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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
+
+Author: Henry Harland
+
+Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5610]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on July 20, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** 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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