“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!”
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