The Cardinal's snuff-box
the north the sky was already clear, blue and hard-looking--a wall of
lapis-lazuli. The dark cloud-canopy was drifting to the south. Suddenly
the sun came out, flashing first from the snows of Monte Sfiorito, then,
in an instant, flooding the entire prospect with a marvellous yellow
light, ethereal amber; whilst long streamers of tinted vapour--columns
of pearl-dust, one might have fancied--rose to meet it; and all wet
surfaces, leaves, lawns, tree-trunks, housetops, the bare crags of the
Gnisi, gleamed in a wash of gold.
Puffs of fresh air blew into the kitchen, filling it with the keen sweet
odour of wet earth. The priest and the Duchessa and Emilia joined Peter
at the open door.
“Oh, your poor, poor garden!” the Duchessa cried.
His garden had suffered a good deal, to be sure. The flowers lay supine,
their faces beaten into the mud; the greensward was littered with fallen
leaves and twigs--and even in one or two places whole branches had been
broken from the trees; on the ground about each rose-bush a snow of pink
rose-petals lay scattered; in the paths there were hundreds of little
pools, shining in the sun like pools of fire.
“There's nothing a gardener can't set right,” said Peter, feeling no
doubt that here was a trifling tax upon the delights the storm had
procured him.
“And oh, our poor, poor hats!” said the Duchessa, eyeing ruefully those
damaged pieces of finery. “I fear no gardener can ever set them right.”
“It sounds inhospitable,” said Peter, “but I suppose I had better go and
build your bridge.”
So he threw a ladder athwart the river, and laid the planks in place, as
he had seen Gigi do the day before.
“How ingenious--and, like all great things, how simple,” laughed the
Duchessa.
Peter waved his hand, as who should modestly deprecate applause. But, I
'm ashamed to own, he didn't disclaim the credit of the invention.
“It will require some nerve,” she reflected, looking at the narrow
planks, the foaming green water. “However--”
And gathering in her skirts, she set bravely forward, and made the
transit without mishap. The priest and Emilia, gathering in their
skirts, made it after her.
She paused on the other side, and looked back, smiling.
“Since you have discovered so efficacious a means of cutting short the
distance between our places of abode,” she said, “I hope you will not
fail to profit by it whenever you may have occasion--on Thursday, for
example.”
“Thank you very much,” said Peter.
“Of course,” she went on, “we may all die of our wetting yet. It would
perhaps show a neighbourly interest if you were to come up to-morrow,
and take our news. Come at four o'clock; and if we're alive... you shall
have another pinch of snuff,” she promised, laughing.
“I adore you,” said Peter, under his breath. “I'll come with great
pleasure,” he said aloud.
“Marietta,” he observed, that evening, as he dined, “I would have you
to know that the Aco is bridged. Hence, there is one symbol the fewer
in Lombardy. But why does--you mustn't mind the Ollendorfian form of my
enquiry--why does the chaplain of the Duchessa wear red stockings?”
“The chaplain of the Duchessa--?” repeated Marietta, wrinkling up her
brow.
“Ang--of the Duchessa di Santangiolo. He wore red stockings, and shoes
with silver buckles. Do you think that's precisely decorous--don't you
think it 's the least bit light-minded--in an ecclesiastic?”
“He--? Who--?” questioned Marietta.
“But the chaplain of the Duchessa--when he was here this afternoon.”
“The chaplain of the Duchessa!” exclaimed Marietta. “Here this
afternoon? The chaplain of the Duchessa was not here this afternoon. His
Eminence the Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here this afternoon.”
“What!” gasped Peter.
“Ang,” said Marietta.
“That was Cardinal Udeschini--that little harmless-looking, sweet-faced
old man!” Peter wondered.
“Sicuro--the uncle of the Duca,” said she.
“Good heavens!” sighed he. “And I allowed myself to hobnob with him like
a boon-companion.”
“Gia,” said she.
“You need n't rub it in,” said he. “For the matter of that, you yourself
entertained him in your kitchen.”
“Scusi?” said she.
“Ah, well--it was probably for the best,” he concluded. “I daresay I
should n't have behaved much better if I had known.”
“It was his coming which saved this house from being struck by
lightning,” announced Marietta.
“Oh--? Was it?” exclaimed Peter.
“Yes, Signorino. The lightning would never strike a house that the Lord
Prince Cardinal was in.”
“I see--it would n't venture--it would n't presume. Did--did it strike
all the houses that the Lord Prince Cardinal was n't in?”
“I do not think so, Signorino. Ma non fa niente. It was a terrible
storm--terrible, terrible. The lightning was going to strike this house,
when the Lord Prince Cardinal arrived.”
“Hum,” said Peter. “Then you, as well as I, have reason for regarding
his arrival as providential.”
XVIII
“I think something must have happened to my watch,” Peter said, next
day.
Indeed, its hands moved with extraordinary, with exasperating slowness.
“It seems absurd that it should do no good to push them on,” he thought.
He would force himself, between twice ascertaining their position, to
wait for a period that felt like an eternity, walking about miserably,
and smoking flavourless cigarettes;--then he would stand amazed,
incredulous, when, with a smirk (as it almost struck him) of ironical
complacence, they would attest that his eternity had lasted something
near a quarter of an hour.
“And I had professed myself a Kantian, and made light of the objective
reality of Time! thou laggard, Time!” he cried, and shook his fist at
Space, Time's unoffending consort.
“I believe it will never be four o'clock again,” he said, in despair,
finally; and once more had out his watch. It was half-past three. He
scowled at the instrument's bland white face. “You have no bowels, no
sensibilities--nothing but dry little methodical jog-trot wheels and
pivots!” he exclaimed, flying to insult for relief. “You're as inhuman
as a French functionary. Do you call yourself a sympathetic comrade
for an impatient man?” He laid it open on his rustic table, and waited
through a last eternity. At a quarter to four he crossed the river. “If
I am early--tant pis!” he decided, choosing the lesser of two evils, and
challenging Fate.
He crossed the river, and stood for the first time in the grounds of
Ventirose--stood where she had been in the habit of standing, during
their water-side colloquies. He glanced back at his house and garden,
envisaging them for the first time, as it were, from her point of
view. They had a queer air of belonging to an era that had passed, to
a yesterday already remote. They looked, somehow, curiously small,
moreover--the garden circumscribed, the two-storied house, with its
striped sunblinds, poor and petty. He turned his back upon them--left
them behind. He would have to come home to them later in the day, to be
sure; but then everything would be different. A chapter would have added
itself to the history of the world; a great event, a great step forward,
would have definitely taken place. He would have been received
at Ventirose as a friend. He would be no longer a mere nodding
acquaintance, owing even that meagre relationship to the haphazard
of propinquity. The ice-broken, if you will, but still present in
abundance--would have been gently thawed away. One era had passed; but
then a new era would have begun.
So he turned his back upon Villa F'loriano, and set off, high-hearted,
up the wide lawns, under the bending trees--whither, on four red-marked
occasions, he had watched her disappear--towards the castle, which
faced him in its vast irregular picturesqueness. There were the oldest
portions, grimly mediaeval, a lakeside fortress, with ponderous round
towers, meurtrieres, machiolations, its grey stone walls discoloured
in fantastic streaks and patches by weather-stains and lichens, or
else shaggily overgrown by creepers. Then there were later portions,
rectangular, pink-stuccoed, with rusticated work at the corners, and,
on the blank spaces between the windows, quaint allegorical frescoes,
faded, half washed-out. And then there were entirely modern-looking
portions, of gleaming marble, with numberless fanciful carvings, spires,
pinnacles, reliefs--wonderfully light, gay, habitable, and (Peter
thought) beautiful, in the clear Italian atmosphere, against the blue
Italian sky.
“It's a perfect house for her,” he said. “It suits her--like an
appropriate garment; it almost seems to express her.”
And all the while, as he proceeded, her voice kept sounding in his ears;
scraps of her conversation, phrases that she had spoken, kept coming
back to him.
One end of the long, wide marble terrace had been arranged as a sort
of out-of-door living-room. A white awning was stretched overhead;
warm-hued rugs were laid on the pavement; there were wicker
lounging-chairs, with bright cushions, and a little table, holding books
and things.
The Duchessa rose from one of the lounging-chairs, and came forward,
smiling, to meet him.
She gave him her hand--for the first time.
It was warm--electrically warm; and it was soft--womanly soft; and it
was firm, alive--it spoke of a vitality, a temperament. Peter was sure,
besides, that it would be sweet to smell; and he longed to bend over it,
and press it with his lips. He might almost have done so, according to
Italian etiquette. But, of course, he simply bowed over it, and let it
go.
“Mi trova abbandonata,” she said, leading the way back to the
terrace-end. There were notes of a peculiar richness in her voice, when
she spoke Italian; and she dwelt languorously on the vowels, and rather
slurred the consonants, lazily, in the manner Italian women have,
whereby they give the quality of velvet to their tongue. She was not an
Italian woman; Heaven be praised, she was English: so this was just pure
gain to the sum-total of her graces. “My uncle and my niece have gone to
the village. But I 'm expecting them to come home at any moment now--and
you'll not have long, I hope, to wait for your snuff.”
She flashed a whimsical little smile into his eyes. Then she returned
to her wicker chair, glancing an invitation at Peter to place himself
in the one facing her. She leaned back, resting her head on a pink silk
cushion.
Peter, no doubt, sent up a silent prayer that her uncle and her niece
might be detained at the village for the rest of the afternoon. By her
niece he took her to mean Emilia: he liked her for the kindly euphemism.
“What hair she has!” he thought, admiring the loose brown masses, warm
upon their background of pink silk.
“Oh, I'm inured to waiting,” he replied, with a retrospective mind for
the interminable waits of that interminable day.
The Duchessa had taken a fan from the table, and was playing with it,
opening and shutting it slowly, in her lap. Now she caught Peter's eyes
examining it, and she gave it to him. (My own suspicion is that Peter's
eyes had been occupied rather with the hands that held the fan, than
with the fan itself--but that's a detail.)
“I picked it up the other day, in Rome,” she said. “Of course, it's
an imitation of the French fans of the last century, but I thought it
pretty.”
It was of white silk, that had been thinly stained a soft yellow, like
the yellow of faded yellow rose-leaves. It was painted with innumerable
plump little cupids, flying among pale clouds. The sticks were of
mother-of=pearl. The end-sticks were elaborately incised, and in the
incisions opals were set, big ones and small ones, smouldering with
green and scarlet fires.
“Very pretty indeed,” said Peter, “and very curious. It's like a great