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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Friend Prospero, 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: My Friend Prospero
+
+Author: Henry Harland
+
+Release Date: January 13, 2005 [EBook #14682]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY FRIEND PROSPERO ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Rick Niles, Charlie Kirschner and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MY FRIEND
+PROSPERO
+
+
+By HENRY HARLAND
+
+_Author of_
+
+THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX.
+Illustrated by G.C. Wilmshurst.
+_One Hundred and Fifth Thousand_.
+
+THE LADY PARAMOUNT.
+_Fifty-fifth Thousand_.
+
+COMEDIES AND ERRORS.
+_Third Edition_.
+
+GREY ROSES. _Third Edition_.
+
+MADEMOISELLE MISS. _Second Edition_.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
+
+LONDON & NEW YORK. MDCCCCIV
+
+1903
+
+
+
+
+PART FIRST
+
+
+
+
+My Friend Prospero
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The coachman drew up his horses before the castle gateway, where their
+hoofs beat a sort of fanfare on the stone pavement; and the footman,
+letting himself smartly down, pulled, with a peremptory gesture that was
+just not quite a swagger, the bronze hand at the end of the dangling
+bell-cord.
+
+Seated alone in her great high-swung barouche, in the sweet April
+weather, Lady Blanchemain gave the interval that followed to a
+consideration of the landscape: first, sleeping in shadowy stillness,
+the formal Italian garden, its terraced lawns and metrical parterres,
+its straight dark avenues of ilex, its cypresses, fountains, statues,
+balustrades; and then, laughing in the breeze and the sun, the wild
+Italian valley, a forest of blossoming fruit-trees, with the river
+winding and glinting in its midst, with olive-clad hills blue-grey at
+either side, and beyond the hills, peering over their shoulders, the
+snow-peaks of mountains, crisp against the sky, and in the level
+distance the hazy shimmer of the lake.
+
+"It is lovely," she exclaimed, fervently, in a whisper, "lovely.--And
+only a generation of blind-worms," was her after-thought, "could discern
+in it the slightest resemblance to the drop-scene of a theatre."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Big, humorous, emotional, imperious, but, above all, interested and
+sociable Lady Blanchemain: do you know her, I wonder? Her billowy white
+hair? Her handsome soft old face, with its smooth skin, and the good
+strong bony structure underneath? Her beautiful old grey eyes, full of
+tenderness and shrewdness, of curiosity, irony, indulgence, overarched
+and emphasized by regular black eyebrows? Her pretty little plump
+pink-white hands, (like two little elderly Cupids), with their shining
+panoply of rings? And her luxurious, courageous, high-hearted manner of
+dressing? The light colours and jaunty fashion of her gowns? Her laces,
+ruffles, embroideries? Her gay little bonnets? Her gems? Linda Baroness
+Blanchemain, of Fring Place, Sussex; Belmore Gardens, Kensington; and
+Villa Antonina, San Remo: big, merry, sociable, sentimental,
+worldly-wise, impetuous Linda Blanchemain: do you know her? If you do,
+I am sure you love her and rejoice in her; and enough is said. If you
+don't, I beg leave to present and to commend her.
+
+I spoke, by the bye, of her "old" face, her "old" eyes. She is, to be
+sure, in so far as mere numbers of years tell, an old woman. But I once
+heard her throw out, in the heat of conversation, the phrase, "a young
+old thing like me;" and I thought she touched a truth.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Well, then, the footman, in his masterful way, pulled the bell-cord;
+Lady Blanchemain contemplated the landscape, and had her opinion of a
+generation that could liken it to the drop-scene of a theatre; and in
+due process of things the bell was answered.
+
+It was answered by a man in a costume that struck my humorous old friend
+as pleasing: a sallow little man whose otherwise quite featureless suit
+of tweeds was embellished by scarlet worsted shoulder-knots. With
+lack-lustre eyes, from behind the plexus of the grille, he rather
+stolidly regarded the imposing British equipage, and waited to be
+addressed.
+
+Lady Blanchemain addressed him in the language of Pistoja. Might one,
+she inquired, with her air of high affability, in her distinguished old
+voice, might one visit the castle?--a question purely of convention, for
+she had not come hither without an assurance from her guide-book.
+
+Shoulder-knots, however,--either to flaunt his attainments, or because
+indeed Pistoiese (what though the polyglot races of Italy have agreed
+upon it as a lingua franca) offered the greater difficulties to his
+Lombardian tongue,--replied in French.
+
+"I do not think so, Madame," was his reply, in a French sufficiently
+heavy and stiff-jointed, enforced by a dubious oscillation of the head.
+
+Lady Blanchemain's black eyebrows shot upwards, marking her surprise;
+then drew together, marking her determination.
+
+"But of course one can--it's in the guide-book," she insisted, and held
+up the red-bound volume.
+
+The sceptic gave a shrug, as one who disclaimed responsibility and
+declined discussion.
+
+"Me, I do not think so. But patience! I will go and ask," he said; and,
+turning his back, faded from sight in the depths of the dark tunnel-like
+porte-cochère.
+
+Vexed, perplexed, Lady Blanchemain fidgeted a little. To have taken this
+long drive for nothing!--sweet though the weather was, fair though the
+valley: but she was not a person who could let the means excuse the end.
+She neither liked nor was accustomed to see her enterprises balked,--to
+see doors remain closed in her face. Doors indeed had a habit of flying
+open at her approach. Besides, the fellow's manner,--his initial stare
+and silence, his tone when he spoke, his shrug, his exhortation to
+patience, and something too in the conduct of his back as he
+departed,--hadn't it lacked I don't know what of becoming deference? to
+satisfy her amour-propre, at any rate, that the mistake, if there was a
+mistake, sprang from no malapprehension of her own, she looked up
+chapter and verse. Yes, there the assurance stood, circumstantial, in
+all the convincingness of the sturdy, small black type:--
+
+"From Roccadoro a charming excursion may be made, up the beautiful Val
+Rampio, to the mediæval village of Sant' Alessina (7 miles), with its
+magnificent castle, in fine grounds, formerly a seat of the Sforzas, now
+belonging to the Prince of Zelt-Neuminster, and containing the
+celebrated Zelt-Neuminster collection of paintings. Incorporated in the
+castle buildings, a noticeable peculiarity, are the parish church and
+presbytery. Accessible daily, except Monday, from 10 to 4; attendant 1
+fr."
+
+So then! To-day was Wednesday, the hour between two and three. So--! Her
+amour-propre triumphed, but I fancy her vexation mounted....
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+"I beg your pardon. It's disgraceful you should have been made to wait.
+The porter is an idiot. You wish, of course, to see the house--?"
+
+The English words, on a key of spontaneous apology, with a very zealous
+inflection of concern--yet, at the same time, with a kind of entirely
+respectful and amiable abruptness, as of one hailing a familiar
+friend,--were pronounced in a breath by a brisk, cheerful, unmistakably
+English voice.
+
+Lady Blanchemain, whose attention had still been on the incriminated
+page, looked quickly up, and (English voice and spontaneous apology
+notwithstanding) I won't vouch that the answer at the tip of her
+impulsive tongue mightn't have proved a hasty one--but the speaker's
+appearance gave her pause: the appearance of the tall, smiling,
+unmistakably English young man, by whom Shoulder-knots had returned
+accompanied, and who now, having pushed the grille ajar and issued
+forth, stood, placing himself with a tentative obeisance at her service,
+beside the carriage: he was so clearly, first of all--what, if it hadn't
+been for her preoccupation, his voice, tone, accent would have warned
+her to expect--so visibly a gentleman; and then, with the even pink of
+his complexion, his yellowish hair and beard, his alert, friendly, very
+blue blue eyes--with his very blue blue flannels too, and his brick-red
+knitted tie--he was so vivid and so unusual.
+
+His appearance gave her a pause; and in the result she in her turn
+almost apologized.
+
+"This wretched book," she explained, pathetically bringing forward her
+_pièce justificative_, "said that it was open to the public."
+
+The vivid young man hastened to put her in the right.
+
+"It is--it _is_," he eagerly affirmed. "Only," he added, with a vaguely
+rueful modulation, and always with that amiable abruptness, as a man
+very much at his ease, while his blue eyes whimsically brightened, "only
+the blessed public never comes--we're so off the beaten path. And I
+suppose one mustn't expect a Scioccone"--his voice swelled on the word,
+and he cast sidelong a scathing glance at his summoner--"to cope with
+unprecedented situations. Will you allow me to help you out?"
+
+"Ah," thought Lady Blanchemain, "Eton," his tone and accent now nicely
+appraised by an experienced ear. "Eton--yes; and probably--h'm? Probably
+Balliol," her experience led her further to surmise. But what--with her
+insatiable curiosity about people, she had of course immediately begun
+to wonder--what was an Eton and Balliol man doing, apparently in a
+position of authority, at this remote Italian castle?
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+He helped her out, very gracefully, very gallantly; and under his
+guidance she made the tour of the vast building: its greater court and
+lesser court; its cloisters, with their faded frescoes, and their
+marvellous outlook, northwards, upon the Alps; its immense rotunda,
+springing to the open dome, where the sky was like an inset plaque of
+turquoise; its "staircase of honour," guarded, in an ascending file, by
+statues of men in armour; and then, on the _piano nobile_, its endless
+chain of big, empty, silent, splendid state apartments, with their
+pavements of gleaming marble, in many-coloured patterns, their painted
+and gilded ceilings, tapestried walls, carved wood and moulded stucco,
+their pictures, pictures, pictures, and their atmosphere of stately
+desolation, their memories of another age, their reminders of the power
+and pomp of people who had long been ghosts.
+
+He was tall (with that insatiable curiosity of hers, she was of course
+continuously studying him), tall and broad-shouldered, but not a bit
+rigid or inflexible--of a figure indeed conspicuously supple, suave in
+its quick movements, soft in its energetic lines, a figure that could
+with equal thoroughness be lazy in repose and vehement in action. His
+yellow hair was thick and fine, and if it hadn't been cropped so close
+would have curled a little. His beard, in small crinkly spirals, did
+actually curl, and toward the edge its yellow burned to red. And his
+blue eyes were so very very blue, and so very keen, and so very frank
+and pleasant--"They are like sailors' eyes," thought Lady Blanchemain,
+who had a sentiment for sailors. He carried his head well thrown back,
+as a man who was perfectly sure of himself and perfectly
+unselfconscious; and thus unconsciously he drew attention to the
+vigorous sweep of his profile, the decisive angles of his brow and nose.
+His voice was brisk and cheerful and masculine; and that abruptness with
+which he spoke--which seemed, as it were, to imply a previous
+acquaintance--was so tempered by manifest good breeding and so coloured
+by manifest good will, that it became a positive part and parcel of what
+one liked in him. It was the abruptness of a man very much at his ease,
+very much a man of the world, yet it was somehow, in its essence,
+boyish. It expressed freshness, sincerity, conviction, a boyish
+wholesale surrender of himself to the business of the moment; it
+expressed, perhaps above all, a boyish thorough good understanding with
+his interlocutor. "It amounts," thought his present interlocutrice, "to
+a kind of infinitely sublimated bluffness."
+
+And then she fell to examining his clothes: his loose, soft, very blue
+blue flannels, with vague stripes of darker blue; his soft shirt, with
+its rolling collar; his red tie, knitted of soft silk, and tied in a
+loose sailor's-knot. She liked his clothes, and she liked the way he
+wore them. They suited him. They were loose and comfortable and
+unconventional, but they were beautifully fresh and well cared for, and
+showed him, if indifferent to the fashion-plate of the season,
+meticulous in a fashion of his own. "It's hard to imagine him dressed
+otherwise," she said, and instantly had a vision of him dressed for
+dinner.
+
+But what--what--what was he doing at Castel Sant' Alessina?
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Meanwhile he plainly knew a tremendous lot about Italian art. Lady
+Blanchemain herself knew a good deal, and could recognize a pundit. He
+illumined their progress by a running fire of exposition and commentary,
+learned and discerning, to which she encouragingly listened, and, as
+occasion required, amiably responded. But Boltraffios, Bernardino
+Luinis, even a putative Giorgione, could not divert her mind from its
+human problem. What was he doing at Castel Sant' Alessina, the property,
+according to her guide-book, of an Austrian prince? What was his status
+here, apparently (bar servants) in solitary occupation? Was he its
+tenant? He couldn't, surely, this well-dressed, high-bred, cultivated
+young compatriot, he couldn't be a mere employé, a steward or curator?
+No: probably a tenant. Antecedently indeed it might seem unlikely that a
+young Englishman should become the tenant of an establishment so huge
+and so sequestered; but was it conceivable that this particular young
+Englishman should be a mere employé? And was there any other
+alternative? She hearkened for a word, a note, that might throw light;
+but of such notes, such words, a young man's conversation, in the
+circumstances, would perhaps naturally yield a meagre crop.
+
+"You mustn't let me tire you," he said presently, as one who had
+forgotten and suddenly remembered that looking at pictures is exhausting
+work. "Won't you sit here and rest a little?"
+
+They were in a smaller room than any they had previously traversed, an
+octagonal room, which a single lofty window filled with sunshine.
+
+"Oh, thank you," said Lady Blanchemain, and seated herself on the
+circular divan in the centre of the polished terrazza floor. She wasn't
+really tired in the least, the indefatigable old sight-seer; but a
+respite from picture-gazing would enable her to turn the talk. She put
+up her mother-of-pearl lorgnon, and glanced round the walls; then,
+lowering it, she frankly raised her eyes, full of curiosity and
+kindness, to her companion's.
+
+"It's a surprise, and a delightful one," she remarked, "having pushed so
+far afield in a foreign land, to be met by the good offices of a
+fellow-countryman--it's so nice of you to be English."
+
+And her eyes softly changed, their curiosity being veiled by a kind of
+humorous content.
+
+The young man's face, from its altitude of six-feet-something, beamed
+responsively down upon her.
+
+"Oh," he laughed, "you mustn't give me too much credit. To be English
+nowadays is so ingloriously easy--since foreign lands have become merely
+the wider suburbs of London."
+
+Lady Blanchemain's eyes lighted approvingly. Afterwards she looked half
+serious.
+
+"True," she discriminated, "London has spread pretty well over the whole
+of Europe; but England, thanks be to goodness, still remains mercifully
+small."
+
+"Yes," agreed the young man, though with a lilt of dubiety, and a frown
+of excogitation, as if he weren't sure that he had quite caught her
+drift.
+
+"The mercy of it is," she smilingly pointed out, "that English folk,
+decent ones, have no need to fight shy of each other when they meet as
+strangers. We all know more or less about each other by hearsay, or
+about each other's people; and we're all pretty sure to have some common
+acquaintances. The smallness of England makes for sociability and
+confidence."
+
+"It ought to, one would think," the young man admitted. "But does it, in
+fact? It had somehow got stuck in my head that English folk, meeting as
+strangers, were rather apt to glare. We're most of us in such a funk,
+you see, lest, if we treat a stranger with civility, he should turn out
+not to be a duke."
+
+"Oh," cried Lady Blanchemain, with merriment, "you forget that I said
+_decent_. I meant, of course, folk who _are_ dukes. We're all dukes--or
+bagmen."
+
+The young man chuckled; but in a minute he pulled a long face, and made
+big, ominous eyes.
+
+"I feel I ought to warn you," he said in a portentous voice, "that some
+of us are mere marquises--of the house of Carabas."
+
+Lady Blanchemain, her whole expansive person, simmered with enjoyment.
+
+"Bless you," she cried, "those are the ducalest, for marquises--of the
+house of Carabas--are men of dash and spirit, born to bear everything
+before them, and to marry the King's daughter."
+
+With that, she had a moment of abstraction. Again, her eyeglass up, she
+glanced round the walls--hung, in this octagonal room, with dim-coloured
+portraits of women, all in wonderful toilets, with wonderful hair and
+head-gear, all wonderfully young and pleased with things, and all four
+centuries dead. They caused her a little feeling of uneasiness, they
+were so dead and silent, and yet somehow, in their fixed postures, with
+their unblinking eyes, their unvarying smiles, so--as it seemed to
+her--so watchful, so intent; and it was a relief to turn from them to
+the window, to the picture framed by the window of warm, breathing,
+heedless nature. But all the while, in her interior mind, she was busy
+with the man before her. "He looks," she considered, "tall as he is, and
+with his radiant blondeur--with the gold in his hair and beard, and the
+sea-blue in his eyes--he looks like a hero out of some old Norse saga.
+He looks like-what's his name?--like Odin. I must really compel him to
+explain himself."
+
+It very well may be, meantime, that he was reciprocally busy with her,
+taking her in, admiring her, this big, jolly, comely, high-mannered old
+woman, all in soft silks and drooping laces, who had driven into his
+solitude from Heaven knew where, and was quite unquestionably Someone,
+Heaven knew who.
+
+She had a moment of abstraction; but now, emerging from it, she used her
+eyeglass as a pointer, and indicatively swept the circle of painted
+eavesdroppers.
+
+"They make one feel like their grandmother, their youth is so flagrant,"
+she sighed, "these grandmothers of the Quattrocento. Ah, well, we can
+only be old once, and we should take advantage of the privileges of age
+while we have 'em. Old people, I am thankful to say, are allowed,
+amongst other things, to be inquisitive. I'm brazenly so. Now, if one of
+our common acquaintances were at hand--for with England still mercifully
+small, we're sure to possess a dozen, you and I--what do you think is
+the question I should ask him?--I should ask him," she avowed, with a
+pretty effect of hesitation, and a smile that went as an advance-guard
+to disarm resentment, "to tell me who you are, and all about you--and to
+introduce you to me."
+
+"Oh," cried the young man, laughing. He laughed for a second or two. In
+the end, pleasantly, with a bow, "My name," he said, "if you can
+possibly care to know, is Blanchemain."
+
+His visitor caught her breath. She sat up straight, and gazed hard at
+him.
+
+"Blanchemain?" she gasped.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+There were, to be sure, reasons and to spare why the name should make
+her sit up straight. Her curiosity had turned the key, and lo, with a
+click, here was an entirely changed, immensely complicated, intensely
+poignant situation. But our excitable old friend was an Englishwoman:
+dissimulation would be her second nature; you could trust her to pull
+the wool over your eyes with a fleet and practised hand. Instinctively,
+furthermore, she would seek to extract from such a situation all the fun
+it promised. Taken off her guard, for the span of ten heart-beats she
+sat up straight and stared; but with the eleventh her attitude relaxed.
+She had regained her outward nonchalance, and resolved upon her system
+of fence.
+
+"Ah," she said, on a tone judiciously compounded of feminine artlessness
+and of forthright British candour, and with a play of the eyebrows that
+attributed her momentary suscitation to the workings of memory, "of
+course--Blanchemain. The Sussex Blanchemains. I expect there's only one
+family of the name?"
+
+"I've never heard of another," assented the young man.
+
+"The Ventmere Blanchemains," she pursued pensively. "Lord Blanchemain of
+Ventmere is your titled head?"
+
+"Exactly," said he.
+
+"I knew the late Lord Blanchemain--I knew him fairly well," she
+mentioned, always with a certain pensiveness.
+
+"Oh--?" said he, politely interested.
+
+"Yes," said she. "But I've never met his successor. The two were not, I
+believe, on speaking terms. Of course,"--and her forthright British
+candour carried her trippingly over the delicate ground,--"it's common
+knowledge that the family is divided against itself--hostile branches--a
+Protestant branch and a Catholic. The present lord, if I've got it
+right, is a Catholic, and the late lord's distant cousin?"
+
+"You've got it quite right," the young man assured her, with a nod, and
+a little laugh. "They had the same great-great-grandfather. The last
+few lords have been Protestants, but in our branch the family have never
+forsaken the old religion."
+
+"I know," said she. "And wasn't it--I've heard the story, but I'm a bit
+hazy about it--wasn't it owing to your--is 'recusancy' the word?--that
+you lost the title? Wasn't there some sort of sharp practice at your
+expense in the last century?"
+
+The young man had another little laugh.
+
+"Oh, nothing," he answered, "that wasn't very much the fashion. The late
+lord's great-grandfather denounced his elder brother as a Papist and a
+Jacobite--nothing more than that. It was after the 'Forty-five. So the
+cadet took the title and estates. But with the death of the late lord, a
+dozen years or so ago, the younger line became extinct, and the title
+reverted."
+
+"I see," said my lady. She knitted her eyebrows, computing. After an
+instant, "General Blanchemain," she resumed, "as the present lord was
+called for the best part of his life, is a bachelor. You will be one of
+his nephews?" She raised her eyes inquiringly.
+
+"The son of his brother Philip," said the young man.
+
+Lady Blanchemain sat up straight again.
+
+"But then," she cried, forgetting to conceal her perturbation, "then
+you're the heir. Philip Blanchemain had but one son, and was the
+General's immediate junior. You're John Blanchemain--John Francis Joseph
+Mary. You're the heir."
+
+The young man smiled--at her eagerness, perhaps.
+
+"The heir-presumptive--I suppose I am," he said.
+
+Lady Blanchemain leaned back and gently tittered.
+
+"See how I know my Peerage!" she exclaimed. Then, looking grave, "You're
+heir to an uncommonly good old title," she informed him.
+
+"I hope it may be many a long day before I'm anything else," said he.
+
+"Your uncle is an old man," she suggestively threw out.
+
+"Oh, not so very old," he submitted. "Only seventy, or thereabouts, and
+younger in many respects than I am. I hope he'll live for ever."
+
+"Hum!" said she, and appeared to fall a-musing. Absently, as it seemed,
+and slowly, she was pulling off her gloves.
+
+"Feuds in families," she said, in a minute, "are bad things. Why don't
+you make it up?"
+
+The young man waved his hand, a pantomimic _non-possumus_.
+
+"There's no one left to make it up with--the others are all dead."
+
+"Oh?" she wondered, her eyebrows elevated, whilst automatically her
+fingers continued to operate upon her gloves. "I thought the last lord
+left a widow. I seem to have heard of a _Lady_ Blanchemain somewhere."
+
+The young man gave still another of his little laughs.
+
+"Linda Lady Blanchemain?" he said. "Yes, one hears a lot of her. A
+highly original character, by all accounts. One hears of her
+everywhere."
+
+Linda Lady Blanchemain's lip began to quiver; but she got it under
+control.
+
+"Well?" she questioned--eyes fixing his, and brimming with a kind of
+humorous defiance, as if to say, "Think me an impertinent old meddler
+if you will, and do your worst,"--"Why don't you make it up with _her_?"
+
+But he didn't seem to mind the meddling in the least. He stood at ease,
+and plausibly put his case.
+
+"Why don't I? Or why doesn't my uncle? My uncle is a temperamental
+conservative, a devotee to his traditions--the sort of man who will
+never do anything that hasn't been the constant habit of his forebears.
+He would no more dream of healing a well-established family feud than of
+selling the family plate. And I--well, surely, it would never be for me
+to make the advances."
+
+"No, you're right," acknowledged Lady Blanchemain. "The advances should
+come from her. But people have such a fatal way--even without being
+temperamental conservatives--of leaving things as they find them.
+Besides, never having seen you, she couldn't know how nice you are. All
+the same, I'll confess, if you insist upon it, that she ought to be
+ashamed of herself. Come--let's make it up."
+
+She rose, a great soft glowing vision of benignancy, and held out her
+hand, now gloveless, her pretty little smooth plump right hand, with
+its twinkling rings.
+
+"Oh!" cried the astonished young man, the astonished, amused, moved,
+wondering, and entirely won young man, his sea-blue eyes wide open, and
+a hundred lights of pleasure and surprise dancing in them.
+
+The benignant vision floated towards him, and he took the little white
+hand in his long lean brown one.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+When the first stress of their emotion had in some degree spent itself
+Lady Blanchemain, returning to her place on the ottoman, bade John sit
+down beside her.
+
+"Now," she said, genially imperative, whilst all manner of kindly and
+admiring interest shone in her face, "there are exactly nine million and
+ninety-nine questions that you'll be obliged to answer before I've done
+with you. But to begin, you must clear up at once a mystery that's been
+troubling me ever since you dashed to my rescue at the gate. What in the
+name of Reason is the cause of your residence in this ultramundane
+stronghold?"
+
+John--convict me of damnable iteration if you must: Heaven has sent me a
+laughing hero--John laughed.
+
+"Oh," he said, "there are several causes--there are exactly nine million
+and ninety-eight."
+
+"Name," commanded Lady Blanchemain, "the first and the last."
+
+"Well," obeyed he, pondering, "I should think the first, the last, and
+perhaps the chief intermediate, would be--the whole blessed thing." And
+his arm described a circle which comprehended the castle and all within
+it, and the countryside without.
+
+"It has a pleasant site, I'll not deny," said Lady Blanchemain. "But
+don't you find it a trifle far away? And a bit up-hill? I'm staying at
+the Victoria at Roccadoro, and it took me an hour and a half to drive
+here."
+
+"But since," said John, with a flattering glance, "since you _are_ here,
+I have no further reason to deplore its farawayness. So few places are
+far away, in these times and climes," he added, on a note of melancholy,
+as one to whom all climes and times were known.
+
+"Hum!" said Lady Blanchemain, matter-of-fact. "Have you been here long?"
+
+"Let me see," John answered. "To-day is the 23rd of April. I arrived
+here--I offer the fact for what it may be worth--on the Feast of All
+Fools."
+
+"_Absit omen_," cried she. "And you intend to stay?"
+
+"Oh, I'm at least wise enough not to fetter myself with intentions,"
+answered John.
+
+She looked about, calculating, estimating.
+
+"I suppose it costs you the very eyes of your head?" she asked.
+
+John giggled.
+
+"Guess what it costs--I give it to you in a thousand."
+
+She continued her survey, brought it to a period.
+
+"A billion a week," she said, with finality. John exulted.
+
+"It costs me," he told her, "six francs fifty a day--wine included."
+
+"What!" cried she, mistrusting her ears.
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+"Fudge!" said she, not to be caught with chaff.
+
+"It sounds like a traveller's tale, I know; but that's so often the
+bother with the truth," said he. "Truth is under no obligation to be
+_vraisemblable_. I'm here _en pension_."
+
+Lady Blanchemain sniffed.
+
+"Does the Prince of Zelt-Neuminster take in boarders?" she inquired,
+her nose in the air.
+
+"Not exactly," said John. "But the Parroco of Sant' Alessina does. I
+board at the presbytery."
+
+"Oh," said Lady Blanchemain, beginning to see light, while her eyebrows
+went up, went down. "You board at the presbytery?"
+
+"For six francs fifty a day--wine included," chuckled John.
+
+"Wine, and apparently the unhindered enjoyment of--the whole blessed
+thing," supplemented she, with a reminder of his comprehensive gesture.
+
+"Yes--the run of the house and garden, the freedom of the hills and
+valley."
+
+"I understand," she said, and was mute for a space, readjusting her
+impressions. "I had supposed," she went on at last, "from the handsome
+way in which you snubbed that creature in shoulder-knots, and proceeded
+to do the honours of the place, that you were little less than its
+proprietor."
+
+"Well, and so I could almost feel I am," laughed John. "I'm alone
+here--there's none my sway to dispute. And as for the creature in
+shoulder-knots, what becomes of the rights of man or the bases of civil
+society, if you can't snub a creature whom you regularly tip? For five
+francs a week the creature in shoulder-knots cleans my boots
+(indifferent well), brushes my clothes, runs my errands (indifferent
+slow),--and swallows my snubs as if they were polenta."
+
+"And tries to shoo intrusive trippers from your threshold--and gets an
+extra plateful for his pains," laughed the lady. "Where," she asked,
+"does the Prince of Zelt-Neuminster keep himself?"
+
+"In Vienna, I believe. Anyhow, at a respectful distance. The parroco,
+who is also his sort of intendant, tells me he practically never comes
+to Sant' Alessina."
+
+"Good easy man," quoth she. "Yes, I certainly supposed you were his
+tenant-in-fee, at the least. You have an air." And her bob of the head
+complimented him upon it.
+
+"Oh, we Marquises of Carabas!" cried John, with a flourish.
+
+She regarded him doubtfully.
+
+"Wouldn't you find yourself in a slightly difficult position, if the
+Prince or his family should suddenly turn up?" she suggested.
+
+"I? Why?" asked John, his blue eyes blank.
+
+"A young man boarding with the parroco for six francs a day--" she
+began.
+
+"Six francs fifty, please," he gently interposed.
+
+"Make it seven if you like," her ladyship largely conceded. "Wouldn't
+your position be slightly false? Would they quite realize who you were?"
+
+"What could that possibly matter? wondered John, eyes blanker still.
+
+"I could conceive occasions in which it might matter furiously," said
+she. "Foreigners can't with half an eye distinguish amongst us, as we
+ourselves can; and Austrians have such oddly exalted notions. You
+wouldn't like to be mistaken for Mr. Snooks?"
+
+"I don't know," John reflected, vistas opening before him. "It might be
+rather a lark."
+
+"Whrrr!" said Lady Blanchemain, fanning herself with her
+pocket-handkerchief. Then she eyed him suspiciously. "You're hiding the
+nine million other causes up your sleeve. It isn't merely the 'whole
+blessed thing' that's keeping an eaglet of your feather alone in an
+improbable nest like this--it's some one particular thing. In my time,"
+she sighed, "it would have been a woman."
+
+"And no wonder," riposted John, with a flowery bow.
+
+"You're very good--but you confuse the issue," said she. "In my time the
+world was young and romantic. In this age of prose and prudence--_is_ it
+a woman?"
+
+"The world is still, is always, young and romantic," said John,
+sententious. "I can't admit that an age of prose and prudence is
+possible. The poetry of earth is never dead, and no more is its folly.
+The world is always romantic, if you have the three gifts needful to
+make it so."
+
+"_Is_ it a woman?" repeated Lady Blanchemain.
+
+"And the three gifts are," said he, "Faith, and the sense of Beauty, and
+the sense of Humour."
+
+"And I should have thought, an attractive member of the opposite sex,"
+said she. "_Is_ it a woman?"
+
+"Well," he at last replied, appearing to take counsel with himself, "I
+don't know why I should forbid myself the relief of owning up to you
+that in a sense it is."
+
+"Hurray!" cried she, moving in her seat, agog, as one who scented her
+pet diversion. "A love affair! I'll be your confidante. Tell me all
+about it."
+
+"Yes, in a sense, a love affair," he confessed.
+
+"Good--excellent," she approved. "But--but what do you mean by 'in a
+sense'?"
+
+"Ah," said he, darkly nodding, "I mean whole worlds by that."
+
+"I don't understand," said she, her face prepared to fall.
+
+"It isn't one woman--it's a score, a century, of the dear things," he
+announced.
+
+Her face fell. "Oh--?" she faltered.
+
+"It's a love affair with a type," he explained.
+
+She frowned upon him. "A love affair with a type--?"
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+She shook her head. "I give you up. In one breath you speak like a
+Mohammedan, in the next like--I don't know what."
+
+"With these," said John, his band stretched towards the wall. "With the
+type of the Quattrocento."
+
+He got upon his feet, and moved from picture to picture; and a fire,
+half indeed of mischief; but half it may be of real enthusiasm,
+glimmered in his eyes.
+
+"With these lost ladies of old years; these soft-coloured shadows, that
+were once rosy flesh; these proud, humble, innocent, subtle, brave, shy,
+pious, pleasure-loving women of the long ago. With them; with their hair
+and eyes and jewels, their tip-tilted, scornful, witty little noses,
+their 'throats so round and lips so red,' their splendid raiment; with
+their mirth, pathos, passion, kindness and cruelty, their infinite
+variety, their undying youth. Ah, the pity of it! Their undying
+youth--and they so irrevocably dead. Peace be to their souls! See," he
+suddenly declaimed, laughing, "how the sun, the very sun in heaven, is
+contending with me, as to which of us shall do them the greater homage,
+the sun that once looked on their living forms, and remembers--see how
+he lights memorial lamps about them," for the sun, reflected from the
+polished floor, threw a sheen upon the ancient canvases, and burned
+bright in the bosses of the frames. "Give me these," he wound up, "a
+book or two, and a jug of the parroco's 'included wine'--my wilderness
+is paradise enow."
+
+Lady Blanchemain's eyes, as she listened, had become deep wells of
+disappointment, then gushing fountains of reproach.
+
+"Oh, you villain!" she groaned, when he had ended, shaking her pretty
+fist. "So to have raised my expectations, and so to dash them!--Do you
+_really_ mean," still clinging to a shred of hope, she pleaded, "really,
+really mean that there's no--no actual woman?"
+
+"I'm sorry," said John, "but I'm afraid I really, really do."
+
+"And you're not--not really in love with any one?"
+
+"No--not really," he said, with a mien that feigned contrition.
+
+"But at your age--how old are you?" she broke off to demand.
+
+"Somewhere between twenty-nine and thirty, I believe," he laughed.
+
+"And in such a romantic environment, and not on account of a woman! It's
+downright unnatural," she declared. "It's flat treason against the
+kingly state of youth."
+
+"I'm awfully sorry," said John. "Yet, after all, what's the good of
+repining? Nothing could happen even if there were a woman."
+
+Lady Blanchemain looked alarmed.
+
+"Nothing could happen? What do you mean? You're not _married_? If you
+are, it must be secretly, for you're put down as single in Burke."
+
+"To the best of my knowledge," John reassured her, laughing, "Burke is
+right. And I prayerfully trust he may never have occasion to revise his
+statement."
+
+"For mercy's sake," cried she, "don't tell me you're a woman-hater!"
+
+"That's just the point," said he. "I'm an adorer of the sex."
+
+"Well, then?" questioned she, at a loss. "How can you 'prayerfully' wish
+to remain a bachelor? Besides, aren't you heir to a peerage? What of the
+succession?"
+
+"That's just the point," he perversely argued. "And you know there are
+plenty of cousins."
+
+"Just the point! just the point!" fretted Lady Blanchemain. "What's just
+the point? Just the point that you aren't a woman-hater?--just the point
+that you're heir to a peerage? You talk like Tom o' Bedlam."
+
+"Well, you see," expounded John, unruffled, "as an adorer of the sex,
+and heir to a peerage, I shouldn't want to marry a woman unless I could
+support her in what they call a manner becoming her rank--and I
+couldn't."
+
+"Couldn't?" the lady scoffed. "I should like to know why not?"
+
+"I'm too--if you will allow me to clothe my thought in somewhat homely
+language--too beastly poor."
+
+"_You--poor?_" ejaculated Lady Blanchemain, falling back.
+
+"Ay--but honest," asseverated John, to calm her fears.
+
+She couldn't help smiling, though she resolutely frowned.
+
+"Be serious," she enjoined him. "Doesn't your uncle make you a suitable
+allowance?"
+
+"I should deceive you," answered John, "if I said he made me an
+_un_suitable one. He makes me, to put it in round numbers, exactly no
+allowance whatsoever."
+
+"The--old--curmudgeon!" cried Lady Blanchemain, astounded, and fiercely
+scanning her words.
+
+"No," returned John, soothingly, "he isn't a curmudgeon. But he's a
+very peculiar man. He's a Spartan, and he lacks imagination. It has
+simply never entered his head that I could _need_ an allowance. And, if
+you come to that, I can't say that I positively do. I have a tiny
+patrimony--threepence a week, or so--enough for my humble necessities,
+though scarcely perhaps enough to support the state of a future peeress.
+No, my uncle isn't a curmudgeon; he's a very fine old boy, of whom I'm
+immensely proud, and though I've yet to see the colour of his money,
+we're quite the best of friends. At any rate, you'll agree that it would
+be the deuce to pay if I were to fall in love.
+
+"Ffff," breathed Lady Blanchemain, fanning. "What did I say of an age of
+prose and prudence? Yet you don't _look_ cold-blooded. What does money
+matter? _Dominus providebit_. Go read Browning. What's 'the true end,
+sole and single' that we're here for? Besides, have you never heard that
+there are such things as marriageable heiresses in the world?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I've heard that," John cheerfully assented. "But don't they
+almost always squint or something? I've heard, too, that there are such
+things as tufted fortune-hunters, but theirs is a career that requires a
+special vocation, and I'm afraid I haven't got it."
+
+"Then you're no true Marquis of Carabas," the lady took him smartly up.
+
+"You've found me out--I'm only a _faux-marquis_," he laughed.
+
+"Thrrr!" breathed Lady Blanchemain, and for a little while appeared lost
+in thought. By-and-by she got up and went to the window, and stood
+looking out. "I never saw a lovelier landscape," she said, musingly.
+"With the grey hills, and the snow-peaks, and the brilliant sky, with
+the golden light and the purple shadows, and the cypresses and olives,
+with the river gleaming below there amongst the peach-blossoms,
+and--isn't that a blackcap singing in the mimosa? It only needs a pair
+of lovers to be perfect--it _cries_ for a pair of lovers. And instead of
+them, I find--what? A hermit and celibate. Look here. Make a clean
+breast of it. _Are_ you cold-blooded?" she asked from over her shoulder.
+
+John merely giggled.
+
+"It would serve you right," said she, truculently, "if some one were to
+rub your eyes with love-in-idleness, to make you dote upon the next
+live creature that you see."
+
+John merely chuckled.
+
+"I'll tell you what," she proceeded, "I'm a bit of an old witch, and
+I'll risk a soothword. As there isn't already a woman, there'll shortly
+be one--my thumbs prick. The stage is set, the scene is too appropriate,
+the play's inevitable. It was never in the will of Providence that a
+youth of your complexion should pass the springtime in a spot all
+teeming with romance like this, and miss a love adventure. A castle in a
+garden, a flowering valley, and the Italian sky--the Italian sun and
+moon! Your portraits of these smiling dead women too, if you like, to
+keep your imagination working. And blackcaps singing in the mimosa. No,
+no. The lady of the piece is waiting in the wings--my thumbs prick. Give
+her but the least excuse, she'll enter, and ... Good Heavens, my
+prophetic soul!" she suddenly, with a sort of catch in her throat, broke
+off.
+
+She turned and faced him, cheeks flushed, eyes flashing.
+
+"Oh, you hypocrite! You monstrous fibber!" she cried, on a tone of
+jubilation, looking daggers.
+
+"Why? What's up? What's the matter?" asked John, at fault.
+
+"How _could_ you have humbugged me so?" she wailed, in delight,
+reverting to the window. "Anyhow, she's charming. She's made for the
+part. I couldn't pray for a more promising heroine."
+
+"She? Who?" asked he, crossing to her side.
+
+"Who? Fie, you slyboots!" she crowed with glee.
+
+"Ah, I see," said John.
+
+For, below them, in the garden, just beyond the mimosa (all powdered
+with fresh gold) where the blackcap was singing, stood a woman.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+She stood in the path, beside a sun-dial, from which she appeared to be
+taking the time of day, a crumbling ancient thing of grey stone, green
+and brown with mosses; and she was smiling pleasantly to herself the
+while, all unaware of the couple who watched her from above. She wore a
+light-coloured garden-frock, and was bare-headed, as one belonging to
+the place. She was young--two or three and twenty, by her aspect: young,
+slender, of an excellent height, and, I hope you would have agreed, a
+beautiful countenance. She studied the sun-dial, and smiled; and what
+with her dark eyes and softly chiselled features, the pale rose in her
+cheeks and the deeper rose of her mouth, with her hair too, almost black
+in shadow, but where the sun touched it turning to sombre red,--yes, I
+think you would have agreed that she was beautiful. Lady Blanchemain, at
+any rate, found her so.
+
+"She's quite lovely," she declared. "Her face is exquisite--so
+sensitive, so spiritual; so distinguished, so aristocratic. And so
+_clever_," she added, after a suspension.
+
+"Mm!" said John, his forehead wrinkled, as if something were puzzling
+him.
+
+"She has a figure--she holds herself well," said Lady Blanchemain.
+
+"Mm!" said John.
+
+"I suppose," said she, "you're too much a mere man to be able to
+appreciate her frock? It's the work of a dressmaker who knows her
+business. And that lilac muslin (that's so fashionable now) really does,
+in the open air, with the country for background, show to immense
+advantage. Come--out with it. Tell me all about her. Who _is_ she?"
+
+"That's just what I'm up a tree to think," said John. "I can't imagine.
+How long has she been there? From what direction did she come?"
+
+"Don't try to hoodwink me any longer," remonstrated the lady,
+unbelieving.
+
+"I've never in my life set eyes on her before," he solemnly averred.
+
+She scrutinized him sharply.
+
+"Hand on heart?" she doubted.
+
+And he, supporting her scrutiny without flinching, answered, "Hand on
+heart."
+
+"Well, then," concluded she, with a laugh, "it looks as if I were even
+more of an old witch than I boasted--and my thumbs pricked to some
+purpose. Here's the lady of the piece already arrived. There, she's
+going away. How well she walks! Have after her--have after her quick,
+and begin your courtship."
+
+The smiling young woman, her lilac dress softly bright in the sun, was
+moving slowly down the garden path, towards the cloisters; and now she
+entered them, and disappeared. But John, instead of "having after her,"
+remained at his counsellor's side, and watched.
+
+"She came from that low doorway, beyond there at the right, where the
+two cypresses are; and she came at the very climax of my vaticination,"
+said her ladyship. "Without a hat, you'll hardly dispute it's probable
+she's staying in the house."
+
+"No--it certainly would seem so," said John. "I'm all up a tree."
+
+"The garden looks rather dreary and empty, now that she has left,
+doesn't it?" she asked. "Yet it looked jolly enough before her advent.
+And see--the lizards (there are four of them, aren't there?) that
+whisked away from the dial at her approach, have come back. Well, _your_
+work's cut out. I suppose it wouldn't be possible for you to give a poor
+woman a dish of tea?"
+
+"I was on the very point of proposing it," said John. "May I conduct you
+to my quarters?"
+
+
+
+
+PART SECOND
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Rather early next morning John was walking among the olives. He had gone
+(straight from his bed, and in perhaps the least considered of toilets:
+an old frieze ulster, ornamented with big buttons of mother-of-pearl, a
+pair of Turkish slippers, a bathing-towel over his shoulder, and for
+head-covering just his uncombed native thatch) he had gone for a swim,
+some half a mile upstream, to a place he knew where the Rampio--the
+madcap Rampio, all shallows and rapids--rests for a moment in a pool,
+wide and deep, translucent, inviting, and, as you perceive when you have
+made your plunge, of a most assertive chill. Now he was on his leisurely
+way home, to the presbytery and what passed there for breakfast.
+
+The hill-side rose from the river's bank in a series of irregular
+terraces, upheld by rough stone walls. The gnarled old trees bent
+towards each other and away like dwarfs and crook-backs dancing a
+fantastic minuet; and in the grass beneath them, where the sun shot his
+fiery darts and cast his net of shadows, Chloris had scattered
+innumerable wildflowers: hyacinths, the colour of the sky; violets, that
+threaded the air for yards about with their sentiment-provoking
+fragrance; tulips, red and yellow; sometimes a tall, imperial iris; here
+and there little white nodding companies of jonquils. Here and there,
+too, the dusty-green reaches were pointed by the dark spire of a
+cypress, alone, in a kind of glooming isolation; here and there a
+blossoming peach or almond, gaily pink, sent an inexpressible little
+thrill of gladness to one's heart. The air was sweetened by many
+incense-breathing things besides the violets,--by moss and bark, the
+dew-laden grass, the moist brown earth; and it was quick with music:
+bees droned, leaves whispered, birds called, sang, gossiped, disputed,
+and the Rampio played a crystal accompaniment.
+
+John swung onwards at ease, while lizards, with tails that seemed
+extravagantly long, fled from before his feet, terrible to them, no
+doubt, as an army with banners, for his Turkish slippers, though not in
+their pristine youth, were of scarlet leather embroidered in a rich
+device with gold. And presently (an experience unusual at that hour in
+the olive wood) he became aware of a human voice.
+
+"Ohé! My good men, there! Will you be so kind as to gather me some of
+those anemones? Here is a lira for your pains."
+
+It was a feminine voice; it was youthful and melodious; it was finished,
+polished, delicately modulated. And its inflection was at once confident
+and gracious,--clearly the speaker took it for granted that she would
+receive attention, and she implied her thanks abundantly beforehand. It
+was a voice that evoked in the imagination a charming picture of fresh,
+young, confident, and gracious womanhood.
+
+"Hello!" said John to himself. "Who is there in this part of the world
+with a voice like that?"
+
+And he felt it would not be surprising if on glancing round he should
+behold--as, in fact, he did--the stranger of yesterday, the Unknown of
+the garden.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+She stood on one of the higher terraces, (a very charming picture
+indeed, bright and erect, in the warm shadow of the olives), and was
+calling down to a couple of peasants at work on the other side of the
+stream. Between the thumb and forefinger of an ungloved fair right hand,
+she held up a silver lira.
+
+Anemones, said she! Near to where the men were working, by the river's
+brink, there was a space of level ground, perhaps a hundred feet long,
+and tapering from half that breadth to a point. And this was simply
+crimson and purple with a countless host of anemones.
+
+She called to the men, and one seeing and hearing her would have thought
+they must abandon everything, and spring to do her bidding. But they
+didn't. Pausing only long enough to give her a phlegmatic stare, as if
+in doubt whether conceivably she could have the impertinence to be
+addressing _them_, and vouchsafing not a word, each went calmly on with
+his employment;--very, very calmly, _piano_, _piano_, gently, languidly,
+filling small baskets with fallen olives, and emptying them upon
+outspread canvas sheets. There are, and more's the pity, two types of
+Italian peasant. There's the old type, which we knew in our youth, and
+happily it still survives in some numbers,--the peasant who, for all his
+rags and tatters, has manners that will often put one's own to shame,
+and, with a _simpatia_ like second-sight, is before one's wishes, in his
+eagerness to serve and please. And there is the new type, which we know
+to our disgust, and unhappily it multiplies like vermin,--the peasant
+who has lent his ear to the social democrat, and, his heart envenomed by
+class hatred, meets your civility with black glances and the behaviour
+of a churl in the sulks.
+
+So, though her voice was sweet to hear, and though, standing there in
+the warm penumbra of the olive orchard, tall and erect and graceful, in
+her bright frock, she made a charming picture, and though she offered a
+silver lira as a prize, the men merely stared at her churlishly, and
+went on with their work--languidly, sluggishly, as men who deemed the
+necessity to work an outrage, and weren't going to condone it by working
+with anything like a will.
+
+Now, John Blanchemain, as I have previously mentioned, was an
+unselfconscious sort of fellow. In his unselfconsciousness, forgetting
+several trifles that might properly have weighed with him, (forgetting
+the tarnished gorgeousness of his Turkish slippers for example, and his
+towzled head, and the bathing-towel that flowed like a piece of classic
+drapery from his shoulder), obeying impulse and instinct, he flung
+himself into the breach.
+
+"Brutes," he muttered between his teeth. Then, in his easiest
+man-of-the-worldy accents, "If you can wait two minutes," he called
+aloud to her. And therewith he went scrambling down the terraces and
+picked his way from stone to stone across the shallows, to the field of
+anemones, where their satiny petals, like crisping wavelets, all
+a-ripple in the moving air, shimmered with constantly changing lights.
+And in a twinkling he had gathered a great armful, and was clambering
+back.
+
+"I beg of you," he said, in his abrupt fashion, holding them out to
+her, and slightly bowing, with that nothing-doubting assurance of his,
+while his blue eyes (to put her entirely at her ease) smiled, frank and
+friendly and serene, into her dark ones.
+
+But hers seemed troubled. She looked at the flowers, she looked at John,
+I think she even looked at her lira. Her eyes seemed undecided.
+
+"Do pray take them," said he, still smiling, still frank and assured,
+but as if a little puzzled, a little amused, by her hesitation, and more
+airily a man-of-the-world than ever, his tone one of high detachment, to
+spare her any possible feeling of personal obligation, and to place his
+performance in the light of a matter of course,--as if indeed he had
+done nothing more than pick up and return, say, a handkerchief she might
+have dropped. "You were right," he owned to his thought of Lady
+Blanchemain; "she is beautiful." Here, at close quarters with her, one's
+perception of her beauty became acute,--here, under the grey old trees,
+in the leafy dimness, alone with her, at two paces from her, where the
+birds sang and the violets gave forth their fragrant breath. He saw that
+her eyes were beautiful (soft and deep and luminous, despite their
+trouble), and her low white brow, and the dark masses of her hair, under
+her garden-hat, and the rose in her cheeks, and the red-rose of her
+mouth. And he saw and felt the beauty and the vitality of her strong
+young body.
+
+But meanwhile she had stretched forth, rather timidly, that ungloved
+fair hand of hers, and taken the flowers.
+
+"You are very good, I am sure. Thank you very much," she said, rather
+faintly, with a grave little inclination of the head.
+
+John, always with magnificent assurance, put up his hand, to doff a
+man-of-the-worldy hat, and bow himself away;--and it encountered his
+bare locks, bare, and still wet from recent ducking. Whereupon,
+suddenly, the trifles he had forgotten were remembered, and at last (in
+the formula of the criminologist) "he realized his position:" hatless
+and uncombed, with the bathing-towel slung from his shoulder, in that
+weather-beaten old frieze coat with its ridiculous buttons, in those
+awful Turkish slippers,--offering, with his grand manner, flowers to a
+woman he didn't know, and smiling, to put her at her ease! His pink
+face burned to a livelier pink, his ears went hot, his heart went cold.
+The bow he finally accomplished was the blighted bud of the bow he had
+projected; and, as the earth didn't, of its charity, open and engulf
+him, he hastened as best he could, and with a painful sense of slinking,
+to remove his crestfallen person from her range of view.
+
+When these unselfconscious fellows are startled into selfconsciousness,
+I fancy they take it hard. I don't know how long it was before John had
+done heaping silent curses, silent but savage, upon himself; his luck,
+his "beastly officiousness," upon the whole afflicting incident: curses
+that he couldn't help diversifying now and then with a catch of
+splenetic laughter, as a vision of the figure he had cut would
+recurrently
+
+     "--_flash upon that inward eye
+     Which is the bliss of solitude_."
+
+"Oh, you _ape!_" he groaned. "Rigged out like Pudding Jack, and, with
+your ineffable simagrees, offering a strange woman flowers!"
+
+If _she_ had only laughed, had only smiled, it wouldn't have been so
+bad, it would have shown that she understood. "But through it all," he
+writhed to recollect, "she was as solemn as a mourner. I suppose she was
+shocked--perhaps she was frightened--very likely she took me for a
+tramp. I wonder she didn't crown my beatitude by giving me her lira.
+These foreigners do so lack certain discernments."
+
+And with that rather an odd detail came back to him. _Was_ she a
+foreigner? For it came vaguely back that he, impulsive and unthinking,
+had spoken to her throughout in English. "And anyhow,"--this came
+distinctly back,--"it was certainly in English that she thanked me."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+What passed for breakfast at the presbytery was the usual Continental
+evasion of that repast,--bread and coffee, despatched in your apartment.
+But at noon the household met to dine.
+
+The dining-room, on the ground floor, long and low, with a vaulted
+ceiling, whitewashed, and a pavement of worn red tiles, was a clean,
+bare room, that (pervaded by a curious, dry, not unpleasant odour)
+seemed actually to smell of bareness, as well as of cleanliness. There
+was a table, there was a dresser, there were a few unpainted deal
+chairs, rush-bottomed (exactly like the chairs in the church, in all
+Italian churches), and there was absolutely nothing else, save a great
+black and white Crucifix attached to the wall. But, by way of
+compensation, its windows opened southwards, flooding it with sunshine,
+and commanding the wonderful perspective of the valley,--the blue-grey
+hills, the snow-peaks, the blossoming low-lands, and the far-away
+opalescence that you knew to be the lake.
+
+At noon the parroco, his niece Annunziata, and his boarder met to dine.
+
+The parroco was a short, stout, florid, black-haired, hawk-nosed,
+fierce-looking, still youngish man, if five-and-forty may be reckoned
+youngish, with a pair of thin lips and powerful jaws which, for purposes
+of speech, he never opened if he could help it. Never,--till Sunday
+came: when, mounting the pulpit, he opened them indeed, and his pent-up
+utterance burst forth in a perfect torrent of a sermon, a wild gush of
+words, shouted at the topmost stress of a remarkably lusty voice,
+arresting for a minute or two by reason of the sheer physical energy it
+represented, and then for a long half hour exquisitely tiresome. But on
+week-days he maintained a prodigious silence, and this (as, though
+fierce-looking, he wasn't in the least really fierce) it would often be
+John's malicious study to tempt him to break. Besides, to-day, John was
+honestly concerned with the pursuit of knowledge.
+
+Accordingly, grace being said, "You never told me," he began, assuming a
+mien of intelligent interest, "that the castle was haunted." He looked
+at the Napoleonic profile of Don Ambrogio, but from the tail of his eye
+he kept a watch as well upon Annunziata, and he saw that that wise
+little maiden became attentive.
+
+"No," said Don Ambrogio, between two spoonfuls of soup.
+
+"You will conceive my astonishment, then," continued John, urbanely,
+"when I discovered that it was."
+
+"It isn't," said Don Ambrogio. He gave himself diligently to the
+business of the hour; his spoon flew backwards and forwards like a
+shuttle. His napkin, tucked into his Roman collar, protected his bosom,
+an effective white cuirass.
+
+"Oh? Not the castle?" questioned John. "Only the garden? And the olive
+wood? True, on reflection, I've never seen it in the house."
+
+"Nothing here is haunted," said the parroco. He made a signal to
+Annunziata, who rose to change the plates. Her big eyes were alight, her
+serious little face was alert; but she would never dream of speaking in
+the presence of her uncle. Marcella, the cook, brought in the inevitable
+veal.
+
+"Oh, for that," insisted John, courteous but firm, "I beg your pardon. I
+myself have seen it on two occasions; and, lest you should fancy it a
+subjective illusion, I may tell you that it was yesterday seen
+simultaneously by another."
+
+"It? It? What is _it_?" asked the parroco, his beaked and ensanguined
+visage fiercer-looking than ever, as he fell upon the inevitable veal
+with a somewhat dull carving-knife.
+
+"Ah," said John, "now you make me regret that I haven't a talent for
+word-painting. It's the form of a woman, a young woman, tall, slender,
+in some pale diaphanous garment, that appears here, appears there,
+remaining distinctly visible for some minutes, and then disappears. No,
+it isn't a subjective illusion. And it isn't, either," the unscrupulous
+creature added, after a pause, raising his voice, and speaking with
+emphasis, as if to repel the insinuation, while the darkness of
+disenchantment swept the face of Annunziata, "it isn't, either, as some
+imaginative people might too hastily conclude, a wraith, a phantom, an
+insubstantial vapour. It's a real material form, that lives and
+breathes, and even, if driven to it, speaks. There's nothing
+supernatural about it,--unless, indeed, we take the transcendental view
+that Nature herself is supernatural. I was wondering, Don Ambrogio,
+whether, without violating a confidence, you could tell me whose form it
+is?"
+
+"Nossignore," said Don Ambrogio, economizing his breath.
+
+"Ah," sighed John, nodding resignedly, "I feared as much. Divining that
+I would institute inquiries, she has stolen a march upon me, and pledged
+you to secrecy."
+
+"Nossignore," disavowed Don Ambrogio, raising eyes the sincerity of
+which there could be no suspecting.
+
+John's face took on an expression of aggrieved surprise.
+
+"But then why won't you tell me?"
+
+"I cannot tell you because I do not know," said Don Ambrogio.
+
+"Oh, I see," said John. "And yet," he argued meditatively, "that's hard
+to conceive. I don't for a moment mean that I doubt it--but it's hard to
+conceive, like the atomic theory, and some of the articles of religion.
+(I hear, by-the-by, that the scientists are throwing the atomic theory
+over. Oh, fickle scientists! Oh, shifting sands of science!) Surely
+there can't be many such tall slender forms, in diaphanous garments,
+appearing and disappearing here and there in your parish? And one would
+suppose, antecedently, that you'd know them all."
+
+"A peasant, a villager," said Don Ambrogio.
+
+"I put it to you as an observer of life," said John, "do peasants, do
+villagers, wear diaphanous garments?"
+
+"A visitor, a sight-seer, from some place on the lake," said Don
+Ambrogio.
+
+"I put it to you as a student of probabilities," said John, "would a
+visitor, would a sight-seer, from some place on the lake, walk in the
+garden of the castle without a hat? And would she appear at Sant'
+Alessina on two days in succession?"
+
+But Don Ambrogio had finished his veal, and when he had finished his
+veal he always left the table, first twice devoutly making the sign of
+the Cross, and then with a bow to John, pronouncing the formula, "You
+will graciously permit? My affairs call me. A thousand regrets." To-day
+he slightly amplified that formula. "A thousand regrets," he said, "and
+as many excuses for my inability to afford the information desired."
+
+After his departure, John turned to Annunziata, where, in her grey
+cotton pinafore, her lips parted, her big eyes two lively points of
+interrogation, she sat opposite to him, impatient to take up the theme.
+
+"Well, Mistress Wisdom!" he saluted her, smiling, and waving his hand.
+"It is a good and wholesome thing for the young to witness the
+discomfiture of the wicked. Your uncle retreats with flying colours. He
+made, to be sure, a slender dinner, but that's his daily habit. If you
+have tears to shed, shed them for me. I have made none at all."
+
+From points of interrogation, Annunziata's eyes changed to abysses of
+wonder, and, big as they were, seemed to grow measurably bigger.
+
+"You have made no dinner?" she protested, in that strangely deep voice
+of hers, with its effect of immense solemnity.
+
+"No, poor dear," said John, with pathos, "no, I have made no dinner."
+
+"But you have eaten a great deal," exclaimed Annunziata, frowning,
+nonplussed. "And you are still eating."
+
+"Quite so," responded John, "though I think it's perhaps the merest
+trifle unhandsome of you to fling it in my face. I have eaten a great
+deal, and I am still eating. That is what I come to table for. In an
+orderly life like mine there is a place for everything. I come to table
+to eat, just as I go to bed to sleep and to church to say my prayers.
+Would you have me sleep at table, eat in church, and say my prayers in
+bed? Eating, however, has nothing to do with the case. I spoke of
+dining--I said I had not dined. Now you shall be the judge. The question
+is, can a Christian man dine twice on the same day? Answer me that."
+
+"Oh, no," answered Annunziata, her pale face very sober, and she
+lengthened out her vowels in deprecation of the idea. "At least, it
+would be gluttony if he did."
+
+"There you are," cried John. "And gluttony is not the undeadliest of the
+Seven Deadly Sins. So, then, unless you would have me guilty of the
+deadly sin of gluttony, you must agree that I have not dined. For I am
+going to dine this evening. I am going to dine at the Hotel Victoria at
+Roccadoro. I am going to dine with a lady. I am going to dine in all the
+pomp and circumstance of my dress-suit, with a white tie and pumps. And
+you yourself have said it, a Christian man may not, without guilt of
+gluttony, dine twice on the same day. Therefore it is the height of
+uncharitableness, it's a deliberate imputation of sin, to contend that I
+have dined already."
+
+Annunziata followed his reasoning thoughtfully, and then gravely set him
+right.
+
+"No," she said, with a drop of the eyelids and a quick little shake of
+the head, "you do not understand. I will explain." Her eyes were wide
+open again, and bright with zeal for his instruction. "You have dined
+already. That is a certain truth, because this meal is dinner, and you
+have eaten it. But to-night you are going to a dinner of ceremony--and
+that is different. A dinner of ceremony does not count. It is the same
+as a supper. My uncle himself once went to a dinner of ceremony at
+Bergamo. No, it will not be gluttony for you to go to a dinner of
+ceremony."
+
+"You speak like a little pope," said John, with enthusiasm. "In matters
+of Faith and Morals I believe you are infallible. If you could guess the
+load you have lifted from my conscience!" And he pushed a hearty ouf.
+
+"I am glad," said Annunziata. And then she attempted to hark back.
+Curiosity again lighting her eyes, "This form that you have seen in the
+garden--" she began.
+
+"Don't try to change the subject," John interrupted. "Let us cultivate
+sequence in our ideas. What I am labouring with hammer and tongs to drag
+from you is the exact date at which, somewhere between the years of our
+salvation 1387 and 1455, you sat for your portrait to the beatified
+painter Giovanni of Fiesole. Now, be a duck, and make a clean breast of
+it."
+
+Annunziata's eyes clouded. A kind of scorn, a kind of pity, and a kind
+of patient longanimity looked from them.
+
+"That is folly," she said, on the deepest of her deep notes, with a
+succession of slow, reflective, side-wise nods.
+
+"Folly--?" repeated John, surprised, but bland. "Oh? Really?"
+
+"Sit for my portrait between the years 1387 and 1455,--how could I?"
+scoffed Annunziata.
+
+"Why? What was to prevent you?" innocently questioned he.
+
+"_Ma come!_ I was not yet alive," said she.
+
+John looked at her with startled eyes, and spoke with animation.
+
+"Weren't you? Word of honour? Are you sure? How do you know? Have you
+any definite recollection that you weren't? Can you clearly recall the
+period in question, and then, reviewing it in detail, positively attest
+that you were dead? For there's no third choice. A person must either be
+alive or dead. And how, if you weren't alive, how ever did it come to
+pass that there should be a perfect portrait of you from Giovanni's
+brush in the Convent of Saint Mark at Florence? Your grave little white
+face, and your wise little big eyes, and your eager little inquisitive
+profile, and your curls flowing about your shoulders, and your pinafore
+that's so like a peplum,--there they all are, precisely as I see them
+before me now. And how was Giovanni able to do them if you weren't
+alive? Perhaps you were pre-mortally alive in Heaven? Giovanni's cell,
+as is well known, had a window that opened straight into Heaven. Perhaps
+he saw you through that window, and painted you without your knowing it.
+The name they give your portrait, by-the-by, would rather seem to
+confirm that theory. What do you think they call it? They call it an _un
+angiolo_. I've got a copy of it in England. When you come to London to
+visit the Queen I'll show it to you."
+
+Annunziata gave her flowing curls a toss.
+
+"The form of the young woman which you have seen in the garden--" she
+began anew.
+
+"Ah," said John, "observe how differently the big fish and the little
+fish will be affected by the same bait."
+
+"When you first spoke of it," said she, "I thought you had seen a holy
+apparition."
+
+"Yes," said he. "That was because I couched my communication in language
+designedly misleading. I employed the terminology of ghost-lore. I said
+'haunted' and 'appear,' and things like that. And you were very properly
+and naturally deceived. I confidently expected that you would be. No, it
+is not given to world-stained and world-worn old men like me to see holy
+apparitions."
+
+"Old men? You are not an old man," said Annunziata.
+
+"Oh? Not? What am I, then?" said John.
+
+"You are a middle-aged man," said she.
+
+"Thank you, Golden Tongue," said he, with a bow.
+
+"And you are sure that it was merely a real person?" she pursued.
+
+"No," said he. "I am too profoundly imbued with the basic principles of
+metaphysics ever to be sure of the objective reality of phenomena. I can
+only swear to my impression. My impression was and is that it was merely
+a real person."
+
+"Then," said Annunziata, with decision, "it must be the person who is
+visiting the Signora Brandi."
+
+"The Signora Brandi?" repeated John. "What a nice name! Who is the
+Signora Brandi?"
+
+"She is an Austrian," said Annunziata.
+
+"Oh--?" said John.
+
+"She lives in the pavilion beyond the clock-tower," said Annunziata.
+
+"I wasn't aware," said John, "that the pavilion beyond the clock-tower
+was inhabited. I wasn't aware that any part of this castle was
+inhabited, except the porter's lodge and the part that we inhabit. Why
+have I been left till now in this state of outer darkness?"
+
+"The Signora Brandi has been absent," said Annunziata. "She has been in
+her own country--in Austria. But the other day she returned. And with
+her came a person to visit her. That is the person whose form you have
+seen in the garden."
+
+"How do you know it wasn't the form of the Signora Brandi herself?" John
+said.
+
+"Oh, no," said Annunziata. "The Signora Brandi is not young. She is old.
+She is as old as--"
+
+"Methuselah? Sin? The hills?" suggested John, Annunziata having paused
+to think.
+
+"No," said Annunziata, repudiating the suggestion with force. "No one is
+so old as Methuselah. She is as old as--well, my uncle."
+
+"I see," said John. "Yes, it's all highly mysterious."
+
+"Mysterious?" said Annunziata.
+
+"I should think so," asseverated he. "Cryptic, enigmatic, esoteric to
+the last degree. To begin with, how does the Signora Brandi, being an
+Austrian, come by so characteristically un-Austrian a name? Is that
+mysterious? And in the next place, why does an Austrian Signora Brandi
+so far forget what is due to her nationality as to live, not in Austria,
+but in Lombardy? And--as if that were not enough--at Castel Sant'
+Alessina? And--as if that were not more than enough--in the pavilion
+beyond the clock? Come, come! Mysterious!"
+
+"You are living in Lombardy, you are living at Castel Sant' Alessina,
+yourself," said Annunziata.
+
+"I hardly think so," said John. "You can scarcely with precision call
+this living--this is rather what purists call sojourning. But even were
+it otherwise, there's all the difference in the world between my case
+and the Signora Brandi's. I am middle-aged and foolish, but she is as
+old as your uncle. Don't you see the mysterious significance of that
+coincidence? And I haven't a young woman visiting me. _Who is the young
+woman?_ Is that a mystery? My sweet child, we tread among mysteries. We
+are at the centre of a coil of mysteries. _Who is the young woman?_ And
+how--consider well upon this--how does it happen that the young woman
+speaks English? Mysterious, indeed!"
+
+He rose, and bowed, with ceremony.
+
+"But we burn daylight. I must not detain you longer. Suffer me to
+imprint upon your hand of velvet a token of my high regard."
+
+And taking Annunziata's frail little white hand, he bent low to kiss it;
+and though his blue eyes were full of laughter, I think that behind the
+laughter there was a great deal of real fondness and admiration.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Half-way down the long straight avenue of ilex-trees that led from the
+castle to the principal entrance of the garden, Annunziata, in her
+pale-grey pinafore (that was so like a peplum), with her hair waving
+about her shoulders, was curled up in the corner of a marble bench,
+gazing with great intentness at a white flower that lay in her lap. It
+was the warmest and the peacefullest moment of the afternoon. The sun
+shone steadily; not a leaf stirred, not a shadow wavered; and the
+intermittent piping of a blackbird, somewhere in the green world
+overhead, seemed merely to give a kind of joyous rhythm to the silence.
+
+"Mercy upon me! Who ever saw so young a maiden so deeply lost in
+thought!" exclaimed a voice.
+
+Annunziata, her reverie thus disturbed, raised a pair of questioning
+eyes.
+
+A lady was standing before her, smiling down upon her, a lady in a frock
+of lilac-coloured muslin, with a white sunshade.
+
+Annunziata, who, when she liked, could be the very pink of formal
+politeness, rose, dropped a courtesy, and said: "Buon giorno,
+Signorina."
+
+"Buon giorno," responded the smiling lady. "Buon giorno--and a penny for
+your thoughts. But I'm sure you could never, never tell what it was you
+were thinking so hard about."
+
+"Scusi," said Annunziata. "I was trying to think of the name of this
+flower." She stooped and picked up the flower, which had slipped from
+her lap to the ground when she rose. Then she held it at arm's length,
+for inspection.
+
+"Oh?" asked the lady, smiling at the flower, as she had smiled at its
+possessor. "Isn't it a narcissus?"
+
+"Yes," said Annunziata. "It is a narcissus. But I was trying to think of
+its particular name."
+
+The lady looked as if she did not quite understand. "Its particular
+name?"
+
+"It is a narcissus," explained Annunziata, "just as I am a girl. But it
+must also have its particular name, just as I have mine. It is a soul
+doing its Purgatory--a very good soul. If you are very good, then, when
+you die, you do your Purgatory as a flower. But it is not such an easy
+Purgatory--oh, no. For look: the flower is beautiful, but it is blind,
+and cannot see; and it is fragrant, but it cannot smell; and people
+admire it and praise it, but it is deaf, and cannot hear. It can only
+wait, wait, wait, and think of God. But it is a short Purgatory. A few
+days, and the flower will fade, and the soul will be released. I think
+this flower's name is Cecilia, it is so white."
+
+The smile in the lady's eyes had brightened, as she listened; and now
+she gave a little laugh, a little, light, musical, pleased and friendly
+laugh.
+
+"Yes," she said. "I have sometimes wondered myself whether flowers might
+not be the Purgatory of very good souls. I am glad to learn from you
+that it is true. And yes, I should think that this flower's name was
+sure to be Cecilia. Cecilia suits it perfectly. What, if one may ask, is
+_your_ particular name?"
+
+"Mariannunziata," said its bearer, not to make two bites of a cherry.
+
+The lady's eyes grew round. "Dear me! A little short name like that?"
+she marvelled.
+
+"No," returned Annunziata, with dignity. "My name in full is longer. My
+name in full is Giuliana Falconieri Maria Annunziata Casalone. Is that
+not long enough?"
+
+"Yes," the lady admitted, "that is just long enough." And she laughed
+again.
+
+"What is _your_ name?" inquired Annunziata.
+
+"My name is Maria Dolores," the lady answered. "You see, we are both
+named Maria."
+
+"Of course," said Annunziata. "All Christians should be named Maria."
+
+"So they should," agreed the lady. "Do you ever tell people how old you
+are?"
+
+"Yes," said Annunziata, "if they wish to know. Why not?"
+
+The smile in the lady's eyes shone brighter than ever. "Do you think you
+could be persuaded to tell me?"
+
+"With pleasure," said Annunziata. "I am eleven years and five months.
+And you?"
+
+"I am just twice as old. I am twenty-two years and ten months. So, when
+you are fifty, how old shall I be?"
+
+"No," said Annunziata, shaking her head. "That trick has been tried with
+me before. My friend Prospero has tried it with me. You hope I will say
+that you will be a hundred. But it is not so. When I am fifty, you will
+be sixty-one, going on sixty-two."
+
+Still again the lady laughed, apparently with great amusement.
+
+"What a little bundle of wisdom you are!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes. My friend Prospero also says that I am wise," answered Annunziata.
+"I like to see you laugh," she mentioned, looking critically at the face
+above her. "You have beautiful teeth, they are so white and shining, and
+so small, and your lips are so red."
+
+"Oh," said the lady, laughing more merrily than ever. "Then you must be
+very entertaining, and I will laugh a great deal."
+
+Still looking critically at the lady's face, "Are you not," demanded
+Annunziata, "the person who has come to visit the Signora Brandi?"
+
+"Signora Brandi?" The lady considered. "Yes, I suppose I must be. At any
+rate, I am the person who has come to visit Frau Brandt."
+
+"Frao Branta? We call her Signora Brandi here," said Annunziata. "Are
+you related to her?"
+
+"No," said the lady, who always seemed inclined to laugh, though
+Annunziata had no consciousness of being very entertaining. "I am not
+related to her. I am only her friend."
+
+"She is an Austrian," said Annunziata. "This castle belongs to
+Austrians. Once upon a time, very long ago, before I was born, all this
+country belonged to Austrians. Are you, too, an Austrian?"
+
+"Yes." The lady nodded. "I, too, am an Austrian."
+
+"And yet," remarked Annunziata, "you speak Italian just as I do."
+
+"It is very good of you to say so," laughed the lady.
+
+"No--it is the truth," said Annunziata.
+
+"But is it not good to tell the truth?" the lady asked.
+
+"No," said Annunziata. "It is only a duty." And again she shook her
+head, slowly, darkly, with an effect of philosophic melancholy. "That is
+very strange and very hard," she pointed out. "If you do not do that
+which is your duty, it is bad, and you are punished. But if you do do
+it, that is not good,--it is only what you ought to do, and you are not
+rewarded." And she fetched her breath in the saddest of sad little
+sighs. Then, briskly covering her cheerfulness, "And you speak English,
+besides," she said.
+
+"Oh?" wondered the lady. "Are you a clairvoyante? How do you know that I
+speak English?"
+
+"My friend Prospero told me so," said Annunziata.
+
+"Your friend Prospero?" the lady repeated. "You quote your friend
+Prospero very often. Who is your friend Prospero?"
+
+"He is a signore," said Annunziata. "He has seen you, he has seen your
+form, in the garden and in the olive wood."
+
+"Oh," said the lady.
+
+"And I suppose he must have heard you speak English," Annunziata added.
+"He lives at the presbytery."
+
+"And where, by-the-by, do _you_ live?" asked the lady.
+
+"I live at the presbytery too," said Annunziata. "I am the niece of the
+parroco. I am the orphan of his only brother. My friend Prospero lives
+with us as a boarder. He is English."
+
+"Indeed?" said the lady. "Prospero is a very odd name for an
+Englishman."
+
+"Prospero is not his name," said Annunziata. "His name is Gian. That is
+English for Giovanni."
+
+"But why, then," the lady puzzled, "do you call him Prospero?"
+
+"Prospero is a name I have given him," explained Annunziata. "One day I
+told his fortune. I can tell fortunes--with olive-stones, with
+playing-cards, or from the lines of the hand. I will tell you yours, if
+you wish. Well, one day, I told Prospero's, and everything came out so
+prosperously for him, I have called him Prospero ever since. He will be
+rich, though he is poor; and he will marry a dark woman, who will also
+be rich; and they will have many, many children, and live in peace to
+the end of their lives. But there!" Annunziata cried out suddenly, with
+excitement, waving the hand that held her narcissus. "There is my friend
+Prospero now, coming in the gig."
+
+Down the avenue, sure enough, a gig was coming, a sufficiently shabby,
+ancient gig, drawn, however, at a very decent pace by a very
+decent-looking horse, and driven by John Blanchemain.
+
+"_Ciao_, Prospero!" called Annunziata, as he passed.
+
+And John took off his hat, a modish Panama, and bowed and smiled to her
+and to the lady. And one adept in reading the meaning of smiles might
+have read three or four separate meanings in that smile of his. It
+seemed to say to Annunziata, "Ah, you rogue! So already you have waylaid
+her, and made her acquaintance." To the lady: "I congratulate you upon
+your companion. Isn't she a diverting little monkey?" To himself: "And I
+congratulate _you_, my dear, upon being clothed and in your right mind,
+and upon having a proper hat to make your bow with." And to the universe
+at large "By Jove, she _is_ good-looking. Standing there before that
+marble bench, in the cool green light, under the great ilexes, with her
+lilac frock and her white sunshade, and Annunziata all in grey beside
+her,--what a subject for a painting, if only there were any painters
+who knew how to paint!"
+
+"He is going to a dinner at Roccadoro," said Annunziata, while John's
+back grew small and smaller in the distance. "Did you see, he had a
+portmanteau under the seat? He is going to a dinner of ceremony, and he
+will have his costume of ceremony in the portmaneau. I wonder what he
+will bring back with him for me. When he goes to Roccadoro he always
+brings something back for me. Last time it was a box of chocolate
+cigars. I should like to see him in his costume of ceremony. Wouldn't
+you?"
+
+But the lady merely laughed. And then, taking Annunziata's chin in her
+hand, she looked down into her big clear eyes, and said, "I must be off
+now, to join Signora Brandi. But I cannot leave without telling you how
+glad I am to have met you, and what pleasure I have derived from your
+conversation. I hope we shall meet often. Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye, Signorina," said Annunziata, becoming formally polite again.
+"I shall always be at your service." And she dropped another courtesy.
+"If you will come to see me at the presbytery," she hospitably added,
+"I will show you my tame kid."
+
+"You are all that is most kind," responded the lady, and went off
+smiling towards the castle.
+
+Annunziata curled herself up in her old corner of the marble bench, and
+appeared to relapse into profound thought.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+A curious little intimate inward glow, a sense, somewhere deep down in
+his consciousness, of elation and well-being, accompanied John all the
+way to Roccadoro, mingling with and sweetening whatever thoughts or
+perceptions occupied his immediate attention. This was a "soul-state"
+that he knew of old, and he had no difficulty in referring it to its
+cause. It was the glow and the elation which he was fortunate enough
+always to experience when his eye had been fed with a fresh impression
+of beauty; and he knew that he owed it to-day to the glimpse he had had,
+in the cool light under the ilexes, of a slender figure in lilac and a
+tiny figure in grey, beside a soft-complexioned old marble bench in the
+midst of a shadowy, sunny, brown and green Italian garden.
+
+The drive to Roccadoro from Sant' Alessina is a pleasant drive. The road
+follows for the most part the windings of the Rampio, so that you are
+seldom out of sight of its gleaming waters, and the brawl of it, now
+louder, now less loud, is perpetually in your ears. To right and left
+you have the tender pink of blossoming almonds, with sometimes the
+scarlet flame of a pomegranate; and then the blue-grey hills, mantled in
+a kind of transparent cloth-of-gold, a gauze of gold, woven of haze and
+sunshine; and then, rosy white, with pale violet shadows, the
+snow-peaks, cut like cameos upon the brilliant azure of the sky. And
+sometimes, of course, you rattle through a village, with its crumbling,
+stained, and faded yellow-stuccoed houses, its dazzling white canvas
+awnings, its church and campanile, and its life that seems to pass
+entirely in the street: men in their shirt sleeves, lounging, smoking,
+spitting (else the land were not Italy!), or perhaps playing cards at a
+table under the leafless bush of the wine-shop; women gossiping over
+their needlework, or, gathered in sociable knots, combing and binding up
+their sleek black hair; children sprawling in the kindly dirt; the
+priest, biretta on head, nose in breviary, drifting slowly upon some
+priestly errand, and "getting through his office;" and the immemorial
+goatherd, bare-legged, in a tattered sugar-loaf hat, followed by his
+flock, with their queer anxious faces, blowing upon his Pan's-pipes
+(shrill strains, in minor mode and plagal scale, a music older than
+Theocritus), or stopping, jealously watched by the customer's avid
+Italian eyes, to milk "_per due centesimi_"--say, a farthing's
+worth--into an outstretched, close-clutched jug. Sometimes the almond
+orchards give place to vineyards, or to maize fields, or to dusky groves
+of walnut, or to plantations of scrubby oak where lean black pigs forage
+for the delectable acorn. Sometimes the valley narrows to a ravine, and
+signs of cultivation disappear, and the voice of the Rampio swells to a
+roar, and you become aware, between the hills that rise gloomy and
+almost sheer beside you, of a great solitude: a solitude that is
+intensified rather than diminished by the sight of some
+lonely--infinitely lonely--grange, perched far aloft, at a height that
+seems out of reach of the world. What possible manner of human beings,
+you wonder, can inhabit there, and what possible dreary manner of
+existence can they lead? But even in the most solitary places you are
+welcomed and sped on by a chorus of bird-songs. The hillsides resound
+with bird-songs continuously for the whole seven miles,--and
+continuously, at this season, for the whole four-and-twenty hours.
+Blackbirds, thrushes, blackcaps, goldfinches, chaffinches, sing from the
+first peep of dawn till the last trace of daylight has died out, and
+then the nightingales begin and keep it up till dawn again. And
+everywhere the soft air is aromatic with a faint scent of rosemary, for
+rosemary grows everywhere under the trees. And everywhere you have the
+purity and brilliancy and yet restraint of colour, and the crisp economy
+of line, which give the Italian landscape its look of having been
+designed by a conscious artist.
+
+In and through his enjoyment of all these pleasantnesses, John felt that
+agreeable glow which he owed to his glimpse of the woman in the garden;
+and when at last he reached the Hotel Victoria, and, having dressed,
+found himself alone for a few moments with Lady Blanchemain, in the dim
+and cool sitting-room where she awaited her guests, he hastened to let
+her know that he shared her own opinion of the woman's charms.
+
+"Your beauty decidedly _is_ a beauty," he declared. "I wish you could
+have seen her as I saw her an hour ago, with a white sunshade, against a
+background of ilexes. It's a thousand pities that painting should be a
+forgotten art."
+
+But Lady Blanchemain (magnificent in purple velvet, with diamonds round
+her throat and in her hair) didn't seem interested.
+
+"Do you know," she said, "I made yesterday one of the most ridiculous
+blunders of my life. It's been preying upon my mind ever since. I
+generally have pretty trustworthy perceptions, and perhaps this is a
+symptom of failing powers. I told myself positively that you were an
+Eton and Balliol man. It never occurred to me till I was halfway home
+that, as a Papist, you'd be nothing of the sort."
+
+"No," said John; "I'm afraid I'm Edgbaston and Paris. The way her hair
+grows low about her brow, and swoops upwards and backwards in a sort of
+tidal wave, and breaks loose in little curling tendrils,--it's
+absolutely lyrical. And the smile at the bottom of her eyes is exactly
+like silent music. And her mouth is a couplet in praise of love, with
+two red lips for rhymes. And her chin is a perfect epithalamium of a
+chin. And then her figure! And then her lilac frock! Oh, it's a
+thousand, thousand pities that painting should he a forgotten art."
+
+"What, the same lilac frock?" said Lady Blanchemain, absently. "Yet you
+certainly have the Eton voice," she mused. "And if I don't pay you the
+doubtful compliment of saying that you have the Balliol manner, you have
+at least a kind of subtilized reminiscence of it."
+
+"I must keep a guard upon myself," said John. "She's visiting an
+Austrian woman who lives in a remote wing of the castle,--the pavilion
+beyond the clock, in fact,--an Austrian woman of the exhilarating name
+of Brandi."
+
+"I'm rather in luck for my dinner to-night," said Lady Blanchemain.
+"I've got Agnes Scope, the niece of the Duke of Wexmouth. She arrived
+here this morning with her aunt, Lady Louisa. Of course I'm putting you
+next to her. As, besides being an extremely nice girl and an heiress,
+she's an ardent pervert to Romanism,--well, a word to the wise."
+
+"Yes, I know her," said John. "We don't get on a bit. She moves on far
+too high a plane for a groundling like me. She's intellectual and
+earnest, and my ignorance and light-mindedness wound her to the quick.
+She'll end, as I've told her to her face, by writing books,--serious
+novels, probably,--which she'll illuminate with beautiful irrelevant
+quotations from Browning and Cardinal Newman."
+
+"Bother," said Lady Blanchemain. "You're perverse."
+
+"Besides," said John, "she's engaged."
+
+"Engaged--?" faltered Lady Blanchemain.
+
+"Yes--to an intellectual and earnest man, named Blake--Bernard Blake--a
+grandson of the famous Blake of Cambridge."
+
+Lady Blanchemain fixed him with darkening eyes.
+
+"Are you sure?" she pleaded.
+
+"I saw it officially stated in the _Morning Post_," was John's
+relentless answer.
+
+"What a nuisance," said Lady Blanchemain, fanning. Her fan was of amber
+tortoise-shell, with white ostrich feathers, and the end sticks bore her
+cypher and coronet in gold.
+
+"What a jolly fan," said John.
+
+"Well, well," said Lady Blanchemain, reconciling herself. Then, after an
+instant of pensiveness, "So you're already laid low by her beauty. But
+you haven't found out yet who she is?"
+
+"Who who is?" said John, looking all at sea.
+
+"Tut. Don't tease. Your woman at the castle."
+
+"My woman at the castle appeared to leave you cold," he complained. "I
+arrived full of her, and you wouldn't listen."
+
+"So you're already in love with her?" said Lady Blanchemain.
+
+"No--not yet," said he. "As yet I merely recognize in her admirable
+material for a painting, and regret that such material should go begging
+for the lack of a painter. But by this time to-morrow--who can tell?"
+
+"Have you found out who she is?" asked Lady Blanchemain.
+
+"No--not yet," said he. "As yet I've merely found out that she's
+visiting an Austrian Signora Brandi, who lives (I can't think why) in
+the pavilion beyond the clock. But by this time to-morrow!" His gesture
+spoke volumes of prospective information.
+
+"She looked like a gentlewoman," reflected his friend.
+
+"For all the world," said he.
+
+"Yet, if she's an Austrian--" She paused and pondered.
+
+"Why? What's the difficulty?" said he.
+
+"To know whether she is _born_," said Lady Blanchemain. "Among
+Austrians, unless you're born, you're impossible, you're nowhere. Brandi
+doesn't sound born, does it? We mustn't let you become enamoured of her
+if she isn't born."
+
+"Brandi sounds tremendously _un_born," assented John. "And if like
+visits like, Signora Brandi's visitor will probably be unborn too. But
+to me that would rather add an attraction,--provided she's _bred_. I'm
+not an Austrian. I'm a Briton and a democrat. I feel it is my destiny,
+if ever I am to become enamoured at all, to become enamoured of the
+daughter of a miller,--of a rising miller, who has given his daughter
+advantages. 'Brèd, not Born: or the Lady of the Mill'--that shall be the
+title of my humble heart-history. If this woman could prove to me that
+she was the daughter of a miller, I'm not sure I shouldn't become
+enamoured of her on the spot. Well, I shall know to-morrow. By this time
+to-morrow I shall possess her entire _dossier_. It may interest you to
+learn that I am employing a detective to investigate her."
+
+"A detective? What do you mean?" said Lady Blanchemain.
+
+"A private detective, a female detective, whom, the next time you come
+to Sant' Alessina, I'll introduce to you," said John.
+
+"What on earth do you mean?" said Lady Blanchemain.
+
+"The most amusing, the most adorable little detective unhung," said he.
+"People are all love and laughter whenever they look at her. She'll worm
+its inmost secrets from my sphinx's heart."
+
+"What pleasure can you take in practising upon a poor old woman who only
+by a sort of fluke isn't your grandmother?" said she.
+
+"Lady Louisa FitzStephen, Miss Scope," said her servant, opening the
+door.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+The nightingales sang him home, and the moon lighted him, the liquid
+moon of April and Italy. As he approached the castle, through the purple
+and silver garden, amid the mysterious sweet odours of the night, he
+glanced up vaguely at the pavilion beyond the clock. He glanced up
+vaguely, but next second he was no longer vague.
+
+There, on a low-hung balcony, not ten feet above him, full in the
+moonlight, stood a figure in white--all in white, with a scarf of white
+lace thrown over her dark hair. The nightingales sang and sobbed, the
+moon rained its amethystine fire upon the earth, the earth gave forth
+its mysterious sweet night odours, and she stood there motionless, and
+breathed and gazed and listened.
+
+But at the sound of wheels in the avenue, she turned slightly, and
+looked down. Her face was fair and delicate and pure in the moonlight,
+and her eyes shone darkly bright.
+
+She turned, and looked down, and her eyes met John's.
+
+"Given the hour and the place, I wonder whether I ought to bow," he
+thought.
+
+Before he could make up his mind, however, his hand had automatically
+raised his hat.
+
+She inclined her head in acknowledgment, and something softly changed in
+her face.
+
+"She smiled!" he said, and caught his breath, with a kind of astonished
+exultancy.
+
+That soft change in her face came and went and came again through all
+his dreams.
+
+
+
+
+PART THIRD
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"Good morning, Prospero," said Annunziata.
+
+"Good morning, Wide-awake," responded John.
+
+He was in the octagonal room on the _piano nobile_ of the castle, where
+his lost ladies of old years smiled on him from their frames. He had
+heard an approaching patter of feet on the pavement of the room beyond;
+and then Annunziata's little grey figure, white face, and big grave
+eyes, had appeared, one picture the more, in the vast carved and gilded
+doorway.
+
+"I have been looking everywhere for you," she said, plaintive.
+
+"Poor sweetheart," he commiserated her. "And can't you find me?"
+
+"I couldn't," said Annunziata, bearing on the tense. "But I have found
+you _now_."
+
+"Oh? Have you? Where?" asked he.
+
+"_Where?_" cried she, with a disdainful movement. "But _here_, of
+course."
+
+"I wouldn't be too cocksure of that," he cautioned her. "_Here_ is a
+mighty evasive bird. For, suppose we were elsewhere, then _there_ would
+be here, and here would be somewhere else."
+
+"No," said Annunziata, with resolution. "Where a person is, that is
+always _here_."
+
+"You speak as if a person carried his here with him, like his hat," said
+John.
+
+"Yes, that is how it is," said Annunziata, nodding.
+
+"You have a remarkably solid little head,--for all its curls, there's no
+confusing it," said he. "Well, have you your report, drawn up, signed,
+sealed, sworn to before a Commissioner for Oaths, and ready to be
+delivered?"
+
+"My report--?" questioned Annunziata, with a glance.
+
+"About the Form," said John. "I caught you yesterday red-handed in the
+fact of pumping it."
+
+"Yes," said Annunziata. "Her name is Maria Dolores."
+
+"A most becoming name," said he.
+
+"She is very nice," said Annunziata.
+
+"She looks very nice," said he.
+
+"She is twenty-two years and ten months old," continued his informant.
+
+"Fancy. As middle-aged as that," commented he.
+
+"Yes. She is an Austrian."
+
+"Ah."
+
+"And as I told you, she is visiting the Signora Brandi. Only, she calls
+her Frao Branta."
+
+"Frao Branta?" John turned the name on his tongue. "Branta? Branta?"
+What familiar German name, at the back of his memory, did it half evoke?
+Suddenly he had a flash. "Can you possibly mean Frau Brandt?"
+
+Annunziata gave a gesture of affirmation.
+
+"Yes, that is it," she said. "You sound it just as she did!"
+
+"I see," said John. "And Brandt, if there are degrees of unbirth, is
+even more furiously unborn than Brandi."
+
+"Unborn--?" said Annunziata, frowning.
+
+"Not noble--not of the aristocracy," John explained.
+
+"Very few people are noble," said Annunziata.
+
+"All the more reason, then, why you and I should be thankful that we
+are," said he.
+
+"You and I?" she expostulated, with a shrug of her little grey
+shoulders. "_Machè!_ We are not noble."
+
+"Aren't we? How do you know?" asked John. "Anyhow," he impressively
+moralized, "we can try to be."
+
+"No," said she, with conclusiveness, with fatalism. "It is no good
+trying. Either you are noble or simple,--God makes you so,--you cannot
+help it. If I were noble, I should be a contessina. If you were noble,
+you would be a gransignore.
+
+"And my unassuming appearance assures you that I'm not?" said he,
+smiling.
+
+"If you were a gransignore," she instructed him, "you would never be
+such friends with me--you would be too proud."
+
+John laughed.
+
+"You judge people by the company they keep. Well, I will apply the same
+principle of judgment to your gossip, Maria Dolores. By-the-by," he
+broke off to inquire, "what is her Pagan name?"
+
+"Her Pagan name? What is that?" asked Annunziata.
+
+"Maria Dolores, I take it, is her Christian name, come by in Holy
+Baptism," said John. "But I suppose she will have a Pagan name, come by
+in the way of the flesh, to round it off with,--just as, for instance, a
+certain flame of mine, whose image, when I die, they'll find engraved
+upon my heart, has the Pagan name of Casalone."
+
+Annunziata looked up, surprised. "Casalone? That is my name," she said.
+
+"Yes," said John. "Yours will be the image."
+
+Annunziata gave her head a toss. "Maria Dolores did not tell me her
+Pagan name," she said.
+
+"At any rate," said he, "to judge by the company she keeps, we may
+safely classify her as unborn. She is probably the daughter of a
+miller,--of a miller (to judge also a little by the frocks she wears) in
+rather a large way of business, who (to judge finally by her cultivated
+voice, her knowledge of languages, and her generally distinguished air)
+has spared no expense in the matter of her education. I shouldn't
+wonder a bit if she could even play the piano."
+
+"No," agreed Annunziata, "that is very likely. But why"--she tilted
+upwards her inquisitive little profile--"why should you think she is the
+daughter of a miller?"
+
+"Miller," said John, "I use as a generic term. Her father may be a
+lexicographer or a dry-salter, a designer of dirigible balloons or a
+manufacturer of air-pumps; he may even be a person of independent means,
+who lives in a big, new, stuccoed villa in the suburbs of Vienna, and
+devotes his leisure to the propagation of orchids: yet all the while a
+miller. By miller I mean a member of the Bourgeoisie: a man who, though
+he be well to do, well educated, well bred, does not bear coat-armour,
+and is therefore to be regarded by those who do with their noses in the
+air,--especially in Austria. Among Austrians, unless you bear
+coat-armour, you're impossible, you're nowhere. We mustn't let you
+become enamoured of her if she doesn't bear coat-armour."
+
+Annunziata's eyes, during this divagation, had wandered to the window,
+the tall window with its view of the terraced garden, where the mimosa
+bloomed and the blackcaps carolled. Now she turned them slowly upon
+John, and he saw from their expression that at last she was coming to
+what for her (as he had known all along) was the real preoccupation of
+the moment. They were immensely serious, intensely concerned, and at the
+same time, in their farther recesses, you felt a kind of fluttering
+shyness, as if _I dare not_ were hanging upon _I would_.
+
+"Tell me," she began, on a deep note, a deep coaxing note.... Then _I
+dare not_ got the better, and she held back.... Then _I would_ took his
+courage in both hands, and she plunged. "What have you brought for me
+from Roccadoro?" And after one glance of half-bashful, all-impassioned
+supplication, she let her eyes drop, and stood before him suspensive, as
+one awaiting the word of destiny.
+
+John's "radiant blondeur," his yellow beard, pink face, and sea-blue
+eyes, lighted up, more radiant still, with subcutaneous laughter.
+
+"The shops were shut," he said. "I arrived after closing time."
+
+But something in his tone rendered this grim announcement nugatory.
+Annunziata drew a long breath, and looked up again. "You have brought
+me something, all the same," she declared with conviction; and eagerly,
+eyes gleaming, "What is it? What is it?" she besought him.
+
+John laughed. "You are quite right," he said. "If one can't buy, beg, or
+borrow, in this world, one can generally steal."
+
+Annunziata drew away, regarded him with misgiving. "Oh, no; you would
+never steal," she protested.
+
+"I'm not so sure--for one I loved," said he. "What would you have liked
+me to bring you?"
+
+Annunziata thought. "I liked those chocolate cigars," she said, her face
+soft with reminiscence of delight.
+
+"Ah, but we mustn't have it _toujours perdrix_," said John. "Do you, by
+any chance, like marchpane?"
+
+"Marchpane?--I adore it," she answered, in an outburst of emotion.
+
+"You have your human weaknesses, after all," John laughed. "Well, I
+stole a pocketful of marchpane."
+
+Annunziata drew away again, her little white forehead furrowed.
+"Stole?" she repeated, reluctant to believe.
+
+"Yes," said he, brazenly, nodding his head.
+
+"Oh, that was very wrong," said Annunziata, sadly shaking hers.
+
+"No," said he. "Because, in the first place, it's a matter of proverbial
+wisdom that stolen marchpane's sweetest. And, in the next place, I stole
+it quite openly, under the eye of the person it belonged to, and she
+made no effort to defend her property. Seeing which, I even went so far
+as to explain to her _why_ I was stealing it. 'There's a young limb o'
+mischief with a sweet tooth at Sant' Alessina,' I explained, 'who
+regularly levies blackmail upon me. I'm stealing this for her.' And then
+the lady I was stealing from told me I might steal as much as ever I
+thought good."
+
+"Oh-h-h," said Annunziata, a long-drawn _Oh_ of relief. "Then you didn't
+steal it--she _gave_ it to you."
+
+"Well," said John, "if casuistry like that can ease your conscience--if
+you feel that you can conscientiously receive it--" And he allowed his
+inflection to complete the sentence.
+
+"Give it to me," said Annunziata, holding out her hands, and dancing up
+and down in glee and in impatience.
+
+"Nenni-dà," said John. "Not till after dinner. I'm not going to be a
+party to the spoiling of a fair, young, healthy appetite."
+
+Pain wrote itself upon Annunziata's brow. "Oh," she grieved, "must I
+wait till after dinner?"
+
+"Yes," said John.
+
+For a breathing-space she struggled. "Would it be bad of me," she asked,
+"if I begged for just a _little_ now?"
+
+"Yes," said John, "bad and bootless. You'd find me as unyielding as
+adamant."
+
+"Ah, well," sighed Annunziata, a deep and tremulous sigh. "Then I will
+wait."
+
+And, like a true philosopher, she proceeded to occupy her mind with a
+fresh interest. She looked round the room, she looked out of the window.
+"Why do you stay here? It is much pleasanter in the garden," she
+remarked.
+
+"I came here to seek for consolation. To-day began for me with a tragic
+misadventure," John replied.
+
+Annunziata's eyes grew big, compassionating him, and, at the same time,
+bespeaking a lively curiosity.
+
+"Poor Prospero," she gently murmured. "What was it?" on tip-toe she
+demanded.
+
+"Well," he said, "when I rose, to go for my morning swim, I made an
+elaborate toilet, because I hoped to meet a certain person whom, for
+reasons connected with my dignity, I wished to impress. But it was
+love's labour lost. The certain person is an ornament of the uncertain
+sex, and didn't turn up. So, to console myself, I came here."
+
+Annunziata looked round the room again. "What is there here that can
+console you?"
+
+"These," said John. His hand swept the pictured walls.
+
+"The paintings?" said she, following his gesture. "How can they console
+you?"
+
+"They're so well painted," said he, fondly studying the soft-coloured
+canvases. "Besides, these ladies are dead. I like dead ladies."
+
+Annunziata looked critically at the pictures, and then at him with
+solemn meaning. "They are very pretty--but they are not dead," she
+pronounced in her deepest voice.
+
+"Not dead?" echoed John, astonished. "Aren't they?"
+
+"No," said she, with a slow shake of the head.
+
+"Dear me," said he. "And, when they're alone here and no one's looking,
+do you think they come down from their frames and dance? It must be a
+sight worth seeing."
+
+"No," said Annunziata. "These are only their pictures. They cannot come
+down from their frames. But the ladies themselves are not dead. Some of
+them are still in Purgatory, perhaps. We should pray for them." She
+made, in parenthesis as it were, a pious sign of the Cross. "Some are
+perhaps already in Heaven. We should ask their prayers. And others are
+perhaps in Hell," she pursued, inexorable theologian that she was. "But
+none of them is dead. No one is dead. There's no such thing as being
+dead."
+
+"But then," puzzled John, "what is it that people mean when they talk of
+Death?"
+
+"I will tell you," said Annunziata, her eyes heavy with thought.
+"Listen, and I will tell you." She seated herself on the big round
+ottoman, and raised her face to his. "Have you ever been at a
+pantomime?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," said John, wondering what could possibly be coming.
+
+"Have you been at the pantomime," she continued earnestly, "when there
+was what they call a transformation-scene?"
+
+"Yes," said John.
+
+"Well," said she, "last winter I was taken to the pantomime at Bergamo,
+and I saw a transformation-scene. You ask me, what is Death? It is
+exactly like a transformation-scene. At the pantomime the scene was just
+like the world. There were trees, and houses, and people, common people,
+like any one. Then suddenly click! Oh, it was wonderful. Everything was
+changed. The trees had leaves of gold and silver, and the houses were
+like fairy palaces, and there were strange lights, red and blue, and
+there were great garlands of the most beautiful flowers, and the people
+were like angels, with gems and shining clothes. Well, you understand,
+at first we had only seen one side of the scene;--then click! everything
+was turned round, and we saw the other side. That is like life and
+death. Always, while we are alive, we can see only one side of things.
+But there is the other side, the under side. Never, so long as we are
+alive, we can never, never see it. But when we die,--click! It is a
+transformation-scene. Everything is turned round, and we see the other
+side. Oh, it will be very different, it will be wonderful. That is what
+they call Death."
+
+It was John's turn to be grave. It was some time before he spoke. He
+looked down at her, with a kind of grave laughter in his eyes, admiring,
+considering. What could he say? ... What he did say, at last, was
+simply, "Thank you, my dear."
+
+Annunziata jumped up.
+
+"Oh, come," she urged. "Let's go into the garden. It is so much nicer
+there than here. There are lots of cockchafers. Besides"--she held out
+as an additional inducement--"we might meet Maria Dolores."
+
+"No," said John. "Though the cockchafers are a temptation, I will stop
+here. But go you to the garden, by all means. And if you do meet Maria
+Dolores, tell her what you have just told me. I think she would like to
+hear it."
+
+"All right," consented Annunziata, moving towards the door. "I'll see
+you at dinner. You won't forget the marchpane?"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+John was in a state of mind that perplexed and rather annoyed him. Until
+the day before yesterday, his detachment here at Sant' Alessina from
+ordinary human society, the absence of people more or less of his own
+sort, had been one of the elements of his situation which he had
+positively, consciously, rejoiced in,--had been an appreciable part of
+what he had summarized to Lady Blanchemain as "the whole blessed thing."
+He had his castle, his pictures, his garden, he had the hills and
+valley, the birds, the flowers, the clouds, the sun, he had the Rampio,
+he had Annunziata, he even had Annunziata's uncle; and with all this he
+had a sense of having stepped out of a world that he knew by heart, that
+he knew to satiety, a world that was stale and stuffy and threadbare,
+with its gilt rubbed off and its colours tarnished, into a world where
+everything was fresh and undiscovered and full of savour, a great cool
+blue and green world that from minute to minute opened up new
+perspectives, made new promises, brought to pass new surprises. And this
+sense, in some strange way, included Time as well as space. It was as if
+he had entered a new region of Time, as if he had escaped from the
+moving current of Time into a stationary moment. Alone here, where
+modern things or thoughts had never penetrated, alone with the earth and
+the sky, the mediæval castle, the dead ladies, with Annunziata, and the
+parroco, and the parroco's Masses and Benedictions--to-day, he would
+please himself by fancying, might be a yesterday of long ago that had
+somehow dropped out of the calendar and remained, a fragment of the Past
+that had been forgotten and left over. The presence of a person of his
+own sort, a fellow citizen of his own period, wearing its clothes,
+speaking its speech, would have broken the charm, would have seemed as
+undesirable and as inappropriate as the introduction of an English
+meadow into the Italian landscape.
+
+Yet now such a person had come, and behold, her presence, so far from
+breaking the charm, merged with and intensified it,--supplied indeed
+the one feature needed to perfect it. A person of his own sort? The
+expression is convenient. A fellow citizen, certainly, of his period,
+wearing its clothes, speaking its speech. But a person, happily, not of
+his own sex, a woman, a beautiful woman; and what her presence supplied
+to the poetry of Sant' Alessina, making it complete, was, if you like,
+the Eternal Feminine. As supplied already by the painted women on the
+walls about him, this force had been static; as supplied by a woman who
+lived and breathed, it became dynamic. That was all very well; if he
+could have let it rest at that, if he could have confined his interest
+in her, his feeling about her, to the plane of pure æsthetics, he would
+have had nothing to complain of. But the mischief was that he couldn't.
+The thing that perplexed and annoyed him,--and humiliated him too, in
+some measure,--was a craving that had sprung up over-night, and was now
+strong and constant, to get into personal touch with her, to make her
+acquaintance, to talk with her; to find out a little what manner of soul
+she had, to establish some sort of human relation with her. It wasn't
+in the least as yet a sentimental craving; or, if it was, John at any
+rate didn't know it. In its essence, perhaps, it was little more than
+curiosity. But it was disturbing, upsetting, it destroyed the peace and
+the harmonious leisure of his day. It perplexed him, it was outside his
+habits, it was unreasonable. "Not unreasonable to think it might be fun
+to talk to a pretty woman," he discriminated, "but unreasonable to yearn
+to talk to her as if your life hung in the balance." And in some
+measure, too, it humiliated him: it was a confession of weakness, of
+insufficiency to himself, of dependence for his contentment upon
+another. He tried to stifle it; he tried to fix his mind on subjects
+that would lead far from it. Every subject, all subjects, subjects the
+most discrepant, seemed to possess one common property, that of leading
+straight back to it. Then he said, "Well, if you can't stifle it, yield
+to it. Go down into the garden--hunt her up--boldly engage her in
+conversation." Assurance was the note of the man; but when he pictured
+himself in the act of "boldly engaging her in conversation," his
+assurance oozed away, and he was conscious of a thrice-humiliating
+shyness. Why? What _was_ there in the woman that should turn a brave man
+shy?
+
+However, the stars were working for him. That afternoon, coming home
+from a stroll among the olives, he met her face to face at the gate of
+the garden, whither she had arrived from the direction of the village.
+Having made his bow, which she accepted with a smile, he could do no
+less than open the gate for her; and as their ways must thence lie
+together, up the long ilex-shaded avenue to the castle, it would be an
+awkward affectation not to speak. And yet (he ground his teeth at having
+to admit it) his heart had begun to pound so violently, (not from
+emotion, he told himself,--from a mere ridiculous sort of nervous
+excitement: what _was_ there in the woman that should excite a sane man
+like that?) he was afraid to trust his voice, lest it should quaver and
+betray him. But fortunately this pounding of the heart lasted only a few
+seconds. The short business of getting the gate open, and of closing it
+afterwards, gave it time to pass. So that now, as they set forwards
+towards the house, he was able to look her in the eye, and to observe,
+with impressiveness, that it was a fine day.
+
+She had accepted his bow with a smile, amiable and unembarrassed; and at
+this, in quite the most unembarrassed manner, smiling again,--perhaps
+with just the faintest, just the gentlest shade of irony, and with just
+the slightest quizzical upward tremor of the eyebrows,--"Isn't it a day
+rather typical of the land and season?" she inquired.
+
+It was the first step that had cost. John's assurance was coming swiftly
+back. Her own air of perfect ease in the circumstances very likely
+accelerated it. "Yes," he answered her. "But surely that isn't a reason
+for begrudging it a word of praise?"
+
+By this he was lucky enough to provoke a laugh, a little light gay
+trill, sudden and brief like three notes on a flute.
+
+"No," she admitted. "You are right. The day deserves the best we can say
+of it."
+
+"Her voice," thought John, availing himself of a phrase that had struck
+him in a book he had lately read, "her voice is like ivory and white
+velvet." And the touch, never so light, of a foreign accent with which
+she spoke, rendered her English piquant and pretty,--gave to each
+syllable a crisp little clean-cut outline. They sauntered on for a
+minute or two in silence, with half the width of the road-way between
+them, the shaded road-way, where the earth showed purple through a thin
+green veil of mosses, and where irregular shafts of sunlight, here and
+there, turned purple and green to red and gold. The warm air, woven of
+garden-fragrances, hung round them palpable, like some infinitely
+subtile fabric. And of course blackbirds were calling, blackcaps and
+thrushes singing, in all the leafy galleries overhead. A fine day
+indeed, mused John, and indeed worthy of the best that they could say.
+His nervousness, his excitement, had entirely left him, his assurance
+had come completely back; and with it had come a curious deep
+satisfaction, a feeling that for the moment at any rate the world left
+nothing to be wished for, that the cup of his desire was full. He didn't
+even, now that he might do so, wish to talk to her. To walk with her was
+enough,--to enjoy her companionship in silence. Yes, that was
+it--companionship. He caught at the word. "That is what I have been
+unconsciously needing all along. I flattered myself that I was
+luxuriating in the very absence of it. But man is a gregarious animal,
+and I was deceived." So he could refer the effect of her propinquity to
+the mere gregarious instinct, not suspecting that a more powerful
+instinct was already awake. Anyhow, his sense of that propinquity,--his
+consciousness of her, gracefully moving beside him in the sweet weather,
+while her summery garments fluttered, and some strange, faint, elusive
+perfume was shaken from them,--filled him with a satisfaction that for
+the moment seemed ultimate. He had no wish to talk. Their progress side
+by side was a conversation without words. They were getting to know each
+other, they were breaking the ice. Each step they took was as good as a
+spoken sentence, was a mutual experience, drawing them closer, helping
+to an understanding. They walked slowly, as by a tacit agreement.
+
+Silence, however, couldn't in the nature of things last for ever. It was
+she who presently broke it.
+
+"I owe you," she said, in her ivory voice, with her clean-cut
+enunciation, "a debt of thanks." And still again she smiled, as she
+looked over towards him, her dark eyes glowing, her dark hair richly
+drooping, in the shadow of a big hat of wine-coloured straw.
+
+John's eyes were at a loss. "Oh--?" he wondered.
+
+"For a pleasure given me by our friend Annunziata," she explained. "This
+morning she told me a most interesting parable about Death. And she
+mentioned that it was you who had suggested to her to tell it me."
+
+"Oh," said John, laughing, while the pink of his skin deepened a shade.
+"She mentioned that, did she? I'm glad if you don't feel that I took a
+good deal upon myself. But she had just told the same parable to me, and
+it seemed a pity it shouldn't have a larger audience."
+
+Then, after a few more paces taken again in silence, "What a marvellous
+little person she is, Annunziata!" said Maria Dolores.
+
+"She's to a marvellous degree the right product of her milieu," said
+John.
+
+Maria Dolores did not speak, but her eyes questioned, "Yes? How do you
+mean?"
+
+"I mean that she's a true child of the presbytery," he replied, "and at
+the same time a true child of this Italy, where Paganism has never
+perfectly died. She has been carefully instructed in her catechism, and
+she has fed upon pious legends, she has breathed an ecclesiastical
+atmosphere, until the things of the Church have become a part of her
+very bone. She sees everything in relation to them, translates
+everything in terms of them. But at the same time odd streaks of
+Paganism survive in her. They survive a little--don't they?--in all
+Italians. Wherever she goes her eye reads omens. She will cast your
+fortune for you with olive-stones. The woods are peopled for her by
+fauns and dryads. When she takes her walks abroad, I've no doubt, she
+catches glimpses of Proteus rising from the lake, and hears old Triton
+blow his wreathed horn."
+
+Maria Dolores looked interested.
+
+"Yes," she said, slowly, thoughtfully, and meditated for an interval.
+By-and-by, "You know," she recommenced, "she's a sort of little person
+about whom one can't help feeling rather frightened." And her eyes
+looked to his for sympathetic understanding.
+
+But his were interrogative. "No? Why should one feel frightened about
+her?"
+
+"Oh," said Maria Dolores, with a movement, "it isn't exactly easy to
+tell why. One's fears are vague. But--well, for one thing, she thinks so
+much about Death. Death and what comes after,--they interest her so
+much. It doesn't seem natural, it makes one uneasy. And then she's so
+delicate-looking. Sometimes she's almost transparent. In every way she
+is too serious. She uses her mind too much, and her body too little. She
+ought to have more of the gaiety of childhood, she ought to have other
+children to romp with. She's too much like a disembodied spirit. It all
+alarms one."
+
+John, as she spoke, frowned, pondering. When she had done, his frown
+cleared, he shook his head.
+
+"I don't think it need," he said. "Her delicacy, her frailness, have
+never struck me as indicating weakness,--they seem simply the proper
+physical accompaniments of her crystalline little soul,--she's made of a
+fine and delicate clay. She thinks about Death, it is true, but not in a
+morbid way,--and that's a part of her ecclesiastical tradition; and she
+thinks quite as much about life,--she thinks about everything. I agree
+with you, it's a pity she has no other children. But she isn't by any
+means deficient in the instincts of childhood. She can enjoy a chocolate
+cigar, for instance, as well as another; and as for marchpane, I have
+her own word that she adores it."
+
+Maria Dolores gave another light trill of laughter.
+
+"Yes, I'm aware of her passion for marchpane. She confided it to me this
+morning. And as, in reply to her questions, I admitted that I rather
+liked it myself, she very generously offered to bring me some this
+afternoon,--which, to be sure, an hour ago, she did."
+
+She laughed again, and John laughed too.
+
+"All the same" she insisted, "I can't help that feeling of uneasiness
+about her. Sometimes, when I look at her, I can almost see her wings.
+What will be her future, if she grows up? One would rather not think of
+her as married to some poor Italian, and having to give herself to the
+prosaic sort of existence that would mean."
+
+"The sordid sort of existence," augmented John. "No, one would decidedly
+rather not. But she will never marry. She will enter religion. Her
+uncle has it all planned out. He destines her for the Servites."
+
+"Oh? The Servites--the Mantellate? I am glad of that," exclaimed Maria
+Dolores. "It is a most beautiful order. They have an especial devotion
+to Our Lady of Sorrows."
+
+"Yes," said John, and remembered it was for Our Lady of Sorrows that she
+who spoke was named.
+
+Slow though their march had been, by this time they had come to the end
+of the avenue, and were in the wide circular sweep before the castle.
+They stopped here, and stood looking off over the garden, with its
+sombre cypresses and bright beds of geranium, down upon the valley, dim
+and luminous in a mist of gold. Great, heavy, fantastic-shaped clouds,
+pearl-white with pearl-grey shadows, piled themselves up against the
+scintillant dark blue of the sky. In and out among the rose-trees near
+at hand, where the sun was hottest, heavily flew, with a loud
+bourdonnement, the cockchafers promised by Annunziata,--big, blundering,
+clumsy, the scorn of their light-winged and business-like competitors,
+the bees. Lizards lay immobile as lizards cast in bronze, only their
+little glittering, watchful pin-heads of eyes giving sign of life. And
+of course the blackcaps never for a moment left off singing.
+
+They stood side by side, within a yard of each other, in silent
+contemplation of these things, during I don't know how many long and,
+for John, delicious seconds. Yes, he owned it to himself; it was
+delicious to feel her standing there beside him, in silent communion
+with him, contemplating the same things, enjoying the same
+pleasantnesses. Companionship--companionship: it was what he had been
+unconsciously needing all along! ... At last she turned, and,
+withdrawing her eyes lingeringly from the landscape, looked into his,
+with a smile. She did not speak, but her smile said, just as explicitly
+as her lips could have done, "What a scene of beauty!"
+
+And John responded aloud, with fervour, "Indeed, indeed it is."
+
+"And so romantic," she added. "It is like a scene out of some old high
+musical romance."
+
+"The most romantic scene I know," said he. "All my life I have thought
+so."
+
+"Oh?" said she, looking surprise. "Have you known it all your life?"
+
+"Well,--very nearly," said he, with half a laugh. "I saw it first when I
+was ten. Then for long years I lost it,--and only recovered it, by
+accident, a month ago."
+
+Her face showed her interest. "Oh? How was that? How did it happen?"
+
+"When I was ten," John recounted, half laughing again, "I was travelling
+with my father, and, among the many places we visited, one seemed to me
+a very vision of romance made real. A vast and stately castle, in a
+garden, in a valley, with splendid halls and chambers, and countless
+beautiful pictures of women. All my life I remembered it, dreamed of it,
+longed to see it again. But I hadn't a notion where it was, save vaguely
+that it was somewhere in Italy; and, my poor father being dead, there
+was no one I could ask. Then, wandering in these parts a month ago, I
+stumbled upon it, and recognized it. Though shrunken a good deal in
+size, to be sure, it was still recognizable, and as romantic as ever."
+
+Maria Dolores listened pensively. When he had reached his period, her
+eyes lighted up. "What a charming adventure!" she said. "And so, for
+you, besides its general romance, the place has a personal one, all your
+own. I, too, have known it for long years, but only from photographs. I
+suppose I should never have seen the real thing, except for a friend of
+mine coming to live here."
+
+"I wonder," said John, "that the people who own it never live here."
+
+"The Prince of Zelt-Neuminster?" said she. "No,--he doesn't like the
+Italian Government. Since Lombardy passed from Austria to Italy, the
+family have entirely given up staying at Sant' Alessina."
+
+"In those circumstances," said John, "practical-minded people, I should
+think, would get rid of the place."
+
+"Oh," said she, laughing, "the Prince, in some ways, is practical-minded
+enough. He has this great collection of Italian paintings, which, by
+Italian law, he mayn't remove from Italian soil; and if he were to get
+rid of Sant' Alessina, where could he house them? In other ways, though,
+he is perhaps not so practical. He is one of those Utopians who believe
+that the present Kingdom of Italy must perforce before long make
+shipwreck; and I think he holds on to Sant' Alessina in the dream of
+coming here in triumph, and grandly celebrating that event."
+
+"I see," said John, nodding. "That is a beautiful ideal."
+
+"Good-bye," said she, flashing a last quick smile into his eyes; and she
+moved away, down a garden path, towards the pavilion beyond the clock.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+And now, I should have imagined, for a single session, (and that an
+initial one), he had had enough. I should have expected him to spend the
+remainder of his day, a full man, in thankful tranquillity, in agreeable
+retrospective rumination. But no. Indulgence, it soon appeared, had but
+whetted his appetite. After a quarter-hour of walking about the garden,
+during which his jumble of sensations and impressions,--her soft-glowing
+eyes, her soft-drooping hair, under her wine-red hat; her slender
+figure, in its fluttering summery muslin, and the faint, faint perfume
+(like a far-away memory of rose-leaves) that hovered near her; her
+smile, and the curves, when she smiled, of her rose-red lips, and the
+gleam of her snow-white teeth; her laugh, her voice, her ivory voice;
+her pretty crisp-cut English; her appreciation of Annunziata, her
+disquieting presentiments concerning her; and his deep satisfaction in
+her propinquity, her "companionship;" and the long shaded fragrant
+avenue, and the bird-songs, and the gentle weather,--after a
+quarter-hour of anything but thankful tranquillity, a quarter-hour of
+unaccountable excitement and exaltation, during which his jumble of
+impressions and sensations settled themselves, from ebullition, into
+some sort of quiescence, he began to grow restlessly aware that, so far
+from having had enough, he had had just a sufficient taste to make him
+hunger keenly for more and more. It was ridiculous, but he couldn't help
+it. And as there seemed no manner of likelihood that his hunger would
+soon be fed, it was trying. At the best, he could not reasonably hope to
+see her again before to-morrow; and even then--? What ghost of a reason
+had he to hope that even then he could renew their conversation? He had
+owed that to-day to the bare hazard of their ways lying together.
+To-morrow, very likely, at the best, he might get a bow and a smile.
+Very likely it might be days before he should again have anything
+approaching a real talk with her. And what--a new consideration, that
+struck a sudden terror to his soul--what if her visit to Frau Brandt
+was to be a short one? What if to-morrow even, she were to depart? "Her
+very ease in talking with me, a stranger, may quite well have been due
+to the fact that she knew she would never see me again," he argued. ...
+So he was working himself into a fine state of despondency, and the
+world was rapidly being resolved into dust and ashes, when Heaven sent
+him a diversion. Nay, indeed, Heaven sent him two diversions.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+There was a sound of wheels on gravel, of horses' hoofs on stone, and
+Lady Blanchemain's great high-swung barouche, rolling superbly forth
+from the avenue, drew up before the Castle, Lady Blanchemain
+herself, big and soft and sumptuous in silks and laces, under a
+much-befurbelowed, much-befringed, lavender-hued silk sunshade,
+occupying the seat of honour. John hastened across the garden, hat in
+hand, to welcome her.
+
+"Jump in," she commanded, with a smile, and an imperious sweep of the
+arm. "I have come to take you for a drive."
+
+The footman (proud man) held open the door, and John jumped in. But just
+as the footman (with an air) had closed the door behind him, and before
+the coachman had touched up his horses, there came a rhythm of running
+footsteps, and the voice of Annunziata called, insistently, "Prospero!
+Prospero!" Then, all out of breath, her pale cheeks pink, her curls in
+disarray, Annunziata arrived beside the carriage, and, no wise abashed
+by that magnificent equipage, nor by the magnificent old lady throning
+in it, (no wise abashed, but, from the roundness of her eyes, a good
+deal surprised and vastly curious), she explained, gasping, "A
+telegram," and held up to John a straw-coloured envelope.
+
+"Thank you," said he, taking it, and waving a friendly hand. "But you
+should not run so fast," he admonished her, with concern.
+
+Whereupon the carriage drove off, Annunziata standing and watching,
+always round-eyed, till it was out of sight.
+
+"What an interesting-looking child!" said Lady Blanchemain.
+
+"Yes," said John. "I should have liked to introduce her to you."
+
+"Who is she?" asked the lady.
+
+"She's the private detective I told you of. She's my affinity. She's the
+young limb o' mischief for whom I ravaged your stores of marchpane.
+She's the niece of the parroco."
+
+"Hum!" said Lady Blanchemain. "Why does she call you--what was
+it?--Prospero?"
+
+"She's an optimist. She's a bird of good omen," answered John. "She's
+satisfied herself, by consulting an oracle, that Fortune has favours up
+her sleeve for me. She encouragingly anticipates them by calling me
+Prospero before the fact."
+
+Lady Blanchemain softly laughed. "That's very nice of her, and very
+wise. Aren't you going to read your telegram?"
+
+"I didn't know whether you'd permit," said John.
+
+"Oh pray," said she, with a gesture.
+
+The carriage by this time had left the garden, and the coachman had
+turned his horses' heads northwards, away from the lake, towards the
+Alps, where their snowy summits, attenuated by the sun and the distance
+and the blue air, looked like vapours rising into the sky.
+
+John tore open his envelope, read, frowned, and uttered a half-stifled
+ejaculation,--something that sounded rather like "I say!" and vaguely
+like "By Jove!"
+
+"No bad news, I hope?" inquired the lady, sympathetic, and trying to
+speak as if she didn't know what curiosity meant.
+
+"Excellent news, on the contrary," said John, "but a bolt from the
+blue." And he offered her the paper.
+
+"Am on my way to Rome," she read aloud. "Could I come to you for a day?
+Winthorpe, Hotel Cavour, Milan."--"Winthorpe?" She pursed her lips, as
+one tasting something. "I don't know the name. Who is he? What's his
+County?" she demanded,--she, who carried the County Families in her
+head.
+
+John chuckled. "He hasn't got a County--he's only an American," he said,
+pronouncing that genial British formula with intention.
+
+"Oh," sighed Lady Blanchemain, her expectations dashed; and drawing in
+her skirts, she sank a little deeper into her corner.
+
+"He hasn't got a County," repeated John. "But he's far and away the
+greatest swell I know."
+
+"A swell? An American?" Lady Blanchemain pressed down her lips, and gave
+a movement to her shoulders.
+
+"An aristocrat, a patrician," said John.
+
+"Fudge!" said Lady Blanchemain. "Americans and Australians--they're
+anything you like, but they're never that."
+
+John laughed. "I adore," he said, "our light and airy British way of
+tarring Americans and Australians with the same brush,--the descendants
+of transported convicts and the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers!"
+
+"Is your Winthorpe man a descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers?" asked Lady
+Blanchemain, dryly.
+
+"Indeed he is," said John. "He's descended from ten separate individuals
+who made the first voyage in the _Mayflower_. And he holds, by-the-by,
+intact, the lands that were ceded to his family by the Indians the year
+after. That ought to recommend him to your Ladyship,--an unbroken tenure
+of nearly three hundred years."
+
+"Old acres," her ladyship admitted, cautiously, "always make for
+respectability."
+
+"Besides," John carelessly threw out, "he's a baronet."
+
+Lady Blanchemain sat up. "A baronet?" she said. "An American?"
+
+"Alas, yes," said John, "a mere American. And one of the earliest
+creations,--by James the First, no less. His patent dates from 1612. But
+he doesn't use the title. He regards it, he pretends, as merged in a
+higher dignity."
+
+"What higher dignity?" asked the lady, frowning.
+
+"That of an American citizen, he says," chuckled John.
+
+"Brrr!" she breathed, impatient.
+
+"And moreover," John gaily continued, "besides being descended from the
+Pilgrim Fathers, he's descended in other lines from half the peerage of
+Seventeenth Century England. And to top up with, if you please, he's
+descended from Alfred the Great. He's only an American, but he can show
+a clear descent bang down from Alfred the Great! I think the most
+exquisite, the most subtle and delicate pleasure I have ever experienced
+has been to see English people, people of yesterday, cheerfully
+patronizing him."
+
+"You've enlarged my sphere of knowledge," said Lady Blanchemain, grimly.
+"I had never known that there was blood in America. Does this prodigious
+personage talk through his nose?"
+
+"Worse luck, no," said John. "I wish he did--a little--just enough to
+smack of his soil, to possess local colour. No, he talks for all the
+world like you or me,--which exposes him to compliments in England. 'An
+American? Really?' our tactful people cry, when he avows his nationality
+'Upon my word, I should never have suspected it.'"
+
+"I suppose, with all the rest, he's rich?" asked Lady Blanchemain.
+
+"Immensely," assented John. "Speaking of Fortune and her favours, she's
+withheld none from him."
+
+"Then he's good-looking, too?"
+
+"He looks like a Man," said John.
+
+"Hum!" said Lady Blanchemain, moving. "If _I_ had received a wire from a
+creature of such proportions, I've a feeling I'd answer it."
+
+"I've a very similar feeling myself," laughed John. "When we turn back,
+if you think your coachman can be persuaded to stop at the telegraph
+office in the village, I'll give my feeling effect."
+
+"I think we might turn back now," said Lady Blanchemain. "It's getting
+rather gloomy here." She looked round, with a little shudder, and then
+gave the necessary order. The valley had narrowed to what was scarcely
+more than a defile between two dark and rugged hillsides,
+--pine-covered hillsides that shut out the sun, smiting the air with
+chill and shadow, and turning the Rampio, whose brawl seemed somehow to
+increase the chill, turning the sparkling, sportive Rampio to the colour
+of slate. "It puts one in mind of brigands," she said, with another
+little shudder. But though the air was chilly, it was wonderfully,
+keenly fragrant with the incense of the pines.
+
+"Well," she asked, when they were facing homewards, "and your woman?
+What of her?"
+
+"Nothing," said John. "Or, anyhow, very little." (It would be extremely
+pleasant, he felt suddenly, to talk of her; but at the same time he felt
+an extreme reluctance to let his pleasure be seen.)
+
+"But your private detective?" said Lady Blanchemain. "Weren't her
+investigations fruitful?"
+
+"Not very," said he. "She learnt little beyond her name and age."
+
+"And what _is_ her name?" asked the lady.
+
+"Her name is Maria Dolores," answered John, (and he experienced a secret
+joy, strange to him, in pronouncing it).
+
+"Maria Dolores?" said Lady Blanchemain, (and he experienced a secret joy
+in hearing it). "Maria Dolores--what?"
+
+"My detective didn't discover her Pagan name," said John.
+
+"So that you are still in doubt whether she's the daughter of a miller?"
+Lady Blanchemain raised her eyebrows.
+
+"Oh, no: I think she's a miller's daughter safely enough," said he. "But
+she's an elaborately chiselled and highly polished one. Her voice is
+like ivory and white velvet; and to hear her speak English is a
+revelation of the hidden beauties of that language."
+
+"Hum!" said Lady Blanchemain, eyeing him. "So you've advanced to the
+point of talking with her?"
+
+"Well," answered John, weighing his words, "I don't know whether I can
+quite say that. But accident threw us together for a minute or two this
+afternoon, and we could scarcely do less, in civility, than exchange the
+time of day."
+
+"And are you in love with her?" asked Lady Blanchemain.
+
+"I wonder," said he. "What do _you_ think? Is it possible for a man to
+be in love with a woman he's seen only half a dozen times all told, and
+spoken with never longer than a minute or two at a stretch?"
+
+"_Was_ it only a minute or two--_really_?" asked Lady Blanchemain,
+wooing his confidence with a glance.
+
+"No," said John. "It was probably ten minutes, possibly fifteen. But
+they passed so quickly, it's really nearer the truth to describe them as
+one or two."
+
+Lady Blanchemain shifted her sunshade, and screwed herself half round,
+so as to face him, her soft old eyes full of smiling scrutiny and
+suspicion.
+
+"I never can tell whether or not you're serious," she complained. "If
+you _are_ serious,--well, _à quand le mariage_?"
+
+"The marriage?" cried John. "How could I marry her? Such a thing's out
+of all question.
+
+"Why?" asked she.
+
+"A miller's daughter!" said John. "Would you have me marry the daughter
+of a miller?"
+
+"You said yourself yesterday--" the lady reminded him.
+
+"Ah, yes," said he. "But night brings counsel."
+
+"If she's well educated," said Lady Blanchemain, "if she's well-bred,
+what does it matter about her father? Though a nobody in Austria, where
+nothing counts but quarterings, he's probably what we'd call a gentleman
+in England. Suppose he's a barrister? Or the editor of a newspaper?
+Or--"
+
+She paused, thoughtful-eyed, to think of respectable professions. At
+last she gave up the effort.
+
+"Well, anything decent," she concluded, "so long as he had plenty of
+money."
+
+"Ah," said John, sadly, and with perhaps mock humility. "If he had
+plenty of money, he'd never consent to his daughter marrying a son of
+poverty like me."
+
+"Pooh! For a title?" cried Lady Blanchemain. "Besides, you have
+prospects. Isn't your name Prospero?"
+
+"I have precious little faith in oracles," said John.
+
+"I advise you to have more," said Lady Blanchemain, with a smile that
+seemed occult.
+
+And now her carriage entered the village, and she put him down at the
+telegraph office.
+
+"Don't wait," said John. "The walk from here to the Castle is nothing,
+and it would take you out of your way."
+
+"Well, good-bye, then," said she. "And cultivate more faith in
+oracles--when they're auspicious."
+
+Alone, she drew from some recondite fold of her many draperies a letter,
+an unsealed letter, which she opened, spread out, and proceeded to read.
+It was a long letter in her ladyship's own handsome, high-bred,
+old-fashioned handwriting; and it was addressed to Messrs. Farrow,
+Bernscot, and Tisdale, Solicitors, Lincoln's Inn Fields, London. She
+read it twice through, and at last (with a smile that seemed occult)
+restored it to its envelope. "Stop at the Post Office," she said to her
+coachman, as they entered Roccadoro; and to her footman, giving him the
+letter, "Have that registered, please."
+
+Annunziata lay in wait for John in the garden. She ran up, and seized
+him by the arm. Then, skipping beside him, as he walked on, "Who was
+she? Where did she come from? Where did she take you? Whom was the
+telegram from?" she demanded in a breath, nestling her curls against his
+coat-sleeve.
+
+"_Piano, piano_," remonstrated John. "One question at a time. Now, begin
+again."
+
+"Whom was the telegram from?" she obeyed, beginning at the end.
+
+"Ah," said he, "the telegram was from _my_ friend Prospero. He's coming
+here to-morrow. We must ask your uncle whether he can give him a bed."
+
+"And the old lady?" pursued Annunziata. "Who was she?"
+
+"The old lady was my fairy godmother," said John, building better than
+he knew.
+
+
+
+
+PART FOURTH
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Pacing together backwards and forwards, as they talked, John and his
+friend Winthorpe presented a striking and perhaps interesting contrast.
+John was tall, but Winthorpe seemed a good deal taller--though, (trifles
+in these matters looming so large), had actual measurements been taken,
+I dare say half an inch would have covered the difference. John was lean
+and sinewy, but rounded off at the joints, and of a pliant carriage, so
+that it never occurred to you to think of him as _thin_. Winthorpe's
+spare figure, spare and angular, with its greater height, held
+unswervingly to the plane of the perpendicular, appeared absolutely to
+be constructed of nothing but bone and tendon. John's head, with its
+yellow hair, its curly beard verging towards red, its pink skin, and
+blue eyes full of laughter, might have served a painter as a model for
+the head of Mirth. Winthorpe's,--with brown hair cropped close, and
+showing the white of the scalp; clean-shaven, but of a steely tint where
+the razor had passed; with a marked jaw-bone and a salient square chin;
+with a high-bridged determined nose, and a white forehead rising
+vertical over thick black eyebrows, and rather deep-set grey
+eyes,--well, clap a steeple-crowned hat upon it, and you could have
+posed him for one of his own Puritan ancestors. The very clothes of the
+men carried on their unlikeness,--John's loose blue flannels and red
+sailor's knot, careless-seeming, but smart in their effect, and showing
+him careful in a fashion of his own; Winthorpe's black tie and dark
+tweeds, as correct as Savile Row could turn them out, yet somehow, by
+the way he wore them, proclaiming him immediately a man who never gave
+two thoughts to his dress. If, however, Winthorpe's face was the face of
+a Puritan, it was the face of a Puritan with a sense of humour--the
+lines about the mouth were clearly the footprints of smiles. It seemed
+the face of a sensitive Puritan, as well, and (maugre that high-bridged
+nose) of a gentle--the light in his clear grey eyes was a kindly and
+gentle light. After all, Governor Bradford, as his writings
+show,--though he tried hard, perhaps, not to let them show it--was a
+Puritan with a sense of humour; John Alden and Priscilla were surely
+sensitive and gentle: and Winthorpe was descended from Governor
+Bradford, and from John Alden and Priscilla. The two friends walked
+backwards and forwards in the great open space before the Castle, and
+talked. They had not met for nearly two years, and had plenty to talk
+about.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Seated at one of the open windows of the pavilion beyond the clock,
+Maria Dolores (in a pale green confection of I know not what airy, filmy
+tissue) looked down, and somewhat vaguely watched them,--herself
+concealed by the netted curtain, which, according to Italian usage, was
+hung across the casement, to mitigate the heat and shut out insects. She
+watched them at first vaguely, and only from time to time, for the rest
+going on with some needlework she had in her lap. But by-and-by she
+dropped her needlework altogether, and her watching became continuous
+and absorbed.
+
+"What a singular-looking man!" she thought, studying Winthorpe. "What an
+ascetic-looking man! He looks like an early Christian martyr. He looks
+like a priest. I believe he _is_ a priest. English priests," she
+remembered, "when they travel, often dress as laymen. Yes, he is a
+priest, and a terribly austere one--I shouldn't like to go to him for
+confession. But in spite of his austerity, he seems to be
+extraordinarily happy about something just at present. That light in his
+eyes,--it is almost a light of ecstasy. It is a light I have never seen
+in any eyes, save those of priests and nuns."
+
+Winthorpe, while that "almost ecstatic" light shone in his eyes, had
+been speaking.
+
+Now, as he paused, John, with a glance of gay astonishment, halted, and
+turned so as to face him. John's lips moved, and it was perfectly plain
+that he was exclaiming, delightedly, "Really? _Really_?"
+
+Winthorpe joyously nodded: whereupon John held out both hands, got hold
+of his friend's, and, his pink face jubilant, shook them with tremendous
+heartiness.
+
+"The priest has received advancement--he is probably to be made a
+bishop," inferred Maria Dolores; "and Signor Prospero is congratulating
+him."
+
+The men resumed their walk; but for quite a minute John kept his hand on
+Winthorpe's shoulder, and again and again gently patted it, murmuring,
+"I am so glad, so immensely glad." Maria Dolores was quite sure that
+this was what he murmured, for, though no word could reach her, John's
+beaming face spoke louder than his voice.
+
+At last John let his hand drop, and, eyebrows raised a little, asked a
+question.
+
+"But how did it happen? But tell me all about it," was what he seemed to
+say.
+
+And Winthorpe (always with something of that ecstatic light in his eyes)
+proceeded to answer. But it was a longish story, and lasted through half
+a dozen of their forward and backward ambulations. Apparently,
+furthermore, it was a story which, as it developed, became less and less
+agreeable to the mind of John; for his face, at first all awake with
+interest, all aglow with pleasure, gradually sobered, gradually
+darkened, took on a frown, expressed dissent, expressed disapprobation,
+till, finally, with an impatient movement, he interrupted, and
+began--speaking rapidly, heatedly--to protest, to remonstrate.
+
+"Ah," thought Maria Dolores, "the priest is to be made a bishop, sure
+enough,--but a missionary bishop. It isn't for nothing that he looks
+like an early Christian martyr. He is going to some outlandish, savage
+part of the world, where he will be murdered by the natives, or die of
+fever or loneliness. He is a man who has listened to the Counsels of
+Perfection. But his unascetic friend Prospero (one would say June
+remonstrating with December) can't bring himself to like it."
+
+John remonstrated, protested, argued. Winthorpe, calmly, smilingly,
+restated his purpose and his motives. John pleaded, implored, appealed
+(so the watcher read his gesture) to earth, to heaven. Winthorpe took
+his arm, and calmly, smilingly, tried to soothe, tried to convince him.
+John drew his arm free, and, employing it to add force and
+persuasiveness to his speech, renewed his arguments, pointed out how
+unnecessary, inhuman, impossible the whole thing was. "It's monstrous.
+It's against all nature. There's no _reason_ in it. What does it _rhyme_
+with? It's wilfully going out of your way to seek, to create,
+wretchedness. My mind simply refuses to accept it." It was as if Maria
+Dolores could hear the words. But Winthorpe, calm and smiling, would not
+be moved. John shook his head, muttered, shrugged his shoulders, threw
+up his hands, muttered again. "Was ever such pig-headed obstinacy! Was
+ever such arbitrary, voluntary blindness! I give you up, for a perverse,
+a triple-pated madman!" And so, John muttering and frowning, Winthorpe
+serenely smiling, reiterating, they passed round the corner of the
+Castle buildings, and were lost to Maria Dolores' view.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+That afternoon, seated on the moss, under a tall eucalyptus tree near to
+Frau Brandt's pavilion, Maria Dolores received a visit from Annunziata.
+
+Annunziata's pale little face was paler, her big grave eyes were graver,
+even than their wont. She nodded her head, slowly, portentously; and her
+glance was heavy with significance.
+
+Maria Dolores smiled. "What is the matter?" she cheerfully inquired.
+
+"Ah," sighed Annunziata, deeply, with another portentous head-shake, "I
+wish I knew."
+
+Maria Dolores laughed. "Sit down," she suggested, making room beside her
+on the moss, "and try to think."
+
+Annunziata sat down, curled herself up. "Something has happened to
+Prospero," she said, _de profundis_.
+
+"Oh?" asked Maria Dolores. "What?" She seemed heartlessly cheerful, and
+even rather amused.
+
+"Ah," sighed Annunziata, "that is what I wish I knew. He has had a
+friend to pass the day with him."
+
+"Yes?" said Maria Dolores. "I expect I saw his friend walking with him
+this morning?"
+
+"_Già_," said Annunziata. "They have been walking about all day. _His_
+friend Prospero he calls him. But he doesn't look very prosperous. He
+looks like a slate-pencil. He is long and thin, and dark and cold, and
+hard, just like a slate-pencil. He would not stay the night, though we
+had a bed prepared for him. He is going to Rome, and Prospero has driven
+him to the railway station at Cortello. I hate him," wound up
+Annunziata, simply.
+
+"Mercy!" exclaimed Maria Dolores, opening her eyes. "Why do you hate
+him?"
+
+"Because he must have said or done something very unkind to Prospero,"
+answered Annunziata. "Oh, you should see him. He is so sad--so sad and
+so angry. He keeps scowling, and shaking his head, and saying things in
+English, which I cannot understand, but I am sure they are sad things
+and angry things. And he would not eat any dinner,--no, not that much,"
+(Annunziata measured off an inch on her finger), "he who always eats a
+great deal,--_eh, ma molto, molto_," and, separating her hands, she
+measured off something like twenty inches in the air.
+
+Maria Dolores couldn't help laughing a little at this. But afterwards
+she said, on a key consolatory, "Ah, well, he has gone away now, so let
+us hope your friend Prospero will promptly recover his accustomed
+appetite."
+
+"Yes," said Annunziata, "I hope so. But oh, that old slate-pencil man,
+how I hate him! I would like to--_uhhh!_" She clenched her little white
+fist, and shook it, threateningly, vehemently, while her eyes fiercely
+flashed. ... Next instant, however, her mien entirely changed. Like a
+light extinguished, all the fierceness went out of her face, making way
+for what seemed pain and terror. "There," she cried, pain and terror in
+her voice, "I have offended God. Oh, I am so sorry, so sorry. My sin, my
+sin, my sin," she murmured, bowing her head, and thrice striking her
+breast.
+
+"I take back every word I said. I do not hate him. I would not hurt
+him--I would not even stick a pin in him--if I had him at my mercy.
+No--I would do anything I could to help him. I would give him anything I
+had that he could want. I would give him my coral rosary. I would give
+him"--she hesitated, struggled, and at last, drawing a deep breath,
+gritting her teeth, in supreme renunciation--"yes, I would give him my
+tame kid," she forced herself to pronounce, with a kind of desperate
+firmness. "But see," she wailed, her little white brow a mesh of painful
+wrinkles, "it is all no good. God is still angry. Oh, what shall I do?"
+And, to the surprise and distress of Maria Dolores, she burst into a
+sudden passion of tears, sobbing, sobbing, with that abandonment of
+grief which only children know.
+
+"My dear, my dear," exclaimed Maria Dolores, drawing her to her. "My
+dearest, you mustn't cry like that. Dear little Annunziata. What is it?
+Why do you cry so, dear one? Answer me. Tell me."
+
+But Annunziata only buried her face in Maria Dolores' sleeve, and
+moaned, while long, tremulous convulsions shook her frail little body.
+Maria Dolores put both arms about her, hugged her close, and laid her
+cheek upon her hair.
+
+"Darling Annunziata, don't cry. Why should you cry so, dearest? God is
+not angry with you. Why should you think that God is angry with you? God
+loves you, darling. Everyone loves you. There, there--dearest--don't
+cry. Sweet one, dear one."
+
+Transitions, with Annunziata, were sometimes inexplicably rapid. All at
+once her sobbing ceased; she looked up, and smiled, smiled radiantly,
+from a face that was wet and glistening with tears. "Thanks be to God,"
+she piously exulted; "God is not angry any more."
+
+"Of course He isn't," said Maria Dolores, tightening her hug, and
+touching Annunziata's curls lightly with her lips. "But He was never
+angry. What made you think that God was angry?"
+
+Annunziata's big eyes widened. "Didn't you notice?" she asked, in a
+hushed voice, amazed.
+
+"No," wondered Maria Dolores. "What was there to notice?"
+
+"He made them draw a cloud over the sun," Annunziata whispered. "Didn't
+you notice that when I said I would like to--when I said what I said
+about that friend of Prospero's--just then they drew a cloud across the
+sun? That is a sign that God is angry. The sun, you know, is the window
+in Heaven through which God looks down on the world, and through which
+the light of Heaven shines on the world. And when the window is open, we
+feel happy and thankful, and wish to sing and laugh. But when we have
+done something to make God angry with us, then He sends angels to draw
+clouds over the window, so that we may be shut out of His sight, and the
+light of Heaven may be shut off from us. And then we are lonely and
+cold, and we could quarrel with anything, even with the pigs. God wishes
+to show us how bad it would be always to be shut off from His sight. But
+now they have drawn the cloud away, so God is not angry any more. I made
+a good act of contrition, and He has forgiven me."
+
+Maria Dolores smiled, but under her smile there was a look of
+seriousness, a look of concern.
+
+"My dear," she said smiling, and looking concerned, "you should try to
+control your vivid little imagination. If every time a cloud crosses the
+sun, you are going to assume the responsibility for it, and to fancy
+that you have offended God, I'm afraid you'll have rather an agitated
+life."
+
+"Oh, no; not _every_ time," exclaimed Annunziata, and she was manifestly
+on the point of making a fine distinction, when abruptly the current of
+her ideas was diverted. "Sh-h! There comes Prospero," she cried,
+starting up. "I can see the top of his white hat above the rhododendron
+bushes. He has driven his friend to Cortello, and come home. I must run
+away, or he will see that I've been crying. Don't tell him," she begged,
+putting her finger on her lips; and she set off running, towards the
+presbytery, just as John stepped forth from behind the long hedge of
+rhododendrons.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+John stepped forth from behind the rhododendrons, with a kind of
+devil-may-care, loose, aimless gait, the brim of his Panama pulled
+brigandishly down over one ear, his hands in the pockets of his coat,
+his head bent, his brow creased, his eyes sombre, every line and fibre
+of his person advertising him the prey of morose disgust. But when he
+saw Maria Dolores, he hastily straightened up, unpocketed his hands,
+took off his hat (giving it a flap that set the brim at a less truculent
+angle), and smiled. And when, the instant after, he caught sight of the
+flying form of Annunziata, his smile turned into a glance of wonder.
+
+"What is the matter with Annunziata? Why is she running with all her
+legs like that?" he asked.
+
+Maria Dolores had the tiniest catch of laughter. "She is running away
+from you," she answered.
+
+"From _me_?" marvelled John. "_Je suis donc un foudre de guerre?_ What
+on earth is she running away from me for?"
+
+Maria Dolores smiled mysteriously.
+
+"Ah," she said, "she asked me not to tell you. I am in the delicate
+position of confidante."
+
+"And therefore I hope you'll tell me with the less reluctance," said
+John, urbanely unprincipled. "A confidante always betrays her confidence
+to some one,--that's the part of the game that makes it worth while."
+
+Maria Dolores' smile deepened.
+
+"In that pale green frock, on that bank of dark-green moss, with her
+complexion and her hair,--by Jove, how stunning she is!" thought John,
+in a commotion.
+
+"Well," she said, "Annunziata ran away because she didn't want you to
+see that she'd been crying."
+
+John raised his eyebrows, the blue eyes under them becoming expressive
+of dismay.
+
+"Crying?" he echoed. "The poor little kiddie! What had she been crying
+about!"
+
+"That is a long story, and involves some of her peculiar theological
+tenets," said Maria Dolores. "But, in a single word, about your
+friend."
+
+John's eyebrows descended to their normal level, and drew together.
+
+"Crying about my friend? What friend?" he puzzled.
+
+"Your friend the priest--the man who has been passing the day here with
+you," explained Maria Dolores.
+
+John gave a start, threw back his head, and eyed her with astonishment.
+
+"That is extraordinary," he exclaimed.
+
+"What?" asked she, lightly glancing up.
+
+"That you should call him my friend the priest," said John, wagging a
+bewildered head.
+
+"Why? Isn't he a priest? He has all the air of one," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"No; he's an American millionaire," said John, succinctly.
+
+Maria Dolores moved in her place, and laughed.
+
+"Dear me!" she said, "I did strike wide of the mark. An American
+millionaire should cultivate a less deceptive appearance. With that
+thin, shaven face of his, and that look of an early Christian martyr in
+his eyes, and the dark clothes he wears, wherever he goes he's sure to
+be mistaken for a priest."
+
+"Yes," said John, with a kind of grimness; "that's what's extraordinary.
+He comes of a long line of bigoted Protestants, he's a reincarnation of
+some of his stern old Puritan forebears, and you find that he looks like
+their pet abomination, a Romish priest. Well, you have a prophetic eye."
+
+Maria Dolores gazed up inquiringly. "A prophetic eye?" she questioned.
+
+"I merely mean," said John, with thaumaturgic airiness, "that the man is
+on his way to Rome to study for the priesthood." And he gave a
+thaumaturgic toss to his bearded chin.
+
+"Oh!" cried Maria Dolores, and leaned back against her eucalyptus tree,
+and laughed again.
+
+John, however, dejectedly shook his head, and gloomed.
+
+"Laugh if you will," he said, "though it seems to me as far as possible
+from a laughing matter, and I think Annunziata chose the better part
+when she cried."
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Maria Dolores, perhaps a trifle stiffly. "I
+was only laughing at the coincidence of my having supposed him to be a
+priest, and then learning that, though he isn't, he is going to become
+one. I was not laughing at the fact itself. Nor was it," she added, her
+stiffness leaving her, and a little glimmer of amusement taking its
+place, "that fact which made Annunziata cry."
+
+"I dare say not," responded John, "seeing that she couldn't possibly
+have known it. But it might well have done so. It's enough to bring
+tears to the eyes of a brazen image." He angrily jerked his shoulders.
+
+"What?" cried Maria Dolores, surprised, rebukeful. "That a man is to
+become a holy priest?"
+
+"Oh, no," said John. "That fact alone, detached from special
+circumstances, might be a subject for rejoicing. But the fact that this
+particular man, _in_ his special circumstances, is to become a
+priest--well, I simply have no words to express my feeling." He threw
+out his arms, in a gesture of despair. "I'm simply sick with rage and
+pity. I could gnash my teeth and rend my garments."
+
+"Mercy!" cried Maria Dolores, stirring. "What are the special
+circumstances?"
+
+"Oh, it's a grisly history," said John. "It's a tale of the wanton,
+ruthless, needless, purposeless sacrifice of two lives. It's his old
+black icy Puritan blood. Winthorpe--that's his name--had for years been
+a freethinker, far too intellectual and enlightened, and that sort of
+thing, you know, to believe any such old wives' tale as the Christian
+Religion. He and I used to have arguments, tremendous ones, in which, of
+course, neither in the least shook the other. Darwin and Spencer, with a
+dash of his native Emerson, were religion enough for him. Then this
+morning he arrived here, and said, 'Congratulate me. A month ago I was
+received into the Church.'"
+
+Maria Dolores looked up, animated, her dark eyes sparkling.
+
+"How splendid!" she said.
+
+"Yes," agreed John, "so I thought. 'Congratulate me,' he said. I should
+think I did congratulate him,--with all my heart and soul. But then,
+naturally, I asked him how it had happened, what had brought it to
+pass."
+
+"Yes--?" prompted Maria Dolores, as he paused.
+
+"Well," said John, his face hardening, "he thereupon proceeded to tell
+me in his quiet way, with his cool voice (it's like smooth-flowing cold
+water), absolutely the most inhuman story I have ever had to keep my
+patience and listen to."
+
+"What was the story?" asked Maria Dolores.
+
+"If you can credit such inhumanity, it was this," answered John. "It
+seems that he fell in love--with a girl in Boston, where he lives. And
+what's more, and worse, the girl fell in love with him. So there they
+were, engaged. But she was a Catholic, and his state of unbelief was a
+cause of great grief to her. So she pleaded with him, and persuaded,
+till, merely to comfort her, and without the faintest suspicion that his
+scepticism could be weakened, he promised to give the Catholic position
+a thorough reconsideration, to read certain books, and to put himself
+under instruction with a priest: which he did. Which he did, if you
+please, with the result, to his own unutterable surprise, that one fine
+day he woke up and discovered that he'd been convinced, that he
+_believed_."
+
+"Yes?" said Maria Dolores, eagerly. "Yes--? And then? And the girl?"
+
+"Ah," said John, with a groan, "the girl That's the pity of it. That's
+where his black old Puritan blood comes in. Blood? It isn't blood--it's
+some fluid form of stone--it's flint dissolved in vinegar. The girl!
+Mind you, she loved him, they were engaged to be married. Well, he went
+to her, and said, 'I have been converted. I believe in the Christian
+religion--your religion. But I can't believe a thing like that, and go
+on living as I lived when I didn't believe it,--go on living as if it
+weren't true, or didn't matter. It does matter--it matters
+supremely--it's the only thing in the world that matters. I can't
+believe it, and _marry_--marry, and live in tranquil indifference to it.
+No, I must put aside the thought of marriage, the thought of personal
+happiness. I must sell all I have and give it to the poor, take up my
+cross and follow Him. I am going to Rome to study for the priesthood.'
+Imagine," groaned John, stretching out his hands, "_imagine_ talking
+like that to a woman you are supposed to love, to a woman who loves
+you." And he wrathfully ground his heel into the earth.
+
+Maria Dolores looked serious.
+
+"After all, he had to obey his conscience," she said. "After all, he was
+logical, he was consistent."
+
+"Oh, his conscience! Oh, consistency!" cried John, with an intolerant
+fling of the body. "At bottom it's nothing better than common
+self-indulgence, as I took the liberty of telling him to his face. It's
+the ardour of the convert, acting upon that acid solution of flint which
+takes the place of blood in his veins, and causing sour puritanical
+impulses, which (like any other voluptuary) he immediately gives way to.
+It's nothing better than unbridled passion. Conscience, indeed! Where
+was his conscience when it came to _her_? Think of that poor girl--that
+poor pale girl--who _loved_ him. Oh, Mother of Mercy!"
+
+He moved impatiently three steps to the left, three steps to the right,
+beating the palm of one hand with the back of the other.
+
+"What did she do? How did she take it?" asked Maria Dolores.
+
+"What she ought to have done," said John, between his teeth, "was to
+scratch his eyes out. What she did do, as he informed me with a seraphic
+countenance, was not merely to approve of everything he said, but to
+determine to do likewise. So, while he's on his way to Rome, to get
+himself tonsured and becassocked, she's scrubbing the floors of an
+Ursuline convent, as a novice. And there are two lives spoiled." He
+shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Oh, no, no," contended Maria Dolores, earnestly, shaking her head, "not
+spoiled. On the contrary. It is sad, in a way, if you like, but it is
+very beautiful, it is heroic. Their love must have been a very beautiful
+love, that could lead them to such self-sacrifice. Two lives given to
+God."
+
+"Can't people give their lives to God without ceasing to _live_?" cried
+John. "If marriage is a sacrament, how can they better give their lives
+to God than by living sanely and sweetly in Christian marriage? But
+these people withdraw from life, renounce life, shirk and evade the life
+that God had prepared for them and was demanding of them. It's as bad as
+suicide. Besides, it implies such a totally perverted view of religion.
+Religion surely is given to us to help us to _live_, to show us _how_ to
+live, to enable us to meet the difficulties, emergencies,
+responsibilities of life. But these people look upon their religion as
+a mandate to turn their backs on the responsibilities of life, and
+scuttle away. And as for _love_! Well, she no doubt did love, poor lady.
+But Winthorpe! No. When a man loves he doesn't send his love into a
+convent, and go to Rome to get himself becassocked." He gave his head a
+nod of finality.
+
+"That, I fancy, is a question of temperament," said Maria Dolores. "Your
+friend has the ascetic temperament. And it does not by any means follow
+that he loves less because he resigns his love. What you call an inhuman
+story seems to me a wonderfully noble one. I saw your friend this
+morning, when he and you were walking together, and I said to myself,
+'That man looks as if he had listened to the Counsels of Perfection. His
+vocation shines through him.' I think you should reconcile yourself to
+his accepting it."
+
+"Well," said John, on the tone of a man ready to change the subject, "I
+owe him at least one good mark. His account of his 'heart-state' led me
+to examine my own, and I discovered that I am in love myself,--which is
+a useful thing to know."
+
+"Oh?" said Maria Dolores, with a little effect of reserve.
+
+"Yes," said John, nothing daunted, "though unlike his, mine is an
+unreciprocated flame, and unavowed."
+
+"Ah?" said Maria Dolores, reserved indeed, but not without an undertone
+of sympathy.
+
+"Yes," said John, playing with fire, and finding therein a heady mixture
+of fearfulness and joy. "The woman I love doesn't dream I love her, and
+dreams still less of loving me,--for which blessed circumstance may
+Heaven make me truly thankful."
+
+The sentiment sounding unlikely, Maria Dolores raised doubtful eyes.
+They shone into John's; his drank their light; and something violent
+happened in his bosom.
+
+"Oh--?" she said.
+
+"Yes," said he, thinking what adorable little hands she had, as they lay
+loosely clasped in her lap, thinking how warm they would be, and
+fragrant; thinking too what fun it was, this playing with fire, how
+perilous and exciting, and how egotistical he must seem to her, and how
+nothing on earth should prevent him from continuing the play. "Yes," he
+said, "it's a circumstance to be thankful for, because, like Winthorpe
+himself, though for different reasons, I'm unable to contemplate
+marriage." His voice sank sorrowfully, and he made a sorrowful movement.
+
+"Oh--?" said Maria Dolores, her sympathy becoming more explicit.
+
+"Winthorpe's too beastly puritanical--and I'm too beastly poor," said
+he.
+
+"Oh," she murmured. Her eyes softened; her sympathy deepened to
+compassion.
+
+"She must certainly put me down as the most complacent egotist in two
+hemispheres, so to regale her with unsolicited information about
+myself," thought John; "but surely it would need six hemispheres to
+produce another pair of eyes as beautiful as hers."--"Yes," he said, "I
+should be 'looking up' if I asked even a beggar-maid to marry me."
+
+Maria Dolores' beautiful eyes became thoughtful as well as
+compassionate.
+
+"But men who are poor work and earn money," she said, on the tone that
+young women adopt when the spirit moves them to preach to young men. And
+when the spirit does move them to that, things may be looked upon as
+having advanced an appreciable distance, the ball may be looked upon as
+rolling.
+
+"So I've heard," said John, his head in the clouds. "It must be dull
+business."
+
+Maria Dolores dimly smiled. "Do _you_ do no work?" she asked.
+
+"I've never had time," said John. "I've been too busy enjoying life."
+
+"Oh," said Maria Dolores, with the intonation of reproach.
+
+"Yes," said he, "enjoying the Humour, the Romance, the Beauty of
+it,--and combine the three together, make a chord of 'em, you get the
+Divinity. Or, to take a lower plane, the world's a stage, and life's the
+drama. I could never leave off watching and listening long enough to do
+any work."
+
+"But do you not wish to play a part in the drama, to be one of the
+actors?" asked his gentle homilist. "Have you no ambition?"
+
+"Not an atom," he easily confessed. "The part of spectator seems to me
+by far the pleasantest. To sit in the stalls and watch the incredible
+jumble-show, the reason-defying topsy-turvydom of it, the gorgeous,
+squalid, tearful, and mirthful pageantry, the reckless inconsequences,
+the flagrant impossibilities; to watch the Devil ramping up and down
+like a hungry lion, and to hear the young-eyed cherubim choiring from
+the skies: what better entertainment could the heart of man desire?"
+
+"But are we here merely to be entertained?" she sweetly preached, while
+John's blue eyes somewhat mischievously laughed, and he felt it hard
+that he couldn't stop her rose-red mouth with kisses. "Aren't we here to
+be, as the old-fashioned phrase goes, of use in the world? Besides, now
+that you are in love, surely you will never sit down weakly, and say, 'I
+am too poor to marry,' and so give up your love,--like your friend
+Winthorpe indeed, but for ignoble instead of noble motives. Surely you
+will set to work with determination, and earn money, and make it
+possible to marry. Or else your love must be a very poor affair." And
+her adorable little hands, as they lay ("like white lilies," thought
+John) upon the pale-green fabric of her gown, unclasped themselves,
+opened wide for an instant, showing the faint pink of their palms, then
+lightly again interlaced their fingers.
+
+He laughed. "You are delicious," he said to her fervently, in silence.
+"My love is all right," he said aloud. "I love her as much as it is
+humanly possible to love. I love her with passion, with tenderness; with
+worship, with longing; I love her with wonder; I love her with sighs,
+with laughter. I love her with all I have and with all I am. And I owe
+one to Winthorpe for having unwittingly opened my eyes to my condition.
+But earning money? I've a notion it's difficult. What could I do?"
+
+"Have you no profession?" she asked.
+
+"Not the ghost of one," said he, with nonchalance.
+
+"But is there no profession that appeals to you--for which you feel that
+you might have a taste?" Her dark eyes were very earnest.
+
+"Not the ghost of one," said he, dissembling his amusement.
+"Professions--don't they all more or less involve sitting shut up in
+stuffy offices, among pigeon-holes full of dusty and futile papers,
+doing tiresome tasks for the greater glory of other people, like a slave
+in the hold of a galley? No, if I'm to work, I must work at something
+that will keep me above decks--something that will keep me out of
+doors, in touch with the air and the earth. I might become an
+agricultural labourer,--but that's not very munificently paid; or a
+farmer,--but that would require perhaps more capital than I could
+command, and anyhow the profits are uncertain. I've an uncle who's a bit
+of a farmer, and year in, year out, I believe he makes a loss. 'Well,
+what's left? ... Ah, a gardener. I don't think I should half mind being
+a gardener."
+
+Maria Dolores looked as if she weren't sure whether or not to take him
+seriously.
+
+"A gardener? That's not very munificently paid either, is it?" she
+suggested, trying her ground.
+
+"Alas, I fear not," sighed John. Then he made a grave face. "But would
+you have me entirely mercenary? Money isn't everything here below."
+
+Maria Dolores smiled. She saw that for the moment at least he was not to
+be taken seriously.
+
+"True," she agreed, "though it ran in my mind that to earn money, so
+that you might marry, was your only motive for going to work at all."
+
+"I had forgotten that," said the light-minded fellow. "I was thinking of
+occupations that would keep one in touch with the earth. A gardener's
+occupation keeps him constantly in the charmingest possible sort of
+touch with her, and the most intimate."
+
+"Do they call the earth _her_ in English?" asked Maria Dolores. "I
+thought they said _it_."
+
+"I'm afraid, for the greater part, they do," answered John. "But it's
+barbarous of them, it's unfilial. Our brown old mother,--fancy
+begrudging her the credit of her sex! Our brown and green old mother;
+our kindly, bounteous mother; our radiant, our queenly mother, old, and
+yet perennially, radiantly young. Look at her now," he cried, circling
+the garden with his arm, and pointing to the farther landscape, "look at
+her, shining in her robes of pearl and gold, shining and smiling,--one
+would say a bride arrayed for the altar. Such is her infinite variety.
+Her infinite variety, her infinite abundance, the fragrance and the
+sweetness of her,--oh, I could fall upon my face and worship her, like a
+Pagan of Eld. The earth and all that grows and lives upon her, the
+blossoming tree, the singing bird,--I could build temples to her."
+
+"And the crawling snake?" put in Maria Dolores, a gleam at the bottom of
+her eyes.
+
+"The crawling snake," quickly retorted John, "serves a most useful
+purpose. He establishes the _raison d'être_ of man. Man and his heel are
+here to crush the serpent's head."
+
+Maria Dolores leaned back, softly laughing.
+
+"Your infatuation for the earth is so great," she said, "mightn't your
+lady-love, if she suspected it, be jealous?"
+
+"No," said John, "it is the earth that might be jealous, for, until I
+saw my lady-love, she was the undivided mistress of my heart. For the
+rest, my lady-love enjoys, upon this point, my entire confidence. I have
+kept nothing from her."
+
+"That is well," approved Maria Dolores. "And the sky and the sea," still
+softly laughing, she asked, "have they no place in your affections?
+
+"The sky is her tiring-maiden, and I love the sky for that," said John.
+"'Tis the sky that clothes her in her many-coloured raiment, and holds
+the light whereby her beauty is made manifest. And the sea is a jewel
+that she bears upon her bosom,--a magical jewel, whence, with the sky's
+aid, she draws the soft rain that is her scent and her cosmetic.
+'Fragrant the fertile earth after soft showers.' Do you know, I could
+almost forgive the dour and detestable Milton everything for the sake of
+those seven words. They show that in the sense of smell he had at least
+one attribute of humanity."
+
+Maria Dolores' dark eyes were quizzical.
+
+"The dour and detestable Milton?" she exclaimed. "Poor Milton! What has
+he done to merit such anathema?
+
+"It isn't what he has done, but what he was," said John. "That he was
+dour nobody will deny, dour and sour and inhuman. Ask those unfortunate,
+long-suffering daughters of his, if you doubt it. _They_ could tell you
+stories. But he was worse. He was a scribe and a Pharisee, a
+pragmatical, self-righteous, canting old scribe and Pharisee. And he was
+worse still, and still worse yet. He was--what seems to me to-day the
+worstest thing unhung--he was a Puritan. Like Winthorpe's, his blood was
+black and icy and vinegarish. Like Winthorpe--But there. I mustn't
+abuse Winthorpe any more, and I must try to forgive Milton. Milton wrote
+seven good words, and Winthorpe unwittingly opened a lover's eyes to his
+condition."
+
+He paused, and smiled down upon her, and his newly opened (and very
+blue) blue eyes said much. Her eyes were dreaming on the landscape,
+where it shone in pearl and gold. However, as she gave no sign of
+finding his conversation wearisome, he took heart, and continued.
+
+"For when he told me how he had put his love away, never again to see
+her, and how at that moment she would be scrubbing floors (or taking the
+discipline, perhaps?) in a convent of Ursulines, suddenly, and without
+any action of the will on my part, there rose before me the vision of a
+certain woman;--a woman I knew a little, admired immensely, very much
+liked, but didn't for an instant suppose I was seriously in love with.
+And involuntarily, with the vision of her before me, I asked myself
+whether, _mutatis mutandis_, I could have done as he had, and in a flash
+I saw that I could not,--that not for the wealth of Ormus and of Ind
+could I or would I give her up, if once I had her. So, by that token,
+and by the uncommon wrath with which his tale inflamed me," John, with a
+rhetorical flourish, perorated, "I discovered that I loved." And again
+his eyes said much.
+
+Hers were still on the prospect.
+
+"Yet if you only know her a little, how can you love her?" she asked, in
+a musing voice.
+
+"Did I say I only know her a little?" asked John. "I know her a great
+deal. I know her through and through. I know that she is pure gold, pure
+crystal; that she is made of all music, all light, all sweetness, and of
+all shadow and silence and mystery too, as women should be. I know that
+earth holds naught above her. I do not care to employ superlatives, so,
+to put it in the form of an understatement, I know that she is simply
+and absolutely perfect. If you could see her! If you could see her eyes,
+her deep-glowing, witty, humorous, mischievous, innocent eyes, with the
+soul that burns in them, the passion that sleeps. If you could see the
+black soft masses of her hair, and her white brow, and the pale-rose of
+her cheeks, and the red-rose of her lovely smiling mouth. If you could
+see her figure, slender and strong, and the grace and pride of her
+carriage,--the carriage of an imperial princess. If you could see her
+hands,--they lie in her lap like languid lilies. And her voice,--'tis
+the colour of her mouth and the glow of her eyes made audible. And if
+you could whisper to yourself her melodious and thrice adorable name. I
+know her a great deal. When I said that I only knew her a little, I
+meant it in the sense that she only knows me a little,--which after all,
+alas, for practical purposes comes to the same thing."
+
+He had spoken with emphasis, with fervour, his pink face animated and
+full of intention. Maria Dolores kept her soft-glowing eyes resolutely
+away from him, but I think the soul that burned in them (if not the
+passion that slept) was vaguely troubled. _Qui pane d'amour_--how does
+the French proverb run? Did she vaguely feel perhaps that the seas they
+were sailing were perilous? Anyhow, as John saw with sinking heart, she
+was at the point of putting an end to their present conjunction,--she
+was preparing to rise. He would have given worlds to offer a helping
+hand, but (however rich in worlds) he was, for the occasion, poor in
+courage. When love comes in at the door, assurance as like as not will
+fly out of the window. So she rose unaided.
+
+"Let us hope," she said, giving him a glance in which he perceived an
+under-gleam as of not unfriendly mockery, "that she will soon come to
+know you better."
+
+"Heaven forbid!" cried he, with a fine simulation of alarm. "It is upon
+her ignorance of my true character that I base such faint hopes as I
+possess of some day winning her esteem."
+
+Maria Dolores laughed, nodded, and lightly moved away.
+
+"My son," said John to himself, "you steered precious close to the wind.
+You had best be careful."
+
+And then he was conscious of a sudden change in things. The garden
+smiled about him, the valley below laughed in the breeze, the blackcaps
+sang, the many windows of the Castle glistened in the sun; but their
+beauty and their pleasantness had departed, had retired with her into
+the long, low, white-walled, red-roofed pavilion. He was conscious of a
+sudden change in things, and of a sudden acute and bitter depression
+within himself.
+
+"These are great larks," he said; "great larks while they last,--but
+what's the good of them in the end? What do they lead to? What's the
+good of coquetting with blisses that can't be yours?" And he breathed a
+prodigious sigh. "When shall I see her again?" he asked, and thereupon
+was seized by his old terror--his terror of yesterday, though it seemed
+to him a terror he had known all his life--lest he should never see her
+again. "She's only a visitor. What's to prevent her leaving this very
+night?"
+
+The imagination was intolerable. He entered the Castle court, and
+climbed the staircase of honour, and rambled through the long suites of
+great empty rooms, empty of everything save the memory of the past and
+the portraits of the dead, there, if he might, for a time at least, to
+lose himself and to forget her.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+"Who is the young man you have been talking with so long?" asked Frau
+Brandt, as Maria Dolores came into her sitting-room, a vast, square,
+bare room, with a marble floor and a painted ceiling, with Venetian
+blinds to shelter it from the sun, and a bitter-sweet smell, as of
+rosemary or I know not what other aromatic herb, upon its cool air.
+
+"Oh? You saw us?" said Maria Dolores, answering the question with
+question.
+
+"Him I have seen many times--every day for a week at least," said Frau
+Brandt. "But I never before saw you talking with him. Who is he?" She
+was a small, brown, square-built, black-haired, homely-featured old
+woman, in a big, round starched white cap and a flowing black silk gown.
+She sat in an uncushioned oaken armchair by the window, with some
+white knitting in her bony, blunt-fingered brown hands, and
+tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles on her nose. But the spectacles
+couldn't hide the goodness or the soundness or the sweetness that looked
+forth from her motherly old honest brown eyes.
+
+"He is a young man who lives _en pension_ at the presbytery," said Maria
+Dolores, "a young Englishman."
+
+"So?" said Frau Brandt. "What is his name?"
+
+"I don't know," said Maria Dolores, with disengagement real or feigned.
+"His Christian name, I believe, is John."
+
+"But his family name?" persisted Frau Brandt.
+
+"It is probably Brown, Jones, or Robinson," said Maria Dolores. "Or it
+may even be Black, Smith, or Johnson. Most Englishmen are named one or
+the other."
+
+"So?" said Frau Brandt. "But is it prudent or seemly for you to talk
+familiarly with a young man whose name is unknown to you?"
+
+"Why not?" asked Maria Dolores, raising her eyebrows, as if surprised.
+"He seems a very harmless young man. I don't think he will eat me. And
+he is English,--and I like English people. And he is intelligent,--his
+conversation amuses me. And he has nice easy, impetuous manners,--so
+different from the formality and restraint of Austrian young men. What
+can his name matter?"
+
+"But"--Frau Brandt looked up impressively over her spectacles, and her
+voice was charged with gravity, for she was about to ask a question to
+the Teutonic mind of quite supreme importance--"but is he noble?" It was
+to her what--nay, more than what--the question, "Is he respectable?"
+would have been to an Englishwoman.
+
+Maria Dolores laughed.
+
+"Oh, no," she said. "At least I have every reason to believe not, and I
+devoutly hope not. He belongs I expect to what they call in England the
+middle class. He has an uncle who is a farmer."
+
+Frau Brandt's good old brown eyes showed her profoundly shocked, and
+expressed profound reprehension.
+
+"But you were speaking with him familiarly--you were speaking with him
+almost as an equal," she pronounced in bated accents, in accents of
+consternation.
+
+Again Maria Dolores laughed.
+
+"True," she assented gaily, "and that is exactly what I couldn't do if
+he _were_ noble. Then I should have to remember our respective
+positions. But where the difference of rank is so great, one can talk
+familiarly without fear. _Ça n'engage à rien_."
+
+Frau Brandt nodded her head, for full half a minute, with many meanings;
+she nodded it now up and down, and now shook it sidewise.
+
+"I do not like it," she said, at last. "Your brother would not like it.
+It is not becoming. Well, thanks be to Heaven, he is only English."
+
+"Oh, of course," agreed Maria Dolores, "if he were Austrian, it would be
+entirely different."
+
+"But is it fair to the young man himself?" pursued Frau Brandt. "Is he
+aware that he is hobanobbing with a Serene Highness? You treat him as an
+equal. What if he should fall in love with you?"
+
+"What indeed! But he won't," laughed Maria Dolores, possibly with a
+mental reservation.
+
+"Who can tell?" said Frau Brandt. "His eyes, when he looked at you, had
+an expression. But there is a greater danger still. You are both at the
+dangerous age. He is good-looking. What if your heart should become
+interested in him?"
+
+"Oh, in that case," answered Maria Dolores, lightly, her chin a little
+in the air, "I should marry him--if he asked me."
+
+"What!" cried Frau Brandt, half rising from her chair.
+
+"Yes," said Maria Dolores, cheerfully unexcited. "He is a man of
+breeding and education, even if he isn't noble. If I loved a man, I
+shouldn't give one thought to his birth. I'm tired of all our Austrian
+insistence upon birth, upon birth and quarterings and precedencies. If
+ever I love, I shall love some one just for what he is, for what God has
+made him, and for nothing else. It wouldn't matter if his father were a
+cobbler--if I loved him, I'd marry him." Her chin higher in the air, she
+had every appearance of meaning what she said.
+
+Frau Brandt had sunk back in her chair, and was nodding her white-capped
+old head again.
+
+"Oh, my child, my child," she grieved. "Will you never rid your fancy of
+these high-flown, unpractical, romantic whimsies? It all comes of
+reading poetry." She herself, good woman, read little but her prayers.
+
+"Oh, my dear true Heart," responded Maria Dolores, laughing. She crossed
+the room, and placed her hand affectionately upon Frau Brandt's
+shoulder. "My dearest old Nurse! Do not distress yourself. This is not
+yet a question of actuality. Let us not cry before we are hurt." And she
+stooped, and kissed her nurse's brown old brow.
+
+But afterwards she stood looking with great pensiveness out of the
+window, stood so for a long while; and I fancy there was a softer glow
+than ever in her soft-glowing eyes, and perhaps a livelier rose in her
+pale-rose cheeks.
+
+"What are you thinking so deeply about?" Frau Brandt asked by-and-by.
+
+Maria Dolores woke with a little start, and turned from the window, and
+laughed again.
+
+"Oh, thinking about my cobbler's son, of course," she said.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Annunziata, seeking him to announce that supper was ready, found John,
+seated in his chamber of dead ladies, his arms folded, his legs crossed,
+his eyes fixed, a frown upon his prone brow; his spirit apparently rapt
+in a brown study.
+
+"Eh! Prospero!" she called.
+
+Whereat he came to himself glanced up, glanced round, changed his
+posture, and finally, rising, blew his preoccupations from him in a
+deep, deep sigh.
+
+"Oh, what a sigh!" marvelled Annunziata, making big eyes. "What are you
+sighing so hard for?"
+
+John looked at her, and smiled.
+
+"Sighing for my miller's daughter, my dear," he said.
+
+And, as he followed her to the presbytery, he sang softly to himself--
+
+     _"It is the miller's daughter,
+       And she is grown so dear, so dear,
+     That I would be the jewel
+       That trembles in her ear."_
+
+
+
+
+PART FIFTH
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+It was Sunday. It was early morning. It was raining,--a fine quiet,
+determined rain, that blurred the lower reaches of the valley, and
+entirely hid the mountain-tops, so that one found it hard not to doubt a
+little whether they were still there. Near at hand the garden was as if
+a thin web of silver had been cast over it, pale and dim, where wet
+surfaces reflected the diffused daylight. And just across the Rampio, on
+the olive-clad hillside that rose abruptly from its brink, rather an
+interesting process was taking place,--the fabrication of clouds, no
+less. The hillside, with its rondure of blue-grey foliage, would lie for
+a moment quite bare and clear; then, at some high point, a mist would
+begin to form, would appear indeed to issue from the earth, as smoke
+from a subterranean fire, white smoke with pearly shadows; would thicken
+and spread out; would draw together and rise in an irregular spiral
+column, curling, swaying, poising, as if uncertain what to do next; and
+at last, all at once making up its mind, (how like a younker or a
+prodigal!), would go sailing away, straggling away, amorphous, on a puff
+of wind, leaving the hillside clear again;--till, presently, the process
+would recommence _da capo_.
+
+John and Annunziata, seated together on a marble bench in the shelter of
+the great cloister, with its faded frescoes, at the north-eastern
+extremity of the castle buildings, had been watching this element-play
+for some minutes in silence. But by-and-by Annunziata spoke.
+
+"What makes the cloud come out of the hill like that?" she asked, her
+eyes anxiously questioning his. "I have seen it happen many times, but I
+could never understand it. There cannot be a fire underneath?"
+
+"If _you_ can't understand it, Mistress Wisdom," responded John, smiling
+on her, "you surely mustn't expect a featherpate like me to. Between
+ourselves, I don't believe any one can really understand it, though
+there's a variety of the human species called scientists who might
+pretend they could. It's all a part of that great scheme of miracles by
+which God's world goes on, Nature, which nobody can really understand in
+the very least. All that the chaps called scientists can really do is to
+observe and more or less give names to the miracles. They can't explain
+'em."
+
+"It is great pleasure to watch such things," said Annunziata. "It is a
+great blessing to be allowed to see a miracle performed with your own
+eyes."
+
+"So it is," agreed John. "And if you keep your eyes well open, there's
+not a minute of the livelong day when you mayn't see one."
+
+"It is very strange," said Annunziata, "but when the sun shines, then I
+love the sunny weather, and am glad that it does not rain. Yet when it
+does rain, then I find that I love the rain too, that I love it just as
+much as the sun,--it is so fresh, it smells so good, the raindrops are
+so pretty, and they make such a pretty sound where they fall, and the
+grey light is so pleasant."
+
+"Our loves," said John, "are always very strange. Love is the rummest
+miracle of them all. It is even more difficult to account for than the
+formation of clouds on the hillside."
+
+"We love the things that give us pleasure," said Annunziata.
+
+"And the people, sometimes, who give us pain," said John.
+
+"We love the people, first of all, who are related to us," said
+Annunziata, "and then the people we see a great deal of--just as I love,
+first of all, my uncle, and then you and Marcella the cook."
+
+"Who brings in the inevitable veal," said John. "Thank you, Honeymouth."
+He bowed and laughed, while Annunziata's grave eyes wondered what he was
+laughing at. "But it isn't every one," he pointed out, "who has your
+solid and well-balanced little head-piece. It isn't every one who keeps
+his love so neatly docketed, or so sanely submitted to the sway of
+reason. Some of us love first of all people who aren't related to us in
+the remotest degree, and people we've seen hardly anything of and know
+next to nothing about."
+
+Annunziata deprecatingly shook her head.
+
+"It is foolish to love people we know nothing about," she declared, in
+her deep voice, and looked a very sage delivering judgment.
+
+"True enough," said John. "But what would you have? Some of us are born
+to folly, as the sparks fly upward. You see, there's a mighty difference
+between love and love. There's the love which is affection, there's the
+love which is cupboard-love, and there's the love which is just simply
+love-love and nothing else. The first, as you have truly observed, has
+its roots in consanguinity or association, the second in a lively hope
+of future comfits, and either is sufficiently explicable. But the third
+has its roots apparently in mere haphazard and causelessness, and isn't
+explicable by any means whatsoever, and yet is far and away the
+violentest of the three. It falls as the lightning from the clouds, and
+strikes whom it will. Though I mix my metaphors fearlessly, like a man,
+I trust, with your feminine intuition, you follow me?"
+
+"No," said Annunziata, without compunction, her eyes on the distance. "I
+don't know what you mean."
+
+"Thank Heaven you don't, pray Heaven you never may," said her
+inconsequential friend. "For love-love is a plague. You meet a person,
+for example, in a garden. You know nothing whatever about her, not even
+her name, though you fear it may be Schmidt. You meet her not more than
+half a dozen times all told. And suddenly one morning you wake up to
+discover that she has become to you the person of first importance in
+the world. She is practically a total stranger to you, she's of a
+different nationality, a different rank, yet she's infinitely the most
+precious and important person in the world. When you're absent from her
+you can do nothing but think of her, gloating with throes of aromatic
+pain over the memory of your last meeting with her, longing with
+soul-hunger for your next. The merest flutter of her gown, modulation of
+her voice, glance of her eye, will throw your heart into a palpitation.
+You look in the direction of the house that she inhabits, and you feel
+the emotions of a Peri looking at the gate of Eden. And it gives you the
+strangest sort of strange joy to talk about her, though of course you
+take pains to talk about her in veiled terms, obliquely, so that your
+listener shan't guess _whom_ you are talking about. In short, she is the
+be-all and the end-all of your existence,--and you don't even know her
+name, though you fear it may be Schmidt."
+
+He lolled back at ease on the marble bench, and twirled his yellow-red
+moustaches, fancy free.
+
+"But you do know her name," said Annunziata, simply, in her deepest
+voice, holding him with a gaze, lucent and serious, that seemed almost
+reproachful. "Her name is Maria Dolores."
+
+The thing was tolerably unexpected. What wonder if it put my hero out of
+countenance? His attitude grew rigid, his pink skin three shades pinker;
+his blue eyes stared at her, startled. So for a second; then he relaxed,
+and laughed, laughed long and heartily, perhaps a little despitefully
+too, at his own expense. ... But he must try, if he might, to repair the
+mischief.
+
+"My poor child," he said, resting his hand on her curls, and gently
+smoothing them. "You are what the French call an _enfant terrible_. You
+are what the English call a deuced sharp little pickle. And I must try,
+if I can, without actually lying, to persuade you that you are utterly
+mistaken, utterly and absolutely mistaken,"--he raised his voice, for
+greater convincingness,--"and that her name is nothing distantly
+resembling the name that you have spoken, and that in fact her name is
+Mrs. Harris, and that in fine there is no such person, and that I was
+merely talking hypothetically, in abstractions; I must draw a herring
+across the trail, I must raise a dust, and throw a lot of it into your
+amazingly clear-sighted little eyes. Now, is it definitely impressed
+upon you that her name is _not_--the thrice-adorable name you
+mentioned?"
+
+"I thought it was," answered Annunziata. "I am sorry it is not." And
+then she dismissed the subject. "See, it is raining harder. See how the
+rain comes down in long strings of beads,--see how it is like a network
+of long strings of glass beads falling through the air. When the rain
+comes down like that, it means that after the rain stops it will be very
+hot. To-morrow it will be very hot."
+
+The bell in the clock-tower tolled out seven solemn strokes; then the
+lighter-toned and nimbler-tongued bell of the church began to ring.
+
+"Come," peremptorily said Annunziata, jumping up. "Mass."
+
+She held out her hand, took John's, and, like a mother, led the meek and
+unquestioning young man to his duties.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Of course there are no such heretical inventions as pews in the parish
+church of Sant' Alessina. You sit upon orthodox rush-bottomed chairs,
+you kneel upon orthodox bare stones. But at the Epistle side of the
+altar, at an elevation of perhaps a yard from the pavement, there is a
+recess in the wall, enclosed by a marble balustrade, and hung with faded
+red curtains, which looks, I'm afraid, a good deal like a private box at
+a theatre, and is in fact the tribune reserved for the masters of the
+Castle. (In former days those masters were the Sforzas. So, from this
+tribune, the members of that race of iron and blood, of fierceness and
+of guile, have assisted at the mystical sacrifice of the Lamb of God!)
+Heretofore, during John's residence at the presbytery, the tribune had
+stood vacant. To-day it was occupied by Maria Dolores and Frau Brandt.
+Maria Dolores, instead of wearing a hat, had adopted the ancient and
+beautiful use of draping a long veil of black lace over her dark hair.
+
+John knelt in the middle of the church, in the thick of the ragged,
+dirty, unsavoury villagers. When Mass was over, he returned to the
+cloisters, and there, face to face, he met the lady of his dreams.
+
+She graciously inclined her head.
+
+"Good morning," she said, smiling, in a voice that seemed to him full of
+morning freshness.
+
+"Good morning," he responded, wondering whether she could hear the
+tremor of his heart. "Though, in honest truth, it's rather a bad
+morning, isn't it?" he submitted, posing his head at an angle, dubious
+and reflective, that seemed to raise the question to a level of
+philosophic import.
+
+"Oh, with these cloisters, one shouldn't complain," said she, glancing
+indicatively round. "One can still be out of doors, and yet not get the
+wetting one deserves. And the view is so fine, and these faded old
+frescoes are so droll."
+
+"Yes," said he, his wits, for the instant, in a state of suspended
+animation. "The view is fine, the frescoes are droll."
+
+She looked as if she were thinking about something.
+
+"Don't you find it," she asked, after a moment, with the slightest
+bepuzzled drawing together of her eyebrows, "a trifle unpleasant,
+hearing Mass from where you do?"
+
+John looked blank.
+
+"Unpleasant? No. Why?" he asked.
+
+"I should think it might be disagreeable to be hemmed in and elbowed by
+those extraordinarily ragged and dirty people," she explained. "It's a
+pity they shouldn't clean themselves up a little before coming to
+church."
+
+"Ah, yes," he assented, "a little cleaning up wouldn't hurt them; that's
+very certain. But," he set forth, in extenuation, "it's not the custom
+of the country, and the fact that it isn't has its good significance, as
+well as its bad. It's one of the many signs of how genuinely democratic
+and popular the Church is in Italy,--as it ought to be everywhere. It is
+here essentially the Church of the people, the Church of the poor. It is
+the one place where the poorest man, in all his rags, and with the soil
+of his work upon him, feels perfectly at ease, perfectly at home,
+perfectly equal to the richest. It is the one place where a reeking
+market-woman, with her basket on her arm, will feel at liberty to take
+her place beside the great lady, in her furs and velvets, and even to
+ask her, with a nudge, to move up and make room. That is as it should
+be, isn't it?"
+
+"No doubt, no doubt," agreed Maria Dolores, beginning to pace backwards
+and forwards over the lichen-stained marble pavement, (stained as by the
+hand of an artist, in wavy veins of yellow or pale-green, with here and
+there little rosettes of scarlet), while John kept beside her. "All the
+same, I should not like to kneel quite in the very heart of the crowd,
+as you do."
+
+"You are a delicate and sensitive woman," he reminded her. "I am a man,
+and a moderately tough one. However, I must admit that until rather
+recently I had exactly your feeling. But I got a lesson." He broke off
+and gave a vague little laugh, vaguely rueful, as at a not altogether
+pleasant reminiscence.
+
+"What was the lesson?" she asked.
+
+"Well," said he, "if you care to know, it was this. The first time that
+I attended Mass here, desiring to avoid the people, I sought out a far
+corner of the church, behind a pillar, where there was no one. But as
+soon as I had got myself well established there, up hobbled a deformed
+and lame old man, and plumped himself down beside me, so close that our
+coat-sleeves touched. I think he was the most repulsive-looking old man
+I have ever seen; he was certainly the dirtiest, the grimiest, and his
+rags were extravagantly foul. I will spare you a more circumstantial
+portrait. And all through Mass I was sick with disgust and sore with
+resentment. Why should he come and rub his coat-sleeve against mine,
+when there was room in plenty for him elsewhere? The next time I went to
+church, I chose a different corner, as remote as might be from my former
+one; but again, no sooner was I well installed, than, lo and behold, the
+same unspeakable old man limped up and knelt with me, cheek by jowl. And
+so, if you can believe it, the next time, and so the next. It didn't
+matter where I placed myself, there he was sure to place himself too.
+You will suppose that, apart from my annoyance, I was vastly perplexed.
+Why should he pursue me so? Who was he? What was he after? And for
+enlightenment I addressed myself to Annunziata. 'Who is the hideous old
+man who always kneels beside me?' I asked her. She had not noticed any
+one kneeling beside me, she said; she had noticed, on the contrary, that
+I always knelt alone, at a distance. 'Well,' said I, 'keep your eyes
+open to-day, and you will see the man I mean.' So we went to Mass, and
+sure enough, no sooner had I found a secluded place, than my old friend
+appeared and joined me, dirtier and more hideous and if possible more
+deformed than ever.
+
+"Yes?" said Maria Dolores, with interest, as he paused.
+
+"When we came out of church, I asked Annunziata who he was," continued
+John. "And she said that though she had kept her eyes open, according to
+my injunction, she had failed to see any one kneeling beside me--that,
+on the contrary, she had seen me," he concluded, with an insouciance
+that was plainly assumed for its dramatic value, "kneeling alone, at a
+distance from every one."
+
+Maria Dolores' face was white. She frowned her mystification.
+
+"What!" she exclaimed, in a half-frightened voice.
+
+"That is precisely the ejaculation that fell from my own lips at the
+time," said John. "Then I gave her a minute description of the old man,
+in all his ugliness. And then she administered my lesson to me."
+
+"Yes? What was it?" questioned Maria Dolores, her interest acute.
+
+"Speaking in that oracular vein of hers, her eyes very big, her face
+very grave, she assured me that my horrible old man had no objective
+existence. She informed me cheerfully and calmly that he was an image of
+my own soul, as it appeared, corrupted and aged and deformed by the sins
+of a lifetime, to God and to the Saints. And she added that he was sent
+to punish me for my pride in thinking myself different to the common
+people, and in seeking to hold myself aloof. Since then," John brought
+his anecdote to a term, "I have always knelt in the body of the church,
+and I have never again seen my Doppelgänger."
+
+Maria Dolores was silent for a little. They had come to the southern end
+of the cloisters, where the buttresses of the Castle walls, all
+shaggy-mantled in a green overgrowth of creepers, fall precipitously
+away, down the steep face of a natural cliff. They stopped here, and
+stood looking off. The rain had held up, though the valley was still
+misty with its vapours. Whiffs of velvety air, warm and sweet, blew in
+their faces, lightly stirred the dark hair about her brow, and, catching
+the flowery edge of her black lace mantilla, set it fluttering.
+
+"That is a very good story," she said, by-and-by, with a sober glance,
+behind which there was the glint of laughter. "In view of it, however, I
+suppose there will be no use in my delivering a message I am charged
+with for you from my friend Frau Brandt."
+
+"Oh?" questioned John. "What message?"
+
+"Frau Brandt has received from the owner of the Castle the privilege of
+hearing Mass from the tribune; and she wished me to invite you in her
+name hereafter to hear Mass from there with us. But I suppose, in view
+of your 'lesson,' that is an invitation which you will decline?" The
+glint of laughter shone brighter in her eyes, and her mouth had a tiny
+pucker, amiably derisive.
+
+John looked at her, his blue eyes bold.
+
+"That is an invitation which I am terribly tempted to accept," he said,
+in a voice of unconcealed emotion, of patent meaning; and beneath his
+bold gaze, her dark eyes dropped, while I think a blush faintly swept
+her cheeks. "And first of all," he added, "pray express to Frau Brandt
+my grateful thanks for it--and let me thank you also for your kindness
+in conveying it. If, in spite of my temptation, I _don't_ accept it,
+that will be for a very special reason, and one quite unconnected with
+my 'lesson.'"
+
+Maria Dolores probably knew her danger. She turned, and began to walk
+backwards, towards the point where you can pass from the cloisters,
+through the great porte-cochère, into the garden, and so on to the
+pavilion beyond the clock. She probably knew her danger; but she was
+human, but she was a woman. Besides, she had reached the porte-cochère,
+and thus commanded a clear means of escape. So, coming to a standstill
+here, "What is the very special reason?" she asked, in a low voice,
+keeping her eyes from his.
+
+His were bolder than ever. Infinite admiration of her burned in them,
+infinite delight in her, desire for her; at the same time a kind of
+angry hopelessness darkened them, and a kind of bitter amusement, as of
+one amused at his own sad plight.
+
+"I wish I were rich," he exclaimed, irritably, between his teeth.
+
+"Oh? Is _that_ the very special reason?" asked she, with two notes of
+laughter.
+
+"No," said he, "but it has a connection with it. You see, I'm in love."
+
+"Yes," said she. "I remember your telling me so."
+
+"Well, I wish I were rich," said he. "Then I might pluck up courage to
+ask the woman I love to be my wife."
+
+"Money isn't everything here below," said she. "I have your own word for
+that."
+
+"What else counts," said he, "when you wish to ask a woman to marry
+you?"
+
+"Oh, many things," said she. "Difference of rank, for example."
+
+"That wouldn't count with me," said the democratic fellow, handsomely.
+"I shouldn't give two thoughts to differences of rank."
+
+Maria Dolores smiled--at her secret reflections, I suppose.
+
+"But poverty puts it out of all question," John moodily went on. "I
+couldn't ask a woman to come and share with me an income of sixpence a
+week. Especially as I have grounds for believing that she's in rather
+affluent circumstances herself. Oh, I wish I were rich!" He repeated
+this aspiration in a groan.
+
+"Poor, poor young man!" she commiserated him, while her eyes, which she
+held perseveringly averted, were soft with sympathy and gay with mirth.
+"When do you begin your gardening?"
+
+"Oh, don't mock me!" he cried, with an imploring gesture. "You know,
+joking apart, that it's child's play for a man of my age, with no
+profession and no special talent, to fancy he can turn to and earn
+money. I might, if I made supernatural exertions, and if Fortune went
+out of her way to favour me, add a maximum of another sixpence to my
+weekly budget. No, there's never a hope for me on sea or land. I must
+e'en bear it, though I cannot grin withal."
+
+"Ah, well," said Maria Dolores, to comfort him, "these attacks, I have
+read, are often as short as they are sharp. Let us trust you'll soon
+rally from this one. How long have they generally lasted in the past?"
+
+John's face grew dark with upbraiding; the sea-blue of his eyes, the
+gold of his hair and beard, the pink of his complexion visibly grew
+dark.
+
+"You are so needlessly unkind," he said, "that you don't deserve to hear
+the true answer to your question."
+
+She studied the half-obliterated fresco on the wall beside her.
+
+"All the same," said he, "you _shall_ hear it. If falling in love were
+my habit, no doubt I shouldn't take it so hard. But the simple truth,
+though I am thirty years old, is that I have never before felt so much
+as a heart-flutter for any woman. And, since you cite your reading, _I_
+have read that a fire which may merely singe the surface of green wood,
+will entirely consume the dry."
+
+She continued to study the ancient painting. Her fingers were playing
+with the ends of her lace veil.
+
+"Besides," he went on, "if I had been in love a dozen times, it wouldn't
+signify. For I should have been in love with ordinary usual human
+women. They're the only sort I ever met--till I met her. She's of a
+totally different order--as distinct from them as ... What shall
+I say? Oh, as unlike them as starfire is unlike dull clay.
+Starfire--starfire--the wonderful, high, white-burning starfire of her
+spirit, that's the thing that strikes you most in her. It shines through
+her. It shines in her eyes, it shines in her hair, her adorable, soft,
+dark, warm and fragrant hair; it shines in her very voice; it shines in
+every word she utters, even in the unkindest."
+
+"Dear me! what an alarmingly refulgent person you depict!" laughed Maria
+Dolores, her eyes still on the wall.
+
+"I have no gift for word-painting," said John; "though I doubt if the
+words are yet invented that could fitly paint my lady. She grows in
+beauty day by day. It's a literal fact--every fresh time I see her, she
+is perceptibly more lovely than the last, more love-compelling in her
+loveliness. But 'tis a thing unpaintable, indescribable, as
+indescribable as the perfume of a rose. Oh, why haven't I five thousand
+a year?"
+
+"You harp so persistently upon your desire for money," suggested Maria
+Dolores, "one might infer she was a commodity, to be bought and sold.
+You begin at the wrong end. What good would five or fifty thousand a
+year do you, if you had not begun by winning her love?
+
+"No, I begin at the proper end, worse luck," John answered, glooming.
+"For, without a decent income, I have no right even to try to win her
+love.
+
+"And that being so," questioned Maria Dolores, "I hope you
+conscientiously avoid her society, or, when you meet, make yourself
+consistently disagreeable to her?
+
+"There's no need for such precautions," John replied. "There's no fear
+for her. She regards me as a casual and passing acquaintance. So I make
+myself no more disagreeable than I am by nature. And if I avoided her
+society, (which I am far from doing), it would be not for her sake, but
+for my own. For, though her society is to me a kind of anticipation of
+the joys of Heaven, yet when I leave it and find myself alone, the
+reaction is dreary in the superlative degree; and the fear, which
+perpetually haunts me (for I know nothing of her plans), lest I shall
+never see her again, is agonizing as a foretaste of--Heaven's antipode.
+Oh, I love her!"
+
+He took, involuntarily I dare say, a step in her direction. She
+retreated under the vaulting of the _porte-cochère_.
+
+"You seem," she commented, "to be getting a good deal of emotional
+experience,--which doubtless some day you will find of value. Why not,
+instead of gardener, embark as novelist or poet? Here is material you
+could then turn to account."
+
+"Ah, there you are," he complained, piteously, "mocking me again. Ah,
+well, if you must have your laugh, have it, and welcome. A man can learn
+to take the bitter with the sweet."
+
+"To spare you that discomfort," said she, moving deeper into the
+archway, while John's face fell, "I will bid you good-bye. I am to
+report, then, that you decline my friend's invitation with thanks?"
+
+"With my most grateful thanks," he was able intensively to rejoin, in
+spite of his dismay at the imminence of her departure.
+
+"And for a very special reason?" she harked back, now, suddenly, for
+the first time since they had touched thin ice, giving him a glance.
+
+It was the fleetingest of fleeting glances, it was merry and ironic, but
+there was something in it which brought a flame to his blue eyes.
+
+"For the very special reason," he answered, with vehemence, "that I fear
+the presence near me of--" He held his breath for a second, the flame in
+his eyes enveloping her; then, with an abrupt change of tone and mien,
+he ended, "--of Frau Brandt might distract my attention from the
+sermon."
+
+She laughed, and said, "Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye," said John. And when she was halfway through the tunnel-like
+passage, "I suppose you know you are leaving me to a day as barren as
+the Desert of Sahara?" he called after her.
+
+"Oh, who can tell what a day may bring forth?" called she, but without
+looking back.
+
+For a long while John's faculties were kept busy, trying to determine
+whether that was a promise, a menace, or a mere word in the air.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+"Rain before seven, clear before eleven," is as true, or as untrue, in
+Lombardy as it is in other parts of the world. The rain had held up, and
+now, in that spirited phrase of Corvo's, "here came my lord the Sun,"
+splendidly putting the clouds to flight, or chaining them, transfigured,
+to his chariot-wheels; clothing the high snow-peaks in a roseate glory,
+(that seemed somehow, I don't know why, to accent their solitude and
+their remoteness); flooding the valley with ethereal amber; turning the
+swollen Rampio to a river of fire while the nearer hillsides, the olive
+woods, the trees in the Castle garden, glistened with a million million
+crystals, and the petals of the flowers were crystal-tipped; while the
+breath of the earth rose in long streamers of luminous incense, and the
+sky gleamed with every tender, every brilliant, tint of blue, from the
+blue of pale forgetmenots to the blue of larkspur.
+
+John, contemplating this spectacle, (and thinking of Maria Dolores?
+revolving still her cryptic valediction?), all at once, as his eye
+rested on the shimmer at the valley's end which he knew to be the lake,
+lifted up his hand and clapped his brow. "By Jove," he muttered, "if I
+wasn't within an ace of clean forgetting!" The sight of the lake had
+fortunately put him in mind that he was engaged to-day to lunch with
+Lady Blanchemain at Roccadoro.
+
+He found her ladyship, in a frock all concentric whirls of crisp white
+ruffles, vigorously wielding a fan, and complaining of the heat.
+(Indeed, as Annunziata had predicted, it had grown markedly warmer.) "I
+shall fly away, if this continues; I shall fly straight to town, and set
+my house in order for the season. When do _you_ come?" she asked,
+smiling on him from her benign old eyes.
+
+"I don't come," answered John. "I rather like town in autumn and winter,
+when it's too dark to see its ugliness, but save me from it in the clear
+light of summer."
+
+"Fudge," said Lady Blanchemain. "London's the most beautiful capital in
+Europe--it's grandiose. And it's the only place where there are any
+people.
+
+"Yes," said John, "but, as at Nice and Homburg, too many of them are
+English. And there's a liberal scattering, I've heard, of Jews?"
+
+"Oh, Jews are all right--when they aren't Jewy," said Lady Blanchemain,
+with magnanimity. "I know some very nice ones. I was rather hoping you
+would be a feature of my Sunday afternoons."
+
+"I'm not a society man," said John. "I've no aptitude myself for
+patronizing or toadying, and I don't particularly enjoy being patronized
+or toadied to."
+
+"Is that the beginning and end of social life in England?" Lady
+Blanchemain inquired, delicately sarcastic.
+
+"As I have seen it, yes," asseverated John. "The beginning, end, and
+middle of social life in England, as in Crim-Tartary, is worship of the
+longest pigtail,--a fetichism sometimes grosser, sometimes subtler,
+sometimes deliberate, often unconscious and instinctive. Every one you
+meet is aware that his pigtail is either longer or shorter than yours,
+and accordingly, more or less subtly, grossly, unconsciously or
+deliberately, swaggers or bends the knee. It's a state of things I've
+tried in vain to find diverting."
+
+"It's a state of things you'll find prevailing pretty well in all places
+where the human species breeds," said Lady Blanchemain. "The only
+difference will be a question of what constitutes the pigtail. And are
+you, then, remaining at Sant' Alessina?"
+
+"For the present," answered John.
+
+"Until--?" she questioned.
+
+"Oh, well, until she sends me away, or leaves herself," said he, "and so
+my fool's paradise achieves its inevitable end."
+
+Lady Blanchemain laughed--a long, quiet laugh of amused contentment.
+
+"Come in to luncheon," she said, putting her soft white hand upon his
+arm, "and tell me all about it." And when they were established at her
+table, a round table, gay with flowers, in a window at the far end of
+the cool, terazza-paved, stucco-columned dining-room of the Hotel
+Victoria, "Why do you call it a fool's paradise?" she asked.
+
+"Well, you see, I'm in love," said he.
+
+"You really are?" she doubted, with sprightliness, looking gleeful.
+
+"All too really," he assured her, in a sinking voice.
+
+"What an old witch I was!" mused she, with satisfaction. "Accept my
+heart-felt felicitations." She beamed upon him.
+
+"I should prefer your condolences," said he, in a voice from the depths.
+
+"_Allons donc!_ Cheer up," laughed she, dallying with her bliss. "Men
+have died, and worms have eaten them, but not for love."
+
+"I wonder," said John. "That is a statement, it seems to me, which would
+be the better for some proving."
+
+"At all events," said she, "you, for one, are not dead yet."
+
+"No," admitted he; "though I could almost wish I was."
+
+"Do you mean to say she has definitely rejected you?" she demanded,
+alarmed.
+
+"Fortune has spared her that necessity," said John. "I haven't asked
+her, and I never shall. I haven't any money."
+
+"Pooh! Is that all?" scoffed her ladyship, relieved. "You have
+prospects."
+
+"Remote ones--the remoter the better. I won't count on dead men's
+shoes," said John.
+
+"What is it your little fortune-teller at the Castle calls you?" asked
+Lady Blanchemain, shrewdly, her dark old eyebrows up.
+
+"She calls me _lucus a non lucendo_," was John's quick riposte; and the
+lady laughed.
+
+But in a moment she pulled a straight face. "I seriously counsel you to
+have more faith," she said. "Go home and ask her to marry you; and if
+she accepts,--you'll see. Money will come. Besides, your rank and your
+prospective rank are assets which you err in not adding to the balance.
+Go home, and propose to her."
+
+"'Twould do no good," said John, dejectedly. "She regards me with
+imperturbable indifference. I've made the fieriest avowals to her, and
+she's never turned a hair."
+
+Lady Blanchemain looked bewildered. "You've made avowals--?" she
+falteringly echoed.
+
+"I should rather think so," John affirmed. "Indirect ones, of course,
+and I hope inoffensive, but fiery as live coals. In the third person,
+you know. I've given her two and two; she has, you may be sure, enough
+skill in mathematics to put 'em together."
+
+"And she never turned a hair?" the lady marvelled.
+
+"She jeered at me, she mocked me, she laughed and rode away," said he.
+
+"She's probably in love with you," said Lady Blanchemain. "If a woman
+will listen, if a woman will laugh! If you don't propose to her now,
+having ensnared her young affections, you'll be something worse than the
+wicked nobleman of song and story."
+
+"Oh, well," John responded, conciliatory, "I dare say some of these days
+a proposal will slip out when I least intend it. So I shall have done
+the honourable thing--and I'm sure I can trust her to play fair and say
+me nay."
+
+Lady Blanchemain slowly shook her head. "I'm glad you're not _my_
+lover," she devoutly murmured, plying her fan.
+
+"Oh, but I am," cried John, with a bow, and an admiring flash of the
+eyes.
+
+Her soft old face lighted up; then it took on an expression of
+resolution, and she set her strong old jaws.
+
+"In that case," she remarked, "you will have the less reluctance in
+granting a favour I'm about to ask you."
+
+"What's the favour?" said John, in a tone of readiness.
+
+"I want you to buy a pig in a poke," said she.
+
+"Oh?" questioned he.
+
+"Yes," said she. "I want you to make me a promise blindfold. I want you
+to promise in the dark that you will do something. What it is that
+you're to do you're not to know till the time comes. Will you promise?"
+
+"Dearest lady," said the trustful young man, "I'm perfectly confident
+that you would never ask me to do anything that I couldn't do with
+profit to myself. Buy a pig in a poke? From you, without a moment's
+hesitation. Of course I promise."
+
+"Bravo, bravo," applauded Lady Blanchemain, glowing at her easy triumph.
+"In a few days you'll receive a letter. That will tell you what it is
+you're pledged to. And now, to reward you, come with me to my
+sitting-room, and I will make you a little present."
+
+When they had reached her sitting-room (dim and cool, with its
+half-drawn blinds and the straw-coloured linen covers of its furniture),
+she put into his hands a small case of shagreen, small and hard, and at
+the edges white with age.
+
+"Go to the window and see what's in it," she said.
+
+And obeying, "By Jove, what a stunner!" he exclaimed. The case contained
+a ring, a light circle of gold, set with a ruby, surrounded by a row of
+diamonds,--for my part, I think the most beautiful ruby I have ever
+seen. It was as big as a hazel-nut, or almost; it was cut, with
+innumerable facets, in the shape of a heart; and it quivered and burned,
+and flowed and rippled, liquidly, with the purest, limpidest red fire.
+
+"'Tis the spirit of a rose, distilled and crystallized," said Lady
+Blanchemain.
+
+"'Tis a drop of liquid light," said John. "But why do you give it to me?
+I can't wear it. I don't think I ought to accept it."
+
+"Nobody asks you to wear it," said Lady Blanchemain. "It's a woman's
+ring, of course. But as for accepting it, you need have no scruples.
+It's an old Blanchemain gem, that was in the family a hundred years
+before I came into it. It's properly an heirloom, and you're the heir.
+I give it to you for a purpose. Should you ever become engaged, I desire
+you to placcit upon the finger of the adventurous woman."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Under a gnarled old olive, by the river's brim, Annunziata sat on the
+turf, head bowed, so that her curls fell in a tangle all about her
+cheeks, and gazed fixedly into the green waters, the laughing, dancing,
+purling waters, green, and, where the sun reached them, shot with seams
+and cleavages of light, like fluorspar. In the sun-flecked,
+shadow-dappled grass near by, violets tried to hide themselves, but were
+betrayed by their truant sweetness. The waters purled, a light breeze
+rustled the olive-leaves, and birds were singing loud and wild, as birds
+will after rain.
+
+Maria Dolores, coming down the path that followed the river's windings,
+stood for a minute, and watched her small friend without speaking. But
+at last she called out, "_Ciao_, Annunziata. Are you dreaming dreams and
+seeing visions?"
+
+Annunziata started and looked up. "Sh-h!" she whispered, with an
+admonitory gesture. She stole a wary glance roundabout, and then spoke
+as one fearful of being overheard. "I was listening to the music of
+Divopan," she said.
+
+Maria Dolores, who had come closer, appeared at a loss. "The music
+of--what?" she questioned.
+
+"Sh-h!" whispered Annunziata. "I would not dare to say it aloud. The
+music of Divopan."
+
+"Divopan?" Maria Dolores puzzled, compliantly guarding her tone. "What
+is that?"
+
+"Divo--Pan," said Annunziata, dividing the word in two, and always with
+an air of excessive caution.
+
+But Maria Dolores helplessly shook her head. "I'm afraid I don't
+understand. What is Divo--Pan?"
+
+"Don't you know what a _divo_ is?" asked Annunziata, her clear grey eyes
+surprised.
+
+"Oh, a _divo?_" said Maria Dolores, getting a glimmer of light. "Ah,
+yes, a divo is a saint, I think?
+
+"Not exactly," Annunziata discriminated, "but something like one. The
+saints, you see, are always very good, and _divi_ are sometimes bad.
+But they are powerful, like saints. They can do anything they wish. Divo
+Pan is the divo who makes all the music that you hear out of doors,--the
+music of the wind and the water and the bird-songs. But you must be
+careful never to praise his music aloud, lest Divo Apollone should hear
+you. He is the divo that makes all the music you hear on instruments--on
+harps and violins and pianos. He is very jealous of Divo Pan, and if he
+hears you praising him, will do something to you. You know what he did
+to King Mida, don't you?"
+
+"What did he do?" asked Maria Dolores.
+
+Annunziata stole another wary glance about.
+
+"Once upon a time," she recounted, always in her lowest voice, "many
+years ago, hundreds of years ago, the King of this country was named
+Mida. And he loved very much the music of Divo Pan. He loved to sit by
+the river here, and to listen to the music of the water, and of the
+leaves, and of the birds. I love to do it too, and I think he was quite
+right. But one day, in his house, there came a musician with a harp, and
+began to play to him. And the King listened for a while, and then he
+told the musician to stop. 'Your music is very good,' he said, 'but now
+I am going into the fields and by the river, where I can hear a music I
+like better.' But the musician with the harp was really Divo Apollone
+himself; disguised. And this made him very angry and jealous. And to
+punish King Mida he changed his ears to long hairy ears, like an ass's.
+So, if you love the music of Divo Pan, you must be very careful not to
+let Divo Apollone hear you praise it, or he will do something to you."
+
+And to drive home this application of her theme, she held up a warning
+finger.
+
+Maria Dolores had listened, smiling. Now she gave a gay little laugh,
+and then for a moment mused. "That is a very curious bit of history,"
+she said, in the end. "How ever did it come to your knowledge?"
+
+Annunziata shrugged. "Oh," she answered, "everybody knows that. I have
+known it for years. My grandmother who lived in Milan told it to me.
+Doesn't the water look cool and pleasant?" was her abrupt digression, as
+she returned her gaze to the Rampio. "When it is hot like this, I
+should like to lie down in the water, and go to sleep. Wouldn't you?"
+
+"I'm not so sure," said Maria Dolores. "I should rather fear I might be
+drowned."
+
+"Oh, but that wouldn't hurt," said Annunziata, with security. "To be
+drowned in such beautiful green water, among all those beams of light,
+would be nice."
+
+"Perhaps you are not aware," said Maria Dolores, "that when people are
+drowned they die?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I know that," said Annunziata. "But"--she raised calm pellucid
+eyes--"wouldn't you like to die?"
+
+"Certainly not," said Maria Dolores, a shadow on her face.
+
+"I would," said Annunziata, stoutly. "It must be lovely to die."
+
+"Hush," Maria Dolores rebuked her, frowning. "You must not say such
+things."
+
+"Why not say them, if you think them?" asked Annunziata.
+
+"You mustn't think them either," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"Oh, I can't help thinking them," said Annunziata, with a movement. "It
+surely must be lovely to die and go to Heaven. If I were perfectly sure
+I should go to Heaven, I would shut my eyes and die now. But I should
+probably have to wait some time in Purgatory. And, of course, I might go
+to Hell."
+
+Maria Dolores' face was full of trouble. "You must not talk like that,"
+she said. "You must not. It is wicked of you."
+
+"Then, if I am wicked, I _should_ go to Hell?" inquired Annunziata,
+looking alertly up.
+
+Maria Dolores looked about her, looked across the river, down the
+valley, as one in distress scanning the prospect for aid. "Of course you
+would not," she said. "My dear child, can't we find something else to
+talk of?"
+
+"Do you think I shall have a very long and hard Purgatory?" asked
+Annunziata.
+
+Maria Dolores threw a despairing glance at the horizon.
+
+"No, no, dear," she answered uneasily. "You will have a very short and
+gentle one. Anyhow, you'll not have to consider that for years to come.
+Now shall we change the subject?"
+
+"Well," said Annunziata, with an air of deliberation, "if you are
+perfectly sure I shall not go to Hell, and that my Purgatory will not
+be long and hard, I think I will do what I said. I will lie down in the
+water and go to sleep, and the water will drown me, and I shall die."
+
+Maria Dolores' face was terrified. "Annunziata!" she cried. "You don't
+know what you are saying. You are cruel. You won't do anything of the
+sort. You must give me your solemn word of honour that you won't do
+anything of the sort. It would be a most dreadful sin. Come. Come with
+me now, away from here, away from the sight of the river. You must never
+come here alone again. Give me your hand, and come away."
+
+Annunziata got up, gave her hand, and moved off at Maria Dolores' side,
+towards the Castle. "Of course," she said, "if I want to die, I don't
+need to lie down in the water. I can die at any moment I wish, by just
+shutting my eyes, and holding my breath, and telling my heart seven
+times to stop beating. Heart, stop beating; heart, stop beating;--that
+way, seven times."
+
+"For the love of Mercy," wailed poor Maria Dolores, almost writhing in
+her misery.... Then, suddenly, she breathed a deep sigh of relief, and
+fervently exclaimed, "Thank God." John was advancing towards them, down
+the rugged pathway.
+
+"Do please come and help me with this perverse and maddening child," she
+called to him, in English. "She's frightening me half out of my wits by
+threatening to die. She even threatened to drown herself in the Rampio."
+
+"Children of her complexion can't die," said John, in Italian, (and
+Annunziata pricked up her ears). "They can only turn into monkeys, and
+then they have to live in the forests of Africa, where it is always
+dark, and all the men and women are negro savages, and all the other
+animals (except the mosquitos and the snakes) are lions and tigers.
+Besides, if Annunziata were to turn into a monkey, she couldn't have the
+sugared chestnuts that somebody or other has brought her from Roccadoro.
+On the chest of drawers in my room there has mysteriously appeared a box
+of sugared chestnuts. I thought they were for her, but they're not,
+unless she will promise never to turn into a monkey."
+
+Annunziata's eyes had clouded.
+
+"Of course I won't turn into a monkey," she said, in accents at once of
+disillusion and disdain. "I did not know there was any such danger. I
+should hate to be a monkey." Then her eyes brightened again. "May I go
+and get them now?" she asked, wistful and impatient.
+
+"Yes," said John; "be off with you." And she went running lightly up the
+hill.
+
+He turned to Maria Dolores. Her face (clear-cut, with its dark hair,
+against the red background of her sunshade) was white and drawn with
+pain. But she smiled, rather wanly, as her gaze met his, and said, in a
+weak voice, "Oh, I am so glad you came. I can't tell you how she was
+frightening me." And all at once her eyes filled with tears.
+
+I needn't say whether John was moved, whether it was his impulse to take
+her in his arms and dry her tears with kisses. He did actually, on that
+impulse, give a perceptible start towards her, but then he restrained
+himself. "The child ought to be whipped," he broke out angrily. "You
+must not take her prattle so seriously."
+
+"But _she_ was so serious," said Maria Dolores. "Oh, when she
+threatened to lie down in the river, and let herself be drowned--!" Her
+voice failed her, as at the inexpressible.
+
+"No fear of that," said John. "The first touch of the cold water (and
+icy-cold it is, a glacier-stream, you know) would bring her to her
+senses. But come! You must not think of it any more. You have had a bad
+shock, but no bones are broken, and now you must try to banish it all
+from your mind."
+
+"What an unaccountable child she is!" said Maria Dolores. "Surely it is
+unnatural and alarming for a child to have her head so teeming with
+strange freaks and fancies. Oh, I pray God to grant that nothing may
+happen to her."
+
+"The most serious evil that's likely to happen to her for the present,"
+said John, "will be an indigestion of marrons glacés."
+
+Maria Dolores' tears had gone now. She smiled. But afterwards she looked
+grave again. "Oh, I wish I could get the dread of something happening to
+her out of my heart. I wish she wasn't so pale and fragile-looking," she
+said. Then there came a gleam in her eyes. "But you were going for a
+walk, and I am detaining you."
+
+"The object of my walk has been accomplished," said John.
+
+"Oh?" questioned she.
+
+"I was walking in the hope, on the chance, that I might meet you," he
+hardily explained. "It's such an age since I've seen you. Are you making
+for the garden? I pray you to be kind, and let me go with you. I've been
+an exile and a wanderer--I've been to Roccadoro."
+
+She had rebegun her ascension of the hill. The path was steep, as well
+as rugged. Sometimes John had to help her over a hard bit. The touch of
+her hand, soft and warm, and firm too, in his; the sense of her
+closeness; the faint fragrance of her garments, of her hair,--these
+things, you may be sure, went to his head, went to his heart. The garden
+lay in a white blaze of sunshine, that seemed almost material, like an
+incandescent fluid; but the entrance to the avenue was dark and
+inviting. "Let us," he proposed, "go and sit on a marble bench under the
+glossy leaves of the ilexes, in the deep, cool shade; and let's play
+that it's a thousand years ago, and that you're a Queen (white Queen
+Blanche, like a queen of lilies), and that I'm your minstrel-man."
+
+"What song will you sing me?" asked she gaily, as they took their places
+on the marble bench. It was semicircular, with a high carved back,
+(carved with the armorials of the Sforzas), and of course it was
+lichen-stained, grey and blue and green, yellow and scarlet.
+
+     "_White Queen Blanche, like a queen of lilies,
+       Fairer and dearer than dearest and fairest,
+     To hear me sing, if it her sweet will is,--
+       Sing, minstrel-man, of thy love, an thou darest_,"
+
+trolled John, in his light barytone, to a tune, I imagine, improvised
+for the occasion. "But if it's a thousand years ago," he laughed, "that
+song smacks too much perhaps of actuality, and I had best choose
+another."
+
+Maria Dolores joined in his laugh. "I did not know you sang," she said.
+"Let me hear the other."
+
+"A song," reflected he, "that I could sing with a good deal of feeling
+and conviction, would be 'Give her but the least excuse to love me.'"
+
+Maria Dolores all at once looked sober.
+
+"Oughtn't you to be careful," she said, "to give her no excuse at all to
+love you, if you are really resolved never to ask her to be your wife?"
+
+"That is exactly what I have given her," answered John, "no excuse at
+all. I should sing in a spirit purely academic,--my song would be the
+utterance of a pious but hopeless longing, of the moth's desire for the
+star."
+
+"But she, I suppose, isn't a star," objected Maria Dolores. "She's
+probably just a weak human woman. You may have given her excuses without
+meaning to." There was the slightest quaver in her voice.
+
+John caught his breath; he turned upon her almost violently. But she was
+facing away from him, down the avenue, so that he could not get her
+eyes.
+
+"In that case," she said, "wouldn't you owe her something?"
+
+"I should owe myself a lifetime's penance with the discipline," John on
+a solemn tone replied, hungrily looking at her cheek, at the little
+tendrils of dark hair about her brow. "God knows what I should owe to
+her."
+
+"You would owe it to her," said Maria Dolores, always facing away, "to
+tell her your love straightforwardly, and to ask her to marry you."
+
+John thrilled, John ached. His blue eyes burned upon her. "What else do
+you think I dream of, night and day? But how could I, with honour? You
+know my poverty," he groaned.
+
+"But if she has enough, more than enough, for two?" softly urged Maria
+Dolores.
+
+"Ah, that's the worst of it," cried he. "If we were equals in penury, if
+she had nothing, then I might honourably ask her, and we could live on
+herbs together in a garret, and I could keep her respect and my own. Oh,
+garret-paradise! But to marry a woman who is rich, to live in luxury
+with her, and to try to look unconscious while she pays the bills,--she
+would despise me, I should abhor myself."
+
+"Why should she despise you?" asked Maria Dolores. "The possession of
+wealth is a mere accident. If people are married and love each other, I
+can't see that it matters an atom whether their money belonged in the
+first place to the man or to the woman,--it would belong henceforward to
+them both equally."
+
+"That is a very generous way of looking at it, but it is a woman's way.
+No decent man could accept it," said John.
+
+"Up to a certain point," said Maria Dolores, slowly, "I understand your
+scruples. I understand that a poor man might feel that he would not like
+to make the advances, if the woman he loved was rich. But suppose the
+woman loved him, and knew that he loved her, and knew that it was only
+his poverty which held him back, then _she_ might make the advances. She
+might put aside her pride, and go halfway to meet him, and to remove his
+difficulties and embarrassments. If, after that, he still did not ask
+her, I think his scruples would have become mere vanity,--I think it
+would show that he cared more for his mere vanity than for her
+happiness."
+
+Her voice died out. John could see that her lip quivered a little. His
+throat was dry. The pulses were pounding in his temples. His brain was
+all a confusion. He hardly knew what had befallen him, he hardly knew
+what she had said. He only knew that there was a great ball of fire in
+his breast, and that the pain of it was half an immeasurable joy.
+
+"God forgive me," the absurd and exaggerated stickler for the dignity of
+his sex wildly cried. "God knows how I love her, how I care for her
+happiness. But to go to her empty-handed,--but to put myself in the
+position of being kept by a woman,--God knows how impossible it is."
+
+Maria Dolores stood up, still looking away from him.
+
+"Well, let us hope," she said, changing her tone to one of unconcerned
+detachment, "that we have been discussing baseless suppositions. Let us
+hope that her heart is quite untouched. And for both your sakes," she
+concluded, her head in the air, "let us hope that you and she will never
+meet again. Good-bye."
+
+She gave him a curt little nod, and walked lightly, rapidly up the
+avenue.
+
+John's brain was all a confusion. He looked after her helplessly. He
+only knew that there was a great ball of fire in his breast, and that
+the pain of it was now unmixed.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Maria Dolores tripped into Frau Brandt's sitting-room, merrily singing a
+snatch of song.
+
+     "_Gardez vous d'être sévère
+     Quand on vous park d'amour_,"
+
+she carolled. Then she stopped singing, and blithely laughed.
+
+Frau Brandt raised her good brown face from her knitting, and her good
+brown eyes looked anxiously upwards, slantwise over her
+tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles.
+
+"What is the matter now?" she asked. "What has happened to vex you now?"
+
+"To vex me!" cried Maria Dolores, in apparent astonishment. "Wasn't I
+singing aloud from sheer exuberance of high spirits?"
+
+"No," said Frau Brandt, with a very positive shake of her white-capped
+head. "You were singing to conceal your low spirits. What has
+happened?"
+
+"Ah, well, then, if you know so much and must know all," said Maria
+Dolores, "I've just proposed to the man I'm in love with, and been sent
+about my business."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Frau Brandt, phlegmatic. "What nonsense is
+this?"
+
+"I mean my cobbler's son," Maria Dolores answered. "I, a Princess of the
+Empire, humbly offered him, a cobbler's son, my hand, heart, and
+fortune,--and the graceless man rejected them with scorn."
+
+"That is a likely story," said Frau Brandt, wagging her chin. Her blunt
+brown fingers returned to their occupation. "I see your Serene Highness
+offering her hand."
+
+"At all events, will you kindly tell Josephine to pack our boxes.
+To-morrow we'll be flitting," her Serene Highness in a casual way
+announced.
+
+"What say you?" cried Frau Brandt, dropping her knitting into her lap.
+
+"Yes--to Mischenau, to my brother," the Princess pursued. "Of course
+you'll have to come with us, poor dear. You can't let me travel alone
+with Josephine."
+
+"No," said Frau Brandt. "I will go with you."
+
+"And you can remain for my wedding," Maria Dolores added. "I am going
+home to meet my brother's wishes, and to marry my second cousin, the
+high and mighty Maximilian, Prince of Zelt-Zelt."
+
+"Herr Gott!" said Frau Brandt, glancing with devotion at the ceiling.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+John, wild-eyed, was still where she had left him, in the avenue,
+savouring and resavouring his woe. "If only," he brooded, "she were of
+one's own rank in the world, then her wealth might perhaps not be such
+an absolutely hopeless impediment as it is. But to marry, as they say,
+beneath one, and to marry money into the bargain,--that would be a
+little too much like the fortune-hunter of tradition." He still sat
+where she had left him, on the marble bench, disconsolate, when the
+parroco approached hurriedly, from the direction of the house.
+
+"Signore," the parroco began, out of breath, "I offer a thousand excuses
+for venturing to disturb you, but my niece has suddenly fallen ill. I am
+going to the village to telephone for a doctor. My cook is away, for her
+Sunday afternoon. Might I pray you to have the extreme kindness to stay
+with the child till I return? I don't know what is the matter, but she
+fainted, and now is delirious, and, I'm afraid, very ill indeed."
+
+"Good Heavens!" gasped John, forgetting everything else. "Of course, of
+course."
+
+And he set off hotfoot for the presbytery.
+
+
+
+
+PART SIXTH
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+I would rather not dwell upon the details of Annunziata's illness. By
+the mercy of Providence, she got well in the end; but in the mean time
+those details were sufficiently painful. John, for example, found it
+more than painful to hear her cry out piteously, as she often would in
+her delirium, that she did not wish to be turned into a monkey; he hung
+his head and groaned, and cursed the malinspired moment which had given
+that chimæra birth. However, he had his compensations. Maria Dolores,
+whom he had thought never to see again, he saw every day. "Let us hope
+that you and she may never meet again." In his despairing heart the
+words became a refrain. But an hour later the news of trouble at the
+presbytery had travelled to the pavilion, and she flew straight to
+Annunziata's bedside. Ever since, (postponing those threatened nuptials
+at Mischenau), she had shared with John, and the parroco, and Marcella
+the cook, the labours of nurse. And though it was arranged that the men,
+turn and turn about, should watch by night, and the women by day, John,
+by coming early and leaving late, contrived to make a good part of his
+vigil and of hers coincident. And the strange result is that now,
+looking backwards upon that period of pain and dread, when from minute
+to minute no one knew what awful change the next minute might
+bring,--looking backwards, and seeing again the small bare room,
+cell-like, with its whitewashed walls, its iron cot, its Crucifix, its
+narrow window (through which wide miles of valley shone), and then the
+little white face and the brown curls tossing on the pillow, and the
+woman of his love sitting near to him, in the intimacy of a common care
+and common duties,--the strange result is that John feels a glow in his
+heart, as at the memory of a period of joy.
+
+"Oh, do not let them turn me into a monkey. Oh, Holy Mother, I am so
+afraid. Oh, do not let them!" Annunziata cried, shuddering, and
+shrinking deeper into bed, towards the wall.
+
+John hung his head and wrung his hands. "My God, my God!" he groaned.
+
+"You should not blame yourself," Maria Dolores said in a low voice,
+while she bathed the child's forehead, and fanned her face. "Your
+intention was good, you could not foresee what has happened, and it may
+be for the best, after all,--it may strengthen her 'will to live,' which
+is the great thing, the doctor says."
+
+She had spoken English, but Annunziata's next outcry was like a
+response.
+
+"Oh, to live, to live--I want to live, to live Oh, let me live!"
+
+But at other times her wandering thoughts took quite a different turn.
+
+Gazing solemnly up into Maria Dolores' face, she said, "He does not even
+know her name, though he fears it may be Smitti. I thought it was Maria
+Dolores, but he fears it may be Smitti."
+
+John looked out of the window, pretending not to hear, and praying, I
+expect, that Maria Dolores' eyes might be blinded and her counsel
+darkened. At the same time, (Heaven having sent me a laughing hero), I
+won't vouch that his shoulders didn't shake a little.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Apropos of their ignorance of each other's patronymics. ... One
+afternoon Maria Dolores was taking the air at the open door of the
+presbytery, when, to a mighty clattering of horses' hoofs, a big
+high-swung barouche came sweeping into the court-yard, described a bold
+half-circle, and abruptly drew up before her. In the barouche sat a big
+old lady, a big soft, humorous-eyed old lady, in cool crêpe-de-chine,
+cream-coloured, with beautiful white hair, a very gay light straw
+bonnet, and a much befurbelowed lavender-hued sunshade. Coachman and
+footman, bolt upright, stared straight before them, as rigid as if their
+liveries were of papier-maché. The horses, with a full sense of what
+they owed to appearances, fierily champed their bits, tossed their
+manes, and pawed the paving-stones. The old lady smiled upon Maria
+Dolores with a look of great friendliness and interest, softly bowed,
+and wished her, in a fine, warm, old high-bred voice, "Good afternoon."
+
+Maria Dolores (feeling an instant liking, as well as curiosity and
+admiration) smiled in her turn, and responded, "Good afternoon."
+
+"You enjoy a fine view from here," the old lady remarked, ducking her
+sunshade in the direction of the valley.
+
+"A beautiful view," agreed Maria Dolores, following the sunshade with
+her eyes.
+
+Those of the stranger had a gleam. "But don't you think, if the
+unvarnished truth may be whispered, that it's becoming the merest trifle
+too hot?" she suggested.
+
+Maria Dolores lightly laughed. "I think it is decidedly too hot," she
+said.
+
+"I'm glad to find we're of the same opinion," declared the old lady,
+fanning herself. "You can positively _see_ the heat vibrating there in
+the distance. We children of the North should fly such weather. For my
+part, I'm off to-morrow for England, where I can shiver through the
+summer comfortably in my chimney-corner."
+
+Maria Dolores laughed out again.
+
+"So I've driven over from Roccadoro," the newcomer continued, "to have a
+farewell look at a young man of my acquaintance who's staying here. I
+dare say you may know him. He has blue eyes and a red beard, a
+flattering manner and a pretty wit, and his name is Blanchemain."
+
+"Oh?" said Maria Dolores, her eyebrows going up. "Is that his name? You
+mean the young Englishman who lives with the parroco?"
+
+The old lady's eyebrows, which were thick and dark, went up too.
+
+"Is it possible you didn't know his name?" was her surprised
+ejaculation. Then she said, "I wonder whether he is anywhere about?"
+
+"I fancy he's asleep," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"Asleep? At this hour?" The dark eyebrows frowned their protest. "That
+sounds like a sad slugabed."
+
+Maria Dolores looked serious. "He was up all night. We have a child ill
+here, and he was up all night, watching."
+
+The stranger's grey eyes filled with concern and sympathy. "I hope, I'm
+sure, it's not that pretty little girl, the niece of the parroco?" she
+said.
+
+"Unhappily, it is," said Maria Dolores. "She has been very ill indeed."
+
+"I am extremely sorry to hear it, extremely sorry," the old lady
+declared, with feeling. "If I can be of any sort of use--if I can send
+anything--or in any way help--" Her eyes completed the offer.
+
+"Oh, thank you, thank you," replied Maria Dolores. "You are most kind,
+but I don't think there is anything any one can do. Besides, she is on
+the mend now, we hope. The doctor says the worst is probably over."
+
+"Well, thank God for that," exclaimed the visitor, with a will. She
+considered for a moment, and then reverted to the previous question. "So
+you did not know that my vivid young friend's name was Blanchemain?"
+
+"No," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"It is a good name--there's none better in England," averred the old
+lady, with a nod of emphasis that set the wheat-ears in her bonnet
+quivering.
+
+"Oh--?" said Maria Dolores, looking politely interested.
+
+"He's the nephew and heir of Lord Blanchemain of Ventmere," her
+instructress went on. "That is one of our most ancient peerages."
+
+"Really?" said Maria Dolores. (What else did she say in her heart? Where
+now was her cobbler's son?)
+
+"And I'm glad to be able to add that I'm his sort of connection--I'm the
+widow of the late Lord Blanchemain." The lady paused; then, with that
+smile of hers which we know, that smile which went as an advance-guard
+to disarm resentment, "People of my age are allowed to be inquisitive,"
+she premised. "I have introduced myself to you--won't you introduce
+yourself to me?"
+
+"My name is Maria Dolores of Zelt-Neuminster," answered the person
+questioned, also smiling.
+
+The widow of the late Lord Blanchemain inwardly gasped, but she was
+quick to suppress all outward symptoms of that circumstance. The
+daughter of Eve in her gasped, but the practised old Englishwoman of the
+world affably and imperturbably pronounced, with a gracious movement of
+the head, "Ah, indeed? You are then, of course, a relation of the
+Prince?"
+
+"I am the Prince's sister," said Maria Dolores. And, as if an
+explanation of her presence was in order, she added, "I am here visiting
+my old nurse and governess, to whom my brother has given a pavilion of
+the Castle for her home."
+
+Lady Blanchemain fanned herself. "A miller's daughter!" she thought,
+with a silent laugh at John's expense and her own. "I am very glad to
+have made your acquaintance," she said, "and I hope this may not be our
+last meeting. I'm afraid I ought now to be hastening back to Roccadoro.
+I wonder whether you will have the kindness, when you see him, to convey
+my parting benediction to Mr. Blanchemain. Oh, no, I would not let him
+be wakened, not for worlds. Thank you. Good-bye."
+
+And with a great effect of majesty and importance, like a conscious
+thing, her carriage rolled away.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+"My romance is over, my April dream is ended," said the Princess, with
+an air, perhaps a feint, of listless melancholy, to Frau Brandt.
+
+"What mean you?" asked Frau Brandt, unmoved.
+
+"My cobbler's son has disappeared--has vanished in a blaze of glory,"
+her Serene Highness explained, and laughed.
+
+"I don't understand," said Frau Brandt. "He has not left Sant'
+Alessina?"
+
+"No, but he isn't a cobbler's son at all--he's merely been masquerading
+as one--his name is not Brown, Jones, or Robinson--his name is the
+high-sounding name of Blanchemain, and he's heir to an English peerage."
+
+"Ah, so? He is then noble?" Frau Brandt inferred, raising her eyes, with
+satisfaction.
+
+"As noble as need be. An English peer is marriageable. So here's adieu
+to my cottage in the air."
+
+"Here's good riddance to it," said Frau Brandt.
+
+That evening, at the hour of sunset, Maria Dolores met John in the
+garden.
+
+"You had a visitor this afternoon," she announced. "A most inspiritingly
+young old lady, as soft and white as a powder-puff, in a carriage that
+was like a coach-and-four. Lady Blanchemain. She is leaving to-morrow
+for England. She desired me to give you her farewell blessing."
+
+"It will be doubly precious to me by reason of the medium through which
+it comes," said John, with his courtliest obeisance.
+
+There was a little pause, during which she looked at the western sky.
+But presently, "Why did you tell me you had an uncle who was a farmer?"
+she asked, beginning slowly to pace down the pathway.
+
+"Did I tell you that? I suppose I had a boastful fit upon me," John
+replied.
+
+"But it very much misled me," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"Oh, it's perfectly true," said John.
+
+"You are the heir to a peerage," said Maria Dolores.
+
+John had a gesture.
+
+"There you are," he said; "and my uncle, the peer, spends much of his
+time and most of his money breeding sheep and growing turnips. If that
+isn't a farmer, I should like to know what is."
+
+"I hope you displayed less reticence regarding your station in the world
+to that woman you were in love with," said she.
+
+"That woman I _was_ in love with?" John caught her up. "That woman I
+_am_ in love with, please."
+
+"Oh? Are you still in love with her?" Maria Dolores wondered. "It is so
+long since you have spoken of her, I thought your heart was healed."
+
+"If I have not spoken of her, it has been because I was under the
+impression that you had tacitly forbidden me to do so," John informed
+her.
+
+"So I had," she admitted. "But I find that there is such a thing--as
+being too well obeyed."
+
+She brought out her last words, after the briefest possible suspension,
+hurriedly, in a voice that quailed a little, as if in terror of its own
+audacity. John, with tingling pulses, turned upon her. But she,
+according to her habit at such times, refused him her eyes. He could
+see, though, that her eyelashes trembled.
+
+"Oh," he cried, "I love her so much, I need her so, I suppose I shall
+end by doing the dishonourable thing."
+
+"Did you ever tell her that you were Lord Blanchemain's heir?" she
+asked.
+
+"I never thought of it. Why should I?" said John.
+
+"When you were bemoaning your poverty, as an obstacle to marriage, you
+might have remembered that your birth counted for something. With us
+Austrians, for example, birth counts for almost everything,--for
+infinitely more than money."
+
+"I think," said John, as one impersonally generalizing, "that a
+fortune-hunter with a tuft is the least admirable variety of that
+animal. I wish you could see what beautiful little rose-white ears she
+has, and the lovely way in which her dark hair droops about them."
+
+"How long ago was it," mused she, "that love first made people fancy
+they saw beauties which had no real existence?"
+
+"Oh, the moment you see a thing, it acquires real existence," John
+returned. "The act of seeing is an act of creation. The thing you see
+has real existence on your retina and in your mind, if nowhere else, and
+that is the realest sort of real existence."
+
+"Then she must thank you as the creator of her 'rose-white' ears,"
+laughed Maria Dolores. "I wonder whether that sunset has any real
+existence, and whether it is really as splendid as it seems."
+
+The west had become a vast sea of gold, a pure and placid sea of
+many-tinted gold, bounded and intersected and broken into innumerable
+wide bays and narrow inlets by great cloud-promontories, purple and rose
+and umber. Directly opposite, just above the crest-line of the hills,
+hung the nearly full moon, pale as a mere phantom of itself.
+And from somewhere in the boscage at the garden's end came a
+lool-lool-lool-lioo-liô, deep and long-drawn, liquid and complaining,
+which one knew to be the preliminary piping-up of Philomel.
+
+"If some things," said John, "derive their beauty from the eye of the
+beholder, the beauty of other things is determined by the presence or
+absence of the person you long to share all beautiful visions with. The
+sky, the clouds, the whole air and earth, this evening, seem to me
+beauty in its ultimate perfection."
+
+Maria Dolores softly laughed, softly, softly. And for a long time, by
+the marble balustrade that guarded this particular terrace of the
+garden, they stood in silence. The western gold burned to red, and more
+sombre red; the cloud-promontories gloomed purpler; the pale moon
+kindled, and shone like ice afire, with its intense cold brilliancy; the
+olive woods against the sky lay black; a score of nightingales, near and
+far, were calling and sobbing and exulting; and two human spirits
+yearned with the mystery of love.
+
+"My income," said John, all at once, brusquely coming to earth, "is
+exactly six hundred pounds a year. I suppose two people _could_ live on
+that, though I'm dashed if I see how. Of course we couldn't live in
+England, where that infernal future peerage would put us under a
+thousand obligations; but I dare say we might find a garret here in
+Italy. The question is, would she be willing, or have I any right to
+ask her, to marry me, on the condition of leaving her own money
+untouched, and living with me on mine?
+
+"Apropos of future peerages and things," said Maria Dolores, "do you
+happen to know whether she has any rank of her own to keep up?"
+
+"I don't care twopence about her rank," said John.
+
+"Do you happen to know her name?" she asked.
+
+"I know what I wish her name was," John promptly answered. "I wish to
+Heaven it was Blanchemain."
+
+Maria Dolores gazed, pensive, at the moon. "He does not even know her
+name," she remarked, on a key of meditation, "though he fears," she
+sadly shook her head, "he fears it may be Smitti."
+
+"Oh, I say!" cried John, wincing, with a kind of sorry giggle; and I
+don't know whether he looked or felt the more sheepish. His face showed
+every signal of humiliation, he tugged nervously at his beard, but his
+eyes, in spite of him, his very blue blue eyes were full of vexed
+amusement.
+
+The bell in the clock-tower struck eight.
+
+"There--it is your hour for going to Annunziata," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"You have not answered my question?" said John.
+
+"I will think about it," said she.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Annunziata's delirium had passed, but in spite of all their efforts to
+persuade her not to talk, talk she would.
+
+"This is the month of May, isn't it?" she asked, next morning.
+
+"Yes, dear one," said Maria Dolores, whose watch it was.
+
+"And that is the month of Mary. San Luca ought to hurry up and make me
+well, so that I can keep flowers on the Lady Altar."
+
+"Then if you wish to get well quickly," said Maria Dolores, "you must
+try not to talk,--nor even to think, if you can help it. You know the
+doctor does not want you to talk."
+
+"All right. I won't talk. A going clock may be always wrong, but a
+stopped clock is right twice a day. So stop your tongue, and avoid
+folly. My uncle told me that. He never talks."
+
+"And now shall you and I imitate his example?" proposed Maria Dolores.
+Her lips, compressed, were plainly the gaolers of a laugh.
+
+"Yes," said Annunziata. "But I can't help thinking of those poor
+flowers. All May flowers are born to be put on the Lady Altar. Those
+poor flowers are missing what they were born for. They must be very
+sad."
+
+"This afternoon, every afternoon," Maria Dolores promised, "I will put
+flowers on the Lady Altar. Now see if you can't shut your eyes, and rest
+for a little while."
+
+"I once found a toad on the Lady Altar. What do you think he was there
+for?" asked Annunziata.
+
+"I can't think, I'm sure," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"Well, when I first saw him I was angry, and I was going to get a broom
+and sweep him away. But then I thought it must be very hard to be a
+toad, and that you can't help being a toad if you are born one, and I
+thought that perhaps that toad was there praying that he might be
+changed from a toad to something else. So I didn't sweep him away. Have
+you ever heard of the little Mass of Corruption that lay in a garden?"
+
+"No," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"Well," said Annunziata, "once upon a time a little Mass of Corruption
+lay in a garden. But it did not know it was a Mass of Corruption, and it
+did not wish to be a Mass of Corruption, and it never did any harm or
+wished any harm to any one, but just lay there all day long, and thought
+how beautiful the sky was, and how good and warm the sun, and how sweet
+the flowers were and the bird-songs, and thanked God with all its heart
+for having given it such a lovely place to lie in. Yet all the while,
+you know, it couldn't help being what it was, a little Mass of
+Corruption. And at the close of the day some people who were walking in
+the garden saw it, and cried out, 'Oh, what a horrible little Mass of
+Corruption!' and they called the gardener, and had it buried in the
+earth. But the little Mass of Corruption, when it heard that it _was_ a
+little Mass of Corruption, felt very, very sad, and it made a
+supplication to Our Lady. 'I do not wish to be a Mass of Corruption,' it
+said. 'Queen of Heaven, pray for me, that I may be purified, and made
+clean, and not be a Mass of Corruption any longer, and that I may then
+go back to the garden, out of this dark earth.' So Our Lady prayed for
+it, and it was cleansed with water and purified, and--what do you think
+the Little Mass of Corruption became? It became a rose--a red rose in
+that very garden, just where they had buried it. From which we see--But
+I don't quite remember what we see from it," she broke off the pain of
+baffled effort on her brow. "My uncle could tell you that."
+
+Afterwards, for a few minutes, she was silent, lying quite still, with
+her eyes on the ceiling.
+
+"Why do sunny lands produce dark people, and dark lands light people?"
+she asked all at once.
+
+"Ah, don't begin to talk again, dear," Maria Dolores pleaded. "The
+doctor will he coming soon now, and he will be angry if he finds that I
+have let you talk."
+
+"Oh, I will tell him that it isn't your fault," said Annunziata. "I will
+tell him that you didn't let me, but that I talked because it is so hard
+to lie here and think, think, think, and not be allowed to say what you
+are thinking. Prospero asked me that question about sunny lands a long
+time ago. I've been thinking and thinking, but I can't think it out.
+Have you a great deal of money? Are you very rich?"
+
+"Darling, won't you please not talk any more?" Maria Dolores implored
+her.
+
+"I'll stop pretty soon," said Annunziata. "I think you are very rich. I
+think, in spite of his saying her name is not Maria Dolores, that you
+are the dark woman whom Prospero is to marry. He is to marry a dark
+woman who will be very rich. But then he will also he very rich himself.
+Is Austria a sunny land? England must be a dark land, for Prospero is
+light. Let me see your left hand, please, and I will tell you whether
+you are to marry a light man.
+
+"Hush!" said Maria Dolores, trying not to laugh. "That shall be some
+other time."
+
+"Wouldn't you like to marry Prospero? I would," said Annunziata.
+
+"I think I hear the wheels of the doctor's gig," said Maria Dolores.
+"Now we shall both be scolded."
+
+"But of course, if you do marry him, I can't," Annunziata pursued,
+undaunted by this menace. "A man isn't allowed to have two
+wives,--unless he is a king. He may have two sisters or two daughters,
+but not two wives or two mothers. There was once a king named Salomone
+who had a thousand wives, but even he had only one mother, I think. I
+hope you will live at Sant' Alessina after your marriage. Will you?"
+
+Maria Dolores bit her lip and vouchsafed no answer; and again for a
+minute or two Annunziata lay silent. But presently, "Have you ever waked
+up in the middle of the night, and felt terribly frightened?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, dear, sometimes. I suppose every one has," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"Well, do you know why people feel so frightened when they wake like
+that?" pursued the child.
+
+"No," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"I do," said Annunziata. "The middle of the night is the Devil's Noon.
+Nobody is awake in the middle of the night except wicked people, like
+thieves or roysterers, or people who are suffering. All people who are
+good, and who are well and happy, are sound asleep. So it is the time
+the Devil likes best, and he and all his evil spirits come to the earth
+to enjoy the great pleasure of seeing people wicked or suffering. And
+that is why we feel so frightened when we wake. The air all round us is
+full of evil spirits, though we can't see them, and they are watching
+us, to run and tell the Devil if we do anything wicked or suffer any
+pain. But it is foolish of us to feel frightened, because our Guardian
+Angels are always there too, and they are a hundred times stronger than
+the evil spirits. Angels, you know, are very big, very much bigger than
+men. Some of them are as tall as mountains, but even the quite small
+ones are as tall as trees."
+
+"This time I really do hear wheels," said Maria Dolores, with an accent
+of thanksgiving.
+
+And she rose to meet the doctor.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+John sat in his room, absorbed in contemplation of a tiny lace-edged
+pocket-handkerchief. He spread it out upon his knee, and laughed. He
+crumpled it up in his palm, and pressed it to his face, and drank deep
+of its faint perfume,--faint, but powerfully provocative of visions and
+emotions. He had found it during the night on the floor of the
+sick-room, and had captured and borne it away like a treasure. He spread
+it out on his knee again, and was again about to laugh at its small size
+and gauzy texture, when his eye was caught by something in its corner.
+He held it nearer to the window. The thing that had caught his eye was a
+cypher surmounted by a crown, embroidered so minutely as almost to call
+for a magnifying glass. But without a glass he could see that the cypher
+was composed of the initials M and D, and that the crown was not a
+coronet, but a closed crown, of the pattern worn by mediatised princes.
+
+"What on earth can be the meaning of this?" he wondered, frowning, and
+breathing quick.
+
+But he was stopped from further speculation for the moment by a knock at
+the door. The postman entered with two letters, for one of which, as it
+was registered, John had to sign. When he had tipped the postman and was
+alone again, he put his registered letter on the dressing-table (with a
+view to disciplining curiosity and exercising patience, possibly) and
+turned his attention to the other. In a handsome, high old hand, that
+somehow reminded him of the writer's voice, it ran as follows:--
+
+     "DEAR JOHN,
+
+     "I was heart-broken not to see you when I drove over to say
+     good-bye this afternoon, but chance favoured me at least to the
+     extent of letting me see your miller's daughter, and you may
+     believe that I was glad of an opportunity to inspect her at close
+     quarters. My dear boy, she is no more a miller's daughter than you
+     are. Her beauty--there's _race_ in it. Her manner and carriage,
+     her voice, accent, her way of dressing, (I'd give a sovereign for
+     the name of her dressmaker), the fineness of her skin, her hair,
+     everything--there's race in 'em all, race and consciousness of
+     race, pride, dignity, distinction. These things don't come to pass
+     in a generation. I'm surprised at your lack of perspicacity. And
+     those blue eyes of yours look so sharp, too. But perhaps your wish
+     was father to your thought. You felt (well, and so to some extent
+     did I) that it would be more _romantic_. She's probably a very
+     great swell indeed, and I expect the Frau What's-her-name she's
+     staying with will turn out to be her old governess or nurse or
+     something. When those Austrians _can_ show quarterings, (of course
+     you must bar recent creations--they're generally named Cohen), they
+     can show them to some effect. They think nothing of thirty-two. All
+     of which, _au fond_, rather rejoices me, for if she really had been
+     a miller's daughter, it would have seemed a good deal like throwing
+     yourself away, and who knows what your rusty, crusty old uncle B.
+     might have said? I've long had a rod in pickle for _him_, and
+     t'other day I applied it. _Attendez_.
+
+     "Don't forget the pig you purchased--so gallantly and confidingly.
+     I would not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments--your
+     pig will gobble 'em up. You should by this have received a
+     communication from my solicitors. Remember, you have pledged your
+     sacred promise. There must be no question of trying to shirk or
+     burke it. Remember that I am quite outrageously rich. I have no
+     children of my own, and no very near relatives, (and my distant
+     ones are intensely disagreeable), and I can't help looking upon the
+     heir of the Blanchemains as a kind of spiritual son. In your
+     position there's no such thing as having too much money. Take all
+     that comes, and never mind the quarter whence. They're Plymouth
+     Brethren, and send me tracts.
+
+     "Good-bye now till August, if not before. For of course in August
+     you must come to me at Fring. Will you bring your bride? When and
+     where the wedding? I suppose they'll want it in Austria. Beware of
+     long engagements--or of too short ones. The autumn's the time,--the
+     only pretty ring-time. You see, you'll need some months for the
+     preparation of your trousseau. I love a man to be smart. Well,
+     good-bye. I was so sorry about that child's illness, but thankful
+     to hear she was mending.
+
+     "Yours affectionately,
+
+     "LINDA BLANCHEMAIN."
+
+And his registered letter, when at last he opened it, ran thus:--
+
+     "DEAR SIR:--Pursuant to instructions received from our client Lady
+     Blanchemain, we beg to hand you herewith our cheque for Seven
+     hundred and fifty pounds (£750 stg.), and to request the favour of
+     your receipt for the same, together with the address of your
+     bankers, that we may pay in quarterly a like sum to your account,
+     it being her ladyship's intention, immediately upon her return to
+     England, to effect a settlement upon yourself and heirs of £100,000
+     funded in Bk. of Eng. stock.
+
+     "We are further to have the pleasure to inform you that by the
+     terms of a will just prepared by us, and to be executed by Lady
+     Blanchemain at the earliest possible date, you are constituted her
+     residuary legatee.
+
+     "With compliments and respectful congratulations,
+
+     "We have the honour, dear Sir, to be,
+
+     "Your obedient servants,
+
+     "FARROW, BERNSCOT, AND TISDALE."
+
+And then there came another tap at the door, and it was the postman who
+had returned, with a third letter which, like the true Italian postman
+that he was, he had forgotten,--and I fancy, if it hadn't been for that
+tip still warm in his pocket, the easy-going fellow would have allowed
+it to stand over till to-morrow. He made, at any rate, a great virtue of
+having discovered it and of having retraced his steps.
+
+The letter was written in black, angular, uncompromising characters,
+that looked rather like sabre-thrusts and bayonets. It read:--
+
+     "DEAR JACK:--I have received the enclosure from Linda Lady
+     Blanchemain. She is an exceedingly impertinent and meddlesome old
+     woman. But she is right about the allowance. I don't know why I
+     never thought of it myself. I don't know why you never suggested
+     it. I extremely regret it. As next in succession, you are
+     certainly entitled to an annuity from the estate. I have to-day
+     remitted £500 to your bankers, and am instructing my agents to pay
+     in a like amount quarterly.
+
+     "I hope I shall soon be seeing you at Ventmere. We are having a
+     grand lambing season, but there's a nasty spread of swine-fever,
+     and the whole country's papered with handbills. I got a goodish bit
+     of hunting down at Wilsborough during the winter. Now there's
+     nothing to do but play golf. I never could find any fun in shooting
+     rooks.
+
+     "Your affectionate uncle,
+
+     "B of V."
+
+And the enclosure:--
+
+     "Linda Lady Blanchemain presents her compliments to Lord
+     Blanchemain of Ventmere, and begs to apprise him that she has
+     lately had the pleasure of meeting his lordship's nephew John, and
+     has discovered to her amazement that his lordship makes him no
+     allowance. This situation, for the heir to the barony of
+     Blanchemain, is of course absurd, and must, Lady Blanchemain is
+     sure, be due entirely to an oversight on his lordship's part. She
+     ventures, therefore, with all respect, to bring it to his notice."
+
+So! Here sat a young man with plenty to think about; a young man, whose
+income, yesterday a bare six hundred, had sprung up over night to
+something near six thousand. Six thousand a year isn't opulence, if you
+like, but a young man possessing it can hardly look upon himself as
+quite empty-handed, either. This young man, however, had other things as
+well to think of. What of that embroidered handkerchief? What of those
+shrewd suspicions of Lady Blanchemain's? What of his miller's daughter?
+
+And there was another thing still. What of his proud old honest Spartan
+of an unimaginative uncle? He thought of him, and "Oh, the poor old
+boy," he cried. "Not for ten times the money would I have had the dear
+old woman write to him like that. How hard it must have hit him!"
+
+"M, D, and a princely crown," he reflected. "I wish I had an Almanach de
+Gotha."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+"Who was it said of some one that he dearly loved a lord?" Maria
+Dolores, her chin in the air, asked of Frau Brandt.
+
+"I do not know," Frau Brandt replied, knitting.
+
+"Well, at least, you know whether it would be possible for a man and
+wife to live luxuriously on sixpence a week. Would it?" pursued her
+tease.
+
+"You are well aware that it would not," said Frau Brandt.
+
+"How about six hundred pounds a year?"
+
+"Six hundred pounds--?" Frau Brandt computed. "That would be six
+thousand florins, no? It would depend upon their station in the world."
+
+"Well, suppose their station were about my station--and my lord's?"
+
+"You," said Frau Brandt, with a chuckle of contentment, swaying her
+white-bonneted head. "You would need twice that for your dress alone."
+
+"One could dress more simply," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"No," said Frau Brandt, her good eyes beaming, "you must always dress in
+the very finest that can be had."
+
+"But then," Maria Dolores asked with wistfulness, "what am I to do? For
+six hundred pounds is the total of his income."
+
+"You have, unless I am mistaken, an income of your own," Frau Brandt
+remarked.
+
+"Yes--but he won't let me use it," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"He? Who?" demanded Frau Brandt, bridling. "Who is there that dares to
+say let or not let to you?
+
+"My future husband," said Maria Dolores. "He has peculiar ideas of
+honour. He does not like the notion of marrying a woman who is richer
+than himself. So he will marry me only on the condition that I send my
+own fortune to be dropped in the middle of the sea."
+
+"What nonsense is this?" said Frau Brandt, composed.
+
+"No, it is the truth," said Maria Dolores, "the true truth. He is too
+proud to live in luxury at his wife's expense."
+
+"I like a man making conditions, when it is a question of marrying you,"
+said Frau Brandt, with scorn.
+
+"So do I," said Maria Dolores, with heartiness.
+
+"Well, at any rate, I am glad to see that he is not after you for your
+money," Frau Brandt reflected.
+
+"I suppose we shall have to dress in sackcloth and dine on lentils,"
+said Maria Dolores.
+
+"Of course you will tell him to take his conditions to the Old One,"
+said Frau Brandt. "It is out of the question for you to change the
+manner of your life."
+
+"I feel indeed as if it were," admitted Maria Dolores. "But if he
+insists?"
+
+"Then tell him to go to the Old One himself," was Frau Brandt's blunt
+advice.
+
+Maria Dolores laughed. "It seems like an _impasse_," she said. "Who is
+to break the news to my brother?"
+
+"We will wait until there is some news to break," the old woman amiably
+grumbled.
+
+Again at the sunset hour Maria Dolores met him in the garden. He was
+seated on one of their marble benches, amongst marble columns,
+(rose-tinted by the western light, and casting long purple shadows), in
+a vine-embowered pergola. He was leaning forward, legs crossed, brow
+wrinkled, as one deep in thought. But of course at the sound of her
+footstep he jumped up.
+
+"What mighty problem were you revolving?" she asked. "You looked like
+Rembrandt's _philosophe en méditation_."
+
+"I was revolving the problem of human love," he answered. "I was
+mutilating Browning.
+
+     '_Was it something said,
+       Something done,
+     Was it touch of hand,
+       Turn of head?_'
+
+I was also thinking about you. I was wondering whether it would be my
+cruel destiny not to see you this evening, and thinking of the first
+time I ever saw you."
+
+"Oh," said she, lightly, "that morning among the olives,--when you
+gathered the windflowers for me?"
+
+"No," said he. "That was the second time."
+
+"Indeed?" said she, surprised. She sat down on the marble bench. John
+stood before her.
+
+"Yes," said he. "The first time was the day before. You were crossing
+the garden--you were bending over the sun-dial--and I spied upon you
+from a window of the _piano nobile_. Lady Blanchemain was there with me,
+and she made a prediction."
+
+"What did she predict?" asked Maria Dolores, unsuspicious.
+
+"She predicted that I would fall--" But he dropped his sentence in the
+middle. "She predicted what has happened."
+
+"Oh," murmured Maria Dolores, and looked at the horizon. By-and-by,
+"That morning among the olives was the first time that I saw you--when
+you dashed like a paladin to my assistance. I feel that I have never
+sufficiently thanked you."
+
+"A paladin oddly panoplied," said John. "Tell me honestly, weren't you
+in two minds whether or not to reward me with largesse? You had silver
+in your hand."
+
+Maria Dolores laughed. I think she coloured a little.
+
+"Perhaps I was, for half a second," she confessed. "But your grand
+manner soon put me in one mind."
+
+John also laughed. He took a turn backwards and forwards. "I have waked
+in the dead of night, and grown hot and cold to remember the figure of
+fun I was."
+
+"No," said Maria Dolores, to console him. "You weren't a figure of fun.
+Your costume had the air of being an impromptu, but," she laughed, "your
+native dignity shone through."
+
+"Thank you," said John, bowing. "The next time I saw you was that same
+afternoon. You were with Annunziata in the avenue. I carried my vision
+of you, like a melody, all the way to Roccadoro-and all the way home
+again."
+
+"I had just made Annunziata's acquaintance," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"You had a white sunshade and a lilac frock," said John. "The next time
+was that night in the moonlight. You were all in white, with a scarf of
+white lace over your hair. You threw me a white rose from your
+balcony--and I have carried that rose with me ever since."
+
+"I threw you a white rose?" doubted Maria Dolores, looking up, at fault.
+
+"Yes," said John. "Have you forgotten it?"
+
+"I certainly have," said she, with emphasis.
+
+"You threw me a smile that was like a white rose," said he.
+
+She laughed.
+
+"I think I just distantly acknowledged your bow," she said.
+
+"Well, some people's distant acknowledgments are like white roses," said
+he. "I hope, at least, you remember what a glorious night it was, and
+how the nightingales were singing?"
+
+"Yes," said she. "I remember that."
+
+"I have a fancy," he declared, "that it will be a more glorious night
+still to-night, and that the nightingales will sing better than they
+have ever sung before."
+
+Maria Dolores did not speak.
+
+"Do you happen," John asked, after a long silence, while they gazed at
+the deepening colours in the west, "do you happen to possess such a
+thing as a copy of the Almanach de Gotha?"
+
+"Yes," said she.
+
+"Really? I wonder whether you will lend it to me?"
+
+"I am sorry--it is in Vienna." And after an instant's pause, she
+ventured, "What, if it isn't indiscreet to inquire, do you wish to look
+up?"
+
+"I wish to look up a lady--a dream lady--a lady who walks in beauty like
+the night of cloudless climes--and whose pocket-handkerchiefs are
+embroidered with the initials M.D., in a cypher, under a princely
+crown."
+
+"I should think," said Maria Dolores, considering, "that she would
+probably be a member of one of the mediatised princely houses. But if
+you have nothing more than her initials to go by, you would find it
+difficult to trace her in the Almanach de Gotha."
+
+"No doubt," said John. "But to a man of spirit a difficulty is a
+challenge."
+
+"Do you make a practice," asked she, "of appropriating people's
+handkerchiefs?"
+
+"Certain people's--yes," unblushing, he promptly owned.
+
+"M.D. under a princely crown, I think you said?" she mused. "It occurs
+to me that Maria Dolores of Zelt-Neuminster's pocket-handkerchiefs might
+be so embroidered."
+
+"Ah?" said John. "Zelt-Neuminster? That would be a daughter of the man
+who owns this Castle?"
+
+"No, she is a sister of the man who owns this Castle."
+
+"I understand," said John. "I wonder that the sister of the man who owns
+this Castle never comes here to see how fine it is."
+
+"She has been here quite recently," said Maria Dolores. "She has been
+here visiting her foster-mother, who lives in the pavilion beyond the
+clock. She came to make a sort of retreat--to think something over."
+
+"Yes--?" questioned he.
+
+"Her brother is very anxious to marry her off. He is anxious that she
+should marry her second cousin, the Prince of Zelt-Zelt. She came here
+to make up her mind."
+
+"Has she made it up?" he asked.
+
+"I am not sure," said she.
+
+"Yet you seem to be deep in her confidence," said he.
+
+"Yes--but she is not quite sure herself."
+
+"Oh--?" said John.
+
+"She is one of those foolish women who dream of marriage as a high
+romance."
+
+"Wise men," said John, "dream of it as the highest."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"A marriage with her cousin would be an end to all romance for ever. She
+was thinking a little while ago, I believe, of marrying a plain
+commoner, the nephew of a farmer. That would have been indeed romantic.
+Now, I hear, she is considering, a future member of your English House
+of Lords."
+
+"Wouldn't even that be rather romantic--if a step down constitutes
+romance?" John suggested.
+
+"Oh, a British peer is scarcely a step down," she returned. "Besides,
+there are people who don't care--what is the expression?--twopence about
+rank."
+
+"When I said that," John explained, "I had no inkling that her rank was
+so exalted."
+
+"Did you think she was the daughter of a cobbler?" Maria Dolores
+quickly, with some haughtiness, inquired.
+
+"I thought she was a daughter of the stars," John answered.
+
+"And you feared her name was Smitti," she said, haughtiness dissolving
+in mirth. "I will never tell you what she feared that yours was."
+
+"See," said John, "how they are hanging the heavens with banners. It
+must be in honour of some great impending event."
+
+Yesterday the west had been a sea. To-day it was a city, a vast grey and
+violet city, with palaces and battlemented towers, and countless airy
+spires and pinnacles; and here, there, everywhere, its walls were gay
+with gold and crimson, as with drooping banners.
+
+"'Tis a city _en fête_," said John. "'Tis the city where marriages are
+made. They must have one in hand."
+
+"Hark," said she, putting up a finger. "There are your nightingales
+beginning."
+
+But the raised finger reminded him of something. "Have you a rooted
+objection to rings?" he asked.
+
+"Why?" asked she.
+
+"I notice that you don't wear any."
+
+"Oh, sometimes I wear many," she said. "Then one has moods in which one
+leaves them off."
+
+"I have a ring in my pocket which I think belongs to you," said he.
+
+"Really? I don't know that any of my rings are missing."
+
+"Here it is," said he. He produced the little old shagreen case he had
+received from Lady Blanchemain, opened, and offered it.
+
+"It is a singularly beautiful ring," said she, her eyes admiring. "But
+it doesn't belong to me."
+
+"I think it does," said he. "May I try it on your finger?"
+
+She put forth her right hand.
+
+"No--your left hand, please," he said. He dropped upon one knee before
+her, and when the delicate white hand was surrendered, I imagine he made
+of getting the ring upon the alliance finger a longer business by a good
+deal than was necessary. "There," he said in the end, "you see. It looks
+as if it had grown there. Of course it belongs to you." He still held
+her hand, warm and firm and velvet-soft. I think in another second he
+would have touched it with his lips. But she drew it away.
+
+She gazed into the depths of the heart-shaped ruby, tremulous with
+liquid light, and smiled as at secret thoughts.
+
+"But I don't see," said John, getting to his feet, "how any man can ask
+a Princess of the House of Zelt to marry him and live on six hundred
+pounds a year."
+
+"She would have to modify her habits a good deal, that is very certain,"
+said Maria Dolores.
+
+"She would have to modify them utterly," said John. "Six hundred a year
+is poverty even for a single man. For a married couple it would be
+beggary. She would have to live like the wife of a petty employé. She
+would have to travel second class and stay at fourth-rate hotels. She
+would have to turn her old dresses and trim her own bonnets. She would
+have to do without a maid. And all this means that she would have
+virtually to renounce her caste, to give up the society of her equals,
+who demand a certain scale of appearances, and to live among pariahs or
+to live in isolation. Don't you think a man would be a monster of
+selfishness to exact such sacrifices?"
+
+"Oh, some men have excessively far-fetched and morbid notions of
+honour," said she.
+
+"Do you think the Princess, with all this brought to her attention,
+would ever dream of consenting?"
+
+"Women in love are weak--they will consent to almost anything," said
+she, her dark eyes smiling for an instant into his.
+
+Why didn't he take her in his arms? Hope deferred maketh the heart sick,
+but to defer the consummation of a joy assured (observes the Persian
+poet) giveth the heart a peculiar sweet excitement.
+
+"Well," said John. "I'm glad to think she is weak; but I'll never ask my
+wife to consent to anything so unpleasant. A Princess and a future
+peeress, living on six hundred pounds a year! It's unheard of."
+
+She looked at him, puzzled, incredulous.
+
+"Oh--? Can you possibly mean--that you will--take back your condition?"
+
+"Yes," said he, humbly. "Who am I to make conditions?"
+
+"You will let her spend as much of her own money as she likes?" she
+wondered, wide-eyed.
+
+"As a lover of thrift, I shall deprecate extravagance," said John. "But
+as a submissive husband, I shall let her do in all things as her fancy
+dictates."
+
+"Well," marvelled she, "here is a surprise--here is a volte-face
+indeed."
+
+And she looked at the city in the sky, and appeared to turn things over.
+
+John was mysteriously chuckling.
+
+"Haven't you your opinion," he asked, "of men who eat their words and
+put their scruples in their pockets?"
+
+"I don't understand," said she, looking wild. "There is, of course, some
+joke."
+
+"There is a joke, indeed," said he; "the joke is that I'm ten times
+richer than I told you I was."
+
+She started back, and fixed him with a glance.
+
+"Then all that about your being poor was only humbug?" There was
+reproach in her voice, I'm not sure there wasn't disappointment.
+
+"No," said he, "it was the exact and literal truth. But I have come into
+a modest competency over-night."
+
+"I don't understand," said she.
+
+"My own part in the story is a sufficiently inglorious one," said he.
+"I'm the benefactee. Lady Blanchemain and my uncle have put their heads
+together, and endowed me. I feel rather small at letting them, but it
+enables me to look my affianced boldly in the money-eye."
+
+"Oh? You are affianced? Already?" she asked gaily.
+
+"No--not unless you are," gaily answered John.
+
+She looked down at her ring.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+The quiet-coloured end of evening smiled fainter, fainter. The aerial
+city, its cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces, had crumbled into
+ruins, and stars twinkled among their shattered and darkened walls. The
+moon burned icily above the eastern hills. The nightingales (or John was
+no true prophet) sang better than they had ever sung before, while bats,
+hither, thither, flew in startling zig-zags, as if waltzing to the
+music. And all the air was sweet with the breath of dew-wet roses.
+
+The clock struck eight.
+
+"There--you must go," said Maria Dolores.
+
+"Go? Where to?" asked John, feigning vagueness.
+
+"This is no subject for jest," said she, feigning severity.
+
+"I can't go yet--I can't leave you yet," said he. "Besides, it is an
+education in æsthetics to watch the moonlight on these marble columns,
+and the pale shadows of the vine-leaves."
+
+"Well, then," said she, "stay you here and pursue your education. I will
+go in your place. For Marcella Cuciniera must be relieved." She rose,
+and moved towards the darkling front of the Castle.
+
+"Hang education! I'll go with you," said John, following.
+
+"I shall only stop a moment, to see how she is," said Maria Dolores.
+"Then I must hurry home, to get my packing begun."
+
+"Your packing?" faltered John.
+
+"To-morrow morning Frau Brandt and I are leaving for Austria--for
+Schloss Mischenau, where my brother lives."
+
+"Good Lord!" said John. "Ah, well, I suppose it is what they would call
+the proper course," he admitted with gloomy resignation. "But think how
+dreadfully you'll be missed--by Annunziata."
+
+"Annunziata is so much better, I can easily be spared," said Maria
+Dolores; "and anyhow--'tis needs must. I think you will probably soon
+receive a letter from my brother, asking you to visit him. Mischenau is
+a place worth seeing, in its northern style. And, in his northern style,
+my brother is a man worth meeting. I counsel you to go."
+
+"I shall certainly go," said John. "I shall linger here at Sant'
+Alessina like a soul in durance, counting the hours till my release. I
+shall be particularly glad to meet your brother, as I have matters of
+importance to arrange with him."
+
+"Until then," said she, smiling, "I think we must do with those--matters
+of importance"--her voice quavered on the word--"what is it that the
+Pope sometimes does with Cardinals?"
+
+"Yes," moodily consented John, "I suppose we must. But oh me, what a
+dreary, blank, stale, and unprofitable desolation this garden will
+become,--and at every turn the ghost of some past joy!"
+
+Annunziata looked up with eyes that seemed omniscient.
+
+"I was thinking about you," she greeted them.
+
+"About which of us?" asked John.
+
+"About both of you. I always now, since a long while, think of you both
+together. I think Maria Dolores is the dark woman whom Prospero is to
+marry."
+
+John laughed. Maria Dolores looked out of the window.
+
+"And I was thinking," Annunziata went on, "how strange it was that if
+you hadn't both at the same time just happened to come to Sant'
+Alessina, you might have lived and died and never have known each
+other."
+
+"Perish that thought," laughed John. "But I have sometimes thought it
+myself."
+
+"And then," Annunziata rounded out her tale, "I thought that perhaps you
+had not just happened--that probably you had been led."
+
+"That is a thing I haven't a doubt of," John with energy affirmed.
+
+"You look as if you were very glad about something--both of you," said
+Annunziata, those omniscient eyes of hers studying their faces. "What is
+it that you are both so glad of?"
+
+"We are so glad to find you feeling so well," answered Maria Dolores.
+
+But Annunziata shook her head, as one who knew better. "No--that is not
+the only thing. You are glad of something else besides."
+
+"There's no taking you in," said John. "But we are under bonds to treat
+that Something Else as the Pope sometimes treats Princes of the Church."
+
+"He gives them red hats," said Annunziata.
+
+"I shall give this thing a crown of myrtle," said John.
+
+"You sometimes say things that sound as if they hadn't any sense,"
+Annunziata informed him, with patient indulgence, nodding at the
+ceiling.
+
+Maria Dolores leaned over the bed, and kissed Annunziata's brow. "Good
+night, carina," she murmured.
+
+Annunziata put up her little white arms, and encircled Maria Dolores'
+neck. Then she kissed her four times--on the brow, on the chin, on the
+left cheek, on the right. "That is a cross of kisses," she explained.
+"It is the way my mother used to kiss me. It means may the four Angels
+of Peace, Grace, Holiness, and Wisdom watch over your sleep."
+
+But early next morning, John being still on duty, Maria Dolores came
+back,--booted and spurred for her journey, in tailor-made tweeds, with a
+little felt toque and a veil: a costume of which Annunziata's eyes were
+quick to catch the suggestion.
+
+"Why are you dressed like that?" she asked, uneasily. "I never saw you
+dressed like that before. You look as if you were going away somewhere."
+
+"I have got to go away--I have got to go to my home, in Austria. I have
+come to bid you good-bye," Maria Dolores answered.
+
+Annunziata's eyes were dark with pain. "Oh," she said, in a voice of
+deep dismay.
+
+"We shan't be separated long, though," Maria Dolores promised. "I have
+asked your uncle to lend you to me. As soon as you are strong enough to
+travel, you are coming to Austria to pay me a long visit. Then I will
+come back with you to Sant' Alessina. And then--well, wherever I go you
+will always go with me. For of course I can never live happily again
+without you."
+
+"One moment, please," put in John. "Here is a small difficulty. I can
+never live happily without her, either. I also have asked her uncle to
+lend her to me. And wherever _I_ go, she is always to go with me. How
+are we to adjust our rival claims?"
+
+Annunziata's eyes lighted up.
+
+"Oh, that will be easy enough," she pointed out. "You will have to go
+everywhere together."
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of My Friend Prospero, by Henry Harland
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