The Cardinal's snuff-box
never be able to resist you.”'
“Oh, I 'm not undertaking to discuss theology with him,” said the
Cardinal. “But one must do something in exchange for a couple of hundred
lire--so I'll come and give you my moral support.”
“You shall have your lovely silver snuffbox, all the same,” said she.
Mark the predestination!
XVI
“CASTEL VENTIROSE,
“August 21 st.
“DEAR Mr. Marchdale: It will give me great pleasure if you can dine
with us on Thursday evening next, at eight o'clock, to meet my uncle,
Cardinal Udeschini, who is staying here for a few days.
“I have been re-reading 'A Man of Words.' I want you to tell me a great
deal more about your friend, the author.
Yours sincerely,
BEATRICE DI SANTANGIOLO.”
It is astonishing, what men will prize, what men will treasure. Peter
Marchdale, for example, prizes, treasures, (and imagines that he will
always prize and treasure), the perfectly conventional, the perfectly
commonplace little document, of which the foregoing is a copy.
The original is written in rather a small, concentrated hand, not
overwhelmingly legible perhaps, but, as we say, “full of character,” on
paper lightly blueish, in the prescribed corner of which a tiny ducal
coronet is embossed, above the initials “B. S.” curiously interlaced in
a cypher.
When Peter received it, and (need I mention?) approached it to his face,
he fancied he could detect just a trace, just the faintest reminder, of
a perfume--something like an afterthought of orris. It was by no means
anodyne. It was a breath, a whisper, vague, elusive, hinting of things
exquisite, intimate of things intimately feminine, exquisitely personal.
I don't know how many times he repeated that manoeuvre of conveying the
letter to his face; but I do know that when I was privileged to inspect
it, a few months later, the only perfume it retained was an unmistakable
perfume of tobacco.
I don't know, either, how many times he read it, searched it, as if
secrets might lie perdu between the lines, as if his gaze could warm
into evidence some sympathetic ink, or compel a cryptic sub-intention
from the text itself.
Well, to be sure, the text had cryptic subintentions; but these were as
far as may be from any that Peter was in a position to conjecture. How
could he guess, for instance, that the letter was an instrument, and he
the victim, of a Popish machination? How could he guess that its writer
knew as well as he did who was the author of “A Man of Words”?
And then, all at once, a shade of trouble of quite another nature fell
upon his mind. He frowned for a while in silent perplexity. At last he
addressed himself to Marietta.
“Have you ever dined with a cardinal?” he asked.
“No, Signorino,” that patient sufferer replied.
“Well, I'm in the very dickens of a quandary--son' proprio nel dickens
d'un imbarazzo.” he informed her.
“Dickens--?” she repeated.
“Si--Dickens, Carlo, celebre autore inglese. Why not?” he asked.
Marietta gazed with long-suffering eyes at the horizon.
“Or, to put it differently,” Peter resumed, “I've come all the way from
London with nothing better than a dinner jacket in my kit.”
“Dina giacca? Cosa e?” questioned Marietta.
“No matter what it is--the important thing is what it is n't. It is n't
a dress-coat.”
“Non e un abito nero,” said Marietta, seeing that he expected her to say
something.
“Well--? You perceive my difficulty. Do you think you could make me
one?” said Peter.
“Make the Signorino a dress-coat? I? Oh, no, Signorino.” Marietta shook
her head.
“I feared as much,” he acknowledged. “Is there a decent tailor in the
village?”
“No, Signorino.”
“Nor in the whole length and breadth of this peninsula, if you come to
that. Well, what am I to do? How am I to dine with a cardinal? Do you
think a cardinal would have a fit if a man were to dine with him in a
dina giacca?”
“Have a fit? Why should he have a fit, Signorino?” Marietta blinked.
“Would he do anything to the man? Would he launch the awful curses of
the Church at him, for instance?”
“Mache, Signorino!” She struck an attitude that put to scorn his
apprehensions.
“I see,” said Peter. “You think there is no danger? You advise me to
brazen the dina giacca out, to swagger it off?”
“I don't understand, Signorino,” said Marietta.
“To understand is to forgive,” said he; “and yet you can't trifle with
English servants like this, though they ought to understand, ought n't
they? In any case, I 'll be guided by your judgment. I'll wear my dina
giacca, but I'll wear it with an air! I 'll confer upon it the dignity
of a court-suit. Is that a gardener--that person working over there?”
Marietta looked in the quarter indicated by Peter's nod.
“Yes, Signorino; ha is the same gardener who works here three days every
week,” she answered.
“Is he, really? He looks like a pirate,” Peter murmured.
“Like a pirate? Luigi?” she exclaimed.
“Yes,” affirmed her master. “He wears green corduroy trousers, and a
red belt, and a blue shirt. That is the pirate uniform. He has a swarthy
skin, and a piercing eye, and hair as black as the Jolly Roger. Those
are the marks by which you recognise a pirate, even when in mufti. I
believe you said his name is Luigi?”
“Yes, Signorino--Luigi Maroni. We call him Gigi.”
“Is Gigi versatile?” asked Peter.
“Versatile--?” puzzled Marietta. But then, risking her own
interpretation of the recondite word, “Oh, no, Signorino. He is of the
country.”
“Ah, he's of the country, is he? So much the better. Then he will know
the way to Castel Ventirose?”
“But naturally, Signorino.” Marietta nodded.
“And do you think, for once in a way, though not versatile, he could be
prevailed upon to divert his faculties from the work of a gardener to
that of a messenger?”
“A messenger, Signorino?” Marietta wrinkled up her brow.
“Ang--an unofficial postman. Do you think he could be induced to carry a
letter for me to the castle?”
“But certainly, Signorino. He is here to obey the Signorino's orders.”
Marietta shrugged her shoulders, and waved her hands.
“Then tell him, please, to go and put the necessary touches to his
toilet,” said Peter. “Meanwhile I'll indite the letter.”
When his letter was indited, he found the piratical-looking Gigi in
attendance, and he gave it to him, with instructions.
Thereupon Gigi (with a smile of sympathetic intelligence, inimitably
Italian) put the letter in his hat, put his hat upon his head, and
started briskly off--but not in the proper direction: not in the
direction of the road, which led to the village, and across the bridge,
and then round upon itself to the gates of the park. He started briskly
off towards Peter's own toolhouse, a low red-tiled pavilion, opposite
the door of Marietta's kitchen.
Peter was on the point of calling to him, of remonstrating. Then he
thought better of it. He would wait a bit, and watch.
He waited and watched; and this was what he saw.
Gigi entered the tool-house, and presently brought out a ladder, which
he carried down to the riverside, and left there. Then he returned to
the tool-house, and came back bearing an armful of planks, each perhaps
a foot wide by five or six feet long. Now he raised his ladder to the
perpendicular, and let it descend before him, so that, one extremity
resting upon the nearer bank, one attained the further, and it spanned
the flood. Finally he laid a plank lengthwise upon the hithermost rungs,
and advanced to the end of it; then another plank; then a third: and he
stood in the grounds of Ventirose.
He had improvised a bridge--a bridge that swayed upwards and downwards
more or less dizzily about the middle, if you will--but an entirely
practicable bridge, for all that. And he had saved himself at least a
good three miles, to the castle and back, by the road.
Peter watched, and admired.
“And I asked whether he was versatile!” he muttered. “Trust an Italian
for economising labour. It looks like unwarrantable invasion of friendly
territory--but it's a dodge worth remembering, all the same.”
He drew the Duchessa's letter from his pocket, and read it again, and
again approached it to his face, communing with that ghost of a perfume.
“Heavens! how it makes one think of chiffons,” he exclaimed.
“Thursday--Thursday--help me to live till Thursday!”
XVII
But he had n't to live till Thursday--he was destined to see her not
later than the next afternoon.
You know with what abruptness, with how brief a warning, storms will
spring from the blue, in that land of lakes and mountains.
It was three o'clock or thereabouts; and Peter was reading in his
garden; and the whole world lay basking in unmitigated sunshine.
Then, all at once, somehow, you felt a change in things: the sunshine
seemed less brilliant, the shadows less solid, less sharply outlined.
Oh, it was very slight, very uncertain; you had to look twice to assure
yourself that it was n't a mere fancy. It seemed as if never so thin a
gauze had been drawn over the face of the sun, just faintly bedimming,
without obscuring it. You could have ransacked the sky in vain to
discover the smallest shred of cloud.
At the same time, the air, which had been hot all day--hot, but buoyant,
but stimulant, but quick with oxygen--seemed to become thick, sluggish,
suffocating, seemed to yield up its vital principle, and to fall a
dead weight upon the earth. And this effect was accompanied by a
sudden silence--the usual busy out-of-door country noises were suddenly
suspended: the locusts stopped their singing; not a bird twittered;
not a leaf rustled: the world held its breath. And if the river went
on babbling, babbling, that was a very part of the silence--accented,
underscored it.
Yet still you could not discern a rack of cloud anywhere in the
sky--still, for a minute or two.... Then, before you knew how it had
happened, the snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito were completely lapped in
cloud.
And now the cloud spread with astonishing rapidity--spread and sank,
cancelling the sun, shrouding the Gnisi to its waist, curling in smoky
wreaths among the battlements of the Cornobastone, turning the lake
from sapphire to sombre steel, filling the entire valley with a strange
mixture of darkness and an uncanny pallid light. Overhead it hung like
a vast canopy of leaden-hued cotton-wool; at the west it had a fringe of
fiery crimson, beyond which a strip of clear sky on the horizon diffused
a dull metallic yellow, like tarnished brass.
Presently, in the distance, there was a low growl of thunder; in a
minute, a louder, angrier growl--as if the first were a menace which had
not been heeded. Then there was a violent gush of wind--cold; smelling
of the forests from which it came; scattering everything before it,
dust, dead leaves, the fallen petals of flowers; making the trees writhe
and labour, like giants wrestling with invisible giants; making the
short grass shudder; corrugating the steel surface of the lake. Then two
or three big raindrops fell--and then, the deluge.
Peter climbed up to his observatory--a square four-windowed turret, at
the top of the house--thence to watch the storm and exult in it. Really
it was splendid--to see, to hear; its immense wild force, its immense
reckless fury. Rain had never rained so hard, he thought. Already,
the lake, the mountain slopes, the villas and vineyards westward, were
totally blotted out, hidden behind walls and walls of water; and even
the neighbouring lawns of Ventirose, the confines of his own garden,
were barely distinguishable, blurred as by a fog. The big drops pelted