The Cardinal's snuff-box
butterfly's wing is n't it? But are n't you afraid of opals?”
“Afraid of opals?” she wondered. “Why should one be?”
“Unless your birthday happens to fall in October, they're reputed to
bring bad luck,” he reminded her.
“My birthday happens to fall in June but I 'll never believe that such
pretty things as opals can bring bad luck,” she laughed, taking the fan,
which he returned to her, and stroking one of the bigger opals with her
finger tip.
“Have you no superstitions?” he asked.
“I hope not--I don't think I have,” she answered. “We're not allowed to
have superstitions, you know--nous autres Catholiques.”
“Oh?” he said, with surprise. “No, I did n't know.”
“Yes, they're a forbidden luxury. But you--? Are you superstitious?
Would you be afraid of opals?”
“I doubt if I should have the courage to wear one. At all events, I
don't regard superstitions in the light of a luxury. I should be glad
to be rid of those I have. They're a horrible inconvenience. But I can't
get it out of my head that the air is filled with a swarm of malignant
little devils, who are always watching their chance to do us an ill
turn. We don't in the least know the conditions under which they can
bring it off; but it's legendary that if we wear opals, or sit thirteen
at table, or start an enterprise on Friday, or what not, we somehow
give them their opportunity. And one naturally wishes to be on the safe
side.”
She looked at him with doubt, considering.
“You don't seriously believe all that?” she said.
“No, I don't seriously believe it. But one breathes it in with the air
of one's nursery, and it sticks. I don't believe it, but I fear it just
enough to be made uneasy. The evil eye, for instance. How can one spend
any time in Italy, where everybody goes loaded with charms against it,
and help having a sort of sneaking half-belief in the evil eye?”
She shook her head, laughing.
“I 've spent a good deal of time in Italy, but I have n't so much as a
sneaking quarter-belief in it.”
“I envy you your strength of mind,” said he. “But surely, though
superstition is a luxury forbidden to Catholics, there are plenty of
good Catholics who indulge in it, all the same?”
“There are never plenty of good Catholics,” said sire. “You employ a
much-abused expression. To profess the Catholic faith, to go to Mass on
Sunday and abstain from meat on Friday, that is by no means sufficient
to constitute a good Catholic. To be a good Catholic one would have to
be a saint, nothing less--and not a mere formal saint, either, but a
very real saint, a saint in thought and feeling, as well as in speech
and action. Just in so far as one is superstitious, one is a bad
Catholic. Oh, if the world were populated by good Catholics, it would be
the Millennium come to pass.”
“It would be that, if it were populated by good Christians--wouldn't
it?” asked Peter.
“The terms are interchangeable,” she answered sweetly, with a
half-comical look of defiance.
“Mercy!” cried he. “Can't a Protestant be a good Christian too?”
“Yes,” she said, “because a Protestant can be a Catholic without knowing
it.”
“Oh--?” he puzzled, frowning.
“It's quite simple,” she explained. “You can't be a Christian unless
you're a Catholic. But if you believe as much of Christian truth as
you've ever had a fair opportunity of learning, and if you try to live
in accordance with Christian morals, you are a Catholic, you're a
member of the Catholic Church, whether you know it or not. You can't be
deprived of your birthright, you see.”
“That seems rather broad,” said Peter; “and one had always heard that
Catholicism was nothing if not narrow.”
“How could it be Catholic if it were narrow?” asked she. “However, if
a Protestant uses his intelligence, and is logical, he'll not remain
an unconscious Catholic long. If he studies the matter, and is logical,
he'll wish to unite himself to the Church in her visible body. Look at
England. See how logic is multiplying converts year by year.”
“But it's the glory of Englishmen to be illogical,” said Peter, with
a laugh. “Our capacity for not following premisses to their logical
consequences is the principal source of our national greatness. So the
bulk of the English are likely to resist conversion for centuries
to come--are they not? And then, nowadays, one is so apt to be an
indifferentist in matters of religion--and Catholicism is so exacting.
One remains a Protestant from the love of ease.”
“And from the desire, on the part of a good many Englishmen at least, to
sail in a boat of their own--not to get mixed up with a lot of foreign
publicans and sinners--no?” she suggested.
“Oh, of course, we're insular and we're Pharisaical,” admitted Peter.
“And as for one's indifference,” she smiled, “that is most probably due
to one's youth and inexperience. One can't come to close quarters with
the realities of life--with sorrow, with great joy, with temptation,
with sin or with heroic virtue, with death, with the birth of a new
soul, with any of the awful, wonderful realities of life--and continue
to be an indifferentist in matters of religion, do you think?”
“When one comes to close quarters with the awful, wonderful realities
of life, one has religious moments,” he acknowledged. “But they're
generally rather fugitive, are n't they?”
“One can cultivate them--one can encourage them,” she said. “If you
would care to know a good Catholic,” she added, “my niece, my little
ward, Emilia is one. She wants to become a Sister of Mercy, to spend her
life nursing the poor.”
“Oh? Would n't that be rather a pity?” Peter said. “She's so extremely
pretty. I don't know when I have seen prettier brown eyes than hers.”
“Well, in a few years, I expect we shall see those pretty brown eyes
looking out from under a sister's coif. No, I don't think it will be
a pity. Nuns and sisters, I think, are the happiest people in the
world--and priests. Have you ever met any one who seemed happier than my
uncle, for example?”
“I have certainly never met any one who seemed sweeter, kinder,” Peter
confessed. “He has a wonderful old face.”
“He's a wonderful old man,” said she. “I 'm going to try to keep him a
prisoner here for the rest of the summer--though he will have it that
he's just run down for a week. He works a great deal too hard when he's
in Rome. He's the only Cardinal I've ever heard of, who takes practical
charge of his titular church. But here in the country he's out-of-doors
all the blessed day, hand in hand with Emilia. He's as young as she is,
I believe. They play together like children--and make--me feel as staid
and solemn and grown-up as one of Mr. Kenneth Grahame's Olympians.”
Peter laughed. Then, in the moment of silence that followed, he happened
to let his eyes stray up the valley.
“Hello!” he suddenly exclaimed. “Someone has been painting our mountain
green.”
The Duchessa turned, to look; and she too uttered an exclamation.
By some accident of reflection or refraction, the snows of Monte
Sfiorito had become bright green, as if the light that fell on them
had passed through emeralds. They both paused, to gaze and marvel for
a little. Indeed, the prospect was a pleasing one, as well as a
surprising--the sunny lawns, the high trees, the blue lake, and then
that bright green mountain.
“I have never known anything like those snow-peaks for sailing under
false colours,” Peter said. “I have seen them every colour of the
calendar, except their native white.”
“You must n't blame the poor things,” pleaded the Duchessa. “They can't
help it. It's all along o' the distance and the atmosphere and the sun.”
She closed her fan, with which she had been more or less idly playing
throughout their dialogue, and replaced it on the table. Among the books
there--French books, for the most part, in yellow paper--Peter saw, with
something of a flutter (he could never see it without something of a
flutter), the grey-and-gold binding of “A Man of Words.”
The Duchessa caught his glance.
“Yes,” she said; “your friend's novel. I told you I had been re-reading
it.”
“Yes,” said he.
“And--do you know--I 'm inclined to agree with your own enthusiastic
estimate of it?” she went on. “I think it's extremely--but
extremely--clever; and more--very charming, very beautiful. The fatal
gift of beauty!”
And her smile reminded him that the application of the tag was his own.
“Yes,” said he.
“Its beauty, though,” she reflected, “is n't exactly of the obvious
sort--is it? It does n't jump at you, for instance. It is rather in the
texture of the work, than on the surface. One has to look, to see it.”
“One always has to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing,” he safely
generalised. But then--he had put his foot in the stirrup--his hobby
bolted with him. “It takes two to make a beautiful object. The eye of
the beholder is every bit as indispensable as the hand of the
artist. The artist does his work--the beholder must do his. They are
collaborators. Each must be the other's equal; and they must also be
like each other--with the likeness of opposites, of complements. Art,
in short, is entirely a matter of reciprocity. The kind of beauty that
jumps at you is the kind you end by getting heartily tired of--is the
skin-deep kind; and therefore it is n't really beauty at all--it is only
an approximation to beauty--it may be only a simulacrum of it.”
Her eyes were smiling, her face was glowing, softly, with interest,
with friendliness and perhaps with the least suspicion of something
else--perhaps with the faintest glimmer of suppressed amusement; but
interest was easily predominant.
“Yes,” she assented.... But then she pursued her own train of ideas.
“And--with you--I particularly like the woman--Pauline. I can't tell
you how much I like her. I--it sounds extravagant, but it's true--I can
think of no other woman in the whole of fiction whom I like so
well--who makes so curiously personal an appeal to me. Her wit--her
waywardness--her tenderness--her generosity--everything. How did your
friend come by his conception of her? She's as real to me as any woman
I have ever known she's more real to me than most of the women I
know--she's absolutely real, she lives, she breathes. Yet I have never
known a woman resembling her. Life would be a merrier business if one
did know women resembling her. She seems to me all that a woman ought
ideally to be. Does your friend know women like that--the lucky man? Or
is Pauline, for all her convincingness, a pure creature of imagination?”
“Ah,” said Peter, laughing, “you touch the secret springs of my friend's
inspiration. That is a story in itself. Felix Wildmay is a perfectly
commonplace Englishman. How could a woman like Pauline be the creature
of his imagination? No--she was a 'thing seen.' God made her. Wildmay
was a mere copyist. He drew her, tant bien que mal, from the life from
a woman who's actually alive on this dull globe to-day. But that's the
story.”
The Duchessa's eyes were intent.
“The story-? Tell me the story,” she pronounced in a breath, with
imperious eagerness.
And her eyes waited, intently.
“Oh,” said Peter, “it's one of those stories that can scarcely be told.
There's hardly any thing to take hold of. It's without incident, without
progression--it's all subjective--it's a drama in states of mind.
Pauline was a 'thing seen,' indeed; but she wasn't a thing known: she
was a thing divined. Wildmay never knew her--never even knew who she
was--never knew her name--never even knew her nationality, though,
as the book shows, he guessed her to be an Englishwoman, married to
a Frenchman. He simply saw her, from a distance, half-a-dozen times
perhaps. He saw her in Paris, once or twice, at the theatre, at the