Cardinal
+Udeschini.
+
+"I am trebly your debtor for it," said the Cardinal.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Cardinal's Snuff-Box, by Henry Harland
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cardinal's Snuff-Box, by Henry Harland
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+Title: The Cardinal's Snuff-Box
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+Author: Henry Harland
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+Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5610]
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX 
+
+BY HENRY HARLAND
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                               I
+
+
+"The Signorino will take coffee?" old Marietta asked, as she
+set the fruit before him.
+
+Peter deliberated for a moment; then burned his ships.
+
+"Yes," he answered.
+
+"But in the garden, perhaps?" the little brown old woman
+suggested, with a persuasive flourish.
+
+"No," he corrected her, gently smiling, and shaking his head,
+"not perhaps--certainly."
+
+Her small, sharp old black Italian eyes twinkled, responsive.
+
+"The Signorino will find a rustic table, under the big
+willow-tree, at the water's edge," she informed him, with a good
+deal of gesture.  "Shall I serve it there?"
+
+"Where you will.  I leave myself entirely in your hands," he
+said.
+
+So he sat by the rustic table, on a rustic bench, under the
+willow, sipped his coffee, smoked his cigarette, and gazed in
+contemplation at the view.
+
+Of its kind, it was rather a striking view.
+
+In the immediate foreground--at his feet, indeed--there was the
+river, the narrow Aco, peacock-green, a dark file of poplars on
+either bank, rushing pell-mell away from the quiet waters of
+the lake.  Then, just across the river, at his left, stretched
+the smooth lawns of the park of Ventirose, with glimpses of
+the many-pinnacled castle through the trees; and, beyond,
+undulating country, flourishing, friendly, a perspective of
+vineyards, cornfields, groves, and gardens, pointed by
+numberless white villas.  At his right loomed the gaunt mass
+of the Gnisi, with its black forests, its bare crags, its
+foaming ascade, and the crenelated range of the Cornobastone;
+and finally, climax and cynosure, at the valley's end,
+Monte Sfiorito, its three snow-covered summits almost
+insubstantial-seeming, floating forms of luminous pink vapour,
+in the evening sunshine, against the intense blue of the sky.
+
+A familiar verse had come into Peter's mind, and kept running
+there obstinately.
+
+"Really," he said to himself, "feature for feature, down to the
+very 'cataract leaping in glory,' the scene might have been got
+up, apres coup, to illustrate it."  And he began to repeat the
+beautiful hackneyed words, under his breath . . . .
+
+But about midway of the third line he was interrupted.
+
+
+
+
+                              II
+
+"It's not altogether a bad sort of view--is it?" some one said,
+in English.
+
+The voice was a woman's.  It was clear and smooth; it was
+crisp-cut, distinguished.
+
+Peter glanced about him.
+
+On the opposite bank of the Aco, in the grounds of Ventirose,
+five or six yards away, a lady was standing, looking at him,
+smiling.
+
+Peter's eyes met hers, took in her face . . . .  And suddenly
+his heart gave a jump.  Then it stopped dead still, tingling,
+for a second.  Then it flew off, racing perilously.--Oh, for
+reasons--for the best reasons in the world: but thereby hangs
+my tale.
+
+She was a young woman, tall, slender, in a white frock, with a
+white cloak, an indescribable complexity of soft lace and airy
+ruffles, round her shoulders.  She wore no hat.  Her hair,
+brown and warm in shadow, sparkled, where it caught the light,
+in a kind of crinkly iridescence, like threads of glass.
+
+Peter's heart (for the best reasons in the world) was racing
+perilously.  "It's impossible--impossible--impossible"--the
+words strummed themselves to its rhythm.  Peter's wits (for had
+not the impossible come to pass?) were in a perilous confusion.
+But he managed to rise from his rustic bench, and to achieve a
+bow.
+
+She inclined her head graciously.
+
+"You do not think it altogether bad--I hope?" she questioned,
+in her crisp-cut voice, raising her eyebrows slightly, with a
+droll little assumption of solicitude.
+
+Peter's wits were in confusion; but he must answer her.  An
+automatic second-self, summoned by the emergency, answered for
+him.
+
+"I think one might safely call it altogether good."
+
+"Oh--?" she exclaimed.
+
+Her eyebrows went up again, but now they expressed a certain
+whimsical surprise.  She threw back her head, and regarded the
+prospect critically.
+
+"It is not, then, too spectacular, too violent?" she wondered,
+returning her gaze to Peter, with an air of polite readiness to
+defer to his opinion.  "Not too much like a decor de theatre?"
+
+"One should judge it," his automatic second-self submitted,
+"with some leniency.  It is, after all, only unaided Nature."
+
+A spark flickered in her eyes, while she appeared to ponder.
+(But I am not sure whether she was pondering the speech or its
+speaker.)
+
+"Really?" she said, in the end.  "Did did Nature build the
+villas, and plant the cornfields?"
+
+But his automatic second-self was on its mettle.
+
+"Yes," it asserted boldly; "the kind of men who build villas
+and plant cornfields must be classified as natural forces."
+
+She gave a light little laugh--and again appeared to ponder for
+a moment.
+
+Then, with another gracious inclination of the head, and an
+interrogative brightening of the eyes, "Mr. Marchdale no
+doubt?" she hazarded.
+
+Peter bowed.
+
+"I am very glad if, on the whole, you like our little effect,"
+she went on, glancing in the direction of Monte Sfiorito.  "I"
+--there was the briefest suspension--"I am your landlady."
+
+For a third time Peter bowed, a rather more elaborate bow than
+his earlier ones, a bow of respectful enlightenment, of feudal
+homage.
+
+"You arrived this afternoon?" she conjectured.
+
+"By the five-twenty-five from Bergamo," said he.
+
+"A very convenient train," she remarked; and then, in the
+pleasantest manner, whereby the unusual mode of valediction was
+carried off, "Good evening."
+
+"Good evening," responded Peter, and accomplished his fourth
+bow.
+
+She moved away from the river, up the smooth lawns, between the
+trees, towards Castel Ventirose, a flitting whiteness amid the
+surrounding green.
+
+Peter stood still, looking after her.
+
+But when she was out of sight, he sank back upon his rustic
+bench, like a man exhausted, and breathed a prodigious sigh.
+He was absurdly pale.  All the same, clenching his fists, and
+softly pounding the table with them, he muttered exultantly,
+between his teeth, "What luck!  What incredible luck!  It's
+she--it's she, as I 'm a heathen.  Oh, what supernatural luck!"
+
+
+
+
+                              III
+
+
+Old Marietta--the bravest of small figures, in her neat
+black-and-white peasant dress, with her silver ornaments,
+and her red silk coif and apron--came for the coffee things.
+
+But at sight of Peter, she abruptly halted.  She struck an
+attitude of alarm.  She fixed him with her fiery little black
+eyes.
+
+"The Signorino is not well!" she cried, in the tones of one
+launching a denunciation.
+
+Peter roused himself.
+
+"Er--yes--I 'm pretty well, thank you," he reassured her.  "I
+--I 'm only dying," he added, sweetly, after an instant's
+hesitation.
+
+"Dying--!" echoed Marietta, wild, aghast.
+
+"Ah, but you can save my life--you come in the very nick of
+time," he said.  "I'm dying of curiosity--dying to know
+something that you can tell me."
+
+Her stare dissolved, her attitude relaxed.  She smiled--relief,
+rebuke.  She shook her finger at him.
+
+"Ah, the Signorino gave me a fine fright," she said.
+
+"A thousand regrets," said Peter.  "Now be a succouring angel,
+and make a clean breast of it.  Who is my landlady?"
+
+Marietta drew back a little.  Her brown old visage wrinkled up,
+perplexed.
+
+"Who is the Signorino's landlady?" she repeated.
+
+"Ang," said he, imitating the characteristic nasalised eh of
+Italian affirmation, and accompanying it by the characteristic
+Italian jerk of the head.
+
+Marietta eyed him, still perplexed--even (one might have
+fancied) a bit suspicious.
+
+"But is it not in the Signorino's lease?" she asked, with
+caution.
+
+"Of course it is," said he.  "That's just the point.  Who is
+she?"
+
+"But if it is in your lease!" she expostulated.
+
+"All the more reason why you should make no secret of it," he
+argued plausibly.  "Come!  Out with it!  Who is my landlady?"
+
+Marietta exchanged a glance with heaven.
+
+"The Signorino's landlady is the Duchessa di Santangiolo," she
+answered, in accents of resignation.
+
+But then the name seemed to stimulate her; and she went on "She
+lives there--at Castel Ventirose."  Marietta pointed towards
+the castle.  "She owns all, all this country, all these houses
+--all, all."  Marietta joined her brown old hands together, and
+separated them, like a swimmer, in a gesture that swept the
+horizon.  Her eyes snapped.
+
+"All Lombardy?" said Peter, without emotion.
+
+Marietta stared again.
+
+"All Lombardy?  Mache!" was her scornful remonstrance.  "Nobody
+owns all Lombardy.  All these lands, these houses."
+
+"Who is she?" Peter asked.
+
+Marietta's eyes blinked, in stupefaction before such stupidity.
+
+"But I have just told you," she cried "She is the Duchessa di
+Santangiolo."
+
+"Who is the Duchessa di Santangiolo?" he asked.
+
+Marietta, blinking harder, shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"But"--she raised her voice, screamed almost, as to one deaf
+--"but the Duchessa di Santangiolo is the Signorino's landlady
+la, proprietaria di tutte queste terre, tutte queste case,
+tutte, tutte."
+
+And she twice, with some violence, reacted her comprehensive
+gesture, like a swimmer's.
+
+"You evade me by a vicious circle," Peter murmured.
+
+Marietta made a mighty effort-brought all her faculties to a
+focus--studied Peter's countenance intently.  Her own was
+suddenly illumined.
+
+"Ah, I understand," she proclaimed, vigorously nodding.  "The
+Signorino desires to know who she is personally!"
+
+"I express myself in obscure paraphrases," said he; "but you,
+with your unfailing Italian simpatia, have divined the exact
+shade of my intention."
+
+"She is the widow of the Duca di Santangiolo," said Marietta.
+
+"Enfin vous entrez dans la voie des aveux," said Peter.
+
+"Scusi?" said Marietta.
+
+"I am glad to hear she's a widow," said he.  "She--she might
+strike a casual observer as somewhat young, for a widow."
+
+"She is not very old," agreed Marietta; "only twenty-six,
+twenty-seven.  She was married from the convent.  That was
+eight, nine years ago.  The Duca has been dead five or six."
+
+"And was he also young and lovely?"
+
+Peter asked.
+
+"Young and lovely!  Mache!" derided Marietta.  "He was past
+forty.  He was fat.  But he was a good man."
+
+"So much the better for him now," said Peter.
+
+"Gia," approved Marietta, and solemnly made the Sign of the
+Cross.
+
+"But will you have the kindness to explain to me," the young
+man continued, "how it happens that the Duchessa di Santangiolo
+speaks English as well as I do?"
+
+The old woman frowned surprise.
+
+"Come?  She speaks English?"
+
+"For all the world like an Englishman," asseverated Peter.
+
+"Ah, well," Marietta reflected, "she was English, you know."
+
+"Oho!" exclaimed Peter.  "She was English!  Was she?"  He bore
+a little on the tense of the verb.  "That lets in a flood of
+light.  And--and what, by the bye, is she now?" he questioned.
+
+"Ma!  Italian, naturally, since she married the Duca," Marietta
+replied.
+
+"Indeed?  Then the leopard can change his spots?" was Peter's
+inference.
+
+"The leopard?" said Marietta, at a loss.
+
+"If the Devil may quote Scripture for his purpose, why may n't
+I?" Peter demanded.  "At all events, the Duchessa di
+Santangiolo is a very beautiful woman."
+
+The Signorino has seen her?" Marietta asked.
+
+"I have grounds for believing so.  An apparition--a phantom of
+delight--appeared on the opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco,
+and announced herself as my landlady.  Of course, she may have
+been an impostor--but she made no attempt to get the rent.  A
+tall woman, in white, with hair, and a figure, and a voice like
+cooling streams, and an eye that can speak volumes with a
+look."
+
+Marietta nodded recognition.
+
+"That would be the Duchessa."
+
+"She's a very beautiful duchessa," reiterated Peter.
+
+Marietta was Italian.  So, Italian--wise, she answered, "We are
+all as God makes us."
+
+"For years I have thought her the most beautiful woman in
+Europe," Peter averred.
+
+Marietta opened her eyes wide.
+
+"For years?  The Signorino knows her?  The Signorino has seen
+her before?"
+
+A phrase came back to him from a novel he had been reading that
+afternoon in the train.  He adapted it to the occasion.
+
+"I rather think she is my long-lost brother."
+
+"Brother--?" faltered Marietta.
+
+"Well, certainly not sister," said Peter, with determination.
+"You have my permission to take away the coffee things."
+
+
+
+
+                              IV
+
+
+Up at the castle, in her rose-and-white boudoir, Beatrice was
+writing a letter to a friend in England.
+
+"Villa Floriano," she wrote, among other words, "has been let
+to an Englishman--a youngish, presentable-looking creature, in
+a dinner jacket, with a tongue in his head, and an indulgent
+eye for Nature--named Peter Marchdale.  Do you happen by any
+chance to know who he is, or anything about him?"
+
+
+
+                              IV
+
+
+Peter very likely slept but little, that first night at the
+villa; and more than once, I fancy, he repeated to his pillow
+his pious ejaculation of the afternoon: "What luck!  What
+supernatural luck!"  He was up, in any case, at an
+unconscionable hour next morning, up, and down in his garden.
+
+"It really is a surprisingly jolly garden," he confessed.  "The
+agent was guiltless of exaggeration, and the photographs were
+not the perjuries one feared."
+
+There were some fine old trees, lindens, acacias, chestnuts, a
+flat-topped Lombardy pine, a darkling ilex, besides the willow
+that overhung the river, and the poplars that stiffly stood
+along its border.  Then there was the peacock-blue river
+itself, dancing and singing as it sped away, with a thousand
+diamonds flashing on its surface--floating, sinking, rising
+--where the sun caught its ripples.  There were some charming
+bits of greensward.  There was a fountain, plashing melodious
+coolness, in a nimbus of spray which the sun touched to rainbow
+pinks and yellows.  There were vivid parterres of flowers,
+begonia and geranium.  There were oleanders, with their heady
+southern perfume; there were pomegranate-blossoms, like knots
+of scarlet crepe; there were white carnations, sweet-peas,
+heliotrope, mignonette; there were endless roses.  And there
+were birds, birds, birds.  Everywhere you heard their joyous
+piping, the busy flutter of their wings.  There were
+goldfinches, blackbirds, thrushes, with their young--the
+plumpest, clumsiest, ruffle-feathered little blunderers, at the
+age ingrat, just beginning to fly, a terrible anxiety to their
+parents--and there were also (I regret to own) a good many
+rowdy sparrows.  There were bees and bumblebees; there were
+brilliant, dangerous-looking dragonflies; there were
+butterflies, blue ones and white ones, fluttering in couples;
+there were also (I am afraid) a good many gadflies--but che
+volete?  Who minds a gadfly or two in Italy?  On the other side
+of the house there were fig-trees and peach-trees, and
+artichokes holding their heads high in rigid rows; and a vine,
+heavy with great clusters of yellow grapes, was festooned upon
+the northern wall.
+
+The morning air was ineffably sweet and keen--penetrant, tonic,
+with moist, racy smells, the smell of the good brown earth, the
+smell of green things and growing things.  The dew was spread
+over the grass like a veil of silver gossamer, spangled with
+crystals.  The friendly country westward, vineyards and white
+villas, laughed in the sun at the Gnisi, sulking black in
+shadow to the east.  The lake lay deep and still, a dark
+sapphire.  And away at the valley's end, Monte Sfiorito, always
+insubstantial-seeming, showed pale blue-grey, upon a sky in
+which still lingered some of the flush of dawn.
+
+It was a surprisingly jolly garden, true enough.  But though
+Peter remained in it all day long--though he haunted the
+riverside, and cast a million desirous glances, between the
+trees, and up the lawns, towards Castel Ventirose--he enjoyed
+no briefest vision of the Duchessa di Santangiolo.
+
+Nor the next day; nor the next.
+
+"Why does n't that old dowager ever come down and look after
+her river?" he asked Marietta.  "For all the attention she
+gives it, the water might be undermining her property on both
+sides."
+
+"That old dowager--?" repeated Marietta, blank.
+
+"That old widow woman--my landlady--the Duchessa Vedova di
+Santangiolo."
+
+"She is not very old--only twenty-six, twenty-seven," said
+Marietta.
+
+"Don't try to persuade me that she is n't old enough to know
+better," retorted Peter, sternly.
+
+"But she has her guards, her keepers, to look after her
+property," said Marietta.
+
+"Guards and keepers are mere mercenaries.  If you want a thing
+well done, you should do it yourself," said Peter, with gloomy
+sententiousness.
+
+On Sunday he went to the little grey rococo parish church.
+There were two Masses, one at eight o'clock, one at ten--and
+the church was quite a mile from Villa Floriano, and up a hill;
+and the Italian sun was hot--but the devoted young man went to
+both.
+
+The Duchessa was at neither.
+
+"What does she think will become of her immortal soul?" he
+asked Marietta.
+
+On Monday he went to the pink-stuccoed village post-office.
+
+Before the post-office door a smart little victoria, with a
+pair of sprightly, fine-limbed French bays, was drawn up, ducal
+coronets emblazoned on its panels.
+
+Peter's heart began to beat.
+
+And while he was hesitating on the doorstep, the door opened,
+and the Duchessa came forth--tall, sumptuous, in white, with
+a wonderful black-plumed hat, and a wonderful white-frilled
+sunshade.  She was followed by a young girl--a pretty,
+dark-complexioned girl, of fourteen, fifteen perhaps, with
+pleasant brown eyes (that lucent Italian brown), and in her
+cheeks a pleasant hint of red (that covert Italian red, which
+seems to glow through the thinnest film of satin).
+
+Peter bowed, standing aside to let them pass.
+
+But when he looked up, the Duchessa had stopped, and was
+smiling on him.
+
+His heart beat harder.
+
+"A lovely day," said the Duchessa.
+
+"Delightful," agreed Peter, between two heart-beats.--Yet he
+looked, in his grey flannels, with his straw-hat and his
+eyeglass, with his lean face, his even colour, his slightly
+supercilious moustaches--he looked a very embodiment of
+cool-blooded English equanimity.
+
+"A trifle warm, perhaps?" the Duchessa suggested, with her air
+of polite (or was it in some part humorous?) readiness to defer
+to his opinion.
+
+"But surely," suggested he, "in Italy, in summer, it is its
+bounden duty to be a trifle warm?"
+
+The Duchessa smiled.
+
+"You like it?  So do I.  But what the country really needs is
+rain."
+
+"Then let us hope," said he, "that the country's real needs may
+remain unsatisfied."
+
+The Duchessa tittered.
+
+"Think of the poor farmers," she said reproachfully.
+
+"It's vain to think of them," he answered.  "'T is an
+ascertained fact that no condition of the weather ever contents
+the farmers."
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+"Ah, well," she consented, "then I 'll join in your hope that
+the fine weather may last.  I--I trust," she was so good as to
+add, "that you're not entirely uncomfortable at Villa
+Floriano?"
+
+"I dare n't allow myself to speak of Villa Floriano," he
+replied.  "I should become dithyrambic.  It's too adorable."
+
+"It has a pretty garden, and--I remember--you admired the
+view," the Duchessa said.  "And that old Marietta?  I trust she
+does for you fairly well?"  Her raised eyebrows expressed
+benevolent (or was it in some part humorous?) concern.
+
+"She does for me to perfection.  That old Marietta is a
+priceless old jewel," Peter vowed.
+
+"A good cook?" questioned the Duchessa.
+
+"A good cook--but also a counsellor and friend.  And with a
+flow of language!"
+
+The Duchessa laughed again.
+
+"Oh, these Lombard peasant women.  They are untiring
+chatterers."
+
+"I 'm not sure," Peter felt himself in justice bound to
+confess, "that Marietta is n't equally untiring as a listener.
+In fact, there's only one respect in which she has disappointed
+me."
+
+"Oh--?" said the Duchessa.  And her raised eyebrows demanded
+particulars.
+
+"She swears she does n't wear a dagger in her garter--has never
+heard of such a practice," Peter explained.  "And now," he
+whispered to his soul, "we 'll see whether our landlady is up
+in modern literature."
+
+Still again the Duchessa laughed.  And, apparently, she was up
+in modern literature.  At any rate--
+
+"Those are Lombard country-girls along the coast," she reminded
+him.  "We are peaceful inland folk, miles from the sea.  But
+you had best be on your guard, none the less."  She shook her
+head, in warning.  "Through all this country-side that old
+Marietta is reputed to be a witch."
+
+"If she's a witch," said Peter, undismayed, "her usefulness
+will be doubled.  I shall put her to the test directly I get
+home."
+
+"Sprinkle her with holy water?" laughed the Duchessa.  "Have a
+care.  If she should turn into a black cat, and fly away on a
+broomstick, you'd never forgive yourself."
+
+Wherewith she swept on to her carriage, followed by her young
+companion.
+
+The sprightly French bays tossed their heads, making the
+harness tinkle.  The footman mounted the box.  The carriage
+rolled away.
+
+But Peter remained for quite a minute motionless on the
+door-step, gazing, bemused, down the long, straight, improbable
+village street, with its poplars, its bridge, its ancient stone
+cross, its irregular pink and yellow houses--as improbable as a
+street in opera-bouffe.  A thin cloud of dust floated after the
+carriage, a thin screen of white dust, which, in the sun,
+looked like a fume of silver.
+
+"I think I could put my finger on a witch worth two of
+Marietta," he said, in the end."  And thus we see," he added,
+struck by something perhaps not altogether novel in his own
+reflection, "how the primary emotions, being perennial, tend to
+express themselves in perennial formulae."
+
+
+
+
+                              VI
+
+
+Back at the villa, he enquired of Marietta who the pretty
+brown-eyed young girl might have been.
+
+"The Signorina Emilia," Marietta promptly informed him.
+
+"Really and truly?" questioned he.
+
+"Ang," affirmed Marietta, with the national jerk of the head;
+"the Signorina Emilia Manfredi--the daughter of the Duca."
+
+"Oh--?  Then the Duca was married before?" concluded Peter,
+with simplicity.
+
+"Che-e-e!" scoffed Marietta, on her highest note.  "Married?
+He?"  Then she winked and nodded--as one man of the world to
+another.  "Ma molto porn!  La mamma fu robaccia di Milano.  But
+after his death, the Duchessa had her brought to the castle.
+She is the same as adopted."
+
+"That looks as if your Duchessa's heart were in the right
+place, after all," commented Peter.
+
+"Gia," agreed Marietta.
+
+"Hang the right place!" cried he.  "What's the good of telling
+me her heart is in the right place, if the right place is
+inaccessible?"
+
+But Marietta only looked bewildered.
+
+He lived in his garden, he haunted the riverside, he made a
+daily pilgrimage to the village post, he thoroughly neglected
+the work he had come to this quiet spot to do.  But a week
+passed, during which he never once beheld so much as the shadow
+of the Duchessa.
+
+On Sunday he trudged his mile, through the sun, and up the
+hill, not only to both Masses, but to Vespers and Benediction.
+
+She was present at none of these offices.
+
+"The Pagan!" he exclaimed.
+
+
+
+
+
+                              VII
+
+
+Up at the castle, on the broad marble terrace, where clematis
+and jessamine climbed over the balustrade and twined about its
+pilasters, where oleanders grew in tall marble urns and shed
+their roseate petals on the pavement, Beatrice, dressed for
+dinner, in white, with pearls in her hair, and pearls round her
+throat, was walking slowly backwards and forwards, reading a
+letter.
+
+"There is a Peter Marchdale--I don't know whether he will be
+your Peter Marchdale or not, my dear; though the name seems
+hardly likely to be common--son of the late Mr. Archibald
+Marchdale, Q.  C., and nephew of old General Marchdale, of
+Whitstoke.  A highly respectable and stodgy Norfolk family.
+I've never happened to meet the man myself, but I'm told he's a
+bit of an eccentric, who amuses himself globe-trotting, and
+writing books (novels, I believe) which nobody, so far as I am
+aware, ever reads.  He writes under a pseudonym, Felix--I 'm
+not sure whether it's Mildmay or Wildmay.  He began life, by
+the bye, in the Diplomatic, and was attache for a while at
+Berlin, or Petersburg, or somewhere; but whether (in the
+elegant language of Diplomacy) he 'chucked it up,' or failed to
+pass his exams, I'm not in a position to say.  He will be near
+thirty, and ought to have a couple of thousand a year--more or
+less.  His father, at any rate, was a great man at the bar, and
+must have left something decent.  And the only other thing in
+the world I know about him is that he's a great friend of that
+clever gossip Margaret Winchfield--which goes to show that
+however obscure he may be as a scribbler of fiction, he must
+possess some redeeming virtues as a social being--for Mrs.
+Winchfield is by no means the sort that falls in love with
+bores.  As you 're not, either--well, verbum sap., as my little
+brother Freddie says."
+
+Beatrice gazed off, over the sunny lawn, with its trees and
+their long shadows, with its shrubberies, its bright
+flower-beds, its marble benches, its artificial ruin; over the
+lake, with its coloured sails, its incongruous puffing
+steamboats; down the valley, away to the rosy peaks of Monte
+Sfiorito, and the deep blue sky behind them.  She plucked a spray
+of jessamine, and brushed the cool white blossoms across her
+cheek, and inhaled their fairy fragrance.
+
+"An obscure scribbler of fiction," she mused.  "Ah, well, one
+is an obscure reader of fiction oneself.  We must send to
+London for Mr. Felix Mildmay Wildmay's works."
+
+
+
+
+                             VIII
+
+
+On Monday evening, at the end of dinner, as she set the fruit
+before him, "The Signorino will take coffee?" old Marietta
+asked.
+
+Peter frowned at the fruit, figs and peaches--
+
+    "Figs imperial purple, and blushing peaches"--
+
+ranged alternately, with fine precision, in a circle, round a
+central heap of translucent yellow grapes.
+
+"Is this the produce of my own vine and fig-tree?" he demanded.
+
+"Yes, Signorino; and also peach-tree," replied Marietta.
+
+"Peaches do not grow on fig-trees?" he enquired.
+
+"No, Signorino," said Marietta.
+
+"Nor figs on thistles.  I wonder why not," said he.
+
+"It is n't Nature," was Marietta's confident generalisation.
+
+"Marietta Cignolesi," Peter pronounced severely, looking her
+hard in the eyes, "I am told you are a witch."
+
+"No," said Marietta, simply, without surprise, without emotion.
+
+"I quite understand," he genially persisted.  "It's a part of
+the game to deny it.  But I have no intention of sprinkling you
+with holy water-so don't be frightened.  Besides, if you should
+do anything outrageous--if you should turn into a black cat,
+and fly away on a broomstick, for example--I could never
+forgive myself.  But I'll thank you to employ a little of your
+witchcraft on my behalf, all the same.  I have lost something
+--something very precious--more precious than rubies--more
+precious than fine gold."
+
+Marietta's brown old wrinkles fell into an expression of alarm.
+
+"In the villa?  In the garden?" she exclaimed, anxiously.
+
+"No, you conscientious old thing you," Peter hastened to
+relieve her.  "Nowhere in your jurisdiction--so don't distress
+yourself: Laggiu, laggiu."
+
+And he waved a vague hand, to indicate outer space.
+
+The Signorino should put up a candle to St. Anthony of Padua,"
+counselled this Catholic witch.
+
+"St. Anthony of Padua?  Why of Padua?" asked Peter.
+
+"St. Anthony of Padua," said Marietta.
+
+"You mean of Lisbon," corrected Peter.
+
+"No," insisted the old woman, with energy.  "St. Anthony of
+Padua."
+
+It But he was born in Lisbon;" insisted Peter.
+
+"No," said Marietta.
+
+"Yes," said he, "parola d' onore.  And, what's more to the
+purpose, he died in Lisbon.  You clearly mean St. Anthony of
+Lisbon."
+
+"No!" Marietta raised her voice, for his speedier conviction.
+"There is no St. Anthony of Lisbon.  St. Anthony of Padua."
+
+"What's the use of sticking to your guns in that obstinate
+fashion?" Peter complained.  "It's mere pride of opinion.
+Don't you know that the ready concession of minor points is a
+part of the grace of life?"
+
+"When you lose an object, you put up a candle to St. Anthony of
+Padua," said Marietta, weary but resolved.
+
+"Not unless you wish to recover the object," contended Peter.
+
+Marietta stared at him, blinking.
+
+"I have no wish to recover the object I have lost," he
+continued blandly.  "The loss of it is a new, thrilling,
+humanising experience.  It will make a man of me--and, let us
+hope, a better man.  Besides, in a sense, I lost it long ago
+--'when first my smitten eyes beat full on her,' one evening at
+the Francais, three, four years ago.  But it's essential to my
+happiness that I should see the person into whose possession it
+has fallen.  That is why I am not angry with you for being a
+witch.  It suits my convenience.  Please arrange with the
+powers of darkness to the end that I may meet the person in
+question tomorrow at the latest.  No!"  He raised a forbidding
+hand.  "I will listen to no protestations.  And, for the rest,
+you may count upon my absolute discretion.
+
+           'She is the darling of my heart
+            And she lives in our valley,'"
+
+he carolled softly.
+
+           "E del mio cuore la carina,
+            E dimor' nella nostra vallettina,"
+
+he obligingly translated.  "But for all the good I get of her,
+she might as well live on the top of the Cornobastone," he
+added dismally.  "Yes, now you may bring me my coffee--only,
+let it be tea.  When your coffee is coffee it keeps me awake at
+night."
+
+Marietta trudged back to her kitchen, nodding at the sky.
+
+The next afternoon, however, the Duchessa di Santangiolo
+appeared on the opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco.
+
+
+
+
+                              IX
+
+
+Peter happened to be engaged in the amiable pastime of tossing
+bread-crumbs to his goldfinches.
+
+But a score or so of sparrows, vulture-like, lurked under cover
+of the neighbouring foliage, to dash in viciously, at the
+critical moment, and snatch the food from the finches' very
+mouths.
+
+The Duchessa watched this little drama for a minute, smiling,
+in silent meditation: while Peter--who, for a wonder, had his
+back turned to the park of Ventirose, and, for a greater wonder
+still perhaps, felt no pricking in his thumbs--remained
+unconscious of her presence.
+
+At last, sorrowfully, (but there was always a smile at the back
+of her eyes), she shook her head.
+
+"Oh, the pirates, the daredevils," she sighed.
+
+Peter started; faced about; saluted.
+
+"The brigands," said she, with a glance towards the sparrows'
+outposts.
+
+"Yes, poor things," said he.
+
+"Poor things?" cried she, indignant.  "The unprincipled little
+monsters!"
+
+"They can't help it," he pleaded for them.  "'It is their
+nature to.'  They were born so.  They had no choice."
+
+"You actually defend them!" she marvelled, rebukefully.
+
+"Oh, dear, no," he disclaimed.  "I don't defend them.  I defend
+nothing.  I merely recognise and accept.  Sparrows--finches.
+It's the way of the world--the established division of the
+world."
+
+She frowned incomprehension.
+
+"The established division of the world--?"
+
+"Exactly," said he.  "Sparrows--finches the snatchers and the
+snatched-from.  Everything that breathes is either a sparrow or
+a finch.  'T is the universal war--the struggle for existence
+--the survival of the most unscrupulous.  'T is a miniature
+presentment of what's going on everywhere in earth and sky."
+
+She shook her head again.
+
+"YOU see the earth and sky through black spectacles, I 'm
+afraid," she remarked, with a long face.  But there was still
+an underglow of amusement in her eyes.
+
+"No," he answered, "because there's a compensation.  As you
+rise in the scale of moral development, it is true, you pass
+from the category of the snatchers to the category of the
+snatched-from, and your ultimate extinction is assured.  But,
+on the other hand, you gain talents and sensibilities.  You do
+not live by bread alone.  These goldfinches, for a case in
+point, can sing--and they have your sympathy.  The sparrows can
+only make a horrid noise--and you contemn them.  That is the
+compensation.  The snatchers can never know the joy of singing
+--or of being pitied by ladies."
+
+"N . . . o, perhaps not," she consented doubtfully.  The
+underglow of amusement in her eyes shone nearer to the surface.
+"But--but they can never know, either, the despair of the
+singer when his songs won't come."
+
+"Or when the ladies are pitiless.  That is true," consented
+Peter.
+
+"And meanwhile they get the bread, crumbs," she said.
+
+"They certainly get the bread-crumbs," he admitted.
+
+"I 'm afraid "--she smiled, as one who has conducted a
+syllogism safely to its conclusion--"I 'm afraid I do not think
+your compensation compensates."
+
+"To be quite honest, I daresay it does n't," he confessed.
+
+"And anyhow"--she followed her victory up--"I should not wish
+my garden to represent the universal war.  I should not wish my
+garden to be a battle-field.  I should wish it to be a retreat
+from the battle--an abode of peace--a happy valley--a sanctuary
+for the snatched-from."
+
+"But why distress one's soul with wishes that are vain?" asked
+he.  "What could one do?"
+
+"One could keep a dragon," she answered promptly.  "If I were
+you, I should keep a sparrow-devouring, finch-respecting
+dragon."
+
+"It would do no good," said he.  "You'd get rid of one species
+of snatcher, but some other species of snatcher would instantly
+pop UP."
+
+She gazed at him with those amused eyes of hers, and still
+again, slowly, sorrowfully, shook her head.
+
+"Oh, your spectacles are black--black," she murmured.
+
+"I hope not," said he; "but such as they are, they show me the
+inevitable conditions of our planet.  The snatcher, here below,
+is ubiquitous and eternal--as ubiquitous, as eternal, as the
+force of gravitation.  He is likewise protean.  Banish him--he
+takes half a minute to change his visible form, and returns au
+galop.  Sometimes he's an ugly little cacophonous brown
+sparrow; sometimes he's a splendid florid money-lender, or an
+aproned and obsequious greengrocer, or a trusted friend, hearty
+and familiar.  But he 's always there; and he's always--if you
+don't mind the vernacular--'on the snatch.'"
+
+The Duchessa arched her eyebrows.
+
+"If things are really at such a sorry pass," she said, "I will
+commend my former proposal to you with increased confidence.
+You should keep a dragon.  After all, you only wish to protect
+your garden; and that"--she embraced it with her glance--"is
+not so very big.  You could teach your dragon, if you procured
+one of an intelligent breed, to devour greengrocers, trusted
+friends, and even moneylenders too (tough though no doubt they
+are), as well as sparrows."
+
+"Your proposal is a surrender to my contention," said Peter.
+"You would set a snatcher to catch the snatchers.  Other
+heights in other lives, perhaps.  But in the dark backward and
+abysm of space to which our lives are confined, the snatcher is
+indigenous and inexpugnable."
+
+The Duchessa looked at the sunny landscape, the bright lawns,
+the high bending trees, with the light caught in the network of
+their million leaves; she looked at the laughing white villas
+westward, the pale-green vineyards, the yellow cornfields; she
+looked at the rushing river, with the diamonds sparkling on its
+surface, at the far-away gleaming snows of Monte Sfiorito, at
+the scintillant blue shy overhead.
+
+Then she looked at Peter, a fine admixture of mirth with
+something like gravity in her smile.
+
+"The dark backward and abysm of space?" she repeated.  "And you
+do not wear black spectacles?  Then it must be that your eyes
+themselves are just a pair of black-seeing pessimists."
+
+"On the contrary," triumphed Peter, "it is because they are
+optimists, that they suspect there must be forwarder and more
+luminous regions than the Solar System."
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+"I think you have the prettiest mouth, and the most exquisite
+little teeth, and the eyes richest in promise, and the sweetest
+laughter, of any woman out of Paradise," said Peter, in the
+silence of his soul.
+
+"It is clear I shall never be your match in debate," said she.
+
+Peter made a gesture of deprecating modesty.
+
+"But I wonder," she went on, "whether you would put me down as
+'another species of snatcher,' if I should ask you to spare me
+just the merest end of a crust of bread?"  And she lifted those
+eyes rich in promise appealingly to his.
+
+"Oh, I beg of you--take all I have," he responded, with
+effusion.  "But--but how--?"
+
+"Toss," she commanded tersely.
+
+So he tossed what was left of his bread into the air, above the
+river; and the Duchessa, easily, deftly, threw up a hand, and
+caught it on the wing.
+
+"Thank you very much," she laughed, with a little bow.
+
+Then she crumbled the bread, and began to sprinkle the ground
+with it; and in an instant she was the centre of a cloud of
+birds.  Peter was at liberty to watch her, to admire the swift
+grace of her motions, their suggestion of delicate strength, of
+joy in things physical, and the lithe elasticity of her figure,
+against the background of satiny lawn, and the further vistas
+of lofty sunlit trees.  She was dressed in white, as always--a
+frock of I know not what supple fabric, that looked as if you
+might have passed it through your ring, and fell in multitudes
+of small soft creases.  Two big red roses drooped from her
+bodice.  She wore a garden-hat, of white straw, with a big
+daring rose-red bow, under which the dense meshes of her hair,
+warmly dark, dimly bright, shimmered in a blur of brownish
+gold.
+
+"What vigour, what verve, what health," thought Peter, watching
+her, "what--lean, fresh, fragrant health!"  And he had, no
+doubt, his emotions.
+
+She bestowed her bread crumbs on the birds; but she was able,
+somehow, to discriminate mightily in favour of the goldfinches.
+She would make a diversion, the semblance of a fling, with her
+empty right hand; and the too-greedy sparrows would dart off,
+avid, on that false lead.  Whereupon, quickly, stealthily, she
+would rain a little shower of crumbs, from her left hand, on
+the grass beside her, to a confiding group of finches assembled
+there.  And if ever a sparrow ventured to intrude his ruffianly
+black beak into this sacred quarter, she would manage, with a
+kind of restrained ferocity, to "shoo" him away, without
+thereby frightening the finches.
+
+And all the while her eyes laughed; and there was colour in her
+cheeks; and there was the forceful, graceful action of her
+body.
+
+When the bread was finished, she clapped her hands together
+gently, to dust the last mites from them, and looked over at
+Peter, and smiled significantly.
+
+"Yes," he acknowledged, "you outwitted them very skilfully.
+You, at any rate, have no need of a dragon."
+
+"Oh, in default of a dragon, one can do dragon's work oneself,"
+she answered lightly.  "Or, rather, one can make oneself an
+instrument of justice."
+
+"All the same, I should call it uncommonly hard luck to be born
+a sparrow--within your jurisdiction," he said.
+
+"It is not an affair of luck," said she.  "One is born a
+sparrow--within my jurisdiction--for one's sins in a former
+state.--No, you little dovelings"--she turned to a pair of
+finches on the greensward near her, who were lingering, and
+gazing up into her face with hungry, expectant eyes--"I have no
+more.  I have given you my all."  And she stretched out her
+open hands, palms downwards, to convince them.
+
+"The sparrows got nothing; and the goldfinches, who got 'your
+all,' grumble because you gave so little," said Peter, sadly.
+"That is what comes of interfering with the laws of Nature."
+And then, as the two birds flew away, "See the dark, doubtful,
+reproachful glances with which they cover you."
+
+"You think they are ungrateful?" she said.  "No--listen."
+
+She held up a finger.
+
+For, at that moment, on the branch of an acacia, just over her
+head, a goldfinch began to sing--his thin, sweet, crystalline
+trill of song.
+
+"Do you call that grumbling?" she asked.
+
+"It implies a grumble," said Peter, "like the 'thank you' of a
+servant dissatisfied with his tip.  It's the very least he can
+do.  It's perfunctory--I 'm not sure it is n't even ironical."
+
+"Perfunctory!  Ironical!" cried the Duchessa.  "Look at him!
+He's warbling his delicious little soul out."
+
+They both paused to look and listen.
+
+The bird's gold-red bosom palpitated.  He marked his
+modulations by sudden emphatic movements of the head.  His eyes
+were fixed intently before him, as if he could actually see and
+follow the shining thread of his song, as it wound away through
+the air.  His performance had all the effect of a spontaneous
+rhapsody.  When it was terminated, he looked down at his
+auditors, eager, inquisitive, as who should say, "I hope you
+liked it?"--and then, with a nod clearly meant as a farewell,
+flew out of sight.
+
+The Duchessa smiled again at Peter, with intention.
+
+"You must really try to take a cheerier view of things," she
+said.
+
+And next instant she too was off, walking slowly, lightly, up
+the green lawns, between the trees, towards the castle, her
+gown fluttering in the breeze, now dazzling white as she came
+into the sun, now pearly grey as she passed into the shade.
+
+"What a woman it is," said Peter to himself, looking after her.
+"What vigour, what verve, what sex!  What a woman!"
+
+And, indeed, there was nothing of the too-prevalent epicene in
+the Duchessa's aspect; she was very certainly a woman.
+"Heavens, how she walks!" he cried in a deep whisper.
+
+But then a sudden wave of dejection swept over him.  At first
+he could not account for it.  By and by, however, a malicious
+little voice began to repeat and repeat within him, "Oh, the
+futile impression you must have made upon her!  Oh, the
+ineptitudes you
+uttered!  Oh, the precious opportunity you have misemployed!"
+
+"You are a witch," he said to Marietta.  "You've proved it to
+the hilt.  I 've seen the person, and the object is more
+desperately lost than ever."
+
+
+
+
+                               X
+
+
+That evening, among the letters Peter received from England,
+there was one from his friend Mrs. Winchfield, which contained
+certain statistics.
+
+"Your Duchessa di Santangiolo 'was' indeed, as your funny old
+servant told you, English: the only child and heiress of the
+last Lord Belfont.  The Belfonts of Lancashire (now, save for
+your Duchessa, extinct) were the most bigoted sort of Roman
+Catholics, and always educated their daughters in foreign
+convents, and as often as not married them to foreigners.  The
+Belfont men, besides, were ever and anon marrying foreign
+wives; so there will be a goodish deal of un-English blood in
+your Duchessa's own ci-devant English veins.
+
+"She was born, as I learn from an indiscretion of my Peerage,
+in 1870, and is, therefore, as near to thirty (the dangerous
+age!) as to the six-and-twenty your droll old Marietta gives
+her.  Her Christian names are Beatrice Antonia Teresa Mary
+--faites en votre choix.  She was married at nineteen to
+Baldassarre Agosto, Principe Udeschini, Duca di Santangiolo,
+Marchese di Castellofranco, Count of the Holy Roman Empire,
+Knight of the Holy Ghost and of St. Gregory, (does it take your
+breath away?), who, according to Frontin, died in '93; and as
+there were no children, his brother Felipe Lorenzo succeeded to
+the titles.  A younger brother still is Bishop of Sardagna.
+Cardinal Udeschini is the uncle.
+
+"That, dear child, empties my sack of information.  But perhaps
+I have a bigger sack, full of good advice, which I have not yet
+opened.  And perhaps, on the whole, I will not open it at all.
+Only, remember that in yonder sentimental Italian lake country,
+in this summer weather, a solitary young man's fancy might be
+much inclined to turn to thoughts of--folly; and keep an eye on
+my friend Peter Marchdale."
+
+Our solitary young man brooded over Mrs. Winchfield's letter
+for a long while.
+
+"The daughter of a lord, and the widow of a duke, and the
+niece-in-law of a cardinal," he said.  "And, as if that were
+not enough, a bigoted Roman Catholic into the bargain . . . .
+And yet--and yet," he went on, taking heart a little, "as for
+her bigotry, to judge by her assiduity in attending the village
+church, that factor, at least, thank goodness, would appear to
+be static, rather than dynamic."
+
+After another longish interval of brooding, he sauntered down
+to the riverside, through his fragrant garden, fragrant and
+fresh with the cool odours of the night, and peered into the
+darkness, towards Castel Ventirose.  Here and there he could
+discern a gleam of yellow, where some lighted window was not
+entirely hidden by the trees.  Thousands and thousands of
+insects were threading the silence with their shrill insistent
+voices.  The repeated wail, harsh, prolonged, eerie, of some
+strange wild creature, bird or beast, came down from the forest
+of the Gnisi.  At his feet, on the troubled surface of the Aco,
+the stars, reflected and distorted, shone like broken
+spearheads.
+
+He lighted a cigarette, and stood there till he had consumed
+it.
+
+"Heigh-ho!" he sighed at last, and turned back towards the
+villa.  And "Yes," he concluded, "I must certainly keep an eye
+on our friend Peter Marchdale."
+
+"But I 'm doubting it's a bit too late--troppo tardo," he
+said to Marietta, whom he found bringing hot water to his
+dressing-room.
+
+"It is not very late," said Marietta.  "Only half-past ten."
+
+"She is a woman--therefore to be loved; she is a duchess
+--therefore to be lost," he explained, in his native tongue.
+
+"Cosa." questioned Marietta, in hers.
+
+
+
+
+                              XI
+
+
+Beatrice and Emilia, strolling together in one of the flowery
+lanes up the hillside, between ranks of the omnipresent poplar,
+and rose-bush hedges, or crumbling pink-stuccoed walls that
+dripped with cyclamen and snapdragon, met old Marietta
+descending, with a basket on her arm.
+
+Marietta courtesied to the ground.
+
+"How do you do, Marietta?" Beatrice asked.
+
+"I can't complain, thank your Grandeur.  I have the lumbago on
+and off pretty constantly, and last week I broke a tooth.  But
+I can't complain.  And your Highness?"
+
+Marietta returned, with brisk aplomb.
+
+Beatrice smiled.  "Bene, grazie.  Your new master--that young
+Englishman," she continued, "I hope you find him kind, and easy
+to do for?"
+
+"Kind--yes, Excellency.  Also easy to do for.  But--!" Marietta
+shrugged her shoulders, and gave her head two meaning
+oscillations.
+
+"Oh--?" wondered Beatrice, knitting puzzled brows.
+
+"Very amiable, your Greatness; but simple, simple," Marietta
+explained, and tapped her brown old forehead with a brown
+forefinger.
+
+"Really--?" wondered Beatrice.
+
+"Yes, Nobility," said Marietta.  "Gentle as a canarybird, but
+innocent, innocent."
+
+"You astonish me," Beatrice avowed.  "How does he show it?"
+
+"The questions he asks, Most Illustrious, the things he says."
+
+"For example--?" pursued Beatrice.
+
+"For example, your Serenity--" Marietta paused, to search her
+memory.--" Well, for one example, he calls roast veal a fowl.
+I give him roast veal for his luncheon, and he says to me,
+'Marietta, this fowl has no wings.'  But everyone knows, your
+Mercy, that veal is not a fowl.  How should veal have wings?"
+
+"How indeed?" assented Beatrice, on a note of commiseration.
+And if the corners of her mouth betrayed a tendency to curve
+upwards, she immediately compelled them down.  "But perhaps he
+does not speak Italian very well?" she suggested.
+
+"Mache, Potenza!  Everyone speaks Italian," cried Marietta.
+
+"Indeed?" said Beatrice.
+
+"Naturally, your Grace--all Christians," Marietta declared.
+
+"Oh, I did n't know," said Beatrice, meekly.  "Well," she
+acknowledged, "since he speaks Italian, it is certainly
+unreasonable of him to call veal a fowl."
+
+"But that, Magnificence," Marietta went on, warming to her
+theme, "that is only one of his simplicities.  He asks me, 'Who
+puts the whitewash on Monte Sfiorito?  'And when I tell him
+that it is not whitewash, but snow, he says, 'How do you know?'
+But everyone knows that it is snow.  Whitewash!"
+
+The sprightly old woman gave her whole body a shake, for the
+better exposition of her state of mind.  And thereupon, from
+the interior of her basket, issued a plaintive little squeal.
+
+"What have you in your basket?" Beatrice asked.
+
+"A little piglet, Nobility--un piccolo porcellino," said
+Marietta.
+
+And lifting the cover an inch or two, she displayed the anxious
+face of a poor little sucking pig.
+
+"E carino?" she demanded, whilst her eyes beamed with a pride
+that almost seemed maternal.
+
+"What on earth are you going to do with him?" Beatrice gasped.
+
+The light of pride gave place to a light of resolution, in
+Marietta's eyes.
+
+"Kill him, Mightiness," was her grim response; "stuff him with
+almonds, raisins, rosemary, and onions; cook him sweet and
+sour; and serve him, garnished with rosettes of beet-root, for
+my Signorino's Sunday dinner."
+
+"Oh-h-h!" shuddered Beatrice and Emilia, in a breath; and they
+resumed their walk.
+
+
+
+
+                              XII
+
+
+Francois was dining--with an appearance of great fervour.
+
+Peter sat on his rustic bench, by the riverside, and watched
+him, smoking a cigarette the while.
+
+The Duchessa di Santangiolo stood screened by a tree in the
+park of Ventirose, and watched them both.
+
+Francois wore a wide blue ribbon round his pink and chubby
+neck; and his dinner consisted of a big bowlful of bread and
+milk.
+
+Presently the Duchessa stepped forth from her ambush, into the
+sun, and laughed.
+
+"What a sweetly pretty scene," she said.  "Pastoral--idyllic
+--it reminds one of Theocritus--it reminds one of Watteau."
+
+Peter threw his cigarette into the river, and made an
+obeisance.
+
+"I am very glad you feel the charm of it," he responded.  "May
+I be permitted to present Master Francois Vllon?"
+
+"We have met before," said the Duchessa, graciously smiling
+upon Francois, and inclining her head.
+
+"Oh, I did n't know," said Peter, apologetic.
+
+"Yes," said the Duchessa, "and in rather tragical
+circumstances.  But at that time he was anonymous.  Why--if you
+won't think my curiosity impertinent--why Francois Villon?"
+
+"Why not?" said Peter.  "He made such a tremendous outcry when
+he was condemned to death, for one thing.  You should have
+heard him.  He has a voice!  Then, for another, he takes such a
+passionate interest in his meat and drink.  And then, if you
+come to that, I really had n't the heart to call him Pauvre
+Lelian."
+
+The Duchessa raised amused eyebrows.
+
+"You felt that Pauvre Lelian was the only alternative?"
+
+"I had in mind a remark of Pauvre Lilian's friend and confrere,
+the cryptic Stephane," Peter answered.  "You will remember it.
+'L'ame d'un poete dans le corps d'un--'  I--I forget the last
+word," he faltered.
+
+"Shall we say 'little pig'?" suggested the Duchessa.
+
+"Oh, please don't," cried Peter, hastily, with a gesture of
+supplication.  "Don't say 'pig' in his presence.  You'll wound
+his feelings."
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+"I knew he was condemned to death," she owned.  "Indeed, it was
+in his condemned cell that I made his acquaintance.  Your
+Marietta Cignolesi introduced us.  Her air was so inexorable, I
+'m a good deal surprised to see him alive to-day.  There was
+some question of a stuffing of rosemary and onions."
+
+"Ah, I see," said Peter, "I see that you're familiar with the
+whole disgraceful story.  Yes, Marietta, the unspeakable old
+Tartar, was all for stuffing him with rosemary and onions.  But
+he could not bring himself to share her point of view.  He
+screamed his protest, like a man, in twenty different octaves.
+You really should have heard him.  His voice is of a compass,
+of a timbre, of an expressiveness!  Passive endurance, I fear,
+is not his forte.  For the sake of peace and silence, I
+intervened, interceded.  She had her knife at his very throat.
+I was not an instant too soon.  So, of course, I 've had to
+adopt him."
+
+"Of course, poor man," sympathised the Duchessa.  "It's a
+recognised principle that if you save a fellow's life, you 're
+bound to him for the rest of yours.  But--but won't you find
+him rather a burdensome responsibility when he's grownup?" she
+reflected.
+
+"--Que voulez-vous?" reflected Peter.  "Burdensome
+responsibilities are the appointed accompaniments of man's
+pilgrimage.  Why not Francois Villon, as well as another?  And
+besides, as the world is at present organised, a member of the
+class vulgarly styled 'the rich' can generally manage to shift
+his responsibilities, when they become too irksome, upon the
+backs of the poor.  For example--Marietta!  Marietta!" he
+called, raising his voice a little, and clapping his hands.
+
+Marietta came.  When she had made her courtesy to the Duchessa,
+and a polite enquiry as to her Excellency's health, Peter said,
+with an indicative nod of the head, "Will you be so good as to
+remove my responsibility?"
+
+"Il porcellino?" questioned Marietta.
+
+"Ang," said he.
+
+And when Marietta had borne Francois, struggling and squealing
+in her arms, from the foreground--
+
+"There--you see how it is done," he remarked.
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+"An object-lesson," she agreed.  "An object-lesson in--might
+n't one call it the science of Applied Cynicism?"
+
+"Science!" Peter plaintively repudiated the word.  "No, no.  I
+was rather flattering myself it was an art."
+
+"Apropos of art--" said the Duchessa.
+
+She came down two or three steps nearer to the brink of the
+river.  She produced from behind her back a hand that she had
+kept there, and held up for Peter's inspection a grey-and-gold
+bound book.
+
+"Apropos of art, I've been reading a novel.  Do you know it?"
+
+Peter glanced at the grey-and-gold binding--and dissembled the
+emotion that suddenly swelled big in his heart.
+
+He screwed his eyeglass into his eye, and gave an intent look.
+
+"I can't make out the title," he temporised, shaking his head,
+and letting his eyeglass drop.
+
+On the whole, it was very well acted; and I hope the occult
+little smile that played about the Duchessa's lips was a smile
+of appreciation.
+
+"It has a highly appropriate title," she said.  "It is called
+'A Man of Words,' by an author I've never happened to hear of
+before, named Felix Wildmay."
+
+"Oh, yes.  How very odd," said Peter.  "By a curious chance, I
+know it very well.  But I 'm surprised to discover that you do.
+How on earth did it fall into your hands?"
+
+"Why on earth shouldn't it?" wondered she.  "Novels are
+intended to fall into people's hands, are they not?"
+
+"I believe so," he assented.  "But intentions, in this vale of
+tears, are not always realised, are they?  Anyhow, 'A Man of
+Words' is not like other novels.  It's peculiar."
+
+"Peculiar--?" she repeated.
+
+"Of a peculiar, of an unparalleled obscurity," he explained.
+"There has been no failure approaching it since What's-his-name
+invented printing.  I hadn't supposed that seven copies of it
+were in circulation."
+
+"Really?" said the Duchessa.  "A correspondent of mine in
+London recommended it.  But--in view of its unparalleled
+obscurity is n't it almost equally a matter for surprise that
+you should know it?"
+
+"It would be, sure enough," consented Peter, "if it weren't
+that I just happen also to know the author."
+
+"Oh--?  You know the author?" cried the Duchessa, with
+animation.
+
+"Comme ma poche," said Peter.  "We were boys together."
+
+"Really?" said she.  "What a coincidence."
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+"And--and his book?"  Her eyebrows went up, interrogative.  "I
+expect, as you know the man, you think rather poorly of it?"
+
+"On the contrary, in the teeth of verisimilitude, I think
+extremely well of it," he answered firmly.  "I admire it
+immensely.  I think it's an altogether ripping little book.  I
+think it's one of the nicest little books I've read for ages.
+
+"How funny," said she.
+
+"Why funny?" asked he.
+
+"It's so unlikely that one should seem a genius to one's old
+familiar friends."
+
+"Did I say he seemed a genius to me?  I misled you.  He does
+n't.  In fact, he very frequently seems--but, for Charity's
+sake, I 'd best forbear to tell.  However, I admire his book.
+And--to be entirely frank--it's a constant source of
+astonishment to me that he should ever have been able to do
+anything one-tenth so good."
+
+The Duchessa smiled pensively.
+
+"Ah, well," she mused, "we must assume that he has happy
+moments--or, perhaps, two soul-sides, one to face the world
+with, one to show his manuscripts when he's writing.  You hint
+a fault, and hesitate dislike.  That, indeed, is only natural,
+on the part of an old friend.  But you pique my interest.  What
+is the trouble with him?  Is--is he conceited, for example?"
+
+"The trouble with him?" Peter pondered.  "Oh, it would be too
+long and too sad a story.  Should I anatomise him to you as he
+is, I must blush and weep, and you must look pale and wonder.
+He has pretty nearly every weakness, not to mention vices, that
+flesh is heir to.  But as for conceit . . . let me see.  He
+concurs in my own high opinion of his work, I believe; but I
+don't know whether, as literary men go, it would be fair to
+call him conceited.  He belongs, at any rate, to the
+comparatively modest minority who do not secretly fancy that
+Shakespeare has come back to life."
+
+"That Shakespeare has come back to life!" marvelled the
+Duchessa.  "Do you mean to say that most literary men fancy
+that?"
+
+"I think perhaps I am acquainted with three who don't," Peter
+replied; "but one of them merely wears his rue with a
+difference.  He fancies that it's Goethe."
+
+"How extravagantly--how exquisitely droll!" she laughed.
+
+"I confess, it struck me so, until I got accustomed to it,"
+said he, "until I learned that it was one of the commonplaces,
+one of the normal attributes of the literary temperament.  It's
+as much to be taken for granted, when you meet an author, as
+the tail is to be taken for granted, when you meet a cat."
+
+"I'm vastly your debtor for the information--it will stand me
+in stead with the next author who comes my way.  But, in that
+case, your friend Mr. Felix Wildmay will be, as it were, a sort
+of Manx cat?" was her smiling deduction.
+
+"Yes, if you like, in that particular, a sort of Manx cat,"
+acquiesced Peter, with a laugh.
+
+The Duchessa laughed too; and then there was a little pause.
+
+Overhead, never so light a breeze lisped never so faintly in
+the tree-tops; here and there bird-notes fell, liquid,
+desultory, like drops of rain after a shower; and constantly
+one heard the cool music of the river.  The sun, filtering
+through worlds and worlds of leaves, shed upon everything a
+green-gold penumbra.  The air, warm and still, was sweet with
+garden-scents.  The lake, according to its habit at this hour
+of the afternoon, had drawn a grey veil over its face, a thin
+grey veil, through which its sapphire-blue shone furtively.
+Far away, in the summer haze, Monte Sfiorito seemed a mere dim
+spectre of itself--a stranger might easily have mistaken it for
+a vague mass of cloud floating above the horizon.
+
+"Are you aware that it 's a singularly lovely afternoon?" the
+Duchessa asked, by and by.
+
+"I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so," Peter hazarded,
+with the least perceptible approach to a meaning bow.
+
+In the Duchessa's face, perhaps, there flickered, for
+half-a-second, the least perceptible light, as of a
+comprehending and unresentful smile.  But she went on,
+with fine aloofness.
+
+"I rather envy you your river, you know.  We are too far from
+it at the castle.  Is n't the sound, the murmur, of it
+delicious?  And its colour--how does it come by such a subtle
+colour?  Is it green?  Is it blue?  And the diamonds on its
+surface--see how they glitter.  You know, of course," she
+questioned, "who the owner is of those unequalled gems?"
+
+"Surely," Peter answered, "the lady paramount of this demesne?"
+
+"No, no." She shook her head, smiling.  "Undine.  They are
+Undine's--her necklaces and tiaras.  No mortal woman's
+jewel-case contains anything half so brilliant.  But look at
+them--look at the long chains of them--how they float for a
+minute--and are then drawn down.  They are Undine's--Undine
+and her companions are sporting with them just below the
+surface.  A moment ago I caught a glimpse of a white arm."
+
+"Ah," said Peter, nodding thoughtfully, "that's what it is to
+have 'the seeing eye.'  But I'm grieved to hear of Undine in
+such a wanton mood.  I had hoped she would still be weeping her
+unhappy love-affair."
+
+"What! with that horrid, stolid German--Hildebrandt, was his
+name?" cried the Duchessa.  "Not she!  Long ago, I'm glad to
+say, she learned to laugh at that, as a mere caprice of her
+immaturity.  However, this is a digression.  I want to return
+to our 'Man of Words.'  Tell me--what is the quality you
+especially like in it?"
+
+"I like its every quality," Peter affirmed, unblushing.  "Its
+style, its finish, its concentration; its wit, humour,
+sentiment; its texture, tone, atmosphere; its scenes, its
+subject; the paper it's printed on, the type, the binding.  But
+above all, I like its heroine.  I think Pauline de Fleuvieres
+the pearl of human women--the cleverest, the loveliest, the
+most desirable, the most exasperating.  And also the most
+feminine.  I can't think of her at all as a mere fiction, a
+mere shadow on paper.  I think of her as a living, breathing,
+flesh-and-blood woman, whom I have actually known.  I can see
+her before me now--I can see her eyes, full of mystery and
+mischief--I can see her exquisite little teeth, as she smiles
+--I can see her hair, her hands--I can almost catch the perfume
+of her garments.  I 'm utterly infatuated with her--I could
+commit a hundred follies for her."
+
+"Mercy!" exclaimed the Duchessa.  "You are enthusiastic."
+
+"The book's admirers are so few, they must endeavour to make up
+in enthusiasm what they lack in numbers," he submitted.
+
+"But--at that rate--why are they so few?" she puzzled.  "If the
+book is all you think it, how do you account for its
+unpopularity?"
+
+"It could never conceivably be anything but unpopular," said
+he.  "It has the fatal gift of beauty."
+
+The Duchessa laughed surprise.
+
+"Is beauty a fatal gift--in works of art?"
+
+"Yes--in England," he declared.
+
+"In England?  Why especially in England?"
+
+"In English-speaking--in Anglo-Saxon lands, if you prefer.  The
+Anglo-Saxon public is beauty-blind.  They have fifty religions
+--only one sauce--and no sense of beauty whatsoever.  They can
+see the nose on one's face--the mote in their neighbour's eye;
+they can see when a bargain is good, when a war will be
+expedient.  But the one thing they can never see is beauty.
+And when, by some rare chance, you catch them in the act of
+admiring a beautiful object, it will never be for its beauty
+--it will be in spite of its beauty for some other, some
+extra-aesthetic interest it possesses--some topical or historical
+interest.  Beauty is necessarily detached from all that is
+topical or historical, or documentary or actual.  It is also
+necessarily an effect of fine shades, delicate values,
+vanishing distinctions, of evasiveness, inconsequence,
+suggestion.  It is also absolute, unrelated--it is positive or
+negative or superlative--it is never comparative.  Well, the
+Anglo-Saxon public is totally insensible to such things.  They
+can no more feel them, than a blind worm can feel the colours
+of the rainbow."
+
+She laughed again, and regarded him with an air of humorous
+meditation.
+
+"And that accounts for the unsuccess of 'A Man of Words'?"
+
+"You might as well offer Francois Villon a banquet of Orient
+pearls."
+
+"You are bitterly hard on the Anglo-Saxon public."
+
+"Oh, no," he disclaimed, "not hard--but just.  I wish them all
+sorts of prosperity, with a little more taste."
+
+"Oh, but surely," she caught him up, "if their taste were
+greater, their prosperity would be less?"
+
+"I don't know," said he.  "The Greeks were fairly prosperous,
+were n't they?  And the Venetians?  And the French are not yet
+quite bankrupt."
+
+Still again she laughed--always with that little air of
+humorous meditation.
+
+"You--you don't exactly overwhelm one with compliments," she
+observed.
+
+He looked alarm, anxiety.
+
+"Don't I?  What have I neglected?" he cried.
+
+"You 've never once evinced the slightest curiosity to learn
+what I think of the book in question."
+
+"Oh, I'm sure you like it," he rejoined hardily.  "You have
+'the seeing eye.'"
+
+"And yet I'm just a humble member of the Anglo-Saxon public."
+
+"No--you're a distinguished member of the Anglo-Saxon
+'remnant.'  Thank heaven, there's a remnant, a little scattered
+remnant.  I'm perfectly sure you like 'A Man of Words.'"
+
+"'Like it' is a proposition so general.  Perhaps I am burning
+to tell someone what I think of it in detail."
+
+She smiled into his eyes, a trifle oddly.
+
+"If you are, then I know someone who is burning to hear you,"
+he avowed.
+
+"Well, then, I think--I think . . . " she began, on a note of
+deliberation.  "But I 'm afraid, just now, it would take too
+long to formulate my thought.  Perhaps I'll try another day."
+
+She gave him a derisory little nod--and in a minute was well up
+the lawn, towards the castle.
+
+Peter glared after her, his fists clenched, teeth set.
+
+"You fiend!" he muttered.  Then, turning savagely upon himself,
+"You duffer!"
+
+Nevertheless, that evening, he said to Marietta, "The plot
+thickens.  We've advanced a step.  We've reached what the
+vulgar call a psychological moment.  She's seen my Portrait of
+a Lady.  But as yet, if you can believe me, she doesn't dream
+who painted it; and she has n't recognised the subject.  As if
+one were to face one's image in the glass, and take it for
+another's!  3--I 'll--I 'll double your wages--if you will
+induce events to hurry up."
+
+However, as he spoke English, Marietta was in no position to
+profit by his offer.
+
+
+
+
+                             XIII
+
+
+Peter was walking in the high-road, on the other side of the
+river--the great high-road that leads from Bergamo to Milan.
+
+It was late in the afternoon, and already, in the west, the sky
+was beginning to put on some of its sunset splendours.  In the
+east, framed to Peter's vision by parallel lines of poplars, it
+hung like a curtain of dark-blue velvet.
+
+Peter sat on the grass, by the roadside, in the shadow of a
+hedge--a rose-bush hedge, of course--and lighted a cigarette.
+
+Far down the long white road, against the blue velvet sky,
+between the poplars, two little spots of black, two small human
+figures, were moving towards him.
+
+Half absently, he let his eyes accompany them.
+
+As they carne nearer, they defined themselves as a boy and a
+girl.  Nearer still, he saw that they were ragged and dusty and
+barefoot.
+
+The boy had three or four gaudy-hued wicker baskets slung over
+his shoulder.
+
+Vaguely, tacitly, Peter supposed that they would be the
+children of some of the peasants of the countryside, on their
+way home from the village.
+
+As they arrived abreast of him, they paid him the usual
+peasants' salute.  The boy lifted a tattered felt hat from his
+head, the girl bobbed a courtesy, and "Buona sera, Eccellenza,"
+they said in concert, without, however, pausing in their march.
+
+Peter put his hand in his pocket.
+
+"Here, little girl," he called.
+
+The little girl glanced at him, doubting.
+
+"Come here," he said.
+
+Her face a question, she came up to him; and he gave her a few
+coppers.
+
+"To buy sweetmeats," he said.
+
+"A thousand thanks; Excellency," said she, bobbing another
+courtesy.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency," said the boy, from his
+distance, again lifting his rag of a hat.
+
+And they trudged on.
+
+But Peter looked after them--and his heart smote him.  They
+were clearly of the poorest of the poor.  He thought of Hansel
+and Gretel.  Why had he given them so little?  He called to
+them to stop.
+
+The little girl came running back.
+
+Peter rose to meet her.
+
+"You may as well buy some ribbons too," he said, and gave her a
+couple of lire.
+
+She looked at the money with surprise--even with an appearance
+of hesitation.  Plainly, it was a sum, in her eyes.
+
+"It's all right.  Now run along," said Peter.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency," said she, with a third
+courtesy, and rejoined her brother . . . .
+
+"Where are they going?" asked a voice.
+
+Peter faced about.
+
+There stood the Duchessa, in a bicycling costume, her bicycle
+beside her.  Her bicycling costume was of blue serge, and she
+wore a jaunty sailor-hat with a blue ribbon.  Peter (in spite
+of the commotion in his breast) was able to remember that this
+was the first time he had seen her in anything but white.
+
+Her attention was all upon the children, whom he, perhaps, had
+more or less banished to Cracklimbo.
+
+"Where are they going?" she repeated, trouble in her voice and
+in her eyes.
+
+Peter collected himself.
+
+"The children?  I don't know--I didn't ask.  Home, aren't
+they?"
+
+"Home?  Oh, no.  They don't live hereabouts," she said.  "I
+know all the poor of this neighbourhood.--Ohe there!  Children!
+Children!" she cried.
+
+But they were quite a hundred yards away, and did not hear.
+
+"Do you wish them to come back?" asked Peter.
+
+"Yes--of course," she answered, with a shade of impatience.
+
+He put his fingers to his lips (you know the schoolboy
+accomplishment), and gave a long whistle.
+
+That the children did hear.
+
+They halted, and turned round, looking, enquiring.
+
+"Come back--come back!" called the Duchessa, raising her hand,
+and beckoning.
+
+They came back.
+
+"The pathetic little imps," she murmured while they were on the
+way.
+
+The boy was a sturdy, square-built fellow, of twelve, thirteen,
+with a shock of brown hair, brown cheeks, and sunny brown eyes;
+with a precocious air of doggedness, of responsibility.  He
+wore an old tail-coat, the tail-coat of a man, ragged,
+discoloured, falling to his ankles.
+
+The girl was ten or eleven, pale, pinched; hungry, weary, and
+sorry looking.  Her hair too had been brown, upon a time; but
+now it was faded to something near the tint of ashes, and had
+almost the effect of being grey.  Her pale little forehead was
+crossed by thin wrinkles, lines of pain, of worry, like an old
+woman's.
+
+The Duchessa, pushing her bicycle, and followed by Peter, moved
+down the road, to meet them.  Peter had never been so near to
+her before--at moments her arm all but brushed his sleeve.  I
+think he blessed the children.
+
+"Where are you going?" the Duchessa asked, softly, smiling into
+the girl's sad little face.
+
+The girl had shown no fear of Peter; but apparently she was
+somewhat frightened by this grand lady.  The toes of her bare
+feet worked nervously in the dust.  She hung her head shyly,
+and eyed her brother.
+
+But the brother, removing his hat, with the bow of an Italian
+peasant--and that is to say, the bow of a courtier--spoke up
+bravely.
+
+"To Turin, Nobility."
+
+He said it in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, quite as he might
+have said, "To the next farm-house."
+
+The Duchessa, however, had not bargained for an answer of this
+measure.  Startled, doubting her ears perhaps, "To--Turin--!"
+she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, Excellency," said the boy.
+
+"But--but Turin--Turin is hundreds of kilometres from here,"
+she said, in a kind of gasp.
+
+"Yes, Excellency," said the boy.
+
+"You are going to Turin--you two children--walking--like that!"
+she persisted.
+
+"Yes, Excellency."
+
+"But--but it will take you a month."
+
+"Pardon, noble lady," said the boy.  "With your Excellency's
+permission, we were told it should take fifteen days."
+
+"Where do you come from?" she asked.
+
+"From Bergamo, Excellency."
+
+"When did you leave Bergamo?"
+
+"Yesterday morning, Excellency."
+
+"The little girl is your sister?"
+
+"Yes, Excellency."
+
+"Have you a mother and father?"
+
+"A father, Excellency.  The mother is dead."  Each of the
+children made the Sign of the Cross; and Peter was somewhat
+surprised, no doubt, to see the Duchessa do likewise.  He had
+yet to learn the beautiful custom of that pious Lombard land,
+whereby, when the Dead are mentioned, you make the Sign of the
+Cross, and, pausing reverently for a moment, say in silence the
+traditional prayer of the Church:
+
+"May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed,
+through the Mercy of God, rest in peace."
+
+"And where is your father?" the Duchessa asked.
+
+"In Turin, Excellency," answered the boy.  "He is a glass-blower.
+After the strike at Bergamo, he went to Turin to seek work.  Now
+he has found it.  So he has sent for us to come to
+him."
+
+"And you two children--alone--are going to walk all the way to
+Turin!"  She could not get over the pitiful wonder of it.
+
+"Yes, Excellency."
+
+"The heart-rending little waifs," she said, in English, with
+something like a sob.  Then, in Italian, "But--but how do you
+live by the way?"
+
+The boy touched his shoulder-load of baskets.
+
+"We sell these, Excellency."
+
+"What is their price?" she asked.
+
+"Thirty soldi, Excellency."
+
+"Have you sold many since you started?"
+
+The boy looked away; and now it was his turn to hang his head,
+and to let his toes work nervously in the dust.
+
+"Haven't you sold any?" she exclaimed, drawing her conclusions.
+
+"No, Excellency.  The people would not buy," he owned, in a
+dull voice, keeping his eyes down.
+
+"Poverino," she murmured.  "Where are you going to sleep
+to-night?"
+
+"In a house, Excellency," said he.
+
+But that seemed to strike the Duchessa as somewhat vague.
+
+"In what house?" she asked.
+
+"I do not know, Excellency," he confessed.  "We will find a
+house."
+
+"Would you like to come back with me, and sleep at my house?"
+
+The boy and girl looked at each other, taking mute counsel.
+
+Then, "Pardon, noble lady--with your Excellency's permission,
+is it far?" the boy questioned.
+
+"I am afraid it is not very near--three or four kilometres."
+
+Again the children looked at each other, conferring.
+Afterwards, the boy shook his head.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency.  With your permission, we must
+not turn back.  We must walk on till later.  At night we will
+find a house."
+
+"They are too proud to own that their house will be a hedge,"
+she said to Peter, again in English.  "Aren't you hungry?" she
+asked the children.
+
+"No, Excellency.  We had bread in the village, below there,"
+answered the boy.
+
+"You will not come home with me, and have a good dinner, and a
+good night's sleep?"
+
+"Pardon, Excellency.  With your favour, the father would not
+wish us to turn back."
+
+The Duchessa looked at the little girl.
+
+The little girl wore a medal of the Immaculate Conception on a
+ribbon round her neck--a forlorn blue ribbon, soiled and
+frayed.
+
+"Oh, you have a holy medal," said the Duchessa.
+
+"Yes, noble lady," said the girl, dropping a courtesy, and
+lifting up her sad little weazened face.
+
+"She has been saying her prayers all along the road," the boy
+volunteered.
+
+"That is right," approved the Duchessa.  "You have not made
+your First Communion yet, have you?"
+
+"No, Excellency," said the girl.  "I shall  make it next year."
+
+"And you?" the Duchessa asked the boy.
+
+"I made mine at Corpus Christi," said the boy, with a touch of
+pride.
+
+The Duchessa turned to Peter.
+
+"Do you know, I haven't a penny in my pocket.  I have come out
+without my purse."
+
+"How much ought one to give them?" Peter asked.
+
+"Of course, there is the fear that they might be robbed," she
+reflected.  "If one should give them a note of any value, they
+would have to change it; and they would probably be robbed.
+What to do?"
+
+"I will speak to the boy," said Peter.  "Would you like to go
+to Turin by train?" he asked.
+
+The boy and girl looked at each other.  Yes, Excellency," said
+the boy.
+
+"But if I give you money for your fare, will you know how to
+take care of it--how to prevent people from robbing you?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Excellency."
+
+"You could take the train this evening, at Venzona, about two
+kilometres from here, in the direction you are walking.  In an
+hour or two you would arrive at Milan; there you would change
+into the train for Turin.  You would be at Turin to-morrow
+morning."
+
+"Yes, Excellency."
+
+"But if I give you money, you will not let people rob you?  If
+I give you a hundred lire?"
+
+The boy drew back, stared, as if frightened.
+
+"A hundred lire--?" he said.
+
+"Yes," said Peter.
+
+The boy looked at his sister.
+
+"Pardon, Nobility," he said.  "With your condescension, does it
+cost a hundred lire to go to Turin by train?"
+
+"Oh, no.  I think it costs eight or ten."
+
+Again the boy looked at his sister.
+
+"Pardon, Nobility.  With your Excellency's permission, we
+should not desire a hundred lire then," he said.
+
+Peter and the Duchessa were not altogether to be blamed, I
+hope, if they exchanged the merest hint of a smile.
+
+"Well, if I should give you fifty?" Peter asked.
+
+"Fifty lire, Excellency?"
+
+Peter nodded.
+
+Still again the boy sought counsel of his sister, with his
+eyes.
+
+"Yes, Excellency," he said.
+
+"You are sure you will be able to take care of it--you will not
+let people rob you," the Duchessa put in, anxious.  "They will
+wish to rob you.  If you go to sleep in the train, they will
+try to pick your pocket."
+
+"I will hide it, noble lady.  No one shall rob me.  If I go to
+sleep in the train, I will sit on it, and my sister will watch.
+If she goes to sleep, I will watch," the boy promised
+confidently.
+
+"You must give it to him in the smallest change you can
+possibly scrape together," she advised Peter.
+
+And with one-lira, two-lira, ten-lira notes, and with a little
+silver and copper, he made up the amount.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency," said the boy, with a bow that
+was magnificent; and he proceeded to distribute the money
+between various obscure pockets.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency," said the girl, with a
+courtesy.
+
+"Addio, a buon' viaggio," said Peter.
+
+"Addio, Eccellenze," said the boy.
+
+"Addio, Eccellenze," said the girl.
+
+But the Duchessa impulsively stooped down, and kissed the girl
+on her poor little wrinkled brow.  And when she stood up, Peter
+saw that her eyes were wet.
+
+The children moved off.  They moved off, whispering together,
+and gesticulating, after the manner of their race: discussing
+something.  Presently they stopped; and the boy came running
+back, while his sister waited.
+
+He doffed his hat, and said, "A thousand pardons, Excellency-"
+
+"Yes?  What is it?" Peter asked.
+
+"With your Excellency's favour--is it obligatory that we should
+take the train?"
+
+"Obligatory?" puzzled Peter.  "How do you mean?"
+
+"If it is not obligatory, we would prefer, with the permission
+of your Excellency, to save the money."
+
+"But--but then you will have to walk!" cried Peter.
+
+"But if it is not obligatory to take the train, we would pray
+your Excellency's permission to save the money.  We should like
+to save the money, to give it to the father.  The father is
+very poor.  Fifty lire is so much,"
+
+This time it was Peter who looked for counsel to the Duchessa.
+
+Her eyes, still bright with tears, responded, "Let them do as
+they will."
+
+"No, it is not obligatory--it is only recommended," he said to
+the boy, with a smile that he could n't help.  "Do as you will.
+But if I were you, I should spare my poor little feet."
+
+"Mille grazie, Eccellenze," the boy said, with a final sweep of
+his tattered hat.  He ran back to his sister; and next moment
+they were walking resolutely on, westward, "into the great red
+light."
+
+
+The Duchessa and Peter were silent for a while, looking after
+them.
+
+They dwindled to dots in the distance, and then, where the road
+turned, disappeared.
+
+At last the Duchessa spoke--but almost as if speaking to
+herself.
+
+"There, Felix Wildmay, you writer of tales, is a subject made
+to your hand," she said.
+
+We may guess whether Peter was startled.  Was it possible that
+she had found him out?  A sound, confused, embarrassed,
+something composite, between an oh and ayes, seemed to expire
+in his throat.
+
+But the Duchessa did n't appear to heed it.
+
+"Don't you think it would be a touching episode for your friend
+to write a story round?" she asked.
+
+We may guess whether he was relieved.
+
+"Oh--oh, yes," he agreed, with the precipitancy of a man who,
+in his relief, would agree to anything.
+
+"Have you ever seen such courage?" she went on.  "The wonderful
+babies!  Fancy fifteen days, fifteen days and nights, alone,
+unprotected, on the highway, those poor little atoms!  Down in
+their hearts they are really filled with terror.  Who would n't
+be, with such a journey before him?  But how finely they
+concealed it, mastered it!  Oh, I hope they won't be robbed.
+God help them--God help them!"
+
+"God help them, indeed," said Peter.
+
+"And the little girl, with her medal of the Immaculate
+Conception.  The father, after all, can hardly be the brute one
+might suspect, since he has given them a religious education.
+Oh, I am sure, I am sure, it was the Blessed Virgin herself who
+sent us across their path, in answer to that poor little
+creature's prayers."
+
+"Yes," said Peter, ambiguously perhaps.  But he liked the way
+in which she united him to herself in the pronoun.
+
+"Which, of course," she added, smiling gravely into his eyes,
+"seems the height of absurdity to you?"
+
+"Why should it seem the height of absurdity to me?" he asked.
+
+"You are a Protestant, I suppose?"
+
+"I suppose so.  But what of that?  At all events, I believe
+there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of
+in the usual philosophies.  And I see no reason why it should
+not have been the Blessed Virgin who sent us across their
+path."
+
+"What would your Protestant pastors and masters do, if they
+heard you?  Isn't that what they call Popish superstition?"
+
+"I daresay.  But I'm not sure that there's any such thing as
+superstition.  Superstition, in its essence, is merely a
+recognition of the truth that in a universe of mysteries and
+contradictions, like ours, nothing conceivable or inconceivable
+is impossible."
+
+"Oh, no, no," she objected.  "Superstition is the belief in
+something that is ugly and bad and unmeaning.  That is the
+difference between superstition and religion.  Religion is the
+belief in something that is beautiful and good and significant
+--something that throws light into the dark places of life--that
+helps us to see and to live."
+
+"Yes," said Peter, "I admit the distinction."  After a little
+suspension, "I thought," he questioned, "that all Catholics
+were required to go to Mass on Sunday?"
+
+"Of course--so they are," said she.
+
+"But--but you--" he began.
+
+"I hear Mass not on Sunday only--I hear it every morning of my
+life."
+
+"Oh?  Indeed?  I beg your pardon," he stumbled.  "I--one--one
+never sees you at the village church."
+
+"No.  We have a chapel and a chaplain at the castle."
+
+She mounted her bicycle.
+
+"Good-bye," she said, and lightly rode away.
+
+"So-ho!  Her bigotry is not such a negligible quantity, after
+all," Peter concluded.
+
+"But what," he demanded of Marietta, as she ministered to his
+wants at dinner, "what does one barrier more or less matter,
+when people are already divided by a gulf that never can be
+traversed?  You see that river?"  He pointed through his open
+window to the Aco.  "It is a symbol.  She stands on one side of
+it, I stand on the other, and we exchange little jokes.  But
+the river is always there, flowing between us, separating us.
+She is the daughter of a lord, and the widow of a duke, and the
+fairest of her sex, and a millionaire, and a Roman Catholic.
+What am I?  Oh, I don't deny I 'm clever.  But for the rest?
+. . .  My dear Marietta, I am simply, in one word, the victim
+of a misplaced attachment."
+
+"Non capisco Francese," said Marietta.
+
+
+
+
+                              XIV
+
+
+And after that, for I forget how many days, Peter and the
+Duchessa did not meet; and so he sank low and lower in his
+mind.
+
+Nothing that can befall us, optimists aver, is without its
+value; and this, I have heard, is especially true if we happen
+to be literary men.  All is grist that comes to a writer's
+mill.
+
+By his present experience, accordingly, Peter learned--and in
+the regretful prose of some future masterpiece will perhaps be
+enabled to remember--how exceeding great is the impatience of
+the lovesick, with what febrile vehemence the smitten heart can
+burn, and to what improbable lengths hours and minutes can on
+occasions stretch themselves.
+
+He tried many methods of distraction.
+
+There was always the panorama of his valley--the dark-blue
+lake, pale Monte Sfiorito, the frowning Gnisi, the smiling
+uplands westward.  There were always the sky, the clouds, the
+clear sunshine, the crisp-etched shadows; and in the afternoon
+there was always the wondrous opalescent haze of August,
+filling every distance.  There was always his garden--there
+were the great trees, with the light sifting through high
+spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds,
+the bees, the butterflies, with their colour, and their
+fragrance, and their music; there was his tinkling fountain,
+in its nimbus of prismatic spray; there was the swift, symbolic
+Aco.  And then, at a half-hour's walk, there was the pretty
+pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top church, its odd
+little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded frescoed
+house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian life:
+--the cobbler tapping in his stall; women gossiping at their
+toilets; children sprawling in the dirt, chasing each other,
+shouting; men drinking, playing mora, quarrelling, laughing,
+singing, twanging mandolines, at the tables under the withered
+bush of the wine-shop; and two or three more pensive citizens
+swinging their legs from the parapet of the bridge, and angling
+for fish that never bit, in the impetuous stream below.
+
+Peter looked at these things; and, it is to be presumed, he saw
+them.  But, for all the joy they gave him, he, this cultivator
+of the sense of beauty, might have been the basest unit of his
+own purblind Anglo-Saxon public.  They were the background for
+an absent figure.  They were the stage-accessories of a drama
+whose action was arrested.  They were an empty theatre.
+
+He tried to read.  He had brought a trunkful of books to Villa
+Floriano; but that book had been left behind which could fix
+his interest now.
+
+He tried to write--and wondered, in a kind of daze, that any
+man should ever have felt the faintest ambition to do a thing
+so thankless and so futile.
+
+"I shall never write again.  Writing," he generalised, and
+possibly not without some reason, "when it is n't the sordidest
+of trades, is a mere fatuous assertion of one's egotism.
+Breaking stones in the street were a nobler occupation; weaving
+ropes of sand were better sport.  The only things that are
+worth writing are inexpressible, and can't be written.  The
+only things that can be written are obvious and worthless--the
+very crackling of thorns under a pot.  Oh, why does n't she
+turn up?"
+
+And the worst of it was that at any moment, for aught he knew,
+she might turn up.  That was the worst of it, and the best.  It
+kept hope alive, only to torture hope.  It encouraged him to
+wait, to watch, to expect; to linger in his garden, gazing
+hungry-eyed up the lawns of Ventirose, striving to pierce the
+foliage that embowered the castle; to wander the country
+round-about, scanning every vista, scrutinising every shape and
+shadow, a tweed-clad Gastibelza.  At any moment, indeed, she
+might turn up; but the days passed--the hypocritic days--and
+she did not turn up.
+
+
+Marietta, the kind soul, noticing his despondency, sought in
+divers artless ways to cheer him.
+
+One evening she burst into his sitting-room with the effect of
+a small explosion, excitement in every line of her brown old
+face and wiry little figure.
+
+"The fireflies!  The fireflies, Signorino!" she cried, with
+strenuous gestures.
+
+"What fireflies?" asked he, with phlegm.
+
+"It is the feast of St. Dominic.  The fireflies have arrived.
+They arrive every year on the feast of St. Dominic.  They are
+the beads of his rosary.  They are St. Dominic's Aves.  There
+are thousands of them.  Come, Signorino, Come and see."
+
+Her black eyes snapped.  She waved her hands urgently towards
+the window.
+
+Peter languidly got up, languidly crossed the room, looked out.
+
+There were, in truth, thousands of them, thousands and
+thousands of tiny primrose flames, circling, fluttering,
+rising, sinking, in the purple blackness of the night, like
+snowflakes in a wind, palpitating like hearts of living
+gold--Jove descending upon Danae invisible.
+
+"Son carin', eh?" cried eager Marietta.
+
+"Hum--yes--pretty enough," he grudgingly acknowledged.  "But
+even so?" the ingrate added, as he turned away, and let himself
+drop back into his lounging-chair.  "My dear good woman, no
+amount of prettiness can disguise the fundamental banality of
+things.  Your fireflies--St. Dominic's beads, if you like--and,
+apropos of that, do you know what they call them in America?
+--they call them lightning-bugs, if you can believe me--remark
+the difference between southern euphuism and western bluntness
+--your fireflies are pretty enough, I grant.  But they are
+tinsel pasted on the Desert of Sahara.  They are condiments
+added to a dinner of dust and ashes.  Life, trick it out as you
+will, is just an incubus--is just the Old Man of the Sea.
+Language fails me to convey to you any notion how heavily he
+sits on my poor shoulders.  I thought I had suffered from ennui
+in my youth.  But the malady merely plays with the green fruit;
+it reserves its serious ravages for the ripe.  I can promise
+you 't is not a laughing matter.  Have you ever had a fixed
+idea?  Have you ever spent days and nights racking your brain,
+importuning the unanswering Powers, to learn whether there was
+--well, whether there was Another Man, for instance?  Oh, bring
+me drink.  Bring me Seltzer water and Vermouth.  I will seek
+nepenthe at the bottom of the wine-cup."
+
+Was there another man?  Why should there not be?  And yet was
+there?  In her continued absence, the question came back
+persistently, and scarcely contributed to his peace of mind.
+
+
+A few days later, nothing discouraged, "Would you like to have
+a good laugh, Signorino?" Marietta enquired.
+
+"Yes," he answered, apathetic.
+
+"Then do me the favour to come," she said.
+
+She led him out of his garden, to the gate of a neighbouring
+meadow.  A beautiful black-horned white cow stood there, her
+head over the bars, looking up and down the road, and now and
+then uttering a low distressful "moo."
+
+"See her," said Marietta.
+
+"I see her.  Well--?" said Peter.
+
+This morning they took her calf from her--to wean it," said
+Marietta.
+
+"Did they, the cruel things?  Well-?" said he.
+
+"And ever since, she has stood there by the gate, looking down
+the road, waiting, calling."
+
+"The poor dear.  Well--?" said he.
+
+"But do you not see, Signorino?  Look at her eyes.  She is
+weeping--weeping like a Christian."
+
+Peter looked-and, sure enough, from the poor cow's eyes tears
+were falling, steadily, rapidly: big limpid tears that trickled
+down her cheek, her great homely hairy cheek, and dropped on
+the grass: tears of helpless pain, uncomprehending endurance.
+"Why have they done this thing to me?" they seemed dumbly to
+cry.
+
+"Have you ever seen a cow weep before?  Is it comical, at
+least?" demanded Marietta, exultant.
+
+"Comical--?" Peter gasped.  "Comical--!" he groaned . . . .
+
+But then he spoke to the cow.
+
+"Poor dear--poor dear," he repeated.  He patted her soft warm
+neck, and scratched her between the horns and along the dewlap.
+
+"Poor dear--poor dear."
+
+The cow lifted up her head, and rested her great chin on
+Peter's shoulder, breathing upon his face.
+
+"Yes, you know that we are companions in misery, don't you?" he
+said.  "They have taken my calf from me too--though my calf,
+indeed, was only a calf in an extremely metaphorical sense--and
+it never was exactly mine, anyhow--I daresay it's belonged from
+the beginning to another man.  You, at least, have n't that
+gall and wormwood added to your cup.  And now you must really
+try to pull yourself together.  It's no good crying.  And
+besides, there are more calves in the sea than have ever been
+taken from it.  You'll have a much handsomer and fatter one
+next time.  And besides, you must remember that your loss
+subserves someone else's gain--the farmer would never have done
+it if it hadn't been to his advantage.  If you 're an altruist,
+that should comfort you.  And you must n't mind Marietta,--you
+must n't mind her laughter.  Marietta is a Latin.  The Latin
+conception of what is laughable differs by the whole span of
+heaven from the Teuton.  You and I are Teutons."
+
+"Teutons--?" questioned Marietta wrinkling her brow.
+
+"Yes--Germanic," said he.
+
+"But I thought the Signorino was English?"
+
+"So he is."
+
+"But the cow is not Germanic.  White, with black horns, that is
+the purest Roman breed, Signorino."
+
+"Fa niente," he instructed her.  "Cows and Englishmen, and all
+such sentimental cattle, including Germans, are Germanic.
+Italians are Latin--with a touch of the Goth and Vandal.  Lions
+and tigers growl and fight because they're Mohammedans.  Dogs
+still bear without abuse the grand old name of Sycophant.  Cats
+are of the princely line of Persia, and worship fire, fish, and
+flattery--as you may have noticed.  Geese belong indifferently
+to any race you like--they are cosmopolitans; and I've known
+here and there a person who, without distinction of
+nationality, was a duck.  In fact, you're rather by way of
+being a duck yourself: And now," he perorated, "never deny
+again that I can talk nonsense with an aching heart."
+
+"All the same," insisted Marietta, "it is very comical to see a
+cow weep."
+
+"At any rate," retorted Peter, "it is not in the least comical
+to hear a hyaena laugh."
+
+"I have never heard one," said she.
+
+"Pray that you never may.  The sound would make an old woman of
+you.  It's quite blood-curdling."
+
+"Davvero?" said Marietta.
+
+"Davvero," he assured her.
+
+And meanwhile the cow stood there, with her head on his
+shoulder, silently weeping, weeping.
+
+He gave her a farewell rub along the nose.
+
+"Good-bye," he said.  "Your breath is like meadowsweet.  So dry
+your tears, and set your hopes upon the future.  I 'll come and
+see you again to-morrow, and I 'll bring you some nice coarse
+salt.  Good-bye."
+
+But when he went to see her on the morrow, she was grazing
+peacefully; and she ate the salt he brought her with heart-whole
+bovine relish--putting out her soft white pad of a tongue,
+licking it deliberately from his hand, savouring it tranquilly,
+and crunching the bigger grains with ruminative enjoyment between
+her teeth.  So soon consoled!  They were companions in misery no
+longer.  "I 'm afraid you are a Latin, after all," he said, and
+left her with a sense of disappointment.
+
+That afternoon Marietta asked, "Would you care to visit the
+castle, Signorino?"
+
+He was seated under his willow-tree, by the river, smoking
+cigarettes--burning superfluous time.
+
+Marietta pointed towards Ventirose.
+
+"Why?" said he.
+
+"The family are away.  In the absence of the family, the public
+are admitted, upon presentation of their cards."
+
+"Oho!" he cried.  "So the family are away, are they?"
+
+"Yes, Signorino."
+
+"Aha!" cried he.  "The family are away.  That explains
+everything.  Have--have they been gone long?"
+
+"Since a week, ten days, Signorino."
+
+"A week!  Ten days!" He started up, indignant.  "You secretive
+wretch!  Why have you never breathed a word of this to me?"
+
+Marietta looked rather frightened.
+
+"I did not know it myself, Signorino," was her meek apology.
+"I heard it in the village this morning, when the Signorino
+sent me to buy coarse salt."
+
+"Oh, I see."  He sank back upon his rustic bench.  "You are
+forgiven."  He extended his hand in sign of absolution.  "Are
+they ever coming back?"
+
+"Naturally, Signorino."
+
+"What makes you think so?"
+
+"But they will naturally come back."
+
+"I felicitate you upon your simple faith.  When?"
+
+"Oh, fra poco.  They have gone to Rome."
+
+"To Rome?  You're trifling with me.  People do not go to Rome
+in August."
+
+"Pardon, Signorino.  People go to Rome for the feast of the
+Assumption.  That is the 15th.  Afterwards they come back,"
+said Marietta, firmly.
+
+"I withdraw my protest," said Peter.  "They have gone to Rome
+for the feast of the Assumption.  Afterwards they will come
+back."
+
+"Precisely, Signorino.  But you have now the right to visit the
+castle, upon presentation of your card.  You address yourself
+to the porter at the lodge.  The castle is grand, magnificent.
+The Court of Honour alone is thirty metres long."
+
+Marietta stretched her hands to right and left as far as they
+would go.
+
+"Marietta," Peter enquired solemnly, "are you familiar with
+the tragedy of 'Hamlet'?"
+
+Marietta blinked.
+
+"No, Signorino."
+
+"You have never read it," he pursued, "in that famous edition
+from which the character of the Prince of Denmark happened to
+be omitted?"
+
+Marietta shook her head, wearily, patiently.
+
+Wearily, patiently, "No, Signorino," she replied.
+
+"Neither have I," said he, "and I don't desire to."
+
+Marietta shrugged her shoulders; then returned gallantly to her
+charge.
+
+"If you would care to visit the castle, Signorino, you could
+see the crypt which contains the tombs of the family of
+Farfalla, the former owners.  They are of black marble and
+alabaster, with gilding--very rich.  You could also see the
+wine-cellars.  Many years ago a tun there burst, and a serving
+man was drowned in the wine.  You could also see the bed in
+which Nabulione, the Emperor of Europe, slept, when he was in
+this country.  Also the ancient kitchen.  Many years ago, in a
+storm, the skeleton of a man fell down the chimney, out upon
+the hearth.  Also what is called the Court of Foxes.  Many
+years ago there was a plague of foxes; and the foxes came down
+from the forest like a great army, thousands of them.  And the
+lords of the castle, and the peasants, and the village people,
+all, all, had to run away like rabbits--or the foxes would have
+eaten them.  It was in what they call the Court of Foxes that
+the King of the foxes held his court.  There is also the park.
+In the park there are statues, ruins, and white peacocks."
+
+"What have I in common with ruins and white peacocks?"
+Peter demanded tragically, when Marietta had brought her
+much-gesticulated exposition to a close.  "Let me impress upon
+you once for all that I am not a tripper.  As for your castle
+--you invite me to a banquet-hall deserted.  As for your park, I
+see quite as much of it as I wish to see, from the seclusion of
+my own pleached garden.  I learned long ago the folly of
+investigating things too closely, the wisdom of leaving things
+in the vague.  At present the park of Ventirose provides me
+with the raw material for day-dreams.  It is a sort of
+looking-glass country,--I can see just so far into it, and no
+farther--that lies beyond is mystery, is potentiality--terra
+incognita, which I can populate with monsters or pleasant
+phantoms, at my whim.  Why should you attempt to deprive me of so
+innocent a recreation?"
+
+"After the return of the family," said Marietta, "the public
+will no longer be admitted.  Meantime--"
+
+"Upon presentation of my card, the porter will conduct me from
+disenchantment to disenchantment.  No, thank you.  Now, if it
+were the other way round, it would be different.  If it were
+the castle and the park that had gone to Rome, and if the
+family could be visited on presentation of my card, I might be
+tempted."
+
+"But that would be impossible, Signorino," said Marietta.
+
+
+
+
+                              XV
+Beatrice walking with a priest--ay, I am not sure it would n't
+be more accurate to say conspiring with a priest: but you
+shall judge.
+
+They were in a room of the Palazzo Udeschini, at Rome--a
+reception room, on the piano nobile.  Therefore you see it: for
+are not all reception-rooms in Roman palaces alike?
+
+Vast, lofty, sombre; the walls hung with dark-green tapestry--a
+pattern of vertical stripes, dark green and darker green; here
+and there a great dark painting, a Crucifixion, a Holy Family,
+in a massive dim-gold frame; dark-hued rugs on the tiled floor;
+dark pieces of furniture, tables, cabinets, dark and heavy; and
+tall windows, bare of curtains at this season, opening upon a
+court--a wide stone-eaved court, planted with fantastic-leaved
+eucalyptus-trees, in the midst of which a brown old fountain,
+indefatigable, played its sibilant monotone.
+
+In the streets there were the smells, the noises, the heat, the
+glare of August of August in Rome, "the most Roman of the
+months," they say; certainly the hottest, noisiest, noisomest,
+and most glaring.  But here all was shadow, coolness,
+stillness, fragrance-the fragrance of the clean air coming in
+from among the eucalyptus-trees.
+
+Beatrice, critical-eyed, stood before a pier-glass, between two
+of the tall windows, turning her head from side to side,
+craning her neck a little--examining (if I must confess it) the
+effect of a new hat.  It was a very stunning hat--if a man's
+opinion hath any pertinence; it was beyond doubt very
+complicated.  There was an upward-springing black brim; there
+was a downward-sweeping black feather; there was a defiant
+white aigrette not unlike the Shah of Persia's; there were
+glints of red.
+
+The priest sat in an arm-chair--one of those stiff, upright
+Roman arm-chairs, which no one would ever dream of calling
+easy-chairs, high-backed, covered with hard leather, studded
+with steel nails--and watched her, smiling amusement,
+indulgence.
+
+He was an oldish priest--sixty, sixty-five.  He was small,
+lightly built, lean-faced, with delicate-strong features: a
+prominent, delicate nose; a well-marked, delicate jaw-bone,
+ending in a prominent, delicate chin; a large, humorous mouth,
+the full lips delicately chiselled; a high, delicate, perhaps
+rather narrow brow, rising above humorous grey eyes, rather
+deep-set.  Then he had silky-soft smooth white hair, and,
+topping the occiput, a tonsure that might have passed for a
+natural bald spot.
+
+He was decidedly clever-looking; he was aristocratic-looking,
+distinguished-looking; but he was, above all, pleasant-looking,
+kindly-looking, sweet-looking.
+
+He wore a plain black cassock, by no means in its first youth
+--brown along the seams, and, at the salient angles, at the
+shoulders, at the elbows, shining with the lustre of hard
+service.  Even without his cassock, I imagine, you would have
+divined him for a clergyman--he bore the clerical impress, that
+odd indefinable air of clericism which everyone recognises,
+though it might not be altogether easy to tell just where or
+from what it takes its origin.  In the garb of an Anglican
+--there being nothing, at first blush, necessarily Italian,
+necessarily un-English, in his face--he would have struck you,
+I think, as a pleasant, shrewd old parson of the scholarly
+--earnest type, mildly donnish, with a fondness for gentle mirth.
+What, however, you would scarcely have divined--unless you had
+chanced to notice, inconspicuous in this sober light, the red
+sash round his waist, or the amethyst on the third finger of
+his right hand--was his rank in the Roman hierarchy.  I have
+the honour of presenting his Eminence Egidio Maria Cardinal
+Udeschini, formerly Bishop of Cittareggio, Prefect of the
+Congregation of Archives and Inscriptions.
+
+That was his title ecclesiastical.  He had two other titles.
+He was a Prince of the Udeschini by accident of birth.  But his
+third title was perhaps his most curious.  It had been
+conferred upon him informally by the populace of the Roman slum
+in which his titular church, St. Mary of the Lilies, was
+situated: the little Uncle of the Poor.
+
+As Italians measure wealth, Cardinal Udeschini was a wealthy
+man.  What with his private fortune and official stipends, he
+commanded an income of something like a hundred thousand lire.
+He allowed himself five thousand lire a year for food,
+clothing, and general expenses.  Lodging and service he had for
+nothing in the palace of his family.  The remaining ninety-odd
+thousand lire of his budget . . .  Well, we all know that
+titles can be purchased in Italy; and that was no doubt the
+price he paid for the title I have mentioned.
+
+However, it was not in money only that Cardinal Udeschim paid.
+He paid also in labour.  I have said that his titular church
+was in a slum.  Rome surely contained no slum more fetid, none
+more perilous--a region of cut-throat alleys, south of the
+Ghetto, along the Tiber bank.  Night after night, accompanied
+by his stout young vicar, Don Giorgio Appolloni, the Cardinal
+worked there as hard as any hard-working curate: visiting the
+sick, comforting the afflicted, admonishing the knavish,
+persuading the drunken from their taverns, making peace between
+the combative.  Not infrequently, when he came home, he would
+add a pair of stilettos to his already large collection of such
+relics.  And his homecomings were apt to be late--oftener than
+not, after midnight; and sometimes, indeed, in the vague
+twilight of morning, at the hour when, as he once expressed it
+to Don Giorgio, "the tired burglar is just lying down to rest."
+And every Saturday evening the Cardinal Prefect of Archives and
+Inscriptions sat for three hours boxed up in his confessional,
+like any parish priest--in his confessional at St. Mary of the
+Lilies, where the penitents who breathed their secrets into his
+ears, and received his fatherly counsels . . .  I beg your
+pardon.  One must not, of course, remember his rags or his
+sores, when Lazarus approaches that tribunal.
+
+But I don't pretend that the Cardinal was a saint; I am sure he
+was not a prig.  For all his works of supererogation, his life
+was a life of pomp and luxury, compared to the proper saint's
+life.  He wore no hair shirt; I doubt if he knew the taste of
+the Discipline.  He had his weaknesses, his foibles--even, if
+you will, his vices.  I have intimated that he was fond of a
+jest.  "The Sacred College," I heard him remark one day, "has
+fifty centres of gravity.  I sometimes fear that I am its
+centre of levity."  He was also fond of music.  He was also
+fond of snuff:
+
+"'T is an abominable habit," he admitted.  "I can't tolerate it
+at all--in others.  When I was Bishop of Cittareggio, I
+discountenanced it utterly among my clergy.  But for myself--I
+need not say there are special circumstances.  Oddly enough, by
+the bye, at Cittareggio each separate member of my clergy was
+able to plead special circumstances for himself I have tried to
+give it up, and the effort has spoiled my temper--turned me
+into a perfect old shrew.  For my friends' sake, therefore, I
+appease myself with an occasional pinch.  You see, tobacco is
+antiseptic.  It's an excellent preservative of the milk of
+human kindness."
+
+The friends in question kept him supplied with sound rappee.
+Jests and music he was abundantly competent to supply himself.
+He played the piano and the organ, and he sang--in a clear,
+sweet, slightly faded tenor.  Of secular composers his
+favourites were "the lucid Scarlatti, the luminous Bach."  But
+the music that roused him to enthusiasm was Gregorian.  He
+would have none other at St. Mary of the Lilies.  He had
+trained his priests and his people there to sing it admirably
+--you should have heard them sing Vespers; and he sang it
+admirably himself--you should have heard him sing a Mass--you
+should have heard that sweet old tenor voice of his in the
+Preface and the Pater Noster.
+
+
+So, then, Beatrice stood before a pier-glass, and studied her
+new hat; whilst the Cardinal, amused, indulgent, sat in his
+high-backed armchair, and watched her.
+
+"Well--?  What do you think?" she asked, turning towards him.
+
+"You appeal to me as an expert?" he questioned.
+
+His speaking-voice, as well as his singing-voice, was sweet,
+but with a kind of trenchant edge upon it, a genial asperity,
+that gave it character, tang.
+
+"As one who should certainly be able to advise," said she.
+
+Well, then--" said he.  He took his chin into his hand, as if
+it were a beard, and looked up at her, considering; and the
+lines of amusement--the "parentheses"--deepened at either side
+of his mouth.  "Well, then, I think if the feather were to be
+lifted a little higher in front, and brought down a little
+lower behind--"
+
+"Good gracious, I don't mean my hat," cried Beatrice.  "What in
+the world can an old dear like you know about hats?"
+
+There was a further deepening of the parentheses.
+
+"Surely," he contended, "a cardinal should know much.  Is it
+not 'the badge of all our tribe,' as your poet Byron says?"
+
+Beatrice laughed.  Then, "Byron--?" she doubted, with a look.
+
+The Cardinal waved his hand--a gesture of amiable concession.
+
+"Oh, if you prefer, Shakespeare.  Everything in English is one
+or the other.  We will not fall out, like the Morellists, over
+an attribution.  The point is that I should be a good judge of
+hats."
+
+He took snuff.
+
+"It's a shame you haven't a decent snuff-box," Beatrice
+observed, with an eye on the enamelled wooden one, cheap and
+shabby, from which he helped himself.
+
+"The box is but the guinea-stamp; the snuff's the thing.--Was
+it Shakespeare or Byron who said that?" enquired the Cardinal.
+
+Beatrice laughed again.
+
+"I think it must have been Pulcinella.  I'll give you a lovely
+silver one, if you'll accept it."
+
+"Will you?  Really?" asked the Cardinal, alert.
+
+"Of course I will.  It's a shame you haven't one already."
+
+"What would a lovely silver one cost?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know.  It does n't matter," answered she.
+
+"But approximately?  More or less?" he pursued.
+
+"Oh, a couple of hundred lire, more or less, I daresay."
+
+"A couple of hundred lire?"  He glanced up, alerter.  "Do you
+happen to have that amount of money on your person?"
+
+Beatrice (the unwary woman) hunted for her pocket--took out her
+purse--computed its contents.
+
+"Yes," she innocently answered.
+
+The Cardinal chuckled--the satisfied chuckle of one whose
+unsuspected tactics have succeeded.
+
+"Then give me the couple of hundred lire."
+
+He put forth his hand.
+
+But Beatrice held back.
+
+"What for?" she asked, suspicion waking.
+
+"Oh, I shall have uses for it."
+
+His outstretched hand--a slim old tapering, bony hand, in
+colour like dusky ivory--closed peremptorily, in a dumb-show
+of receiving; and now, by the bye, you could not have failed
+to notice the big lucent amethyst, in its setting of
+elaborately-wrought pale gold, on the third finger.
+
+"Come!  Give!" he insisted, imperative.
+
+Rueful but resigned, Beatrice shook her head.
+
+"You have caught me finely," she sighed, and gave.
+
+"You should n't have jingled your purse--you should n't have
+flaunted your wealth in my face," laughed the Cardinal, putting
+away the notes.  He took snuff again.  "I think I honestly
+earned that pinch," he murmured.
+
+"At any rate," said Beatrice, laying what unction she could to
+her soul, "I am acquainted with a dignitary of the Church, who
+has lost a handsome silver snuffbox--beautiful repousse work,
+with his arms engraved on the lid."
+
+"And I," retaliated he, "I am acquainted with a broken-down old
+doctor and his wife, in Trastevere, who shall have meat and
+wine at dinner for the next two months--at the expense of a
+niece of mine.  'I am so glad,' as Alice of Wonderland says,
+'that you married into our family.'"
+
+"Alice of Wonderland--?" doubted Beatrice.
+
+The Cardinal waved his hand.
+
+"Oh, if you prefer, Punch.  Everything in English is one or the
+other."
+
+Beatrice laughed.  "It was the I of which especially surprised
+my English ear," she explained.
+
+"I am your debtor for two hundred lire.  I cannot quarrel with
+you over a particle," said he.
+
+"But why," asked she, "why did you give yourself such
+superfluous pains?  Why couldn't you ask me for the money
+point-blank?  Why lure it from me, by trick and device?"
+
+The Cardinal chuckled.
+
+"Ah, one must keep one's hand in.  And one must not look like a
+Jesuit for nothing."
+
+"Do you look like a Jesuit?"
+
+"I have been told so."
+
+"By whom--for mercy's sake?"
+
+"By a gentleman I had the pleasure of meeting not long ago in
+the train--a very gorgeous gentleman, with gold chains and
+diamonds flashing from every corner of his person, and a
+splendid waxed moustache, and a bald head which, I think, was
+made of polished pink coral.  He turned to me in the most
+affable manner, and said, 'I see, Reverend Sir, that you are a
+Jesuit.  There should be a fellow-feeling between you and me.
+I am a Jew.  Jews and Jesuits have an almost equally bad
+name!'"
+
+The Cardinal's humorous grey eyes swam in a glow of delighted
+merriment.
+
+"I could have hugged him for his 'almost.'  I have been
+wondering ever since whether in his mind it was the Jews or the
+Jesuits who benefited by that reservation.  I have been
+wondering also what I ought to have replied."
+
+"What did you reply?" asked Beatrice, curious.
+
+"No, no," said the Cardinal.  "With sentiments of the highest
+consideration, I must respectfully decline to tell you.  It was
+too flat.  I am humiliated whenever I recall it."
+
+"You might have replied that the Jews, at least, have the
+advantage of meriting their bad name," she suggested.
+
+"Oh, my dear child!" objected he.  "My reply was flat--you
+would have had it sharp.  I should have hurt the poor
+well-meaning man's feelings, and perhaps have burdened my own
+soul with a falsehood, into the bargain.  Who are we, to judge
+whether people merit their bad name or not?  No, no.  The
+humiliating circumstance is, that if I had possessed the
+substance as well as the show, if I had really been a son of
+St. Ignatius, I should have found a retort that would have
+effected the Jew's conversion."
+
+"And apropos of conversions," said Beatrice, "see how far we
+have strayed from our muttons."
+
+"Our muttons--?"  The Cardinal looked up, enquiring.
+
+"I want to know what you think--not of my hat--but of my man."
+
+"Oh--ah, yes; your Englishman, your tenant."  The Cardinal
+nodded.
+
+"My Englishman--my tenant--my heretic," said she.
+
+"Well," said he, pondering, while the parentheses became marked
+again,--"I should think, from what you tell me, that you would
+find him a useful neighbour.  Let me see . . .  You got fifty
+lire out of him, for a word; and the children went off,
+blessing you as their benefactress.  I should think that you
+would find him a valuable neighbour--and that he, on his side,
+might find you an expensive one."
+
+Beatrice, with a gesture, implored him to be serious.
+
+"Ah, please don't tease about this," she said.  "I want to know
+what you think of his conversion?"
+
+"The conversion of a heretic is always 'a consummation devoutly
+to be desired,' as well, you may settle it between Shakespeare
+and Byron, to suit yourself.  And there are none so devoutly
+desirous of such consummations as you Catholics of England
+--especially you women.  It is said that a Catholic Englishwoman
+once tried to convert the Pope."
+
+"Well, there have been popes whom it would n't have hurt,"
+commented Beatrice.  "And as for Mr. Marchdale," she continued,
+"he has shown 'dispositions.'  He admitted that he could see no
+reason why it should not have been Our Blessed Lady who sent us
+to the children's aid.  Surely, from a Protestant, that is an
+extraordinary admission?"
+
+"Yes," said the Cardinal.  "And if he meant it, one may
+conclude that he has a philosophic mind."
+
+"If he meant it?" Beatrice cried.  "Why should he not have
+meant it?  Why should he have said it if he did not mean it?"
+
+"Oh, don't ask me," protested the Cardinal.  "There is a thing
+the French call politesse.  I can conceive a young man
+professing to agree with a lady for the sake of what the French
+might call her beaux yeux."
+
+"I give you my word," said Beatrice, "that my beaux yeux had
+nothing to do with the case.  He said it in the most absolute
+good faith.  He said he believed that in a universe like ours
+nothing was impossible--that there were more things in heaven
+and earth than people generally dreamed of--that he could see
+no reason why the Blessed Virgin should not have sent us across
+the children's path.  Oh, he meant it.  I am perfectly sure he
+meant it."
+
+The Cardinal smiled--at her eagerness, perhaps.
+
+"Well, then," he repeated, "we must conclude that he has a
+philosophic mind."
+
+"But what is one to do?" asked she.  "Surely one ought to do
+something?  One ought to follow such an admission up?  When a
+man is so far on the way to the light, it is surely one's duty
+to lead him farther?"
+
+"Without doubt," said the Cardinal.
+
+"Well--?  What can one do?"
+
+The Cardinal looked grave.
+
+"One can pray," he said.
+
+"Emilia and I pray for his conversion night and morning."
+
+"That is good," he approved.
+
+"But that is surely not enough?"
+
+"One can have Masses said."
+
+"Monsignor Langshawe, at the castle, says a Mass for him twice
+a week."
+
+"That is good," approved the Cardinal.
+
+"But is that enough?"
+
+"Why doesn't Monsignor Langshawe call upon him--cultivate his
+acquaintance--talk with him--set him thinking?" the Cardinal
+enquired.
+
+"Oh, Monsignor Langshawe!" Beatrice sighed, with a gesture.
+"He is interested in nothing but geology--he would talk to him
+of nothing but moraines--he would set him thinking of nothing
+but the march of glaciers."
+
+"Hum," said the Cardinal.
+
+"Well, then--?" questioned Beatrice.
+
+"Well, then, Carissima, why do you not take the affair in hand
+yourself?"
+
+"But that is just the difficulty.  What can I what can a mere
+woman--do in such a case?"
+
+The Cardinal looked into his amethyst, as a crystal-gazer into
+his crystal; and the lines about his humorous old mouth
+deepened and quivered.
+
+"I will lend you the works of Bellarmine  in I forget how many
+volumes.  You can prime yourself with them, and then invite
+your heretic to a course of instructions."
+
+"Oh, I wish you would n't turn it to a joke," said Beatrice.
+
+"Bellarmine--a joke!" exclaimed the Cardinal.  "It is the first
+time I have ever heard him called so.  However, I will not
+press the suggestion."
+
+"But then--?  Oh, please advise me seriously.  What can I do?
+What can a mere unlearned woman do?"
+
+The Cardinal took snuff.  He gazed into his amethyst again,
+beaming at it, as if he could descry something deliciously
+comical in its depths.  He gave a soft little laugh.  At last
+he looked up.
+
+"Well," he responded slowly, "in an extremity, I should think
+that a mere unlearned woman might, if she made an effort, ask
+the heretic to dinner.  I 'll come down and stay with you for a
+day or two, and you can ask him to dinner."
+
+"You're a perfect old darling," cried Beatrice, with rapture.
+"He'll never be able to resist you."'
+
+"Oh, I 'm not undertaking to discuss theology with him," said
+the Cardinal.  "But one must do something in exchange for a
+couple of hundred lire--so I'll come and give you my moral
+support."
+
+"You shall have your lovely silver snuffbox, all the same,"
+said she.
+
+Mark the predestination!
+
+
+
+
+                              XVI
+
+
+                                      "CASTEL VENTIROSE,
+                                          "August 21 st.
+
+"DEAR Mr. Marchdale: It will give me great pleasure if you can
+dine with us on Thursday evening next, at eight o'clock, to
+meet my uncle, Cardinal Udeschini, who is staying here for a
+few days.
+
+"I have been re-reading 'A Man of Words.'  I want you to tell
+me a great deal more about your friend, the author.
+
+                                        Yours sincerely,
+                                     BEATRICE DI SANTANGIOLO."
+
+It is astonishing, what men will prize, what men will treasure.
+Peter Marchdale, for example, prizes, treasures, (and imagines
+that he will always prize and treasure), the perfectly
+conventional, the perfectly commonplace little document, of
+which the foregoing is a copy.
+
+The original is written in rather a small, concentrated hand,
+not overwhelmingly legible perhaps, but, as we say, "full of
+character," on paper lightly blueish, in the prescribed corner
+of which a tiny ducal coronet is embossed, above the initials
+"B. S." curiously interlaced in a cypher.
+
+When Peter received it, and (need I mention?) approached it to
+his face, he fancied he could detect just a trace, just the
+faintest reminder, of a perfume--something like an afterthought
+of orris.  It was by no means anodyne.  It was a breath, a
+whisper, vague, elusive, hinting of things exquisite, intimate
+of things intimately feminine, exquisitely personal.  I don't
+know how many times he repeated that manoeuvre of conveying the
+letter to his face; but I do know that when I was privileged to
+inspect it, a few months later, the only perfume it retained
+was an unmistakable perfume of tobacco.
+
+I don't know, either, how many times he read it, searched it,
+as if secrets might lie perdu between the lines, as if his gaze
+could warm into evidence some sympathetic ink, or compel a
+cryptic sub-intention from the text itself.
+
+Well, to be sure, the text had cryptic subintentions; but these
+were as far as may be from any that Peter was in a position to
+conjecture.  How could he guess, for instance, that the letter
+was an instrument, and he the victim, of a Popish machination?
+How could he guess that its writer knew as well as he did who
+was the author of "A Man of Words"?
+
+And then, all at once, a shade of trouble of quite another
+nature fell upon his mind.  He frowned for a while in silent
+perplexity.  At last he addressed himself to Marietta.
+
+"Have you ever dined with a cardinal?" he asked.
+
+"No, Signorino," that patient sufferer replied.
+
+"Well, I'm in the very dickens of a quandary--son' proprio nel
+dickens d'un imbarazzo." he informed her.
+
+"Dickens--?" she repeated.
+
+"Si--Dickens, Carlo, celebre autore inglese.  Why not?" he
+asked.
+
+Marietta gazed with long-suffering eyes at the horizon.
+
+"Or, to put it differently," Peter resumed, "I've come all the
+way from London with nothing better than a dinner jacket in my
+kit."
+
+"Dina giacca?  Cosa e?" questioned Marietta.
+
+"No matter what it is--the important thing is what it is n't.
+It is n't a dress-coat."
+
+"Non e un abito nero," said Marietta, seeing that he expected
+her to say something.
+
+"Well--?  You perceive my difficulty.  Do you think you could
+make me one?" said Peter.
+
+"Make the Signorino a dress-coat?  I?  Oh, no, Signorino."
+Marietta shook her head.
+
+"I feared as much," he acknowledged.  "Is there a decent tailor
+in the village?"
+
+"No, Signorino."
+
+"Nor in the whole length and breadth of this peninsula, if you
+come to that.  Well, what am I to do?  How am I to dine with a
+cardinal?  Do you think a cardinal would have a fit if a man
+were to dine with him in a dina giacca?"
+
+"Have a fit?  Why should he have a fit, Signorino?" Marietta
+blinked.
+
+"Would he do anything to the man?  Would he launch the awful
+curses of the Church at him, for instance?"
+
+"Mache, Signorino!" She struck an attitude that put to scorn
+his apprehensions.
+
+"I see," said Peter.  "You think there is no danger?  You
+advise me to brazen the dina giacca out, to swagger it off?"
+
+"I don't understand, Signorino," said Marietta.
+
+"To understand is to forgive," said he; "and yet you can't
+trifle with English servants like this, though they ought to
+understand, ought n't they?  In any case, I 'll be guided by
+your judgment.  I'll wear my dina giacca, but I'll wear it with
+an air!  I 'll confer upon it the dignity of a court-suit.  Is
+that a gardener--that person working over there?"
+
+Marietta looked in the quarter indicated by Peter's nod.
+
+"Yes, Signorino; ha is the same gardener who works here three
+days every week," she answered.
+
+"Is he, really?  He looks like a pirate," Peter murmured.
+
+"Like a pirate?  Luigi?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes," affirmed her master.  "He wears green corduroy trousers,
+and a red belt, and a blue shirt.  That is the pirate uniform.
+He has a swarthy skin, and a piercing eye, and hair as black as
+the Jolly Roger.  Those are the marks by which you recognise a
+pirate, even when in mufti.  I believe you said his name is
+Luigi?"
+
+Yes, Signorino--Luigi Maroni.  We call him Gigi."
+
+"Is Gigi versatile?" asked Peter.
+
+"Versatile--?" puzzled Marietta.  But then, risking her own
+interpretation of the recondite word, "Oh, no, Signorino.  He
+is of the country."
+
+"Ah, he's of the country, is he?  So much the better.  Then he
+will know the way to Castel Ventirose?"
+
+But naturally, Signorino." Marietta nodded.
+
+"And do you think, for once in a way, though not versatile, he
+could be prevailed upon to divert his faculties from the work
+of a gardener to that of a messenger?"
+
+"A messenger, Signorino?" Marietta wrinkled up her brow.
+
+"Ang--an unofficial postman.  Do you think he could be induced
+to carry a letter for me to the castle?"
+
+"But certainly, Signorino.  He is here to obey the Signorino's
+orders."  Marietta shrugged her shoulders, and waved her hands.
+
+"Then tell him, please, to go and put the necessary touches to
+his toilet," said Peter.  "Meanwhile I'll indite the letter."
+
+When his letter was indited, he found the piratical-looking
+Gigi in attendance, and he gave it to him, with instructions.
+
+Thereupon Gigi (with a smile of sympathetic intelligence,
+inimitably Italian) put the letter in his hat, put his hat upon
+his head, and started briskly off--but not in the proper
+direction: not in the direction of the road, which led to the
+village, and across the bridge, and then round upon itself to
+the gates of the park.  He started briskly off towards Peter's
+own toolhouse, a low red-tiled pavilion, opposite the door of
+Marietta's kitchen.
+
+Peter was on the point of calling to him, of remonstrating.
+Then he thought better of it.  He would wait a bit, and watch.
+
+He waited and watched; and this was what he saw.
+
+Gigi entered the tool-house, and presently brought out a
+ladder, which he carried down to the riverside, and left there.
+Then he returned to the tool-house, and came back bearing an
+armful of planks, each perhaps a foot wide by five or six feet
+long.  Now he raised his ladder to the perpendicular, and let
+it descend before him, so that, one extremity resting upon the
+nearer bank, one attained the further, and it spanned the
+flood.  Finally he laid a plank lengthwise upon the hithermost
+rungs, and advanced to the end of it; then another plank; then
+a third: and he stood in the grounds of Ventirose.
+
+He had improvised a bridge--a bridge that swayed upwards and
+downwards more or less dizzily about the middle, if you will
+--but an entirely practicable bridge, for all that.  And he had
+saved himself at least a good three miles, to the castle and
+back, by the road.
+
+Peter watched, and admired.
+
+"And I asked whether he was versatile!" he muttered.  "Trust an
+Italian for economising labour.  It looks like unwarrantable
+invasion of friendly territory--but it's a dodge worth
+remembering, all the same."
+
+He drew the Duchessa's letter from his pocket, and read it
+again, and again approached it to his face, communing with that
+ghost of a perfume.
+
+"Heavens!  how it makes one think of chiffons," he exclaimed.
+"Thursday--Thursday--help me to live till Thursday!"
+
+
+
+
+                             XVII
+
+
+But he had n't to live till Thursday--he was destined to see
+her not later than the next afternoon.
+
+You know with what abruptness, with how brief a warning, storms
+will spring from the blue, in that land of lakes and mountains.
+
+It was three o'clock or thereabouts; and Peter was reading in
+his garden; and the whole world lay basking in unmitigated
+sunshine.
+
+Then, all at once, somehow, you felt a change in things: the
+sunshine seemed less brilliant, the shadows less solid, less
+sharply outlined.  Oh, it was very slight, very uncertain; you
+had to look twice to assure yourself that it was n't a mere
+fancy.  It seemed as if never so thin a gauze had been drawn
+over the face of the sun, just faintly bedimming, without
+obscuring it.  You could have ransacked the sky in vain to
+discover the smallest shred of cloud.
+
+At the same time, the air, which had been hot all day--hot,
+but buoyant, but stimulant, but quick with oxygen--seemed to
+become thick, sluggish, suffocating, seemed to yield up its
+vital principle, and to fall a dead weight upon the earth.
+And this effect was accompanied by a sudden silence--the usual
+busy out-of-door country noises were suddenly suspended: the
+locusts stopped their singing; not a bird twittered; not a
+leaf rustled: the world held its breath.  And if the river
+went on babbling, babbling, that was a very part of the
+silence--accented, underscored it.
+
+Yet still you could not discern a rack of cloud anywhere in the
+sky--still, for a minute or two . . . .  Then, before you knew
+how it had happened, the snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito were
+completely lapped in cloud.
+
+And now the cloud spread with astonishing rapidity--spread and
+sank, cancelling the sun, shrouding the Gnisi to its waist,
+curling in smoky wreaths among the battlements of the
+Cornobastone, turning the lake from sapphire to sombre steel,
+filling the entire valley with a strange mixture of darkness
+and an uncanny pallid light.  Overhead it hung like a vast
+canopy of leaden-hued cotton-wool; at the west it had a fringe
+of fiery crimson, beyond which a strip of clear sky on the
+horizon diffused a dull metallic yellow, like tarnished brass.
+
+Presently, in the distance, there was a low growl of thunder;
+in a minute, a louder, angrier growl--as if the first were a
+menace which had not been heeded.  Then there was a violent
+gush of wind--cold; smelling of the forests from which it came;
+scattering everything before it, dust, dead leaves, the fallen
+petals of flowers; making the trees writhe and labour, like
+giants wrestling with invisible giants; making the short grass
+shudder; corrugating the steel surface of the lake.  Then two
+or three big raindrops fell--and then, the deluge.
+
+Peter climbed up to his observatory--a square four-windowed
+turret, at the top of the house--thence to watch the storm and
+exult in it.  Really it was splendid--to see, to hear; its
+immense wild force, its immense reckless fury.  Rain had never
+rained so hard, he thought.  Already, the lake, the mountain
+slopes, the villas and vineyards westward, were totally blotted
+out, hidden behind walls and walls of water; and even the
+neighbouring lawns of Ventirose, the confines of his own
+garden, were barely distinguishable, blurred as by a fog.  The
+big drops pelted the river like bullets, sending up splashes
+bigger than themselves.  And the tiled roof just above his head
+resounded with a continual loud crepitation, as if a multitude
+of iron-shod elves were dancing on it.  The thunder crashed,
+roared, reverberated, like the toppling of great edifices.  The
+lightning tore through the black cloud-canopy in long blinding
+zig-zags.  The wind moaned, howled, hooted--and the square
+chamber where Peter stood shook and rattled under its
+buffetings, and was full of the chill and the smell of it.
+Really the whole thing was splendid.
+
+His garden-paths ran with muddy brooklets; the high-road beyond
+his hedge was transformed to a shallow torrent . . . .  And,
+just at that moment, looking off along the highroad, he saw
+something that brought his heart into his throat.
+
+Three figures were hurrying down it, half-drowned in the rain
+--the Duchessa di Santangiolo, Emilia Manfredi, and a priest.
+
+In a twinkling, Peter, bareheaded, was at his gate.
+
+"Come in--come in," he called.
+
+"We are simply drenched--we shall inundate your house," the
+Duchessa said, as he showed them into his sitting-room.
+
+They were indeed dripping with water, soiled to their knees
+with mud.
+
+"Good heavens!" gasped Peter, stupid.  "How were you ever out
+in such a downpour?"
+
+She smiled, rather forlornly.
+
+"No one told us that it was going to rain, and we were off for
+a good long walk--for pleasure."
+
+"You must be wet to the bone--you must be perishing with cold,"
+he cried, looking from one to another.
+
+"Yes, I daresay we are perishing with cold," she admitted.
+
+"And I have no means of offering you a fire--there are no
+fireplaces," he groaned, with a gesture round the bleak Italian
+room, to certify their absence.
+
+"Is n't there a kitchen?" asked the Duchessa, a faint spark of
+raillery kindling amid the forlornness of her smile.
+
+Peter threw up his hands.
+
+"I had lost my head.  The kitchen, of course.  I 'll tell
+Marietta to light a fire."
+
+He excused himself, and sought out Marietta.  He found her in
+her housekeeper's room, on her knees, saying her rosary, in
+obvious terror.  I 'm afraid he interrupted her orisons
+somewhat brusquely.
+
+"Will you be so good as to start a rousing fire in the kitchen
+--as quickly as ever it can be done?"
+
+And he rejoined his guests.
+
+"If you will come this way--" he said.
+
+Marietta had a fire of logs and pine-cones blazing in no time.
+She courtesied low to the Duchessa, lower still to the priest
+--in fact, Peter was n't sure that she did n't genuflect before
+him, while he made a rapid movement with his hand over her
+head: the Sign of the Cross, perhaps.
+
+He was a little, unassuming-looking, white haired priest, with
+a remarkably clever, humorous, kindly face; and he wore a
+remarkably shabby cassock.  The Duchessa's chaplain, Peter
+supposed.  How should it occur to him that this was Cardinal
+Udeschini?  Do Cardinals (in one's antecedent notion of them)
+wear shabby cassocks, and look humorous and unassuming?  Do
+they go tramping about the country in the rain, attended by no
+retinue save a woman and a fourteen-year-old girl?  And are
+they little men--in one's antecedent notion?  True, his shabby
+cassock had red buttons, and there was a red sash round his
+waist, and a big amethyst glittered in a setting of pale gold
+on his annular finger.  But Peter was not sufficiently versed
+in fashions canonical, to recognise the meaning of these
+insignia.
+
+How, on the other hand, should it occur to the Duchessa that
+Peter needed enlightenment?  At all events, she said to him,
+"Let me introduce you;" and then, to the priest, "Let me
+present Mr. Marchdale--of whom you have heard before now."
+
+The white-haired old man smiled sweetly into Peter's eyes, and
+gave him a slender, sensitive old hand.
+
+"E cattivo vento che non e buono per qualcuno--debbo a questa
+burrasca la pregustazione d' un piacere," he said, with a
+mingling of ceremonious politeness and sunny geniality that was
+of his age and race.
+
+Peter--instinctively--he could not have told why--put a good
+deal more deference into his bow, than men of his age and race
+commonly put into their bows, and murmured something about
+"grand' onore."
+
+Marietta placed a row of chairs before the raised stone hearth,
+and afterwards, at her master's request, busied herself
+preparing tea.
+
+"But I think you would all be wise to take a little brandy
+first," Peter suggested.  "It is my despair that I am not able
+to provide you with a change of raiment.  Brandy will be the
+best substitute, perhaps."
+
+The old priest laughed, and put his hand upon the shoulder of
+Emilia.
+
+"You have spared this young lady an embarrassing avowal.
+Brandy is exactly what she was screwing her courage to the
+point of asking for."
+
+"Oh, no!" protested Emilia, in a deep Italian voice, with
+passionate seriousness.
+
+But Peter fetched a decanter, and poured brandy for everyone.
+
+"I drink to your health--c'est bien le cas de le dire.  I hope
+you will not have caught your deaths of cold," he said.
+
+"Oh, we are quite warm now," said the Duchessa.  "We are snug
+in an ingle on Mount Ararat."
+
+"Our wetting will have done us good--it will make us grow.  You
+and I will never regret that, will we, Emilietta?" said the
+priest.
+
+A lively colour had come into the Duchessa's cheeks; her eyes
+seemed unusually bright.  Her hair was in some disorder,
+drooping at the sides, and blown over her brow in fine free
+wavelets.  It was dark in the kitchen, save for the firelight,
+which danced fantastically on the walls and ceiling, and struck
+a ruddy glow from Marietta's copper pots and pans.  The rain
+pattered lustily without; the wind wailed in the chimney; the
+lightning flashed, the thunder volleyed.  And Peter looked at
+the Duchessa--and blessed the elements.  To see her seated
+there, in her wet gown, seated familiarly, at her ease, before
+his fire, in his kitchen, with that colour in her cheeks, that
+brightness in her eyes, and her hair in that disarray--it was
+unspeakable; his heart closed in a kind of delicious spasm.
+And the fragrance, subtle, secret, evasive, that hovered in the
+air near her, did not diminish his emotion.
+
+"I wonder," she asked, with a comical little glance upwards at
+him, "whether you would resent it very much if I should take
+off my hat--because it's a perfect reservoir, and the water
+will keep trickling down my neck."
+
+His joy needed but this culmination that she should take off
+her hat!
+
+"Oh, I beg of you--" he returned fervently.
+
+"You had better take yours off too, Emilia," said the Duchessa.
+
+"Admire masculine foresight," said the priest.  "I took mine
+off when I came in."
+
+"Let me hang them up," said Peter.
+
+It was wonderful to hold her hat in his hand--it was like
+holding a part of herself.  He brushed it surreptitiously
+against his face, as he hung it up.  Its fragrance--which met
+him like an answering caress, almost--did not lessen his
+emotion.
+
+Then Marietta brought the tea, with bread-and-butter, and
+toast, and cakes, and pretty blue china cups and saucers, and
+silver that glittered in the firelight.
+
+"Will you do me the honour of pouring the tea?" Peter asked the
+Duchessa.
+
+So she poured the tea, and Peter passed it.  As he stood close
+to her, to take it--oh, but his heart beat, believe me!  And
+once, when she was giving him a cup, the warm tips of her
+fingers lightly touched his hand.  Believe me, the touch had
+its effect.  And always there was that heady fragrance in the
+air, like a mysterious little voice, singing secrets.
+
+"I wonder," the old priest said, "why tea is not more generally
+drunk by us Italians.  I never taste it without resolving to
+acquire the habit.  I remember, when I was a child, our mothers
+used to keep it as a medicine; and you could only buy it at the
+chemists' shops."
+
+"It's coming in, you know, at Rome--among the Whites," said the
+Duchessa.
+
+"Among the Whites!" cried he, with a jocular simulation of
+disquiet.  "You should not have told me that, till I had
+finished my cup.  Now I shall feel that I am sharing a
+dissipation with our spoliators."
+
+"That should give an edge to its aroma," laughed she.  "And
+besides, the Whites aren't all responsible for our spoliation
+--some of them are not so white as your fancy paints them.
+They'd be very decent people, for the most part--if they were
+n't so vulgar."
+
+"If you stick up for the Whites like that when I am Pope, I
+shall excommunicate you," the priest threatened.  "Meanwhile,
+what have you to say against the Blacks?"
+
+"The Blacks, with few exceptions, are even blacker than they're
+painted; but they too would be fairly decent people in their
+way--if they were n't so respectable.  That is what makes Rome
+impossible as a residence for any one who cares for human
+society.  White society is so vulgar--Black society is so
+deadly dull."
+
+"It is rather curious," said the priest, "that the chief of
+each party should wear the colour of his adversary.  Our chief
+dresses in white, and their chief can be seen any day driving
+about the streets in black."
+
+And Peter, during this interchange of small-talk, was at
+liberty to feast his eyes upon her.
+
+"Perhaps you have not yet reached the time of life where men
+begin to find a virtue in snuff?" the priest said, producing a
+smart silver snuff box, tapping the lid, and proffering it to
+Peter.
+
+"On the contrary--thank you," Peter answered, and absorbed his
+pinch like an adept.
+
+"How on earth have you learned to take it without a paroxysm?"
+cried the surprised Duchessa.
+
+"Oh, a thousand years ago I was in the Diplomatic Service," he
+explained.  "It is one of the requirements."
+
+Emilia Manfredi lifted her big brown eyes, filled with girlish
+wonder, to his face, and exclaimed, "How extraordinary!"
+
+"It is n't half so extraordinary as it would be if it were
+true, my dear," said the Duchessa.
+
+"Oh?  Non e poi vero?" murmured Emilia, and her eyes darkened
+with disappointment.
+
+Peter meanwhile was looking at the snuffbox, which the priest
+still held in his hand, and admiring its brave repousse work of
+leaves and flowers, and the escutcheon engraved on the lid.
+But what if he could have guessed the part he had passively
+played in obtaining it for its possessor--or the part that it
+was still to play in his own epopee?  Mark again the
+predestination!
+
+"The storm is passing," said the priest.
+
+"Worse luck!" thought Peter.
+
+For indeed the rain and the wind were moderating, the thunder
+had rolled farther away, the sky was becoming lighter.
+
+"But there's a mighty problem before us still," said the
+Duchessa.  "How are we to get to Ventirose?  The roads will, be
+ankle-deep with mud."
+
+"If you wish to do me a very great kindness--" Peter began.
+
+"Yes--?" she encouraged him.
+
+"You will allow me to go before you, and tell them to come for
+you with a carriage."
+
+"I shall certainly allow you to do nothing of the sort," she
+replied severely.  "I suppose there is no one whom you could
+send?"
+
+"I should hardly like to send Marietta.  I 'm afraid there is
+no one else.  But upon my word, I should enjoy going myself."
+
+She shook her head, smiling at him with mock compassion.
+
+"Would you?  Poor man, poor man!  That is an enjoyment which
+you will have to renounce.  One must n't expect too much in
+this sad life."
+
+"Well, then," said Peter, "I have an expedient.  If you can
+walk a somewhat narrow plank--?"
+
+"Yes--?" questioned she.
+
+"I think I can improvise a bridge across the river."
+
+"I believe the rain has stopped," said the priest, looking
+towards the window.
+
+Peter, manning his soul for the inevitable, got up, went to the
+door, opened it, stuck out his head.
+
+"Yes," he acknowledged, while his heart sank within him, "the
+rain has stopped."
+
+And now the storm departed almost as rapidly as it had arrived.
+In the north the sky was already clear, blue and hard-looking
+--a wall of lapis-lazuli.  The dark cloud-canopy was drifting to
+the south.  Suddenly the sun came out, flashing first from the
+snows of Monte Sfiorito, then, in an instant, flooding the
+entire prospect with a marvellous yellow light, ethereal amber;
+whilst long streamers of tinted vapour--columns of pearl-dust,
+one might have fancied--rose to meet it; and all wet surfaces,
+leaves, lawns, tree-trunks, housetops, the bare crags of the
+Gnisi, gleamed in a wash of gold.
+
+Puffs of fresh air blew into the kitchen, filling it with the
+keen sweet odour of wet earth.  The priest and the Duchessa and
+Emilia joined Peter at the open door.
+
+"Oh, your poor, poor garden!" the Duchessa cried.
+
+His garden had suffered a good deal, to be sure.  The flowers
+lay supine, their faces beaten into the mud; the greensward was
+littered with fallen leaves and twigs--and even in one or two
+places whole branches had been broken from the trees; on the
+ground about each rose-bush a snow of pink rose-petals lay
+scattered; in the paths there were hundreds of little pools,
+shining in the sun like pools of fire.
+
+"There's nothing a gardener can't set right," said Peter,
+feeling no doubt that here was a trifling tax upon the delights
+the storm had procured him.
+
+"And oh, our poor, poor hats!" said the Duchessa, eyeing
+ruefully those damaged pieces of finery.  "I fear no gardener
+can ever set them right."
+
+"It sounds inhospitable," said Peter, "but I suppose I had
+better go and build your bridge."
+
+So he threw a ladder athwart the river, and laid the planks in
+place, as he had seen Gigi do the day before.
+
+"How ingenious--and, like all great things, how simple,"
+laughed the Duchessa.
+
+Peter waved his hand, as who should modestly deprecate
+applause.  But, I 'm ashamed to own, he didn't disclaim the
+credit of the invention.
+
+"It will require some nerve," she reflected, looking at the
+narrow planks, the foaming green water.  "However--"
+
+And gathering in her skirts, she set bravely forward, and made
+the transit without mishap.  The priest and Emilia, gathering
+in their skirts, made it after her.
+
+She paused on the other side, and looked back, smiling.
+
+"Since you have discovered so efficacious a means of cutting
+short the distance between our places of abode," she said, "I
+hope you will not fail to profit by it whenever you may have
+occasion--on Thursday, for example."
+
+"Thank you very much," said Peter.
+
+"Of course," she went on, "we may all die of our wetting yet.
+It would perhaps show a neighbourly interest if you were to
+come up to-morrow, and take our news.  Come at four o'clock;
+and if we're alive . . .  you shall have another pinch of
+snuff," she promised, laughing.
+
+"I adore you," said Peter, under his breath.  "I'll come with
+great pleasure," he said aloud.
+
+
+"Marietta," he observed, that evening, as he dined, "I would
+have you to know that the Aco is bridged.  Hence, there is one
+symbol the fewer in Lombardy.  But why does--you mustn't mind
+the Ollendorfian form of my enquiry--why does the chaplain of
+the Duchessa wear red stockings?"
+
+"The chaplain of the Duchessa--?" repeated Marietta, wrinkling
+up her brow.
+
+"Ang--of the Duchessa di Santangiolo.  He wore red stockings,
+and shoes with silver buckles.  Do you think that's precisely
+decorous--don't you think it 's the least bit light-minded--in
+an ecclesiastic?"
+
+"He--?  Who--?" questioned Marietta.
+
+"But the chaplain of the Duchessa--when he was here this
+afternoon."
+
+"The chaplain of the Duchessa!" exclaimed Marietta.  "Here this
+afternoon?  The chaplain of the Duchessa was not here this
+afternoon.  His Eminence the Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was
+here this afternoon."
+
+"What!" gasped Peter.
+
+"Ang," said Marietta.
+
+"That was Cardinal Udeschini--that little harmless-looking,
+sweet-faced old man!" Peter wondered.
+
+"Sicuro--the uncle of the Duca," said she.
+
+"Good heavens!" sighed he.  "And I allowed myself to hobnob
+with him like a boon-companion."
+
+"Gia," said she.
+
+"You need n't rub it in," said he.  "For the matter of that,
+you yourself entertained him in your kitchen."
+
+"Scusi?" said she.
+
+"Ah, well--it was probably for the best," he concluded.  "I
+daresay I should n't have behaved much better if I had known."
+
+"It was his coming which saved this house from being struck by
+lightning," announced Marietta.
+
+"Oh--?  Was it?" exclaimed Peter.
+
+"Yes, Signorino.  The lightning would never strike a house that
+the Lord Prince Cardinal was in."
+
+"I see--it would n't venture--it would n't presume.  Did--did
+it strike all the houses that the Lord Prince Cardinal was n't
+in?"
+
+"I do not think so, Signorino.  Ma non fa niente.  It was a
+terrible storm--terrible, terrible.  The lightning was going to
+strike this house, when the Lord Prince Cardinal arrived."
+
+"Hum," said Peter.  "Then you, as well as I, have reason for
+regarding his arrival as providential."
+
+
+
+
+                             XVIII
+
+
+"I think something must have happened to my watch," Peter
+said, next day.
+
+Indeed, its hands moved with extraordinary, with exasperating
+slowness.
+
+"It seems absurd that it should do no good to push them on," he
+thought.
+
+He would force himself, between twice ascertaining their
+position, to wait for a period that felt like an eternity,
+walking about miserably, and smoking flavourless cigarettes;
+--then he would stand amazed, incredulous, when, with a smirk
+(as it almost struck him) of ironical complacence, they would
+attest that his eternity had lasted something near a quarter of
+an hour.
+
+"And I had professed myself a Kantian, and made light of the
+objective reality of Time! thou laggard, Time!" he cried, and
+shook his fist at Space, Time's unoffending consort.
+
+"I believe it will never be four o'clock again," he said, in
+despair, finally; and once more had out his watch.  It was
+half-past three.  He scowled at the instrument's bland white
+face.  "You have no bowels, no sensibilities--nothing but dry
+little methodical jog-trot wheels and pivots!" he exclaimed,
+flying to insult for relief.  "You're as inhuman as a French
+functionary.  Do you call yourself a sympathetic comrade for an
+impatient man?" He laid it open on his rustic table, and waited
+through a last eternity.  At a quarter to four he crossed the
+river.  "If I am early--tant pis!" he decided, choosing the
+lesser of two evils, and challenging Fate.
+
+He crossed the river, and stood for the first time in the
+grounds of Ventirose--stood where she had been in the habit of
+standing, during their water-side colloquies.  He glanced back
+at his house and garden, envisaging them for the first time, as
+it were, from her point of view.  They had a queer air of
+belonging to an era that had passed, to a yesterday already
+remote.  They looked, somehow, curiously small, moreover--the
+garden circumscribed, the two-storied house, with its striped
+sunblinds, poor and petty.  He turned his back upon them--left
+them behind.  He would have to come home to them later in the
+day, to be sure; but then everything would be different.  A
+chapter would have added itself to the history of the world; a
+great event, a great step forward, would have definitely taken
+place.  He would have been received at Ventirose as a friend.
+He would be no longer a mere nodding acquaintance, owing even
+that meagre relationship to the haphazard of propinquity.  The
+ice-broken, if you will, but still present in abundance--would
+have been gently thawed away.  One era had passed; but then a
+new era would have begun.
+
+So he turned his back upon Villa F'loriano, and.  set off,
+high-hearted, up the wide lawns, under the bending trees
+--whither, on four red-marked occasions, he had watched her
+disappear--towards the castle, which faced him in its vast
+irregular picturesqueness.  There were the oldest portions,
+grimly mediaeval, a lakeside fortress, with ponderous round
+towers, meurtrieres, machiolations, its grey stone walls
+discoloured in fantastic streaks and patches by weather-stains
+and lichens, or else shaggily overgrown by creepers.  Then
+there were later portions, rectangular, pink-stuccoed, with
+rusticated work at the corners, and, on the blank spaces
+between the windows, quaint allegorical frescoes, faded, half
+washed-out.  And then there were entirely modern-looking
+portions, of gleaming marble, with numberless fanciful
+carvings, spires, pinnacles, reliefs--wonderfully light, gay,
+habitable, and (Peter thought) beautiful, in the clear Italian
+atmosphere, against the blue Italian sky.
+
+"It's a perfect house for her," he said.  "It suits her--like
+an appropriate garment; it almost seems to express her."
+
+And all the while, as he proceeded, her voice kept sounding in
+his ears; scraps of her conversation, phrases that she had
+spoken, kept coming back to him.
+
+
+One end of the long, wide marble terrace had been arranged as a
+sort of out-of-door living-room.  A white awning was stretched
+overhead; warm-hued rugs were laid on the pavement; there were
+wicker lounging-chairs, with bright cushions, and a little
+table, holding books and things.
+
+The Duchessa rose from one of the lounging-chairs, and came
+forward, smiling, to meet him.
+
+She gave him her hand--for the first time.
+
+It was warm--electrically warm; and it was soft--womanly soft;
+and it was firm, alive--it spoke of a vitality, a temperament.
+Peter was sure, besides, that it would be sweet to smell; and
+he longed to bend over it, and press it with his lips.  He
+might almost have done so, according to Italian etiquette.
+But, of course, he simply bowed over it, and let it go.
+
+"Mi trova abbandonata," she said, leading the way back to the
+terrace-end.  There were notes of a peculiar richness in her
+voice, when she spoke Italian; and she dwelt languorously on
+the vowels, and rather slurred the consonants, lazily, in the
+manner Italian women have, whereby they give the quality of
+velvet to their tongue.  She was not an Italian woman; Heaven
+be praised, she was English: so this was just pure gain to the
+sum-total of her graces.  "My uncle and my niece have gone to
+the village.  But I 'm expecting them to come home at any
+moment now--and you'll not have long, I hope, to wait for your
+snuff."
+
+She flashed a whimsical little smile into his eyes.  Then she
+returned to her wicker chair, glancing an invitation at Peter
+to place himself in the one facing her.  She leaned back,
+resting her head on a pink silk cushion.
+
+Peter, no doubt, sent up a silent prayer that her uncle and her
+niece might be detained at the village for the rest of the
+afternoon.  By her niece he took her to mean Emilia: he liked
+her for the kindly euphemism.  "What hair she has!" he thought,
+admiring the loose brown masses, warm upon their background of
+pink silk.
+
+"Oh, I'm inured to waiting," he replied, with a retrospective
+mind for the interminable waits of that interminable day.
+
+The Duchessa had taken a fan from the table, and was playing
+with it, opening and shutting it slowly, in her lap.  Now she
+caught Peter's eyes examining it, and she gave it to him.  (My
+own suspicion is that Peter's eyes had been occupied rather
+with the hands that held the fan, than with the fan itself--but
+that's a detail.)
+
+"I picked it up the other day, in Rome," she said.  "Of course,
+it's an imitation of the French fans of the last century, but I
+thought it pretty."
+
+It was of white silk, that had been thinly stained a soft
+yellow, like the yellow of faded yellow rose-leaves.  It was
+painted with innumerable plump little cupids, flying among pale
+clouds.  The sticks were of mother-of=pearl.  The end-sticks
+were elaborately incised, and in the incisions opals were set,
+big ones and small ones, smouldering with green and scarlet
+fires.
+
+"Very pretty indeed," said Peter, "and very curious.  It's like
+a great butterfly's wing is n't it?  But are n't you afraid of
+opals?"
+
+"Afraid of opals?" she wondered.  "Why should one be?"
+
+"Unless your birthday happens to fall in October, they're
+reputed to bring bad luck," he reminded her.
+
+"My birthday happens to fall in June but I 'll never believe
+that such pretty things as opals can bring bad luck," she
+laughed, taking the fan, which he returned to her, and stroking
+one of the bigger opals with her finger tip.
+
+"Have you no superstitions?" he asked.
+
+"I hope not--I don't think I have," she answered.  "We're not
+allowed to have superstitions, you know--nous autres
+Catholiques."
+
+"Oh?" he said, with surprise.  "No, I did n't know."
+
+"Yes, they're a forbidden luxury.  But you--?  Are you
+superstitious?  Would you be afraid of opals?"
+
+"I doubt if I should have the courage to wear one.  At all
+events, I don't regard superstitions in the light of a luxury.
+I should be glad to be rid of those I have.  They're a horrible
+inconvenience.  But I can't get it out of my head that the air
+is filled with a swarm of malignant little devils, who are
+always watching their chance to do us an ill turn.  We don't in
+the least know the conditions under which they can bring it
+off; but it's legendary that if we wear opals, or sit thirteen
+at table, or start an enterprise on Friday, or what not, we
+somehow give them their opportunity.  And one naturally wishes
+to be on the safe side."
+
+She looked at him with.  doubt, considering.
+
+"You don't seriously believe all that?" she said.
+
+"No, I don't seriously believe it.  But one breathes it in with
+the air of one's nursery, and it sticks.  I don't believe it,
+but I fear it just enough to be made uneasy.  The evil eye, for
+instance.  How can one spend any time in Italy, where everybody
+goes loaded with charms against it, and help having a sort of
+sneaking half-belief in the evil eye?"
+
+She shook her head, laughing.
+
+"I 've spent a good deal of time in Italy, but I have n't so
+much as a sneaking quarter-belief in it."
+
+"I envy you your strength of mind," said he.  "But surely,
+though superstition is a luxury forbidden to Catholics, there
+are plenty of good Catholics who indulge in it, all the same?"
+
+"There are never plenty of good Catholics," said sire.  "You
+employ a much-abused expression.  To profess the Catholic
+faith, to go to Mass on Sunday and abstain from meat on Friday,
+that is by no means sufficient to constitute a good Catholic.
+To be a good Catholic one would have to be a saint, nothing
+less--and not a mere formal saint, either, but a very real
+saint, a saint in thought and feeling, as well as in speech and
+action.  Just in so far as one is superstitious, one is a bad
+Catholic.  Oh, if the world were populated by good Catholics,
+it would be the Millennium come to pass."
+
+"It would be that, if it were populated by good Christians
+--wouldn't it?" asked Peter.
+
+"The terms are interchangeable," she answered sweetly, with a
+half-comical look of defiance.
+
+"Mercy!" cried he.  "Can't a Protestant be a good Christian
+too?"
+
+"Yes," she said, "because a Protestant can be a Catholic
+without knowing it."
+
+"Oh--?" he puzzled, frowning.
+
+"It's quite simple," she explained.  "You can't be a Christian
+unless you're a Catholic.  But if you believe as much of
+Christian truth as you've ever had a fair opportunity of
+learning, and if you try to live in accordance with Christian
+morals, you are a Catholic, you're a member of the Catholic
+Church, whether you know it or not.  You can't be deprived of
+your birthright, you see."
+
+"That seems rather broad," said Peter; "and one had always
+heard that Catholicism was nothing if not narrow."
+
+"How could it be Catholic if it were narrow?" asked she.
+"However, if a Protestant uses his intelligence, and is
+logical, he'll not remain an unconscious Catholic long.  If he
+studies the matter, and is logical, he'll wish to unite himself
+to the Church in her visible body.  Look at England.  See how
+logic is multiplying converts year by year."
+
+"But it's the glory of Englishmen to be illogical," said Peter,
+with a laugh.  "Our capacity for not following premisses to
+their logical consequences is the principal source of our
+national greatness.  So the bulk of the English are likely to
+resist conversion for centuries to come--are they not?  And
+then, nowadays, one is so apt to be an indifferentist in
+matters of religion--and Catholicism is so exacting.  One
+remains a Protestant from the love of ease."
+
+"And from the desire, on the part of a good many Englishmen at
+least, to sail in a boat of their own--not to get mixed up with
+a lot of foreign publicans and sinners--no?" she suggested.
+
+"Oh, of course, we're insular and we're Pharisaical," admitted
+Peter.
+
+"And as for one's indifference," she smiled, "that is most
+probably due to one's youth and inexperience.  One can't come
+to close quarters with the realities of life--with sorrow, with
+great joy, with temptation, with sin or with heroic virtue,
+with death, with the birth of a new soul, with any of the
+awful, wonderful realities of life--and continue to be an
+indifferentist in matters of religion, do you think?"
+
+"When one comes to close quarters with the awful, wonderful
+realities of life, one has religious moments," he acknowledged.
+"But they're generally rather fugitive, are n't they?"
+
+"One can cultivate them--one can encourage them," she said.
+"If you would care to know a good Catholic," she added, "my
+niece, my little ward, Emilia is one.  She wants to become a
+Sister of Mercy, to spend her life nursing the poor."
+
+"Oh?  Would n't that be rather a pity?" Peter said.  "She's so
+extremely pretty.  I don't know when I have seen prettier brown
+eyes than hers."
+
+"Well, in a few years, I expect we shall see those pretty brown
+eyes looking out from under a sister's coif.  No, I don't think
+it will be a pity.  Nuns and sisters, I think, are the happiest
+people in the world--and priests.  Have you ever met any one
+who seemed happier than my uncle, for example?"
+
+"I have certainly never met any one who seemed sweeter,
+kinder," Peter confessed.  "He has a wonderful old face."
+
+"He's a wonderful old man," said she.  "I 'm going to try to
+keep him a prisoner here for the rest of the summer--though he
+will have it that he's just run down for a week.  He works a
+great deal too hard when he's in Rome.  He's the only Cardinal
+I've ever heard of, who takes practical charge of his titular
+church.  But here in the country he's out-of-doors all the
+blessed day, hand in hand with Emilia.  He's as young as she
+is, I believe.  They play together like children--and make--me
+feel as staid and solemn and grown-up as one of Mr. Kenneth
+Grahame's Olympians."
+
+Peter laughed.  Then, in the moment of silence that followed,
+he happened to let his eyes stray up the valley.
+
+"Hello!" he suddenly exclaimed.  "Someone has been painting our
+mountain green."
+
+The Duchessa turned, to look; and she too uttered an
+exclamation.
+
+By some accident of reflection or refraction, the snows of
+Monte Sfiorito had become bright green, as if the light that
+fell on them had passed through emeralds.  They both paused, to
+gaze and marvel for a little.  Indeed, the prospect was a
+pleasing one, as well as a surprising--the sunny lawns, the
+high trees, the blue lake, and then that bright green mountain.
+
+"I have never known anything like those snow-peaks for sailing
+under false colours," Peter said.  "I have seen them every
+colour of the calendar, except their native white."
+
+"You must n't blame the poor things," pleaded the Duchessa.
+"They can't help it.  It's all along o' the distance and the
+atmosphere and the sun."
+
+She closed her fan, with which she had been more or less idly
+playing throughout their dialogue, and replaced it on the
+table.  Among the books there--French books, for the most part,
+in yellow paper--Peter saw, with something of a flutter (he
+could never see it without something of a flutter), the
+grey-and-gold binding of "A Man of Words."
+
+The Duchessa caught his glance.
+
+"Yes," she said; "your friend's novel.  I told you I had been
+re-reading it."
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+"And--do you know--I 'm inclined to agree with your own
+enthusiastic estimate of it?" she went on.  "I think it's
+extremely--but extremely--clever; and more--very charming, very
+beautiful.  The fatal gift of beauty!"
+
+And her smile reminded him that the application of the tag was
+his own.
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+"Its beauty, though," she reflected, "is n't exactly of the
+obvious sort--is it?  It does n't jump at you, for instance.
+It is rather in the texture of the work, than on the surface.
+One has to look, to see it."
+
+"One always has to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing,"
+he safely generalised.  But then--he had put his foot in the
+stirrup--his hobby bolted with him.  "It takes two to make a
+beautiful object.  The eye of the beholder is every bit as
+indispensable as the hand of the artist.  The artist does his
+work--the beholder must do his.  They are collaborators.  Each
+must be the other's equal; and they must also be like each
+other--with the likeness of opposites, of complements.  Art, in
+short, is entirely a matter of reciprocity.  The kind of beauty
+that jumps at you is the kind you end by getting heartily tired
+of--is the skin-deep kind; and therefore it is n't really
+beauty at all--it is only an approximation to beauty--it may be
+only a simulacrum of it."
+
+Her eyes were smiling, her face was glowing, softly, with
+interest, with friendliness and perhaps with the least
+suspicion of something else--perhaps with the faintest glimmer
+of suppressed amusement; but interest was easily predominant.
+
+"Yes," she assented . . . .  But then she pursued her own train
+of ideas.  "And--with you--I particularly like the woman
+--Pauline.  I can't tell you how much I like her.  I--it sounds
+extravagant, but it's true--I can think of no other woman in
+the whole of fiction whom I like so well--who makes so
+curiously personal an appeal to me.  Her wit--her waywardness
+--her tenderness--her generosity--everything.  How did your
+friend come by his conception of her?  She's as real to me as
+any woman I have ever known she's more real to me than most of
+the women I know--she's absolutely real, she lives, she
+breathes.  Yet I have never known a woman resembling her.  Life
+would be a merrier business if one did know women resembling
+her.  She seems to me all that a woman ought ideally to be.
+Does your friend know women like that--the lucky man?  Or is
+Pauline, for all her convincingness, a pure creature of
+imagination?"
+
+"Ah," said Peter, laughing, "you touch the secret springs of my
+friend's inspiration.  That is a story in itself.  Felix
+Wildmay is a perfectly commonplace Englishman.  How could a
+woman like Pauline be the creature of his imagination?  No--she
+was a 'thing seen.' God made her.  Wildmay was a mere copyist.
+He drew her, tant bien que mal, from the life from a woman
+who's actually alive on this dull globe to-day.  But that's the
+story."
+
+The Duchessa's eyes were intent.
+
+"The story-?  Tell me the story," she pronounced in a breath,
+with imperious eagerness.
+
+And her eyes waited, intently.
+
+"Oh," said Peter, "it's one of those stories that can scarcely
+be told.  There's hardly any thing to take hold of.  It's
+without incident, without progression--it's all subjective
+--it's a drama in states of mind.  Pauline was a 'thing seen,'
+indeed; but she wasn't a thing known: she was a thing divined.
+Wildmay never knew her--never even knew who she was--never knew
+her name--never even knew her nationality, though, as the book
+shows, he guessed her to be an Englishwoman, married to a
+Frenchman.  He simply saw her, from a distance, half-a-dozen
+times perhaps.  He saw her in Paris, once or twice, at the
+theatre, at the opera; and then later again, once or twice, in
+London; and then, once more, in Paris, in the Bois.  That was
+all, but that was enough.  Her appearance--her face, her eyes,
+her smile, her way of carrying herself, her way of carrying her
+head, her gestures, her movements, her way of dressing--he
+never so much as heard her voice--her mere appearance made an
+impression on him such as all the rest of womankind had totally
+failed to make.  She was exceedingly lovely, of course,
+exceedingly distinguished, noble-looking; but she was
+infinitely more.  Her face her whole person--had an expression!
+A spirit burned in her--a prismatic, aromatic fire.  Other
+women seemed dust, seemed dead, beside her.  She was a garden,
+inexhaustible, of promises, of suggestions.  Wit,
+capriciousness, generosity, emotion--you have said it--they
+were all there.  Race was there, nerve.  Sex was there--all the
+mystery, magic, all the essential, elemental principles of the
+Feminine, were there: she was a woman.  A wonderful, strenuous
+soul was there: Wildmay saw it, felt it.  He did n't know her
+--he had no hope of ever knowing her--but he knew her better
+than he knew any one else in the world.  She became the absorbing
+subject of his thoughts, the heroine of his dreams.  She
+became, in fact, the supreme influence of his life."
+
+The Duchessa's eyes had not lost their intentness, while he was
+speaking.  Now that he had finished, she looked down at her
+hands, folded in her lap, and mused for a moment in silence.
+At last she looked up again.
+
+"It's as strange as anything I have ever heard," she said,
+"it's furiously strange--and romantic--and interesting.  But
+--but--" She frowned a little, hesitating between a choice of
+questions.
+
+"Oh, it's a story all compact of 'buts,'" Peter threw out
+laughing.
+
+She let the remark pass her--she had settled upon her question.
+
+"But how could he endure such a situation?" she asked.  "How
+could he sit still under it?  Did n't he try in any way--did
+n't he make any effort at all--to--to find her out--to discover
+who she was--to get introduced to her?  I should think he could
+never have rested--I should think he would have moved heaven
+and earth."
+
+"What could he do?  Tell me a single thing he could have done,"
+said Peter.  "Society has made no provision for a case like
+his.  It 's absurd--but there it is.  You see a woman
+somewhere; you long to make her acquaintance; and there's no
+natural bar to your doing so--you 're a presentable man she's
+what they call a lady--you're both, more or less, of the same
+monde.  Yet there 's positively no way known by which you can
+contrive it--unless chance, mere fortuitous chance, just
+happens to drop a common acquaintance between you, at the right
+time and place.  Chance, in Wildmay's case, happened to drop
+all the common acquaintances they may possibly have had at a
+deplorable distance.  He was alone on each of the occasions
+when he saw her.  There was no one he could ask to introduce
+him; there was no one he could apply to for information
+concerning her.  He could n't very well follow her carriage
+through the streets--dog her to her lair, like a detective.
+Well--what then?"
+
+The Duchessa was playing with her fan again.
+
+"No," she agreed; "I suppose it was hopeless.  But it seems
+rather hard on the poor man--rather baffling and tantalising."
+
+"The poor man thought it so, to be sure," said Peter; "he
+fretted and fumed a good deal, and kicked against the pricks.
+Here, there, now, anon, he would enjoy his brief little vision
+of her--then she would vanish into the deep inane.  So, in the
+end--he had to take it out in something--he took it out in
+writing a book about her.  He propped up a mental portrait of
+her on his desk before him, and translated it into the
+character of Pauline.  In that way he was able to spend long
+delightful hours alone with her every day, in a kind of
+metaphysical intimacy.  He had never heard her voice--but now
+he heard it as often as Pauline opened her lips.  He owned her
+--he possessed her--she lived under his roof--she was always
+waiting for him in his study.  She is real to you?  She was
+inexpressibly, miraculously real to him.  He saw her, knew her,
+felt her, realised her, in every detail of her mind, her soul,
+her person--down to the very intonations of her speech--down to
+the veins in her hands, the rings on her fingers--down to her
+very furs and laces, the frou-frou of her skirts, the scent
+upon her pocket-handkerchief.  He had numbered the hairs of her
+head, almost."
+
+Again the Duchessa mused for a while in silence, opening and
+shutting her fan, and gazing into its opals.
+
+"I am thinking of it from the woman's point of view," she said,
+by and by.  "To have played such a part in a man's life--and
+never to have dreamed it!  Never even, very likely, to have
+dreamed that such a man existed--for it's entirely possible she
+didn't notice him, on those occasions when he saw her.  And to
+have been the subject of such a novel--and never to have
+dreamed that, either!  To have read the novel perhaps--without
+dreaming for an instant that there was any sort of connection
+between Pauline and herself!  Or else--what would almost be
+stranger still--not to have read the novel, not to have heard
+of it!  To have inspired such a book, such a beautiful book
+--yet to remain in sheer unconscious ignorance that there was
+such a book!  Oh, I think it is even more extraordinary from
+the woman's point of view than from the man's.  There is
+something almost terrifying about it.  To have had such an
+influence on the destiny of someone you've never heard of!
+There's a kind of intangible sense of a responsibility."
+
+"There is also, perhaps," laughed Peter, "a kind of intangible
+sense of a liberty taken.  I'm bound to say I think Wildmay was
+decidedly at his ease.  To appropriate in that cool fashion the
+personality of a total stranger!  But artists are the most
+unprincipled folk unhung.  Ils prennent leur bien la, ou ils le
+trouvent."
+
+"Oh, no," said the Duchessa, "I think she was fair game.  One
+can carry delicacy too far.  He was entitled to the benefits of
+his discovery--for, after all, it was a discovery, was n't it?
+You have said yourself how indispensable the eye of the
+beholder is--'the seeing eye.'  I think, indeed, the whole
+affair speaks extremely well for Mr. Wildmay.  It is not every
+man who would be capable of so purely intellectual a passion.
+I suppose one must call his feeling for her a passion?  It
+indicates a distinction in his nature.  He can hardly be a mere
+materialist.  But--but I think it's heart-rending that he never
+met her."
+
+"Oh, but that's the continuation of the story," said Peter.
+"He did meet her in the end, you know."
+
+"He did meet her!" cried the Duchessa, starting up, with a
+sudden access of interest, whilst her eyes lightened.  "He did
+meet her?  Oh, you must tell me about that."
+
+And just at this crisis the Cardinal and Emilia appeared,
+climbing the terrace steps.
+
+"Bother!" exclaimed the Duchessa, under her breath.  Then, to
+Peter, "It will have to be for another time--unless I die of
+the suspense."
+
+After the necessary greetings were transacted, another elderly
+priest joined the company; a tall, burly, rather florid man,
+mentioned, when Peter was introduced to him, as Monsignor
+Langshawe.  "This really is her chaplain," Peter concluded.
+Then a servant brought tea.
+
+"Ah, Diamond, Diamond, you little know what mischief you might
+have wrought," he admonished himself, as he walked home through
+the level sunshine.  "In another instant, if we'd not been
+interrupted, you would have let the cat out of the bag.  The
+premature escape of the cat from the bag would spoil
+everything."
+
+And he hugged himself, as one snatched from peril, in a qualm
+of retroactive terror.  At the same time he was filled with a
+kind of exultancy.  All that he had hoped had come to pass, and
+more, vastly more.  Not only had he been received as a friend
+at Ventirose, but he had been encouraged to tell her a part at
+least of the story by which her life and his were so curiously
+connected; and he had been snatched from the peril of telling
+her too much.  The day was not yet when he could safely say,
+"Mutato nomine. . . . ."  Would the day ever be?  But,
+meanwhile, just to have told her the first ten lines of that
+story, he could not help feeling, somehow advanced matters
+tremendously, somehow put a new face on matters.
+
+"The hour for which the ages sighed may not be so far away as
+you think," he said to Marietta.  "The curtain has risen upon
+Act Three.  I fancy I can perceive faint glimmerings of the
+beginning of the end."
+
+
+
+
+                              XIX
+
+
+All that evening, something which he had not been conscious of
+noticing especially when it was present to him--certainly he
+had paid no conscious attention to its details--kept recurring
+and recurring to Peter's memory: the appearance of the
+prettily-arranged terrace-end at Ventirose: the white awning,
+with the blue sky at its edges, the sunny park beyond; the
+warm-hued carpets on the marble pavement; the wicker chairs,
+with their bright cushions; the table, with its books and
+bibelots--the yellow French books, a tortoise-shell paperknife,
+a silver paperweight, a crystal smelling-bottle, a bowlful of
+drooping poppies; and the marble balustrade, with its delicate
+tracery of leaves and tendrils, where the jessamine twined
+round its pillars.
+
+This kept recurring, recurring, vividly, a picture that he
+could see without closing his eyes, a picture with a very
+decided sentiment.  Like the gay and gleaming many-pinnacled
+facade of her house, it seemed appropriate to her; it seemed in
+its fashion to express her.  Nay, it seemed to do more.  It was
+a corner of her every-day environment; these things were the
+companions, the witnesses, of moments of her life, phases of
+herself, which were hidden from Peter; they were the companions
+and witnesses of her solitude, her privacy; they were her
+confidants, in a way.  They seemed not merely to express her,
+therefore, but to be continually on the point--I had almost
+said of betraying her.  At all events, if he could only
+understand their silent language, they would prove rich in
+precious revelations.  So he welcomed their recurrences, dwelt
+upon them, pondered them, and got a deep if somewhat
+inarticulate pleasure from them.
+
+On Thursday, as he approached the castle, the last fires of
+sunset were burning in the sky behind it--the long irregular
+mass of buildings stood out in varying shades of blue, against
+varying, dying shades of red: the grey stone, dark, velvety
+indigo; the pink stucco, pink still, but with a transparent
+blue penumbra over it; the white marble, palely, scintillantly
+amethystine.  And if he was interested in her environment, now
+he could study it to his heart's content: the wide marble
+staircase, up which he was shown, with its crimson carpet, and
+the big mellow painting, that looked as if it might be a
+Titian, at the top; the great saloon, in which he was received,
+with its polished mosaic floor, its frescoed ceiling, its
+white-and-gold panelling, its hangings and upholsteries of
+yellow brocade, its satinwood chairs and tables, its bronzes,
+porcelains, embroideries, its screens and mirrors; the long
+dining-hall, with its high pointed windows, its slender marble
+columns supporting a vaulted roof, its twinkling candles in
+chandeliers and sconces of cloudy Venetian glass, its brilliant
+table, its flowers and their colours and their scents.
+
+He could study her environment to his heart's content, indeed
+--or to his heart's despair.  For all this had rather the effect
+of chilling, of depressing him.  It was very splendid; it was
+very luxurious and cheerful; it was appropriate and personal to
+her, if you like; no doubt, in its fashion, in its measure, it,
+too, expressed her.  But, at that rate, it expressed her in an
+aspect which Peter had instinctively made it his habit to
+forget, which he by no means found it inspiriting to remember.
+It expressed, it emphasised, her wealth, her rank; it
+emphasised the distance, in a worldly sense, between her and
+himself, the conventional barriers.
+
+And she . . .
+
+She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she
+was all that she had ever been--and yet--and yet--Well,
+somehow, she seemed indefinably different.  Somehow, again, the
+distance, the barriers, were emphasised.  She was very lovely,
+she was entirely cordial, friendly, she was all that she had
+ever been; but, somehow, to-night, she seemed very much the
+great lady, very much the duchess . . . .
+
+"My dear man," he said to himself, "you were mad to dream for a
+single instant that there was the remotest possibility of
+anything ever happening."
+
+The only other guests, besides the Cardinal and Monsignor
+Langshawe, were an old Frenchwoman, with beautiful white hair,
+from one of the neighbouring villas, Madame de Lafere, and a
+young, pretty, witty, and voluble Irishwoman, Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence, from an hotel at Spiaggia.  In deference, perhaps,
+to the cloth of the two ecclesiastics, none of the women were
+in full evening-dress, and there was no arm-taking when they
+went in to dinner.  The dinner itself was of a simplicity which
+Peter thought admirable, and which, of course, he attributed to
+his Duchessa's own good taste.  He was not yet familiar enough
+with the Black aristocracy of Italy, to be aware that in the
+matter of food and drink simplicity is as much the criterion of
+good form amongst them, as lavish complexity is the criterion
+of good form amongst the English-imitating Whites.
+
+The conversation, I believe, took its direction chiefly from
+the initiative of Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.  With great
+sprightliness and humour, and with an astonishing light-hearted
+courage, she rallied the Cardinal upon the neglect in which her
+native island was allowed to languish by the powers at Rome.
+"The most Catholic country in three hemispheres, to be sure,"
+she said; "every inch of its soil soaked with the blood of
+martyrs.  Yet you've not added an Irish saint to the Calendar
+for I see you're blushing to think how many ages; and you've
+taken sides with the heretic Saxon against us in our struggle
+for Home Rule--which I blame you for, though, being a landowner
+and a bit of an absentee, I 'm a traitorous Unionist myself."
+
+The Cardinal laughingly retorted that the Irish were far too
+fine, too imaginative and poetical a race, to be bothered with
+material questions of government and administration.  They
+should leave such cares to the stolid, practical English, and
+devote the leisure they would thus obtain to the further
+exercise and development of what someone had called "the
+starfire of the Celtic nature."  Ireland should look upon
+England as her working-housekeeper.  And as for the addition of
+Irish saints to the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their
+excessive number.  "'T is an embarrassment of riches.  If we
+were once to begin, we could never leave off till we had
+canonised nine-tenths of the dead population."
+
+Monsignor Langshawe, at this (making jest the cue for earnest),
+spoke up for Scotland, and deplored the delay in the
+beatification of Blessed Mary.  "The official beatification,"
+he discriminated, "for she was beatified in the heart of every
+true Catholic Scot on the day when Bloody Elizabeth murdered
+her."
+
+And Madame de Lafere put in a plea for Louis XVI,
+Marie-Antoinette. and the little Dauphin.
+
+"Blessed Mary--Bloody Elizabeth," laughed the Duchessa, in an
+aside to Peter; "here is language to use in the presence of a
+Protestant Englishman."
+
+"Oh, I'm accustomed to 'Bloody Elizabeth,'" said he.  "Was n't
+it a word of Cardinal Newman's?"
+
+"Yes, I think so," said she.  "And since every one is naming
+his candidate; for the Calendar, you have named mine.  I think
+there never was a saintlier saint than Cardinal Newman."
+
+"What is your Eminence's attitude towards the question of mixed
+marriages?" Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.
+
+Peter pricked up his ears.
+
+"It is not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in
+England," his Eminence replied; "but in the abstract, and other
+things equal, my attitude would of course be one of
+disapproval."
+
+"And yet surely," contended she, "if a pious Catholic girl
+marries a Protestant man, she has a hundred chances of
+converting him?"
+
+"I don't know," said the Cardinal.  "Would n't it be safer to
+let the conversion precede the marriage?  Afterwards, I 'm
+afraid, he would have a hundred chances of inducing her to
+apostatise, or, at least, of rendering her lukewarm."
+
+"Not if she had a spark of the true zeal," said Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence.  "Any wife can make her husband's life a burden to
+him, if she will conscientiously lay herself out to do so.  The
+man would be glad to submit, for the sake of peace in his
+household.  I often sigh for the good old days of the
+Inquisition; but it's still possible, in the blessed seclusion
+of the family circle, to apply the rack and the thumbscrew in a
+modified form.  I know a dozen fine young Protestant men in
+London whom I'm labouring to convert, and I feel I 'm defeated
+only by the circumstance that I'm not in a position to lead
+them to the altar in the full meaning of the expression."
+
+"A dozen?" the Cardinal laughed.  "Aren't you complicating the
+question of mixed marriages with that of plural marriage?"
+
+"'T was merely a little Hibernicism, for which I beg your
+Eminence's indulgence," laughed she.  "But what puts the most
+spokes in a proselytiser's wheel is the Faith itself.  If we
+only deserved the reputation for sharp practice and double
+dealing which the Protestants have foisted upon us, it would be
+roses, roses, all the way.  Why are we forbidden to let the end
+justify the means?  And where are those accommodements avec le
+ciel of which we've heard?  We're not even permitted a few poor
+accommodements avec le monde."
+
+"Look at my uncle's face," whispered the Duchessa to Peter.
+The Cardinal's fine old face was all alight with amusement.
+"In his fondness for taking things by their humorous end, he
+has met an affinity."
+
+"It will be a grand day for the Church and the nations, when we
+have an Irish Pope," Mrs. O'Donovan Florence continued.  "A
+good, stalwart, militant Irishman is what's needed to set
+everything right.  With a sweet Irish tongue, he'd win home the
+wandering sheep; and with a strong Irish arm, he'd drive the
+wolves from the fold.  It's he that would soon sweep the
+Italians out of Rome."
+
+"The Italians will soon be swept out of Rome by the natural
+current of events," said the Cardinal.  "But an Irish bishop of
+my acquaintance insists that we have already had many Irish
+Popes, without knowing it.  Of all the greatest Popes he cries,
+'Surely, they must have had Irish blood.'  He's perfectly
+convinced that Pius the Ninth was Irish.  His very name, his
+family-name, Ferretti, was merely the Irish name, Farrity,
+Italianised, the good bishop says.  No one but an Irishman, he
+insists, could have been so witty."
+
+Mrs. O'Donovan Florence looked intensely thoughtful for a
+moment . . . .  Then, "I 'm trying to think of the original
+Irish form of Udeschini," she declared.
+
+At which there was a general laugh.
+
+"When you say 'soon,' Eminence, do you mean that we may hope to
+see the Italians driven from Rome in our time?" enquired Madame
+de Lafere.
+
+"They are on the verge of bankruptcy--for their sins," the
+Cardinal answered.  "When the crash comes--and it can't fail to
+come before many years--there will necessarily be a
+readjustment.  I do not believe that the conscience of
+Christendom will again allow Peter to be deprived of his
+inheritance."
+
+"God hasten the good day," said Monsignor Langshawe.
+
+"If I can live to see Rome restored to the Pope, I shall die
+content, even though I cannot live to see France restored to
+the King," said the old Frenchwoman.
+
+"And I--even though I cannot live to see Britain restored to
+the Faith," said the Monsignore.
+
+The Duchessa smiled at Peter.
+
+"What a hotbed of Ultramontanes and reactionaries you have
+fallen into," she murmured.
+
+"It is exhilarating," said he, "to meet people who have
+convictions."
+
+"Even when you regard their convictions as erroneous?" she
+asked.
+
+"Yes, even then," he answered.  "But I'm not sure I regard as
+erroneous the convictions I have heard expressed to-night."
+
+"Oh--?" she wondered.  "Would you like to see Rome restored to
+the Pope?"
+
+"Yes," said he, "decidedly--for aesthetic reasons, if for no
+others."
+
+"I suppose there are aesthetic reasons," she assented.  "But
+we, of course, think there are conclusive reasons in mere
+justice."
+
+"I don't doubt there are conclusive reasons in mere justice,
+too," said he.
+
+After dinner, at the Cardinal's invitation, the Duchessa went
+to the piano, and played Bach and Scarlatti.  Her face, in the
+soft candlelight, as she discoursed that "luminous, lucid"
+music, Peter thought . . .  But what do lovers always think of
+their ladies' faces, when they look up from their pianos, in
+soft candlelight?
+
+Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, taking her departure, said to the
+Cardinal, "I owe your Eminence the two proudest days of my
+life.  The first was when I read in the paper that you had
+received the hat, and I was able to boast to all my
+acquaintances that I had been in the convent with your niece by
+marriage.  And the second is now, when I can boast forevermore
+hereafter that I've enjoyed the honour of making my courtesy to
+you."
+
+"So," said Peter, as he walked home through the dew and the
+starlight of the park, amid the phantom perfumes of the night,
+"so the Cardinal does n't approve of mixed marriages and, of
+course, his niece does n't, either.  But what can it matter to
+me?  For alas and alas--as he truly said--it's hardly a
+question of actuality."
+
+And he lit a cigarette.
+
+
+
+
+                              XX
+
+
+"So he did meet her, after all?" the Duchessa said.
+
+"Yes, he met her in the end," Peter answered.
+
+They were seated under the gay white awning, against the bright
+perspective of lawn, lake, and mountains, on the terrace at
+Ventirose, where Peter was paying his dinner-call.  The August
+day was hot and still and beautiful--a day made of gold and
+velvet and sweet odours.  The Duchessa lay back languidly,
+among the crisp silk cushions, in her low, lounging chair; and
+Peter, as he looked at her, told himself that he must be
+cautious, cautious.
+
+"Yes, he met her in the end," he said.
+
+"Well--?  And then--?" she questioned, with a show of
+eagerness, smiling into his eyes.  "What happened?  Did she
+come up to his expectations?  Or was she just the usual
+disappointment?  I have been pining--oh, but pining--to hear
+the continuation of the story."
+
+She smiled into his eyes, and his heart fluttered.  "I must be
+cautious," he told himself.  "In more ways than one, this is a
+crucial moment."  At the same time, as a very part of his
+caution, he must appear entirely nonchalant and candid.
+
+"Oh, no--tutt' altro," he said, with an assumption of
+nonchalant airiness and candid promptness.  "She 'better
+bettered' his expectations--she surpassed his fondest.  She was
+a thousand times more delightful than he had dreamed--though,
+as you know, he had dreamed a good deal.  Pauline de Fleuvieres
+turned out to be the feeblest, faintest echo of her."
+
+The Duchessa meditated for an instant.
+
+"It seems impossible.  It's one of those situations in which a
+disenchantment seems the foregone conclusion," she said, at
+last.
+
+"It seems so, indeed," assented Peter; "but disenchantment,
+there was none.  She was all that he had imagined, and
+infinitely more.  She was the substance--he had imagined the
+shadow.  He had divined her, as it were, from a single angle,
+and there were many angles.  Pauline was the pale reflection of
+one side of her--a pencil-sketch in profile."
+
+The Duchessa shook her head, marvelling, and smiled again.
+
+"You pile wonder upon wonder," she said.  "That the reality
+should excel the poet's ideal!  That the cloud-capped towers
+which looked splendid from afar, with all the glamour of
+distance, should prove to be more splendid still, on close
+inspection!  It's dead against the accepted theory of things.
+And that any woman should be nicer than that adorable Pauline!
+You tax belief.  But I want to know what happened.  Had she
+read his book?"
+
+"Nothing happened," said Peter.  "I warned you that it was a
+drama without action.  A good deal happened, no doubt, in
+Wildmay's secret soul.  But externally, nothing.  They simply
+chatted together--exchanged the time o' day--like any pair of
+acquaintances.  No, I don't think she had read his book.  She
+did read it afterwards, though."
+
+"And liked it?"
+
+"Yes--she said she liked it."
+
+"Well--?  But then-?" the Duchessa pressed him, insistently.
+"When she discovered the part she had had in its composition--?
+Was n't she overwhelmed?  Wasn't she immensely interested
+--surprised--moved?"
+
+She leaned forward a little.  Her eyes were shining.  Her lips
+were slightly parted, so that between their warm rosiness Peter
+could see the exquisite white line of her teeth.  His heart
+fluttered again.  "I must be cautious, cautious," he
+remembered, and made a strenuous "act of will" to steady
+himself.
+
+"Oh, she never discovered that," he said.
+
+"What!" exclaimed the Duchessa.  Her face fell.  Her eyes
+darkened--with dismay, with incomprehension.  "Do you--you
+don't--mean to say that he didn't tell her?"  There was
+reluctance to believe, there was a conditional implication of
+deep reproach, in her voice.
+
+Peter had to repeat his act of will.
+
+"How could he tell her?" he asked.
+
+She frowned at him, with reproach that was explicit now, and a
+kind of pained astonishment.
+
+"How could he help telling her?" she cried.  "But--but it was
+the one great fact between them.  But it was a fact that
+intimately concerned her--it was a fact of her own destiny.
+But it was her right to be told.  Do you seriously mean that he
+did n't tell her?  But why did n't he?  What could have
+possessed him?"
+
+There was something like a tremor in her voice.  "I must appear
+entirely nonchalant and candid," Peter remembered.
+
+"I fancy he was possessed, in some measure, by a sense of the
+liberty he had taken by a sense of what one might, perhaps,
+venture to qualify as his 'cheek.'  For, if it was n't already
+a liberty to embody his notion of her in a novel--in a
+published book, for daws to peck at--it would have become a
+liberty the moment he informed her that he had done so.  That
+would have had the effect of making her a kind of involuntary
+particeps criminis."
+
+"Oh, the foolish man!" sighed the Duchessa, with a rueful shake
+of the head.  "His foolish British self-consciousness!  His
+British inability to put himself in another person's place, to
+see things from another's point of view!  Could n't he see,
+from her point of view, from any point of view but his own,
+that it was her right to be told?  That the matter affected her
+in one way, as much as it affected him in another?  That since
+she had influenced--since she had contributed to--his life and
+his art as she had, it was her right to know it?  Couldn't he
+see that his 'cheek,' his real 'cheek,' began when he withheld
+from her that great strange chapter of her own history?  Oh, he
+ought to have told her, he ought to have told her."
+
+She sank back in her chair, giving her head another rueful
+shake, and gazed ruefully away, over the sunny landscape,
+through the mellow atmosphere, into the golden-hazy distance.
+
+Peter looked at her--and then, quickly, for caution's sake,
+looked elsewhere.
+
+"But there were other things to be taken into account," he
+said.
+
+The Duchessa raised her eyes.  "What other things?" they
+gravely questioned.
+
+"Would n't his telling her have been equivalent to a
+declaration of love?" questioned he, looking at the signet-ring
+on the little finger of his left hand.
+
+"A declaration of love?" She considered for a moment.  "Yes, I
+suppose in a way it would," she acknowledged.  "But even so?"
+she asked, after another moment of consideration.  "Why should
+he not have made her a declaration of love?  He was in love
+with her, wasn't he?"
+
+The point of frank interrogation in her eyes showed clearly,
+showed cruelly, how detached, how impersonal, her interest was.
+
+"Frantically," said Peter.  For caution's sake, he kept HIS
+eyes on the golden-hazy peaks of Monte Sfionto.  "He had been
+in love with her, in a fashion, of course, from the beginning.
+But after he met her, he fell in love with her anew.  His mind,
+his imagination, had been in love with its conception of her.
+But now he, the man, loved her, the woman herself, frantically,
+with just a downright common human love.  There were
+circumstances, however, which made it impossible for him to
+tell her so."
+
+"What circumstances?"  There was the same frank look of
+interrogation.  "Do you mean that she was married?"
+
+"No, not that.  By the mercy of heaven," he pronounced, with
+energy, "she was a widow."
+
+The Duchessa broke into an amused laugh.
+
+"Permit me to admire your piety," she said.
+
+And Peter, as his somewhat outrageous ejaculation came back to
+him, laughed vaguely too.
+
+"But then--?" she went on.  "What else?  By the mercy of
+heaven, she was a widow.  What other circumstance could have
+tied his tongue?"
+
+"Oh," he answered, a trifle uneasily, "a multitude of
+circumstances.  Pretty nearly every conventional barrier the
+world has invented, existed between him and her.  She was a
+frightful swell, for one thing."
+
+"A frightful swell--?"  The Duchessa raised her eyebrows.
+
+"Yes," said Peter, "at a vertiginous height above him--horribly
+'aloft and lone' in the social hierarchy."  He tried to smile.
+
+"What could that matter?" the Duchessa objected simply.  "Mr.
+Wildmay is a gentleman."
+
+"How do you know he is?" Peter asked, thinking to create a
+diversion,
+
+"Of course, he is.  He must be.  No one but a gentleman could
+have had such an experience, could have written such a book.
+And besides, he's a friend of yours.  Of course he's a
+gentleman," returned the adroit Duchessa.
+
+"But there are degrees of gentleness, I believe," said Peter.
+"She was at the topmost top.  He--well, at all events, he knew
+his place.  He had too much humour, too just a sense of
+proportion, to contemplate offering her his hand."
+
+"A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman--under royalty,"
+said the Duchessa.
+
+"He can, to be sure--and he can also see it declined with
+thanks," Peter answered.  "But it wasn't merely her rank.  She
+was horribly rich, besides.  And then--and then--!  There were
+ten thousand other impediments.  But the chief of them all, I
+daresay, was Wildmay's fear lest an avowal of his attachment
+should lead to his exile from her presence--and he naturally
+did not wish to be exiled."
+
+"Faint heart!" the Duchessa said.  "He ought to have told her.
+The case was peculiar, was unique.  Ordinary rules could n't
+apply to it.  And how could he be sure, after all, that she
+would n't have despised the conventional barriers, as you call
+them?  Every man gets the wife he deserves--and certainly he
+had gone a long way towards deserving her.  She could n't have
+felt quite indifferent to him--if he had told her; quite
+indifferent to the man who had drawn that magnificent Pauline
+from his vision of her.  No woman could be entirely proof
+against a compliment like that.  And I insist that it was her
+right to know.  He should simply have told her the story of his
+book and of her part in it.  She would have inferred the rest.
+He needn't have mentioned love--the word."
+
+"Well," said Peter, "it is not always too late to mend.  He may
+tell her some fine day yet."
+
+And in his soul two voices were contending.
+
+"Tell her--tell her--tell her!  Tell her now, at once, and
+abide your chances," urged one.  "No--no--no--do nothing of the
+kind," protested the second.  "She is arguing the point for its
+abstract interest.  She is a hundred miles from dreaming that
+you are the man--hundreds of miles from dreaming that she is
+the woman.  If she had the least suspicion of that, she would
+sing a song as different as may be.  Caution, caution."
+
+He looked at her--warm and fragrant and radiant, in her soft,
+white gown, in her low lounging-chair, so near, so near to him
+--he looked at her glowing eyes, her red lips, her rich brown
+hair, at the white-and-rose of her skin, at the delicate blue
+veins in her forehead, at her fine white hands, clasped loosely
+together in her lap, at the flowing lines of her figure, with
+its supple grace and strength; and behind her, surrounding her,
+accessory to her, he was conscious of the golden August world,
+in the golden August weather--of the green park, and the pure
+sunshine, and the sweet, still air, of the blue lake, and the
+blue sky, and the mountains with their dark-blue shadows, of
+the long marble terrace, and the gleaming marble facade of the
+house, and the marble balustrade, with the jessamine twining
+round its columns.  The picture was very beautiful--but
+something was wanting to perfect its beauty; and the name of
+the something that was wanting sang itself in poignant
+iteration to the beating of his pulses.  And he longed and
+longed to tell her; and he dared not; and he hesitated . . . .
+
+And while he was hesitating, the pounding of hoofs and the
+grinding of carriage-wheels on gravel reached his ears--and so
+the situation was saved, or the opportunity lost, as you choose
+to think it.  For next minute a servant appeared on the
+terrace, and announced Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+
+And shortly after that lady's arrival, Peter took his leave.
+
+
+
+
+                              XXI
+
+
+Well, Trixie, and is one to congratulate you?" asked Mrs.
+O'Donovan Florence.
+
+"Congratulate me--?  On what?" asked Beatrice.
+
+"On what, indeed!" cried the vivacious Irishwoman.  "Don't try
+to pull the wool over the eyes of an old campaigner like me."
+
+Beatrice looked blank.
+
+"I can't in the least think what you mean," she said.
+
+"Get along with you," cried Mrs. O'Donovan Florence; and she
+brandished her sunshade threateningly.  "On your engagement to
+Mr.--what's this his name is?--to be sure."
+
+She glanced indicatively down the lawn, in the direction of
+Peter's retreating tweeds.
+
+Beatrice had looked blank.  But now she looked--first, perhaps,
+for a tiny fraction of a second, startled--then gently,
+compassionately ironical.
+
+"My poor Kate!  Are you out of your senses?" she enquired, in
+accents of concern, nodding her head, with a feint of pensive
+pity.
+
+"Not I," returned Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, cheerfully
+confident.  "But I 'm thinking I could lay my finger on a
+long-limbed young Englishman less than a mile from here, who
+very nearly is.  Hasn't he asked you yet?"
+
+"Es-to bete?" Beatrice murmured, pitifully nodding again.
+
+"Ah, well, if he has n't, it's merely a question of time when
+he will," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.  "You've only to notice
+the famished gaze with which he devours you, to see his
+condition.  But don't try to hoodwink me.  Don't pretend that
+this is news to you."
+
+"News!" scoffed Beatrice.  "It's news and nonsense--the product
+of your irrepressible imagination.  Mr. What's-this-his-name-is,
+as you call him, and I are the barest acquaintances.  He's
+our temporary neighbour--the tenant for the season of Villa
+Floriano--the house you can catch a glimpse of, below there,
+through the trees, on the other side of the river."
+
+"Is he, now, really?  And that's very interesting too.  But I
+wasn't denying it."  Mrs. O'Donovan Florence smiled, with
+derisive sweetness.  "The fact of his being the tenant of the
+house I can catch a glimpse of, through the trees, on the other
+side of the river, though a valuable acquisition to my stores
+of knowledge, does n't explain away his famished glance unless,
+indeed, he's behind with the rent: but even then, it's not
+famished he'd look, but merely anxious and persuasive.  I'm
+a landlord myself.  No, Trixie, dear, you've made roast meat of
+the poor fellow's heart, as the poetical Persians express it;
+and if he has n't told you so yet with his tongue, he tells the
+whole world so with his eyes as often as he allows them to rest
+on their loadstone, your face.  You can see the sparks and the
+smoke escaping from them, as though they were chimneys.  If
+you've not observed that for yourself, it can only be that
+excessive modesty has rendered you blind.  The man is head over
+ears in love with you.  Nonsense or bonsense, that is the sober
+truth."
+
+Beatrice laughed.
+
+"I 'm sorry to destroy a romance, Kate," she said; "but alas
+for the pretty one you 've woven, I happen to know that, so far
+from being in love with me, Mr. Marchdale is quite desperately
+in love with another woman.  He was talking to me about her the
+moment before you arrived."
+
+"Was he, indeed?--and you the barest acquaintances!" quizzed
+Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, pulling a face.  "Well, well," she
+went on thoughtfully, "if he's in love with another woman, that
+settles my last remaining doubt.  It can only be that the other
+woman's yourself."
+
+Beatrice shook her head, and laughed again.
+
+"Is that what they call an Irishism?" she asked, with polite
+curiosity.
+
+"And an Irishism is a very good thing, too--when employed with
+intention," retorted her friend.  "Did he just chance, now, in
+a casual way, to mention the other woman's name, I wonder?"
+
+"Oh, you perverse and stiff-necked generation!" Beatrice
+laughed.  "What can his mentioning or not mentioning her name
+signify?  For since he's in love with her, it's hardly likely
+that he's in love with you or me at the same time, is it?"
+
+"That's as may be.  But I'll wager I could make a shrewd guess
+at her name myself.  And what else did he tell you about her?
+He's told me nothing; but I'll warrant I could paint her
+portrait.  She's a fine figure of a young Englishwoman,
+brown-haired, grey-eyed, and she stands about five-feet-eight
+in her shoes.  There's an expression of great malice and humour
+in her physiognomy, and a kind of devil-may-care haughtiness in
+the poise of her head.  She's a bit of a grande dame, into the
+bargain--something like an Anglo-Italian duchess, for example;
+she's monstrously rich; and she adds, you'll be surprised to
+learn, to her other fascinations that of being a widow.  Faith,
+the men are so fond of widows, it's a marvel to me that we're
+ever married at all until we reach that condition;--and there,
+if you like, is another Irishism for you.  But what's this?
+Methinks a rosy blush mantles my lady's brow.  Have I touched
+the heel of Achilles?  She IS a widow?  He TOLD you she was a
+widow? . . .  But--bless us and save us!--what's come to you
+now?  You're as white as a sheet.  What is it?"
+
+"Good heavens!" gasped Beatrice.  She lay back in her chair,
+and stared with horrified eyes into space.  "Good--good
+heavens!"
+
+Mrs. O' Donovan Florence leaned forward and took her hand.
+
+"What is it, my dear?  What's come to you?" she asked, in
+alarm.
+
+Beatrice gave a kind of groan.
+
+"It's absurd--it's impossible," she said; "and yet, if by any
+ridiculous chance you should be right, it's too horribly
+horrible."  She repeated her groan.  "If by any ridiculous
+chance you are right, the man will think that I have been
+leading him on!"
+
+"LEADING HIM ON!"  Mrs. O'Donovan Florence suppressed a shriek
+of ecstatic mirth.  "There's no question about my being right,"
+she averred soberly.  "He wears his heart behind his eyeglass;
+and whoso runs may read it."
+
+"Well, then--" began Beatrice, with an air of desperation . . .
+"But no," she broke off.  "YOU CAN'T be right.  It's
+impossible, impossible.  Wait.  I'll tell you the whole story.
+You shall see for yourself."
+
+"Go on," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, assuming an attitude of
+devout attention, which she retained while Beatrice (not
+without certain starts and hesitations) recounted the fond tale
+of Peter's novel, and of the woman who had suggested the
+character of Pauline.
+
+"But OF COURSE!" cried the Irishwoman, when the tale was
+finished; and this time her shriek of mirth, of glee, was not
+suppressed.  "Of course--you miracle of unsuspecting innocence!
+The man would never have breathed a whisper of the affair to
+any soul alive, save to his heroine herself--let alone to you,
+if you and she were not the same.  Couple that with the eyes he
+makes at you, and you've got assurance twice assured.  You
+ought to have guessed it from the first syllable he uttered.
+And when he went on about her exalted station and her fabulous
+wealth!  Oh, my ingenue!  Oh, my guileless lambkin!  And you
+Trixie Belfont!  Where's your famous wit?  Where are your
+famous intuitions?"
+
+"BUT DON'T YOU SEE," wailed Beatrice, "don't you see the
+utterly odious position this leaves me in?  I've been urging
+him with all my might to tell her!  I said . . . oh, the things
+I said!"  She shuddered visibly.  "I said that differences of
+rank and fortune could n't matter."  She gave a melancholy laugh.
+"I said that very likely she'd accept him.  I said she couldn't
+help being . . .  Oh, my dear, my dear!  He'll think--of course,
+he can't help thinking--that I was encouraging him--that I was
+coming halfway to meet him."
+
+"Hush, hush!  It's not so bad as that," said Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence, soothingly.  "For surely, as I understand it, the man
+doesn't dream that you knew it was about himself he was
+speaking.  He always talked of the book as by a friend of his;
+and you never let him suspect that you had pierced his
+subterfuge."
+
+Beatrice frowned for an instant, putting this consideration in
+its place, in her troubled mind.  Then suddenly a light of
+intense, of immense relief broke in her face.
+
+"Thank goodness!" she sighed.  "I had forgotten.  No, he does
+n't dream that.  But oh, the fright I had!"
+
+"He'll tell you, all the same," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+
+"No, he'll never tell me now.  I am forewarned, forearmed.  I
+'ll give him no chance," Beatrice answered.
+
+"Yes; and what's more, you'll marry him," said her friend.
+
+"Kate!  Don't descend to imbecilities," cried Beatrice.
+
+"You'll marry him," reiterated Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, calmly.
+"You'll end by marrying him--if you're human; and I've seldom
+known a human being who was more so.  It's not in flesh and
+blood to remain unmoved by a tribute such as that man has paid
+you.  The first thing you'll do will be to re-read the novel.
+Otherwise, I'd request the loan of it myself, for I 'm
+naturally curious to compare the wrought ring with the virgin
+gold--but I know it's the wrought ring the virgin gold will
+itself be wanting, directly it's alone.  And then the poison
+will work.  And you'll end by marrying him."
+
+"In the first place," replied Beatrice, firmly, "I shall never
+marry any one.  That is absolutely certain.  In the next place,
+I shall not re-read the novel; and to prove that I shan't, I
+shall insist on your taking it with you when you leave to-day.
+And finally, I'm nowhere near convinced that you're right about
+my being . . .  well, you might as well say the raw material,
+the rough ore, as the virgin gold.  It's only a bare
+possibility.  But even the possibility had not occurred to me
+before.  Now that it has, I shall be on my guard.  I shall know
+how to prevent any possible developments."
+
+"In the first place," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, with equal
+firmness, "wild horses couldn't induce me to take the novel.
+Wait till you're alone.  A hundred questions about it will come
+flocking to your mind; you'd be miserable if you had n't it to
+refer to.  In the next place, the poison will work and work.
+Say what you will, it's flattery that wins us.  In the third
+place, he'll tell you.  Finally, you'll make a good Catholic of
+him, and marry him.  It's absurd, it's iniquitous, anyhow, for
+a young and beautiful woman like you to remain a widow.  And
+your future husband is a man of talent and distinction, and
+he's not bad-looking, either.  Will you stick to your title,
+now, I wonder?  Or will you step down, and be plain Mrs.
+Marchdale?  No--the Honourable Mrs.--excuse me--'Mr. and the
+Honourable Mrs. Marchdale.'  I see you in the 'Morning Post'
+already.  And will you
+continue to live in Italy?  Or will you come back to England?"
+
+"Oh, my good Kate, my sweet Kate, my incorrigible Kate, what an
+extravagantly silly Kate you can be when the mood takes you,"
+Beatrice laughed.
+
+"Kate me as many Kates as you like, the man is really not
+bad-looking.  He has a nice lithe springy figure, and a clean
+complexion, and an open brow.  And if there's a suggestion of
+superciliousness in the tilt of his nose, of scepticism in the
+twirl of his moustaches, and of obstinacy in the squareness of
+his chin--ma foi, you must take the bitter with the sweet.
+Besides, he has decent hair, and plenty of it--he'll not go
+bald.  And he dresses well, and wears his clothes with an air.
+In short, you'll make a very handsome couple.  Anyhow, when
+your family are gathered round the evening lamp to-night, I 'll
+stake my fortune on it, but I can foretell the name of the book
+they'll find Trixie Belfont reading," laughed Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence.
+
+
+For a few minutes, after her friend had left her, Beatrice sat
+still, her head resting on her hand, and gazed with fixed eyes
+at Monte Sfiorito.  Then she rose, and walked briskly backwards
+and forwards, for a while, up and down the terrace.  Presently
+she came to a standstill, and leaning on the balustrade, while
+one of her feet kept lightly tapping the pavement, looked off
+again towards the mountain.
+
+The prospect was well worth her attention, with its blue and
+green and gold, its wood and water, its misty-blushing snows,
+its spaciousness and its atmosphere.  In the sky a million
+fluffy little cloudlets floated like a flock of fantastic
+birds, with mother-of-pearl tinted plumage.  The shadows were
+lengthening now.  The sunshine glanced from the smooth surface
+of the lake as from burnished metal, and falling on the
+coloured sails of the fishing-boats, made them gleam like sails
+of crimson silk.  But I wonder how much of this Beatrice really
+saw.
+
+She plucked an oleander from one of the tall marble urns set
+along the balustrade, and pressed the pink blossom against her
+face, and, closing her eyes, breathed in its perfume; then,
+absent-minded, she let it drop, over the terrace, upon the path
+below.
+
+"It's impossible," she said suddenly, aloud.  At last she went
+into the house, and up to her rose-and-white retiring-room.
+There she took a book from the table, and sank into a deep
+easy-chair, and began to turn the pages.
+
+But when, by and by, approaching footsteps became audible in
+the stone-floored corridor without, Beatrice hastily shut the
+book, thrust it back upon the table, and caught up another so
+that Emilia Manfredi, entering, found her reading Monsieur
+Anatole France's "Etui de nacre."
+
+"Emilia," she said, "I wish you would translate the I Jongleur
+de Notre Dame' into Italian."
+
+
+
+
+                             XXII
+
+
+Peter, we may suppose, returned to Villa Floriano that
+afternoon in a state of some excitement.
+
+"He ought to have told her--"
+
+"It was her right to be told--"
+
+"What could her rank matter--"
+
+"A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman--"
+
+"She would have despised the conventional barriers--"
+
+"No woman could be proof against such a compliment--"
+
+The case was peculiar--ordinary rules could not apply to it--"
+
+"Every man gets the wife he deserves--and he had certainly gone
+a long way towards deserving her--"
+
+"He should simply have told her the story of his book and of
+her part in it--he need n't have mentioned love--she would have
+understood--"
+
+The Duchessa's voice, clear and cool and crisp-cut, sounded
+perpetually in his ears; the words she had spoken, the
+arguments she had urged, repeated and repeated themselves,
+danced round and round, in his memory.
+
+"Ought I to have told her--then and there?  Shall I go to her
+and tell her to-morrow?"
+
+He tried to think; but he could not think.  His faculties were
+in a whirl--he could by no means command them.  He could only
+wait, inert, while the dance went on.  It was an extremely
+riotous dance.  The Duchessa's conversation was reproduced
+without sequence, without coherence--scattered fragments of it
+were flashed before him fitfully, in swift disorder.  If he
+would attempt to seize upon one of those fragments, to detain
+and fix it, for consideration--a speech of hers, a look, an
+inflection--then the whole experience suddenly lost its
+outlines, his recollection of it became a jumble, and he was
+left, as it were, intellectually gasping.
+
+He walked about his garden, he went into the house, he came
+out, he walked about again.  he went in and dressed for dinner,
+he
+sat on his rustic bench, he smoked cigarette after cigarette.
+
+"Ought I to have told her?  Ought I to tell her to-morrow?"
+
+At moments there would come a lull in the turmoil, an interval
+of quiet, of apparent clearness; and the answer would seem
+perfectly plain.
+
+"Of course, you ought to tell her.  Tell her--and all will be
+well.  She has put herself in the supposititious woman's place,
+and she says, 'He ought to tell her.'  She says it earnestly,
+vehemently.  That means that if she were the woman, she would
+wish to be told.  She will despise the conventional barriers
+--she will be touched, she will be moved.  'No woman could be
+proof against such a compliment.'  Go to her to-morrow, and
+tell her--and all will be well."
+
+At these moments he would look up towards the castle, and
+picture the morrow's consummation; and his heart would have a
+convulsion.  Imagination flew on the wings of his desire.  She
+stood before him in all her sumptuous womanhood, tender and
+strong and glowing.  As he spoke, her eyes lightened, her eyes
+burned, the blood came and went in her cheeks; her lips parted.
+Then she whispered something; and his heart leapt terribly; and
+he called her name--"Beatrice!  Beatrice!"  Her name expressed
+the inexpressible--the adoring passion, the wild hunger and
+wild triumph of his soul.  But now she was moving towards him
+--she was holding out her hands.  He caught her in his arms--he
+held her yielding body in his arms.  And his heart leapt
+terribly, terribly.  And he wondered how he could endure, how
+he could live through, the hateful hours that must elapse
+before tomorrow would be to-day.
+
+But "hearts, after leaps, ache."  Presently the whirl would
+begin again; and then, by and by, in another lull, a contrary
+answer would seem equally plain.
+
+"Tell her, indeed?  My dear man, are you mad?  She would simply
+be amazed, struck dumb, by your presumption.  I can see from
+here her incredulity--I can see the scorn with which she would
+wither you.  It has never dimly occurred to her as conceivable
+that you would venture to be in love with her, that you would
+dare to lift your eyes to her--you who are nothing, to her who
+is all.  Yes--nothing, nobody.  In her view, you are just a
+harmless nobody, whose society she tolerates for kindness'
+sake--and faute de mieux.  It is precisely because she deems
+you a nobody--because she is profoundly conscious of the gulf
+that separates you from her--that she can condescend to be
+amiably familiar.  If you were of a rank even remotely
+approximating to her own, she would be a thousand times more
+circumspect.  Remember--she does not dream that you are Felix
+Wildmay.  He is a mere name to her; and his story is an amusing
+little romance, perfectly external to herself, which she
+discusses with entirely impersonal interest.  Tell her by all
+means, if you like Say, 'I am Wildmay--you are Pauline.'  And
+see how amazed she will be, and how incensed, and how
+indignant."
+
+Then he would look up at the castle stonily, in a mood of
+desperate renunciation, and vaguely meditate packing his
+belongings, and going home to England.
+
+At other moments a third answer would seem the plain one:
+something between these extremes of optimism and pessimism, a
+compromise, it not a reconciliation.
+
+"Come!  Let us be calm, let us be judicial.  The consequences
+of our actions, here below, if hardly ever so good as we could
+hope, are hardly ever so bad as we might fear.  Let us regard
+this matter in the light of that guiding principle.  True, she
+does n't dream that you are Wildmay.  True, if you were
+abruptly to say to her, 'I am Wildmay--you are the woman,' she
+would be astonished--even, if you will, at first, more or less
+taken aback, disconcerted.  But indignant?  Why?  What is this
+gulf that separates you from her?  What are these conventional
+barriers of which you make so much?  She is a duchess, she is
+the daughter of a lord, and she is rich.  Well, all that is to
+be regretted.  But you are neither a plebeian nor a pauper
+yourself.  You are a man of good birth, you are a man of some
+parts, and you have a decent income.  It amounts to this--she
+is a great lady, you are a small gentleman.  In ordinary
+circumstances, to be sure, so small a gentleman could not ask
+so great a lady to become his wife.  But here the circumstances
+are not ordinary.  Destiny has meddled in the business.  Small
+gentleman though you are, an unusual and subtle relation-ship
+has been established between you and your great lady.  She
+herself says, 'Ordinary rules cannot apply--he ought to tell
+her.'  Very good: tell her.  She will be astonished, but she
+will see that there is no occasion for resentment.  And though
+the odds are, of course, a hundred to one that she will not
+accept you, still she must treat you as an honourable suitor.
+And whether she accepts you or rejects you, it is better to
+tell her and to have it over, than to go on forever dangling
+this way, like the poor cat in the adage.  Tell her--put your
+fate to the touch--hope nothing, fear nothing--and bow to the
+event."
+
+But even this temperate answer provoked its counter-answer.
+
+"The odds are a hundred to one, a thousand to one, that she
+will not accept you.  And if you tell her, and she does not
+accept you, she will not allow you to see her any more, you
+will be exiled from her presence.  And I thought, you did not
+wish to be exiled from her presence, You would stake, then,
+this great privilege, the privilege of seeing her, of knowing
+her, upon a.  chance that has a thousand to one against it.
+You make light of the conventional barriers--but the principal
+barrier of them all, you are forgetting.  She is a Roman
+Catholic, and a devout one.  Marry a Protestant?  She would as
+soon think of marrying a Paynim Turk."
+
+In the end, no doubt, a kind of exhaustion followed upon his
+excitement.  Questions and answers suspended themselves; and he
+could only look up towards Ventirose, and dumbly wish that he
+was there.  The distance was so trifling--in five minutes he
+could traverse it--the law seemed absurd and arbitrary, which
+condemned him to sit apart, free only to look and wish.
+
+It was in this condition of mind that Marietta found him, when
+she came to announce dinner.
+
+Peter gave himself a shake.  The sight of the brown old woman,
+with her homely, friendly face, brought him back to small
+things, to actual things; and that, if it was n't a comfort,
+was, at any rate, a relief.
+
+"Dinner?" he questioned.  "Do peris at the gates of Eden DINE?"
+
+"The soup is on the table," said Marietta.
+
+He rose, casting a last glance towards the castle.
+
+            Towers and battlements . . .
+            Bosomed high in tufted trees,
+            Where perhaps some beauty lies,
+            The cynosure of neighbouring eyes."
+
+He repeated the lines in an undertone, and went in to dinner.
+And then the restorative spirit of nonsense descended upon him.
+
+"Marietta," he asked, "what is your attitude towards the
+question of mixed marriages?"
+
+Marietta wrinkled her brow.
+
+"Mixed marriages?  What is that, Signorino?"
+
+"Marriages between Catholics and Protestants," he explained.
+
+"Protestants?" Her brow was still a network.  "What things are
+they?"
+
+"They are things--or perhaps it would be less invidious to say
+people--who are not Catholics--who repudiate Catholicism as a
+deadly and soul-destroying error."
+
+"Jews?" asked Marietta.
+
+"No--not exactly.  They are generally classified as Christians.
+But they protest, you know.  Protesto, protestare, verb,
+active, first conjugation.  'Mi pare che la donna protesta
+troppo,' as the poet sings.  They're Christians, but they
+protest against the Pope and the Pretender."
+
+"The Signorino means Freemasons," said Marietta.
+
+"No, he does n't," said Peter.  "He means Protestants."
+
+"But pardon, Signorino," she insisted; "if they are not
+Catholics, they must be Freemasons or Jews.  They cannot be
+Christians.  Christian--Catholic: it is the same.  All
+Christians are Catholics."
+
+"Tu quoque!" he cried.  "You regard the terms as
+interchangeable?  I 've heard the identical sentiment similarly
+enunciated by another.  Do I look like a Freemason?"
+
+She bent her sharp old eyes upon him studiously for a moment.
+Then she shook her head.
+
+"No," she answered slowly.  "I do not think that the Signorino
+looks like a Freemason."
+
+"A Jew, then?"
+
+"Mache!  A Jew?  The Signorino!" She shrugged derision.
+
+"And yet I'm what they call a Protestant," he said.
+
+"No," said she.
+
+"Yes," said he.  "I refer you to my sponsors in baptism.  A
+regular, true blue moderate High Churchman and Tory, British
+and Protestant to the backbone, with 'Frustrate their Popish
+tricks' writ large all over me.  You have never by any chance
+married a Protestant yourself?" he asked.
+
+"No, Signorino.  I have never married any one.  But it was not
+for the lack of occasions.  Twenty, thirty young men courted me
+when I was a girl.  But--mica!--I would not look at them.  When
+men are young they are too unsteady for husbands; when they are
+old they have the rheumatism."
+
+Admirably philosophised," he approved.  But it sometimes
+happens that men are neither young nor old.  There are men of
+thirty-five--I have even heard that there are men of forty.
+What of them?"
+
+"There is a proverb, Signorino, which says, Sposi di quarant'
+anni son mai sempre tiranni," she informed him.
+
+"For the matter of that," he retorted, "there is a proverb
+which says, Love laughs at locksmiths."
+
+"Non capisco," said Marietta.
+
+"That's merely because it's English," said he.  "You'd
+understand fast enough if I should put it in Italian.  But I
+only quoted it to show the futility of proverbs.  Laugh at
+locksmiths, indeed!  Why, it can't even laugh at such an
+insignificant detail as a Papist's prejudices.  But I wish I
+were a duke and a millionaire.  Do you know any one who could
+create me a duke and endow me with a million?"
+
+"No, Signorino," she answered, shaking her head.
+
+"Fragrant Cytherea, foam-born Venus, deathless Aphrodite,
+cannot, goddess though she is," he complained.  "The fact is, I
+'m feeling rather undone.  I think I will ask you to bring me a
+bottle of Asti-spumante--some of the dry kind, with the white
+seal.  I 'll try to pretend that it's champagne.  To tell or
+not to tell--that is the question.
+
+           'A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
+            With the dream of, meet death with--
+
+And yet, if you can believe me, the man who penned those lines
+had never seen her.  He penned another line equally pat to the
+situation, though he had never seen me, either
+
+           'Is there no method to tell her in Spanish?"
+
+But you can't imagine how I detest that vulgar use of 'pen' for
+'write'--as if literature were a kind of pig.  However, it's
+perhaps no worse than the use of Asti for champagne.  One
+should n't be too fastidious.  I must really try to think of
+some method of telling her in Spanish."
+
+Marietta went to fetch the Asti.
+
+
+
+
+                             XXIII
+
+
+When Peter rose next morning, he pulled a grimace at the
+departed night.
+
+"You are a detected cheat," he cried, "an unmasked impostor.
+You live upon your reputation as a counsellor--'tis the only
+reason why we bear with you.  La nuit porte conseil!  Yet what
+counsel have you brought to me?--and I at the pass where my
+need is uttermost.  Shall I go to her this afternoon, and
+unburden my soul--or shall I not?  You have left me where you
+found me--in the same fine, free, and liberal state of
+vacillation.  Discredited oracle!"
+
+He was standing before his dressing-table, brushing his hair.
+The image in the glass frowned back at him.  Then something
+struck him.
+
+"At all events, we'll go this morning to Spiaggia, and have our
+hair cut," he resolved.
+
+So he walked to the village, and caught the ten o'clock omnibus
+for Spiaggia.  And after he had had his hair cut, he went to
+the Hotel de Russie, and lunched in the garden.  And after
+luncheon, of course, he entered the grounds of the Casino, and
+strolled backwards and forwards, one of a merry procession, on
+the terrace by the lakeside.  The gay toilets of the women,
+their bright-coloured hats and sunshades, made the terrace look
+like a great bank of monstrous moving flowers.  The band played
+brisk accompaniments to the steady babble of voices, Italian,
+English, German.  The pure air was shot with alien scents--the
+women's perfumery, the men's cigarette-smoke.  The marvellous
+blue waters crisped in the breeze, and sparkled in the sun; and
+the smooth snows of Monte Sfiorito loomed so near, one felt one
+could almost put out one's stick and scratch one's name upon
+them . . . .  And here, as luck would have it, Peter came face
+to face with Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+
+"How do you do?" said she, offering her hand.
+
+"How do you do?" said he.
+
+"It's a fine day," said she.
+
+"Very," said he.
+
+"Shall I make you a confidence?" she asked.
+
+"Do," he answered.
+
+"Are you sure I can trust you?" She scanned his face dubiously.
+
+"Try it and see," he urged.
+
+"Well, then, if you must know, I was thirsting to take a table
+and call for coffee; but having no man at hand to chaperon me,
+I dared not."
+
+"Je vous en prie'' cried Peter, with a gesture of gallantry;
+and he led her to one of the round marble tables.  "Due caffe,"
+he said to the brilliant creature (chains, buckles, ear-rings,
+of silver filigree, and head-dress and apron of flame-red silk)
+who came to learn their pleasure.
+
+"Softly, softly," put in Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.  "Not a drop
+of coffee for me.  An orange-sherbet, if you please.  Coffee
+was a figure of speech--a generic term for light refreshments."
+
+Peter laughed, and amended his order.
+
+"Do you see those three innocent darlings playing together,
+under the eye of their governess, by the Wellingtonia yonder?"
+enquired the lady.
+
+"The little girl in white and the two boys?" asked Peter.
+
+"Precisely," said she.  "Such as they are, they're me own."
+
+"Really?" he responded, in the tone of profound and sympathetic
+interest we are apt to affect when parents begin about their
+children.
+
+"I give you my word for it," she assured him.  "But I mention
+the fact, not in a spirit of boastfulness, but merely to show
+you that I 'm not entirely alone and unprotected.  There's an
+American at our hotel, by the bye, who goes up and down telling
+every one who'll listen that it ought to be Washingtonia, and
+declaiming with tears in his eyes against the arrogance of the
+English in changing Washington to Wellington.  As he's a
+respectable-looking man with grown-up daughters, I should think
+very likely he's right."
+
+"Very likely," said Peter.  "It's an American tree, is n't it?"
+
+"Whether it is n't or whether it is," said she, "one thing is
+undeniable: you English are the coldest-blooded animals south
+of the Arctic Circle."
+
+"Oh--?  Are we?" he doubted.
+
+"You are that," she affirmed, with sorrowing emphasis.
+
+"Ah, well," he reflected, "the temperature of our blood does
+n't matter.  We're, at any rate, notoriously warm-hearted."
+
+"Are you indeed?" she exclaimed.  "If you are, it's a mighty
+quiet kind of notoriety, let me tell you, and a mighty cold
+kind of warmth."
+
+Peter laughed.
+
+"You're all for prudence and expediency.  You're the slaves of
+your reason.  You're dominated by the head, not by the heart.
+You're little better than calculating-machines.  Are you ever
+known, now, for instance, to risk earth and heaven, and all
+things between them, on a sudden unthinking impulse?"
+
+"Not often, I daresay," he admitted.
+
+"And you sit there as serene as a brazen statue, and own it
+without a quaver," she reproached him.
+
+"Surely," he urged, "in my character of Englishman, it behooves
+me to appear smug and self-satisfied?"
+
+"You're right," she agreed.  "I wonder," she continued, after a
+moment's pause, during which her eyes looked thoughtful, "I
+wonder whether you would fall upon and annihilate a person who
+should venture to offer you a word of well-meant advice."
+
+"I should sit as serene as a brazen statue, and receive it
+without a quaver," he promised.
+
+"Well, then," said she, leaning forward a little, and dropping
+her voice, "why don't you take your courage in both hands, and
+ask her?"
+
+Peter stared.
+
+"Be guided by me--and do it," she said.
+
+"Do what?" he puzzled.
+
+"Ask her to marry you, of course," she returned amiably.  Then,
+without allowing him time to shape an answer, "Touche!" she
+cried, in triumph.  "I 've brought the tell-tale colour to your
+cheek.  And you a brazen statue!  'They do not love who do not
+show their love.'  But, in faith, you show yours to any one
+who'll be at pains to watch you.  Your eyes betray you as often
+as ever you look at her.  I had n't observed you for two
+minutes by the clock, when I knew your secret as well as if you
+'d chosen me for your confessor.  But what's holding you back?
+You can't expect her to do the proposing.  Now curse me for a
+meddlesome Irishwoman, if you will--but why don't you throw
+yourself at her feet, and ask her, like a man?"
+
+"How can I?" said Peter, abandoning any desire he may have felt
+to beat about the bush.  Nay, indeed, it is very possible he
+welcomed, rather than resented, the Irishwoman's meddling.
+
+"What's to prevent you?" said she.
+
+"Everything," said he.
+
+"Everything is nothing.  That?"
+
+"Dear lady!  She is hideously rich, for one thing."
+
+"Getaway with you!" was the dear lady's warm expostulation.
+"What has money to do with the question, if a man's in love?
+But that's the English of it--there you are with your
+cold-blooded calculation.  You chain up your natural impulses as
+if they were dangerous beasts.  Her money never saved you from
+succumbing to her enchantments.  Why should it bar you from
+declaring your passion."
+
+"There's a sort of tendency in society," said Peter, "to look
+upon the poor man who seeks the hand of a rich woman as a
+fortunehunter."
+
+"A fig for the opinion of society," she cried.  "The only
+opinion you should consider is the opinion of the woman you
+adore.  I was an heiress myself; and when Teddy O'Donovan
+proposed to me, upon my conscience I believe the sole piece of
+property he possessed in the world was a corkscrew.  So much
+for her ducats!"
+
+Peter laughed.
+
+"Men, after coffee, are frequently in the habit of smoking,"
+said she.  "You have my sanction for a cigarette.  It will keep
+you in countenance."
+
+"Thank you," said Peter, and lit his cigarette.
+
+"And surely, it's a countenance you'll need, to be going on
+like that about her money.  However--if you can find a ray of
+comfort in the information--small good will her future husband
+get of it, even if he is a fortunehunter: for she gives the
+bulk of it away in charity, and I 'm doubtful if she keeps two
+thousand a year for her own spending."
+
+"Really?" said Peter; and for a breathing-space it seemed to
+him that there was a ray of comfort in the information.
+
+"Yes, you may rate her at two thousand a year," said Mrs.
+O'Donovan Florence.  "I suppose you can match that yourself.
+So the disparity disappears."
+
+The ray of comfort had flickered for a second, and gone out.
+
+"There are unfortunately other disparities," he remarked
+gloomily.
+
+"Put a name on them," said she.
+
+"There's her rank."
+
+His impetuous adviser flung up a hand of scorn.
+
+"Her rank, do you say?" she cried.  "To the mischief with her
+rank.  What's rank to love?  A woman is only a woman, whether
+she calls herself a duchess or a dairy-maid.  A woman with any
+spirit would marry a bank manager, if she loved him.  A man's a
+man.  You should n't care that for her rank."
+
+"That" was a snap of Mrs. O' Donovan Florence's fingers.
+
+"I suppose you know," said Peter, "that I am a Protestant."
+
+"Are you--you poor benighted creature?  Well, that's easily
+remedied.  Go and get yourself baptised directly."
+
+She waved her hand towards the town, as if to recommend his
+immediate procedure in quest of a baptistery.
+
+Peter laughed again.
+
+"I 'm afraid that's more easily said than done."
+
+"Easy!" she exclaimed.  "Why, you've only to stand still and
+let yourself be sprinkled.  It's the priest who does the work.
+Don't tell me," she added, with persuasive inconsequence, "that
+you'll allow a little thing like being in love with a woman to
+keep you back from professing the true faith."
+
+"Ah, if I were convinced that it is true," he sighed, still
+laughing.
+
+"What call have you to doubt it?  And anyhow, what does it
+matter whether you 're convinced or not?  I remember, when I
+was a school-girl, I never was myself convinced of the theorems
+of Euclid; but I professed them gladly, for the sake of the
+marks they brought; and the eternal verities of mathematics
+remained unshaken by my scepticism."
+
+"Your reasoning is subtle," laughed Peter.  "But the worst of
+it is, if I were ten times a Catholic, she wouldn't have me.
+So what's the use?"
+
+"You never can tell whether a woman will have you or not, until
+you offer yourself.  And even if she refuses you, is that a
+ground for despair?  My own husband asked me three times, and
+three times I said no.  And then he took to writing verses--and
+I saw there was but one way to stop him.  So we were married.
+Ask her; ask her again--and again.  You can always resort in
+the end to versification.  And now," the lady concluded,
+rising, "I have spoken, and I leave you to your fate.  I'm
+obliged to return to the hotel, to hold a bed of justice.  It
+appears that my innocent darlings, beyond there, innocent as
+they look, have managed among them to break the electric light
+in my sitting-room.  They're to be arraigned before me at three
+for an instruction criminelle.  Put what I 've said in your
+pipe, and smoke it--'tis a mother's last request.  If I 've not
+succeeded in determining you, don't pretend, at least, that I
+haven't encouraged you a bit.  Put what I 've said in your
+pipe, and see whether, by vigorous drawing, you can't fan the
+smouldering fires of encouragement into a small blaze of
+determination."
+
+Peter resumed his stroll backwards and forwards by the
+lakeside.  Encouragement was all very well; but . . . "Shall I
+--shall I not?  Shall I--shall I not?  Shall I--shall I not?"
+The eternal question went tick-tack, tick-tack, to the rhythm of
+his march.  He glared at vacancy, and tried hard to make up his
+mind.
+
+"I'm afraid I must be somewhat lacking in decision of
+character," he said, with pathetic wonder.
+
+Then suddenly he stamped his foot.
+
+"Come!  An end to this tergiversation.  Do it.  Do it," cried
+his manlier soul.
+
+"I will," he resolved all at once, drawing a deep breath, and
+clenching his fists.
+
+He left the Casino, and set forth to walk to Ventirose.  He
+could not wait for the omnibus, which would not leave till
+four.  He must strike while his will was hot.
+
+He walked rapidly; in less than an hour he had reached the tall
+gilded grille of the park.  He stopped for an instant, and
+looked up the straight avenue of chestnuts, to the western
+front of the castle, softly alight in the afternoon sun.  He
+put his hand upon the pendent bell-pull of twisted iron, to
+summon the porter.  In another second he would have rung, he
+would have been admitted . . . .  And just then one of the
+little demons that inhabit the circumambient air, called his
+attention to an aspect of the situation which he had not
+thought of.
+
+"Wait a bit," it whispered in his ear.  "You were there only
+yesterday.  It can't fail, therefore, to seem extraordinary,
+your calling again to-day.  You must be prepared with an
+excuse, an explanation.  But suppose, when you arrive, suppose
+that (like the lady in the ballad) she greets you with 'a
+glance of cold surprise'--what then, my dear?  Why, then, it's
+obvious, you can't allege the true explanation--can you?  If
+she greets you with a glance of cold, surprise, you 'll have
+your answer, as it were, before the fact you 'll know that there's
+no manner of hope for you; and the time for passionate avowals
+will automatically defer itself.  But then--?  How will you
+justify your visit?  What face can you put on?"
+
+"H'm," assented Peter, "there's something in that."
+
+"There's a great deal in that," said the demon.  "You must have
+an excuse up your sleeve, a pretext.  A true excuse is a fine
+thing in its way; but when you come to a serious emergency, an
+alternative false excuse is indispensable."
+
+"H'm," said Peter.
+
+However, if there are demons in the atmosphere, there are gods
+in the machine--(Paraschkine even goes so far as to maintain
+that
+there are more gods in the machine than have ever been taken
+from it.")  While Peter stood still, pondering the demon's
+really rather cogent intervention, his eye was caught by
+something that glittered in the grass at the roadside.
+
+"The Cardinal's snuff-box," he exclaimed, picking it up.
+
+The Cardinal had dropped his snuff-box.  Here was an excuse,
+and to spare.  Peter rang the bell.
+
+
+
+
+                             XXIV
+
+
+And, like the lady in the ballad, sure enough, she greeted his
+arrival with a glance of cold surprise.
+
+At all events, eyebrows raised, face unsmiling, it was a glance
+that clearly supplemented her spoken "How do you do?" by a
+tacit (perhaps self-addressed?) "What can bring him here?"
+
+You or I, indeed, or Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, in the fulness of
+our knowledge, might very likely have interpreted it rather as
+a glance of nervous apprehension.  Anyhow, it was a glance that
+perfectly checked the impetus of his intent.  Something snapped
+and gave way within him; and he needed no further signal that
+the occasion for passionate avowals was not the present.
+
+And thereupon befell a scene that was really quite too absurd,
+that was really childish, a scene over the memory of which, I
+must believe, they themselves have sometimes laughed together;
+though, at the moment, its absurdity held, for him at least,
+elements of the tragic.
+
+He met her in the broad gravelled carriage-sweep, before the
+great hall-door.  She had on her hat and gloves, as if she were
+just going out.  It seemed to him that she was a little pale;
+her eyes seemed darker than usual, and graver.  Certainly--cold
+surprise, or nervous apprehension, as you will--her attitude
+was by no means cordial.  It was not oncoming.  It showed none
+of her accustomed easy, half-humorous, wholly good-humoured
+friendliness.  It was decidedly the attitude of a person
+standing off, shut in, withheld.
+
+"I have never seen her in the least like this before," he
+thought, as he looked at her pale face, her dark, grave eyes;
+"I have never seen her more beautiful.  And there is not one
+single atom of hope for me."
+
+"How do you do?" she said, unsmiling and waited, as who should
+invite him to state his errand.  She did not offer him her hand
+but, for that matter, (she might have pleaded), she could not,
+very well: for one of her hands held her sunshade, and the
+other held an embroidered silk bag, woman's makeshift for a
+pocket.
+
+And then, capping the first pang of his disappointment, a kind
+of anger seized him.  After all, what right had she to receive
+him in this fashion?--as if he were an intrusive stranger.  In
+common civility, in common justice, she owed it to him to
+suppose that he would not be there without abundant reason.
+
+And now, with Peter angry, the absurd little scene began.
+
+Assuming an attitude designed to be, in its own way, as
+reticent as hers, "I was passing your gate," he explained,
+"when I happened to find this, lying by the roadside.  I took
+the liberty of bringing it to you."
+
+He gave her the Cardinal's snuff box, which, in spite of her
+hands' preoccupation, she was able to accept.
+
+"A liberty!" he thought, grinding his teeth.  "Yes!  No doubt
+she would have wished me to leave it with the porter at the
+lodge.  No doubt she deems it an act of officiousness on my
+part to have found it at all."
+
+And his anger mounted.
+
+"How very good of you," she said.  "My uncle could not think
+where he had mislaid it."
+
+"I am very fortunate to be the means of restoring it," said he.
+
+Then, after a second's suspension, as she said nothing (she
+kept her eyes on the snuffbox, examining it as if it were quite
+new to her), he lifted his hat, and bowed, preparatory to
+retiring down the avenue.
+
+"Oh, but my uncle will wish to thank you," she exclaimed,
+looking up, with a kind of start.  "Will you not come in?  I--I
+will see whether he is disengaged."
+
+She made a tentative movement towards the door.  She had thawed
+perceptibly.
+
+But even as she thawed, Peter, in his anger, froze and
+stiffened.  "I will see whether he is disengaged."  The
+expression grated.  And perhaps, in effect, it was not a
+particularly felicitous expression.  But if the poor woman was
+suffering from nervous apprehension--?
+
+"I beg you on no account to disturb Cardinal Udeschini," he
+returned loftily.  "It is not a matter of the slightest
+consequence."
+
+And even as he stiffened, she unbent.
+
+"But it is a matter of consequence to him, to us," she said,
+faintly smiling.  "We have hunted high and low for it.  We
+feared it was lost for good.  It must have fallen from his
+pocket when he was walking.  He will wish to thank you."
+
+"I am more than thanked already," said Peter.  Alas (as
+Monsieur de la Pallisse has sagely noted), when we aim to
+appear dignified, how often do we just succeed in appearing
+churlish.
+
+And to put a seal upon this ridiculous encounter, to make it
+irrevocable, he lifted his hat again, and turned away.
+
+"Oh, very well," murmured the Duchessa, in a voice that did not
+reach him.  If it had reached him, perhaps he would have come
+back, perhaps things might have happened.  I think there was
+regret in her voice, as well as despite.  She stood for a
+minute, as he tramped down the avenue, and looked after him,
+with those unusually dark, grave eyes.  At last, making a
+little gesture--as of regret?  despite?  impatience?--she went
+into the house.
+
+"Here is your snuff-box," she said to the Cardinal.
+
+The old man put down his Breviary (he was seated by an open
+window, getting through his office), and smiled at the snuff
+box fondly, caressing it with his finger.  Afterwards, he shook
+it, opened it, and took a pinch of snuff.
+
+"Where did you find it?" he enquired.
+
+"It was found by that Mr. Marchdale," she said, "in the road,
+outside the gate.  You must have let it drop this morning, when
+you were walking with Emilia."
+
+"That Mr. Marchdale?" exclaimed the Cardinal.  "What a
+coincidence."
+
+"A coincidence--?" questioned Beatrice.
+
+"To be sure," said he.  "Was it not to Mr. Marchdale that I
+owed it in the first instance?"
+
+"Oh--?  Was it?  I had fancied that you owed it to me."
+
+"Yes--but," he reminded her, whilst the lines deepened about
+his humorous old mouth, "but as a reward of my virtue in
+conspiring with you to convert him.  And, by the way, how is
+his conversion progressing?"
+
+The Cardinal looked up, with interest.
+
+"It is not progressing at all.  I think there is no chance of
+it," answered Beatrice, in a tone that seemed to imply a
+certain irritation.
+
+"Oh--?" said the Cardinal.
+
+"No," said she.
+
+"I thought he had shown 'dispositions'?" said the Cardinal.
+
+"That was a mistake.  He has shown none.  He is a very tiresome
+and silly person.  He is not worth converting," she declared
+succinctly.
+
+"Good gracious!" said the Cardinal.
+
+He resumed his office.  But every now and again he would pause,
+and look out of the window, with the frown of a man meditating
+something; then he would shake his head significantly, and take
+snuff.
+
+Peter tramped down the avenue, angry and sick.
+
+Her reception of him had not only administered an instant
+death-blow to his hopes as a lover, but in its ungenial
+aloofness it had cruelly wounded his pride as a man.  He felt
+snubbed and humiliated.  Oh, true enough, she had unbent a
+little, towards the end.  But it was the look with which she
+had first greeted him--it was the air with which she had waited
+for him to state his errand--that stung, and rankled, and would
+not be forgotten.
+
+He was angry with her, angry with circumstances, with life,
+angry with himself.
+
+"I am a fool--and a double fool--and a triple fool," he said.
+"I am a fool ever to have thought of her at all; a double fool
+ever to have allowed myself to think so much of her; a triple
+and quadruple and quintuple idiot ever to have imagined for a
+moment that anything could come of it.  I have wasted time
+enough.  The next best thing to winning is to know when you are
+beaten.  I acknowledge myself beaten.  I will go back to
+England as soon as I can get my boxes packed."
+
+He gazed darkly round the familiar valley, with eyes that
+abjured it.
+
+Olympus, no doubt, laughed.
+
+
+
+
+                              XXV
+
+
+"I shall go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes
+packed."
+
+But he took no immediate steps to get them packed.
+
+"Hope," observes the clear-sighted French publicist quoted in
+the preceding chapter, "hope dies hard."
+
+Hope, Peter fancied, had received its death-blow that
+afternoon.  Already, that evening, it began to revive a little.
+It was very much enfeebled; it was very indefinite and
+diffident; but it was not dead.  It amounted, perhaps, to
+nothing more than a vague kind of feeling that he would not, on
+the whole, make his departure for England quite so precipitate
+as, in the first heat of his anger, the first chill of his
+despair, he had intended.  Piano, piano!  He would move slowly,
+he would do nothing rash.
+
+But he was not happy, he was very far from happy.  He spent a
+wretched night, a wretched, restless morrow.  He walked about a
+great deal--about his garden, and afterwards, when the damnable
+iteration of his garden had become unbearable, he walked to the
+village, and took the riverside path, under the poplars, along
+the racing Aco, and followed it, as the waters paled.  and
+broadened, for I forget how many joyless, unremunerative miles.
+
+When he came home, fagged out and dusty, at dinner time,
+Marietta presented a visiting card to him, on her handsomest
+salver.  She presented it with a flourish that was almost a
+swagger.
+
+Twice the size of an ordinary visiting-card, the fashion of it
+was roughly thus:
+
+                   IL CARDLE UDESCHINI
+          Sacr: Congr: Archiv: et Inscript: Praef:
+
+          Palazzo Udeschini.
+
+And above the legend, was pencilled, in a small oldfashioned
+hand, wonderfully neat and pretty:--
+
+"To thank Mr. Marchdale for his courtesy in returning my
+snuff-box."
+
+"The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here," said Marietta.
+There was a swagger in her accent.  There was also something in
+her accent that seemed to rebuke Peter for his absence.
+
+"I had inferred as much from this," said he, tapping the card.
+"We English, you know, are great at putting two and two
+together."
+
+"He came in a carriage," said Marietta.
+
+"Not really?" said her master.
+
+"Ang--veramente," she affirmed.
+
+"Was--was he alone?" Peter asked, an obscure little twinge of
+hope stirring in his heart.
+
+"No.  Signorino."  And then she generalised, with
+untranslatable magniloquence: "Un amplissimo porporato non va
+mai solo."
+
+Peter ought to have hugged her for that amplissimo porporato.
+But he was selfishly engrossed in his emotions.
+
+"Who was with him?"  He tried to throw the question out with a
+casual effect, an effect of unconcern.
+
+"The Signorina Emelia Manfredi was with him," answered
+Marietta, little recking how mere words can stab.
+
+"Oh," said Peter.
+
+"The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was very sorry not to see
+the Signorino," continued Marietta.
+
+"Poor man--was he?  Let us trust that time will console him,"
+said Peter, callously.
+
+But, "I wonder," he asked himself, "I wonder whether perhaps I
+was the least bit hasty yesterday?  If I had stopped, I should
+have saved the Cardinal a journey here to-day--I might have
+known that he would come, these Italians are so punctilious
+--and then, if I had stopped--if I had stopped--possibly
+--possibly--"
+
+Possibly what?  Oh, nothing.  And yet, if he had stopped . . .
+well, at any rate, he would have gained time.  The Duchessa had
+already begun to thaw.  If he had stopped . . .  He could
+formulate no precise conclusion to that if; but he felt dimly
+remorseful that he had not stopped, he felt that he had indeed
+been the least bit hasty.  And his remorse was somehow medicine
+to his reviving hope.
+
+"After all, I scarcely gave things a fair trial yesterday," he
+said.
+
+And the corollary of that, of course, was that he might give
+things a further and fairer trial some other day.
+
+But his hope was still hard hurt; he was still in a profound
+dejection.
+
+"The Signorino is not eating his dinner," cried Marietta,
+fixing him with suspicious, upbraiding eyes.
+
+"I never said I was," he retorted.
+
+"The Signorino is not well?" she questioned, anxious.
+
+"Oh, yes--cosi, cosi; the Signorino is well enough," he
+answered.
+
+"The dinner"--you could perceive that she brought herself with
+difficulty to frame the dread hypothesis--"the dinner is not
+good?"  Her voice sank.  She waited, tense, for his reply.
+
+"The dinner," said he, "if one may criticise without eating it,
+the dinner is excellent.  I will have no aspersions cast upon
+my cook."
+
+"Ah-h-h!" breathed Marietta, a tremulous sigh of relief.
+
+"It is not the Signorino, it is not the dinner, it is the world
+that is awry," Peter went on, in reflective melancholy.  "'T is
+the times that are out of joint.  'T is the sex, the Sex, that
+is not well, that is not good, that needs a thorough
+overhauling and reforming."
+
+"Which sex?" asked Marietta.
+
+"The sex," said Peter.  "By the unanimous consent of
+rhetoricians, there is but one sex the sex, the fair sex, the
+unfair sex, the gentle sex, the barbaric sex.  We men do not
+form a sex, we do not even form a sect.  We are your mere
+hangers-on, camp-followers, satellites--your things, your
+playthings--we are the mere shuttlecocks which you toss hither
+and thither with your battledores, as the wanton mood impels
+you.  We are born of woman, we are swaddled and nursed by
+woman, we are governessed by woman; subsequently, we are
+beguiled by woman, fooled by woman, led on, put off, tantalised
+by woman, fretted and bullied by her; finally, last scene of
+all, we are wrapped in our cerements by woman.  Man's life,
+birth, death, turn upon woman, as upon a hinge.  I have ever
+been a misanthrope, but now I am seriously thinking of becoming
+a misogynist as well.  Would you advise me to-do so?"
+
+"A misogynist?  What is that, Signorino?" asked Marietta.
+
+"A woman-hater," he explained; "one who abhors and forswears
+the sex; one who has dashed his rose-coloured spectacles from
+his eyes, and sees woman as she really is, with no illusive
+glamour; one who has found her out.  Yes, I think I shall
+become a misogynist.  It is the only way of rendering yourself
+invulnerable, 't is the only safe course.  During my walk this
+afternoon, I recollected, from the scattered pigeon-holes of
+memory, and arranged in consequent order, at least a score of
+good old apothegmatic shafts against the sex.  Was it not, for
+example, in the grey beginning of days, was it not woman whose
+mortal taste brought sin into the world and all our woe?  Was
+not that Pandora a woman, who liberated, from the box wherein
+they were confined, the swarm of winged evils that still
+afflict us?  I will not remind you of St. John Chrysostom's
+golden parable about a temple and the thing it is constructed
+over.  But I will come straight to the point, and ask whether
+this is truth the poet sings, when he informs us roundly that
+'every woman is a scold at heart'?"
+
+Marietta was gazing patiently at the sky.  She did not answer.
+
+"The tongue," Peter resumed, "is woman's weapon, even as the
+fist is man's.  And it is a far deadlier weapon.  Words break
+no bones--they break hearts, instead.  Yet were men one-tenth
+part so ready with their fists, as women are with their barbed
+and envenomed tongues, what savage brutes you would think us
+--would n't you?--and what a rushing trade the police-courts
+would drive, to be sure.  That is one of the good old cliches
+that came back to me during my walk.  All women are alike
+--there's no choice amongst animated fashion-plates: that is
+another.  A woman is the creature of her temper; her husband,
+her children, and her servants are its victims: that is a
+third.  Woman is a bundle of pins; man is her pin-cushion.
+When woman loves, 't is not the man she loves, but the man's
+flattery; woman's love is reflex self-love.  The man who
+marries puts himself in irons.  Marriage is a bird-cage in a
+garden.  The birds without hanker to get in; but the birds
+within know that there is no condition so enviable as that of
+the birds without.  Well, speak up.  What do you think?  Do you
+advise me to become a misogynist?"
+
+"I do not understand, Signorino," said Marietta.
+
+"Of course, you don't," said Peter.  "Who ever could understand
+such stuff and nonsense?  That's the worst of it.  If only one
+could understand, if only one could believe it, one might find
+peace, one might resign oneself.  But alas and alas!  I have
+never had any real faith in human wickedness; and now, try as I
+will, I cannot imbue my mind with any real faith in the
+undesirability of woman.  That is why you see me dissolved in
+tears, and unable to eat my dinner.  Oh, to think, to think,"
+he cried with passion, suddenly breaking into English, "to
+think that less than a fortnight ago, less than one little
+brief fortnight ago, she was seated in your kitchen, seated
+there familiarly, in her wet clothes, pouring tea, for all the
+world as if she was the mistress of the house!"
+
+Days passed.  He could not go to Ventirose--or, anyhow, he
+thought he could not.  He reverted to his old habit of living
+in his garden, haunting the riverside, keeping watchful,
+covetous eyes turned towards the castle.  The river bubbled and
+babbled; the sun shone strong and clear; his fountain tinkled;
+his
+birds flew about their affairs; his flowers breathed forth
+their perfumes; the Gnisi frowned, the uplands westward
+laughed, the snows of Monte Sfiorito sailed under every colour
+of the calendar except their native white.  All was as it had
+ever been--but oh, the difference to him.  A week passed.  He
+caught no glimpse of the Duchessa.  Yet he took no steps to get
+his boxes packed.
+
+
+
+
+                             XXVI
+
+
+And then Marietta fell ill.
+
+One morning, when she came into his room, to bring his tea, and
+to open the Venetian blinds that shaded his windows, she failed
+to salute him with her customary brisk "Buon giorno,
+Signorino."
+
+Noticing which, and wondering, he, from his pillow, called out,
+"Buon' giorno, Marietta."
+
+"Buon' giorno, Signorino," she returned but in a whisper.
+
+"What's the matter?  Is there cause for secrecy?" Peter asked.
+
+"I have a cold, Signorino," she whispered, pointing to her
+chest.  "I cannot speak."
+
+The Venetian blinds were up by this time; the room was full of
+sun.  He looked at her.  Something in her face alarmed him.  It
+seemed drawn and set, it seemed flushed.
+
+"Come here," he said, with a certain peremptoriness.  "Give me
+your hand."
+
+She wiped her brown old hand backwards and forwards across her
+apron; then gave it to him.
+
+It was hot and dry.
+
+"Your cold is feverish," he said.  "You must go to bed, and
+stay there till the fever has passed."
+
+"I cannot go to bed, Signorino," she replied.
+
+"Can't you?  Have you tried?" asked he.
+
+"No, Signorino," she admitted.
+
+"Well, you never can tell whether you can do a thing or not,
+until you try," said he.  "Try to go to bed; and if at first
+you don't succeed, try, try again."
+
+"I cannot go to bed.  Who would do the Signorino's work?" was
+her whispered objection.
+
+"Hang the Signorino's work.  The Signorino's work will do
+itself.  Have you never observed that if you conscientiously
+neglect to do your work, it somehow manages to get done without
+you?  You have a feverish cold; you must keep out of draughts;
+and the only place where you can be sure of keeping out of
+draughts, is bed.  Go to bed at once."
+
+She left the room.
+
+But when Peter came downstairs, half an hour later, he heard
+her moving in her kitchen.
+
+"Marietta!" he cried, entering that apartment with the mien of
+Nemesis.  "I thought I told you to go to bed."
+
+Marietta cowered a little, and looked sheepish, as one
+surprised in the flagrant fact of misdemeanour.
+
+"Yes, Signorino," she whispered.
+
+"Well--?  Do you call this bed?" he demanded.
+
+"No, Signorino," she acknowledged.
+
+"Do you wish to oblige me to put you to bed?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, no, Signorino," she protested, horror in her whisper.
+
+"Then go to bed directly.  If you delay any longer, I shall
+accuse you of wilful insubordination."
+
+"Bene, Signorino," reluctantly consented Marietta.
+
+Peter strolled into his garden.  Gigi, the gardener, was
+working there.
+
+"The very man I most desired to meet," said Peter, and beckoned
+to him.  "Is there a doctor in the village?" he enquired, when
+Gigi had approached.
+
+"Yes, Signorino.  The Syndic is a doctor--Dr. Carretaji."
+
+"Good," said Peter.  "Will you go to the village, please, and
+ask Dr. Carretaji if he can make it convenient to call here
+to-day?  Marietta is not well."
+
+"Yes, Signorino."
+
+"And stop a bit," said Peter.  "Are there such things as women
+in the village?'
+
+"Ah, mache, Signorino!  But many, many," answered Gigi, rolling
+his dark eyes sympathetically, and waving his hands.
+
+"I need but one," said Peter.  "A woman to come and do
+Marietta's work for a day or two--cook, and clean up, and that
+sort of thing.  Do you think you could procure me such a
+woman?"
+
+"There is my wife, Signorino," suggested Gigi.  "If she would
+content the Signorino?"
+
+"Oh?  I was n't aware that you were married.  A hundred
+felicitations.  Yes, your wife, by all means.  Ask her to come
+and rule as Marietta's vicereine."
+
+Gigi started for the village.
+
+Peter went into the house, and knocked at Marietta's bed-room
+door.  He found her in bed, with her rosary in her hands.  If
+she could not work, she would not waste her time.  In
+Marietta's simple scheme of life, work and prayer, prayer and
+work, stood, no doubt, as alternative and complementary duties.
+
+"But you are not half warmly enough covered up," said Peter.
+
+He fetched his travelling-rug, and spread it over her.  Then he
+went to the kitchen, where she had left a fire burning, and
+filled a bottle with hot water.
+
+"Put this at your feet," he said, returning to Marietta.
+
+"Oh, I cannot allow the Signorino to wait on me like this," the
+old woman mustered voice to murmur.
+
+"The Signorino likes it--it affords him healthful exercise,"
+Peter assured her.
+
+Dr. Carretaji came about noon, a fat middleaged man, with a
+fringe of black hair round an ivory-yellow scalp, a massive
+watch-chain (adorned by the inevitable pointed bit of coral),
+and podgy, hairy hands.  But he seemed kind and honest, and he
+seemed to know his business.
+
+"She has a catarrh of the larynx, with, I am afraid, a
+beginning of bronchitis," was his verdict.
+
+"Is there any danger?" Peter asked.
+
+"Not the slightest.  She must remain in bed, and take frequent
+nourishment.  Hot milk, and now and then beef-tea.  I will send
+some medicine.  But the great things are nourishment and
+warmth.  I will call again to-morrow."
+
+Gigi's wife came.  She was a tall, stalwart, blackbrowed,
+red-cheeked young woman, and her name (Gigi's eyes flashed
+proudly, as he announced it) her name was Carolina Maddalena.
+
+Peter had to be in and out of Marietta's room all day, to see.
+that she took her beef-tea and milk and medicine regularly.
+She dozed a good deal.  When she was awake, she said her
+rosary.
+
+But next day she was manifestly worse.
+
+"Yes--bronchitis, as I feared," said the doctor.  "Danger?  No
+--none, if properly looked after.  Add a little brandy to her
+milk, and see that she has at least a small cupful every
+half-hour.  I think it would be easier for you if you had a
+nurse.  Someone should be with her at night.  There is a Convent
+of Mercy at Venzona.  If you like, I will telephone for a
+sister."
+
+"Thank you very much.  I hope you will," said Peter.
+
+And that afternoon Sister Scholastica arrived, and established
+herself in the sick-room.  Sister Scholastica was young, pale,
+serene, competent.  But sometimes she had to send for Peter.
+
+"She refuses to take her milk.  Possibly she will take it from
+you," the sister said.
+
+Then Peter would assume a half-bluff (perhaps half-wheedling?)
+tone of mastery.
+
+"Come, Marietta!  You must take your, milk.  The Signorino
+wishes it.  You must not disobey the Signorino."
+
+And Marietta, with a groan, would rouse herself, and take it,
+Peter holding the cup to her lips.
+
+On the third day, in the morning, Sister Scholastica said, "She
+imagines that she is worse.  I do not think so myself.  But she
+keeps repeating that she is going to die.  She wishes to see a
+priest.  I think it would make her feel easier.  Can you send
+for the Parrocco?  Please let him know that it is not an
+occasion for the Sacraments.  But it would do her good if he
+would come and talk with her."
+
+And the doctor, who arrived just then, having visited Marietta,
+confirmed the sister's opinion.
+
+"She is no worse--she is, if anything, rather better.  Her
+malady is taking its natural course.  But people of her class
+always fancy they are going to die, if they are ill enough to
+stay in bed.  It is the panic of ignorance.  Yes, I think it
+would do her good to see a priest.  But there is not the
+slightest occasion for the Sacraments."
+
+So Peter sent Gigi to the village for the Parrocco.  And Gigi
+came back with the intelligence that the Parrocco was away,
+making a retreat, and would not return till Saturday.  To-day
+was Wednesday.
+
+"What shall we do now?" Peter asked of Sister Scholastica.
+
+"There is Monsignor Langshawe, at Castel Ventirose," said the
+sister.
+
+"Could I ask him to come?" Peter doubted.
+
+"Certainly," said the sister.  "In a case of illness, the
+nearest priest will always gladly come."
+
+So Peter despatched Gigi with a note to Monsignor Langshawe.
+
+And presently up drove a brougham, with Gigi on the box beside
+the coachman.  And from the brougham descended, not Monsignor
+Langshawe, but Cardinal Udeschini, followed by Emilia Manfredi.
+
+The Cardinal gave Peter his hand, with a smile so sweet, so
+benign, so sunny-bright--it was like music, Peter thought; it
+was like a silent anthem.
+
+"Monsignor Langshawe has gone to Scotland, for his holiday.  I
+have come in his place.  Your man told me of your need," the
+Cardinal explained.
+
+"I don't know how to thank your Eminence," Peter murmured, and
+conducted him to Marietta's room.
+
+Sister Scholastica genuflected, and kissed the Cardinal's ring,
+and received his Benediction.  Then she and Peter withdrew, and
+went into the garden.
+
+The sister joined Emilia, and they walked backwards and
+forwards together, talking.  Peter sat on his rustic bench,
+smoked cigarettes, and waited.
+
+Nearly an hour passed.
+
+At length the Cardinal came out.
+
+Peter rose, and went forward to meet him.
+
+The Cardinal was smiling; but about his eyes there was a
+suggestive redness.
+
+"Mr. Marchdale," he said, "your housekeeper is in great
+distress of conscience touching one or two offences she feels
+she has been guilty of towards you.  They seem to me, in
+frankness, somewhat trifling.  But I cannot persuade her to
+accept my view.  She will not be happy till she has asked and
+received your pardon for them."
+
+"Offences towards me?" Peter wondered.  "Unless excess of
+patience with a very trying employer constitutes an offence,
+she has been guilty of none."
+
+"Never mind," said the Cardinal.  "Her conscience accuses her
+--she must satisfy it.  Will you come?"
+
+The Cardinal sat down at the head of Marietta's bed, and took
+her hand.
+
+"Now, dear," he said, with the gentleness, the tenderness, of
+one speaking to a beloved child, "here is Mr. Marchdale.  Tell
+him what you have on your mind.  He is ready to hear and to
+forgive you."
+
+Marietta fixed her eyes anxiously on Peter's face.
+
+"First," she whispered, "I wish to beg the Signorino to pardon
+all this trouble I am making for him.  I am the Signorino's
+servant; but instead of serving, I make trouble for him."
+
+She paused.  The Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+
+Peter answered, "Marietta, if you talk like that, you will make
+the Signorino cry.  You are the best servant that ever lived.
+You are putting me to no trouble at all.  You are giving me a
+chance--which I should be glad of, except that it involves your
+suffering--to show my affection for you, and my gratitude."
+
+"There, dear," said the Cardinal to her, "you see the Signorino
+makes nothing of that.  Now the next thing.  Go on."
+
+I have to ask the Signorino's forgiveness for my impertinence,"
+whispered Marietta.
+
+"Impertinence--?" faltered Peter.  "You have never been
+impertinent."
+
+"Scusi, Signorino," she went on, in her whisper.  "I have
+sometimes contradicted the Signorino.  I contradicted the
+Signorino when he told me that St. Anthony of Padua was born in
+Lisbon.  It is impertinent of a servant to contradict her
+master.  And now his most high Eminence says the Signorino was
+right.  I beg the Signorino to forgive me."
+
+Again the Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+
+"You dear old woman," Peter half laughed, half sobbed, "how can
+you ask me to forgive a mere difference of opinion?  You--you
+dear old thing."
+
+The Cardinal smiled, and patted Marietta's hand.
+
+"The Signorino is too good," Marietta sighed.
+
+"Go on, dear," said the Cardinal.
+
+"I have been guilty of the deadly sin of evil speaking.  I have
+spoken evil of the Signorino," she went on.  "I said--I said to
+people--that the Signorino was simple--that he was simple and
+natural.  I thought so then.  Now I know it is not so.  I know
+it is only that the Signorino is English."
+
+Once more the Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+
+Again Peter half laughed, half sobbed.
+
+"Marietta!  Of course I am simple and natural.  At least, I try
+to be.  Come!  Look up.  Smile.  Promise you will not worry
+about these things any more."
+
+She looked up, she smiled faintly.
+
+"The Signorino is too good," she whispered.
+
+After a little interval of silence, "Now, dear," said the
+Cardinal, "the last thing of all."
+
+Marietta gave a groan, turning her head from side to side on
+her pillow.
+
+"You need not be afraid," said the Cardinal.  "Mr. Marchdale
+will certainly forgive you."
+
+"Oh-h-h," groaned Marietta.  She stared at the ceiling for an
+instant.
+
+The Cardinal patted her hand.  "Courage, courage," he said.
+
+"Oh--Signorino mio," she groaned again, "this you never can
+forgive me.  It is about the little pig, the porcellino.  The
+Signorino remembers the little pig, which he called Francesco?"
+
+"Yes," answered Peter.
+
+"The Signorino told me to take the little pig away, to find a
+home for him.  And I told the Signorino that I would take him
+to my nephew, who is a farmer, towards Fogliamo.  The Signorino
+remembers?"
+
+"Yes," answered Peter.  "Yes, you dear old thing.  I remember."
+
+Marietta drew a deep breath, summoned her utmost fortitude.
+
+"Well, I did not take him to my nephew.  The--the Signorino ate
+him."
+
+Peter could hardly keep from laughing.  He could only utter a
+kind of half-choked "Oh?"
+
+"Yes," whispered Marietta.  "He was bought with the Signorino's
+money.  I did not like to see the Signorino's money wasted.  So
+I deceived the Signorino.  You ate him as a chicken-pasty."
+
+This time Peter did laugh, I am afraid.  Even the Cardinal
+--well, his smile was perilously near a titter.  He took a big
+pinch of snuff.
+
+"I killed Francesco, and I deceived the Signorino.  I am very
+sorry," Marietta said.
+
+Peter knelt down at her bedside.
+
+"Marietta!  Your conscience is too sensitive.  As for killing
+Francesco--we are all mortal, he could not have lived forever.
+And as for deceiving the Signorino, you did it for his own
+good.  I remember that chicken-pasty.  It was the best
+chicken-pasty I have ever tasted.  You must not worry any more
+about the little pig."
+
+Marietta turned her face towards him, and smiled.
+
+"The Signorino forgives his servant?" she whispered.
+
+Peter could not help it.  He bent forward, and kissed her brown
+old cheek.
+
+"She will be easier now," said the Cardinal.  "I will stay with
+her a little longer."
+
+Peter went out.  The scene had been childish--do you say?
+--ridiculous, almost farcical indeed?  And yet, somehow, it
+seemed to Peter that his heart was full of unshed tears.  At
+the same time, as he thought of the Cardinal, as he saw his
+face, his smile, as he heard the intonations of his voice, the
+words he had spoken, as he thought of the way he had held
+Marietta's hand and patted it--at the same time a kind of
+strange joy seemed to fill his heart, a strange feeling of
+exaltation, of enthusiasm.
+
+"What a heavenly old man," he said.
+
+In the garden Sister Scholastica and Emilia were still walking
+together.
+
+They halted, when Peter came out; and Emilia said, "With your
+consent, Signore, Sister Scholastica has accepted me as her
+lieutenant.  I will come every morning, and sit with Marietta
+during the day.  That will relieve the sister, who has to be up
+with her at night."
+
+And every morning after that, Emilia came, walking through the
+park, and crossing the river by the ladder-bridge, which Peter
+left now permanently in its position.  And once or twice a
+week, in the afternoon, the Cardinal would drive up in the
+brougham, and, having paid a little visit to Marietta, would
+drive Emilia home.
+
+In the sick-room Emilia would read to Marietta, or say the
+rosary for her.
+
+Marietta mended steadily day by day.  At the end of a fortnight
+she was able to leave her bed for an hour or two in the
+afternoon, and sit in the sun in the garden.  Then Sister
+Scholastica went back to her convent at Venzona.  At the end of
+the third week Marietta could be up all day.  But Gigi's
+stalwart Carolina Maddalena continued to rule as vicereine in
+the kitchen.  And Emilia continued to come every morning.
+
+"Why does the Duchessa never come?" Peter wondered.  "It would
+be decent of her to come and see the poor old woman."
+
+Whenever he thought of Cardinal Udeschini, the same strange
+feeling of joy would spring up in his heart, which he had felt
+when he had left the beautiful old man with Marietta, on the
+day of his first visit.  In the beginning he could only give
+this feeling a very general and indefinite expression.  "He is
+a man who renews one's faith in things, who renews one's faith
+in human nature."  But gradually, I suppose, the feeling
+crystallised; and at last, in due season, it found for itself
+an expression that was not so indefinite.
+
+It was in the afternoon, and he had just conducted the Cardinal
+and Emilia to their carriage.  He stood at his gate for a
+minute, and watched the carriage as it rolled away.
+
+"What a heavenly old man, what a heavenly old man," he thought.
+
+Then, still looking after the carriage, before turning back
+into his garden, he heard himself repeat, half aloud
+
+       "Nor knowest thou what argument
+        Thy life to thy neighbour's creed hath lent."
+
+The words had come to his lips, and were pronounced, were
+addressed to his mental image of the Cardinal, without any
+conscious act of volition on his part.  He heard them with a
+sort of surprise, almost as if some one else had spoken them.
+He could not in the least remember what poem they were from, he
+could not even remember what poet they were by.  Were they by
+Emerson?  It was years since he had read a line of Emerson's.
+
+All that evening the couplet kept running in his head.  And the
+feeling of joy, of enthusiasm, in his heart, was not so strange
+now.  But I think it was intensified.
+
+The next time the Cardinal arrived at Villa Floriano, and gave
+Peter his hand, Peter did not merely shake it, English fashion,
+as he had hitherto done.
+
+The Cardinal looked startled.
+
+Then his eyes searched Peter's face for a second, keenly
+interrogative.  Then they softened; and a wonderful clear light
+shone in them, a wonderful pure, sweet light.
+
+"Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus, Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus
+Sanctus," he said, making the Sign of the Cross.
+
+
+
+
+                             XXVII
+
+
+Up at the castle, Cardinal Udeschini was walking backwards and
+forwards on the terrace, reading his Breviary.
+
+Beatrice was seated under the white awning, at the terrace-end,
+doing some kind of needlework.
+
+Presently the Cardinal came to a standstill near her, and
+closed his book, putting his finger in it, to keep the place.
+
+"It will be, of course, a great loss to Casa Udeschini, when
+you marry," he remarked.
+
+Beatrice looked up, astonishment on her brow.
+
+"When I marry?" she exclaimed.  "Well, if ever there was a
+thunderbolt from a clear sky!"
+
+And she laughed.
+
+"Yes-when you marry," the Cardinal repeated, with conviction.
+"You are a young woman--you are twenty-eight years old.  You
+will, marry.  It is only right that you should marry.  You have
+not the vocation for a religious.  Therefore you must marry.
+But it will be a great loss to the house of Udeschini."
+
+"Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof," said Beatrice,
+laughing again.  "I haven't the remotest thought of marrying.
+I shall never marry."
+
+"Il ne faut jamais dire a la fontaine, je ne boirai pas de ton
+eau," his Eminence cautioned her, whilst the lines of humour
+about his mouth emphasised themselves, and his grey eyes
+twinkled.  "Other things equal, marriage is as much the proper
+state for the laity, as celibacy is the proper state for the
+clergy.  You will marry.  It would be selfish of us to oppose
+your marrying.  You ought to marry.  But it will be a great
+loss to the family--it will be a great personal loss to me.
+You are as dear to me as any of my blood.  I am always
+forgetting that we are uncle and niece by courtesy only."
+
+"I shall never marry.  But nothing that can happen to me can
+ever make the faintest difference in my feeling for you.  I
+hope you know how much I love you?"  She looked into his eyes,
+smiling her love.  "You are only my uncle by courtesy?  But you
+are more than an uncle--you have been like a father to me, ever
+since I left my convent."
+
+The Cardinal returned her smile.
+
+"Carissima," he murmured.  Then, "It will be a matter of the
+utmost importance to me, however," he went on, "that, when the
+time comes, you should marry a good man, a suitable man--a man
+who will love you, whom you will love--and, if possible, a man
+who will not altogether separate you from me, who will perhaps
+love me a little too.  It would send me in sorrow to my grave,
+if you should marry a man who was not worthy of you."
+
+"I will guard against that danger by not marrying at all,"
+laughed Beatrice.
+
+"No--you will marry, some day," said the Cardinal.  "And I wish
+you to remember that I shall not oppose your marrying--provided
+the man is a good man.  Felipe will not like it--Guido will
+pull a long nose--but I, at least, will take your part, if I
+can feel that the man is good.  Good men are rare, my dear;
+good husbands are rarer still.  I can think, for instance, of
+no man in our Roman nobility, whom I should be content to see
+you marry.  Therefore I hope you will not marry a Roman.  You
+would be more likely to marry one of your own countrymen.
+That, of course, would double the loss to us, if it should take
+you away from Italy.  But remember, if he is a man whom I can
+think worthy of you, you may count upon me as an ally."
+
+He resumed his walk, reopening his Breviary.
+
+Beatrice resumed her needlework.  But she found it difficult to
+fix her attention on it.  Every now and then, she would leave
+her needle stuck across its seam, let the work drop to her lap,
+and, with eyes turned vaguely up the valley, fall, apparently,
+into a muse.
+
+"I wonder why he said all that to me?" was the question that
+kept posing itself.
+
+By and by the Cardinal closed his Breviary, and put it in his
+pocket.  I suppose he had finished his office for the day.
+Then he came and sat down in one of the wicker chairs, under
+the awning.  On the table, among the books and things, stood a
+carafe of water, some tumblers, a silver sugar-bowl, and a
+crystal dish full of fresh pomegranate seeds.  It looked like a
+dish full of unset rubies.  The Cardinal poured some water into
+a tumbler, added a lump of sugar and a spoonful of pomegranate
+seeds, stirred the mixture till it became rose-coloured, and
+drank it off in a series of little sips.
+
+"What is the matter, Beatrice?" he asked, all at once.
+
+Beatrice raised her eyes, perplexed.
+
+"The matter--?  Is anything the matter?"
+
+"Yes," said the Cardinal; "something is the matter.  You are
+depressed, you are nervous, you are not yourself.  I have
+noticed it for many days.  Have you something on, your mind?"
+
+"Nothing in the world," Beatrice answered, with an appearance
+of great candour.  "I had not noticed that I was nervous or
+depressed."
+
+"We are entering October," said the Cardinal.  "I must return
+to Rome.  I have been absent too long already.  I must return
+next week.  But I should not like to go away with the feeling
+that you are unhappy."
+
+"If a thing were needed to make me unhappy, it would be the
+announcement of your intended departure," Beatrice said,
+smiling.  "But otherwise, I am no more unhappy than it is
+natural to be.  Life, after all, is n't such a furiously gay
+business as to keep one perpetually singing and dancing--is it?
+But I am not especially unhappy."
+
+"H'm," said the Cardinal.  Then, in a minute, "You will come to
+Rome in November, I suppose?" he asked.
+
+"Yes--towards the end of November, I think," said Beatrice.
+
+The Cardinal rose, and began to walk backwards and forwards
+again.
+
+In a little while the sound of carriage-wheels could be heard,
+in the sweep, round the corner of the house.
+
+The Cardinal looked at his watch.
+
+"Here is the carriage," he said.  "I must go down and see that
+poor old woman . . . .  Do you know," he added, after a
+moment's hesitation, "I think it would be well if you were to
+go with me."
+
+A shadow came into Beatrice's eyes.
+
+"What good would that do?" she asked.
+
+"It would give her pleasure, no doubt.  And besides, she is one
+of your parishioners, as it were.  I think you ought to go.
+You have never been to see her since she fell ill."
+
+"Oh--well," said Beatrice.
+
+She was plainly unwilling.  But she went to put on her things.
+
+In the carriage, when they had passed the village and crossed
+the bridge, as they were bowling along the straight white road
+that led to the villa, "What a long time it is since Mr.
+Marchdale has been at Ventirose," remarked the Cardinal.
+
+"Oh--?  Is it?" responded Beatrice, with indifference.
+
+"It is more than three weeks, I think--it is nearly a month,"
+the Cardinal said.
+
+"Oh--?" said she.
+
+"He has had his hands full, of course; he has had little
+leisure," the Cardinal pursued.  "His devotion to his poor old
+servant has been quite admirable.  But now that she is
+practically recovered, he will be freer."
+
+"Yes," said Beatrice.
+
+"He is a young man whom I like very much," said the Cardinal.
+"He is intelligent; he has good manners; and he has a fine
+sense of the droll.  Yes, he has wit--a wit that you seldom
+find in an Anglo-Saxon, a wit that is almost Latin.  But you
+have lost your interest in him?  That is because you despair of
+his conversion?"
+
+"I confess I am not greatly interested in him," Beatrice
+answered.  "And I certainly have no hopes of his conversion."
+
+The Cardinal smiled at his ring.  He opened his snuffbox, and
+inhaled a long deliberate pinch of snuff.
+
+"Ah, well--who can tell?" he said.  "But--he will be free now,
+and it is so long since he has been at the castle--had you not
+better ask him to luncheon or dinner?"
+
+"Why should I?" answered Beatrice.  "If he does not come to
+Ventirose, it is presumably because he does not care to come.
+If he does care to come, he needs no invitation.  He knows that
+he is at liberty to call whenever he likes."
+
+"But it would be civil, it would be neighbourly, to ask him to
+a meal," the Cardinal submitted.
+
+"And it would put him in the embarrassing predicament of having
+either to accept against his will, or to decline and appear
+ungracious," submitted Beatrice.  "No, it is evident that
+Ventirose does not amuse him."
+
+"Bene," said the Cardinal.  "Be it as you wish."
+
+But when they reached Villa Floriano, Peter was not at home.
+
+"He has gone to Spiaggia for the day," Emilia informed them.
+
+Beatrice, the Cardinal fancied, looked at once relieved and
+disappointed.
+
+Marietta was seated in the sun, in a sheltered corner of the
+garden.
+
+While Beatrice talked with her, the Cardinal walked about.
+
+Now it so happened that on Peter's rustic table a book lay
+open, face downwards.
+
+The Cardinal saw the book.  He halted in his walk, and glanced
+round the garden, as if to make sure that he was not observed.
+He tapped his snuff--box, and took a pinch of snuff.  Then he
+appeared to meditate for an instant, the lines about his mouth
+becoming very marked indeed.  At last, swiftly, stealthily,
+almost with the air of a man committing felony, he slipped
+his snuff-box under the open book, well under it, so that it
+was completely covered up.
+
+On the way back to Ventirose, the Cardinal put his hand in his
+pocket.
+
+"Dear me!" he suddenly exclaimed.  "I have lost my snuff box
+again."  He shook his head, as one who recognises a fatality.
+"I am always losing it."
+
+"Are you sure you had it with you?" Beatrice asked.
+
+"Oh, yes, I think I had it with me.  I should have missed it
+before this, if I had left it at home.  I must have dropped it
+in Mr. Marchdale's garden."
+
+"In that case it will probably be found," said Beatrice.
+
+
+Peter had gone to Spiaggia, I imagine, in the hope of meeting
+Mrs. O'Donovan Florence; but the printed visitors' list there
+told him that she had left nearly a fortnight since.  On his
+return to the villa, he was greeted by Marietta with the proud
+tidings that her Excellency the Duchessa di Santangiolo had
+been to see her.
+
+"Oh--?  Really?" he questioned lightly.  (His heart, I think,
+dropped a beat, all the same.)
+
+"Ang," said Marietta.  "She came with the most Eminent Prince
+Cardinal.  They came in the carriage.  She stayed half an hour.
+She was very gracious."
+
+"Ah?" said Peter.  "I am glad to hear it."
+
+"She was beautifully dressed," said Marietta.
+
+"Of that I have not the shadow of a doubt," said he.
+
+"The Signorina Emilia drove away with them," said she.
+
+"Dear, dear!  What a chapter of adventures," was his comment.
+
+He went to his rustic table, and picked up his book.
+
+"How the deuce did that come there?" he wondered, discovering
+the snuff box.
+
+It was, in truth, an odd place for it.  A cardinal may
+inadvertently drop his snuff box, to be sure.  But if the whole
+College of Cardinals together had dropped a snuff box, it would
+hardly have fallen, of its own weight, through the covers of an
+open book, to the under-side thereof, and have left withal no
+trace of its passage.
+
+"Solid matter will not pass through solid matter, without
+fraction--I learned that at school," said Peter.
+
+The inference would be that someone had purposely put the snuff
+box there.
+
+But who?
+
+The Cardinal himself?  In the name of reason, why?
+
+Emilia?  Nonsense.
+
+Marietta?  Absurd.
+
+The Du--
+
+A wild surmise darted through Peter's soul.  Could it be?
+Could it conceivably be?  Was it possible that--that--was it
+possible, in fine, that this was a kind of signal, a kind of
+summons?
+
+Oh, no, no, no.  And yet--and yet--
+
+No, certainly not.  The idea was preposterous.  It deserved,
+and (I trust) obtained, summary deletion.
+
+"Nevertheless," said Peter, "it's a long while since I have
+darkened the doors of Ventirose.  And a poor excuse is better
+than none.  And anyhow, the Cardinal will be glad to have his
+snuff."
+
+The ladder-bridge was in its place.
+
+He crossed the Aco.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+He crossed the Aco, and struck bravely forward, up the smooth
+lawns, under the bending trees, towards the castle.
+
+The sun was setting.  The irregular mass of buildings stood out
+in varying shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of
+red.
+
+Half way there, Peter stopped, and looked back.
+
+The level sunshine turned the black forests of the Gnisi to
+shining forests of bronze, and the foaming cascade that leapt
+down its side to a cascade of liquid gold.  The lake, for the
+greater part, lay in shadow, violet-grey through a pearl-grey
+veil of mist; but along the opposite shore it caught the light,
+and gleamed a crescent of quicksilver, with roseate
+reflections.  The three snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito, at the
+valley's end, seemed almost insubstantial--floating forms of
+luminous pink vapour, above the hazy horizon, in a pure sky
+intensely blue.
+
+A familiar verse came into Peter's mind.
+
+"Really,"' he said to himself, "down to the very 'cataract
+leaping in glory,' I believe they must have pre-arranged the
+scene, feature for feature, to illustrate it."  And he began to
+repeat the vivid, musical lines, under his breath . . .
+
+But about midway of them he was interrupted.
+
+"It's not altogether a bad sort of view--is it?" a voice asked,
+behind him.
+
+Peter faced about.
+
+On a marble bench, under a feathery acacia; a few yards away, a
+lady was seated, looking at him, smiling.
+
+Peter's eyes met hers--and suddenly his heart gave a jump.
+Then it stood dead still for a second.  Then it flew off,
+racing perilously.  Oh, for the best reasons in the world.
+There was something in her eyes, there was a glow, a softness,
+that seemed--that seemed . . .  But thereby hangs my tale.
+
+She was dressed in white.  She had some big bright-yellow
+chrysanthemums stuck in her belt.  She wore no hat.  Her hair,
+brown and warm in shadow, sparkled, where the sun touched it,
+transparent and iridescent, like crinkly threads of glass.
+
+"You do not think it altogether bad--I hope?" she questioned,
+arching her eyebrows slightly, with a droll little assumption
+of concern.
+
+Peter's heart was racing--but he must answer her.
+
+"I was just wondering," he answered, with a tolerably
+successful feint of composure, "whether one might not safely
+call it altogether good."
+
+"Oh--?" she exclaimed.
+
+She threw back her head, and examined the prospect critically.
+Afterwards, she returned her gaze to Peter, with an air of
+polite readiness to defer to his opinion.
+
+"It is not too sensational?  Not too much like a landscape on
+the stage?"
+
+"We must judge it leniently," said he; "we must remember that
+it is only unaided Nature.  Besides," he added, "to be
+meticulously truthful, there is a spaciousness, there is a
+vivacity in the light and colour, there is a sense of depth and
+atmosphere, that we should hardly find in a landscape on the
+stage."
+
+"Yes--perhaps there is," she admitted thoughtfully.
+
+And with that, they looked into each other's eyes, and laughed.
+
+"Are you aware," the lady asked, after a brief silence, "that
+it is a singularly lovely evening."
+
+"I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so," Peter answered,
+with the least approach to a meaning bow.
+
+In the lady's face there flickered, perhaps, for half a second,
+the faintest light, as of a comprehending and unresentful
+smile.  But she went on, with fine detachment
+
+"How calm and still it is.  The wonderful peace of the day's
+compline.  It seems as if the earth had stopped breathing--does
+n't it?  The birds have already gone to bed, though the sun is
+only just setting.  It is the hour when they are generally
+noisiest; but they have gone to bed--the sparrows and the
+finches, the snatchers and the snatched-from, are equal in the
+article of sleep.  That is because they feel the touch of
+autumn.  How beautiful it is, in spite of its sadness, this
+first touch of autumn--it is like sad distant music.  Can you
+analyse it, can you explain it?  There is no chill, it is quite
+warm, and yet one knows somehow that autumn is here.  The birds
+know it, and have gone to bed.  In another month they will be
+flying away, to Africa and the Hesperides--all of them except
+the sparrows, who stay all winter.  I wonder how they get on
+during the winter, with no goldfinches to snatch from?"
+
+She turned to Peter with a look of respectful enquiry, as one
+appealing to an authority for information.
+
+"Oh, they snatch from each other, during the winter," he
+explained.  "It is thief rob thief, when honest victims are not
+forthcoming.  And--what is more to the point--they must keep
+their beaks in, against the return of the goldfinches with the
+spring."
+
+The Duchessa--for I scorn to deceive the trustful reader
+longer; and (as certain fines mouches, despite my efforts at
+concealment, may ere this have suspected) the mysterious lady
+was no one else--the Duchessa gaily laughed.
+
+Yes," she said, "the goldfinches will return with the spring.
+But isn't that rather foolish of them?  If I were a goldfinch,
+I think I should make my abode permanent in the sparrowless
+south."
+
+"There is no sparrowless south," said Peter.  "Sparrows, alas,
+abound in every latitude; and the farther south you go, the
+fiercer and bolder and more impudent they become.  In Africa
+and the Hesperides, which you have mentioned, they not
+infrequently attack the caravans, peck the eyes out of the
+camels, and are sometimes even known to carry off a man, a
+whole man, vainly struggling in their inexorable talons.  There
+is no sparrowless south.  But as for the goldfinches returning
+--it is the instinct of us bipeds to return.  Plumed and
+plumeless, we all return to something, what though we may have
+registered the most solemn vows to remain away."
+
+He delivered his last phrases with an accent, he punctuated
+them with a glance, in which there may have lurked an
+intention.
+
+But the Duchessa did not appear to notice it.
+
+"Yes--true--so we do," she assented vaguely.  "And what you
+tell me of the sparrows in the Hesperides is very novel and
+impressive--unless, indeed, it is a mere traveller's tale, with
+which you are seeking to practise upon my credulity.  But since
+I find you in this communicative vein, will you not push
+complaisance a half-inch further, and tell me what that thing
+is, suspended there in the sky above the crest of the
+Cornobastone--that pale round thing, that looks like the
+spectre of a magnified half-crown?"
+
+Peter turned to the quarter her gaze indicated.
+
+"Oh, that," he said, "is nothing.  In frankness, it is only
+what the vulgar style the moon."
+
+"How odd," said she.  "I thought it was what the vulgar style
+the moon."
+
+And they both laughed again.
+
+The Duchessa moved a little; and thus she uncovered, carved on
+the back of her marble bench, and blazoned in red and gold, a
+coat of arms.
+
+She touched the shield with her finger.
+
+"Are you interested in canting heraldry?" she asked.  "There is
+no country so rich in it as Italy.  These are the arms of the
+Farfalla, the original owners of this property.  Or, seme of
+twenty roses gules; the crest, on a rose gules, a butterfly or,
+with wings displayed; and the motto--how could the heralds ever
+have sanctioned such an unheraldic and unheroic motto?
+
+                      Rosa amorosa,
+                      Farfalla giojosa,
+                      Mi cantano al cuore
+                      La gioja e l' amore.
+
+They were the great people of this region for countless
+generations, the Farfalla.  They were Princes of Ventirose and
+Patricians of Milan.  And then the last of them was ruined at
+Monte Carlo, and killed himself there, twenty-odd years ago.
+That is how all their gioja and amore ended.  It was the case
+of a butterfly literally broken upon a wheel.  The estate fell
+into the hands of the Jews, as everything more or less does
+sooner or later; and they--if you can believe me--they were
+going to turn the castle into an hotel, into one of those
+monstrous modern hotels, for other Jews to come to, when I
+happened to hear of it, and bought it.  Fancy turning that
+splendid old castle into a Jew-infested hotel!  It is one of
+the few castles in Italy that have a ghost.  Oh, but a quite
+authentic ghost.  It is called the White Page--il Paggio Bianco
+di Ventirose.  It is the ghost of a boy about sixteen.  He
+walks on the ramparts of the old keep, and looks off towards
+the lake, as if he were watching a boat, and sometimes he waves
+his arms, as if he were signalling.  And from head to foot he
+is perfectly white, like a statue.  I have never seen him
+myself; but so many people say they have, I cannot doubt he is
+authentic.  And the Jews wanted to turn this haunted castle
+into an hotel . . .  As a tribute to the memory of the
+Farfalla, I take pains to see that their arms, which are
+carved, as you see them here, in at least a hundred different
+places, are remetalled and retinctured as often as time and the
+weather render it necessary."
+
+She looked towards the castle, while she spoke; and now she
+rose, with the design, perhaps, of moving in that direction.
+
+Peter felt that the moment had come for actualities.
+
+"It seems improbable," he began,--and I 'm afraid you will
+think there is a tiresome monotony in my purposes; but I am
+here again to return Cardinal Udeschini's snuff box.  He left
+it in my garden."
+
+"Oh--?" said the Duchessa.  "Yes, he thought he must have left
+it there.  He is always mislaying it.  Happily, he has another,
+for emergencies.  It was very good of you to trouble to bring
+it back."
+
+She gave a light little laugh..
+
+"I may also improve this occasion," Peter abruptly continued,
+"to make my adieux.  I shall be leaving for England in a few
+days now."
+
+The Duchessa raised her eyebrows.
+
+"Really?" she said.  "Oh, that is too bad," she added, by way
+of comment.  "October, you know, is regarded as the best month
+of all the twelve, in this lake country."
+
+"Yes, I know it," Peter responded regretfully.
+
+"And it is a horrid month in England," she went on.
+
+"It is an abominable month in England," he acknowledged.
+
+"Here it is blue, like larkspur, and all fragrant of the
+vintage, and joyous with the songs of the vintagers," she said.
+"There it is dingy-brown, and songless, and it smells of
+smoke."
+
+"Yes," he agreed.
+
+"But you are a sportsman?  You go in for shooting?" she
+conjectured.
+
+"No," he answered.  "I gave up shooting years ago."
+
+"Oh--?  Hunting, then?"
+
+"I hate hunting.  One is always getting rolled on by one's
+horse."
+
+"Ah, I see.  It--it will be golf, perhaps?"
+
+"No, it is not even golf."
+
+"Don't tell me it is football?"
+
+"Do I look as if it were football?"
+
+"It is sheer homesickness, in fine?  You are grieving for the
+purple of your native heather?"
+
+"There is scarcely any heather in my native county.  No," said
+Peter, "no.  To tell you the truth, it is the usual thing.  It
+is an histoire de femme."
+
+"I 'might have guessed it," she exclaimed.  "It is still that
+everlasting woman."
+
+"That everlasting woman--?" Peter faltered.
+
+"To be sure," said she.  "The woman you are always going on
+about.  The woman of your novel.  This woman, in short."
+
+And she produced from behind her back a hand that she had kept
+there, and held up for his inspection a grey-and-gold bound
+book.
+
+"MY novel--?" faltered he.  (But the sight of it, in her
+possession, in these particular circumstances, gave him a
+thrill that was not a thrill of despair.)
+
+"Your novel," she repeated, smiling sweetly, and mimicking his
+tone.  Then she made a little moue.  "Of course, I have known
+that you were your friend Felix Wildmay, from the outset."
+
+"Oh," said Peter, in a feeble sort of gasp, looking bewildered.
+"You have known that from the outset?"  And his brain seemed to
+reel.
+
+"Yes," said she, "of course.  Where would the fun have been,
+otherwise?  And now you are going away, back to her shrine, to
+renew your worship.  I hope you will find the courage to offer
+her your hand."
+
+Peter's brain was reeling.  But here was the opportunity of his
+life.
+
+"You give me courage," he pronounced, with sudden daring.  "You
+are in a position to help me with her.  And since you know so
+much, I should like you to know more.  I should like to tell
+you who she is."
+
+"One should be careful where one bestows one's confidences,"
+she warned him; but there was something in her eyes, there was
+a glow, a softness, that seemed at the same time to invite
+them.
+
+"No," he said, "better than telling you who she is, I will tell
+you where I first saw her.  It was at the Francais, in
+December, four years ago, a Thursday night, a subscription
+night.  She sat in one of the middle boxes of the first tier.
+She was dressed in white.  Her companions were an elderly
+woman, English I think, in black, who wore a cap; and an old
+man, with white moustache and imperial, who looked as if he
+might be a French officer.  And the play--."
+
+He broke off, and looked at the Duchessa.  She kept her eyes
+down.
+
+"Yes--the play?" she questioned, in a low voice, after a little
+wait.
+
+"The play was Monsieur Pailleron's 'Le monde ou l'on
+s'ennuie'," he said,
+
+"Oh," said she, still keeping her eyes down.  Her voice was
+still very low.  But there was something in it that made
+Peter's heart leap.
+
+"The next time I saw her," he began . . .
+
+But then he had to stop.  He felt as if the beating of his
+heart must suffocate him.
+
+"Yes--the next time?" she questioned.
+
+He drew a deep breath.  He began anew--
+
+"The next time was a week later, at the Opera.  They were
+giving Lohengrin.  She was with the same man and woman, and
+there was another, younger man.  She had pearls round her neck
+and in her hair, and she had a cloak lined with white fur.  She
+left before the opera was over.  I did not see her again until
+the following May, when I saw her once or twice in London,
+driving in the Park.  She was always with the same elderly
+Englishwoman, but the military-looking old Frenchman had
+disappeared.  And then I saw her once more, a year later, in
+Paris, driving in the Bois."
+
+The Duchessa kept her eyes down.  She did not speak.
+
+Peter waited as long as flesh-and-blood could wait, looking at
+her.
+
+"Well?" he pleaded, at last.  "That is all.  Have you nothing
+to say to me?"
+
+She raised her eyes, and for the tiniest fraction of a second
+they gave themselves to his.  Then she dropped them again.
+
+"You are sure," she asked, "you are perfectly sure that when,
+afterwards, you met her, and came to know her as she really is
+--you are perfectly sure there was no disappointment?"
+
+"Disappointment!" cried Peter.  "She is in every way
+immeasurably beyond anything that I was capable of dreaming.
+Oh, if you could see her, if you could hear her speak, if you
+could look into her eyes--if you could see her as others see
+her--you would not ask whether there was a disappointment.  She
+is . . .  No; the language is not yet invented, in which I
+could describe her."
+
+The Duchessa smiled, softly, to herself.
+
+"And you are in love with her--more or less?" she asked.
+
+"I love her so that the bare imagination of being allowed to
+tell her of my love almost makes me faint with joy.  But it is
+like the story of the poor squire who loved his queen.  She is
+the greatest of great ladies.  I am nobody.  She is so
+beautiful, so splendid, and so high above me, it would be the
+maddest presumption for me to ask her for her love.  To ask for
+the love of my Queen!  And yet--Oh, I can say no more.  God
+sees my heart.  God knows how I love her."
+
+"And it is on her account--because you think your love is
+hopeless--that you are going away, that you are going back to
+England?"
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+She raised her eyes again, and again they gave themselves to
+his.  There was something in them, there was a glow, a softness
+. . .
+
+"Don't go," she said.
+
+
+Up at the castle--Peter had hurried down to the villa, dressed,
+and returned to the castle to dine--he restored the snuff-box
+to Cardinal Udeschini.
+
+"I am trebly your debtor for it," said the Cardinal.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Cardinal's Snuff-Box, by Henry Harland
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX ***
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