The Cardinal's Snuff-Box

XIX

All that evening, something which he had not been conscious of noticing especially when it was present to him—certainly he had paid no conscious attention to its details—kept recurring and recurring to Peter's memory: the appearance of the prettily-arranged terrace-end at Ventirose: the white awning, with the blue sky at its edges, the sunny park beyond; the warm-hued carpets on the marble pavement; the wicker chairs, with their bright cushions; the table, with its books and bibelots—the yellow French books, a tortoise-shell paperknife, a silver paperweight, a crystal smelling-bottle, a bowlful of drooping poppies; and the marble balustrade, with its delicate tracery of leaves and tendrils, where the jessamine twined round its pillars.

This kept recurring, recurring, vividly, a picture that he could see without closing his eyes, a picture with a very decided sentiment. Like the gay and gleaming many-pinnacled facade of her house, it seemed appropriate to her; it seemed in its fashion to express her. Nay, it seemed to do more. It was a corner of her every-day environment; these things were the companions, the witnesses, of moments of her life, phases of herself, which were hidden from Peter; they were the companions and witnesses of her solitude, her privacy; they were her confidants, in a way. They seemed not merely to express her, therefore, but to be continually on the point—I had almost said of betraying her. At all events, if he could only understand their silent language, they would prove rich in precious revelations. So he welcomed their recurrences, dwelt upon them, pondered them, and got a deep if somewhat inarticulate pleasure from them.

On Thursday, as he approached the castle, the last fires of sunset were burning in the sky behind it—the long irregular mass of buildings stood out in varying shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of red: the grey stone, dark, velvety indigo; the pink stucco, pink still, but with a transparent blue penumbra over it; the white marble, palely, scintillantly amethystine. And if he was interested in her environment, now he could study it to his heart's content: the wide marble staircase, up which he was shown, with its crimson carpet, and the big mellow painting, that looked as if it might be a Titian, at the top; the great saloon, in which he was received, with its polished mosaic floor, its frescoed ceiling, its white-and-gold panelling, its hangings and upholsteries of yellow brocade, its satinwood chairs and tables, its bronzes, porcelains, embroideries, its screens and mirrors; the long dining-hall, with its high pointed windows, its slender marble columns supporting a vaulted roof, its twinkling candles in chandeliers and sconces of cloudy Venetian glass, its brilliant table, its flowers and their colours and their scents.

He could study her environment to his heart's content, indeed—or to his heart's despair. For all this had rather the effect of chilling, of depressing him. It was very splendid; it was very luxurious and cheerful; it was appropriate and personal to her, if you like; no doubt, in its fashion, in its measure, it, too, expressed her. But, at that rate, it expressed her in an aspect which Peter had instinctively made it his habit to forget, which he by no means found it inspiriting to remember. It expressed, it emphasised, her wealth, her rank; it emphasised the distance, in a worldly sense, between her and himself, the conventional barriers.

And she...

She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she was all that she had ever been—and yet—and yet—Well, somehow, she seemed indefinably different. Somehow, again, the distance, the barriers, were emphasised. She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she was all that she had ever been; but, somehow, to-night, she seemed very much the great lady, very much the duchess....

“My dear man,” he said to himself, “you were mad to dream for a single instant that there was the remotest possibility of anything ever happening.”

The only other guests, besides the Cardinal and Monsignor Langshawe, were an old Frenchwoman, with beautiful white hair, from one of the neighbouring villas, Madame de Lafere, and a young, pretty, witty, and voluble Irishwoman, Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, from an hotel at Spiaggia. In deference, perhaps, to the cloth of the two ecclesiastics, none of the women were in full evening-dress, and there was no arm-taking when they went in to dinner. The dinner itself was of a simplicity which Peter thought admirable, and which, of course, he attributed to his Duchessa's own good taste. He was not yet familiar enough with the Black aristocracy of Italy, to be aware that in the matter of food and drink simplicity is as much the criterion of good form amongst them, as lavish complexity is the criterion of good form amongst the English-imitating Whites.

The conversation, I believe, took its direction chiefly from the initiative of Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. With great sprightliness and humour, and with an astonishing light-hearted courage, she rallied the Cardinal upon the neglect in which her native island was allowed to languish by the powers at Rome. “The most Catholic country in three hemispheres, to be sure,” she said; “every inch of its soil soaked with the blood of martyrs. Yet you've not added an Irish saint to the Calendar for I see you're blushing to think how many ages; and you've taken sides with the heretic Saxon against us in our struggle for Home Rule—which I blame you for, though, being a landowner and a bit of an absentee, I 'm a traitorous Unionist myself.”

The Cardinal laughingly retorted that the Irish were far too fine, too imaginative and poetical a race, to be bothered with material questions of government and administration. They should leave such cares to the stolid, practical English, and devote the leisure they would thus obtain to the further exercise and development of what someone had called “the starfire of the Celtic nature.” Ireland should look upon England as her working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of Irish saints to the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their excessive number. “'T is an embarrassment of riches. If we were once to begin, we could never leave off till we had canonised nine-tenths of the dead population.”

Monsignor Langshawe, at this (making jest the cue for earnest), spoke up for Scotland, and deplored the delay in the beatification of Blessed Mary. “The official beatification,” he discriminated, “for she was beatified in the heart of every true Catholic Scot on the day when Bloody Elizabeth murdered her.”

And Madame de Lafere put in a plea for Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and the little Dauphin.

“Blessed Mary—Bloody Elizabeth,” laughed the Duchessa, in an aside to Peter; “here is language to use in the presence of a Protestant Englishman.”

“Oh, I'm accustomed to 'Bloody Elizabeth,'” said he. “Was n't it a word of Cardinal Newman's?”

“Yes, I think so,” said she. “And since every one is naming his candidate; for the Calendar, you have named mine. I think there never was a saintlier saint than Cardinal Newman.”

“What is your Eminence's attitude towards the question of mixed marriages?” Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.

Peter pricked up his ears.

“It is not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in England,” his Eminence replied; “but in the abstract, and other things equal, my attitude would of course be one of disapproval.”

“And yet surely,” contended she, “if a pious Catholic girl marries a Protestant man, she has a hundred chances of converting him?”

“I don't know,” said the Cardinal. “Would n't it be safer to let the conversion precede the marriage? Afterwards, I 'm afraid, he would have a hundred chances of inducing her to apostatise, or, at least, of rendering her lukewarm.”

“Not if she had a spark of the true zeal,” said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. “Any wife can make her husband's life a burden to him, if she will conscientiously lay herself out to do so. The man would be glad to submit, for the sake of peace in his household. I often sigh for the good old days of the Inquisition; but it's still possible, in the blessed seclusion of the family circle, to apply the rack and the thumbscrew in a modified form. I know a dozen fine young Protestant men in London whom I'm labouring to convert, and I feel I 'm defeated only by the circumstance that I'm not in a position to lead them to the altar in the full meaning of the expression.”

“A dozen?” the Cardinal laughed. “Aren't you complicating the question of mixed marriages with that of plural marriage?”

“'T was merely a little Hibernicism, for which I beg your Eminence's indulgence,” laughed she. “But what puts the most spokes in a proselytiser's wheel is the Faith itself. If we only deserved the reputation for sharp practice and double dealing which the Protestants have foisted upon us, it would be roses, roses, all the way. Why are we forbidden to let the end justify the means? And where are those accommodements avec le ciel of which we've heard? We're not even permitted a few poor accommodements avec le monde.”

“Look at my uncle's face,” whispered the Duchessa to Peter. The Cardinal's fine old face was all alight with amusement. “In his fondness for taking things by their humorous end, he has met an affinity.”

“It will be a grand day for the Church and the nations, when we have an Irish Pope,” Mrs. O'Donovan Florence continued. “A good, stalwart, militant Irishman is what's needed to set everything right. With a sweet Irish tongue, he'd win home the wandering sheep; and with a strong Irish arm, he'd drive the wolves from the fold. It's he that would soon sweep the Italians out of Rome.”

“The Italians will soon be swept out of Rome by the natural current of events,” said the Cardinal. “But an Irish bishop of my acquaintance insists that we have already had many Irish Popes, without knowing it. Of all the greatest Popes he cries, 'Surely, they must have had Irish blood.' He's perfectly convinced that Pius the Ninth was Irish. His very name, his family-name, Ferretti, was merely the Irish name, Farrity, Italianised, the good bishop says. No one but an Irishman, he insists, could have been so witty.”

Mrs. O'Donovan Florence looked intensely thoughtful for a moment.... Then, “I 'm trying to think of the original Irish form of Udeschini,” she declared.

At which there was a general laugh.

“When you say 'soon,' Eminence, do you mean that we may hope to see the Italians driven from Rome in our time?” enquired Madame de Lafere.

“They are on the verge of bankruptcy—for their sins,” the Cardinal answered. “When the crash comes—and it can't fail to come before many years—there will necessarily be a readjustment. I do not believe that the conscience of Christendom will again allow Peter to be deprived of his inheritance.”

“God hasten the good day,” said Monsignor Langshawe.

“If I can live to see Rome restored to the Pope, I shall die content, even though I cannot live to see France restored to the King,” said the old Frenchwoman.

“And I—even though I cannot live to see Britain restored to the Faith,” said the Monsignore.

The Duchessa smiled at Peter.

“What a hotbed of Ultramontanes and reactionaries you have fallen into,” she murmured.

“It is exhilarating,” said he, “to meet people who have convictions.”

“Even when you regard their convictions as erroneous?” she asked.

“Yes, even then,” he answered. “But I'm not sure I regard as erroneous the convictions I have heard expressed to-night.”

“Oh—?” she wondered. “Would you like to see Rome restored to the Pope?”

“Yes,” said he, “decidedly—for aesthetic reasons, if for no others.”

“I suppose there are aesthetic reasons,” she assented. “But we, of course, think there are conclusive reasons in mere justice.”

“I don't doubt there are conclusive reasons in mere justice, too,” said he.

After dinner, at the Cardinal's invitation, the Duchessa went to the piano, and played Bach and Scarlatti. Her face, in the soft candlelight, as she discoursed that “luminous, lucid” music, Peter thought... But what do lovers always think of their ladies' faces, when they look up from their pianos, in soft candlelight?

Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, taking her departure, said to the Cardinal, “I owe your Eminence the two proudest days of my life. The first was when I read in the paper that you had received the hat, and I was able to boast to all my acquaintances that I had been in the convent with your niece by marriage. And the second is now, when I can boast forevermore hereafter that I've enjoyed the honour of making my courtesy to you.”

“So,” said Peter, as he walked home through the dew and the starlight of the park, amid the phantom perfumes of the night, “so the Cardinal does n't approve of mixed marriages and, of course, his niece does n't, either. But what can it matter to me? For alas and alas—as he truly said—it's hardly a question of actuality.”

And he lit a cigarette.