The Cardinal's Snuff-Box

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.”

“The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here,” said Marietta. There was a swagger in her accent. There was also something in her accent that seemed to rebuke Peter for his absence.

“I had inferred as much from this,” said he, tapping the card. “We English, you know, are great at putting two and two together.”

“He came in a carriage,” said Marietta.

“Not really?” said her master.

“Ang—veramente,” she affirmed.

“Was—was he alone?” Peter asked, an obscure little twinge of hope stirring in his heart.

“No. Signorino.” And then she generalised, with untranslatable magniloquence: “Un amplissimo porporato non va mai solo.”

Peter ought to have hugged her for that amplissimo porporato. But he was selfishly engrossed in his emotions.

“Who was with him?” He tried to throw the question out with a casual effect, an effect of unconcern.

“The Signorina Emelia Manfredi was with him,” answered Marietta, little recking how mere words can stab.

“Oh,” said Peter.

“The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was very sorry not to see the Signorino,” continued Marietta.

“Poor man—was he? Let us trust that time will console him,” said Peter, callously.

But, “I wonder,” he asked himself, “I wonder whether perhaps I was the least bit hasty yesterday? If I had stopped, I should have saved the Cardinal a journey here to-day—I might have known that he would come, these Italians are so punctilious—and then, if I had stopped—if I had stopped—possibly—possibly—”

Possibly what? Oh, nothing. And yet, if he had stopped... well, at any rate, he would have gained time. The Duchessa had already begun to thaw. If he had stopped... He could formulate no precise conclusion to that if; but he felt dimly remorseful that he had not stopped, he felt that he had indeed been the least bit hasty. And his remorse was somehow medicine to his reviving hope.

“After all, I scarcely gave things a fair trial yesterday,” he said.

And the corollary of that, of course, was that he might give things a further and fairer trial some other day.

But his hope was still hard hurt; he was still in a profound dejection.

“The Signorino is not eating his dinner,” cried Marietta, fixing him with suspicious, upbraiding eyes.

“I never said I was,” he retorted.

“The Signorino is not well?” she questioned, anxious.

“Oh, yes—cosi, cosi; the Signorino is well enough,” he answered.

“The dinner”—you could perceive that she brought herself with difficulty to frame the dread hypothesis—“the dinner is not good?” Her voice sank. She waited, tense, for his reply.

“The dinner,” said he, “if one may criticise without eating it, the dinner is excellent. I will have no aspersions cast upon my cook.”

“Ah-h-h!” breathed Marietta, a tremulous sigh of relief.

“It is not the Signorino, it is not the dinner, it is the world that is awry,” Peter went on, in reflective melancholy. “'T is the times that are out of joint. 'T is the sex, the Sex, that is not well, that is not good, that needs a thorough overhauling and reforming.”

“Which sex?” asked Marietta.

“The sex,” said Peter. “By the unanimous consent of rhetoricians, there is but one sex the sex, the fair sex, the unfair sex, the gentle sex, the barbaric sex. We men do not form a sex, we do not even form a sect. We are your mere hangers-on, camp-followers, satellites—your things, your playthings—we are the mere shuttlecocks which you toss hither and thither with your battledores, as the wanton mood impels you. We are born of woman, we are swaddled and nursed by woman, we are governessed by woman; subsequently, we are beguiled by woman, fooled by woman, led on, put off, tantalised by woman, fretted and bullied by her; finally, last scene of all, we are wrapped in our cerements by woman. Man's life, birth, death, turn upon woman, as upon a hinge. I have ever been a misanthrope, but now I am seriously thinking of becoming a misogynist as well. Would you advise me to-do so?”

“A misogynist? What is that, Signorino?” asked Marietta.

“A woman-hater,” he explained; “one who abhors and forswears the sex; one who has dashed his rose-coloured spectacles from his eyes, and sees woman as she really is, with no illusive glamour; one who has found her out. Yes, I think I shall become a misogynist. It is the only way of rendering yourself invulnerable, 't is the only safe course. During my walk this afternoon, I recollected, from the scattered pigeon-holes of memory, and arranged in consequent order, at least a score of good old apothegmatic shafts against the sex. Was it not, for example, in the grey beginning of days, was it not woman whose mortal taste brought sin into the world and all our woe? Was not that Pandora a woman, who liberated, from the box wherein they were confined, the swarm of winged evils that still afflict us? I will not remind you of St. John Chrysostom's golden parable about a temple and the thing it is constructed over. But I will come straight to the point, and ask whether this is truth the poet sings, when he informs us roundly that 'every woman is a scold at heart'?”

Marietta was gazing patiently at the sky. She did not answer.

“The tongue,” Peter resumed, “is woman's weapon, even as the fist is man's. And it is a far deadlier weapon. Words break no bones—they break hearts, instead. Yet were men one-tenth part so ready with their fists, as women are with their barbed and envenomed tongues, what savage brutes you would think us—would n't you?—and what a rushing trade the police-courts would drive, to be sure. That is one of the good old cliches that came back to me during my walk. All women are alike—there's no choice amongst animated fashion-plates: that is another. A woman is the creature of her temper; her husband, her children, and her servants are its victims: that is a third. Woman is a bundle of pins; man is her pin-cushion. When woman loves, 't is not the man she loves, but the man's flattery; woman's love is reflex self-love. The man who marries puts himself in irons. Marriage is a bird-cage in a garden. The birds without hanker to get in; but the birds within know that there is no condition so enviable as that of the birds without. Well, speak up. What do you think? Do you advise me to become a misogynist?”

“I do not understand, Signorino,” said Marietta.

“Of course, you don't,” said Peter. “Who ever could understand such stuff and nonsense? That's the worst of it. If only one could understand, if only one could believe it, one might find peace, one might resign oneself. But alas and alas! I have never had any real faith in human wickedness; and now, try as I will, I cannot imbue my mind with any real faith in the undesirability of woman. That is why you see me dissolved in tears, and unable to eat my dinner. Oh, to think, to think,” he cried with passion, suddenly breaking into English, “to think that less than a fortnight ago, less than one little brief fortnight ago, she was seated in your kitchen, seated there familiarly, in her wet clothes, pouring tea, for all the world as if she was the mistress of the house!”

Days passed. He could not go to Ventirose—or, anyhow, he thought he could not. He reverted to his old habit of living in his garden, haunting the riverside, keeping watchful, covetous eyes turned towards the castle. The river bubbled and babbled; the sun shone strong and clear; his fountain tinkled; his birds flew about their affairs; his flowers breathed forth their perfumes; the Gnisi frowned, the uplands westward laughed, the snows of Monte Sfiorito sailed under every colour of the calendar except their native white. All was as it had ever been—but oh, the difference to him. A week passed. He caught no glimpse of the Duchessa. Yet he took no steps to get his boxes packed.