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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cardinal's Snuff-Box, by Henry Harland
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Cardinal's Snuff-Box
+
+Author: Henry Harland
+
+Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5610]
+Posting Date: March 25, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX
+
+By Henry Harland
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"The Signorino will take coffee?" old Marietta asked, as she set the
+fruit before him.
+
+Peter deliberated for a moment; then burned his ships.
+
+"Yes," he answered.
+
+"But in the garden, perhaps?" the little brown old woman suggested, with
+a persuasive flourish.
+
+"No," he corrected her, gently smiling, and shaking his head, "not
+perhaps--certainly."
+
+Her small, sharp old black Italian eyes twinkled, responsive.
+
+"The Signorino will find a rustic table, under the big willow-tree, at
+the water's edge," she informed him, with a good deal of gesture. "Shall
+I serve it there?"
+
+"Where you will. I leave myself entirely in your hands," he said.
+
+So he sat by the rustic table, on a rustic bench, under the willow,
+sipped his coffee, smoked his cigarette, and gazed in contemplation at
+the view.
+
+Of its kind, it was rather a striking view.
+
+In the immediate foreground--at his feet, indeed--there was the river,
+the narrow Aco, peacock-green, a dark file of poplars on either bank,
+rushing pell-mell away from the quiet waters of the lake. Then, just
+across the river, at his left, stretched the smooth lawns of the park of
+Ventirose, with glimpses of the many-pinnacled castle through the trees;
+and, beyond, undulating country, flourishing, friendly, a perspective of
+vineyards, cornfields, groves, and gardens, pointed by numberless white
+villas. At his right loomed the gaunt mass of the Gnisi, with its black
+forests, its bare crags, its foaming ascade, and the crenelated range of
+the Cornobastone; and finally, climax and cynosure, at the valley's
+end, Monte Sfiorito, its three snow-covered summits almost
+insubstantial-seeming, floating forms of luminous pink vapour, in the
+evening sunshine, against the intense blue of the sky.
+
+A familiar verse had come into Peter's mind, and kept running there
+obstinately.
+
+"Really," he said to himself, "feature for feature, down to the very
+'cataract leaping in glory,' the scene might have been got up, apres
+coup, to illustrate it." And he began to repeat the beautiful hackneyed
+words, under his breath....
+
+But about midway of the third line he was interrupted.
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+"It's not altogether a bad sort of view--is it?" some one said, in
+English.
+
+The voice was a woman's. It was clear and smooth; it was crisp-cut,
+distinguished.
+
+Peter glanced about him.
+
+On the opposite bank of the Aco, in the grounds of Ventirose, five or
+six yards away, a lady was standing, looking at him, smiling.
+
+Peter's eyes met hers, took in her face.... And suddenly his heart gave
+a jump. Then it stopped dead still, tingling, for a second. Then it flew
+off, racing perilously.--Oh, for reasons--for the best reasons in the
+world: but thereby hangs my tale.
+
+She was a young woman, tall, slender, in a white frock, with a white
+cloak, an indescribable complexity of soft lace and airy ruffles, round
+her shoulders. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow,
+sparkled, where it caught the light, in a kind of crinkly iridescence,
+like threads of glass.
+
+Peter's heart (for the best reasons in the world) was racing perilously.
+"It's impossible--impossible--impossible"--the words strummed themselves
+to its rhythm. Peter's wits (for had not the impossible come to pass?)
+were in a perilous confusion. But he managed to rise from his rustic
+bench, and to achieve a bow.
+
+She inclined her head graciously.
+
+"You do not think it altogether bad--I hope?" she questioned, in her
+crisp-cut voice, raising her eyebrows slightly, with a droll little
+assumption of solicitude.
+
+Peter's wits were in confusion; but he must answer her. An automatic
+second-self, summoned by the emergency, answered for him.
+
+"I think one might safely call it altogether good."
+
+"Oh--?" she exclaimed.
+
+Her eyebrows went up again, but now they expressed a certain whimsical
+surprise. She threw back her head, and regarded the prospect critically.
+
+"It is not, then, too spectacular, too violent?" she wondered, returning
+her gaze to Peter, with an air of polite readiness to defer to his
+opinion. "Not too much like a decor de theatre?"
+
+"One should judge it," his automatic second-self submitted, "with some
+leniency. It is, after all, only unaided Nature."
+
+A spark flickered in her eyes, while she appeared to ponder. (But I am
+not sure whether she was pondering the speech or its speaker.)
+
+"Really?" she said, in the end. "Did did Nature build the villas, and
+plant the cornfields?"
+
+But his automatic second-self was on its mettle.
+
+"Yes," it asserted boldly; "the kind of men who build villas and plant
+cornfields must be classified as natural forces."
+
+She gave a light little laugh--and again appeared to ponder for a
+moment.
+
+Then, with another gracious inclination of the head, and an
+interrogative brightening of the eyes, "Mr. Marchdale no doubt?" she
+hazarded.
+
+Peter bowed.
+
+"I am very glad if, on the whole, you like our little effect," she went
+on, glancing in the direction of Monte Sfiorito. "I"--there was the
+briefest suspension--"I am your landlady."
+
+For a third time Peter bowed, a rather more elaborate bow than his
+earlier ones, a bow of respectful enlightenment, of feudal homage.
+
+"You arrived this afternoon?" she conjectured.
+
+"By the five-twenty-five from Bergamo," said he.
+
+"A very convenient train," she remarked; and then, in the pleasantest
+manner, whereby the unusual mode of valediction was carried off, "Good
+evening."
+
+"Good evening," responded Peter, and accomplished his fourth bow.
+
+She moved away from the river, up the smooth lawns, between the trees,
+towards Castel Ventirose, a flitting whiteness amid the surrounding
+green.
+
+Peter stood still, looking after her.
+
+But when she was out of sight, he sank back upon his rustic bench, like
+a man exhausted, and breathed a prodigious sigh. He was absurdly pale.
+All the same, clenching his fists, and softly pounding the table with
+them, he muttered exultantly, between his teeth, "What luck! What
+incredible luck! It's she--it's she, as I 'm a heathen. Oh, what
+supernatural luck!"
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Old Marietta--the bravest of small figures, in her neat black-and-white
+peasant dress, with her silver ornaments, and her red silk coif and
+apron--came for the coffee things.
+
+But at sight of Peter, she abruptly halted. She struck an attitude of
+alarm. She fixed him with her fiery little black eyes.
+
+"The Signorino is not well!" she cried, in the tones of one launching a
+denunciation.
+
+Peter roused himself.
+
+"Er--yes--I 'm pretty well, thank you," he reassured her. "I--I 'm only
+dying," he added, sweetly, after an instant's hesitation.
+
+"Dying--!" echoed Marietta, wild, aghast.
+
+"Ah, but you can save my life--you come in the very nick of time," he
+said. "I'm dying of curiosity--dying to know something that you can tell
+me."
+
+Her stare dissolved, her attitude relaxed. She smiled--relief, rebuke.
+She shook her finger at him.
+
+"Ah, the Signorino gave me a fine fright," she said.
+
+"A thousand regrets," said Peter. "Now be a succouring angel, and make a
+clean breast of it. Who is my landlady?"
+
+Marietta drew back a little. Her brown old visage wrinkled up,
+perplexed.
+
+"Who is the Signorino's landlady?" she repeated.
+
+"Ang," said he, imitating the characteristic nasalised eh of Italian
+affirmation, and accompanying it by the characteristic Italian jerk of
+the head.
+
+Marietta eyed him, still perplexed--even (one might have fancied) a bit
+suspicious.
+
+"But is it not in the Signorino's lease?" she asked, with caution.
+
+"Of course it is," said he. "That's just the point. Who is she?"
+
+"But if it is in your lease!" she expostulated.
+
+"All the more reason why you should make no secret of it," he argued
+plausibly. "Come! Out with it! Who is my landlady?"
+
+Marietta exchanged a glance with heaven.
+
+"The Signorino's landlady is the Duchessa di Santangiolo," she answered,
+in accents of resignation.
+
+But then the name seemed to stimulate her; and she went on "She lives
+there--at Castel Ventirose." Marietta pointed towards the castle. "She
+owns all, all this country, all these houses--all, all." Marietta joined
+her brown old hands together, and separated them, like a swimmer, in a
+gesture that swept the horizon. Her eyes snapped.
+
+"All Lombardy?" said Peter, without emotion.
+
+Marietta stared again.
+
+"All Lombardy? Mache!" was her scornful remonstrance. "Nobody owns all
+Lombardy. All these lands, these houses."
+
+"Who is she?" Peter asked.
+
+Marietta's eyes blinked, in stupefaction before such stupidity.
+
+"But I have just told you," she cried "She is the Duchessa di
+Santangiolo."
+
+"Who is the Duchessa di Santangiolo?" he asked.
+
+Marietta, blinking harder, shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"But"--she raised her voice, screamed almost, as to one deaf--"but the
+Duchessa di Santangiolo is the Signorino's landlady la, proprietaria di
+tutte queste terre, tutte queste case, tutte, tutte."
+
+And she twice, with some violence, reacted her comprehensive gesture,
+like a swimmer's.
+
+"You evade me by a vicious circle," Peter murmured.
+
+Marietta made a mighty effort-brought all her faculties to a
+focus--studied Peter's countenance intently. Her own was suddenly
+illumined.
+
+"Ah, I understand," she proclaimed, vigorously nodding. "The Signorino
+desires to know who she is personally!"
+
+"I express myself in obscure paraphrases," said he; "but you, with
+your unfailing Italian simpatia, have divined the exact shade of my
+intention."
+
+"She is the widow of the Duca di Santangiolo," said Marietta.
+
+"Enfin vous entrez dans la voie des aveux," said Peter.
+
+"Scusi?" said Marietta.
+
+"I am glad to hear she's a widow," said he. "She--she might strike a
+casual observer as somewhat young, for a widow."
+
+"She is not very old," agreed Marietta; "only twenty-six, twenty-seven.
+She was married from the convent. That was eight, nine years ago. The
+Duca has been dead five or six."
+
+"And was he also young and lovely?"
+
+Peter asked.
+
+"Young and lovely! Mache!" derided Marietta. "He was past forty. He was
+fat. But he was a good man."
+
+"So much the better for him now," said Peter.
+
+"Gia," approved Marietta, and solemnly made the Sign of the Cross.
+
+"But will you have the kindness to explain to me," the young man
+continued, "how it happens that the Duchessa di Santangiolo speaks
+English as well as I do?"
+
+The old woman frowned surprise.
+
+"Come? She speaks English?"
+
+"For all the world like an Englishman," asseverated Peter.
+
+"Ah, well," Marietta reflected, "she was English, you know."
+
+"Oho!" exclaimed Peter. "She was English! Was she?" He bore a little on
+the tense of the verb. "That lets in a flood of light. And--and what, by
+the bye, is she now?" he questioned.
+
+"Ma! Italian, naturally, since she married the Duca," Marietta replied.
+
+"Indeed? Then the leopard can change his spots?" was Peter's inference.
+
+"The leopard?" said Marietta, at a loss.
+
+"If the Devil may quote Scripture for his purpose, why may n't I?"
+Peter demanded. "At all events, the Duchessa di Santangiolo is a very
+beautiful woman."
+
+"The Signorino has seen her?" Marietta asked.
+
+"I have grounds for believing so. An apparition--a phantom of
+delight--appeared on the opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco, and
+announced herself as my landlady. Of course, she may have been an
+impostor--but she made no attempt to get the rent. A tall woman, in
+white, with hair, and a figure, and a voice like cooling streams, and an
+eye that can speak volumes with a look."
+
+Marietta nodded recognition.
+
+"That would be the Duchessa."
+
+"She's a very beautiful duchessa," reiterated Peter.
+
+Marietta was Italian. So, Italian--wise, she answered, "We are all as
+God makes us."
+
+"For years I have thought her the most beautiful woman in Europe," Peter
+averred.
+
+Marietta opened her eyes wide.
+
+"For years? The Signorino knows her? The Signorino has seen her before?"
+
+A phrase came back to him from a novel he had been reading that
+afternoon in the train. He adapted it to the occasion.
+
+"I rather think she is my long-lost brother."
+
+"Brother--?" faltered Marietta.
+
+"Well, certainly not sister," said Peter, with determination. "You have
+my permission to take away the coffee things."
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Up at the castle, in her rose-and-white boudoir, Beatrice was writing a
+letter to a friend in England.
+
+"Villa Floriano," she wrote, among other words, "has been let to an
+Englishman--a youngish, presentable-looking creature, in a dinner
+jacket, with a tongue in his head, and an indulgent eye for
+Nature--named Peter Marchdale. Do you happen by any chance to know who
+he is, or anything about him?"
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Peter very likely slept but little, that first night at the villa; and
+more than once, I fancy, he repeated to his pillow his pious ejaculation
+of the afternoon: "What luck! What supernatural luck!" He was up, in
+any case, at an unconscionable hour next morning, up, and down in his
+garden.
+
+"It really is a surprisingly jolly garden," he confessed. "The agent was
+guiltless of exaggeration, and the photographs were not the perjuries
+one feared."
+
+There were some fine old trees, lindens, acacias, chestnuts, a
+flat-topped Lombardy pine, a darkling ilex, besides the willow that
+overhung the river, and the poplars that stiffly stood along its border.
+Then there was the peacock-blue river itself, dancing and singing as it
+sped away, with a thousand diamonds flashing on its surface--floating,
+sinking, rising--where the sun caught its ripples. There were some
+charming bits of greensward. There was a fountain, plashing melodious
+coolness, in a nimbus of spray which the sun touched to rainbow
+pinks and yellows. There were vivid parterres of flowers, begonia and
+geranium. There were oleanders, with their heady southern perfume; there
+were pomegranate-blossoms, like knots of scarlet crepe; there were
+white carnations, sweet-peas, heliotrope, mignonette; there were endless
+roses. And there were birds, birds, birds. Everywhere you heard their
+joyous piping, the busy flutter of their wings. There were goldfinches,
+blackbirds, thrushes, with their young--the plumpest, clumsiest,
+ruffle-feathered little blunderers, at the age ingrat, just beginning to
+fly, a terrible anxiety to their parents--and there were also (I regret
+to own) a good many rowdy sparrows. There were bees and bumblebees;
+there were brilliant, dangerous-looking dragonflies; there were
+butterflies, blue ones and white ones, fluttering in couples; there were
+also (I am afraid) a good many gadflies--but che volete? Who minds
+a gadfly or two in Italy? On the other side of the house there were
+fig-trees and peach-trees, and artichokes holding their heads high in
+rigid rows; and a vine, heavy with great clusters of yellow grapes, was
+festooned upon the northern wall.
+
+The morning air was ineffably sweet and keen--penetrant, tonic, with
+moist, racy smells, the smell of the good brown earth, the smell of
+green things and growing things. The dew was spread over the grass like
+a veil of silver gossamer, spangled with crystals. The friendly country
+westward, vineyards and white villas, laughed in the sun at the Gnisi,
+sulking black in shadow to the east. The lake lay deep and still, a
+dark sapphire. And away at the valley's end, Monte Sfiorito, always
+insubstantial-seeming, showed pale blue-grey, upon a sky in which still
+lingered some of the flush of dawn.
+
+It was a surprisingly jolly garden, true enough. But though Peter
+remained in it all day long--though he haunted the riverside, and cast
+a million desirous glances, between the trees, and up the lawns, towards
+Castel Ventirose--he enjoyed no briefest vision of the Duchessa di
+Santangiolo.
+
+Nor the next day; nor the next.
+
+"Why does n't that old dowager ever come down and look after her river?"
+he asked Marietta. "For all the attention she gives it, the water might
+be undermining her property on both sides."
+
+"That old dowager--?" repeated Marietta, blank.
+
+"That old widow woman--my landlady--the Duchessa Vedova di Santangiolo."
+
+"She is not very old--only twenty-six, twenty-seven," said Marietta.
+
+"Don't try to persuade me that she is n't old enough to know better,"
+retorted Peter, sternly.
+
+"But she has her guards, her keepers, to look after her property," said
+Marietta.
+
+"Guards and keepers are mere mercenaries. If you want a thing well done,
+you should do it yourself," said Peter, with gloomy sententiousness.
+
+On Sunday he went to the little grey rococo parish church. There were
+two Masses, one at eight o'clock, one at ten--and the church was quite
+a mile from Villa Floriano, and up a hill; and the Italian sun was
+hot--but the devoted young man went to both.
+
+The Duchessa was at neither.
+
+"What does she think will become of her immortal soul?" he asked
+Marietta.
+
+On Monday he went to the pink-stuccoed village post-office.
+
+Before the post-office door a smart little victoria, with a pair
+of sprightly, fine-limbed French bays, was drawn up, ducal coronets
+emblazoned on its panels.
+
+Peter's heart began to beat.
+
+And while he was hesitating on the doorstep, the door opened, and
+the Duchessa came forth--tall, sumptuous, in white, with a wonderful
+black-plumed hat, and a wonderful white-frilled sunshade. She was
+followed by a young girl--a pretty, dark-complexioned girl, of fourteen,
+fifteen perhaps, with pleasant brown eyes (that lucent Italian brown),
+and in her cheeks a pleasant hint of red (that covert Italian red, which
+seems to glow through the thinnest film of satin).
+
+Peter bowed, standing aside to let them pass.
+
+But when he looked up, the Duchessa had stopped, and was smiling on him.
+
+His heart beat harder.
+
+"A lovely day," said the Duchessa.
+
+"Delightful," agreed Peter, between two heart-beats.--Yet he looked, in
+his grey flannels, with his straw-hat and his eyeglass, with his lean
+face, his even colour, his slightly supercilious moustaches--he looked a
+very embodiment of cool-blooded English equanimity.
+
+"A trifle warm, perhaps?" the Duchessa suggested, with her air of polite
+(or was it in some part humorous?) readiness to defer to his opinion.
+
+"But surely," suggested he, "in Italy, in summer, it is its bounden duty
+to be a trifle warm?"
+
+The Duchessa smiled.
+
+"You like it? So do I. But what the country really needs is rain."
+
+"Then let us hope," said he, "that the country's real needs may remain
+unsatisfied."
+
+The Duchessa tittered.
+
+"Think of the poor farmers," she said reproachfully.
+
+"It's vain to think of them," he answered. "'T is an ascertained fact
+that no condition of the weather ever contents the farmers."
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+"Ah, well," she consented, "then I 'll join in your hope that the fine
+weather may last. I--I trust," she was so good as to add, "that you're
+not entirely uncomfortable at Villa Floriano?"
+
+"I dare n't allow myself to speak of Villa Floriano," he replied. "I
+should become dithyrambic. It's too adorable."
+
+"It has a pretty garden, and--I remember--you admired the view," the
+Duchessa said. "And that old Marietta? I trust she does for you fairly
+well?" Her raised eyebrows expressed benevolent (or was it in some part
+humorous?) concern.
+
+"She does for me to perfection. That old Marietta is a priceless old
+jewel," Peter vowed.
+
+"A good cook?" questioned the Duchessa.
+
+"A good cook--but also a counsellor and friend. And with a flow of
+language!"
+
+The Duchessa laughed again.
+
+"Oh, these Lombard peasant women. They are untiring chatterers."
+
+"I 'm not sure," Peter felt himself in justice bound to confess, "that
+Marietta is n't equally untiring as a listener. In fact, there's only
+one respect in which she has disappointed me."
+
+"Oh--?" said the Duchessa. And her raised eyebrows demanded particulars.
+
+"She swears she does n't wear a dagger in her garter--has never heard of
+such a practice," Peter explained. "And now," he whispered to his soul,
+"we 'll see whether our landlady is up in modern literature."
+
+Still again the Duchessa laughed. And, apparently, she was up in modern
+literature. At any rate--
+
+"Those are Lombard country-girls along the coast," she reminded him.
+"We are peaceful inland folk, miles from the sea. But you had best be on
+your guard, none the less." She shook her head, in warning. "Through all
+this country-side that old Marietta is reputed to be a witch."
+
+"If she's a witch," said Peter, undismayed, "her usefulness will be
+doubled. I shall put her to the test directly I get home."
+
+"Sprinkle her with holy water?" laughed the Duchessa. "Have a care. If
+she should turn into a black cat, and fly away on a broomstick, you'd
+never forgive yourself."
+
+Wherewith she swept on to her carriage, followed by her young companion.
+
+The sprightly French bays tossed their heads, making the harness tinkle.
+The footman mounted the box. The carriage rolled away.
+
+But Peter remained for quite a minute motionless on the door-step,
+gazing, bemused, down the long, straight, improbable village street,
+with its poplars, its bridge, its ancient stone cross, its irregular
+pink and yellow houses--as improbable as a street in opera-bouffe. A
+thin cloud of dust floated after the carriage, a thin screen of white
+dust, which, in the sun, looked like a fume of silver.
+
+"I think I could put my finger on a witch worth two of Marietta," he
+said, in the end. "And thus we see," he added, struck by something
+perhaps not altogether novel in his own reflection, "how the primary
+emotions, being perennial, tend to express themselves in perennial
+formulae."
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Back at the villa, he enquired of Marietta who the pretty brown-eyed
+young girl might have been.
+
+"The Signorina Emilia," Marietta promptly informed him.
+
+"Really and truly?" questioned he.
+
+"Ang," affirmed Marietta, with the national jerk of the head; "the
+Signorina Emilia Manfredi--the daughter of the Duca."
+
+"Oh--? Then the Duca was married before?" concluded Peter, with
+simplicity.
+
+"Che-e-e!" scoffed Marietta, on her highest note. "Married? He?" Then
+she winked and nodded--as one man of the world to another. "Ma molto
+porn! La mamma fu robaccia di Milano. But after his death, the Duchessa
+had her brought to the castle. She is the same as adopted."
+
+"That looks as if your Duchessa's heart were in the right place, after
+all," commented Peter.
+
+"Gia," agreed Marietta.
+
+"Hang the right place!" cried he. "What's the good of telling me her
+heart is in the right place, if the right place is inaccessible?"
+
+But Marietta only looked bewildered.
+
+He lived in his garden, he haunted the riverside, he made a daily
+pilgrimage to the village post, he thoroughly neglected the work he had
+come to this quiet spot to do. But a week passed, during which he never
+once beheld so much as the shadow of the Duchessa.
+
+On Sunday he trudged his mile, through the sun, and up the hill, not
+only to both Masses, but to Vespers and Benediction.
+
+She was present at none of these offices.
+
+"The Pagan!" he exclaimed.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Up at the castle, on the broad marble terrace, where clematis and
+jessamine climbed over the balustrade and twined about its pilasters,
+where oleanders grew in tall marble urns and shed their roseate petals
+on the pavement, Beatrice, dressed for dinner, in white, with pearls in
+her hair, and pearls round her throat, was walking slowly backwards and
+forwards, reading a letter.
+
+"There is a Peter Marchdale--I don't know whether he will be your Peter
+Marchdale or not, my dear; though the name seems hardly likely to be
+common--son of the late Mr. Archibald Marchdale, Q. C., and nephew of
+old General Marchdale, of Whitstoke. A highly respectable and stodgy
+Norfolk family. I've never happened to meet the man myself, but I'm
+told he's a bit of an eccentric, who amuses himself globe-trotting, and
+writing books (novels, I believe) which nobody, so far as I am aware,
+ever reads. He writes under a pseudonym, Felix--I 'm not sure whether
+it's Mildmay or Wildmay. He began life, by the bye, in the Diplomatic,
+and was attache for a while at Berlin, or Petersburg, or somewhere; but
+whether (in the elegant language of Diplomacy) he 'chucked it up,' or
+failed to pass his exams, I'm not in a position to say. He will be near
+thirty, and ought to have a couple of thousand a year--more or less.
+His father, at any rate, was a great man at the bar, and must have left
+something decent. And the only other thing in the world I know about
+him is that he's a great friend of that clever gossip Margaret
+Winchfield--which goes to show that however obscure he may be as a
+scribbler of fiction, he must possess some redeeming virtues as a social
+being--for Mrs. Winchfield is by no means the sort that falls in love
+with bores. As you 're not, either--well, verbum sap., as my little
+brother Freddie says."
+
+Beatrice gazed off, over the sunny lawn, with its trees and their
+long shadows, with its shrubberies, its bright flower-beds, its marble
+benches, its artificial ruin; over the lake, with its coloured sails,
+its incongruous puffing steamboats; down the valley, away to the rosy
+peaks of Monte Sfiorito, and the deep blue sky behind them. She plucked
+a spray of jessamine, and brushed the cool white blossoms across her
+cheek, and inhaled their fairy fragrance.
+
+"An obscure scribbler of fiction," she mused. "Ah, well, one is an
+obscure reader of fiction oneself. We must send to London for Mr. Felix
+Mildmay Wildmay's works."
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+On Monday evening, at the end of dinner, as she set the fruit before
+him, "The Signorino will take coffee?" old Marietta asked.
+
+Peter frowned at the fruit, figs and peaches--
+
+    "Figs imperial purple, and blushing peaches"--
+
+ranged alternately, with fine precision, in a circle, round a central
+heap of translucent yellow grapes.
+
+"Is this the produce of my own vine and fig-tree?" he demanded.
+
+"Yes, Signorino; and also peach-tree," replied Marietta.
+
+"Peaches do not grow on fig-trees?" he enquired.
+
+"No, Signorino," said Marietta.
+
+"Nor figs on thistles. I wonder why not," said he.
+
+"It is n't Nature," was Marietta's confident generalisation.
+
+"Marietta Cignolesi," Peter pronounced severely, looking her hard in the
+eyes, "I am told you are a witch."
+
+"No," said Marietta, simply, without surprise, without emotion.
+
+"I quite understand," he genially persisted. "It's a part of the game
+to deny it. But I have no intention of sprinkling you with holy water-so
+don't be frightened. Besides, if you should do anything outrageous--if
+you should turn into a black cat, and fly away on a broomstick, for
+example--I could never forgive myself. But I'll thank you to employ
+a little of your witchcraft on my behalf, all the same. I have lost
+something--something very precious--more precious than rubies--more
+precious than fine gold."
+
+Marietta's brown old wrinkles fell into an expression of alarm.
+
+"In the villa? In the garden?" she exclaimed, anxiously.
+
+"No, you conscientious old thing you," Peter hastened to relieve her.
+"Nowhere in your jurisdiction--so don't distress yourself: Laggiu,
+laggiu."
+
+And he waved a vague hand, to indicate outer space.
+
+"The Signorino should put up a candle to St. Anthony of Padua,"
+counselled this Catholic witch.
+
+"St. Anthony of Padua? Why of Padua?" asked Peter.
+
+"St. Anthony of Padua," said Marietta.
+
+"You mean of Lisbon," corrected Peter.
+
+"No," insisted the old woman, with energy. "St. Anthony of Padua."
+
+"But he was born in Lisbon;" insisted Peter.
+
+"No," said Marietta.
+
+"Yes," said he, "parola d' onore. And, what's more to the purpose, he
+died in Lisbon. You clearly mean St. Anthony of Lisbon."
+
+"No!" Marietta raised her voice, for his speedier conviction. "There is
+no St. Anthony of Lisbon. St. Anthony of Padua."
+
+"What's the use of sticking to your guns in that obstinate fashion?"
+Peter complained. "It's mere pride of opinion. Don't you know that the
+ready concession of minor points is a part of the grace of life?"
+
+"When you lose an object, you put up a candle to St. Anthony of Padua,"
+said Marietta, weary but resolved.
+
+"Not unless you wish to recover the object," contended Peter.
+
+Marietta stared at him, blinking.
+
+"I have no wish to recover the object I have lost," he continued
+blandly. "The loss of it is a new, thrilling, humanising experience.
+It will make a man of me--and, let us hope, a better man. Besides, in
+a sense, I lost it long ago--'when first my smitten eyes beat full
+on her,' one evening at the Francais, three, four years ago. But it's
+essential to my happiness that I should see the person into whose
+possession it has fallen. That is why I am not angry with you for being
+a witch. It suits my convenience. Please arrange with the powers of
+darkness to the end that I may meet the person in question tomorrow
+at the latest. No!" He raised a forbidding hand. "I will listen to
+no protestations. And, for the rest, you may count upon my absolute
+discretion.
+
+           'She is the darling of my heart
+            And she lives in our valley,'"
+
+he carolled softly.
+
+           "E del mio cuore la carina,
+            E dimor' nella nostra vallettina,"
+
+he obligingly translated. "But for all the good I get of her, she might
+as well live on the top of the Cornobastone," he added dismally. "Yes,
+now you may bring me my coffee--only, let it be tea. When your coffee is
+coffee it keeps me awake at night."
+
+Marietta trudged back to her kitchen, nodding at the sky.
+
+The next afternoon, however, the Duchessa di Santangiolo appeared on the
+opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco.
+
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Peter happened to be engaged in the amiable pastime of tossing
+bread-crumbs to his goldfinches.
+
+But a score or so of sparrows, vulture-like, lurked under cover of the
+neighbouring foliage, to dash in viciously, at the critical moment, and
+snatch the food from the finches' very mouths.
+
+The Duchessa watched this little drama for a minute, smiling, in silent
+meditation: while Peter--who, for a wonder, had his back turned to the
+park of Ventirose, and, for a greater wonder still perhaps, felt no
+pricking in his thumbs--remained unconscious of her presence.
+
+At last, sorrowfully, (but there was always a smile at the back of her
+eyes), she shook her head.
+
+"Oh, the pirates, the daredevils," she sighed.
+
+Peter started; faced about; saluted.
+
+"The brigands," said she, with a glance towards the sparrows' outposts.
+
+"Yes, poor things," said he.
+
+"Poor things?" cried she, indignant. "The unprincipled little monsters!"
+
+"They can't help it," he pleaded for them. "'It is their nature to.'
+They were born so. They had no choice."
+
+"You actually defend them!" she marvelled, rebukefully.
+
+"Oh, dear, no," he disclaimed. "I don't defend them. I defend nothing.
+I merely recognise and accept. Sparrows--finches. It's the way of the
+world--the established division of the world."
+
+She frowned incomprehension.
+
+"The established division of the world--?"
+
+"Exactly," said he. "Sparrows--finches the snatchers and the
+snatched-from. Everything that breathes is either a sparrow or a finch.
+'T is the universal war--the struggle for existence--the survival of
+the most unscrupulous. 'T is a miniature presentment of what's going on
+everywhere in earth and sky."
+
+She shook her head again.
+
+"YOU see the earth and sky through black spectacles, I 'm afraid,"
+she remarked, with a long face. But there was still an underglow of
+amusement in her eyes.
+
+"No," he answered, "because there's a compensation. As you rise in the
+scale of moral development, it is true, you pass from the category of
+the snatchers to the category of the snatched-from, and your ultimate
+extinction is assured. But, on the other hand, you gain talents and
+sensibilities. You do not live by bread alone. These goldfinches, for a
+case in point, can sing--and they have your sympathy. The sparrows
+can only make a horrid noise--and you contemn them. That is the
+compensation. The snatchers can never know the joy of singing--or of
+being pitied by ladies."
+
+"N... o, perhaps not," she consented doubtfully. The underglow of
+amusement in her eyes shone nearer to the surface. "But--but they can
+never know, either, the despair of the singer when his songs won't
+come."
+
+"Or when the ladies are pitiless. That is true," consented Peter.
+
+"And meanwhile they get the bread, crumbs," she said.
+
+"They certainly get the bread-crumbs," he admitted.
+
+"I 'm afraid "--she smiled, as one who has conducted a syllogism
+safely to its conclusion--"I 'm afraid I do not think your compensation
+compensates."
+
+"To be quite honest, I daresay it does n't," he confessed.
+
+"And anyhow"--she followed her victory up--"I should not wish my garden
+to represent the universal war. I should not wish my garden to be a
+battle-field. I should wish it to be a retreat from the battle--an abode
+of peace--a happy valley--a sanctuary for the snatched-from."
+
+"But why distress one's soul with wishes that are vain?" asked he. "What
+could one do?"
+
+"One could keep a dragon," she answered promptly. "If I were you, I
+should keep a sparrow-devouring, finch-respecting dragon."
+
+"It would do no good," said he. "You'd get rid of one species of
+snatcher, but some other species of snatcher would instantly pop UP."
+
+She gazed at him with those amused eyes of hers, and still again,
+slowly, sorrowfully, shook her head.
+
+"Oh, your spectacles are black--black," she murmured.
+
+"I hope not," said he; "but such as they are, they show me the
+inevitable conditions of our planet. The snatcher, here below, is
+ubiquitous and eternal--as ubiquitous, as eternal, as the force of
+gravitation. He is likewise protean. Banish him--he takes half a minute
+to change his visible form, and returns au galop. Sometimes he's an
+ugly little cacophonous brown sparrow; sometimes he's a splendid florid
+money-lender, or an aproned and obsequious greengrocer, or a trusted
+friend, hearty and familiar. But he 's always there; and he's always--if
+you don't mind the vernacular--'on the snatch.'"
+
+The Duchessa arched her eyebrows.
+
+"If things are really at such a sorry pass," she said, "I will commend
+my former proposal to you with increased confidence. You should keep a
+dragon. After all, you only wish to protect your garden; and that"--she
+embraced it with her glance--"is not so very big. You could teach
+your dragon, if you procured one of an intelligent breed, to devour
+greengrocers, trusted friends, and even moneylenders too (tough though
+no doubt they are), as well as sparrows."
+
+"Your proposal is a surrender to my contention," said Peter. "You would
+set a snatcher to catch the snatchers. Other heights in other lives,
+perhaps. But in the dark backward and abysm of space to which our lives
+are confined, the snatcher is indigenous and inexpugnable."
+
+The Duchessa looked at the sunny landscape, the bright lawns, the high
+bending trees, with the light caught in the network of their million
+leaves; she looked at the laughing white villas westward, the pale-green
+vineyards, the yellow cornfields; she looked at the rushing river, with
+the diamonds sparkling on its surface, at the far-away gleaming snows of
+Monte Sfiorito, at the scintillant blue shy overhead.
+
+Then she looked at Peter, a fine admixture of mirth with something like
+gravity in her smile.
+
+"The dark backward and abysm of space?" she repeated. "And you do not
+wear black spectacles? Then it must be that your eyes themselves are
+just a pair of black-seeing pessimists."
+
+"On the contrary," triumphed Peter, "it is because they are optimists,
+that they suspect there must be forwarder and more luminous regions than
+the Solar System."
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+"I think you have the prettiest mouth, and the most exquisite little
+teeth, and the eyes richest in promise, and the sweetest laughter, of
+any woman out of Paradise," said Peter, in the silence of his soul.
+
+"It is clear I shall never be your match in debate," said she.
+
+Peter made a gesture of deprecating modesty.
+
+"But I wonder," she went on, "whether you would put me down as 'another
+species of snatcher,' if I should ask you to spare me just the merest
+end of a crust of bread?" And she lifted those eyes rich in promise
+appealingly to his.
+
+"Oh, I beg of you--take all I have," he responded, with effusion.
+"But--but how--?"
+
+"Toss," she commanded tersely.
+
+So he tossed what was left of his bread into the air, above the river;
+and the Duchessa, easily, deftly, threw up a hand, and caught it on the
+wing.
+
+"Thank you very much," she laughed, with a little bow.
+
+Then she crumbled the bread, and began to sprinkle the ground with it;
+and in an instant she was the centre of a cloud of birds. Peter was at
+liberty to watch her, to admire the swift grace of her motions, their
+suggestion of delicate strength, of joy in things physical, and the
+lithe elasticity of her figure, against the background of satiny lawn,
+and the further vistas of lofty sunlit trees. She was dressed in white,
+as always--a frock of I know not what supple fabric, that looked as if
+you might have passed it through your ring, and fell in multitudes of
+small soft creases. Two big red roses drooped from her bodice. She wore
+a garden-hat, of white straw, with a big daring rose-red bow, under
+which the dense meshes of her hair, warmly dark, dimly bright, shimmered
+in a blur of brownish gold.
+
+"What vigour, what verve, what health," thought Peter, watching
+her, "what--lean, fresh, fragrant health!" And he had, no doubt, his
+emotions.
+
+She bestowed her bread crumbs on the birds; but she was able, somehow,
+to discriminate mightily in favour of the goldfinches. She would make a
+diversion, the semblance of a fling, with her empty right hand; and the
+too-greedy sparrows would dart off, avid, on that false lead. Whereupon,
+quickly, stealthily, she would rain a little shower of crumbs, from
+her left hand, on the grass beside her, to a confiding group of finches
+assembled there. And if ever a sparrow ventured to intrude his ruffianly
+black beak into this sacred quarter, she would manage, with a kind of
+restrained ferocity, to "shoo" him away, without thereby frightening the
+finches.
+
+And all the while her eyes laughed; and there was colour in her cheeks;
+and there was the forceful, graceful action of her body.
+
+When the bread was finished, she clapped her hands together gently,
+to dust the last mites from them, and looked over at Peter, and smiled
+significantly.
+
+"Yes," he acknowledged, "you outwitted them very skilfully. You, at any
+rate, have no need of a dragon."
+
+"Oh, in default of a dragon, one can do dragon's work oneself," she
+answered lightly. "Or, rather, one can make oneself an instrument of
+justice."
+
+"All the same, I should call it uncommonly hard luck to be born a
+sparrow--within your jurisdiction," he said.
+
+"It is not an affair of luck," said she. "One is born a sparrow--within
+my jurisdiction--for one's sins in a former state.--No, you little
+dovelings"--she turned to a pair of finches on the greensward near her,
+who were lingering, and gazing up into her face with hungry, expectant
+eyes--"I have no more. I have given you my all." And she stretched out
+her open hands, palms downwards, to convince them.
+
+"The sparrows got nothing; and the goldfinches, who got 'your all,'
+grumble because you gave so little," said Peter, sadly. "That is what
+comes of interfering with the laws of Nature." And then, as the two
+birds flew away, "See the dark, doubtful, reproachful glances with which
+they cover you."
+
+"You think they are ungrateful?" she said. "No--listen."
+
+She held up a finger.
+
+For, at that moment, on the branch of an acacia, just over her head, a
+goldfinch began to sing--his thin, sweet, crystalline trill of song.
+
+"Do you call that grumbling?" she asked.
+
+"It implies a grumble," said Peter, "like the 'thank you' of a
+servant dissatisfied with his tip. It's the very least he can do. It's
+perfunctory--I 'm not sure it is n't even ironical."
+
+"Perfunctory! Ironical!" cried the Duchessa. "Look at him! He's warbling
+his delicious little soul out."
+
+They both paused to look and listen.
+
+The bird's gold-red bosom palpitated. He marked his modulations by
+sudden emphatic movements of the head. His eyes were fixed intently
+before him, as if he could actually see and follow the shining thread of
+his song, as it wound away through the air. His performance had all the
+effect of a spontaneous rhapsody. When it was terminated, he looked
+down at his auditors, eager, inquisitive, as who should say, "I hope you
+liked it?"--and then, with a nod clearly meant as a farewell, flew out
+of sight.
+
+The Duchessa smiled again at Peter, with intention.
+
+"You must really try to take a cheerier view of things," she said.
+
+And next instant she too was off, walking slowly, lightly, up the green
+lawns, between the trees, towards the castle, her gown fluttering in the
+breeze, now dazzling white as she came into the sun, now pearly grey as
+she passed into the shade.
+
+"What a woman it is," said Peter to himself, looking after her. "What
+vigour, what verve, what sex! What a woman!"
+
+And, indeed, there was nothing of the too-prevalent epicene in the
+Duchessa's aspect; she was very certainly a woman. "Heavens, how she
+walks!" he cried in a deep whisper.
+
+But then a sudden wave of dejection swept over him. At first he could
+not account for it. By and by, however, a malicious little voice began
+to repeat and repeat within him, "Oh, the futile impression you must
+have made upon her! Oh, the ineptitudes you uttered! Oh, the precious
+opportunity you have misemployed!"
+
+"You are a witch," he said to Marietta. "You've proved it to the hilt. I
+'ve seen the person, and the object is more desperately lost than ever."
+
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+That evening, among the letters Peter received from England, there was
+one from his friend Mrs. Winchfield, which contained certain statistics.
+
+"Your Duchessa di Santangiolo 'was' indeed, as your funny old servant
+told you, English: the only child and heiress of the last Lord Belfont.
+The Belfonts of Lancashire (now, save for your Duchessa, extinct) were
+the most bigoted sort of Roman Catholics, and always educated their
+daughters in foreign convents, and as often as not married them to
+foreigners. The Belfont men, besides, were ever and anon marrying
+foreign wives; so there will be a goodish deal of un-English blood in
+your Duchessa's own ci-devant English veins.
+
+"She was born, as I learn from an indiscretion of my Peerage, in 1870,
+and is, therefore, as near to thirty (the dangerous age!) as to the
+six-and-twenty your droll old Marietta gives her. Her Christian names
+are Beatrice Antonia Teresa Mary--faites en votre choix. She was
+married at nineteen to Baldassarre Agosto, Principe Udeschini, Duca di
+Santangiolo, Marchese di Castellofranco, Count of the Holy Roman Empire,
+Knight of the Holy Ghost and of St. Gregory, (does it take your breath
+away?), who, according to Frontin, died in '93; and as there were no
+children, his brother Felipe Lorenzo succeeded to the titles. A younger
+brother still is Bishop of Sardagna. Cardinal Udeschini is the uncle.
+
+"That, dear child, empties my sack of information. But perhaps I have
+a bigger sack, full of good advice, which I have not yet opened. And
+perhaps, on the whole, I will not open it at all. Only, remember that
+in yonder sentimental Italian lake country, in this summer weather, a
+solitary young man's fancy might be much inclined to turn to thoughts
+of--folly; and keep an eye on my friend Peter Marchdale."
+
+Our solitary young man brooded over Mrs. Winchfield's letter for a long
+while.
+
+"The daughter of a lord, and the widow of a duke, and the niece-in-law
+of a cardinal," he said. "And, as if that were not enough, a bigoted
+Roman Catholic into the bargain.... And yet--and yet," he went on,
+taking heart a little, "as for her bigotry, to judge by her assiduity
+in attending the village church, that factor, at least, thank goodness,
+would appear to be static, rather than dynamic."
+
+After another longish interval of brooding, he sauntered down to the
+riverside, through his fragrant garden, fragrant and fresh with the
+cool odours of the night, and peered into the darkness, towards Castel
+Ventirose. Here and there he could discern a gleam of yellow, where
+some lighted window was not entirely hidden by the trees. Thousands
+and thousands of insects were threading the silence with their shrill
+insistent voices. The repeated wail, harsh, prolonged, eerie, of some
+strange wild creature, bird or beast, came down from the forest of
+the Gnisi. At his feet, on the troubled surface of the Aco, the stars,
+reflected and distorted, shone like broken spearheads.
+
+He lighted a cigarette, and stood there till he had consumed it.
+
+"Heigh-ho!" he sighed at last, and turned back towards the villa. And
+"Yes," he concluded, "I must certainly keep an eye on our friend Peter
+Marchdale."
+
+"But I 'm doubting it's a bit too late--troppo tardo," he said to
+Marietta, whom he found bringing hot water to his dressing-room.
+
+"It is not very late," said Marietta. "Only half-past ten."
+
+"She is a woman--therefore to be loved; she is a duchess--therefore to
+be lost," he explained, in his native tongue.
+
+"Cosa." questioned Marietta, in hers.
+
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Beatrice and Emilia, strolling together in one of the flowery lanes up
+the hillside, between ranks of the omnipresent poplar, and rose-bush
+hedges, or crumbling pink-stuccoed walls that dripped with cyclamen and
+snapdragon, met old Marietta descending, with a basket on her arm.
+
+Marietta courtesied to the ground.
+
+"How do you do, Marietta?" Beatrice asked.
+
+"I can't complain, thank your Grandeur. I have the lumbago on and off
+pretty constantly, and last week I broke a tooth. But I can't complain.
+And your Highness?"
+
+Marietta returned, with brisk aplomb.
+
+Beatrice smiled. "Bene, grazie. Your new master--that young Englishman,"
+she continued, "I hope you find him kind, and easy to do for?"
+
+"Kind--yes, Excellency. Also easy to do for. But--!" Marietta shrugged
+her shoulders, and gave her head two meaning oscillations.
+
+"Oh--?" wondered Beatrice, knitting puzzled brows.
+
+"Very amiable, your Greatness; but simple, simple," Marietta explained,
+and tapped her brown old forehead with a brown forefinger.
+
+"Really--?" wondered Beatrice.
+
+"Yes, Nobility," said Marietta. "Gentle as a canarybird, but innocent,
+innocent."
+
+"You astonish me," Beatrice avowed. "How does he show it?"
+
+"The questions he asks, Most Illustrious, the things he says."
+
+"For example--?" pursued Beatrice.
+
+"For example, your Serenity--" Marietta paused, to search her memory.--
+"Well, for one example, he calls roast veal a fowl. I give him roast veal
+for his luncheon, and he says to me, 'Marietta, this fowl has no wings.'
+But everyone knows, your Mercy, that veal is not a fowl. How should veal
+have wings?"
+
+"How indeed?" assented Beatrice, on a note of commiseration. And if
+the corners of her mouth betrayed a tendency to curve upwards, she
+immediately compelled them down. "But perhaps he does not speak Italian
+very well?" she suggested.
+
+"Mache, Potenza! Everyone speaks Italian," cried Marietta.
+
+"Indeed?" said Beatrice.
+
+"Naturally, your Grace--all Christians," Marietta declared.
+
+"Oh, I did n't know," said Beatrice, meekly. "Well," she acknowledged,
+"since he speaks Italian, it is certainly unreasonable of him to call
+veal a fowl."
+
+"But that, Magnificence," Marietta went on, warming to her theme, "that
+is only one of his simplicities. He asks me, 'Who puts the whitewash on
+Monte Sfiorito? 'And when I tell him that it is not whitewash, but
+snow, he says, 'How do you know?' But everyone knows that it is snow.
+Whitewash!"
+
+The sprightly old woman gave her whole body a shake, for the better
+exposition of her state of mind. And thereupon, from the interior of her
+basket, issued a plaintive little squeal.
+
+"What have you in your basket?" Beatrice asked.
+
+"A little piglet, Nobility--un piccolo porcellino," said Marietta.
+
+And lifting the cover an inch or two, she displayed the anxious face of
+a poor little sucking pig.
+
+"E carino?" she demanded, whilst her eyes beamed with a pride that
+almost seemed maternal.
+
+"What on earth are you going to do with him?" Beatrice gasped.
+
+The light of pride gave place to a light of resolution, in Marietta's
+eyes.
+
+"Kill him, Mightiness," was her grim response; "stuff him with almonds,
+raisins, rosemary, and onions; cook him sweet and sour; and serve him,
+garnished with rosettes of beet-root, for my Signorino's Sunday dinner."
+
+"Oh-h-h!" shuddered Beatrice and Emilia, in a breath; and they resumed
+their walk.
+
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+Francois was dining--with an appearance of great fervour.
+
+Peter sat on his rustic bench, by the riverside, and watched him,
+smoking a cigarette the while.
+
+The Duchessa di Santangiolo stood screened by a tree in the park of
+Ventirose, and watched them both.
+
+Francois wore a wide blue ribbon round his pink and chubby neck; and his
+dinner consisted of a big bowlful of bread and milk.
+
+Presently the Duchessa stepped forth from her ambush, into the sun, and
+laughed.
+
+"What a sweetly pretty scene," she said. "Pastoral--idyllic--it reminds
+one of Theocritus--it reminds one of Watteau."
+
+Peter threw his cigarette into the river, and made an obeisance.
+
+"I am very glad you feel the charm of it," he responded. "May I be
+permitted to present Master Francois Vllon?"
+
+"We have met before," said the Duchessa, graciously smiling upon
+Francois, and inclining her head.
+
+"Oh, I did n't know," said Peter, apologetic.
+
+"Yes," said the Duchessa, "and in rather tragical circumstances. But
+at that time he was anonymous. Why--if you won't think my curiosity
+impertinent--why Francois Villon?"
+
+"Why not?" said Peter. "He made such a tremendous outcry when he was
+condemned to death, for one thing. You should have heard him. He has
+a voice! Then, for another, he takes such a passionate interest in his
+meat and drink. And then, if you come to that, I really had n't the
+heart to call him Pauvre Lelian."
+
+The Duchessa raised amused eyebrows.
+
+"You felt that Pauvre Lelian was the only alternative?"
+
+"I had in mind a remark of Pauvre Lilian's friend and confrere, the
+cryptic Stephane," Peter answered. "You will remember it. 'L'ame d'un
+poete dans le corps d'un--' I--I forget the last word," he faltered.
+
+"Shall we say 'little pig'?" suggested the Duchessa.
+
+"Oh, please don't," cried Peter, hastily, with a gesture of
+supplication. "Don't say 'pig' in his presence. You'll wound his
+feelings."
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+"I knew he was condemned to death," she owned. "Indeed, it was in his
+condemned cell that I made his acquaintance. Your Marietta Cignolesi
+introduced us. Her air was so inexorable, I 'm a good deal surprised to
+see him alive to-day. There was some question of a stuffing of rosemary
+and onions."
+
+"Ah, I see," said Peter, "I see that you're familiar with the whole
+disgraceful story. Yes, Marietta, the unspeakable old Tartar, was
+all for stuffing him with rosemary and onions. But he could not bring
+himself to share her point of view. He screamed his protest, like a man,
+in twenty different octaves. You really should have heard him. His voice
+is of a compass, of a timbre, of an expressiveness! Passive endurance, I
+fear, is not his forte. For the sake of peace and silence, I intervened,
+interceded. She had her knife at his very throat. I was not an instant
+too soon. So, of course, I 've had to adopt him."
+
+"Of course, poor man," sympathised the Duchessa. "It's a recognised
+principle that if you save a fellow's life, you 're bound to him for
+the rest of yours. But--but won't you find him rather a burdensome
+responsibility when he's grownup?" she reflected.
+
+"--Que voulez-vous?" reflected Peter. "Burdensome responsibilities
+are the appointed accompaniments of man's pilgrimage. Why not Francois
+Villon, as well as another? And besides, as the world is at present
+organised, a member of the class vulgarly styled 'the rich' can
+generally manage to shift his responsibilities, when they become too
+irksome, upon the backs of the poor. For example--Marietta! Marietta!"
+he called, raising his voice a little, and clapping his hands.
+
+Marietta came. When she had made her courtesy to the Duchessa, and
+a polite enquiry as to her Excellency's health, Peter said, with
+an indicative nod of the head, "Will you be so good as to remove my
+responsibility?"
+
+"Il porcellino?" questioned Marietta.
+
+"Ang," said he.
+
+And when Marietta had borne Francois, struggling and squealing in her
+arms, from the foreground--
+
+"There--you see how it is done," he remarked.
+
+The Duchessa laughed.
+
+"An object-lesson," she agreed. "An object-lesson in--might n't one call
+it the science of Applied Cynicism?"
+
+"Science!" Peter plaintively repudiated the word. "No, no. I was rather
+flattering myself it was an art."
+
+"Apropos of art--" said the Duchessa.
+
+She came down two or three steps nearer to the brink of the river. She
+produced from behind her back a hand that she had kept there, and held
+up for Peter's inspection a grey-and-gold bound book.
+
+"Apropos of art, I've been reading a novel. Do you know it?"
+
+Peter glanced at the grey-and-gold binding--and dissembled the emotion
+that suddenly swelled big in his heart.
+
+He screwed his eyeglass into his eye, and gave an intent look.
+
+"I can't make out the title," he temporised, shaking his head, and
+letting his eyeglass drop.
+
+On the whole, it was very well acted; and I hope the occult little smile
+that played about the Duchessa's lips was a smile of appreciation.
+
+"It has a highly appropriate title," she said. "It is called 'A Man of
+Words,' by an author I've never happened to hear of before, named Felix
+Wildmay."
+
+"Oh, yes. How very odd," said Peter. "By a curious chance, I know it
+very well. But I 'm surprised to discover that you do. How on earth did
+it fall into your hands?"
+
+"Why on earth shouldn't it?" wondered she. "Novels are intended to fall
+into people's hands, are they not?"
+
+"I believe so," he assented. "But intentions, in this vale of tears,
+are not always realised, are they? Anyhow, 'A Man of Words' is not like
+other novels. It's peculiar."
+
+"Peculiar--?" she repeated.
+
+"Of a peculiar, of an unparalleled obscurity," he explained. "There has
+been no failure approaching it since What's-his-name invented printing.
+I hadn't supposed that seven copies of it were in circulation."
+
+"Really?" said the Duchessa. "A correspondent of mine in London
+recommended it. But--in view of its unparalleled obscurity is n't it
+almost equally a matter for surprise that you should know it?"
+
+"It would be, sure enough," consented Peter, "if it weren't that I just
+happen also to know the author."
+
+"Oh--? You know the author?" cried the Duchessa, with animation.
+
+"Comme ma poche," said Peter. "We were boys together."
+
+"Really?" said she. "What a coincidence."
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+"And--and his book?" Her eyebrows went up, interrogative. "I expect, as
+you know the man, you think rather poorly of it?"
+
+"On the contrary, in the teeth of verisimilitude, I think extremely
+well of it," he answered firmly. "I admire it immensely. I think it's
+an altogether ripping little book. I think it's one of the nicest little
+books I've read for ages.
+
+"How funny," said she.
+
+"Why funny?" asked he.
+
+"It's so unlikely that one should seem a genius to one's old familiar
+friends."
+
+"Did I say he seemed a genius to me? I misled you. He does n't. In fact,
+he very frequently seems--but, for Charity's sake, I 'd best forbear
+to tell. However, I admire his book. And--to be entirely frank--it's a
+constant source of astonishment to me that he should ever have been able
+to do anything one-tenth so good."
+
+The Duchessa smiled pensively.
+
+"Ah, well," she mused, "we must assume that he has happy moments--or,
+perhaps, two soul-sides, one to face the world with, one to show his
+manuscripts when he's writing. You hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.
+That, indeed, is only natural, on the part of an old friend. But you
+pique my interest. What is the trouble with him? Is--is he conceited,
+for example?"
+
+"The trouble with him?" Peter pondered. "Oh, it would be too long and
+too sad a story. Should I anatomise him to you as he is, I must blush
+and weep, and you must look pale and wonder. He has pretty nearly
+every weakness, not to mention vices, that flesh is heir to. But as for
+conceit... let me see. He concurs in my own high opinion of his work, I
+believe; but I don't know whether, as literary men go, it would be fair
+to call him conceited. He belongs, at any rate, to the comparatively
+modest minority who do not secretly fancy that Shakespeare has come back
+to life."
+
+"That Shakespeare has come back to life!" marvelled the Duchessa. "Do
+you mean to say that most literary men fancy that?"
+
+"I think perhaps I am acquainted with three who don't," Peter replied;
+"but one of them merely wears his rue with a difference. He fancies that
+it's Goethe."
+
+"How extravagantly--how exquisitely droll!" she laughed.
+
+"I confess, it struck me so, until I got accustomed to it," said he,
+"until I learned that it was one of the commonplaces, one of the normal
+attributes of the literary temperament. It's as much to be taken
+for granted, when you meet an author, as the tail is to be taken for
+granted, when you meet a cat."
+
+"I'm vastly your debtor for the information--it will stand me in stead
+with the next author who comes my way. But, in that case, your friend
+Mr. Felix Wildmay will be, as it were, a sort of Manx cat?" was her
+smiling deduction.
+
+"Yes, if you like, in that particular, a sort of Manx cat," acquiesced
+Peter, with a laugh.
+
+The Duchessa laughed too; and then there was a little pause.
+
+Overhead, never so light a breeze lisped never so faintly in the
+tree-tops; here and there bird-notes fell, liquid, desultory, like drops
+of rain after a shower; and constantly one heard the cool music of the
+river. The sun, filtering through worlds and worlds of leaves, shed upon
+everything a green-gold penumbra. The air, warm and still, was sweet
+with garden-scents. The lake, according to its habit at this hour of
+the afternoon, had drawn a grey veil over its face, a thin grey veil,
+through which its sapphire-blue shone furtively. Far away, in the summer
+haze, Monte Sfiorito seemed a mere dim spectre of itself--a stranger
+might easily have mistaken it for a vague mass of cloud floating above
+the horizon.
+
+"Are you aware that it 's a singularly lovely afternoon?" the Duchessa
+asked, by and by.
+
+"I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so," Peter hazarded, with the
+least perceptible approach to a meaning bow.
+
+In the Duchessa's face, perhaps, there flickered, for half-a-second, the
+least perceptible light, as of a comprehending and unresentful smile.
+But she went on, with fine aloofness.
+
+"I rather envy you your river, you know. We are too far from it at
+the castle. Is n't the sound, the murmur, of it delicious? And its
+colour--how does it come by such a subtle colour? Is it green? Is it
+blue? And the diamonds on its surface--see how they glitter. You know,
+of course," she questioned, "who the owner is of those unequalled gems?"
+
+"Surely," Peter answered, "the lady paramount of this demesne?"
+
+"No, no." She shook her head, smiling. "Undine. They are Undine's--her
+necklaces and tiaras. No mortal woman's jewel-case contains anything
+half so brilliant. But look at them--look at the long chains of
+them--how they float for a minute--and are then drawn down. They are
+Undine's--Undine and her companions are sporting with them just below
+the surface. A moment ago I caught a glimpse of a white arm."
+
+"Ah," said Peter, nodding thoughtfully, "that's what it is to have 'the
+seeing eye.' But I'm grieved to hear of Undine in such a wanton mood. I
+had hoped she would still be weeping her unhappy love-affair."
+
+"What! with that horrid, stolid German--Hildebrandt, was his name?"
+cried the Duchessa. "Not she! Long ago, I'm glad to say, she learned to
+laugh at that, as a mere caprice of her immaturity. However, this is a
+digression. I want to return to our 'Man of Words.' Tell me--what is the
+quality you especially like in it?"
+
+"I like its every quality," Peter affirmed, unblushing. "Its style,
+its finish, its concentration; its wit, humour, sentiment; its texture,
+tone, atmosphere; its scenes, its subject; the paper it's printed
+on, the type, the binding. But above all, I like its heroine. I think
+Pauline de Fleuvieres the pearl of human women--the cleverest, the
+loveliest, the most desirable, the most exasperating. And also the most
+feminine. I can't think of her at all as a mere fiction, a mere shadow
+on paper. I think of her as a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood woman,
+whom I have actually known. I can see her before me now--I can see
+her eyes, full of mystery and mischief--I can see her exquisite little
+teeth, as she smiles--I can see her hair, her hands--I can almost catch
+the perfume of her garments. I 'm utterly infatuated with her--I could
+commit a hundred follies for her."
+
+"Mercy!" exclaimed the Duchessa. "You are enthusiastic."
+
+"The book's admirers are so few, they must endeavour to make up in
+enthusiasm what they lack in numbers," he submitted.
+
+"But--at that rate--why are they so few?" she puzzled. "If the book is
+all you think it, how do you account for its unpopularity?"
+
+"It could never conceivably be anything but unpopular," said he. "It has
+the fatal gift of beauty."
+
+The Duchessa laughed surprise.
+
+"Is beauty a fatal gift--in works of art?"
+
+"Yes--in England," he declared.
+
+"In England? Why especially in England?"
+
+"In English-speaking--in Anglo-Saxon lands, if you prefer. The
+Anglo-Saxon public is beauty-blind. They have fifty religions--only one
+sauce--and no sense of beauty whatsoever. They can see the nose on one's
+face--the mote in their neighbour's eye; they can see when a bargain is
+good, when a war will be expedient. But the one thing they can never see
+is beauty. And when, by some rare chance, you catch them in the act of
+admiring a beautiful object, it will never be for its beauty--it will be
+in spite of its beauty for some other, some extra-aesthetic interest it
+possesses--some topical or historical interest. Beauty is necessarily
+detached from all that is topical or historical, or documentary or
+actual. It is also necessarily an effect of fine shades, delicate
+values, vanishing distinctions, of evasiveness, inconsequence,
+suggestion. It is also absolute, unrelated--it is positive or negative
+or superlative--it is never comparative. Well, the Anglo-Saxon public
+is totally insensible to such things. They can no more feel them, than a
+blind worm can feel the colours of the rainbow."
+
+She laughed again, and regarded him with an air of humorous meditation.
+
+"And that accounts for the unsuccess of 'A Man of Words'?"
+
+"You might as well offer Francois Villon a banquet of Orient pearls."
+
+"You are bitterly hard on the Anglo-Saxon public."
+
+"Oh, no," he disclaimed, "not hard--but just. I wish them all sorts of
+prosperity, with a little more taste."
+
+"Oh, but surely," she caught him up, "if their taste were greater, their
+prosperity would be less?"
+
+"I don't know," said he. "The Greeks were fairly prosperous, were n't
+they? And the Venetians? And the French are not yet quite bankrupt."
+
+Still again she laughed--always with that little air of humorous
+meditation.
+
+"You--you don't exactly overwhelm one with compliments," she observed.
+
+He looked alarm, anxiety.
+
+"Don't I? What have I neglected?" he cried.
+
+"You 've never once evinced the slightest curiosity to learn what I
+think of the book in question."
+
+"Oh, I'm sure you like it," he rejoined hardily. "You have 'the seeing
+eye.'"
+
+"And yet I'm just a humble member of the Anglo-Saxon public."
+
+"No--you're a distinguished member of the Anglo-Saxon 'remnant.' Thank
+heaven, there's a remnant, a little scattered remnant. I'm perfectly
+sure you like 'A Man of Words.'"
+
+"'Like it' is a proposition so general. Perhaps I am burning to tell
+someone what I think of it in detail."
+
+She smiled into his eyes, a trifle oddly.
+
+"If you are, then I know someone who is burning to hear you," he avowed.
+
+"Well, then, I think--I think..." she began, on a note of deliberation.
+"But I 'm afraid, just now, it would take too long to formulate my
+thought. Perhaps I'll try another day."
+
+She gave him a derisory little nod--and in a minute was well up the
+lawn, towards the castle.
+
+Peter glared after her, his fists clenched, teeth set.
+
+"You fiend!" he muttered. Then, turning savagely upon himself, "You
+duffer!"
+
+Nevertheless, that evening, he said to Marietta, "The plot thickens.
+We've advanced a step. We've reached what the vulgar call a
+psychological moment. She's seen my Portrait of a Lady. But as yet, if
+you can believe me, she doesn't dream who painted it; and she has n't
+recognised the subject. As if one were to face one's image in the glass,
+and take it for another's! 3--I 'll--I 'll double your wages--if you
+will induce events to hurry up."
+
+However, as he spoke English, Marietta was in no position to profit by
+his offer.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Peter was walking in the high-road, on the other side of the river--the
+great high-road that leads from Bergamo to Milan.
+
+It was late in the afternoon, and already, in the west, the sky was
+beginning to put on some of its sunset splendours. In the east, framed
+to Peter's vision by parallel lines of poplars, it hung like a curtain
+of dark-blue velvet.
+
+Peter sat on the grass, by the roadside, in the shadow of a hedge--a
+rose-bush hedge, of course--and lighted a cigarette.
+
+Far down the long white road, against the blue velvet sky, between the
+poplars, two little spots of black, two small human figures, were moving
+towards him.
+
+Half absently, he let his eyes accompany them.
+
+As they came nearer, they defined themselves as a boy and a girl.
+Nearer still, he saw that they were ragged and dusty and barefoot.
+
+The boy had three or four gaudy-hued wicker baskets slung over his
+shoulder.
+
+Vaguely, tacitly, Peter supposed that they would be the children of some
+of the peasants of the countryside, on their way home from the village.
+
+As they arrived abreast of him, they paid him the usual peasants'
+salute. The boy lifted a tattered felt hat from his head, the girl
+bobbed a courtesy, and "Buona sera, Eccellenza," they said in concert,
+without, however, pausing in their march.
+
+Peter put his hand in his pocket.
+
+"Here, little girl," he called.
+
+The little girl glanced at him, doubting.
+
+"Come here," he said.
+
+Her face a question, she came up to him; and he gave her a few coppers.
+
+"To buy sweetmeats," he said.
+
+"A thousand thanks; Excellency," said she, bobbing another courtesy.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency," said the boy, from his distance, again
+lifting his rag of a hat.
+
+And they trudged on.
+
+But Peter looked after them--and his heart smote him. They were clearly
+of the poorest of the poor. He thought of Hansel and Gretel. Why had he
+given them so little? He called to them to stop.
+
+The little girl came running back.
+
+Peter rose to meet her.
+
+"You may as well buy some ribbons too," he said, and gave her a couple
+of lire.
+
+She looked at the money with surprise--even with an appearance of
+hesitation. Plainly, it was a sum, in her eyes.
+
+"It's all right. Now run along," said Peter.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency," said she, with a third courtesy, and
+rejoined her brother....
+
+"Where are they going?" asked a voice.
+
+Peter faced about.
+
+There stood the Duchessa, in a bicycling costume, her bicycle beside
+her. Her bicycling costume was of blue serge, and she wore a jaunty
+sailor-hat with a blue ribbon. Peter (in spite of the commotion in his
+breast) was able to remember that this was the first time he had seen
+her in anything but white.
+
+Her attention was all upon the children, whom he, perhaps, had more or
+less banished to Cracklimbo.
+
+"Where are they going?" she repeated, trouble in her voice and in her
+eyes.
+
+Peter collected himself.
+
+"The children? I don't know--I didn't ask. Home, aren't they?"
+
+"Home? Oh, no. They don't live hereabouts," she said. "I know all the
+poor of this neighbourhood.--Ohe there! Children! Children!" she cried.
+
+But they were quite a hundred yards away, and did not hear.
+
+"Do you wish them to come back?" asked Peter.
+
+"Yes--of course," she answered, with a shade of impatience.
+
+He put his fingers to his lips (you know the schoolboy accomplishment),
+and gave a long whistle.
+
+That the children did hear.
+
+They halted, and turned round, looking, enquiring.
+
+"Come back--come back!" called the Duchessa, raising her hand, and
+beckoning.
+
+They came back.
+
+"The pathetic little imps," she murmured while they were on the way.
+
+The boy was a sturdy, square-built fellow, of twelve, thirteen, with
+a shock of brown hair, brown cheeks, and sunny brown eyes; with
+a precocious air of doggedness, of responsibility. He wore an old
+tail-coat, the tail-coat of a man, ragged, discoloured, falling to his
+ankles.
+
+The girl was ten or eleven, pale, pinched; hungry, weary, and sorry
+looking. Her hair too had been brown, upon a time; but now it was faded
+to something near the tint of ashes, and had almost the effect of being
+grey. Her pale little forehead was crossed by thin wrinkles, lines of
+pain, of worry, like an old woman's.
+
+The Duchessa, pushing her bicycle, and followed by Peter, moved down
+the road, to meet them. Peter had never been so near to her before--at
+moments her arm all but brushed his sleeve. I think he blessed the
+children.
+
+"Where are you going?" the Duchessa asked, softly, smiling into the
+girl's sad little face.
+
+The girl had shown no fear of Peter; but apparently she was somewhat
+frightened by this grand lady. The toes of her bare feet worked
+nervously in the dust. She hung her head shyly, and eyed her brother.
+
+But the brother, removing his hat, with the bow of an Italian
+peasant--and that is to say, the bow of a courtier--spoke up bravely.
+
+"To Turin, Nobility."
+
+He said it in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, quite as he might have
+said, "To the next farm-house."
+
+The Duchessa, however, had not bargained for an answer of this measure.
+Startled, doubting her ears perhaps, "To--Turin--!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, Excellency," said the boy.
+
+"But--but Turin--Turin is hundreds of kilometres from here," she said,
+in a kind of gasp.
+
+"Yes, Excellency," said the boy.
+
+"You are going to Turin--you two children--walking--like that!" she
+persisted.
+
+"Yes, Excellency."
+
+"But--but it will take you a month."
+
+"Pardon, noble lady," said the boy. "With your Excellency's permission,
+we were told it should take fifteen days."
+
+"Where do you come from?" she asked.
+
+"From Bergamo, Excellency."
+
+"When did you leave Bergamo?"
+
+"Yesterday morning, Excellency."
+
+"The little girl is your sister?"
+
+"Yes, Excellency."
+
+"Have you a mother and father?"
+
+"A father, Excellency. The mother is dead." Each of the children made
+the Sign of the Cross; and Peter was somewhat surprised, no doubt, to
+see the Duchessa do likewise. He had yet to learn the beautiful custom
+of that pious Lombard land, whereby, when the Dead are mentioned, you
+make the Sign of the Cross, and, pausing reverently for a moment, say in
+silence the traditional prayer of the Church:
+
+"May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the
+Mercy of God, rest in peace."
+
+"And where is your father?" the Duchessa asked.
+
+"In Turin, Excellency," answered the boy. "He is a glass-blower. After
+the strike at Bergamo, he went to Turin to seek work. Now he has found
+it. So he has sent for us to come to him."
+
+"And you two children--alone--are going to walk all the way to Turin!"
+She could not get over the pitiful wonder of it.
+
+"Yes, Excellency."
+
+"The heart-rending little waifs," she said, in English, with something
+like a sob. Then, in Italian, "But--but how do you live by the way?"
+
+The boy touched his shoulder-load of baskets.
+
+"We sell these, Excellency."
+
+"What is their price?" she asked.
+
+"Thirty soldi, Excellency."
+
+"Have you sold many since you started?"
+
+The boy looked away; and now it was his turn to hang his head, and to
+let his toes work nervously in the dust.
+
+"Haven't you sold any?" she exclaimed, drawing her conclusions.
+
+"No, Excellency. The people would not buy," he owned, in a dull voice,
+keeping his eyes down.
+
+"Poverino," she murmured. "Where are you going to sleep to-night?"
+
+"In a house, Excellency," said he.
+
+But that seemed to strike the Duchessa as somewhat vague.
+
+"In what house?" she asked.
+
+"I do not know, Excellency," he confessed. "We will find a house."
+
+"Would you like to come back with me, and sleep at my house?"
+
+The boy and girl looked at each other, taking mute counsel.
+
+Then, "Pardon, noble lady--with your Excellency's permission, is it
+far?" the boy questioned.
+
+"I am afraid it is not very near--three or four kilometres."
+
+Again the children looked at each other, conferring. Afterwards, the boy
+shook his head.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency. With your permission, we must not turn
+back. We must walk on till later. At night we will find a house."
+
+"They are too proud to own that their house will be a hedge," she said
+to Peter, again in English. "Aren't you hungry?" she asked the children.
+
+"No, Excellency. We had bread in the village, below there," answered the
+boy.
+
+"You will not come home with me, and have a good dinner, and a good
+night's sleep?"
+
+"Pardon, Excellency. With your favour, the father would not wish us to
+turn back."
+
+The Duchessa looked at the little girl.
+
+The little girl wore a medal of the Immaculate Conception on a ribbon
+round her neck--a forlorn blue ribbon, soiled and frayed.
+
+"Oh, you have a holy medal," said the Duchessa.
+
+"Yes, noble lady," said the girl, dropping a courtesy, and lifting up
+her sad little weazened face.
+
+"She has been saying her prayers all along the road," the boy
+volunteered.
+
+"That is right," approved the Duchessa. "You have not made your First
+Communion yet, have you?"
+
+"No, Excellency," said the girl. "I shall make it next year."
+
+"And you?" the Duchessa asked the boy.
+
+"I made mine at Corpus Christi," said the boy, with a touch of pride.
+
+The Duchessa turned to Peter.
+
+"Do you know, I haven't a penny in my pocket. I have come out without my
+purse."
+
+"How much ought one to give them?" Peter asked.
+
+"Of course, there is the fear that they might be robbed," she reflected.
+"If one should give them a note of any value, they would have to change
+it; and they would probably be robbed. What to do?"
+
+"I will speak to the boy," said Peter. "Would you like to go to Turin by
+train?" he asked.
+
+The boy and girl looked at each other. "Yes, Excellency," said the boy.
+
+"But if I give you money for your fare, will you know how to take care
+of it--how to prevent people from robbing you?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Excellency."
+
+"You could take the train this evening, at Venzona, about two kilometres
+from here, in the direction you are walking. In an hour or two you would
+arrive at Milan; there you would change into the train for Turin. You
+would be at Turin to-morrow morning."
+
+"Yes, Excellency."
+
+"But if I give you money, you will not let people rob you? If I give you
+a hundred lire?"
+
+The boy drew back, stared, as if frightened.
+
+"A hundred lire--?" he said.
+
+"Yes," said Peter.
+
+The boy looked at his sister.
+
+"Pardon, Nobility," he said. "With your condescension, does it cost a
+hundred lire to go to Turin by train?"
+
+"Oh, no. I think it costs eight or ten."
+
+Again the boy looked at his sister.
+
+"Pardon, Nobility. With your Excellency's permission, we should not
+desire a hundred lire then," he said.
+
+Peter and the Duchessa were not altogether to be blamed, I hope, if they
+exchanged the merest hint of a smile.
+
+"Well, if I should give you fifty?" Peter asked.
+
+"Fifty lire, Excellency?"
+
+Peter nodded.
+
+Still again the boy sought counsel of his sister, with his eyes.
+
+"Yes, Excellency," he said.
+
+"You are sure you will be able to take care of it--you will not let
+people rob you," the Duchessa put in, anxious. "They will wish to
+rob you. If you go to sleep in the train, they will try to pick your
+pocket."
+
+"I will hide it, noble lady. No one shall rob me. If I go to sleep in
+the train, I will sit on it, and my sister will watch. If she goes to
+sleep, I will watch," the boy promised confidently.
+
+"You must give it to him in the smallest change you can possibly scrape
+together," she advised Peter.
+
+And with one-lira, two-lira, ten-lira notes, and with a little silver
+and copper, he made up the amount.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency," said the boy, with a bow that was
+magnificent; and he proceeded to distribute the money between various
+obscure pockets.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Excellency," said the girl, with a courtesy.
+
+"Addio, a buon' viaggio," said Peter.
+
+"Addio, Eccellenze," said the boy.
+
+"Addio, Eccellenze," said the girl.
+
+But the Duchessa impulsively stooped down, and kissed the girl on her
+poor little wrinkled brow. And when she stood up, Peter saw that her
+eyes were wet.
+
+The children moved off. They moved off, whispering together, and
+gesticulating, after the manner of their race: discussing something.
+Presently they stopped; and the boy came running back, while his sister
+waited.
+
+He doffed his hat, and said, "A thousand pardons, Excellency-"
+
+"Yes? What is it?" Peter asked.
+
+"With your Excellency's favour--is it obligatory that we should take the
+train?"
+
+"Obligatory?" puzzled Peter. "How do you mean?"
+
+"If it is not obligatory, we would prefer, with the permission of your
+Excellency, to save the money."
+
+"But--but then you will have to walk!" cried Peter.
+
+"But if it is not obligatory to take the train, we would pray your
+Excellency's permission to save the money. We should like to save the
+money, to give it to the father. The father is very poor. Fifty lire is
+so much."
+
+This time it was Peter who looked for counsel to the Duchessa.
+
+Her eyes, still bright with tears, responded, "Let them do as they
+will."
+
+"No, it is not obligatory--it is only recommended," he said to the boy,
+with a smile that he could n't help. "Do as you will. But if I were you,
+I should spare my poor little feet."
+
+"Mille grazie, Eccellenze," the boy said, with a final sweep of his
+tattered hat. He ran back to his sister; and next moment they were
+walking resolutely on, westward, "into the great red light."
+
+
+The Duchessa and Peter were silent for a while, looking after them.
+
+They dwindled to dots in the distance, and then, where the road turned,
+disappeared.
+
+At last the Duchessa spoke--but almost as if speaking to herself.
+
+"There, Felix Wildmay, you writer of tales, is a subject made to your
+hand," she said.
+
+We may guess whether Peter was startled. Was it possible that she had
+found him out? A sound, confused, embarrassed, something composite,
+between an oh and ayes, seemed to expire in his throat.
+
+But the Duchessa did n't appear to heed it.
+
+"Don't you think it would be a touching episode for your friend to write
+a story round?" she asked.
+
+We may guess whether he was relieved.
+
+"Oh--oh, yes," he agreed, with the precipitancy of a man who, in his
+relief, would agree to anything.
+
+"Have you ever seen such courage?" she went on. "The wonderful babies!
+Fancy fifteen days, fifteen days and nights, alone, unprotected, on the
+highway, those poor little atoms! Down in their hearts they are really
+filled with terror. Who would n't be, with such a journey before him?
+But how finely they concealed it, mastered it! Oh, I hope they won't be
+robbed. God help them--God help them!"
+
+"God help them, indeed," said Peter.
+
+"And the little girl, with her medal of the Immaculate Conception. The
+father, after all, can hardly be the brute one might suspect, since he
+has given them a religious education. Oh, I am sure, I am sure, it was
+the Blessed Virgin herself who sent us across their path, in answer to
+that poor little creature's prayers."
+
+"Yes," said Peter, ambiguously perhaps. But he liked the way in which
+she united him to herself in the pronoun.
+
+"Which, of course," she added, smiling gravely into his eyes, "seems the
+height of absurdity to you?"
+
+"Why should it seem the height of absurdity to me?" he asked.
+
+"You are a Protestant, I suppose?"
+
+"I suppose so. But what of that? At all events, I believe there are
+more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the usual
+philosophies. And I see no reason why it should not have been the
+Blessed Virgin who sent us across their path."
+
+"What would your Protestant pastors and masters do, if they heard you?
+Isn't that what they call Popish superstition?"
+
+"I daresay. But I'm not sure that there's any such thing as
+superstition. Superstition, in its essence, is merely a recognition of
+the truth that in a universe of mysteries and contradictions, like ours,
+nothing conceivable or inconceivable is impossible."
+
+"Oh, no, no," she objected. "Superstition is the belief in something
+that is ugly and bad and unmeaning. That is the difference between
+superstition and religion. Religion is the belief in something that is
+beautiful and good and significant--something that throws light into the
+dark places of life--that helps us to see and to live."
+
+"Yes," said Peter, "I admit the distinction." After a little suspension,
+"I thought," he questioned, "that all Catholics were required to go to
+Mass on Sunday?"
+
+"Of course--so they are," said she.
+
+"But--but you--" he began.
+
+"I hear Mass not on Sunday only--I hear it every morning of my life."
+
+"Oh? Indeed? I beg your pardon," he stumbled. "I--one--one never sees
+you at the village church."
+
+"No. We have a chapel and a chaplain at the castle."
+
+She mounted her bicycle.
+
+"Good-bye," she said, and lightly rode away.
+
+"So-ho! Her bigotry is not such a negligible quantity, after all," Peter
+concluded.
+
+"But what," he demanded of Marietta, as she ministered to his wants
+at dinner, "what does one barrier more or less matter, when people are
+already divided by a gulf that never can be traversed? You see that
+river?" He pointed through his open window to the Aco. "It is a symbol.
+She stands on one side of it, I stand on the other, and we exchange
+little jokes. But the river is always there, flowing between us,
+separating us. She is the daughter of a lord, and the widow of a duke,
+and the fairest of her sex, and a millionaire, and a Roman Catholic.
+What am I? Oh, I don't deny I 'm clever. But for the rest? ... My
+dear Marietta, I am simply, in one word, the victim of a misplaced
+attachment."
+
+"Non capisco Francese," said Marietta.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+And after that, for I forget how many days, Peter and the Duchessa did
+not meet; and so he sank low and lower in his mind.
+
+Nothing that can befall us, optimists aver, is without its value; and
+this, I have heard, is especially true if we happen to be literary men.
+All is grist that comes to a writer's mill.
+
+By his present experience, accordingly, Peter learned--and in the
+regretful prose of some future masterpiece will perhaps be enabled to
+remember--how exceeding great is the impatience of the lovesick,
+with what febrile vehemence the smitten heart can burn, and to
+what improbable lengths hours and minutes can on occasions stretch
+themselves.
+
+He tried many methods of distraction.
+
+There was always the panorama of his valley--the dark-blue lake, pale
+Monte Sfiorito, the frowning Gnisi, the smiling uplands westward. There
+were always the sky, the clouds, the clear sunshine, the crisp-etched
+shadows; and in the afternoon there was always the wondrous opalescent
+haze of August, filling every distance. There was always his
+garden--there were the great trees, with the light sifting through high
+spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees,
+the butterflies, with their colour, and their fragrance, and their
+music; there was his tinkling fountain, in its nimbus of prismatic
+spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a half-hour's
+walk, there was the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top
+church, its odd little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded
+frescoed house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian
+life:--the cobbler tapping in his stall; women gossiping at their
+toilets; children sprawling in the dirt, chasing each other, shouting;
+men drinking, playing mora, quarrelling, laughing, singing, twanging
+mandolines, at the tables under the withered bush of the wine-shop; and
+two or three more pensive citizens swinging their legs from the parapet
+of the bridge, and angling for fish that never bit, in the impetuous
+stream below.
+
+Peter looked at these things; and, it is to be presumed, he saw them.
+But, for all the joy they gave him, he, this cultivator of the sense of
+beauty, might have been the basest unit of his own purblind Anglo-Saxon
+public. They were the background for an absent figure. They were the
+stage-accessories of a drama whose action was arrested. They were an
+empty theatre.
+
+He tried to read. He had brought a trunkful of books to Villa Floriano;
+but that book had been left behind which could fix his interest now.
+
+He tried to write--and wondered, in a kind of daze, that any man should
+ever have felt the faintest ambition to do a thing so thankless and so
+futile.
+
+"I shall never write again. Writing," he generalised, and possibly not
+without some reason, "when it is n't the sordidest of trades, is a mere
+fatuous assertion of one's egotism. Breaking stones in the street were
+a nobler occupation; weaving ropes of sand were better sport. The only
+things that are worth writing are inexpressible, and can't be written.
+The only things that can be written are obvious and worthless--the very
+crackling of thorns under a pot. Oh, why does n't she turn up?"
+
+And the worst of it was that at any moment, for aught he knew, she might
+turn up. That was the worst of it, and the best. It kept hope alive,
+only to torture hope. It encouraged him to wait, to watch, to expect;
+to linger in his garden, gazing hungry-eyed up the lawns of Ventirose,
+striving to pierce the foliage that embowered the castle; to wander the
+country round-about, scanning every vista, scrutinising every shape and
+shadow, a tweed-clad Gastibelza. At any moment, indeed, she might turn
+up; but the days passed--the hypocritic days--and she did not turn up.
+
+
+Marietta, the kind soul, noticing his despondency, sought in divers
+artless ways to cheer him.
+
+One evening she burst into his sitting-room with the effect of a small
+explosion, excitement in every line of her brown old face and wiry
+little figure.
+
+"The fireflies! The fireflies, Signorino!" she cried, with strenuous
+gestures.
+
+"What fireflies?" asked he, with phlegm.
+
+"It is the feast of St. Dominic. The fireflies have arrived. They
+arrive every year on the feast of St. Dominic. They are the beads of his
+rosary. They are St. Dominic's Aves. There are thousands of them. Come,
+Signorino, Come and see."
+
+Her black eyes snapped. She waved her hands urgently towards the window.
+
+Peter languidly got up, languidly crossed the room, looked out.
+
+There were, in truth, thousands of them, thousands and thousands of tiny
+primrose flames, circling, fluttering, rising, sinking, in the purple
+blackness of the night, like snowflakes in a wind, palpitating like
+hearts of living gold--Jove descending upon Danae invisible.
+
+"Son carin', eh?" cried eager Marietta.
+
+"Hum--yes--pretty enough," he grudgingly acknowledged. "But even so?"
+the ingrate added, as he turned away, and let himself drop back into
+his lounging-chair. "My dear good woman, no amount of prettiness
+can disguise the fundamental banality of things. Your fireflies--St.
+Dominic's beads, if you like--and, apropos of that, do you know what
+they call them in America?--they call them lightning-bugs, if you can
+believe me--remark the difference between southern euphuism and western
+bluntness--your fireflies are pretty enough, I grant. But they are
+tinsel pasted on the Desert of Sahara. They are condiments added to a
+dinner of dust and ashes. Life, trick it out as you will, is just an
+incubus--is just the Old Man of the Sea. Language fails me to convey to
+you any notion how heavily he sits on my poor shoulders. I thought I had
+suffered from ennui in my youth. But the malady merely plays with the
+green fruit; it reserves its serious ravages for the ripe. I can promise
+you 't is not a laughing matter. Have you ever had a fixed idea? Have
+you ever spent days and nights racking your brain, importuning the
+unanswering Powers, to learn whether there was--well, whether there was
+Another Man, for instance? Oh, bring me drink. Bring me Seltzer water
+and Vermouth. I will seek nepenthe at the bottom of the wine-cup."
+
+Was there another man? Why should there not be? And yet was there? In
+her continued absence, the question came back persistently, and scarcely
+contributed to his peace of mind.
+
+
+A few days later, nothing discouraged, "Would you like to have a good
+laugh, Signorino?" Marietta enquired.
+
+"Yes," he answered, apathetic.
+
+"Then do me the favour to come," she said.
+
+She led him out of his garden, to the gate of a neighbouring meadow. A
+beautiful black-horned white cow stood there, her head over the
+bars, looking up and down the road, and now and then uttering a low
+distressful "moo."
+
+"See her," said Marietta.
+
+"I see her. Well--?" said Peter.
+
+"This morning they took her calf from her--to wean it," said Marietta.
+
+"Did they, the cruel things? Well--?" said he.
+
+"And ever since, she has stood there by the gate, looking down the road,
+waiting, calling."
+
+"The poor dear. Well--?" said he.
+
+"But do you not see, Signorino? Look at her eyes. She is
+weeping--weeping like a Christian."
+
+Peter looked-and, sure enough, from the poor cow's eyes tears were
+falling, steadily, rapidly: big limpid tears that trickled down her
+cheek, her great homely hairy cheek, and dropped on the grass: tears of
+helpless pain, uncomprehending endurance. "Why have they done this thing
+to me?" they seemed dumbly to cry.
+
+"Have you ever seen a cow weep before? Is it comical, at least?"
+demanded Marietta, exultant.
+
+"Comical--?" Peter gasped. "Comical--!" he groaned....
+
+But then he spoke to the cow.
+
+"Poor dear--poor dear," he repeated. He patted her soft warm neck, and
+scratched her between the horns and along the dewlap.
+
+"Poor dear--poor dear."
+
+The cow lifted up her head, and rested her great chin on Peter's
+shoulder, breathing upon his face.
+
+"Yes, you know that we are companions in misery, don't you?" he said.
+"They have taken my calf from me too--though my calf, indeed, was only a
+calf in an extremely metaphorical sense--and it never was exactly mine,
+anyhow--I daresay it's belonged from the beginning to another man. You,
+at least, have n't that gall and wormwood added to your cup. And now
+you must really try to pull yourself together. It's no good crying. And
+besides, there are more calves in the sea than have ever been taken from
+it. You'll have a much handsomer and fatter one next time. And besides,
+you must remember that your loss subserves someone else's gain--the
+farmer would never have done it if it hadn't been to his advantage.
+If you 're an altruist, that should comfort you. And you must n't mind
+Marietta,--you must n't mind her laughter. Marietta is a Latin. The
+Latin conception of what is laughable differs by the whole span of
+heaven from the Teuton. You and I are Teutons."
+
+"Teutons--?" questioned Marietta wrinkling her brow.
+
+"Yes--Germanic," said he.
+
+"But I thought the Signorino was English?"
+
+"So he is."
+
+"But the cow is not Germanic. White, with black horns, that is the
+purest Roman breed, Signorino."
+
+"Fa niente," he instructed her. "Cows and Englishmen, and all such
+sentimental cattle, including Germans, are Germanic. Italians are
+Latin--with a touch of the Goth and Vandal. Lions and tigers growl and
+fight because they're Mohammedans. Dogs still bear without abuse the
+grand old name of Sycophant. Cats are of the princely line of Persia,
+and worship fire, fish, and flattery--as you may have noticed. Geese
+belong indifferently to any race you like--they are cosmopolitans;
+and I've known here and there a person who, without distinction of
+nationality, was a duck. In fact, you're rather by way of being a duck
+yourself: And now," he perorated, "never deny again that I can talk
+nonsense with an aching heart."
+
+"All the same," insisted Marietta, "it is very comical to see a cow
+weep."
+
+"At any rate," retorted Peter, "it is not in the least comical to hear a
+hyaena laugh."
+
+"I have never heard one," said she.
+
+"Pray that you never may. The sound would make an old woman of you. It's
+quite blood-curdling."
+
+"Davvero?" said Marietta.
+
+"Davvero," he assured her.
+
+And meanwhile the cow stood there, with her head on his shoulder,
+silently weeping, weeping.
+
+He gave her a farewell rub along the nose.
+
+"Good-bye," he said. "Your breath is like meadowsweet. So dry your
+tears, and set your hopes upon the future. I 'll come and see you again
+to-morrow, and I 'll bring you some nice coarse salt. Good-bye."
+
+But when he went to see her on the morrow, she was grazing peacefully;
+and she ate the salt he brought her with heart-whole bovine
+relish--putting out her soft white pad of a tongue, licking it
+deliberately from his hand, savouring it tranquilly, and crunching
+the bigger grains with ruminative enjoyment between her teeth. So soon
+consoled! They were companions in misery no longer. "I 'm afraid you
+are a Latin, after all," he said, and left her with a sense of
+disappointment.
+
+That afternoon Marietta asked, "Would you care to visit the castle,
+Signorino?"
+
+He was seated under his willow-tree, by the river, smoking
+cigarettes--burning superfluous time.
+
+Marietta pointed towards Ventirose.
+
+"Why?" said he.
+
+"The family are away. In the absence of the family, the public are
+admitted, upon presentation of their cards."
+
+"Oho!" he cried. "So the family are away, are they?"
+
+"Yes, Signorino."
+
+"Aha!" cried he. "The family are away. That explains everything.
+Have--have they been gone long?"
+
+"Since a week, ten days, Signorino."
+
+"A week! Ten days!" He started up, indignant. "You secretive wretch! Why
+have you never breathed a word of this to me?"
+
+Marietta looked rather frightened.
+
+"I did not know it myself, Signorino," was her meek apology. "I heard
+it in the village this morning, when the Signorino sent me to buy coarse
+salt."
+
+"Oh, I see." He sank back upon his rustic bench. "You are forgiven." He
+extended his hand in sign of absolution. "Are they ever coming back?"
+
+"Naturally, Signorino."
+
+"What makes you think so?"
+
+"But they will naturally come back."
+
+"I felicitate you upon your simple faith. When?"
+
+"Oh, fra poco. They have gone to Rome."
+
+"To Rome? You're trifling with me. People do not go to Rome in August."
+
+"Pardon, Signorino. People go to Rome for the feast of the Assumption.
+That is the 15th. Afterwards they come back," said Marietta, firmly.
+
+"I withdraw my protest," said Peter. "They have gone to Rome for the
+feast of the Assumption. Afterwards they will come back."
+
+"Precisely, Signorino. But you have now the right to visit the castle,
+upon presentation of your card. You address yourself to the porter at
+the lodge. The castle is grand, magnificent. The Court of Honour alone
+is thirty metres long."
+
+Marietta stretched her hands to right and left as far as they would go.
+
+"Marietta," Peter enquired solemnly, "are you familiar with the tragedy
+of 'Hamlet'?"
+
+Marietta blinked.
+
+"No, Signorino."
+
+"You have never read it," he pursued, "in that famous edition from which
+the character of the Prince of Denmark happened to be omitted?"
+
+Marietta shook her head, wearily, patiently.
+
+Wearily, patiently, "No, Signorino," she replied.
+
+"Neither have I," said he, "and I don't desire to."
+
+Marietta shrugged her shoulders; then returned gallantly to her charge.
+
+"If you would care to visit the castle, Signorino, you could see the
+crypt which contains the tombs of the family of Farfalla, the former
+owners. They are of black marble and alabaster, with gilding--very rich.
+You could also see the wine-cellars. Many years ago a tun there burst,
+and a serving man was drowned in the wine. You could also see the bed
+in which Nabulione, the Emperor of Europe, slept, when he was in this
+country. Also the ancient kitchen. Many years ago, in a storm, the
+skeleton of a man fell down the chimney, out upon the hearth. Also
+what is called the Court of Foxes. Many years ago there was a plague
+of foxes; and the foxes came down from the forest like a great army,
+thousands of them. And the lords of the castle, and the peasants, and
+the village people, all, all, had to run away like rabbits--or the foxes
+would have eaten them. It was in what they call the Court of Foxes that
+the King of the foxes held his court. There is also the park. In the
+park there are statues, ruins, and white peacocks."
+
+"What have I in common with ruins and white peacocks?" Peter demanded
+tragically, when Marietta had brought her much-gesticulated exposition
+to a close. "Let me impress upon you once for all that I am not a
+tripper. As for your castle--you invite me to a banquet-hall deserted.
+As for your park, I see quite as much of it as I wish to see, from the
+seclusion of my own pleached garden. I learned long ago the folly of
+investigating things too closely, the wisdom of leaving things in
+the vague. At present the park of Ventirose provides me with the raw
+material for day-dreams. It is a sort of looking-glass country,--I can
+see just so far into it, and no farther--that lies beyond is mystery,
+is potentiality--terra incognita, which I can populate with monsters or
+pleasant phantoms, at my whim. Why should you attempt to deprive me of
+so innocent a recreation?"
+
+"After the return of the family," said Marietta, "the public will no
+longer be admitted. Meantime--"
+
+"Upon presentation of my card, the porter will conduct me from
+disenchantment to disenchantment. No, thank you. Now, if it were the
+other way round, it would be different. If it were the castle and
+the park that had gone to Rome, and if the family could be visited on
+presentation of my card, I might be tempted."
+
+"But that would be impossible, Signorino," said Marietta.
+
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+
+Beatrice walking with a priest--ay, I am not sure it would n't be
+more accurate to say conspiring with a priest: but you shall judge.
+
+They were in a room of the Palazzo Udeschini, at Rome--a reception
+room, on the piano nobile. Therefore you see it: for are not all
+reception-rooms in Roman palaces alike?
+
+Vast, lofty, sombre; the walls hung with dark-green tapestry--a pattern
+of vertical stripes, dark green and darker green; here and there a
+great dark painting, a Crucifixion, a Holy Family, in a massive dim-gold
+frame; dark-hued rugs on the tiled floor; dark pieces of furniture,
+tables, cabinets, dark and heavy; and tall windows, bare of curtains
+at this season, opening upon a court--a wide stone-eaved court, planted
+with fantastic-leaved eucalyptus-trees, in the midst of which a brown
+old fountain, indefatigable, played its sibilant monotone.
+
+In the streets there were the smells, the noises, the heat, the glare
+of August of August in Rome, "the most Roman of the months," they say;
+certainly the hottest, noisiest, noisomest, and most glaring. But here
+all was shadow, coolness, stillness, fragrance-the fragrance of the
+clean air coming in from among the eucalyptus-trees.
+
+Beatrice, critical-eyed, stood before a pier-glass, between two of the
+tall windows, turning her head from side to side, craning her neck a
+little--examining (if I must confess it) the effect of a new hat. It
+was a very stunning hat--if a man's opinion hath any pertinence; it was
+beyond doubt very complicated. There was an upward-springing black brim;
+there was a downward-sweeping black feather; there was a defiant white
+aigrette not unlike the Shah of Persia's; there were glints of red.
+
+The priest sat in an arm-chair--one of those stiff, upright Roman
+arm-chairs, which no one would ever dream of calling easy-chairs,
+high-backed, covered with hard leather, studded with steel nails--and
+watched her, smiling amusement, indulgence.
+
+He was an oldish priest--sixty, sixty-five. He was small, lightly built,
+lean-faced, with delicate-strong features: a prominent, delicate nose; a
+well-marked, delicate jaw-bone, ending in a prominent, delicate chin;
+a large, humorous mouth, the full lips delicately chiselled; a high,
+delicate, perhaps rather narrow brow, rising above humorous grey eyes,
+rather deep-set. Then he had silky-soft smooth white hair, and, topping
+the occiput, a tonsure that might have passed for a natural bald spot.
+
+He was decidedly clever-looking; he was aristocratic-looking,
+distinguished-looking; but he was, above all, pleasant-looking,
+kindly-looking, sweet-looking.
+
+He wore a plain black cassock, by no means in its first youth--brown
+along the seams, and, at the salient angles, at the shoulders, at
+the elbows, shining with the lustre of hard service. Even without his
+cassock, I imagine, you would have divined him for a clergyman--he
+bore the clerical impress, that odd indefinable air of clericism which
+everyone recognises, though it might not be altogether easy to tell
+just where or from what it takes its origin. In the garb of an
+Anglican--there being nothing, at first blush, necessarily Italian,
+necessarily un-English, in his face--he would have struck you, I think,
+as a pleasant, shrewd old parson of the scholarly--earnest type, mildly
+donnish, with a fondness for gentle mirth. What, however, you would
+scarcely have divined--unless you had chanced to notice, inconspicuous
+in this sober light, the red sash round his waist, or the amethyst on
+the third finger of his right hand--was his rank in the Roman hierarchy.
+I have the honour of presenting his Eminence Egidio Maria Cardinal
+Udeschini, formerly Bishop of Cittareggio, Prefect of the Congregation
+of Archives and Inscriptions.
+
+That was his title ecclesiastical. He had two other titles. He was a
+Prince of the Udeschini by accident of birth. But his third title was
+perhaps his most curious. It had been conferred upon him informally by
+the populace of the Roman slum in which his titular church, St. Mary of
+the Lilies, was situated: the little Uncle of the Poor.
+
+As Italians measure wealth, Cardinal Udeschini was a wealthy man. What
+with his private fortune and official stipends, he commanded an income
+of something like a hundred thousand lire. He allowed himself five
+thousand lire a year for food, clothing, and general expenses. Lodging
+and service he had for nothing in the palace of his family. The
+remaining ninety-odd thousand lire of his budget... Well, we all know
+that titles can be purchased in Italy; and that was no doubt the price
+he paid for the title I have mentioned.
+
+However, it was not in money only that Cardinal Udeschim paid. He paid
+also in labour. I have said that his titular church was in a slum. Rome
+surely contained no slum more fetid, none more perilous--a region of
+cut-throat alleys, south of the Ghetto, along the Tiber bank. Night
+after night, accompanied by his stout young vicar, Don Giorgio
+Appolloni, the Cardinal worked there as hard as any hard-working curate:
+visiting the sick, comforting the afflicted, admonishing the knavish,
+persuading the drunken from their taverns, making peace between the
+combative. Not infrequently, when he came home, he would add a pair
+of stilettos to his already large collection of such relics. And his
+homecomings were apt to be late--oftener than not, after midnight; and
+sometimes, indeed, in the vague twilight of morning, at the hour when,
+as he once expressed it to Don Giorgio, "the tired burglar is just
+lying down to rest." And every Saturday evening the Cardinal Prefect
+of Archives and Inscriptions sat for three hours boxed up in his
+confessional, like any parish priest--in his confessional at St. Mary
+of the Lilies, where the penitents who breathed their secrets into his
+ears, and received his fatherly counsels... I beg your pardon. One must
+not, of course, remember his rags or his sores, when Lazarus approaches
+that tribunal.
+
+But I don't pretend that the Cardinal was a saint; I am sure he was not
+a prig. For all his works of supererogation, his life was a life of pomp
+and luxury, compared to the proper saint's life. He wore no hair shirt;
+I doubt if he knew the taste of the Discipline. He had his weaknesses,
+his foibles--even, if you will, his vices. I have intimated that he was
+fond of a jest. "The Sacred College," I heard him remark one day, "has
+fifty centres of gravity. I sometimes fear that I am its centre of
+levity." He was also fond of music. He was also fond of snuff:
+
+"'T is an abominable habit," he admitted. "I can't tolerate it at
+all--in others. When I was Bishop of Cittareggio, I discountenanced
+it utterly among my clergy. But for myself--I need not say there are
+special circumstances. Oddly enough, by the bye, at Cittareggio each
+separate member of my clergy was able to plead special circumstances
+for himself I have tried to give it up, and the effort has spoiled
+my temper--turned me into a perfect old shrew. For my friends' sake,
+therefore, I appease myself with an occasional pinch. You see, tobacco
+is antiseptic. It's an excellent preservative of the milk of human
+kindness."
+
+The friends in question kept him supplied with sound rappee. Jests and
+music he was abundantly competent to supply himself. He played the piano
+and the organ, and he sang--in a clear, sweet, slightly faded tenor. Of
+secular composers his favourites were "the lucid Scarlatti, the luminous
+Bach." But the music that roused him to enthusiasm was Gregorian. He
+would have none other at St. Mary of the Lilies. He had trained his
+priests and his people there to sing it admirably--you should have heard
+them sing Vespers; and he sang it admirably himself--you should have
+heard him sing a Mass--you should have heard that sweet old tenor voice
+of his in the Preface and the Pater Noster.
+
+
+So, then, Beatrice stood before a pier-glass, and studied her new hat;
+whilst the Cardinal, amused, indulgent, sat in his high-backed armchair,
+and watched her.
+
+"Well--? What do you think?" she asked, turning towards him.
+
+"You appeal to me as an expert?" he questioned.
+
+His speaking-voice, as well as his singing-voice, was sweet, but with
+a kind of trenchant edge upon it, a genial asperity, that gave it
+character, tang.
+
+"As one who should certainly be able to advise," said she.
+
+"Well, then--" said he. He took his chin into his hand, as if it were
+a beard, and looked up at her, considering; and the lines of
+amusement--the "parentheses"--deepened at either side of his mouth.
+"Well, then, I think if the feather were to be lifted a little higher in
+front, and brought down a little lower behind--"
+
+"Good gracious, I don't mean my hat," cried Beatrice. "What in the world
+can an old dear like you know about hats?"
+
+There was a further deepening of the parentheses.
+
+"Surely," he contended, "a cardinal should know much. Is it not 'the
+badge of all our tribe,' as your poet Byron says?"
+
+Beatrice laughed. Then, "Byron--?" she doubted, with a look.
+
+The Cardinal waved his hand--a gesture of amiable concession.
+
+"Oh, if you prefer, Shakespeare. Everything in English is one or the
+other. We will not fall out, like the Morellists, over an attribution.
+The point is that I should be a good judge of hats."
+
+He took snuff.
+
+"It's a shame you haven't a decent snuff-box," Beatrice observed, with
+an eye on the enamelled wooden one, cheap and shabby, from which he
+helped himself.
+
+"The box is but the guinea-stamp; the snuff's the thing.--Was it
+Shakespeare or Byron who said that?" enquired the Cardinal.
+
+Beatrice laughed again.
+
+"I think it must have been Pulcinella. I'll give you a lovely silver
+one, if you'll accept it."
+
+"Will you? Really?" asked the Cardinal, alert.
+
+"Of course I will. It's a shame you haven't one already."
+
+"What would a lovely silver one cost?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know. It does n't matter," answered she.
+
+"But approximately? More or less?" he pursued.
+
+"Oh, a couple of hundred lire, more or less, I daresay."
+
+"A couple of hundred lire?" He glanced up, alerter. "Do you happen to
+have that amount of money on your person?"
+
+Beatrice (the unwary woman) hunted for her pocket--took out her
+purse--computed its contents.
+
+"Yes," she innocently answered.
+
+The Cardinal chuckled--the satisfied chuckle of one whose unsuspected
+tactics have succeeded.
+
+"Then give me the couple of hundred lire."
+
+He put forth his hand.
+
+But Beatrice held back.
+
+"What for?" she asked, suspicion waking.
+
+"Oh, I shall have uses for it."
+
+His outstretched hand--a slim old tapering, bony hand, in colour like
+dusky ivory--closed peremptorily, in a dumb-show of receiving; and now,
+by the bye, you could not have failed to notice the big lucent amethyst,
+in its setting of elaborately-wrought pale gold, on the third finger.
+
+"Come! Give!" he insisted, imperative.
+
+Rueful but resigned, Beatrice shook her head.
+
+"You have caught me finely," she sighed, and gave.
+
+"You should n't have jingled your purse--you should n't have flaunted
+your wealth in my face," laughed the Cardinal, putting away the
+notes. He took snuff again. "I think I honestly earned that pinch," he
+murmured.
+
+"At any rate," said Beatrice, laying what unction she could to her soul,
+"I am acquainted with a dignitary of the Church, who has lost a handsome
+silver snuffbox--beautiful repousse work, with his arms engraved on the
+lid."
+
+"And I," retaliated he, "I am acquainted with a broken-down old doctor
+and his wife, in Trastevere, who shall have meat and wine at dinner for
+the next two months--at the expense of a niece of mine. 'I am so glad,'
+as Alice of Wonderland says, 'that you married into our family.'"
+
+"Alice of Wonderland--?" doubted Beatrice.
+
+The Cardinal waved his hand.
+
+"Oh, if you prefer, Punch. Everything in English is one or the other."
+
+Beatrice laughed. "It was the I of which especially surprised my English
+ear," she explained.
+
+"I am your debtor for two hundred lire. I cannot quarrel with you over a
+particle," said he.
+
+"But why," asked she, "why did you give yourself such superfluous pains?
+Why couldn't you ask me for the money point-blank? Why lure it from me,
+by trick and device?"
+
+The Cardinal chuckled.
+
+"Ah, one must keep one's hand in. And one must not look like a Jesuit
+for nothing."
+
+"Do you look like a Jesuit?"
+
+"I have been told so."
+
+"By whom--for mercy's sake?"
+
+"By a gentleman I had the pleasure of meeting not long ago in the
+train--a very gorgeous gentleman, with gold chains and diamonds flashing
+from every corner of his person, and a splendid waxed moustache, and a
+bald head which, I think, was made of polished pink coral. He turned to
+me in the most affable manner, and said, 'I see, Reverend Sir, that you
+are a Jesuit. There should be a fellow-feeling between you and me. I am
+a Jew. Jews and Jesuits have an almost equally bad name!'"
+
+The Cardinal's humorous grey eyes swam in a glow of delighted merriment.
+
+"I could have hugged him for his 'almost.' I have been wondering ever
+since whether in his mind it was the Jews or the Jesuits who benefited
+by that reservation. I have been wondering also what I ought to have
+replied."
+
+"What did you reply?" asked Beatrice, curious.
+
+"No, no," said the Cardinal. "With sentiments of the highest
+consideration, I must respectfully decline to tell you. It was too flat.
+I am humiliated whenever I recall it."
+
+"You might have replied that the Jews, at least, have the advantage of
+meriting their bad name," she suggested.
+
+"Oh, my dear child!" objected he. "My reply was flat--you would have had
+it sharp. I should have hurt the poor well-meaning man's feelings, and
+perhaps have burdened my own soul with a falsehood, into the bargain.
+Who are we, to judge whether people merit their bad name or not? No, no.
+The humiliating circumstance is, that if I had possessed the substance
+as well as the show, if I had really been a son of St. Ignatius,
+I should have found a retort that would have effected the Jew's
+conversion."
+
+"And apropos of conversions," said Beatrice, "see how far we have
+strayed from our muttons."
+
+"Our muttons--?" The Cardinal looked up, enquiring.
+
+"I want to know what you think--not of my hat--but of my man."
+
+"Oh--ah, yes; your Englishman, your tenant." The Cardinal nodded.
+
+"My Englishman--my tenant--my heretic," said she.
+
+"Well," said he, pondering, while the parentheses became marked
+again,--"I should think, from what you tell me, that you would find him
+a useful neighbour. Let me see... You got fifty lire out of him, for a
+word; and the children went off, blessing you as their benefactress. I
+should think that you would find him a valuable neighbour--and that he,
+on his side, might find you an expensive one."
+
+Beatrice, with a gesture, implored him to be serious.
+
+"Ah, please don't tease about this," she said. "I want to know what you
+think of his conversion?"
+
+"The conversion of a heretic is always 'a consummation devoutly to be
+desired,' as well, you may settle it between Shakespeare and Byron,
+to suit yourself. And there are none so devoutly desirous of such
+consummations as you Catholics of England--especially you women. It is
+said that a Catholic Englishwoman once tried to convert the Pope."
+
+"Well, there have been popes whom it would n't have hurt," commented
+Beatrice. "And as for Mr. Marchdale," she continued, "he has shown
+'dispositions.' He admitted that he could see no reason why it should
+not have been Our Blessed Lady who sent us to the children's aid.
+Surely, from a Protestant, that is an extraordinary admission?"
+
+"Yes," said the Cardinal. "And if he meant it, one may conclude that he
+has a philosophic mind."
+
+"If he meant it?" Beatrice cried. "Why should he not have meant it? Why
+should he have said it if he did not mean it?"
+
+"Oh, don't ask me," protested the Cardinal. "There is a thing the French
+call politesse. I can conceive a young man professing to agree with a
+lady for the sake of what the French might call her beaux yeux."
+
+"I give you my word," said Beatrice, "that my beaux yeux had nothing to
+do with the case. He said it in the most absolute good faith. He said he
+believed that in a universe like ours nothing was impossible--that
+there were more things in heaven and earth than people generally dreamed
+of--that he could see no reason why the Blessed Virgin should not have
+sent us across the children's path. Oh, he meant it. I am perfectly sure
+he meant it."
+
+The Cardinal smiled--at her eagerness, perhaps.
+
+"Well, then," he repeated, "we must conclude that he has a philosophic
+mind."
+
+"But what is one to do?" asked she. "Surely one ought to do something?
+One ought to follow such an admission up? When a man is so far on the
+way to the light, it is surely one's duty to lead him farther?"
+
+"Without doubt," said the Cardinal.
+
+"Well--? What can one do?"
+
+The Cardinal looked grave.
+
+"One can pray," he said.
+
+"Emilia and I pray for his conversion night and morning."
+
+"That is good," he approved.
+
+"But that is surely not enough?"
+
+"One can have Masses said."
+
+"Monsignor Langshawe, at the castle, says a Mass for him twice a week."
+
+"That is good," approved the Cardinal.
+
+"But is that enough?"
+
+"Why doesn't Monsignor Langshawe call upon him--cultivate his
+acquaintance--talk with him--set him thinking?" the Cardinal enquired.
+
+"Oh, Monsignor Langshawe!" Beatrice sighed, with a gesture. "He is
+interested in nothing but geology--he would talk to him of nothing
+but moraines--he would set him thinking of nothing but the march of
+glaciers."
+
+"Hum," said the Cardinal.
+
+"Well, then--?" questioned Beatrice.
+
+"Well, then, Carissima, why do you not take the affair in hand
+yourself?"
+
+"But that is just the difficulty. What can I what can a mere woman--do
+in such a case?"
+
+The Cardinal looked into his amethyst, as a crystal-gazer into his
+crystal; and the lines about his humorous old mouth deepened and
+quivered.
+
+"I will lend you the works of Bellarmine in I forget how many volumes.
+You can prime yourself with them, and then invite your heretic to a
+course of instructions."
+
+"Oh, I wish you would n't turn it to a joke," said Beatrice.
+
+"Bellarmine--a joke!" exclaimed the Cardinal. "It is the first time
+I have ever heard him called so. However, I will not press the
+suggestion."
+
+"But then--? Oh, please advise me seriously. What can I do? What can a
+mere unlearned woman do?"
+
+The Cardinal took snuff. He gazed into his amethyst again, beaming at
+it, as if he could descry something deliciously comical in its depths.
+He gave a soft little laugh. At last he looked up.
+
+"Well," he responded slowly, "in an extremity, I should think that a
+mere unlearned woman might, if she made an effort, ask the heretic to
+dinner. I 'll come down and stay with you for a day or two, and you can
+ask him to dinner."
+
+"You're a perfect old darling," cried Beatrice, with rapture. "He'll
+never be able to resist you."'
+
+"Oh, I 'm not undertaking to discuss theology with him," said the
+Cardinal. "But one must do something in exchange for a couple of hundred
+lire--so I'll come and give you my moral support."
+
+"You shall have your lovely silver snuffbox, all the same," said she.
+
+Mark the predestination!
+
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+                                      "CASTEL VENTIROSE,
+                                          "August 21 st.
+
+"DEAR Mr. Marchdale: It will give me great pleasure if you can dine
+with us on Thursday evening next, at eight o'clock, to meet my uncle,
+Cardinal Udeschini, who is staying here for a few days.
+
+"I have been re-reading 'A Man of Words.' I want you to tell me a great
+deal more about your friend, the author.
+
+                                        Yours sincerely,
+                                     BEATRICE DI SANTANGIOLO."
+
+It is astonishing, what men will prize, what men will treasure. Peter
+Marchdale, for example, prizes, treasures, (and imagines that he will
+always prize and treasure), the perfectly conventional, the perfectly
+commonplace little document, of which the foregoing is a copy.
+
+The original is written in rather a small, concentrated hand, not
+overwhelmingly legible perhaps, but, as we say, "full of character," on
+paper lightly blueish, in the prescribed corner of which a tiny ducal
+coronet is embossed, above the initials "B. S." curiously interlaced in
+a cypher.
+
+When Peter received it, and (need I mention?) approached it to his face,
+he fancied he could detect just a trace, just the faintest reminder, of
+a perfume--something like an afterthought of orris. It was by no means
+anodyne. It was a breath, a whisper, vague, elusive, hinting of things
+exquisite, intimate of things intimately feminine, exquisitely personal.
+I don't know how many times he repeated that manoeuvre of conveying the
+letter to his face; but I do know that when I was privileged to inspect
+it, a few months later, the only perfume it retained was an unmistakable
+perfume of tobacco.
+
+I don't know, either, how many times he read it, searched it, as if
+secrets might lie perdu between the lines, as if his gaze could warm
+into evidence some sympathetic ink, or compel a cryptic sub-intention
+from the text itself.
+
+Well, to be sure, the text had cryptic subintentions; but these were as
+far as may be from any that Peter was in a position to conjecture. How
+could he guess, for instance, that the letter was an instrument, and he
+the victim, of a Popish machination? How could he guess that its writer
+knew as well as he did who was the author of "A Man of Words"?
+
+And then, all at once, a shade of trouble of quite another nature fell
+upon his mind. He frowned for a while in silent perplexity. At last he
+addressed himself to Marietta.
+
+"Have you ever dined with a cardinal?" he asked.
+
+"No, Signorino," that patient sufferer replied.
+
+"Well, I'm in the very dickens of a quandary--son' proprio nel dickens
+d'un imbarazzo." he informed her.
+
+"Dickens--?" she repeated.
+
+"Si--Dickens, Carlo, celebre autore inglese. Why not?" he asked.
+
+Marietta gazed with long-suffering eyes at the horizon.
+
+"Or, to put it differently," Peter resumed, "I've come all the way from
+London with nothing better than a dinner jacket in my kit."
+
+"Dina giacca? Cosa e?" questioned Marietta.
+
+"No matter what it is--the important thing is what it is n't. It is n't
+a dress-coat."
+
+"Non e un abito nero," said Marietta, seeing that he expected her to say
+something.
+
+"Well--? You perceive my difficulty. Do you think you could make me
+one?" said Peter.
+
+"Make the Signorino a dress-coat? I? Oh, no, Signorino." Marietta shook
+her head.
+
+"I feared as much," he acknowledged. "Is there a decent tailor in the
+village?"
+
+"No, Signorino."
+
+"Nor in the whole length and breadth of this peninsula, if you come to
+that. Well, what am I to do? How am I to dine with a cardinal? Do you
+think a cardinal would have a fit if a man were to dine with him in a
+dina giacca?"
+
+"Have a fit? Why should he have a fit, Signorino?" Marietta blinked.
+
+"Would he do anything to the man? Would he launch the awful curses of
+the Church at him, for instance?"
+
+"Mache, Signorino!" She struck an attitude that put to scorn his
+apprehensions.
+
+"I see," said Peter. "You think there is no danger? You advise me to
+brazen the dina giacca out, to swagger it off?"
+
+"I don't understand, Signorino," said Marietta.
+
+"To understand is to forgive," said he; "and yet you can't trifle with
+English servants like this, though they ought to understand, ought n't
+they? In any case, I 'll be guided by your judgment. I'll wear my dina
+giacca, but I'll wear it with an air! I 'll confer upon it the dignity
+of a court-suit. Is that a gardener--that person working over there?"
+
+Marietta looked in the quarter indicated by Peter's nod.
+
+"Yes, Signorino; ha is the same gardener who works here three days every
+week," she answered.
+
+"Is he, really? He looks like a pirate," Peter murmured.
+
+"Like a pirate? Luigi?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes," affirmed her master. "He wears green corduroy trousers, and a
+red belt, and a blue shirt. That is the pirate uniform. He has a swarthy
+skin, and a piercing eye, and hair as black as the Jolly Roger. Those
+are the marks by which you recognise a pirate, even when in mufti. I
+believe you said his name is Luigi?"
+
+"Yes, Signorino--Luigi Maroni. We call him Gigi."
+
+"Is Gigi versatile?" asked Peter.
+
+"Versatile--?" puzzled Marietta. But then, risking her own
+interpretation of the recondite word, "Oh, no, Signorino. He is of the
+country."
+
+"Ah, he's of the country, is he? So much the better. Then he will know
+the way to Castel Ventirose?"
+
+"But naturally, Signorino." Marietta nodded.
+
+"And do you think, for once in a way, though not versatile, he could be
+prevailed upon to divert his faculties from the work of a gardener to
+that of a messenger?"
+
+"A messenger, Signorino?" Marietta wrinkled up her brow.
+
+"Ang--an unofficial postman. Do you think he could be induced to carry a
+letter for me to the castle?"
+
+"But certainly, Signorino. He is here to obey the Signorino's orders."
+Marietta shrugged her shoulders, and waved her hands.
+
+"Then tell him, please, to go and put the necessary touches to his
+toilet," said Peter. "Meanwhile I'll indite the letter."
+
+When his letter was indited, he found the piratical-looking Gigi in
+attendance, and he gave it to him, with instructions.
+
+Thereupon Gigi (with a smile of sympathetic intelligence, inimitably
+Italian) put the letter in his hat, put his hat upon his head, and
+started briskly off--but not in the proper direction: not in the
+direction of the road, which led to the village, and across the bridge,
+and then round upon itself to the gates of the park. He started briskly
+off towards Peter's own toolhouse, a low red-tiled pavilion, opposite
+the door of Marietta's kitchen.
+
+Peter was on the point of calling to him, of remonstrating. Then he
+thought better of it. He would wait a bit, and watch.
+
+He waited and watched; and this was what he saw.
+
+Gigi entered the tool-house, and presently brought out a ladder, which
+he carried down to the riverside, and left there. Then he returned to
+the tool-house, and came back bearing an armful of planks, each perhaps
+a foot wide by five or six feet long. Now he raised his ladder to the
+perpendicular, and let it descend before him, so that, one extremity
+resting upon the nearer bank, one attained the further, and it spanned
+the flood. Finally he laid a plank lengthwise upon the hithermost rungs,
+and advanced to the end of it; then another plank; then a third: and he
+stood in the grounds of Ventirose.
+
+He had improvised a bridge--a bridge that swayed upwards and downwards
+more or less dizzily about the middle, if you will--but an entirely
+practicable bridge, for all that. And he had saved himself at least a
+good three miles, to the castle and back, by the road.
+
+Peter watched, and admired.
+
+"And I asked whether he was versatile!" he muttered. "Trust an Italian
+for economising labour. It looks like unwarrantable invasion of friendly
+territory--but it's a dodge worth remembering, all the same."
+
+He drew the Duchessa's letter from his pocket, and read it again, and
+again approached it to his face, communing with that ghost of a perfume.
+
+"Heavens! how it makes one think of chiffons," he exclaimed.
+"Thursday--Thursday--help me to live till Thursday!"
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+But he had n't to live till Thursday--he was destined to see her not
+later than the next afternoon.
+
+You know with what abruptness, with how brief a warning, storms will
+spring from the blue, in that land of lakes and mountains.
+
+It was three o'clock or thereabouts; and Peter was reading in his
+garden; and the whole world lay basking in unmitigated sunshine.
+
+Then, all at once, somehow, you felt a change in things: the sunshine
+seemed less brilliant, the shadows less solid, less sharply outlined.
+Oh, it was very slight, very uncertain; you had to look twice to assure
+yourself that it was n't a mere fancy. It seemed as if never so thin a
+gauze had been drawn over the face of the sun, just faintly bedimming,
+without obscuring it. You could have ransacked the sky in vain to
+discover the smallest shred of cloud.
+
+At the same time, the air, which had been hot all day--hot, but buoyant,
+but stimulant, but quick with oxygen--seemed to become thick, sluggish,
+suffocating, seemed to yield up its vital principle, and to fall a
+dead weight upon the earth. And this effect was accompanied by a
+sudden silence--the usual busy out-of-door country noises were suddenly
+suspended: the locusts stopped their singing; not a bird twittered;
+not a leaf rustled: the world held its breath. And if the river went
+on babbling, babbling, that was a very part of the silence--accented,
+underscored it.
+
+Yet still you could not discern a rack of cloud anywhere in the
+sky--still, for a minute or two.... Then, before you knew how it had
+happened, the snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito were completely lapped in
+cloud.
+
+And now the cloud spread with astonishing rapidity--spread and sank,
+cancelling the sun, shrouding the Gnisi to its waist, curling in smoky
+wreaths among the battlements of the Cornobastone, turning the lake
+from sapphire to sombre steel, filling the entire valley with a strange
+mixture of darkness and an uncanny pallid light. Overhead it hung like
+a vast canopy of leaden-hued cotton-wool; at the west it had a fringe of
+fiery crimson, beyond which a strip of clear sky on the horizon diffused
+a dull metallic yellow, like tarnished brass.
+
+Presently, in the distance, there was a low growl of thunder; in a
+minute, a louder, angrier growl--as if the first were a menace which had
+not been heeded. Then there was a violent gush of wind--cold; smelling
+of the forests from which it came; scattering everything before it,
+dust, dead leaves, the fallen petals of flowers; making the trees writhe
+and labour, like giants wrestling with invisible giants; making the
+short grass shudder; corrugating the steel surface of the lake. Then two
+or three big raindrops fell--and then, the deluge.
+
+Peter climbed up to his observatory--a square four-windowed turret, at
+the top of the house--thence to watch the storm and exult in it. Really
+it was splendid--to see, to hear; its immense wild force, its immense
+reckless fury. Rain had never rained so hard, he thought. Already,
+the lake, the mountain slopes, the villas and vineyards westward, were
+totally blotted out, hidden behind walls and walls of water; and even
+the neighbouring lawns of Ventirose, the confines of his own garden,
+were barely distinguishable, blurred as by a fog. The big drops pelted
+the river like bullets, sending up splashes bigger than themselves.
+And the tiled roof just above his head resounded with a continual loud
+crepitation, as if a multitude of iron-shod elves were dancing on it.
+The thunder crashed, roared, reverberated, like the toppling of great
+edifices. The lightning tore through the black cloud-canopy in long
+blinding zig-zags. The wind moaned, howled, hooted--and the square
+chamber where Peter stood shook and rattled under its buffetings, and
+was full of the chill and the smell of it. Really the whole thing was
+splendid.
+
+His garden-paths ran with muddy brooklets; the high-road beyond his
+hedge was transformed to a shallow torrent.... And, just at that moment,
+looking off along the highroad, he saw something that brought his heart
+into his throat.
+
+Three figures were hurrying down it, half-drowned in the rain--the
+Duchessa di Santangiolo, Emilia Manfredi, and a priest.
+
+In a twinkling, Peter, bareheaded, was at his gate.
+
+"Come in--come in," he called.
+
+"We are simply drenched--we shall inundate your house," the Duchessa
+said, as he showed them into his sitting-room.
+
+They were indeed dripping with water, soiled to their knees with mud.
+
+"Good heavens!" gasped Peter, stupid. "How were you ever out in such a
+downpour?"
+
+She smiled, rather forlornly.
+
+"No one told us that it was going to rain, and we were off for a good
+long walk--for pleasure."
+
+"You must be wet to the bone--you must be perishing with cold," he
+cried, looking from one to another.
+
+"Yes, I daresay we are perishing with cold," she admitted.
+
+"And I have no means of offering you a fire--there are no fireplaces,"
+he groaned, with a gesture round the bleak Italian room, to certify
+their absence.
+
+"Is n't there a kitchen?" asked the Duchessa, a faint spark of raillery
+kindling amid the forlornness of her smile.
+
+Peter threw up his hands.
+
+"I had lost my head. The kitchen, of course. I 'll tell Marietta to
+light a fire."
+
+He excused himself, and sought out Marietta. He found her in her
+housekeeper's room, on her knees, saying her rosary, in obvious terror.
+I 'm afraid he interrupted her orisons somewhat brusquely.
+
+"Will you be so good as to start a rousing fire in the kitchen--as
+quickly as ever it can be done?"
+
+And he rejoined his guests.
+
+"If you will come this way--" he said.
+
+Marietta had a fire of logs and pine-cones blazing in no time. She
+courtesied low to the Duchessa, lower still to the priest--in fact,
+Peter was n't sure that she did n't genuflect before him, while he made
+a rapid movement with his hand over her head: the Sign of the Cross,
+perhaps.
+
+He was a little, unassuming-looking, white haired priest, with a
+remarkably clever, humorous, kindly face; and he wore a remarkably
+shabby cassock. The Duchessa's chaplain, Peter supposed. How should it
+occur to him that this was Cardinal Udeschini? Do Cardinals (in one's
+antecedent notion of them) wear shabby cassocks, and look humorous and
+unassuming? Do they go tramping about the country in the rain, attended
+by no retinue save a woman and a fourteen-year-old girl? And are they
+little men--in one's antecedent notion? True, his shabby cassock had red
+buttons, and there was a red sash round his waist, and a big amethyst
+glittered in a setting of pale gold on his annular finger. But Peter was
+not sufficiently versed in fashions canonical, to recognise the meaning
+of these insignia.
+
+How, on the other hand, should it occur to the Duchessa that Peter
+needed enlightenment? At all events, she said to him, "Let me introduce
+you;" and then, to the priest, "Let me present Mr. Marchdale--of whom
+you have heard before now."
+
+The white-haired old man smiled sweetly into Peter's eyes, and gave him
+a slender, sensitive old hand.
+
+"E cattivo vento che non e buono per qualcuno--debbo a questa burrasca
+la pregustazione d' un piacere," he said, with a mingling of ceremonious
+politeness and sunny geniality that was of his age and race.
+
+Peter--instinctively--he could not have told why--put a good deal more
+deference into his bow, than men of his age and race commonly put into
+their bows, and murmured something about "grand' onore."
+
+Marietta placed a row of chairs before the raised stone hearth, and
+afterwards, at her master's request, busied herself preparing tea.
+
+"But I think you would all be wise to take a little brandy first," Peter
+suggested. "It is my despair that I am not able to provide you with a
+change of raiment. Brandy will be the best substitute, perhaps."
+
+The old priest laughed, and put his hand upon the shoulder of Emilia.
+
+"You have spared this young lady an embarrassing avowal. Brandy is
+exactly what she was screwing her courage to the point of asking for."
+
+"Oh, no!" protested Emilia, in a deep Italian voice, with passionate
+seriousness.
+
+But Peter fetched a decanter, and poured brandy for everyone.
+
+"I drink to your health--c'est bien le cas de le dire. I hope you will
+not have caught your deaths of cold," he said.
+
+"Oh, we are quite warm now," said the Duchessa. "We are snug in an ingle
+on Mount Ararat."
+
+"Our wetting will have done us good--it will make us grow. You and I
+will never regret that, will we, Emilietta?" said the priest.
+
+A lively colour had come into the Duchessa's cheeks; her eyes seemed
+unusually bright. Her hair was in some disorder, drooping at the sides,
+and blown over her brow in fine free wavelets. It was dark in the
+kitchen, save for the firelight, which danced fantastically on the walls
+and ceiling, and struck a ruddy glow from Marietta's copper pots and
+pans. The rain pattered lustily without; the wind wailed in the chimney;
+the lightning flashed, the thunder volleyed. And Peter looked at the
+Duchessa--and blessed the elements. To see her seated there, in her wet
+gown, seated familiarly, at her ease, before his fire, in his kitchen,
+with that colour in her cheeks, that brightness in her eyes, and her
+hair in that disarray--it was unspeakable; his heart closed in a kind
+of delicious spasm. And the fragrance, subtle, secret, evasive, that
+hovered in the air near her, did not diminish his emotion.
+
+"I wonder," she asked, with a comical little glance upwards at
+him, "whether you would resent it very much if I should take off my
+hat--because it's a perfect reservoir, and the water will keep trickling
+down my neck."
+
+His joy needed but this culmination that she should take off her hat!
+
+"Oh, I beg of you--" he returned fervently.
+
+"You had better take yours off too, Emilia," said the Duchessa.
+
+"Admire masculine foresight," said the priest. "I took mine off when I
+came in."
+
+"Let me hang them up," said Peter.
+
+It was wonderful to hold her hat in his hand--it was like holding a part
+of herself. He brushed it surreptitiously against his face, as he
+hung it up. Its fragrance--which met him like an answering caress,
+almost--did not lessen his emotion.
+
+Then Marietta brought the tea, with bread-and-butter, and toast, and
+cakes, and pretty blue china cups and saucers, and silver that glittered
+in the firelight.
+
+"Will you do me the honour of pouring the tea?" Peter asked the
+Duchessa.
+
+So she poured the tea, and Peter passed it. As he stood close to her,
+to take it--oh, but his heart beat, believe me! And once, when she was
+giving him a cup, the warm tips of her fingers lightly touched his hand.
+Believe me, the touch had its effect. And always there was that heady
+fragrance in the air, like a mysterious little voice, singing secrets.
+
+"I wonder," the old priest said, "why tea is not more generally drunk by
+us Italians. I never taste it without resolving to acquire the habit. I
+remember, when I was a child, our mothers used to keep it as a medicine;
+and you could only buy it at the chemists' shops."
+
+"It's coming in, you know, at Rome--among the Whites," said the
+Duchessa.
+
+"Among the Whites!" cried he, with a jocular simulation of disquiet.
+"You should not have told me that, till I had finished my cup. Now I
+shall feel that I am sharing a dissipation with our spoliators."
+
+"That should give an edge to its aroma," laughed she. "And besides, the
+Whites aren't all responsible for our spoliation--some of them are not
+so white as your fancy paints them. They'd be very decent people, for
+the most part--if they were n't so vulgar."
+
+"If you stick up for the Whites like that when I am Pope, I shall
+excommunicate you," the priest threatened. "Meanwhile, what have you to
+say against the Blacks?"
+
+"The Blacks, with few exceptions, are even blacker than they're painted;
+but they too would be fairly decent people in their way--if they were
+n't so respectable. That is what makes Rome impossible as a residence
+for any one who cares for human society. White society is so
+vulgar--Black society is so deadly dull."
+
+"It is rather curious," said the priest, "that the chief of each party
+should wear the colour of his adversary. Our chief dresses in white, and
+their chief can be seen any day driving about the streets in black."
+
+And Peter, during this interchange of small-talk, was at liberty to
+feast his eyes upon her.
+
+"Perhaps you have not yet reached the time of life where men begin to
+find a virtue in snuff?" the priest said, producing a smart silver snuff
+box, tapping the lid, and proffering it to Peter.
+
+"On the contrary--thank you," Peter answered, and absorbed his pinch
+like an adept.
+
+"How on earth have you learned to take it without a paroxysm?" cried the
+surprised Duchessa.
+
+"Oh, a thousand years ago I was in the Diplomatic Service," he
+explained. "It is one of the requirements."
+
+Emilia Manfredi lifted her big brown eyes, filled with girlish wonder,
+to his face, and exclaimed, "How extraordinary!"
+
+"It is n't half so extraordinary as it would be if it were true, my
+dear," said the Duchessa.
+
+"Oh? Non e poi vero?" murmured Emilia, and her eyes darkened with
+disappointment.
+
+Peter meanwhile was looking at the snuffbox, which the priest still held
+in his hand, and admiring its brave repousse work of leaves and flowers,
+and the escutcheon engraved on the lid. But what if he could have
+guessed the part he had passively played in obtaining it for its
+possessor--or the part that it was still to play in his own epopee? Mark
+again the predestination!
+
+"The storm is passing," said the priest.
+
+"Worse luck!" thought Peter.
+
+For indeed the rain and the wind were moderating, the thunder had rolled
+farther away, the sky was becoming lighter.
+
+"But there's a mighty problem before us still," said the Duchessa. "How
+are we to get to Ventirose? The roads will, be ankle-deep with mud."
+
+"If you wish to do me a very great kindness--" Peter began.
+
+"Yes--?" she encouraged him.
+
+"You will allow me to go before you, and tell them to come for you with
+a carriage."
+
+"I shall certainly allow you to do nothing of the sort," she replied
+severely. "I suppose there is no one whom you could send?"
+
+"I should hardly like to send Marietta. I 'm afraid there is no one
+else. But upon my word, I should enjoy going myself."
+
+She shook her head, smiling at him with mock compassion.
+
+"Would you? Poor man, poor man! That is an enjoyment which you will have
+to renounce. One must n't expect too much in this sad life."
+
+"Well, then," said Peter, "I have an expedient. If you can walk a
+somewhat narrow plank--?"
+
+"Yes--?" questioned she.
+
+"I think I can improvise a bridge across the river."
+
+"I believe the rain has stopped," said the priest, looking towards the
+window.
+
+Peter, manning his soul for the inevitable, got up, went to the door,
+opened it, stuck out his head.
+
+"Yes," he acknowledged, while his heart sank within him, "the rain has
+stopped."
+
+And now the storm departed almost as rapidly as it had arrived. In
+the north the sky was already clear, blue and hard-looking--a wall of
+lapis-lazuli. The dark cloud-canopy was drifting to the south. Suddenly
+the sun came out, flashing first from the snows of Monte Sfiorito, then,
+in an instant, flooding the entire prospect with a marvellous yellow
+light, ethereal amber; whilst long streamers of tinted vapour--columns
+of pearl-dust, one might have fancied--rose to meet it; and all wet
+surfaces, leaves, lawns, tree-trunks, housetops, the bare crags of the
+Gnisi, gleamed in a wash of gold.
+
+Puffs of fresh air blew into the kitchen, filling it with the keen sweet
+odour of wet earth. The priest and the Duchessa and Emilia joined Peter
+at the open door.
+
+"Oh, your poor, poor garden!" the Duchessa cried.
+
+His garden had suffered a good deal, to be sure. The flowers lay supine,
+their faces beaten into the mud; the greensward was littered with fallen
+leaves and twigs--and even in one or two places whole branches had been
+broken from the trees; on the ground about each rose-bush a snow of pink
+rose-petals lay scattered; in the paths there were hundreds of little
+pools, shining in the sun like pools of fire.
+
+"There's nothing a gardener can't set right," said Peter, feeling no
+doubt that here was a trifling tax upon the delights the storm had
+procured him.
+
+"And oh, our poor, poor hats!" said the Duchessa, eyeing ruefully those
+damaged pieces of finery. "I fear no gardener can ever set them right."
+
+"It sounds inhospitable," said Peter, "but I suppose I had better go and
+build your bridge."
+
+So he threw a ladder athwart the river, and laid the planks in place, as
+he had seen Gigi do the day before.
+
+"How ingenious--and, like all great things, how simple," laughed the
+Duchessa.
+
+Peter waved his hand, as who should modestly deprecate applause. But, I
+'m ashamed to own, he didn't disclaim the credit of the invention.
+
+"It will require some nerve," she reflected, looking at the narrow
+planks, the foaming green water. "However--"
+
+And gathering in her skirts, she set bravely forward, and made the
+transit without mishap. The priest and Emilia, gathering in their
+skirts, made it after her.
+
+She paused on the other side, and looked back, smiling.
+
+"Since you have discovered so efficacious a means of cutting short the
+distance between our places of abode," she said, "I hope you will not
+fail to profit by it whenever you may have occasion--on Thursday, for
+example."
+
+"Thank you very much," said Peter.
+
+"Of course," she went on, "we may all die of our wetting yet. It would
+perhaps show a neighbourly interest if you were to come up to-morrow,
+and take our news. Come at four o'clock; and if we're alive... you shall
+have another pinch of snuff," she promised, laughing.
+
+"I adore you," said Peter, under his breath. "I'll come with great
+pleasure," he said aloud.
+
+
+"Marietta," he observed, that evening, as he dined, "I would have you
+to know that the Aco is bridged. Hence, there is one symbol the fewer
+in Lombardy. But why does--you mustn't mind the Ollendorfian form of my
+enquiry--why does the chaplain of the Duchessa wear red stockings?"
+
+"The chaplain of the Duchessa--?" repeated Marietta, wrinkling up her
+brow.
+
+"Ang--of the Duchessa di Santangiolo. He wore red stockings, and shoes
+with silver buckles. Do you think that's precisely decorous--don't you
+think it 's the least bit light-minded--in an ecclesiastic?"
+
+"He--? Who--?" questioned Marietta.
+
+"But the chaplain of the Duchessa--when he was here this afternoon."
+
+"The chaplain of the Duchessa!" exclaimed Marietta. "Here this
+afternoon? The chaplain of the Duchessa was not here this afternoon. His
+Eminence the Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here this afternoon."
+
+"What!" gasped Peter.
+
+"Ang," said Marietta.
+
+"That was Cardinal Udeschini--that little harmless-looking, sweet-faced
+old man!" Peter wondered.
+
+"Sicuro--the uncle of the Duca," said she.
+
+"Good heavens!" sighed he. "And I allowed myself to hobnob with him like
+a boon-companion."
+
+"Gia," said she.
+
+"You need n't rub it in," said he. "For the matter of that, you yourself
+entertained him in your kitchen."
+
+"Scusi?" said she.
+
+"Ah, well--it was probably for the best," he concluded. "I daresay I
+should n't have behaved much better if I had known."
+
+"It was his coming which saved this house from being struck by
+lightning," announced Marietta.
+
+"Oh--? Was it?" exclaimed Peter.
+
+"Yes, Signorino. The lightning would never strike a house that the Lord
+Prince Cardinal was in."
+
+"I see--it would n't venture--it would n't presume. Did--did it strike
+all the houses that the Lord Prince Cardinal was n't in?"
+
+"I do not think so, Signorino. Ma non fa niente. It was a terrible
+storm--terrible, terrible. The lightning was going to strike this house,
+when the Lord Prince Cardinal arrived."
+
+"Hum," said Peter. "Then you, as well as I, have reason for regarding
+his arrival as providential."
+
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+"I think something must have happened to my watch," Peter said, next
+day.
+
+Indeed, its hands moved with extraordinary, with exasperating slowness.
+
+"It seems absurd that it should do no good to push them on," he thought.
+
+He would force himself, between twice ascertaining their position, to
+wait for a period that felt like an eternity, walking about miserably,
+and smoking flavourless cigarettes;--then he would stand amazed,
+incredulous, when, with a smirk (as it almost struck him) of ironical
+complacence, they would attest that his eternity had lasted something
+near a quarter of an hour.
+
+"And I had professed myself a Kantian, and made light of the objective
+reality of Time! thou laggard, Time!" he cried, and shook his fist at
+Space, Time's unoffending consort.
+
+"I believe it will never be four o'clock again," he said, in despair,
+finally; and once more had out his watch. It was half-past three. He
+scowled at the instrument's bland white face. "You have no bowels, no
+sensibilities--nothing but dry little methodical jog-trot wheels and
+pivots!" he exclaimed, flying to insult for relief. "You're as inhuman
+as a French functionary. Do you call yourself a sympathetic comrade
+for an impatient man?" He laid it open on his rustic table, and waited
+through a last eternity. At a quarter to four he crossed the river. "If
+I am early--tant pis!" he decided, choosing the lesser of two evils, and
+challenging Fate.
+
+He crossed the river, and stood for the first time in the grounds of
+Ventirose--stood where she had been in the habit of standing, during
+their water-side colloquies. He glanced back at his house and garden,
+envisaging them for the first time, as it were, from her point of
+view. They had a queer air of belonging to an era that had passed, to
+a yesterday already remote. They looked, somehow, curiously small,
+moreover--the garden circumscribed, the two-storied house, with its
+striped sunblinds, poor and petty. He turned his back upon them--left
+them behind. He would have to come home to them later in the day, to be
+sure; but then everything would be different. A chapter would have added
+itself to the history of the world; a great event, a great step forward,
+would have definitely taken place. He would have been received
+at Ventirose as a friend. He would be no longer a mere nodding
+acquaintance, owing even that meagre relationship to the haphazard
+of propinquity. The ice-broken, if you will, but still present in
+abundance--would have been gently thawed away. One era had passed; but
+then a new era would have begun.
+
+So he turned his back upon Villa F'loriano, and set off, high-hearted,
+up the wide lawns, under the bending trees--whither, on four red-marked
+occasions, he had watched her disappear--towards the castle, which
+faced him in its vast irregular picturesqueness. There were the oldest
+portions, grimly mediaeval, a lakeside fortress, with ponderous round
+towers, meurtrieres, machiolations, its grey stone walls discoloured
+in fantastic streaks and patches by weather-stains and lichens, or
+else shaggily overgrown by creepers. Then there were later portions,
+rectangular, pink-stuccoed, with rusticated work at the corners, and,
+on the blank spaces between the windows, quaint allegorical frescoes,
+faded, half washed-out. And then there were entirely modern-looking
+portions, of gleaming marble, with numberless fanciful carvings, spires,
+pinnacles, reliefs--wonderfully light, gay, habitable, and (Peter
+thought) beautiful, in the clear Italian atmosphere, against the blue
+Italian sky.
+
+"It's a perfect house for her," he said. "It suits her--like an
+appropriate garment; it almost seems to express her."
+
+And all the while, as he proceeded, her voice kept sounding in his ears;
+scraps of her conversation, phrases that she had spoken, kept coming
+back to him.
+
+
+One end of the long, wide marble terrace had been arranged as a sort
+of out-of-door living-room. A white awning was stretched overhead;
+warm-hued rugs were laid on the pavement; there were wicker
+lounging-chairs, with bright cushions, and a little table, holding books
+and things.
+
+The Duchessa rose from one of the lounging-chairs, and came forward,
+smiling, to meet him.
+
+She gave him her hand--for the first time.
+
+It was warm--electrically warm; and it was soft--womanly soft; and it
+was firm, alive--it spoke of a vitality, a temperament. Peter was sure,
+besides, that it would be sweet to smell; and he longed to bend over it,
+and press it with his lips. He might almost have done so, according to
+Italian etiquette. But, of course, he simply bowed over it, and let it
+go.
+
+"Mi trova abbandonata," she said, leading the way back to the
+terrace-end. There were notes of a peculiar richness in her voice, when
+she spoke Italian; and she dwelt languorously on the vowels, and rather
+slurred the consonants, lazily, in the manner Italian women have,
+whereby they give the quality of velvet to their tongue. She was not an
+Italian woman; Heaven be praised, she was English: so this was just pure
+gain to the sum-total of her graces. "My uncle and my niece have gone to
+the village. But I 'm expecting them to come home at any moment now--and
+you'll not have long, I hope, to wait for your snuff."
+
+She flashed a whimsical little smile into his eyes. Then she returned
+to her wicker chair, glancing an invitation at Peter to place himself
+in the one facing her. She leaned back, resting her head on a pink silk
+cushion.
+
+Peter, no doubt, sent up a silent prayer that her uncle and her niece
+might be detained at the village for the rest of the afternoon. By her
+niece he took her to mean Emilia: he liked her for the kindly euphemism.
+"What hair she has!" he thought, admiring the loose brown masses, warm
+upon their background of pink silk.
+
+"Oh, I'm inured to waiting," he replied, with a retrospective mind for
+the interminable waits of that interminable day.
+
+The Duchessa had taken a fan from the table, and was playing with it,
+opening and shutting it slowly, in her lap. Now she caught Peter's eyes
+examining it, and she gave it to him. (My own suspicion is that Peter's
+eyes had been occupied rather with the hands that held the fan, than
+with the fan itself--but that's a detail.)
+
+"I picked it up the other day, in Rome," she said. "Of course, it's
+an imitation of the French fans of the last century, but I thought it
+pretty."
+
+It was of white silk, that had been thinly stained a soft yellow, like
+the yellow of faded yellow rose-leaves. It was painted with innumerable
+plump little cupids, flying among pale clouds. The sticks were of
+mother-of=pearl. The end-sticks were elaborately incised, and in the
+incisions opals were set, big ones and small ones, smouldering with
+green and scarlet fires.
+
+"Very pretty indeed," said Peter, "and very curious. It's like a great
+butterfly's wing is n't it? But are n't you afraid of opals?"
+
+"Afraid of opals?" she wondered. "Why should one be?"
+
+"Unless your birthday happens to fall in October, they're reputed to
+bring bad luck," he reminded her.
+
+"My birthday happens to fall in June but I 'll never believe that such
+pretty things as opals can bring bad luck," she laughed, taking the fan,
+which he returned to her, and stroking one of the bigger opals with her
+finger tip.
+
+"Have you no superstitions?" he asked.
+
+"I hope not--I don't think I have," she answered. "We're not allowed to
+have superstitions, you know--nous autres Catholiques."
+
+"Oh?" he said, with surprise. "No, I did n't know."
+
+"Yes, they're a forbidden luxury. But you--? Are you superstitious?
+Would you be afraid of opals?"
+
+"I doubt if I should have the courage to wear one. At all events, I
+don't regard superstitions in the light of a luxury. I should be glad
+to be rid of those I have. They're a horrible inconvenience. But I can't
+get it out of my head that the air is filled with a swarm of malignant
+little devils, who are always watching their chance to do us an ill
+turn. We don't in the least know the conditions under which they can
+bring it off; but it's legendary that if we wear opals, or sit thirteen
+at table, or start an enterprise on Friday, or what not, we somehow
+give them their opportunity. And one naturally wishes to be on the safe
+side."
+
+She looked at him with doubt, considering.
+
+"You don't seriously believe all that?" she said.
+
+"No, I don't seriously believe it. But one breathes it in with the air
+of one's nursery, and it sticks. I don't believe it, but I fear it just
+enough to be made uneasy. The evil eye, for instance. How can one spend
+any time in Italy, where everybody goes loaded with charms against it,
+and help having a sort of sneaking half-belief in the evil eye?"
+
+She shook her head, laughing.
+
+"I 've spent a good deal of time in Italy, but I have n't so much as a
+sneaking quarter-belief in it."
+
+"I envy you your strength of mind," said he. "But surely, though
+superstition is a luxury forbidden to Catholics, there are plenty of
+good Catholics who indulge in it, all the same?"
+
+"There are never plenty of good Catholics," said sire. "You employ a
+much-abused expression. To profess the Catholic faith, to go to Mass on
+Sunday and abstain from meat on Friday, that is by no means sufficient
+to constitute a good Catholic. To be a good Catholic one would have to
+be a saint, nothing less--and not a mere formal saint, either, but a
+very real saint, a saint in thought and feeling, as well as in speech
+and action. Just in so far as one is superstitious, one is a bad
+Catholic. Oh, if the world were populated by good Catholics, it would be
+the Millennium come to pass."
+
+"It would be that, if it were populated by good Christians--wouldn't
+it?" asked Peter.
+
+"The terms are interchangeable," she answered sweetly, with a
+half-comical look of defiance.
+
+"Mercy!" cried he. "Can't a Protestant be a good Christian too?"
+
+"Yes," she said, "because a Protestant can be a Catholic without knowing
+it."
+
+"Oh--?" he puzzled, frowning.
+
+"It's quite simple," she explained. "You can't be a Christian unless
+you're a Catholic. But if you believe as much of Christian truth as
+you've ever had a fair opportunity of learning, and if you try to live
+in accordance with Christian morals, you are a Catholic, you're a
+member of the Catholic Church, whether you know it or not. You can't be
+deprived of your birthright, you see."
+
+"That seems rather broad," said Peter; "and one had always heard that
+Catholicism was nothing if not narrow."
+
+"How could it be Catholic if it were narrow?" asked she. "However, if
+a Protestant uses his intelligence, and is logical, he'll not remain
+an unconscious Catholic long. If he studies the matter, and is logical,
+he'll wish to unite himself to the Church in her visible body. Look at
+England. See how logic is multiplying converts year by year."
+
+"But it's the glory of Englishmen to be illogical," said Peter, with
+a laugh. "Our capacity for not following premisses to their logical
+consequences is the principal source of our national greatness. So the
+bulk of the English are likely to resist conversion for centuries
+to come--are they not? And then, nowadays, one is so apt to be an
+indifferentist in matters of religion--and Catholicism is so exacting.
+One remains a Protestant from the love of ease."
+
+"And from the desire, on the part of a good many Englishmen at least, to
+sail in a boat of their own--not to get mixed up with a lot of foreign
+publicans and sinners--no?" she suggested.
+
+"Oh, of course, we're insular and we're Pharisaical," admitted Peter.
+
+"And as for one's indifference," she smiled, "that is most probably due
+to one's youth and inexperience. One can't come to close quarters with
+the realities of life--with sorrow, with great joy, with temptation,
+with sin or with heroic virtue, with death, with the birth of a new
+soul, with any of the awful, wonderful realities of life--and continue
+to be an indifferentist in matters of religion, do you think?"
+
+"When one comes to close quarters with the awful, wonderful realities
+of life, one has religious moments," he acknowledged. "But they're
+generally rather fugitive, are n't they?"
+
+"One can cultivate them--one can encourage them," she said. "If you
+would care to know a good Catholic," she added, "my niece, my little
+ward, Emilia is one. She wants to become a Sister of Mercy, to spend her
+life nursing the poor."
+
+"Oh? Would n't that be rather a pity?" Peter said. "She's so extremely
+pretty. I don't know when I have seen prettier brown eyes than hers."
+
+"Well, in a few years, I expect we shall see those pretty brown eyes
+looking out from under a sister's coif. No, I don't think it will be
+a pity. Nuns and sisters, I think, are the happiest people in the
+world--and priests. Have you ever met any one who seemed happier than my
+uncle, for example?"
+
+"I have certainly never met any one who seemed sweeter, kinder," Peter
+confessed. "He has a wonderful old face."
+
+"He's a wonderful old man," said she. "I 'm going to try to keep him a
+prisoner here for the rest of the summer--though he will have it that
+he's just run down for a week. He works a great deal too hard when he's
+in Rome. He's the only Cardinal I've ever heard of, who takes practical
+charge of his titular church. But here in the country he's out-of-doors
+all the blessed day, hand in hand with Emilia. He's as young as she is,
+I believe. They play together like children--and make--me feel as staid
+and solemn and grown-up as one of Mr. Kenneth Grahame's Olympians."
+
+Peter laughed. Then, in the moment of silence that followed, he happened
+to let his eyes stray up the valley.
+
+"Hello!" he suddenly exclaimed. "Someone has been painting our mountain
+green."
+
+The Duchessa turned, to look; and she too uttered an exclamation.
+
+By some accident of reflection or refraction, the snows of Monte
+Sfiorito had become bright green, as if the light that fell on them
+had passed through emeralds. They both paused, to gaze and marvel for
+a little. Indeed, the prospect was a pleasing one, as well as a
+surprising--the sunny lawns, the high trees, the blue lake, and then
+that bright green mountain.
+
+"I have never known anything like those snow-peaks for sailing under
+false colours," Peter said. "I have seen them every colour of the
+calendar, except their native white."
+
+"You must n't blame the poor things," pleaded the Duchessa. "They can't
+help it. It's all along o' the distance and the atmosphere and the sun."
+
+She closed her fan, with which she had been more or less idly playing
+throughout their dialogue, and replaced it on the table. Among the books
+there--French books, for the most part, in yellow paper--Peter saw, with
+something of a flutter (he could never see it without something of a
+flutter), the grey-and-gold binding of "A Man of Words."
+
+The Duchessa caught his glance.
+
+"Yes," she said; "your friend's novel. I told you I had been re-reading
+it."
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+"And--do you know--I 'm inclined to agree with your own enthusiastic
+estimate of it?" she went on. "I think it's extremely--but
+extremely--clever; and more--very charming, very beautiful. The fatal
+gift of beauty!"
+
+And her smile reminded him that the application of the tag was his own.
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+"Its beauty, though," she reflected, "is n't exactly of the obvious
+sort--is it? It does n't jump at you, for instance. It is rather in the
+texture of the work, than on the surface. One has to look, to see it."
+
+"One always has to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing," he safely
+generalised. But then--he had put his foot in the stirrup--his hobby
+bolted with him. "It takes two to make a beautiful object. The eye of
+the beholder is every bit as indispensable as the hand of the
+artist. The artist does his work--the beholder must do his. They are
+collaborators. Each must be the other's equal; and they must also be
+like each other--with the likeness of opposites, of complements. Art,
+in short, is entirely a matter of reciprocity. The kind of beauty that
+jumps at you is the kind you end by getting heartily tired of--is the
+skin-deep kind; and therefore it is n't really beauty at all--it is only
+an approximation to beauty--it may be only a simulacrum of it."
+
+Her eyes were smiling, her face was glowing, softly, with interest,
+with friendliness and perhaps with the least suspicion of something
+else--perhaps with the faintest glimmer of suppressed amusement; but
+interest was easily predominant.
+
+"Yes," she assented.... But then she pursued her own train of ideas.
+"And--with you--I particularly like the woman--Pauline. I can't tell
+you how much I like her. I--it sounds extravagant, but it's true--I can
+think of no other woman in the whole of fiction whom I like so
+well--who makes so curiously personal an appeal to me. Her wit--her
+waywardness--her tenderness--her generosity--everything. How did your
+friend come by his conception of her? She's as real to me as any woman
+I have ever known she's more real to me than most of the women I
+know--she's absolutely real, she lives, she breathes. Yet I have never
+known a woman resembling her. Life would be a merrier business if one
+did know women resembling her. She seems to me all that a woman ought
+ideally to be. Does your friend know women like that--the lucky man? Or
+is Pauline, for all her convincingness, a pure creature of imagination?"
+
+"Ah," said Peter, laughing, "you touch the secret springs of my friend's
+inspiration. That is a story in itself. Felix Wildmay is a perfectly
+commonplace Englishman. How could a woman like Pauline be the creature
+of his imagination? No--she was a 'thing seen.' God made her. Wildmay
+was a mere copyist. He drew her, tant bien que mal, from the life from
+a woman who's actually alive on this dull globe to-day. But that's the
+story."
+
+The Duchessa's eyes were intent.
+
+"The story-? Tell me the story," she pronounced in a breath, with
+imperious eagerness.
+
+And her eyes waited, intently.
+
+"Oh," said Peter, "it's one of those stories that can scarcely be told.
+There's hardly any thing to take hold of. It's without incident, without
+progression--it's all subjective--it's a drama in states of mind.
+Pauline was a 'thing seen,' indeed; but she wasn't a thing known: she
+was a thing divined. Wildmay never knew her--never even knew who she
+was--never knew her name--never even knew her nationality, though,
+as the book shows, he guessed her to be an Englishwoman, married to
+a Frenchman. He simply saw her, from a distance, half-a-dozen times
+perhaps. He saw her in Paris, once or twice, at the theatre, at the
+opera; and then later again, once or twice, in London; and then, once
+more, in Paris, in the Bois. That was all, but that was enough. Her
+appearance--her face, her eyes, her smile, her way of carrying herself,
+her way of carrying her head, her gestures, her movements, her way of
+dressing--he never so much as heard her voice--her mere appearance
+made an impression on him such as all the rest of womankind had totally
+failed to make. She was exceedingly lovely, of course, exceedingly
+distinguished, noble-looking; but she was infinitely more. Her face her
+whole person--had an expression! A spirit burned in her--a prismatic,
+aromatic fire. Other women seemed dust, seemed dead, beside her. She
+was a garden, inexhaustible, of promises, of suggestions. Wit,
+capriciousness, generosity, emotion--you have said it--they were all
+there. Race was there, nerve. Sex was there--all the mystery, magic, all
+the essential, elemental principles of the Feminine, were there: she was
+a woman. A wonderful, strenuous soul was there: Wildmay saw it, felt it.
+He did n't know her--he had no hope of ever knowing her--but he knew her
+better than he knew any one else in the world. She became the absorbing
+subject of his thoughts, the heroine of his dreams. She became, in fact,
+the supreme influence of his life."
+
+The Duchessa's eyes had not lost their intentness, while he was
+speaking. Now that he had finished, she looked down at her hands, folded
+in her lap, and mused for a moment in silence. At last she looked up
+again.
+
+"It's as strange as anything I have ever heard," she said, "it's
+furiously strange--and romantic--and interesting. But--but--" She
+frowned a little, hesitating between a choice of questions.
+
+"Oh, it's a story all compact of 'buts,'" Peter threw out laughing.
+
+She let the remark pass her--she had settled upon her question.
+
+"But how could he endure such a situation?" she asked. "How could he sit
+still under it? Did n't he try in any way--did n't he make any effort at
+all--to--to find her out--to discover who she was--to get introduced to
+her? I should think he could never have rested--I should think he would
+have moved heaven and earth."
+
+"What could he do? Tell me a single thing he could have done," said
+Peter. "Society has made no provision for a case like his. It 's
+absurd--but there it is. You see a woman somewhere; you long to make
+her acquaintance; and there's no natural bar to your doing so--you 're a
+presentable man she's what they call a lady--you're both, more or less,
+of the same monde. Yet there 's positively no way known by which you can
+contrive it--unless chance, mere fortuitous chance, just happens to drop
+a common acquaintance between you, at the right time and place. Chance,
+in Wildmay's case, happened to drop all the common acquaintances they
+may possibly have had at a deplorable distance. He was alone on each
+of the occasions when he saw her. There was no one he could ask to
+introduce him; there was no one he could apply to for information
+concerning her. He could n't very well follow her carriage through the
+streets--dog her to her lair, like a detective. Well--what then?"
+
+The Duchessa was playing with her fan again.
+
+"No," she agreed; "I suppose it was hopeless. But it seems rather hard
+on the poor man--rather baffling and tantalising."
+
+"The poor man thought it so, to be sure," said Peter; "he fretted and
+fumed a good deal, and kicked against the pricks. Here, there, now,
+anon, he would enjoy his brief little vision of her--then she would
+vanish into the deep inane. So, in the end--he had to take it out in
+something--he took it out in writing a book about her. He propped up a
+mental portrait of her on his desk before him, and translated it
+into the character of Pauline. In that way he was able to spend long
+delightful hours alone with her every day, in a kind of metaphysical
+intimacy. He had never heard her voice--but now he heard it as often as
+Pauline opened her lips. He owned her--he possessed her--she lived under
+his roof--she was always waiting for him in his study. She is real to
+you? She was inexpressibly, miraculously real to him. He saw her, knew
+her, felt her, realised her, in every detail of her mind, her soul, her
+person--down to the very intonations of her speech--down to the veins
+in her hands, the rings on her fingers--down to her very furs and laces,
+the frou-frou of her skirts, the scent upon her pocket-handkerchief. He
+had numbered the hairs of her head, almost."
+
+Again the Duchessa mused for a while in silence, opening and shutting
+her fan, and gazing into its opals.
+
+"I am thinking of it from the woman's point of view," she said, by
+and by. "To have played such a part in a man's life--and never to have
+dreamed it! Never even, very likely, to have dreamed that such a man
+existed--for it's entirely possible she didn't notice him, on those
+occasions when he saw her. And to have been the subject of such a
+novel--and never to have dreamed that, either! To have read the novel
+perhaps--without dreaming for an instant that there was any sort of
+connection between Pauline and herself! Or else--what would almost be
+stranger still--not to have read the novel, not to have heard of it! To
+have inspired such a book, such a beautiful book--yet to remain in sheer
+unconscious ignorance that there was such a book! Oh, I think it is even
+more extraordinary from the woman's point of view than from the man's.
+There is something almost terrifying about it. To have had such an
+influence on the destiny of someone you've never heard of! There's a
+kind of intangible sense of a responsibility."
+
+"There is also, perhaps," laughed Peter, "a kind of intangible sense of
+a liberty taken. I'm bound to say I think Wildmay was decidedly at his
+ease. To appropriate in that cool fashion the personality of a total
+stranger! But artists are the most unprincipled folk unhung. Ils
+prennent leur bien la, ou ils le trouvent."
+
+"Oh, no," said the Duchessa, "I think she was fair game. One can carry
+delicacy too far. He was entitled to the benefits of his discovery--for,
+after all, it was a discovery, was n't it? You have said yourself how
+indispensable the eye of the beholder is--'the seeing eye.' I think,
+indeed, the whole affair speaks extremely well for Mr. Wildmay. It is
+not every man who would be capable of so purely intellectual a passion.
+I suppose one must call his feeling for her a passion? It indicates a
+distinction in his nature. He can hardly be a mere materialist. But--but
+I think it's heart-rending that he never met her."
+
+"Oh, but that's the continuation of the story," said Peter. "He did meet
+her in the end, you know."
+
+"He did meet her!" cried the Duchessa, starting up, with a sudden access
+of interest, whilst her eyes lightened. "He did meet her? Oh, you must
+tell me about that."
+
+And just at this crisis the Cardinal and Emilia appeared, climbing the
+terrace steps.
+
+"Bother!" exclaimed the Duchessa, under her breath. Then, to Peter, "It
+will have to be for another time--unless I die of the suspense."
+
+After the necessary greetings were transacted, another elderly priest
+joined the company; a tall, burly, rather florid man, mentioned, when
+Peter was introduced to him, as Monsignor Langshawe. "This really is her
+chaplain," Peter concluded. Then a servant brought tea.
+
+"Ah, Diamond, Diamond, you little know what mischief you might have
+wrought," he admonished himself, as he walked home through the level
+sunshine. "In another instant, if we'd not been interrupted, you would
+have let the cat out of the bag. The premature escape of the cat from
+the bag would spoil everything."
+
+And he hugged himself, as one snatched from peril, in a qualm of
+retroactive terror. At the same time he was filled with a kind of
+exultancy. All that he had hoped had come to pass, and more, vastly
+more. Not only had he been received as a friend at Ventirose, but he had
+been encouraged to tell her a part at least of the story by which her
+life and his were so curiously connected; and he had been snatched from
+the peril of telling her too much. The day was not yet when he could
+safely say, "Mutato nomine....." Would the day ever be? But, meanwhile,
+just to have told her the first ten lines of that story, he could not
+help feeling, somehow advanced matters tremendously, somehow put a new
+face on matters.
+
+"The hour for which the ages sighed may not be so far away as you
+think," he said to Marietta. "The curtain has risen upon Act Three. I
+fancy I can perceive faint glimmerings of the beginning of the end."
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+All that evening, something which he had not been conscious of noticing
+especially when it was present to him--certainly he had paid no
+conscious attention to its details--kept recurring and recurring to
+Peter's memory: the appearance of the prettily-arranged terrace-end at
+Ventirose: the white awning, with the blue sky at its edges, the sunny
+park beyond; the warm-hued carpets on the marble pavement; the wicker
+chairs, with their bright cushions; the table, with its books and
+bibelots--the yellow French books, a tortoise-shell paperknife, a silver
+paperweight, a crystal smelling-bottle, a bowlful of drooping poppies;
+and the marble balustrade, with its delicate tracery of leaves and
+tendrils, where the jessamine twined round its pillars.
+
+This kept recurring, recurring, vividly, a picture that he could see
+without closing his eyes, a picture with a very decided sentiment.
+Like the gay and gleaming many-pinnacled facade of her house, it seemed
+appropriate to her; it seemed in its fashion to express her. Nay, it
+seemed to do more. It was a corner of her every-day environment; these
+things were the companions, the witnesses, of moments of her life,
+phases of herself, which were hidden from Peter; they were the
+companions and witnesses of her solitude, her privacy; they were her
+confidants, in a way. They seemed not merely to express her, therefore,
+but to be continually on the point--I had almost said of betraying her.
+At all events, if he could only understand their silent language,
+they would prove rich in precious revelations. So he welcomed their
+recurrences, dwelt upon them, pondered them, and got a deep if somewhat
+inarticulate pleasure from them.
+
+On Thursday, as he approached the castle, the last fires of sunset were
+burning in the sky behind it--the long irregular mass of buildings stood
+out in varying shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of red: the
+grey stone, dark, velvety indigo; the pink stucco, pink still, but
+with a transparent blue penumbra over it; the white marble, palely,
+scintillantly amethystine. And if he was interested in her environment,
+now he could study it to his heart's content: the wide marble staircase,
+up which he was shown, with its crimson carpet, and the big mellow
+painting, that looked as if it might be a Titian, at the top; the great
+saloon, in which he was received, with its polished mosaic floor,
+its frescoed ceiling, its white-and-gold panelling, its hangings and
+upholsteries of yellow brocade, its satinwood chairs and tables, its
+bronzes, porcelains, embroideries, its screens and mirrors; the long
+dining-hall, with its high pointed windows, its slender marble columns
+supporting a vaulted roof, its twinkling candles in chandeliers and
+sconces of cloudy Venetian glass, its brilliant table, its flowers and
+their colours and their scents.
+
+He could study her environment to his heart's content, indeed--or to
+his heart's despair. For all this had rather the effect of chilling,
+of depressing him. It was very splendid; it was very luxurious and
+cheerful; it was appropriate and personal to her, if you like; no doubt,
+in its fashion, in its measure, it, too, expressed her. But, at that
+rate, it expressed her in an aspect which Peter had instinctively made
+it his habit to forget, which he by no means found it inspiriting
+to remember. It expressed, it emphasised, her wealth, her rank; it
+emphasised the distance, in a worldly sense, between her and himself,
+the conventional barriers.
+
+And she...
+
+She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she was all
+that she had ever been--and yet--and yet--Well, somehow, she seemed
+indefinably different. Somehow, again, the distance, the barriers, were
+emphasised. She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she
+was all that she had ever been; but, somehow, to-night, she seemed very
+much the great lady, very much the duchess....
+
+"My dear man," he said to himself, "you were mad to dream for a single
+instant that there was the remotest possibility of anything ever
+happening."
+
+The only other guests, besides the Cardinal and Monsignor Langshawe,
+were an old Frenchwoman, with beautiful white hair, from one of the
+neighbouring villas, Madame de Lafere, and a young, pretty, witty, and
+voluble Irishwoman, Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, from an hotel at Spiaggia.
+In deference, perhaps, to the cloth of the two ecclesiastics, none of
+the women were in full evening-dress, and there was no arm-taking when
+they went in to dinner. The dinner itself was of a simplicity which
+Peter thought admirable, and which, of course, he attributed to his
+Duchessa's own good taste. He was not yet familiar enough with the Black
+aristocracy of Italy, to be aware that in the matter of food and drink
+simplicity is as much the criterion of good form amongst them, as lavish
+complexity is the criterion of good form amongst the English-imitating
+Whites.
+
+The conversation, I believe, took its direction chiefly from the
+initiative of Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. With great sprightliness and
+humour, and with an astonishing light-hearted courage, she rallied the
+Cardinal upon the neglect in which her native island was allowed to
+languish by the powers at Rome. "The most Catholic country in three
+hemispheres, to be sure," she said; "every inch of its soil soaked
+with the blood of martyrs. Yet you've not added an Irish saint to the
+Calendar for I see you're blushing to think how many ages; and you've
+taken sides with the heretic Saxon against us in our struggle for Home
+Rule--which I blame you for, though, being a landowner and a bit of an
+absentee, I 'm a traitorous Unionist myself."
+
+The Cardinal laughingly retorted that the Irish were far too fine, too
+imaginative and poetical a race, to be bothered with material questions
+of government and administration. They should leave such cares to the
+stolid, practical English, and devote the leisure they would thus obtain
+to the further exercise and development of what someone had called "the
+starfire of the Celtic nature." Ireland should look upon England as
+her working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of Irish saints to
+the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their excessive number. "'T is an
+embarrassment of riches. If we were once to begin, we could never leave
+off till we had canonised nine-tenths of the dead population."
+
+Monsignor Langshawe, at this (making jest the cue for earnest), spoke
+up for Scotland, and deplored the delay in the beatification of Blessed
+Mary. "The official beatification," he discriminated, "for she was
+beatified in the heart of every true Catholic Scot on the day when
+Bloody Elizabeth murdered her."
+
+And Madame de Lafere put in a plea for Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and
+the little Dauphin.
+
+"Blessed Mary--Bloody Elizabeth," laughed the Duchessa, in an aside
+to Peter; "here is language to use in the presence of a Protestant
+Englishman."
+
+"Oh, I'm accustomed to 'Bloody Elizabeth,'" said he. "Was n't it a word
+of Cardinal Newman's?"
+
+"Yes, I think so," said she. "And since every one is naming his
+candidate; for the Calendar, you have named mine. I think there never
+was a saintlier saint than Cardinal Newman."
+
+"What is your Eminence's attitude towards the question of mixed
+marriages?" Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.
+
+Peter pricked up his ears.
+
+"It is not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in England,"
+his Eminence replied; "but in the abstract, and other things equal, my
+attitude would of course be one of disapproval."
+
+"And yet surely," contended she, "if a pious Catholic girl marries a
+Protestant man, she has a hundred chances of converting him?"
+
+"I don't know," said the Cardinal. "Would n't it be safer to let the
+conversion precede the marriage? Afterwards, I 'm afraid, he would
+have a hundred chances of inducing her to apostatise, or, at least, of
+rendering her lukewarm."
+
+"Not if she had a spark of the true zeal," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+"Any wife can make her husband's life a burden to him, if she will
+conscientiously lay herself out to do so. The man would be glad to
+submit, for the sake of peace in his household. I often sigh for the
+good old days of the Inquisition; but it's still possible, in the
+blessed seclusion of the family circle, to apply the rack and the
+thumbscrew in a modified form. I know a dozen fine young Protestant men
+in London whom I'm labouring to convert, and I feel I 'm defeated only
+by the circumstance that I'm not in a position to lead them to the altar
+in the full meaning of the expression."
+
+"A dozen?" the Cardinal laughed. "Aren't you complicating the question
+of mixed marriages with that of plural marriage?"
+
+"'T was merely a little Hibernicism, for which I beg your Eminence's
+indulgence," laughed she. "But what puts the most spokes in a
+proselytiser's wheel is the Faith itself. If we only deserved the
+reputation for sharp practice and double dealing which the Protestants
+have foisted upon us, it would be roses, roses, all the way. Why are
+we forbidden to let the end justify the means? And where are those
+accommodements avec le ciel of which we've heard? We're not even
+permitted a few poor accommodements avec le monde."
+
+"Look at my uncle's face," whispered the Duchessa to Peter. The
+Cardinal's fine old face was all alight with amusement. "In his fondness
+for taking things by their humorous end, he has met an affinity."
+
+"It will be a grand day for the Church and the nations, when we have
+an Irish Pope," Mrs. O'Donovan Florence continued. "A good, stalwart,
+militant Irishman is what's needed to set everything right. With a sweet
+Irish tongue, he'd win home the wandering sheep; and with a strong Irish
+arm, he'd drive the wolves from the fold. It's he that would soon sweep
+the Italians out of Rome."
+
+"The Italians will soon be swept out of Rome by the natural current
+of events," said the Cardinal. "But an Irish bishop of my acquaintance
+insists that we have already had many Irish Popes, without knowing it.
+Of all the greatest Popes he cries, 'Surely, they must have had Irish
+blood.' He's perfectly convinced that Pius the Ninth was Irish. His very
+name, his family-name, Ferretti, was merely the Irish name, Farrity,
+Italianised, the good bishop says. No one but an Irishman, he insists,
+could have been so witty."
+
+Mrs. O'Donovan Florence looked intensely thoughtful for a moment....
+Then, "I 'm trying to think of the original Irish form of Udeschini,"
+she declared.
+
+At which there was a general laugh.
+
+"When you say 'soon,' Eminence, do you mean that we may hope to see the
+Italians driven from Rome in our time?" enquired Madame de Lafere.
+
+"They are on the verge of bankruptcy--for their sins," the Cardinal
+answered. "When the crash comes--and it can't fail to come before many
+years--there will necessarily be a readjustment. I do not believe that
+the conscience of Christendom will again allow Peter to be deprived of
+his inheritance."
+
+"God hasten the good day," said Monsignor Langshawe.
+
+"If I can live to see Rome restored to the Pope, I shall die content,
+even though I cannot live to see France restored to the King," said the
+old Frenchwoman.
+
+"And I--even though I cannot live to see Britain restored to the Faith,"
+said the Monsignore.
+
+The Duchessa smiled at Peter.
+
+"What a hotbed of Ultramontanes and reactionaries you have fallen into,"
+she murmured.
+
+"It is exhilarating," said he, "to meet people who have convictions."
+
+"Even when you regard their convictions as erroneous?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, even then," he answered. "But I'm not sure I regard as erroneous
+the convictions I have heard expressed to-night."
+
+"Oh--?" she wondered. "Would you like to see Rome restored to the Pope?"
+
+"Yes," said he, "decidedly--for aesthetic reasons, if for no others."
+
+"I suppose there are aesthetic reasons," she assented. "But we, of
+course, think there are conclusive reasons in mere justice."
+
+"I don't doubt there are conclusive reasons in mere justice, too," said
+he.
+
+After dinner, at the Cardinal's invitation, the Duchessa went to the
+piano, and played Bach and Scarlatti. Her face, in the soft candlelight,
+as she discoursed that "luminous, lucid" music, Peter thought... But
+what do lovers always think of their ladies' faces, when they look up
+from their pianos, in soft candlelight?
+
+Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, taking her departure, said to the Cardinal, "I
+owe your Eminence the two proudest days of my life. The first was when I
+read in the paper that you had received the hat, and I was able to boast
+to all my acquaintances that I had been in the convent with your
+niece by marriage. And the second is now, when I can boast forevermore
+hereafter that I've enjoyed the honour of making my courtesy to you."
+
+"So," said Peter, as he walked home through the dew and the starlight of
+the park, amid the phantom perfumes of the night, "so the Cardinal
+does n't approve of mixed marriages and, of course, his niece does n't,
+either. But what can it matter to me? For alas and alas--as he truly
+said--it's hardly a question of actuality."
+
+And he lit a cigarette.
+
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+"So he did meet her, after all?" the Duchessa said.
+
+"Yes, he met her in the end," Peter answered.
+
+They were seated under the gay white awning, against the bright
+perspective of lawn, lake, and mountains, on the terrace at Ventirose,
+where Peter was paying his dinner-call. The August day was hot and
+still and beautiful--a day made of gold and velvet and sweet odours. The
+Duchessa lay back languidly, among the crisp silk cushions, in her low,
+lounging chair; and Peter, as he looked at her, told himself that he
+must be cautious, cautious.
+
+"Yes, he met her in the end," he said.
+
+"Well--? And then--?" she questioned, with a show of eagerness, smiling
+into his eyes. "What happened? Did she come up to his expectations?
+Or was she just the usual disappointment? I have been pining--oh, but
+pining--to hear the continuation of the story."
+
+She smiled into his eyes, and his heart fluttered. "I must be cautious,"
+he told himself. "In more ways than one, this is a crucial moment." At
+the same time, as a very part of his caution, he must appear entirely
+nonchalant and candid.
+
+"Oh, no--tutt' altro," he said, with an assumption of nonchalant
+airiness and candid promptness. "She 'better bettered' his
+expectations--she surpassed his fondest. She was a thousand times more
+delightful than he had dreamed--though, as you know, he had dreamed a
+good deal. Pauline de Fleuvieres turned out to be the feeblest, faintest
+echo of her."
+
+The Duchessa meditated for an instant.
+
+"It seems impossible. It's one of those situations in which a
+disenchantment seems the foregone conclusion," she said, at last.
+
+"It seems so, indeed," assented Peter; "but disenchantment, there was
+none. She was all that he had imagined, and infinitely more. She was the
+substance--he had imagined the shadow. He had divined her, as it were,
+from a single angle, and there were many angles. Pauline was the pale
+reflection of one side of her--a pencil-sketch in profile."
+
+The Duchessa shook her head, marvelling, and smiled again.
+
+"You pile wonder upon wonder," she said. "That the reality should excel
+the poet's ideal! That the cloud-capped towers which looked splendid
+from afar, with all the glamour of distance, should prove to be more
+splendid still, on close inspection! It's dead against the accepted
+theory of things. And that any woman should be nicer than that adorable
+Pauline! You tax belief. But I want to know what happened. Had she read
+his book?"
+
+"Nothing happened," said Peter. "I warned you that it was a drama
+without action. A good deal happened, no doubt, in Wildmay's secret
+soul. But externally, nothing. They simply chatted together--exchanged
+the time o' day--like any pair of acquaintances. No, I don't think she
+had read his book. She did read it afterwards, though."
+
+"And liked it?"
+
+"Yes--she said she liked it."
+
+"Well--? But then-?" the Duchessa pressed him, insistently. "When
+she discovered the part she had had in its composition--? Was n't she
+overwhelmed? Wasn't she immensely interested--surprised--moved?"
+
+She leaned forward a little. Her eyes were shining. Her lips were
+slightly parted, so that between their warm rosiness Peter could see the
+exquisite white line of her teeth. His heart fluttered again. "I must be
+cautious, cautious," he remembered, and made a strenuous "act of will"
+to steady himself.
+
+"Oh, she never discovered that," he said.
+
+"What!" exclaimed the Duchessa. Her face fell. Her eyes darkened--with
+dismay, with incomprehension. "Do you--you don't--mean to say that
+he didn't tell her?" There was reluctance to believe, there was a
+conditional implication of deep reproach, in her voice.
+
+Peter had to repeat his act of will.
+
+"How could he tell her?" he asked.
+
+She frowned at him, with reproach that was explicit now, and a kind of
+pained astonishment.
+
+"How could he help telling her?" she cried. "But--but it was the one
+great fact between them. But it was a fact that intimately concerned
+her--it was a fact of her own destiny. But it was her right to be told.
+Do you seriously mean that he did n't tell her? But why did n't he? What
+could have possessed him?"
+
+There was something like a tremor in her voice. "I must appear entirely
+nonchalant and candid," Peter remembered.
+
+"I fancy he was possessed, in some measure, by a sense of the liberty he
+had taken by a sense of what one might, perhaps, venture to qualify as
+his 'cheek.' For, if it was n't already a liberty to embody his notion
+of her in a novel--in a published book, for daws to peck at--it would
+have become a liberty the moment he informed her that he had done so.
+That would have had the effect of making her a kind of involuntary
+particeps criminis."
+
+"Oh, the foolish man!" sighed the Duchessa, with a rueful shake of the
+head. "His foolish British self-consciousness! His British inability
+to put himself in another person's place, to see things from another's
+point of view! Could n't he see, from her point of view, from any point
+of view but his own, that it was her right to be told? That the matter
+affected her in one way, as much as it affected him in another? That
+since she had influenced--since she had contributed to--his life and his
+art as she had, it was her right to know it? Couldn't he see that his
+'cheek,' his real 'cheek,' began when he withheld from her that great
+strange chapter of her own history? Oh, he ought to have told her, he
+ought to have told her."
+
+She sank back in her chair, giving her head another rueful shake,
+and gazed ruefully away, over the sunny landscape, through the mellow
+atmosphere, into the golden-hazy distance.
+
+Peter looked at her--and then, quickly, for caution's sake, looked
+elsewhere.
+
+"But there were other things to be taken into account," he said.
+
+The Duchessa raised her eyes. "What other things?" they gravely
+questioned.
+
+"Would n't his telling her have been equivalent to a declaration of
+love?" questioned he, looking at the signet-ring on the little finger of
+his left hand.
+
+"A declaration of love?" She considered for a moment. "Yes, I suppose
+in a way it would," she acknowledged. "But even so?" she asked, after
+another moment of consideration. "Why should he not have made her a
+declaration of love? He was in love with her, wasn't he?"
+
+The point of frank interrogation in her eyes showed clearly, showed
+cruelly, how detached, how impersonal, her interest was.
+
+"Frantically," said Peter. For caution's sake, he kept HIS eyes on the
+golden-hazy peaks of Monte Sfionto. "He had been in love with her, in a
+fashion, of course, from the beginning. But after he met her, he fell in
+love with her anew. His mind, his imagination, had been in love with its
+conception of her. But now he, the man, loved her, the woman herself,
+frantically, with just a downright common human love. There were
+circumstances, however, which made it impossible for him to tell her
+so."
+
+"What circumstances?" There was the same frank look of interrogation.
+"Do you mean that she was married?"
+
+"No, not that. By the mercy of heaven," he pronounced, with energy, "she
+was a widow."
+
+The Duchessa broke into an amused laugh.
+
+"Permit me to admire your piety," she said.
+
+And Peter, as his somewhat outrageous ejaculation came back to him,
+laughed vaguely too.
+
+"But then--?" she went on. "What else? By the mercy of heaven, she was a
+widow. What other circumstance could have tied his tongue?"
+
+"Oh," he answered, a trifle uneasily, "a multitude of circumstances.
+Pretty nearly every conventional barrier the world has invented, existed
+between him and her. She was a frightful swell, for one thing."
+
+"A frightful swell--?" The Duchessa raised her eyebrows.
+
+"Yes," said Peter, "at a vertiginous height above him--horribly 'aloft
+and lone' in the social hierarchy." He tried to smile.
+
+"What could that matter?" the Duchessa objected simply. "Mr. Wildmay is
+a gentleman."
+
+"How do you know he is?" Peter asked, thinking to create a diversion.
+
+"Of course, he is. He must be. No one but a gentleman could have had
+such an experience, could have written such a book. And besides, he's
+a friend of yours. Of course he's a gentleman," returned the adroit
+Duchessa.
+
+"But there are degrees of gentleness, I believe," said Peter. "She was
+at the topmost top. He--well, at all events, he knew his place. He had
+too much humour, too just a sense of proportion, to contemplate offering
+her his hand."
+
+"A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman--under royalty," said the
+Duchessa.
+
+"He can, to be sure--and he can also see it declined with thanks,"
+Peter answered. "But it wasn't merely her rank. She was horribly
+rich, besides. And then--and then--! There were ten thousand other
+impediments. But the chief of them all, I daresay, was Wildmay's fear
+lest an avowal of his attachment should lead to his exile from her
+presence--and he naturally did not wish to be exiled."
+
+"Faint heart!" the Duchessa said. "He ought to have told her. The case
+was peculiar, was unique. Ordinary rules could n't apply to it. And
+how could he be sure, after all, that she would n't have despised the
+conventional barriers, as you call them? Every man gets the wife he
+deserves--and certainly he had gone a long way towards deserving her.
+She could n't have felt quite indifferent to him--if he had told her;
+quite indifferent to the man who had drawn that magnificent Pauline from
+his vision of her. No woman could be entirely proof against a compliment
+like that. And I insist that it was her right to know. He should simply
+have told her the story of his book and of her part in it. She would
+have inferred the rest. He needn't have mentioned love--the word."
+
+"Well," said Peter, "it is not always too late to mend. He may tell her
+some fine day yet."
+
+And in his soul two voices were contending.
+
+"Tell her--tell her--tell her! Tell her now, at once, and abide your
+chances," urged one. "No--no--no--do nothing of the kind," protested the
+second. "She is arguing the point for its abstract interest. She is a
+hundred miles from dreaming that you are the man--hundreds of miles from
+dreaming that she is the woman. If she had the least suspicion of that,
+she would sing a song as different as may be. Caution, caution."
+
+He looked at her--warm and fragrant and radiant, in her soft, white
+gown, in her low lounging-chair, so near, so near to him--he looked
+at her glowing eyes, her red lips, her rich brown hair, at the
+white-and-rose of her skin, at the delicate blue veins in her forehead,
+at her fine white hands, clasped loosely together in her lap, at the
+flowing lines of her figure, with its supple grace and strength; and
+behind her, surrounding her, accessory to her, he was conscious of the
+golden August world, in the golden August weather--of the green park,
+and the pure sunshine, and the sweet, still air, of the blue lake, and
+the blue sky, and the mountains with their dark-blue shadows, of the
+long marble terrace, and the gleaming marble facade of the house, and
+the marble balustrade, with the jessamine twining round its columns.
+The picture was very beautiful--but something was wanting to perfect its
+beauty; and the name of the something that was wanting sang itself
+in poignant iteration to the beating of his pulses. And he longed and
+longed to tell her; and he dared not; and he hesitated....
+
+And while he was hesitating, the pounding of hoofs and the grinding of
+carriage-wheels on gravel reached his ears--and so the situation was
+saved, or the opportunity lost, as you choose to think it. For next
+minute a servant appeared on the terrace, and announced Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence.
+
+And shortly after that lady's arrival, Peter took his leave.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+"Well, Trixie, and is one to congratulate you?" asked Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence.
+
+"Congratulate me--? On what?" asked Beatrice.
+
+"On what, indeed!" cried the vivacious Irishwoman. "Don't try to pull
+the wool over the eyes of an old campaigner like me."
+
+Beatrice looked blank.
+
+"I can't in the least think what you mean," she said.
+
+"Get along with you," cried Mrs. O'Donovan Florence; and she brandished
+her sunshade threateningly. "On your engagement to Mr.--what's this his
+name is?--to be sure."
+
+She glanced indicatively down the lawn, in the direction of Peter's
+retreating tweeds.
+
+Beatrice had looked blank. But now she looked--first, perhaps, for
+a tiny fraction of a second, startled--then gently, compassionately
+ironical.
+
+"My poor Kate! Are you out of your senses?" she enquired, in accents of
+concern, nodding her head, with a feint of pensive pity.
+
+"Not I," returned Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, cheerfully confident. "But I
+'m thinking I could lay my finger on a long-limbed young Englishman less
+than a mile from here, who very nearly is. Hasn't he asked you yet?"
+
+"Es-to bete?" Beatrice murmured, pitifully nodding again.
+
+"Ah, well, if he has n't, it's merely a question of time when he will,"
+said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. "You've only to notice the famished
+gaze with which he devours you, to see his condition. But don't try to
+hoodwink me. Don't pretend that this is news to you."
+
+"News!" scoffed Beatrice. "It's news and nonsense--the product of your
+irrepressible imagination. Mr. What's-this-his-name-is, as you call him,
+and I are the barest acquaintances. He's our temporary neighbour--the
+tenant for the season of Villa Floriano--the house you can catch a
+glimpse of, below there, through the trees, on the other side of the
+river."
+
+"Is he, now, really? And that's very interesting too. But I wasn't
+denying it." Mrs. O'Donovan Florence smiled, with derisive sweetness.
+"The fact of his being the tenant of the house I can catch a glimpse
+of, through the trees, on the other side of the river, though a valuable
+acquisition to my stores of knowledge, does n't explain away his
+famished glance unless, indeed, he's behind with the rent: but even
+then, it's not famished he'd look, but merely anxious and persuasive.
+I'm a landlord myself. No, Trixie, dear, you've made roast meat of the
+poor fellow's heart, as the poetical Persians express it; and if he has
+n't told you so yet with his tongue, he tells the whole world so with
+his eyes as often as he allows them to rest on their loadstone, your
+face. You can see the sparks and the smoke escaping from them, as though
+they were chimneys. If you've not observed that for yourself, it can
+only be that excessive modesty has rendered you blind. The man is head
+over ears in love with you. Nonsense or bonsense, that is the sober
+truth."
+
+Beatrice laughed.
+
+"I 'm sorry to destroy a romance, Kate," she said; "but alas for the
+pretty one you 've woven, I happen to know that, so far from being in
+love with me, Mr. Marchdale is quite desperately in love with another
+woman. He was talking to me about her the moment before you arrived."
+
+"Was he, indeed?--and you the barest acquaintances!" quizzed Mrs.
+O'Donovan Florence, pulling a face. "Well, well," she went on
+thoughtfully, "if he's in love with another woman, that settles my last
+remaining doubt. It can only be that the other woman's yourself."
+
+Beatrice shook her head, and laughed again.
+
+"Is that what they call an Irishism?" she asked, with polite curiosity.
+
+"And an Irishism is a very good thing, too--when employed with
+intention," retorted her friend. "Did he just chance, now, in a casual
+way, to mention the other woman's name, I wonder?"
+
+"Oh, you perverse and stiff-necked generation!" Beatrice laughed. "What
+can his mentioning or not mentioning her name signify? For since he's
+in love with her, it's hardly likely that he's in love with you or me at
+the same time, is it?"
+
+"That's as may be. But I'll wager I could make a shrewd guess at her
+name myself. And what else did he tell you about her? He's told me
+nothing; but I'll warrant I could paint her portrait. She's a fine
+figure of a young Englishwoman, brown-haired, grey-eyed, and she stands
+about five-feet-eight in her shoes. There's an expression of great
+malice and humour in her physiognomy, and a kind of devil-may-care
+haughtiness in the poise of her head. She's a bit of a grande dame, into
+the bargain--something like an Anglo-Italian duchess, for example; she's
+monstrously rich; and she adds, you'll be surprised to learn, to her
+other fascinations that of being a widow. Faith, the men are so fond
+of widows, it's a marvel to me that we're ever married at all until we
+reach that condition;--and there, if you like, is another Irishism for
+you. But what's this? Methinks a rosy blush mantles my lady's brow. Have
+I touched the heel of Achilles? She IS a widow? He TOLD you she was a
+widow?... But--bless us and save us!--what's come to you now? You're as
+white as a sheet. What is it?"
+
+"Good heavens!" gasped Beatrice. She lay back in her chair, and stared
+with horrified eyes into space. "Good--good heavens!"
+
+Mrs. O' Donovan Florence leaned forward and took her hand.
+
+"What is it, my dear? What's come to you?" she asked, in alarm.
+
+Beatrice gave a kind of groan.
+
+"It's absurd--it's impossible," she said; "and yet, if by any ridiculous
+chance you should be right, it's too horribly horrible." She repeated
+her groan. "If by any ridiculous chance you are right, the man will
+think that I have been leading him on!"
+
+"LEADING HIM ON!" Mrs. O'Donovan Florence suppressed a shriek of
+ecstatic mirth. "There's no question about my being right," she averred
+soberly. "He wears his heart behind his eyeglass; and whoso runs may
+read it."
+
+"Well, then--" began Beatrice, with an air of desperation... "But no,"
+she broke off. "YOU CAN'T be right. It's impossible, impossible. Wait.
+I'll tell you the whole story. You shall see for yourself."
+
+"Go on," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, assuming an attitude of devout
+attention, which she retained while Beatrice (not without certain starts
+and hesitations) recounted the fond tale of Peter's novel, and of the
+woman who had suggested the character of Pauline.
+
+"But OF COURSE!" cried the Irishwoman, when the tale was finished;
+and this time her shriek of mirth, of glee, was not suppressed. "Of
+course--you miracle of unsuspecting innocence! The man would never have
+breathed a whisper of the affair to any soul alive, save to his heroine
+herself--let alone to you, if you and she were not the same. Couple that
+with the eyes he makes at you, and you've got assurance twice assured.
+You ought to have guessed it from the first syllable he uttered. And
+when he went on about her exalted station and her fabulous wealth! Oh,
+my ingenue! Oh, my guileless lambkin! And you Trixie Belfont! Where's
+your famous wit? Where are your famous intuitions?"
+
+"BUT DON'T YOU SEE," wailed Beatrice, "don't you see the utterly odious
+position this leaves me in? I've been urging him with all my might to
+tell her! I said... oh, the things I said!" She shuddered visibly. "I
+said that differences of rank and fortune could n't matter." She gave a
+melancholy laugh. "I said that very likely she'd accept him. I said she
+couldn't help being... Oh, my dear, my dear! He'll think--of course,
+he can't help thinking--that I was encouraging him--that I was coming
+halfway to meet him."
+
+"Hush, hush! It's not so bad as that," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence,
+soothingly. "For surely, as I understand it, the man doesn't dream that
+you knew it was about himself he was speaking. He always talked of the
+book as by a friend of his; and you never let him suspect that you had
+pierced his subterfuge."
+
+Beatrice frowned for an instant, putting this consideration in its
+place, in her troubled mind. Then suddenly a light of intense, of
+immense relief broke in her face.
+
+"Thank goodness!" she sighed. "I had forgotten. No, he does n't dream
+that. But oh, the fright I had!"
+
+"He'll tell you, all the same," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+
+"No, he'll never tell me now. I am forewarned, forearmed. I 'll give him
+no chance," Beatrice answered.
+
+"Yes; and what's more, you'll marry him," said her friend.
+
+"Kate! Don't descend to imbecilities," cried Beatrice.
+
+"You'll marry him," reiterated Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, calmly. "You'll
+end by marrying him--if you're human; and I've seldom known a human
+being who was more so. It's not in flesh and blood to remain unmoved by
+a tribute such as that man has paid you. The first thing you'll do will
+be to re-read the novel. Otherwise, I'd request the loan of it myself,
+for I 'm naturally curious to compare the wrought ring with the virgin
+gold--but I know it's the wrought ring the virgin gold will itself be
+wanting, directly it's alone. And then the poison will work. And you'll
+end by marrying him."
+
+"In the first place," replied Beatrice, firmly, "I shall never marry any
+one. That is absolutely certain. In the next place, I shall not re-read
+the novel; and to prove that I shan't, I shall insist on your taking it
+with you when you leave to-day. And finally, I'm nowhere near convinced
+that you're right about my being... well, you might as well say the
+raw material, the rough ore, as the virgin gold. It's only a bare
+possibility. But even the possibility had not occurred to me before.
+Now that it has, I shall be on my guard. I shall know how to prevent any
+possible developments."
+
+"In the first place," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, with equal firmness,
+"wild horses couldn't induce me to take the novel. Wait till you're
+alone. A hundred questions about it will come flocking to your mind;
+you'd be miserable if you had n't it to refer to. In the next place, the
+poison will work and work. Say what you will, it's flattery that wins
+us. In the third place, he'll tell you. Finally, you'll make a good
+Catholic of him, and marry him. It's absurd, it's iniquitous, anyhow,
+for a young and beautiful woman like you to remain a widow. And
+your future husband is a man of talent and distinction, and he's not
+bad-looking, either. Will you stick to your title, now, I wonder? Or
+will you step down, and be plain Mrs. Marchdale? No--the Honourable
+Mrs.--excuse me--'Mr. and the Honourable Mrs. Marchdale.' I see you in
+the 'Morning Post' already. And will you continue to live in Italy? Or
+will you come back to England?"
+
+"Oh, my good Kate, my sweet Kate, my incorrigible Kate, what an
+extravagantly silly Kate you can be when the mood takes you," Beatrice
+laughed.
+
+"Kate me as many Kates as you like, the man is really not bad-looking.
+He has a nice lithe springy figure, and a clean complexion, and an open
+brow. And if there's a suggestion of superciliousness in the tilt of his
+nose, of scepticism in the twirl of his moustaches, and of obstinacy in
+the squareness of his chin--ma foi, you must take the bitter with the
+sweet. Besides, he has decent hair, and plenty of it--he'll not go bald.
+And he dresses well, and wears his clothes with an air. In short, you'll
+make a very handsome couple. Anyhow, when your family are gathered
+round the evening lamp to-night, I 'll stake my fortune on it, but I
+can foretell the name of the book they'll find Trixie Belfont reading,"
+laughed Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+
+
+For a few minutes, after her friend had left her, Beatrice sat still,
+her head resting on her hand, and gazed with fixed eyes at Monte
+Sfiorito. Then she rose, and walked briskly backwards and forwards, for
+a while, up and down the terrace. Presently she came to a standstill,
+and leaning on the balustrade, while one of her feet kept lightly
+tapping the pavement, looked off again towards the mountain.
+
+The prospect was well worth her attention, with its blue and green and
+gold, its wood and water, its misty-blushing snows, its spaciousness
+and its atmosphere. In the sky a million fluffy little cloudlets floated
+like a flock of fantastic birds, with mother-of-pearl tinted plumage.
+The shadows were lengthening now. The sunshine glanced from the smooth
+surface of the lake as from burnished metal, and falling on the coloured
+sails of the fishing-boats, made them gleam like sails of crimson silk.
+But I wonder how much of this Beatrice really saw.
+
+She plucked an oleander from one of the tall marble urns set along the
+balustrade, and pressed the pink blossom against her face, and, closing
+her eyes, breathed in its perfume; then, absent-minded, she let it drop,
+over the terrace, upon the path below.
+
+"It's impossible," she said suddenly, aloud. At last she went into the
+house, and up to her rose-and-white retiring-room. There she took a book
+from the table, and sank into a deep easy-chair, and began to turn the
+pages.
+
+But when, by and by, approaching footsteps became audible in the
+stone-floored corridor without, Beatrice hastily shut the book, thrust
+it back upon the table, and caught up another so that Emilia Manfredi,
+entering, found her reading Monsieur Anatole France's "Etui de nacre."
+
+"Emilia," she said, "I wish you would translate the I Jongleur de Notre
+Dame' into Italian."
+
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+Peter, we may suppose, returned to Villa Floriano that afternoon in a
+state of some excitement.
+
+"He ought to have told her--"
+
+"It was her right to be told--"
+
+"What could her rank matter--"
+
+"A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman--"
+
+"She would have despised the conventional barriers--"
+
+"No woman could be proof against such a compliment--"
+
+"The case was peculiar--ordinary rules could not apply to it--"
+
+"Every man gets the wife he deserves--and he had certainly gone a long
+way towards deserving her--"
+
+"He should simply have told her the story of his book and of her part in
+it--he need n't have mentioned love--she would have understood--"
+
+The Duchessa's voice, clear and cool and crisp-cut, sounded perpetually
+in his ears; the words she had spoken, the arguments she had urged,
+repeated and repeated themselves, danced round and round, in his memory.
+
+"Ought I to have told her--then and there? Shall I go to her and tell
+her to-morrow?"
+
+He tried to think; but he could not think. His faculties were in a
+whirl--he could by no means command them. He could only wait, inert,
+while the dance went on. It was an extremely riotous dance. The
+Duchessa's conversation was reproduced without sequence, without
+coherence--scattered fragments of it were flashed before him fitfully,
+in swift disorder. If he would attempt to seize upon one of those
+fragments, to detain and fix it, for consideration--a speech of hers,
+a look, an inflection--then the whole experience suddenly lost its
+outlines, his recollection of it became a jumble, and he was left, as it
+were, intellectually gasping.
+
+He walked about his garden, he went into the house, he came out, he
+walked about again, he went in and dressed for dinner, he sat on his
+rustic bench, he smoked cigarette after cigarette.
+
+"Ought I to have told her? Ought I to tell her to-morrow?"
+
+At moments there would come a lull in the turmoil, an interval of quiet,
+of apparent clearness; and the answer would seem perfectly plain.
+
+"Of course, you ought to tell her. Tell her--and all will be well. She
+has put herself in the supposititious woman's place, and she says, 'He
+ought to tell her.' She says it earnestly, vehemently. That means that
+if she were the woman, she would wish to be told. She will despise the
+conventional barriers--she will be touched, she will be moved. 'No woman
+could be proof against such a compliment.' Go to her to-morrow, and tell
+her--and all will be well."
+
+At these moments he would look up towards the castle, and picture
+the morrow's consummation; and his heart would have a convulsion.
+Imagination flew on the wings of his desire. She stood before him in all
+her sumptuous womanhood, tender and strong and glowing. As he spoke, her
+eyes lightened, her eyes burned, the blood came and went in her cheeks;
+her lips parted. Then she whispered something; and his heart leapt
+terribly; and he called her name--"Beatrice! Beatrice!" Her name
+expressed the inexpressible--the adoring passion, the wild hunger and
+wild triumph of his soul. But now she was moving towards him--she was
+holding out her hands. He caught her in his arms--he held her yielding
+body in his arms. And his heart leapt terribly, terribly. And he
+wondered how he could endure, how he could live through, the hateful
+hours that must elapse before tomorrow would be to-day.
+
+But "hearts, after leaps, ache." Presently the whirl would begin again;
+and then, by and by, in another lull, a contrary answer would seem
+equally plain.
+
+"Tell her, indeed? My dear man, are you mad? She would simply be amazed,
+struck dumb, by your presumption. I can see from here her incredulity--I
+can see the scorn with which she would wither you. It has never dimly
+occurred to her as conceivable that you would venture to be in love with
+her, that you would dare to lift your eyes to her--you who are nothing,
+to her who is all. Yes--nothing, nobody. In her view, you are just a
+harmless nobody, whose society she tolerates for kindness' sake--and
+faute de mieux. It is precisely because she deems you a nobody--because
+she is profoundly conscious of the gulf that separates you from
+her--that she can condescend to be amiably familiar. If you were of a
+rank even remotely approximating to her own, she would be a thousand
+times more circumspect. Remember--she does not dream that you are Felix
+Wildmay. He is a mere name to her; and his story is an amusing little
+romance, perfectly external to herself, which she discusses with
+entirely impersonal interest. Tell her by all means, if you like Say,
+'I am Wildmay--you are Pauline.' And see how amazed she will be, and how
+incensed, and how indignant."
+
+Then he would look up at the castle stonily, in a mood of desperate
+renunciation, and vaguely meditate packing his belongings, and going
+home to England.
+
+At other moments a third answer would seem the plain one: something
+between these extremes of optimism and pessimism, a compromise, it not a
+reconciliation.
+
+"Come! Let us be calm, let us be judicial. The consequences of our
+actions, here below, if hardly ever so good as we could hope, are hardly
+ever so bad as we might fear. Let us regard this matter in the light of
+that guiding principle. True, she does n't dream that you are Wildmay.
+True, if you were abruptly to say to her, 'I am Wildmay--you are the
+woman,' she would be astonished--even, if you will, at first, more or
+less taken aback, disconcerted. But indignant? Why? What is this gulf
+that separates you from her? What are these conventional barriers of
+which you make so much? She is a duchess, she is the daughter of a lord,
+and she is rich. Well, all that is to be regretted. But you are neither
+a plebeian nor a pauper yourself. You are a man of good birth, you are a
+man of some parts, and you have a decent income. It amounts to this--she
+is a great lady, you are a small gentleman. In ordinary circumstances,
+to be sure, so small a gentleman could not ask so great a lady to become
+his wife. But here the circumstances are not ordinary. Destiny has
+meddled in the business. Small gentleman though you are, an unusual and
+subtle relation-ship has been established between you and your great
+lady. She herself says, 'Ordinary rules cannot apply--he ought to tell
+her.' Very good: tell her. She will be astonished, but she will see that
+there is no occasion for resentment. And though the odds are, of course,
+a hundred to one that she will not accept you, still she must treat you
+as an honourable suitor. And whether she accepts you or rejects you,
+it is better to tell her and to have it over, than to go on forever
+dangling this way, like the poor cat in the adage. Tell her--put your
+fate to the touch--hope nothing, fear nothing--and bow to the event."
+
+But even this temperate answer provoked its counter-answer.
+
+"The odds are a hundred to one, a thousand to one, that she will not
+accept you. And if you tell her, and she does not accept you, she will
+not allow you to see her any more, you will be exiled from her presence.
+And I thought, you did not wish to be exiled from her presence, You
+would stake, then, this great privilege, the privilege of seeing her, of
+knowing her, upon a. chance that has a thousand to one against it. You
+make light of the conventional barriers--but the principal barrier of
+them all, you are forgetting. She is a Roman Catholic, and a devout one.
+Marry a Protestant? She would as soon think of marrying a Paynim Turk."
+
+In the end, no doubt, a kind of exhaustion followed upon his excitement.
+Questions and answers suspended themselves; and he could only look up
+towards Ventirose, and dumbly wish that he was there. The distance was
+so trifling--in five minutes he could traverse it--the law seemed absurd
+and arbitrary, which condemned him to sit apart, free only to look and
+wish.
+
+It was in this condition of mind that Marietta found him, when she came
+to announce dinner.
+
+Peter gave himself a shake. The sight of the brown old woman, with
+her homely, friendly face, brought him back to small things, to actual
+things; and that, if it was n't a comfort, was, at any rate, a relief.
+
+"Dinner?" he questioned. "Do peris at the gates of Eden DINE?"
+
+"The soup is on the table," said Marietta.
+
+He rose, casting a last glance towards the castle.
+
+            Towers and battlements...
+            Bosomed high in tufted trees,
+            Where perhaps some beauty lies,
+            The cynosure of neighbouring eyes."
+
+He repeated the lines in an undertone, and went in to dinner. And then
+the restorative spirit of nonsense descended upon him.
+
+"Marietta," he asked, "what is your attitude towards the question of
+mixed marriages?"
+
+Marietta wrinkled her brow.
+
+"Mixed marriages? What is that, Signorino?"
+
+"Marriages between Catholics and Protestants," he explained.
+
+"Protestants?" Her brow was still a network. "What things are they?"
+
+"They are things--or perhaps it would be less invidious to say
+people--who are not Catholics--who repudiate Catholicism as a deadly and
+soul-destroying error."
+
+"Jews?" asked Marietta.
+
+"No--not exactly. They are generally classified as Christians. But
+they protest, you know. Protesto, protestare, verb, active, first
+conjugation. 'Mi pare che la donna protesta troppo,' as the poet
+sings. They're Christians, but they protest against the Pope and the
+Pretender."
+
+"The Signorino means Freemasons," said Marietta.
+
+"No, he does n't," said Peter. "He means Protestants."
+
+"But pardon, Signorino," she insisted; "if they are not Catholics,
+they must be Freemasons or Jews. They cannot be Christians.
+Christian--Catholic: it is the same. All Christians are Catholics."
+
+"Tu quoque!" he cried. "You regard the terms as interchangeable? I 've
+heard the identical sentiment similarly enunciated by another. Do I look
+like a Freemason?"
+
+She bent her sharp old eyes upon him studiously for a moment. Then she
+shook her head.
+
+"No," she answered slowly. "I do not think that the Signorino looks like
+a Freemason."
+
+"A Jew, then?"
+
+"Mache! A Jew? The Signorino!" She shrugged derision.
+
+"And yet I'm what they call a Protestant," he said.
+
+"No," said she.
+
+"Yes," said he. "I refer you to my sponsors in baptism. A regular, true
+blue moderate High Churchman and Tory, British and Protestant to the
+backbone, with 'Frustrate their Popish tricks' writ large all over me.
+You have never by any chance married a Protestant yourself?" he asked.
+
+"No, Signorino. I have never married any one. But it was not for the
+lack of occasions. Twenty, thirty young men courted me when I was a
+girl. But--mica!--I would not look at them. When men are young they are
+too unsteady for husbands; when they are old they have the rheumatism."
+
+"Admirably philosophised," he approved. "But it sometimes happens that
+men are neither young nor old. There are men of thirty-five--I have even
+heard that there are men of forty. What of them?"
+
+"There is a proverb, Signorino, which says, Sposi di quarant' anni son
+mai sempre tiranni," she informed him.
+
+"For the matter of that," he retorted, "there is a proverb which says,
+Love laughs at locksmiths."
+
+"Non capisco," said Marietta.
+
+"That's merely because it's English," said he. "You'd understand fast
+enough if I should put it in Italian. But I only quoted it to show the
+futility of proverbs. Laugh at locksmiths, indeed! Why, it can't even
+laugh at such an insignificant detail as a Papist's prejudices. But
+I wish I were a duke and a millionaire. Do you know any one who could
+create me a duke and endow me with a million?"
+
+"No, Signorino," she answered, shaking her head.
+
+"Fragrant Cytherea, foam-born Venus, deathless Aphrodite, cannot,
+goddess though she is," he complained. "The fact is, I 'm feeling
+rather undone. I think I will ask you to bring me a bottle of
+Asti-spumante--some of the dry kind, with the white seal. I 'll try
+to pretend that it's champagne. To tell or not to tell--that is the
+question.
+
+           'A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
+            With the dream of, meet death with--
+
+And yet, if you can believe me, the man who penned those lines had never
+seen her. He penned another line equally pat to the situation, though he
+had never seen me, either
+
+           'Is there no method to tell her in Spanish?"
+
+But you can't imagine how I detest that vulgar use of 'pen' for
+'write'--as if literature were a kind of pig. However, it's perhaps
+no worse than the use of Asti for champagne. One should n't be too
+fastidious. I must really try to think of some method of telling her in
+Spanish."
+
+Marietta went to fetch the Asti.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+When Peter rose next morning, he pulled a grimace at the departed night.
+
+"You are a detected cheat," he cried, "an unmasked impostor. You live
+upon your reputation as a counsellor--'tis the only reason why we bear
+with you. La nuit porte conseil! Yet what counsel have you brought to
+me?--and I at the pass where my need is uttermost. Shall I go to her
+this afternoon, and unburden my soul--or shall I not? You have left
+me where you found me--in the same fine, free, and liberal state of
+vacillation. Discredited oracle!"
+
+He was standing before his dressing-table, brushing his hair. The image
+in the glass frowned back at him. Then something struck him.
+
+"At all events, we'll go this morning to Spiaggia, and have our hair
+cut," he resolved.
+
+So he walked to the village, and caught the ten o'clock omnibus for
+Spiaggia. And after he had had his hair cut, he went to the Hotel de
+Russie, and lunched in the garden. And after luncheon, of course, he
+entered the grounds of the Casino, and strolled backwards and forwards,
+one of a merry procession, on the terrace by the lakeside. The gay
+toilets of the women, their bright-coloured hats and sunshades, made
+the terrace look like a great bank of monstrous moving flowers. The band
+played brisk accompaniments to the steady babble of voices, Italian,
+English, German. The pure air was shot with alien scents--the women's
+perfumery, the men's cigarette-smoke. The marvellous blue waters crisped
+in the breeze, and sparkled in the sun; and the smooth snows of Monte
+Sfiorito loomed so near, one felt one could almost put out one's stick
+and scratch one's name upon them.... And here, as luck would have it,
+Peter came face to face with Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
+
+"How do you do?" said she, offering her hand.
+
+"How do you do?" said he.
+
+"It's a fine day," said she.
+
+"Very," said he.
+
+"Shall I make you a confidence?" she asked.
+
+"Do," he answered.
+
+"Are you sure I can trust you?" She scanned his face dubiously.
+
+"Try it and see," he urged.
+
+"Well, then, if you must know, I was thirsting to take a table and call
+for coffee; but having no man at hand to chaperon me, I dared not."
+
+"Je vous en prie," cried Peter, with a gesture of gallantry; and he
+led her to one of the round marble tables. "Due caffe," he said to the
+brilliant creature (chains, buckles, ear-rings, of silver filigree,
+and head-dress and apron of flame-red silk) who came to learn their
+pleasure.
+
+"Softly, softly," put in Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. "Not a drop of
+coffee for me. An orange-sherbet, if you please. Coffee was a figure of
+speech--a generic term for light refreshments."
+
+Peter laughed, and amended his order.
+
+"Do you see those three innocent darlings playing together, under the
+eye of their governess, by the Wellingtonia yonder?" enquired the lady.
+
+"The little girl in white and the two boys?" asked Peter.
+
+"Precisely," said she. "Such as they are, they're me own."
+
+"Really?" he responded, in the tone of profound and sympathetic interest
+we are apt to affect when parents begin about their children.
+
+"I give you my word for it," she assured him. "But I mention the fact,
+not in a spirit of boastfulness, but merely to show you that I 'm not
+entirely alone and unprotected. There's an American at our hotel, by the
+bye, who goes up and down telling every one who'll listen that it ought
+to be Washingtonia, and declaiming with tears in his eyes against the
+arrogance of the English in changing Washington to Wellington. As he's
+a respectable-looking man with grown-up daughters, I should think very
+likely he's right."
+
+"Very likely," said Peter. "It's an American tree, is n't it?"
+
+"Whether it is n't or whether it is," said she, "one thing is
+undeniable: you English are the coldest-blooded animals south of the
+Arctic Circle."
+
+"Oh--? Are we?" he doubted.
+
+"You are that," she affirmed, with sorrowing emphasis.
+
+"Ah, well," he reflected, "the temperature of our blood does n't matter.
+We're, at any rate, notoriously warm-hearted."
+
+"Are you indeed?" she exclaimed. "If you are, it's a mighty quiet kind
+of notoriety, let me tell you, and a mighty cold kind of warmth."
+
+Peter laughed.
+
+"You're all for prudence and expediency. You're the slaves of your
+reason. You're dominated by the head, not by the heart. You're little
+better than calculating-machines. Are you ever known, now, for instance,
+to risk earth and heaven, and all things between them, on a sudden
+unthinking impulse?"
+
+"Not often, I daresay," he admitted.
+
+"And you sit there as serene as a brazen statue, and own it without a
+quaver," she reproached him.
+
+"Surely," he urged, "in my character of Englishman, it behooves me to
+appear smug and self-satisfied?"
+
+"You're right," she agreed. "I wonder," she continued, after a moment's
+pause, during which her eyes looked thoughtful, "I wonder whether you
+would fall upon and annihilate a person who should venture to offer you
+a word of well-meant advice."
+
+"I should sit as serene as a brazen statue, and receive it without a
+quaver," he promised.
+
+"Well, then," said she, leaning forward a little, and dropping her
+voice, "why don't you take your courage in both hands, and ask her?"
+
+Peter stared.
+
+"Be guided by me--and do it," she said.
+
+"Do what?" he puzzled.
+
+"Ask her to marry you, of course," she returned amiably. Then, without
+allowing him time to shape an answer, "Touche!" she cried, in triumph.
+"I 've brought the tell-tale colour to your cheek. And you a brazen
+statue! 'They do not love who do not show their love.' But, in faith,
+you show yours to any one who'll be at pains to watch you. Your eyes
+betray you as often as ever you look at her. I had n't observed you for
+two minutes by the clock, when I knew your secret as well as if you 'd
+chosen me for your confessor. But what's holding you back? You
+can't expect her to do the proposing. Now curse me for a meddlesome
+Irishwoman, if you will--but why don't you throw yourself at her feet,
+and ask her, like a man?"
+
+"How can I?" said Peter, abandoning any desire he may have felt to beat
+about the bush. Nay, indeed, it is very possible he welcomed, rather
+than resented, the Irishwoman's meddling.
+
+"What's to prevent you?" said she.
+
+"Everything," said he.
+
+"Everything is nothing. That?"
+
+"Dear lady! She is hideously rich, for one thing."
+
+"Getaway with you!" was the dear lady's warm expostulation. "What
+has money to do with the question, if a man's in love? But that's the
+English of it--there you are with your cold-blooded calculation. You
+chain up your natural impulses as if they were dangerous beasts. Her
+money never saved you from succumbing to her enchantments. Why should it
+bar you from declaring your passion."
+
+"There's a sort of tendency in society," said Peter, "to look upon the
+poor man who seeks the hand of a rich woman as a fortunehunter."
+
+"A fig for the opinion of society," she cried. "The only opinion you
+should consider is the opinion of the woman you adore. I was an heiress
+myself; and when Teddy O'Donovan proposed to me, upon my conscience
+I believe the sole piece of property he possessed in the world was a
+corkscrew. So much for her ducats!"
+
+Peter laughed.
+
+"Men, after coffee, are frequently in the habit of smoking," said she.
+"You have my sanction for a cigarette. It will keep you in countenance."
+
+"Thank you," said Peter, and lit his cigarette.
+
+"And surely, it's a countenance you'll need, to be going on like that
+about her money. However--if you can find a ray of comfort in the
+information--small good will her future husband get of it, even if he is
+a fortunehunter: for she gives the bulk of it away in charity, and I 'm
+doubtful if she keeps two thousand a year for her own spending."
+
+"Really?" said Peter; and for a breathing-space it seemed to him that
+there was a ray of comfort in the information.
+
+"Yes, you may rate her at two thousand a year," said Mrs. O'Donovan
+Florence. "I suppose you can match that yourself. So the disparity
+disappears."
+
+The ray of comfort had flickered for a second, and gone out.
+
+"There are unfortunately other disparities," he remarked gloomily.
+
+"Put a name on them," said she.
+
+"There's her rank."
+
+His impetuous adviser flung up a hand of scorn.
+
+"Her rank, do you say?" she cried. "To the mischief with her rank.
+What's rank to love? A woman is only a woman, whether she calls herself
+a duchess or a dairy-maid. A woman with any spirit would marry a bank
+manager, if she loved him. A man's a man. You should n't care that for
+her rank."
+
+"That," was a snap of Mrs. O' Donovan Florence's fingers.
+
+"I suppose you know," said Peter, "that I am a Protestant."
+
+"Are you--you poor benighted creature? Well, that's easily remedied. Go
+and get yourself baptised directly."
+
+She waved her hand towards the town, as if to recommend his immediate
+procedure in quest of a baptistery.
+
+Peter laughed again.
+
+"I 'm afraid that's more easily said than done."
+
+"Easy!" she exclaimed. "Why, you've only to stand still and let yourself
+be sprinkled. It's the priest who does the work. Don't tell me," she
+added, with persuasive inconsequence, "that you'll allow a little thing
+like being in love with a woman to keep you back from professing the
+true faith."
+
+"Ah, if I were convinced that it is true," he sighed, still laughing.
+
+"What call have you to doubt it? And anyhow, what does it matter whether
+you 're convinced or not? I remember, when I was a school-girl, I never
+was myself convinced of the theorems of Euclid; but I professed them
+gladly, for the sake of the marks they brought; and the eternal verities
+of mathematics remained unshaken by my scepticism."
+
+"Your reasoning is subtle," laughed Peter. "But the worst of it is, if I
+were ten times a Catholic, she wouldn't have me. So what's the use?"
+
+"You never can tell whether a woman will have you or not, until you
+offer yourself. And even if she refuses you, is that a ground for
+despair? My own husband asked me three times, and three times I said no.
+And then he took to writing verses--and I saw there was but one way to
+stop him. So we were married. Ask her; ask her again--and again. You can
+always resort in the end to versification. And now," the lady concluded,
+rising, "I have spoken, and I leave you to your fate. I'm obliged
+to return to the hotel, to hold a bed of justice. It appears that my
+innocent darlings, beyond there, innocent as they look, have managed
+among them to break the electric light in my sitting-room. They're to be
+arraigned before me at three for an instruction criminelle. Put what I
+'ve said in your pipe, and smoke it--'tis a mother's last request. If
+I 've not succeeded in determining you, don't pretend, at least, that I
+haven't encouraged you a bit. Put what I 've said in your pipe, and see
+whether, by vigorous drawing, you can't fan the smouldering fires of
+encouragement into a small blaze of determination."
+
+Peter resumed his stroll backwards and forwards by the lakeside.
+Encouragement was all very well; but... "Shall I--shall I not? Shall
+I--shall I not? Shall I--shall I not?" The eternal question went
+tick-tack, tick-tack, to the rhythm of his march. He glared at vacancy,
+and tried hard to make up his mind.
+
+"I'm afraid I must be somewhat lacking in decision of character," he
+said, with pathetic wonder.
+
+Then suddenly he stamped his foot.
+
+"Come! An end to this tergiversation. Do it. Do it," cried his manlier
+soul.
+
+"I will," he resolved all at once, drawing a deep breath, and clenching
+his fists.
+
+He left the Casino, and set forth to walk to Ventirose. He could not
+wait for the omnibus, which would not leave till four. He must strike
+while his will was hot.
+
+He walked rapidly; in less than an hour he had reached the tall gilded
+grille of the park. He stopped for an instant, and looked up the
+straight avenue of chestnuts, to the western front of the castle, softly
+alight in the afternoon sun. He put his hand upon the pendent bell-pull
+of twisted iron, to summon the porter. In another second he would have
+rung, he would have been admitted.... And just then one of the little
+demons that inhabit the circumambient air, called his attention to an
+aspect of the situation which he had not thought of.
+
+"Wait a bit," it whispered in his ear. "You were there only yesterday.
+It can't fail, therefore, to seem extraordinary, your calling again
+to-day. You must be prepared with an excuse, an explanation. But
+suppose, when you arrive, suppose that (like the lady in the ballad) she
+greets you with 'a glance of cold surprise'--what then, my dear? Why,
+then, it's obvious, you can't allege the true explanation--can you?
+If she greets you with a glance of cold, surprise, you 'll have your
+answer, as it were, before the fact you 'll know that there's no manner
+of hope for you; and the time for passionate avowals will automatically
+defer itself. But then--? How will you justify your visit? What face can
+you put on?"
+
+"H'm," assented Peter, "there's something in that."
+
+"There's a great deal in that," said the demon. "You must have an excuse
+up your sleeve, a pretext. A true excuse is a fine thing in its way;
+but when you come to a serious emergency, an alternative false excuse is
+indispensable."
+
+"H'm," said Peter.
+
+However, if there are demons in the atmosphere, there are gods in the
+machine--("Paraschkine even goes so far as to maintain that there are
+more gods in the machine than have ever been taken from it.")
+While Peter stood still, pondering the demon's really rather cogent
+intervention, his eye was caught by something that glittered in the
+grass at the roadside.
+
+"The Cardinal's snuff-box," he exclaimed, picking it up.
+
+The Cardinal had dropped his snuff-box. Here was an excuse, and to
+spare. Peter rang the bell.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+And, like the lady in the ballad, sure enough, she greeted his arrival
+with a glance of cold surprise.
+
+At all events, eyebrows raised, face unsmiling, it was a glance that
+clearly supplemented her spoken "How do you do?" by a tacit (perhaps
+self-addressed?) "What can bring him here?"
+
+You or I, indeed, or Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, in the fulness of our
+knowledge, might very likely have interpreted it rather as a glance of
+nervous apprehension. Anyhow, it was a glance that perfectly checked the
+impetus of his intent. Something snapped and gave way within him; and
+he needed no further signal that the occasion for passionate avowals was
+not the present.
+
+And thereupon befell a scene that was really quite too absurd, that was
+really childish, a scene over the memory of which, I must believe, they
+themselves have sometimes laughed together; though, at the moment, its
+absurdity held, for him at least, elements of the tragic.
+
+He met her in the broad gravelled carriage-sweep, before the great
+hall-door. She had on her hat and gloves, as if she were just going out.
+It seemed to him that she was a little pale; her eyes seemed darker than
+usual, and graver. Certainly--cold surprise, or nervous apprehension, as
+you will--her attitude was by no means cordial. It was not oncoming. It
+showed none of her accustomed easy, half-humorous, wholly good-humoured
+friendliness. It was decidedly the attitude of a person standing off,
+shut in, withheld.
+
+"I have never seen her in the least like this before," he thought, as
+he looked at her pale face, her dark, grave eyes; "I have never seen her
+more beautiful. And there is not one single atom of hope for me."
+
+"How do you do?" she said, unsmiling and waited, as who should invite
+him to state his errand. She did not offer him her hand but, for that
+matter, (she might have pleaded), she could not, very well: for one of
+her hands held her sunshade, and the other held an embroidered silk bag,
+woman's makeshift for a pocket.
+
+And then, capping the first pang of his disappointment, a kind of
+anger seized him. After all, what right had she to receive him in this
+fashion?--as if he were an intrusive stranger. In common civility, in
+common justice, she owed it to him to suppose that he would not be there
+without abundant reason.
+
+And now, with Peter angry, the absurd little scene began.
+
+Assuming an attitude designed to be, in its own way, as reticent as
+hers, "I was passing your gate," he explained, "when I happened to find
+this, lying by the roadside. I took the liberty of bringing it to you."
+
+He gave her the Cardinal's snuff box, which, in spite of her hands'
+preoccupation, she was able to accept.
+
+"A liberty!" he thought, grinding his teeth. "Yes! No doubt she would
+have wished me to leave it with the porter at the lodge. No doubt she
+deems it an act of officiousness on my part to have found it at all."
+
+And his anger mounted.
+
+"How very good of you," she said. "My uncle could not think where he had
+mislaid it."
+
+"I am very fortunate to be the means of restoring it," said he.
+
+Then, after a second's suspension, as she said nothing (she kept her
+eyes on the snuffbox, examining it as if it were quite new to her), he
+lifted his hat, and bowed, preparatory to retiring down the avenue.
+
+"Oh, but my uncle will wish to thank you," she exclaimed, looking up,
+with a kind of start. "Will you not come in? I--I will see whether he is
+disengaged."
+
+She made a tentative movement towards the door. She had thawed
+perceptibly.
+
+But even as she thawed, Peter, in his anger, froze and stiffened. "I
+will see whether he is disengaged." The expression grated. And perhaps,
+in effect, it was not a particularly felicitous expression. But if the
+poor woman was suffering from nervous apprehension--?
+
+"I beg you on no account to disturb Cardinal Udeschini," he returned
+loftily. "It is not a matter of the slightest consequence."
+
+And even as he stiffened, she unbent.
+
+"But it is a matter of consequence to him, to us," she said, faintly
+smiling. "We have hunted high and low for it. We feared it was lost for
+good. It must have fallen from his pocket when he was walking. He will
+wish to thank you."
+
+"I am more than thanked already," said Peter. Alas (as Monsieur de la
+Pallisse has sagely noted), when we aim to appear dignified, how often
+do we just succeed in appearing churlish.
+
+And to put a seal upon this ridiculous encounter, to make it
+irrevocable, he lifted his hat again, and turned away.
+
+"Oh, very well," murmured the Duchessa, in a voice that did not reach
+him. If it had reached him, perhaps he would have come back, perhaps
+things might have happened. I think there was regret in her voice, as
+well as despite. She stood for a minute, as he tramped down the avenue,
+and looked after him, with those unusually dark, grave eyes. At last,
+making a little gesture--as of regret? despite? impatience?--she went
+into the house.
+
+"Here is your snuff-box," she said to the Cardinal.
+
+The old man put down his Breviary (he was seated by an open window,
+getting through his office), and smiled at the snuff box fondly,
+caressing it with his finger. Afterwards, he shook it, opened it, and
+took a pinch of snuff.
+
+"Where did you find it?" he enquired.
+
+"It was found by that Mr. Marchdale," she said, "in the road, outside
+the gate. You must have let it drop this morning, when you were walking
+with Emilia."
+
+"That Mr. Marchdale?" exclaimed the Cardinal. "What a coincidence."
+
+"A coincidence--?" questioned Beatrice.
+
+"To be sure," said he. "Was it not to Mr. Marchdale that I owed it in
+the first instance?"
+
+"Oh--? Was it? I had fancied that you owed it to me."
+
+"Yes--but," he reminded her, whilst the lines deepened about his
+humorous old mouth, "but as a reward of my virtue in conspiring with you
+to convert him. And, by the way, how is his conversion progressing?"
+
+The Cardinal looked up, with interest.
+
+"It is not progressing at all. I think there is no chance of it,"
+answered Beatrice, in a tone that seemed to imply a certain irritation.
+
+"Oh--?" said the Cardinal.
+
+"No," said she.
+
+"I thought he had shown 'dispositions'?" said the Cardinal.
+
+"That was a mistake. He has shown none. He is a very tiresome and silly
+person. He is not worth converting," she declared succinctly.
+
+"Good gracious!" said the Cardinal.
+
+He resumed his office. But every now and again he would pause, and look
+out of the window, with the frown of a man meditating something; then he
+would shake his head significantly, and take snuff.
+
+Peter tramped down the avenue, angry and sick.
+
+Her reception of him had not only administered an instant death-blow
+to his hopes as a lover, but in its ungenial aloofness it had cruelly
+wounded his pride as a man. He felt snubbed and humiliated. Oh, true
+enough, she had unbent a little, towards the end. But it was the look
+with which she had first greeted him--it was the air with which she had
+waited for him to state his errand--that stung, and rankled, and would
+not be forgotten.
+
+He was angry with her, angry with circumstances, with life, angry with
+himself.
+
+"I am a fool--and a double fool--and a triple fool," he said. "I am
+a fool ever to have thought of her at all; a double fool ever to have
+allowed myself to think so much of her; a triple and quadruple and
+quintuple idiot ever to have imagined for a moment that anything could
+come of it. I have wasted time enough. The next best thing to winning is
+to know when you are beaten. I acknowledge myself beaten. I will go back
+to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed."
+
+He gazed darkly round the familiar valley, with eyes that abjured it.
+
+Olympus, no doubt, laughed.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+"I shall go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed."
+
+But he took no immediate steps to get them packed.
+
+"Hope," observes the clear-sighted French publicist quoted in the
+preceding chapter, "hope dies hard."
+
+Hope, Peter fancied, had received its death-blow that afternoon.
+Already, that evening, it began to revive a little. It was very much
+enfeebled; it was very indefinite and diffident; but it was not dead. It
+amounted, perhaps, to nothing more than a vague kind of feeling that
+he would not, on the whole, make his departure for England quite so
+precipitate as, in the first heat of his anger, the first chill of his
+despair, he had intended. Piano, piano! He would move slowly, he would
+do nothing rash.
+
+But he was not happy, he was very far from happy. He spent a wretched
+night, a wretched, restless morrow. He walked about a great deal--about
+his garden, and afterwards, when the damnable iteration of his garden
+had become unbearable, he walked to the village, and took the riverside
+path, under the poplars, along the racing Aco, and followed it, as
+the waters paled and broadened, for I forget how many joyless,
+unremunerative miles.
+
+When he came home, fagged out and dusty, at dinner time, Marietta
+presented a visiting card to him, on her handsomest salver. She
+presented it with a flourish that was almost a swagger.
+
+Twice the size of an ordinary visiting-card, the fashion of it was
+roughly thus:
+
+                   IL CARDLE UDESCHINI
+          Sacr: Congr: Archiv: et Inscript: Praef:
+
+          Palazzo Udeschini.
+
+And above the legend, was pencilled, in a small oldfashioned hand,
+wonderfully neat and pretty:--
+
+"To thank Mr. Marchdale for his courtesy in returning my snuff-box."
+
+"The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here," said Marietta. There was
+a swagger in her accent. There was also something in her accent that
+seemed to rebuke Peter for his absence.
+
+"I had inferred as much from this," said he, tapping the card. "We
+English, you know, are great at putting two and two together."
+
+"He came in a carriage," said Marietta.
+
+"Not really?" said her master.
+
+"Ang--veramente," she affirmed.
+
+"Was--was he alone?" Peter asked, an obscure little twinge of hope
+stirring in his heart.
+
+"No. Signorino." And then she generalised, with untranslatable
+magniloquence: "Un amplissimo porporato non va mai solo."
+
+Peter ought to have hugged her for that amplissimo porporato. But he was
+selfishly engrossed in his emotions.
+
+"Who was with him?" He tried to throw the question out with a casual
+effect, an effect of unconcern.
+
+"The Signorina Emelia Manfredi was with him," answered Marietta, little
+recking how mere words can stab.
+
+"Oh," said Peter.
+
+"The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was very sorry not to see the
+Signorino," continued Marietta.
+
+"Poor man--was he? Let us trust that time will console him," said Peter,
+callously.
+
+But, "I wonder," he asked himself, "I wonder whether perhaps I was the
+least bit hasty yesterday? If I had stopped, I should have saved the
+Cardinal a journey here to-day--I might have known that he would come,
+these Italians are so punctilious--and then, if I had stopped--if I had
+stopped--possibly--possibly--"
+
+Possibly what? Oh, nothing. And yet, if he had stopped... well, at any
+rate, he would have gained time. The Duchessa had already begun to thaw.
+If he had stopped... He could formulate no precise conclusion to that
+if; but he felt dimly remorseful that he had not stopped, he felt that
+he had indeed been the least bit hasty. And his remorse was somehow
+medicine to his reviving hope.
+
+"After all, I scarcely gave things a fair trial yesterday," he said.
+
+And the corollary of that, of course, was that he might give things a
+further and fairer trial some other day.
+
+But his hope was still hard hurt; he was still in a profound dejection.
+
+"The Signorino is not eating his dinner," cried Marietta, fixing him
+with suspicious, upbraiding eyes.
+
+"I never said I was," he retorted.
+
+"The Signorino is not well?" she questioned, anxious.
+
+"Oh, yes--cosi, cosi; the Signorino is well enough," he answered.
+
+"The dinner"--you could perceive that she brought herself with
+difficulty to frame the dread hypothesis--"the dinner is not good?" Her
+voice sank. She waited, tense, for his reply.
+
+"The dinner," said he, "if one may criticise without eating it, the
+dinner is excellent. I will have no aspersions cast upon my cook."
+
+"Ah-h-h!" breathed Marietta, a tremulous sigh of relief.
+
+"It is not the Signorino, it is not the dinner, it is the world that is
+awry," Peter went on, in reflective melancholy. "'T is the times that
+are out of joint. 'T is the sex, the Sex, that is not well, that is not
+good, that needs a thorough overhauling and reforming."
+
+"Which sex?" asked Marietta.
+
+"The sex," said Peter. "By the unanimous consent of rhetoricians, there
+is but one sex the sex, the fair sex, the unfair sex, the gentle sex,
+the barbaric sex. We men do not form a sex, we do not even form a sect.
+We are your mere hangers-on, camp-followers, satellites--your things,
+your playthings--we are the mere shuttlecocks which you toss hither and
+thither with your battledores, as the wanton mood impels you. We are
+born of woman, we are swaddled and nursed by woman, we are governessed
+by woman; subsequently, we are beguiled by woman, fooled by woman, led
+on, put off, tantalised by woman, fretted and bullied by her; finally,
+last scene of all, we are wrapped in our cerements by woman. Man's
+life, birth, death, turn upon woman, as upon a hinge. I have ever been a
+misanthrope, but now I am seriously thinking of becoming a misogynist as
+well. Would you advise me to-do so?"
+
+"A misogynist? What is that, Signorino?" asked Marietta.
+
+"A woman-hater," he explained; "one who abhors and forswears the sex;
+one who has dashed his rose-coloured spectacles from his eyes, and sees
+woman as she really is, with no illusive glamour; one who has found her
+out. Yes, I think I shall become a misogynist. It is the only way of
+rendering yourself invulnerable, 't is the only safe course. During my
+walk this afternoon, I recollected, from the scattered pigeon-holes of
+memory, and arranged in consequent order, at least a score of good old
+apothegmatic shafts against the sex. Was it not, for example, in the
+grey beginning of days, was it not woman whose mortal taste brought
+sin into the world and all our woe? Was not that Pandora a woman, who
+liberated, from the box wherein they were confined, the swarm of
+winged evils that still afflict us? I will not remind you of St.
+John Chrysostom's golden parable about a temple and the thing it is
+constructed over. But I will come straight to the point, and ask whether
+this is truth the poet sings, when he informs us roundly that 'every
+woman is a scold at heart'?"
+
+Marietta was gazing patiently at the sky. She did not answer.
+
+"The tongue," Peter resumed, "is woman's weapon, even as the fist is
+man's. And it is a far deadlier weapon. Words break no bones--they break
+hearts, instead. Yet were men one-tenth part so ready with their fists,
+as women are with their barbed and envenomed tongues, what savage
+brutes you would think us--would n't you?--and what a rushing trade
+the police-courts would drive, to be sure. That is one of the good
+old cliches that came back to me during my walk. All women are
+alike--there's no choice amongst animated fashion-plates: that is
+another. A woman is the creature of her temper; her husband, her
+children, and her servants are its victims: that is a third. Woman is a
+bundle of pins; man is her pin-cushion. When woman loves, 't is not the
+man she loves, but the man's flattery; woman's love is reflex self-love.
+The man who marries puts himself in irons. Marriage is a bird-cage in
+a garden. The birds without hanker to get in; but the birds within know
+that there is no condition so enviable as that of the birds without.
+Well, speak up. What do you think? Do you advise me to become a
+misogynist?"
+
+"I do not understand, Signorino," said Marietta.
+
+"Of course, you don't," said Peter. "Who ever could understand
+such stuff and nonsense? That's the worst of it. If only one could
+understand, if only one could believe it, one might find peace, one
+might resign oneself. But alas and alas! I have never had any real faith
+in human wickedness; and now, try as I will, I cannot imbue my mind with
+any real faith in the undesirability of woman. That is why you see
+me dissolved in tears, and unable to eat my dinner. Oh, to think, to
+think," he cried with passion, suddenly breaking into English, "to think
+that less than a fortnight ago, less than one little brief fortnight
+ago, she was seated in your kitchen, seated there familiarly, in her wet
+clothes, pouring tea, for all the world as if she was the mistress of
+the house!"
+
+Days passed. He could not go to Ventirose--or, anyhow, he thought
+he could not. He reverted to his old habit of living in his garden,
+haunting the riverside, keeping watchful, covetous eyes turned towards
+the castle. The river bubbled and babbled; the sun shone strong and
+clear; his fountain tinkled; his birds flew about their affairs; his
+flowers breathed forth their perfumes; the Gnisi frowned, the uplands
+westward laughed, the snows of Monte Sfiorito sailed under every colour
+of the calendar except their native white. All was as it had ever
+been--but oh, the difference to him. A week passed. He caught no glimpse
+of the Duchessa. Yet he took no steps to get his boxes packed.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+And then Marietta fell ill.
+
+One morning, when she came into his room, to bring his tea, and to open
+the Venetian blinds that shaded his windows, she failed to salute him
+with her customary brisk "Buon giorno, Signorino."
+
+Noticing which, and wondering, he, from his pillow, called out, "Buon'
+giorno, Marietta."
+
+"Buon' giorno, Signorino," she returned but in a whisper.
+
+"What's the matter? Is there cause for secrecy?" Peter asked.
+
+"I have a cold, Signorino," she whispered, pointing to her chest. "I
+cannot speak."
+
+The Venetian blinds were up by this time; the room was full of sun. He
+looked at her. Something in her face alarmed him. It seemed drawn and
+set, it seemed flushed.
+
+"Come here," he said, with a certain peremptoriness. "Give me your
+hand."
+
+She wiped her brown old hand backwards and forwards across her apron;
+then gave it to him.
+
+It was hot and dry.
+
+"Your cold is feverish," he said. "You must go to bed, and stay there
+till the fever has passed."
+
+"I cannot go to bed, Signorino," she replied.
+
+"Can't you? Have you tried?" asked he.
+
+"No, Signorino," she admitted.
+
+"Well, you never can tell whether you can do a thing or not, until you
+try," said he. "Try to go to bed; and if at first you don't succeed,
+try, try again."
+
+"I cannot go to bed. Who would do the Signorino's work?" was her
+whispered objection.
+
+"Hang the Signorino's work. The Signorino's work will do itself. Have
+you never observed that if you conscientiously neglect to do your work,
+it somehow manages to get done without you? You have a feverish cold;
+you must keep out of draughts; and the only place where you can be sure
+of keeping out of draughts, is bed. Go to bed at once."
+
+She left the room.
+
+But when Peter came downstairs, half an hour later, he heard her moving
+in her kitchen.
+
+"Marietta!" he cried, entering that apartment with the mien of Nemesis.
+"I thought I told you to go to bed."
+
+Marietta cowered a little, and looked sheepish, as one surprised in the
+flagrant fact of misdemeanour.
+
+"Yes, Signorino," she whispered.
+
+"Well--? Do you call this bed?" he demanded.
+
+"No, Signorino," she acknowledged.
+
+"Do you wish to oblige me to put you to bed?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, no, Signorino," she protested, horror in her whisper.
+
+"Then go to bed directly. If you delay any longer, I shall accuse you of
+wilful insubordination."
+
+"Bene, Signorino," reluctantly consented Marietta.
+
+Peter strolled into his garden. Gigi, the gardener, was working there.
+
+"The very man I most desired to meet," said Peter, and beckoned to
+him. "Is there a doctor in the village?" he enquired, when Gigi had
+approached.
+
+"Yes, Signorino. The Syndic is a doctor--Dr. Carretaji."
+
+"Good," said Peter. "Will you go to the village, please, and ask Dr.
+Carretaji if he can make it convenient to call here to-day? Marietta is
+not well."
+
+"Yes, Signorino."
+
+"And stop a bit," said Peter. "Are there such things as women in the
+village?'
+
+"Ah, mache, Signorino! But many, many," answered Gigi, rolling his dark
+eyes sympathetically, and waving his hands.
+
+"I need but one," said Peter. "A woman to come and do Marietta's work
+for a day or two--cook, and clean up, and that sort of thing. Do you
+think you could procure me such a woman?"
+
+"There is my wife, Signorino," suggested Gigi. "If she would content the
+Signorino?"
+
+"Oh? I was n't aware that you were married. A hundred felicitations.
+Yes, your wife, by all means. Ask her to come and rule as Marietta's
+vicereine."
+
+Gigi started for the village.
+
+Peter went into the house, and knocked at Marietta's bed-room door. He
+found her in bed, with her rosary in her hands. If she could not work,
+she would not waste her time. In Marietta's simple scheme of life,
+work and prayer, prayer and work, stood, no doubt, as alternative and
+complementary duties.
+
+"But you are not half warmly enough covered up," said Peter.
+
+He fetched his travelling-rug, and spread it over her. Then he went to
+the kitchen, where she had left a fire burning, and filled a bottle with
+hot water.
+
+"Put this at your feet," he said, returning to Marietta.
+
+"Oh, I cannot allow the Signorino to wait on me like this," the old
+woman mustered voice to murmur.
+
+"The Signorino likes it--it affords him healthful exercise," Peter
+assured her.
+
+Dr. Carretaji came about noon, a fat middleaged man, with a fringe of
+black hair round an ivory-yellow scalp, a massive watch-chain (adorned
+by the inevitable pointed bit of coral), and podgy, hairy hands. But he
+seemed kind and honest, and he seemed to know his business.
+
+"She has a catarrh of the larynx, with, I am afraid, a beginning of
+bronchitis," was his verdict.
+
+"Is there any danger?" Peter asked.
+
+"Not the slightest. She must remain in bed, and take frequent
+nourishment. Hot milk, and now and then beef-tea. I will send some
+medicine. But the great things are nourishment and warmth. I will call
+again to-morrow."
+
+Gigi's wife came. She was a tall, stalwart, blackbrowed, red-cheeked
+young woman, and her name (Gigi's eyes flashed proudly, as he announced
+it) her name was Carolina Maddalena.
+
+Peter had to be in and out of Marietta's room all day, to see that
+she took her beef-tea and milk and medicine regularly. She dozed a good
+deal. When she was awake, she said her rosary.
+
+But next day she was manifestly worse.
+
+"Yes--bronchitis, as I feared," said the doctor. "Danger? No--none, if
+properly looked after. Add a little brandy to her milk, and see that she
+has at least a small cupful every half-hour. I think it would be easier
+for you if you had a nurse. Someone should be with her at night. There
+is a Convent of Mercy at Venzona. If you like, I will telephone for a
+sister."
+
+"Thank you very much. I hope you will," said Peter.
+
+And that afternoon Sister Scholastica arrived, and established herself
+in the sick-room. Sister Scholastica was young, pale, serene, competent.
+But sometimes she had to send for Peter.
+
+"She refuses to take her milk. Possibly she will take it from you," the
+sister said.
+
+Then Peter would assume a half-bluff (perhaps half-wheedling?) tone of
+mastery.
+
+"Come, Marietta! You must take your milk. The Signorino wishes it. You
+must not disobey the Signorino."
+
+And Marietta, with a groan, would rouse herself, and take it, Peter
+holding the cup to her lips.
+
+On the third day, in the morning, Sister Scholastica said, "She imagines
+that she is worse. I do not think so myself. But she keeps repeating
+that she is going to die. She wishes to see a priest. I think it would
+make her feel easier. Can you send for the Parrocco? Please let him know
+that it is not an occasion for the Sacraments. But it would do her good
+if he would come and talk with her."
+
+And the doctor, who arrived just then, having visited Marietta,
+confirmed the sister's opinion.
+
+"She is no worse--she is, if anything, rather better. Her malady is
+taking its natural course. But people of her class always fancy they are
+going to die, if they are ill enough to stay in bed. It is the panic of
+ignorance. Yes, I think it would do her good to see a priest. But there
+is not the slightest occasion for the Sacraments."
+
+So Peter sent Gigi to the village for the Parrocco. And Gigi came back
+with the intelligence that the Parrocco was away, making a retreat, and
+would not return till Saturday. To-day was Wednesday.
+
+"What shall we do now?" Peter asked of Sister Scholastica.
+
+"There is Monsignor Langshawe, at Castel Ventirose," said the sister.
+
+"Could I ask him to come?" Peter doubted.
+
+"Certainly," said the sister. "In a case of illness, the nearest priest
+will always gladly come."
+
+So Peter despatched Gigi with a note to Monsignor Langshawe.
+
+And presently up drove a brougham, with Gigi on the box beside the
+coachman. And from the brougham descended, not Monsignor Langshawe, but
+Cardinal Udeschini, followed by Emilia Manfredi.
+
+The Cardinal gave Peter his hand, with a smile so sweet, so benign, so
+sunny-bright--it was like music, Peter thought; it was like a silent
+anthem.
+
+"Monsignor Langshawe has gone to Scotland, for his holiday. I have come
+in his place. Your man told me of your need," the Cardinal explained.
+
+"I don't know how to thank your Eminence," Peter murmured, and conducted
+him to Marietta's room.
+
+Sister Scholastica genuflected, and kissed the Cardinal's ring, and
+received his Benediction. Then she and Peter withdrew, and went into the
+garden.
+
+The sister joined Emilia, and they walked backwards and forwards
+together, talking. Peter sat on his rustic bench, smoked cigarettes, and
+waited.
+
+Nearly an hour passed.
+
+At length the Cardinal came out.
+
+Peter rose, and went forward to meet him.
+
+The Cardinal was smiling; but about his eyes there was a suggestive
+redness.
+
+"Mr. Marchdale," he said, "your housekeeper is in great distress of
+conscience touching one or two offences she feels she has been guilty
+of towards you. They seem to me, in frankness, somewhat trifling. But
+I cannot persuade her to accept my view. She will not be happy till she
+has asked and received your pardon for them."
+
+"Offences towards me?" Peter wondered. "Unless excess of patience with
+a very trying employer constitutes an offence, she has been guilty of
+none."
+
+"Never mind," said the Cardinal. "Her conscience accuses her--she must
+satisfy it. Will you come?"
+
+The Cardinal sat down at the head of Marietta's bed, and took her hand.
+
+"Now, dear," he said, with the gentleness, the tenderness, of one
+speaking to a beloved child, "here is Mr. Marchdale. Tell him what you
+have on your mind. He is ready to hear and to forgive you."
+
+Marietta fixed her eyes anxiously on Peter's face.
+
+"First," she whispered, "I wish to beg the Signorino to pardon all this
+trouble I am making for him. I am the Signorino's servant; but instead
+of serving, I make trouble for him."
+
+She paused. The Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+
+Peter answered, "Marietta, if you talk like that, you will make the
+Signorino cry. You are the best servant that ever lived. You are putting
+me to no trouble at all. You are giving me a chance--which I should be
+glad of, except that it involves your suffering--to show my affection
+for you, and my gratitude."
+
+"There, dear," said the Cardinal to her, "you see the Signorino makes
+nothing of that. Now the next thing. Go on."
+
+"I have to ask the Signorino's forgiveness for my impertinence,"
+whispered Marietta.
+
+"Impertinence--?" faltered Peter. "You have never been impertinent."
+
+"Scusi, Signorino," she went on, in her whisper. "I have sometimes
+contradicted the Signorino. I contradicted the Signorino when he told
+me that St. Anthony of Padua was born in Lisbon. It is impertinent of
+a servant to contradict her master. And now his most high Eminence says
+the Signorino was right. I beg the Signorino to forgive me."
+
+Again the Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+
+"You dear old woman," Peter half laughed, half sobbed, "how can you ask
+me to forgive a mere difference of opinion? You--you dear old thing."
+
+The Cardinal smiled, and patted Marietta's hand.
+
+"The Signorino is too good," Marietta sighed.
+
+"Go on, dear," said the Cardinal.
+
+"I have been guilty of the deadly sin of evil speaking. I have spoken
+evil of the Signorino," she went on. "I said--I said to people--that the
+Signorino was simple--that he was simple and natural. I thought so
+then. Now I know it is not so. I know it is only that the Signorino is
+English."
+
+Once more the Cardinal smiled at Peter.
+
+Again Peter half laughed, half sobbed.
+
+"Marietta! Of course I am simple and natural. At least, I try to be.
+Come! Look up. Smile. Promise you will not worry about these things any
+more."
+
+She looked up, she smiled faintly.
+
+"The Signorino is too good," she whispered.
+
+After a little interval of silence, "Now, dear," said the Cardinal, "the
+last thing of all."
+
+Marietta gave a groan, turning her head from side to side on her pillow.
+
+"You need not be afraid," said the Cardinal. "Mr. Marchdale will
+certainly forgive you."
+
+"Oh-h-h," groaned Marietta. She stared at the ceiling for an instant.
+
+The Cardinal patted her hand. "Courage, courage," he said.
+
+"Oh--Signorino mio," she groaned again, "this you never can forgive me.
+It is about the little pig, the porcellino. The Signorino remembers the
+little pig, which he called Francesco?"
+
+"Yes," answered Peter.
+
+"The Signorino told me to take the little pig away, to find a home for
+him. And I told the Signorino that I would take him to my nephew, who is
+a farmer, towards Fogliamo. The Signorino remembers?"
+
+"Yes," answered Peter. "Yes, you dear old thing. I remember."
+
+Marietta drew a deep breath, summoned her utmost fortitude.
+
+"Well, I did not take him to my nephew. The--the Signorino ate him."
+
+Peter could hardly keep from laughing. He could only utter a kind of
+half-choked "Oh?"
+
+"Yes," whispered Marietta. "He was bought with the Signorino's money.
+I did not like to see the Signorino's money wasted. So I deceived the
+Signorino. You ate him as a chicken-pasty."
+
+This time Peter did laugh, I am afraid. Even the Cardinal--well, his
+smile was perilously near a titter. He took a big pinch of snuff.
+
+"I killed Francesco, and I deceived the Signorino. I am very sorry,"
+Marietta said.
+
+Peter knelt down at her bedside.
+
+"Marietta! Your conscience is too sensitive. As for killing
+Francesco--we are all mortal, he could not have lived forever. And as
+for deceiving the Signorino, you did it for his own good. I remember
+that chicken-pasty. It was the best chicken-pasty I have ever tasted.
+You must not worry any more about the little pig."
+
+Marietta turned her face towards him, and smiled.
+
+"The Signorino forgives his servant?" she whispered.
+
+Peter could not help it. He bent forward, and kissed her brown old
+cheek.
+
+"She will be easier now," said the Cardinal. "I will stay with her a
+little longer."
+
+Peter went out. The scene had been childish--do you say?--ridiculous,
+almost farcical indeed? And yet, somehow, it seemed to Peter that his
+heart was full of unshed tears. At the same time, as he thought of the
+Cardinal, as he saw his face, his smile, as he heard the intonations of
+his voice, the words he had spoken, as he thought of the way he had held
+Marietta's hand and patted it--at the same time a kind of strange
+joy seemed to fill his heart, a strange feeling of exaltation, of
+enthusiasm.
+
+"What a heavenly old man," he said.
+
+In the garden Sister Scholastica and Emilia were still walking together.
+
+They halted, when Peter came out; and Emilia said, "With your consent,
+Signore, Sister Scholastica has accepted me as her lieutenant. I will
+come every morning, and sit with Marietta during the day. That will
+relieve the sister, who has to be up with her at night."
+
+And every morning after that, Emilia came, walking through the park,
+and crossing the river by the ladder-bridge, which Peter left now
+permanently in its position. And once or twice a week, in the afternoon,
+the Cardinal would drive up in the brougham, and, having paid a little
+visit to Marietta, would drive Emilia home.
+
+In the sick-room Emilia would read to Marietta, or say the rosary for
+her.
+
+Marietta mended steadily day by day. At the end of a fortnight she was
+able to leave her bed for an hour or two in the afternoon, and sit in
+the sun in the garden. Then Sister Scholastica went back to her convent
+at Venzona. At the end of the third week Marietta could be up all day.
+But Gigi's stalwart Carolina Maddalena continued to rule as vicereine in
+the kitchen. And Emilia continued to come every morning.
+
+"Why does the Duchessa never come?" Peter wondered. "It would be decent
+of her to come and see the poor old woman."
+
+Whenever he thought of Cardinal Udeschini, the same strange feeling of
+joy would spring up in his heart, which he had felt when he had left the
+beautiful old man with Marietta, on the day of his first visit. In the
+beginning he could only give this feeling a very general and indefinite
+expression. "He is a man who renews one's faith in things, who renews
+one's faith in human nature." But gradually, I suppose, the feeling
+crystallised; and at last, in due season, it found for itself an
+expression that was not so indefinite.
+
+It was in the afternoon, and he had just conducted the Cardinal and
+Emilia to their carriage. He stood at his gate for a minute, and watched
+the carriage as it rolled away.
+
+"What a heavenly old man, what a heavenly old man," he thought.
+
+Then, still looking after the carriage, before turning back into his
+garden, he heard himself repeat, half aloud
+
+       "Nor knowest thou what argument
+        Thy life to thy neighbour's creed hath lent."
+
+The words had come to his lips, and were pronounced, were addressed to
+his mental image of the Cardinal, without any conscious act of volition
+on his part. He heard them with a sort of surprise, almost as if some
+one else had spoken them. He could not in the least remember what poem
+they were from, he could not even remember what poet they were by. Were
+they by Emerson? It was years since he had read a line of Emerson's.
+
+All that evening the couplet kept running in his head. And the feeling
+of joy, of enthusiasm, in his heart, was not so strange now. But I think
+it was intensified.
+
+The next time the Cardinal arrived at Villa Floriano, and gave Peter his
+hand, Peter did not merely shake it, English fashion, as he had hitherto
+done.
+
+The Cardinal looked startled.
+
+Then his eyes searched Peter's face for a second, keenly interrogative.
+Then they softened; and a wonderful clear light shone in them, a
+wonderful pure, sweet light.
+
+"Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus, Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus,"
+he said, making the Sign of the Cross.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+Up at the castle, Cardinal Udeschini was walking backwards and forwards
+on the terrace, reading his Breviary.
+
+Beatrice was seated under the white awning, at the terrace-end, doing
+some kind of needlework.
+
+Presently the Cardinal came to a standstill near her, and closed his
+book, putting his finger in it, to keep the place.
+
+"It will be, of course, a great loss to Casa Udeschini, when you marry,"
+he remarked.
+
+Beatrice looked up, astonishment on her brow.
+
+"When I marry?" she exclaimed. "Well, if ever there was a thunderbolt
+from a clear sky!"
+
+And she laughed.
+
+"Yes-when you marry," the Cardinal repeated, with conviction. "You are a
+young woman--you are twenty-eight years old. You will, marry. It is only
+right that you should marry. You have not the vocation for a religious.
+Therefore you must marry. But it will be a great loss to the house of
+Udeschini."
+
+"Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof," said Beatrice, laughing
+again. "I haven't the remotest thought of marrying. I shall never
+marry."
+
+"Il ne faut jamais dire a la fontaine, je ne boirai pas de ton eau,"
+his Eminence cautioned her, whilst the lines of humour about his mouth
+emphasised themselves, and his grey eyes twinkled. "Other things equal,
+marriage is as much the proper state for the laity, as celibacy is the
+proper state for the clergy. You will marry. It would be selfish of us
+to oppose your marrying. You ought to marry. But it will be a great loss
+to the family--it will be a great personal loss to me. You are as dear
+to me as any of my blood. I am always forgetting that we are uncle and
+niece by courtesy only."
+
+"I shall never marry. But nothing that can happen to me can ever make
+the faintest difference in my feeling for you. I hope you know how much
+I love you?" She looked into his eyes, smiling her love. "You are only
+my uncle by courtesy? But you are more than an uncle--you have been like
+a father to me, ever since I left my convent."
+
+The Cardinal returned her smile.
+
+"Carissima," he murmured. Then, "It will be a matter of the utmost
+importance to me, however," he went on, "that, when the time comes, you
+should marry a good man, a suitable man--a man who will love you, whom
+you will love--and, if possible, a man who will not altogether separate
+you from me, who will perhaps love me a little too. It would send me
+in sorrow to my grave, if you should marry a man who was not worthy of
+you."
+
+"I will guard against that danger by not marrying at all," laughed
+Beatrice.
+
+"No--you will marry, some day," said the Cardinal. "And I wish you to
+remember that I shall not oppose your marrying--provided the man is a
+good man. Felipe will not like it--Guido will pull a long nose--but I,
+at least, will take your part, if I can feel that the man is good. Good
+men are rare, my dear; good husbands are rarer still. I can think, for
+instance, of no man in our Roman nobility, whom I should be content to
+see you marry. Therefore I hope you will not marry a Roman. You would be
+more likely to marry one of your own countrymen. That, of course,
+would double the loss to us, if it should take you away from Italy. But
+remember, if he is a man whom I can think worthy of you, you may count
+upon me as an ally."
+
+He resumed his walk, reopening his Breviary.
+
+Beatrice resumed her needlework. But she found it difficult to fix her
+attention on it. Every now and then, she would leave her needle stuck
+across its seam, let the work drop to her lap, and, with eyes turned
+vaguely up the valley, fall, apparently, into a muse.
+
+"I wonder why he said all that to me?" was the question that kept posing
+itself.
+
+By and by the Cardinal closed his Breviary, and put it in his pocket.
+I suppose he had finished his office for the day. Then he came and sat
+down in one of the wicker chairs, under the awning. On the table, among
+the books and things, stood a carafe of water, some tumblers, a silver
+sugar-bowl, and a crystal dish full of fresh pomegranate seeds. It
+looked like a dish full of unset rubies. The Cardinal poured some water
+into a tumbler, added a lump of sugar and a spoonful of pomegranate
+seeds, stirred the mixture till it became rose-coloured, and drank it
+off in a series of little sips.
+
+"What is the matter, Beatrice?" he asked, all at once.
+
+Beatrice raised her eyes, perplexed.
+
+"The matter--? Is anything the matter?"
+
+"Yes," said the Cardinal; "something is the matter. You are depressed,
+you are nervous, you are not yourself. I have noticed it for many days.
+Have you something on, your mind?"
+
+"Nothing in the world," Beatrice answered, with an appearance of great
+candour. "I had not noticed that I was nervous or depressed."
+
+"We are entering October," said the Cardinal. "I must return to Rome. I
+have been absent too long already. I must return next week. But I should
+not like to go away with the feeling that you are unhappy."
+
+"If a thing were needed to make me unhappy, it would be the announcement
+of your intended departure," Beatrice said, smiling. "But otherwise,
+I am no more unhappy than it is natural to be. Life, after all, is n't
+such a furiously gay business as to keep one perpetually singing and
+dancing--is it? But I am not especially unhappy."
+
+"H'm," said the Cardinal. Then, in a minute, "You will come to Rome in
+November, I suppose?" he asked.
+
+"Yes--towards the end of November, I think," said Beatrice.
+
+The Cardinal rose, and began to walk backwards and forwards again.
+
+In a little while the sound of carriage-wheels could be heard, in the
+sweep, round the corner of the house.
+
+The Cardinal looked at his watch.
+
+"Here is the carriage," he said. "I must go down and see that poor old
+woman.... Do you know," he added, after a moment's hesitation, "I think
+it would be well if you were to go with me."
+
+A shadow came into Beatrice's eyes.
+
+"What good would that do?" she asked.
+
+"It would give her pleasure, no doubt. And besides, she is one of your
+parishioners, as it were. I think you ought to go. You have never been
+to see her since she fell ill."
+
+"Oh--well," said Beatrice.
+
+She was plainly unwilling. But she went to put on her things.
+
+In the carriage, when they had passed the village and crossed the
+bridge, as they were bowling along the straight white road that led
+to the villa, "What a long time it is since Mr. Marchdale has been at
+Ventirose," remarked the Cardinal.
+
+"Oh--? Is it?" responded Beatrice, with indifference.
+
+"It is more than three weeks, I think--it is nearly a month," the
+Cardinal said.
+
+"Oh--?" said she.
+
+"He has had his hands full, of course; he has had little leisure," the
+Cardinal pursued. "His devotion to his poor old servant has been quite
+admirable. But now that she is practically recovered, he will be freer."
+
+"Yes," said Beatrice.
+
+"He is a young man whom I like very much," said the Cardinal. "He is
+intelligent; he has good manners; and he has a fine sense of the droll.
+Yes, he has wit--a wit that you seldom find in an Anglo-Saxon, a wit
+that is almost Latin. But you have lost your interest in him? That is
+because you despair of his conversion?"
+
+"I confess I am not greatly interested in him," Beatrice answered. "And
+I certainly have no hopes of his conversion."
+
+The Cardinal smiled at his ring. He opened his snuffbox, and inhaled a
+long deliberate pinch of snuff.
+
+"Ah, well--who can tell?" he said. "But--he will be free now, and it is
+so long since he has been at the castle--had you not better ask him to
+luncheon or dinner?"
+
+"Why should I?" answered Beatrice. "If he does not come to Ventirose, it
+is presumably because he does not care to come. If he does care to come,
+he needs no invitation. He knows that he is at liberty to call whenever
+he likes."
+
+"But it would be civil, it would be neighbourly, to ask him to a meal,"
+the Cardinal submitted.
+
+"And it would put him in the embarrassing predicament of having either
+to accept against his will, or to decline and appear ungracious,"
+submitted Beatrice. "No, it is evident that Ventirose does not amuse
+him."
+
+"Bene," said the Cardinal. "Be it as you wish."
+
+But when they reached Villa Floriano, Peter was not at home.
+
+"He has gone to Spiaggia for the day," Emilia informed them.
+
+Beatrice, the Cardinal fancied, looked at once relieved and
+disappointed.
+
+Marietta was seated in the sun, in a sheltered corner of the garden.
+
+While Beatrice talked with her, the Cardinal walked about.
+
+Now it so happened that on Peter's rustic table a book lay open, face
+downwards.
+
+The Cardinal saw the book. He halted in his walk, and glanced round
+the garden, as if to make sure that he was not observed. He tapped his
+snuff--box, and took a pinch of snuff. Then he appeared to meditate for
+an instant, the lines about his mouth becoming very marked indeed.
+At last, swiftly, stealthily, almost with the air of a man committing
+felony, he slipped his snuff-box under the open book, well under it, so
+that it was completely covered up.
+
+On the way back to Ventirose, the Cardinal put his hand in his pocket.
+
+"Dear me!" he suddenly exclaimed. "I have lost my snuff box again." He
+shook his head, as one who recognises a fatality. "I am always losing
+it."
+
+"Are you sure you had it with you?" Beatrice asked.
+
+"Oh, yes, I think I had it with me. I should have missed it before this,
+if I had left it at home. I must have dropped it in Mr. Marchdale's
+garden."
+
+"In that case it will probably be found," said Beatrice.
+
+
+Peter had gone to Spiaggia, I imagine, in the hope of meeting Mrs.
+O'Donovan Florence; but the printed visitors' list there told him that
+she had left nearly a fortnight since. On his return to the villa, he
+was greeted by Marietta with the proud tidings that her Excellency the
+Duchessa di Santangiolo had been to see her.
+
+"Oh--? Really?" he questioned lightly. (His heart, I think, dropped a
+beat, all the same.)
+
+"Ang," said Marietta. "She came with the most Eminent Prince Cardinal.
+They came in the carriage. She stayed half an hour. She was very
+gracious."
+
+"Ah?" said Peter. "I am glad to hear it."
+
+"She was beautifully dressed," said Marietta.
+
+"Of that I have not the shadow of a doubt," said he.
+
+"The Signorina Emilia drove away with them," said she.
+
+"Dear, dear! What a chapter of adventures," was his comment.
+
+He went to his rustic table, and picked up his book.
+
+"How the deuce did that come there?" he wondered, discovering the snuff
+box.
+
+It was, in truth, an odd place for it. A cardinal may inadvertently
+drop his snuff box, to be sure. But if the whole College of Cardinals
+together had dropped a snuff box, it would hardly have fallen, of
+its own weight, through the covers of an open book, to the under-side
+thereof, and have left withal no trace of its passage.
+
+"Solid matter will not pass through solid matter, without fraction--I
+learned that at school," said Peter.
+
+The inference would be that someone had purposely put the snuff box
+there.
+
+But who?
+
+The Cardinal himself? In the name of reason, why?
+
+Emilia? Nonsense.
+
+Marietta? Absurd.
+
+The Du--
+
+A wild surmise darted through Peter's soul. Could it be? Could it
+conceivably be? Was it possible that--that--was it possible, in fine,
+that this was a kind of signal, a kind of summons?
+
+Oh, no, no, no. And yet--and yet--
+
+No, certainly not. The idea was preposterous. It deserved, and (I trust)
+obtained, summary deletion.
+
+"Nevertheless," said Peter, "it's a long while since I have darkened the
+doors of Ventirose. And a poor excuse is better than none. And anyhow,
+the Cardinal will be glad to have his snuff."
+
+The ladder-bridge was in its place.
+
+He crossed the Aco.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+He crossed the Aco, and struck bravely forward, up the smooth lawns,
+under the bending trees, towards the castle.
+
+The sun was setting. The irregular mass of buildings stood out in
+varying shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of red.
+
+Half way there, Peter stopped, and looked back.
+
+The level sunshine turned the black forests of the Gnisi to shining
+forests of bronze, and the foaming cascade that leapt down its side to
+a cascade of liquid gold. The lake, for the greater part, lay in shadow,
+violet-grey through a pearl-grey veil of mist; but along the opposite
+shore it caught the light, and gleamed a crescent of quicksilver, with
+roseate reflections. The three snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito, at the
+valley's end, seemed almost insubstantial--floating forms of luminous
+pink vapour, above the hazy horizon, in a pure sky intensely blue.
+
+A familiar verse came into Peter's mind.
+
+"Really,"' he said to himself, "down to the very 'cataract leaping in
+glory,' I believe they must have pre-arranged the scene, feature for
+feature, to illustrate it." And he began to repeat the vivid, musical
+lines, under his breath...
+
+But about midway of them he was interrupted.
+
+"It's not altogether a bad sort of view--is it?" a voice asked, behind
+him.
+
+Peter faced about.
+
+On a marble bench, under a feathery acacia; a few yards away, a lady was
+seated, looking at him, smiling.
+
+Peter's eyes met hers--and suddenly his heart gave a jump. Then it stood
+dead still for a second. Then it flew off, racing perilously. Oh, for
+the best reasons in the world. There was something in her eyes, there
+was a glow, a softness, that seemed--that seemed... But thereby hangs my
+tale.
+
+She was dressed in white. She had some big bright-yellow chrysanthemums
+stuck in her belt. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow,
+sparkled, where the sun touched it, transparent and iridescent, like
+crinkly threads of glass.
+
+"You do not think it altogether bad--I hope?" she questioned, arching
+her eyebrows slightly, with a droll little assumption of concern.
+
+Peter's heart was racing--but he must answer her.
+
+"I was just wondering," he answered, with a tolerably successful feint
+of composure, "whether one might not safely call it altogether good."
+
+"Oh--?" she exclaimed.
+
+She threw back her head, and examined the prospect critically.
+Afterwards, she returned her gaze to Peter, with an air of polite
+readiness to defer to his opinion.
+
+"It is not too sensational? Not too much like a landscape on the stage?"
+
+"We must judge it leniently," said he; "we must remember that it is only
+unaided Nature. Besides," he added, "to be meticulously truthful, there
+is a spaciousness, there is a vivacity in the light and colour, there
+is a sense of depth and atmosphere, that we should hardly find in a
+landscape on the stage."
+
+"Yes--perhaps there is," she admitted thoughtfully.
+
+And with that, they looked into each other's eyes, and laughed.
+
+"Are you aware," the lady asked, after a brief silence, "that it is a
+singularly lovely evening."
+
+"I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so," Peter answered, with the
+least approach to a meaning bow.
+
+In the lady's face there flickered, perhaps, for half a second, the
+faintest light, as of a comprehending and unresentful smile. But she
+went on, with fine detachment
+
+"How calm and still it is. The wonderful peace of the day's compline. It
+seems as if the earth had stopped breathing--does n't it? The birds have
+already gone to bed, though the sun is only just setting. It is the
+hour when they are generally noisiest; but they have gone to bed--the
+sparrows and the finches, the snatchers and the snatched-from, are equal
+in the article of sleep. That is because they feel the touch of autumn.
+How beautiful it is, in spite of its sadness, this first touch of
+autumn--it is like sad distant music. Can you analyse it, can you
+explain it? There is no chill, it is quite warm, and yet one knows
+somehow that autumn is here. The birds know it, and have gone to bed.
+In another month they will be flying away, to Africa and the
+Hesperides--all of them except the sparrows, who stay all winter. I
+wonder how they get on during the winter, with no goldfinches to snatch
+from?"
+
+She turned to Peter with a look of respectful enquiry, as one appealing
+to an authority for information.
+
+"Oh, they snatch from each other, during the winter," he explained. "It
+is thief rob thief, when honest victims are not forthcoming. And--what
+is more to the point--they must keep their beaks in, against the return
+of the goldfinches with the spring."
+
+The Duchessa--for I scorn to deceive the trustful reader longer; and (as
+certain fines mouches, despite my efforts at concealment, may ere this
+have suspected) the mysterious lady was no one else--the Duchessa gaily
+laughed.
+
+"Yes," she said, "the goldfinches will return with the spring. But isn't
+that rather foolish of them? If I were a goldfinch, I think I should
+make my abode permanent in the sparrowless south."
+
+"There is no sparrowless south," said Peter. "Sparrows, alas, abound in
+every latitude; and the farther south you go, the fiercer and bolder and
+more impudent they become. In Africa and the Hesperides, which you have
+mentioned, they not infrequently attack the caravans, peck the eyes out
+of the camels, and are sometimes even known to carry off a man, a
+whole man, vainly struggling in their inexorable talons. There is no
+sparrowless south. But as for the goldfinches returning--it is the
+instinct of us bipeds to return. Plumed and plumeless, we all return to
+something, what though we may have registered the most solemn vows to
+remain away."
+
+He delivered his last phrases with an accent, he punctuated them with a
+glance, in which there may have lurked an intention.
+
+But the Duchessa did not appear to notice it.
+
+"Yes--true--so we do," she assented vaguely. "And what you tell me of
+the sparrows in the Hesperides is very novel and impressive--unless,
+indeed, it is a mere traveller's tale, with which you are seeking to
+practise upon my credulity. But since I find you in this communicative
+vein, will you not push complaisance a half-inch further, and tell me
+what that thing is, suspended there in the sky above the crest of the
+Cornobastone--that pale round thing, that looks like the spectre of a
+magnified half-crown?"
+
+Peter turned to the quarter her gaze indicated.
+
+"Oh, that," he said, "is nothing. In frankness, it is only what the
+vulgar style the moon."
+
+"How odd," said she. "I thought it was what the vulgar style the moon."
+
+And they both laughed again.
+
+The Duchessa moved a little; and thus she uncovered, carved on the back
+of her marble bench, and blazoned in red and gold, a coat of arms.
+
+She touched the shield with her finger.
+
+"Are you interested in canting heraldry?" she asked. "There is no
+country so rich in it as Italy. These are the arms of the Farfalla, the
+original owners of this property. Or, seme of twenty roses gules; the
+crest, on a rose gules, a butterfly or, with wings displayed; and the
+motto--how could the heralds ever have sanctioned such an unheraldic and
+unheroic motto?
+
+                      Rosa amorosa,
+                      Farfalla giojosa,
+                      Mi cantano al cuore
+                      La gioja e l' amore.
+
+They were the great people of this region for countless generations, the
+Farfalla. They were Princes of Ventirose and Patricians of Milan. And
+then the last of them was ruined at Monte Carlo, and killed himself
+there, twenty-odd years ago. That is how all their gioja and amore
+ended. It was the case of a butterfly literally broken upon a wheel. The
+estate fell into the hands of the Jews, as everything more or less does
+sooner or later; and they--if you can believe me--they were going
+to turn the castle into an hotel, into one of those monstrous modern
+hotels, for other Jews to come to, when I happened to hear of it, and
+bought it. Fancy turning that splendid old castle into a Jew-infested
+hotel! It is one of the few castles in Italy that have a ghost. Oh, but
+a quite authentic ghost. It is called the White Page--il Paggio Bianco
+di Ventirose. It is the ghost of a boy about sixteen. He walks on the
+ramparts of the old keep, and looks off towards the lake, as if he
+were watching a boat, and sometimes he waves his arms, as if he were
+signalling. And from head to foot he is perfectly white, like a statue.
+I have never seen him myself; but so many people say they have, I cannot
+doubt he is authentic. And the Jews wanted to turn this haunted castle
+into an hotel... As a tribute to the memory of the Farfalla, I take
+pains to see that their arms, which are carved, as you see them here, in
+at least a hundred different places, are remetalled and retinctured as
+often as time and the weather render it necessary."
+
+She looked towards the castle, while she spoke; and now she rose, with
+the design, perhaps, of moving in that direction.
+
+Peter felt that the moment had come for actualities.
+
+"It seems improbable," he began,--"and I 'm afraid you will think there
+is a tiresome monotony in my purposes; but I am here again to return
+Cardinal Udeschini's snuff box. He left it in my garden."
+
+"Oh--?" said the Duchessa. "Yes, he thought he must have left it there.
+He is always mislaying it. Happily, he has another, for emergencies. It
+was very good of you to trouble to bring it back."
+
+She gave a light little laugh..
+
+"I may also improve this occasion," Peter abruptly continued, "to make
+my adieux. I shall be leaving for England in a few days now."
+
+The Duchessa raised her eyebrows.
+
+"Really?" she said. "Oh, that is too bad," she added, by way of comment.
+"October, you know, is regarded as the best month of all the twelve, in
+this lake country."
+
+"Yes, I know it," Peter responded regretfully.
+
+"And it is a horrid month in England," she went on.
+
+"It is an abominable month in England," he acknowledged.
+
+"Here it is blue, like larkspur, and all fragrant of the vintage,
+and joyous with the songs of the vintagers," she said. "There it is
+dingy-brown, and songless, and it smells of smoke."
+
+"Yes," he agreed.
+
+"But you are a sportsman? You go in for shooting?" she conjectured.
+
+"No," he answered. "I gave up shooting years ago."
+
+"Oh--? Hunting, then?"
+
+"I hate hunting. One is always getting rolled on by one's horse."
+
+"Ah, I see. It--it will be golf, perhaps?"
+
+"No, it is not even golf."
+
+"Don't tell me it is football?"
+
+"Do I look as if it were football?"
+
+"It is sheer homesickness, in fine? You are grieving for the purple of
+your native heather?"
+
+"There is scarcely any heather in my native county. No," said Peter,
+"no. To tell you the truth, it is the usual thing. It is an histoire de
+femme."
+
+"I 'might have guessed it," she exclaimed. "It is still that everlasting
+woman."
+
+"That everlasting woman--?" Peter faltered.
+
+"To be sure," said she. "The woman you are always going on about. The
+woman of your novel. This woman, in short."
+
+And she produced from behind her back a hand that she had kept there,
+and held up for his inspection a grey-and-gold bound book.
+
+"MY novel--?" faltered he. (But the sight of it, in her possession, in
+these particular circumstances, gave him a thrill that was not a thrill
+of despair.)
+
+"Your novel," she repeated, smiling sweetly, and mimicking his tone.
+Then she made a little moue. "Of course, I have known that you were your
+friend Felix Wildmay, from the outset."
+
+"Oh," said Peter, in a feeble sort of gasp, looking bewildered. "You
+have known that from the outset?" And his brain seemed to reel.
+
+"Yes," said she, "of course. Where would the fun have been, otherwise?
+And now you are going away, back to her shrine, to renew your worship. I
+hope you will find the courage to offer her your hand."
+
+Peter's brain was reeling. But here was the opportunity of his life.
+
+"You give me courage," he pronounced, with sudden daring. "You are in a
+position to help me with her. And since you know so much, I should like
+you to know more. I should like to tell you who she is."
+
+"One should be careful where one bestows one's confidences," she warned
+him; but there was something in her eyes, there was a glow, a softness,
+that seemed at the same time to invite them.
+
+"No," he said, "better than telling you who she is, I will tell you
+where I first saw her. It was at the Francais, in December, four years
+ago, a Thursday night, a subscription night. She sat in one of the
+middle boxes of the first tier. She was dressed in white. Her companions
+were an elderly woman, English I think, in black, who wore a cap; and an
+old man, with white moustache and imperial, who looked as if he might be
+a French officer. And the play--."
+
+He broke off, and looked at the Duchessa. She kept her eyes down.
+
+"Yes--the play?" she questioned, in a low voice, after a little wait.
+
+"The play was Monsieur Pailleron's 'Le monde ou l'on s'ennuie'," he
+said.
+
+"Oh," said she, still keeping her eyes down. Her voice was still very
+low. But there was something in it that made Peter's heart leap.
+
+"The next time I saw her," he began...
+
+But then he had to stop. He felt as if the beating of his heart must
+suffocate him.
+
+"Yes--the next time?" she questioned.
+
+He drew a deep breath. He began anew--
+
+"The next time was a week later, at the Opera. They were giving
+Lohengrin. She was with the same man and woman, and there was another,
+younger man. She had pearls round her neck and in her hair, and she had
+a cloak lined with white fur. She left before the opera was over. I did
+not see her again until the following May, when I saw her once or twice
+in London, driving in the Park. She was always with the same elderly
+Englishwoman, but the military-looking old Frenchman had disappeared.
+And then I saw her once more, a year later, in Paris, driving in the
+Bois."
+
+The Duchessa kept her eyes down. She did not speak.
+
+Peter waited as long as flesh-and-blood could wait, looking at her.
+
+"Well?" he pleaded, at last. "That is all. Have you nothing to say to
+me?"
+
+She raised her eyes, and for the tiniest fraction of a second they gave
+themselves to his. Then she dropped them again.
+
+"You are sure," she asked, "you are perfectly sure that when,
+afterwards, you met her, and came to know her as she really is--you are
+perfectly sure there was no disappointment?"
+
+"Disappointment!" cried Peter. "She is in every way immeasurably beyond
+anything that I was capable of dreaming. Oh, if you could see her, if
+you could hear her speak, if you could look into her eyes--if you
+could see her as others see her--you would not ask whether there was a
+disappointment. She is... No; the language is not yet invented, in which
+I could describe her."
+
+The Duchessa smiled, softly, to herself.
+
+"And you are in love with her--more or less?" she asked.
+
+"I love her so that the bare imagination of being allowed to tell her of
+my love almost makes me faint with joy. But it is like the story of the
+poor squire who loved his queen. She is the greatest of great ladies.
+I am nobody. She is so beautiful, so splendid, and so high above me, it
+would be the maddest presumption for me to ask her for her love. To ask
+for the love of my Queen! And yet--Oh, I can say no more. God sees my
+heart. God knows how I love her."
+
+"And it is on her account--because you think your love is hopeless--that
+you are going away, that you are going back to England?"
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+She raised her eyes again, and again they gave themselves to his. There
+was something in them, there was a glow, a softness ...
+
+"Don't go," she said.
+
+
+Up at the castle--Peter had hurried down to the villa, dressed, and
+returned to the castle to dine--he restored the snuff-box to Cardinal
+Udeschini.
+
+"I am trebly your debtor for it," said the Cardinal.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Cardinal's Snuff-Box, by Henry Harland
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