The Cardinal's snuff-box
“I will,” he resolved all at once, drawing a deep breath, and clenching
his fists.
He left the Casino, and set forth to walk to Ventirose. He could not
wait for the omnibus, which would not leave till four. He must strike
while his will was hot.
He walked rapidly; in less than an hour he had reached the tall gilded
grille of the park. He stopped for an instant, and looked up the
straight avenue of chestnuts, to the western front of the castle, softly
alight in the afternoon sun. He put his hand upon the pendent bell-pull
of twisted iron, to summon the porter. In another second he would have
rung, he would have been admitted.... And just then one of the little
demons that inhabit the circumambient air, called his attention to an
aspect of the situation which he had not thought of.
“Wait a bit,” it whispered in his ear. “You were there only yesterday.
It can't fail, therefore, to seem extraordinary, your calling again
to-day. You must be prepared with an excuse, an explanation. But
suppose, when you arrive, suppose that (like the lady in the ballad) she
greets you with 'a glance of cold surprise'--what then, my dear? Why,
then, it's obvious, you can't allege the true explanation--can you?
If she greets you with a glance of cold, surprise, you 'll have your
answer, as it were, before the fact you 'll know that there's no manner
of hope for you; and the time for passionate avowals will automatically
defer itself. But then--? How will you justify your visit? What face can
you put on?”
“H'm,” assented Peter, “there's something in that.”
“There's a great deal in that,” said the demon. “You must have an excuse
up your sleeve, a pretext. A true excuse is a fine thing in its way;
but when you come to a serious emergency, an alternative false excuse is
indispensable.”
“H'm,” said Peter.
However, if there are demons in the atmosphere, there are gods in the
machine--(“Paraschkine even goes so far as to maintain that there are
more gods in the machine than have ever been taken from it.”)
While Peter stood still, pondering the demon's really rather cogent
intervention, his eye was caught by something that glittered in the
grass at the roadside.
“The Cardinal's snuff-box,” he exclaimed, picking it up.
The Cardinal had dropped his snuff-box. Here was an excuse, and to
spare. Peter rang the bell.
XXIV
And, like the lady in the ballad, sure enough, she greeted his arrival
with a glance of cold surprise.
At all events, eyebrows raised, face unsmiling, it was a glance that
clearly supplemented her spoken “How do you do?” by a tacit (perhaps
self-addressed?) “What can bring him here?”
You or I, indeed, or Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, in the fulness of our
knowledge, might very likely have interpreted it rather as a glance of
nervous apprehension. Anyhow, it was a glance that perfectly checked the
impetus of his intent. Something snapped and gave way within him; and
he needed no further signal that the occasion for passionate avowals was
not the present.
And thereupon befell a scene that was really quite too absurd, that was
really childish, a scene over the memory of which, I must believe, they
themselves have sometimes laughed together; though, at the moment, its
absurdity held, for him at least, elements of the tragic.
He met her in the broad gravelled carriage-sweep, before the great
hall-door. She had on her hat and gloves, as if she were just going out.
It seemed to him that she was a little pale; her eyes seemed darker than
usual, and graver. Certainly--cold surprise, or nervous apprehension, as
you will--her attitude was by no means cordial. It was not oncoming. It
showed none of her accustomed easy, half-humorous, wholly good-humoured
friendliness. It was decidedly the attitude of a person standing off,
shut in, withheld.
“I have never seen her in the least like this before,” he thought, as
he looked at her pale face, her dark, grave eyes; “I have never seen her
more beautiful. And there is not one single atom of hope for me.”
“How do you do?” she said, unsmiling and waited, as who should invite
him to state his errand. She did not offer him her hand but, for that
matter, (she might have pleaded), she could not, very well: for one of
her hands held her sunshade, and the other held an embroidered silk bag,
woman's makeshift for a pocket.
And then, capping the first pang of his disappointment, a kind of
anger seized him. After all, what right had she to receive him in this
fashion?--as if he were an intrusive stranger. In common civility, in
common justice, she owed it to him to suppose that he would not be there
without abundant reason.
And now, with Peter angry, the absurd little scene began.
Assuming an attitude designed to be, in its own way, as reticent as
hers, “I was passing your gate,” he explained, “when I happened to find
this, lying by the roadside. I took the liberty of bringing it to you.”
He gave her the Cardinal's snuff box, which, in spite of her hands'
preoccupation, she was able to accept.
“A liberty!” he thought, grinding his teeth. “Yes! No doubt she would
have wished me to leave it with the porter at the lodge. No doubt she
deems it an act of officiousness on my part to have found it at all.”
And his anger mounted.
“How very good of you,” she said. “My uncle could not think where he had
mislaid it.”
“I am very fortunate to be the means of restoring it,” said he.
Then, after a second's suspension, as she said nothing (she kept her
eyes on the snuffbox, examining it as if it were quite new to her), he
lifted his hat, and bowed, preparatory to retiring down the avenue.
“Oh, but my uncle will wish to thank you,” she exclaimed, looking up,
with a kind of start. “Will you not come in? I--I will see whether he is
disengaged.”
She made a tentative movement towards the door. She had thawed
perceptibly.
But even as she thawed, Peter, in his anger, froze and stiffened. “I
will see whether he is disengaged.” The expression grated. And perhaps,
in effect, it was not a particularly felicitous expression. But if the
poor woman was suffering from nervous apprehension--?
“I beg you on no account to disturb Cardinal Udeschini,” he returned
loftily. “It is not a matter of the slightest consequence.”
And even as he stiffened, she unbent.
“But it is a matter of consequence to him, to us,” she said, faintly
smiling. “We have hunted high and low for it. We feared it was lost for
good. It must have fallen from his pocket when he was walking. He will
wish to thank you.”
“I am more than thanked already,” said Peter. Alas (as Monsieur de la
Pallisse has sagely noted), when we aim to appear dignified, how often
do we just succeed in appearing churlish.
And to put a seal upon this ridiculous encounter, to make it
irrevocable, he lifted his hat again, and turned away.
“Oh, very well,” murmured the Duchessa, in a voice that did not reach
him. If it had reached him, perhaps he would have come back, perhaps
things might have happened. I think there was regret in her voice, as
well as despite. She stood for a minute, as he tramped down the avenue,
and looked after him, with those unusually dark, grave eyes. At last,
making a little gesture--as of regret? despite? impatience?--she went
into the house.
“Here is your snuff-box,” she said to the Cardinal.
The old man put down his Breviary (he was seated by an open window,
getting through his office), and smiled at the snuff box fondly,
caressing it with his finger. Afterwards, he shook it, opened it, and
took a pinch of snuff.
“Where did you find it?” he enquired.
“It was found by that Mr. Marchdale,” she said, “in the road, outside
the gate. You must have let it drop this morning, when you were walking
with Emilia.”
“That Mr. Marchdale?” exclaimed the Cardinal. “What a coincidence.”
“A coincidence--?” questioned Beatrice.
“To be sure,” said he. “Was it not to Mr. Marchdale that I owed it in
the first instance?”
“Oh--? Was it? I had fancied that you owed it to me.”
“Yes--but,” he reminded her, whilst the lines deepened about his
humorous old mouth, “but as a reward of my virtue in conspiring with you
to convert him. And, by the way, how is his conversion progressing?”
The Cardinal looked up, with interest.
“It is not progressing at all. I think there is no chance of it,”
answered Beatrice, in a tone that seemed to imply a certain irritation.
“Oh--?” said the Cardinal.
“No,” said she.
“I thought he had shown 'dispositions'?” said the Cardinal.
“That was a mistake. He has shown none. He is a very tiresome and silly
person. He is not worth converting,” she declared succinctly.
“Good gracious!” said the Cardinal.
He resumed his office. But every now and again he would pause, and look
out of the window, with the frown of a man meditating something; then he
would shake his head significantly, and take snuff.
Peter tramped down the avenue, angry and sick.
Her reception of him had not only administered an instant death-blow
to his hopes as a lover, but in its ungenial aloofness it had cruelly
wounded his pride as a man. He felt snubbed and humiliated. Oh, true
enough, she had unbent a little, towards the end. But it was the look
with which she had first greeted him--it was the air with which she had
waited for him to state his errand--that stung, and rankled, and would
not be forgotten.
He was angry with her, angry with circumstances, with life, angry with
himself.
“I am a fool--and a double fool--and a triple fool,” he said. “I am
a fool ever to have thought of her at all; a double fool ever to have
allowed myself to think so much of her; a triple and quadruple and
quintuple idiot ever to have imagined for a moment that anything could
come of it. I have wasted time enough. The next best thing to winning is
to know when you are beaten. I acknowledge myself beaten. I will go back
to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed.”
He gazed darkly round the familiar valley, with eyes that abjured it.
Olympus, no doubt, laughed.
XXV
“I shall go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed.”
But he took no immediate steps to get them packed.
“Hope,” observes the clear-sighted French publicist quoted in the
preceding chapter, “hope dies hard.”
Hope, Peter fancied, had received its death-blow that afternoon.
Already, that evening, it began to revive a little. It was very much
enfeebled; it was very indefinite and diffident; but it was not dead. It
amounted, perhaps, to nothing more than a vague kind of feeling that
he would not, on the whole, make his departure for England quite so
precipitate as, in the first heat of his anger, the first chill of his
despair, he had intended. Piano, piano! He would move slowly, he would
do nothing rash.
But he was not happy, he was very far from happy. He spent a wretched
night, a wretched, restless morrow. He walked about a great deal--about
his garden, and afterwards, when the damnable iteration of his garden
had become unbearable, he walked to the village, and took the riverside
path, under the poplars, along the racing Aco, and followed it, as
the waters paled and broadened, for I forget how many joyless,
unremunerative miles.
When he came home, fagged out and dusty, at dinner time, Marietta
presented a visiting card to him, on her handsomest salver. She
presented it with a flourish that was almost a swagger.
Twice the size of an ordinary visiting-card, the fashion of it was
roughly thus:
IL CARDLE UDESCHINI
Sacr: Congr: Archiv: et Inscript: Praef:
Palazzo Udeschini.
And above the legend, was pencilled, in a small oldfashioned hand,
wonderfully neat and pretty:--
“To thank Mr. Marchdale for his courtesy in returning my snuff-box.”