He crossed the Aco, and struck bravely forward, up the smooth lawns, under the bending trees, towards the castle.
The sun was setting. The irregular mass of buildings stood out in varying shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of red.
Half way there, Peter stopped, and looked back.
The level sunshine turned the black forests of the Gnisi to shining forests of bronze, and the foaming cascade that leapt down its side to a cascade of liquid gold. The lake, for the greater part, lay in shadow, violet-grey through a pearl-grey veil of mist; but along the opposite shore it caught the light, and gleamed a crescent of quicksilver, with roseate reflections. The three snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito, at the valley's end, seemed almost insubstantial—floating forms of luminous pink vapour, above the hazy horizon, in a pure sky intensely blue.
A familiar verse came into Peter's mind.
“Really,”' he said to himself, “down to the very 'cataract leaping in glory,' I believe they must have pre-arranged the scene, feature for feature, to illustrate it.” And he began to repeat the vivid, musical lines, under his breath...
But about midway of them he was interrupted.
“It's not altogether a bad sort of view—is it?” a voice asked, behind him.
Peter faced about.
On a marble bench, under a feathery acacia; a few yards away, a lady was seated, looking at him, smiling.
Peter's eyes met hers—and suddenly his heart gave a jump. Then it stood dead still for a second. Then it flew off, racing perilously. Oh, for the best reasons in the world. There was something in her eyes, there was a glow, a softness, that seemed—that seemed... But thereby hangs my tale.
She was dressed in white. She had some big bright-yellow chrysanthemums stuck in her belt. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow, sparkled, where the sun touched it, transparent and iridescent, like crinkly threads of glass.
“You do not think it altogether bad—I hope?” she questioned, arching her eyebrows slightly, with a droll little assumption of concern.
Peter's heart was racing—but he must answer her.
“I was just wondering,” he answered, with a tolerably successful feint of composure, “whether one might not safely call it altogether good.”
“Oh—?” she exclaimed.
She threw back her head, and examined the prospect critically. Afterwards, she returned her gaze to Peter, with an air of polite readiness to defer to his opinion.
“It is not too sensational? Not too much like a landscape on the stage?”
“We must judge it leniently,” said he; “we must remember that it is only unaided Nature. Besides,” he added, “to be meticulously truthful, there is a spaciousness, there is a vivacity in the light and colour, there is a sense of depth and atmosphere, that we should hardly find in a landscape on the stage.”
“Yes—perhaps there is,” she admitted thoughtfully.
And with that, they looked into each other's eyes, and laughed.
“Are you aware,” the lady asked, after a brief silence, “that it is a singularly lovely evening.”
“I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so,” Peter answered, with the least approach to a meaning bow.
In the lady's face there flickered, perhaps, for half a second, the faintest light, as of a comprehending and unresentful smile. But she went on, with fine detachment
“How calm and still it is. The wonderful peace of the day's compline. It seems as if the earth had stopped breathing—does n't it? The birds have already gone to bed, though the sun is only just setting. It is the hour when they are generally noisiest; but they have gone to bed—the sparrows and the finches, the snatchers and the snatched-from, are equal in the article of sleep. That is because they feel the touch of autumn. How beautiful it is, in spite of its sadness, this first touch of autumn—it is like sad distant music. Can you analyse it, can you explain it? There is no chill, it is quite warm, and yet one knows somehow that autumn is here. The birds know it, and have gone to bed. In another month they will be flying away, to Africa and the Hesperides—all of them except the sparrows, who stay all winter. I wonder how they get on during the winter, with no goldfinches to snatch from?”
She turned to Peter with a look of respectful enquiry, as one appealing to an authority for information.
“Oh, they snatch from each other, during the winter,” he explained. “It is thief rob thief, when honest victims are not forthcoming. And—what is more to the point—they must keep their beaks in, against the return of the goldfinches with the spring.”
The Duchessa—for I scorn to deceive the trustful reader longer; and (as certain fines mouches, despite my efforts at concealment, may ere this have suspected) the mysterious lady was no one else—the Duchessa gaily laughed.
“Yes,” she said, “the goldfinches will return with the spring. But isn't that rather foolish of them? If I were a goldfinch, I think I should make my abode permanent in the sparrowless south.”
“There is no sparrowless south,” said Peter. “Sparrows, alas, abound in every latitude; and the farther south you go, the fiercer and bolder and more impudent they become. In Africa and the Hesperides, which you have mentioned, they not infrequently attack the caravans, peck the eyes out of the camels, and are sometimes even known to carry off a man, a whole man, vainly struggling in their inexorable talons. There is no sparrowless south. But as for the goldfinches returning—it is the instinct of us bipeds to return. Plumed and plumeless, we all return to something, what though we may have registered the most solemn vows to remain away.”
He delivered his last phrases with an accent, he punctuated them with a glance, in which there may have lurked an intention.
But the Duchessa did not appear to notice it.
“Yes—true—so we do,” she assented vaguely. “And what you tell me of the sparrows in the Hesperides is very novel and impressive—unless, indeed, it is a mere traveller's tale, with which you are seeking to practise upon my credulity. But since I find you in this communicative vein, will you not push complaisance a half-inch further, and tell me what that thing is, suspended there in the sky above the crest of the Cornobastone—that pale round thing, that looks like the spectre of a magnified half-crown?”
Peter turned to the quarter her gaze indicated.
“Oh, that,” he said, “is nothing. In frankness, it is only what the vulgar style the moon.”
“How odd,” said she. “I thought it was what the vulgar style the moon.”
And they both laughed again.
The Duchessa moved a little; and thus she uncovered, carved on the back of her marble bench, and blazoned in red and gold, a coat of arms.
She touched the shield with her finger.
“Are you interested in canting heraldry?” she asked. “There is no country so rich in it as Italy. These are the arms of the Farfalla, the original owners of this property. Or, seme of twenty roses gules; the crest, on a rose gules, a butterfly or, with wings displayed; and the motto—how could the heralds ever have sanctioned such an unheraldic and unheroic motto?
Rosa amorosa,
Farfalla giojosa,
Mi cantano al cuore
La gioja e l' amore.
They were the great people of this region for countless generations, the Farfalla. They were Princes of Ventirose and Patricians of Milan. And then the last of them was ruined at Monte Carlo, and killed himself there, twenty-odd years ago. That is how all their gioja and amore ended. It was the case of a butterfly literally broken upon a wheel. The estate fell into the hands of the Jews, as everything more or less does sooner or later; and they—if you can believe me—they were going to turn the castle into an hotel, into one of those monstrous modern hotels, for other Jews to come to, when I happened to hear of it, and bought it. Fancy turning that splendid old castle into a Jew-infested hotel! It is one of the few castles in Italy that have a ghost. Oh, but a quite authentic ghost. It is called the White Page—il Paggio Bianco di Ventirose. It is the ghost of a boy about sixteen. He walks on the ramparts of the old keep, and looks off towards the lake, as if he were watching a boat, and sometimes he waves his arms, as if he were signalling. And from head to foot he is perfectly white, like a statue. I have never seen him myself; but so many people say they have, I cannot doubt he is authentic. And the Jews wanted to turn this haunted castle into an hotel... As a tribute to the memory of the Farfalla, I take pains to see that their arms, which are carved, as you see them here, in at least a hundred different places, are remetalled and retinctured as often as time and the weather render it necessary.”
She looked towards the castle, while she spoke; and now she rose, with the design, perhaps, of moving in that direction.
Peter felt that the moment had come for actualities.
“It seems improbable,” he began,—“and I 'm afraid you will think there is a tiresome monotony in my purposes; but I am here again to return Cardinal Udeschini's snuff box. He left it in my garden.”
“Oh—?” said the Duchessa. “Yes, he thought he must have left it there. He is always mislaying it. Happily, he has another, for emergencies. It was very good of you to trouble to bring it back.”
She gave a light little laugh..
“I may also improve this occasion,” Peter abruptly continued, “to make my adieux. I shall be leaving for England in a few days now.”
The Duchessa raised her eyebrows.
“Really?” she said. “Oh, that is too bad,” she added, by way of comment. “October, you know, is regarded as the best month of all the twelve, in this lake country.”
“Yes, I know it,” Peter responded regretfully.
“And it is a horrid month in England,” she went on.
“It is an abominable month in England,” he acknowledged.
“Here it is blue, like larkspur, and all fragrant of the vintage, and joyous with the songs of the vintagers,” she said. “There it is dingy-brown, and songless, and it smells of smoke.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“But you are a sportsman? You go in for shooting?” she conjectured.
“No,” he answered. “I gave up shooting years ago.”
“Oh—? Hunting, then?”
“I hate hunting. One is always getting rolled on by one's horse.”
“Ah, I see. It—it will be golf, perhaps?”
“No, it is not even golf.”
“Don't tell me it is football?”
“Do I look as if it were football?”
“It is sheer homesickness, in fine? You are grieving for the purple of your native heather?”
“There is scarcely any heather in my native county. No,” said Peter, “no. To tell you the truth, it is the usual thing. It is an histoire de femme.”
“I 'might have guessed it,” she exclaimed. “It is still that everlasting woman.”
“That everlasting woman—?” Peter faltered.
“To be sure,” said she. “The woman you are always going on about. The woman of your novel. This woman, in short.”
And she produced from behind her back a hand that she had kept there, and held up for his inspection a grey-and-gold bound book.
“MY novel—?” faltered he. (But the sight of it, in her possession, in these particular circumstances, gave him a thrill that was not a thrill of despair.)
“Your novel,” she repeated, smiling sweetly, and mimicking his tone. Then she made a little moue. “Of course, I have known that you were your friend Felix Wildmay, from the outset.”
“Oh,” said Peter, in a feeble sort of gasp, looking bewildered. “You have known that from the outset?” And his brain seemed to reel.
“Yes,” said she, “of course. Where would the fun have been, otherwise? And now you are going away, back to her shrine, to renew your worship. I hope you will find the courage to offer her your hand.”
Peter's brain was reeling. But here was the opportunity of his life.
“You give me courage,” he pronounced, with sudden daring. “You are in a position to help me with her. And since you know so much, I should like you to know more. I should like to tell you who she is.”
“One should be careful where one bestows one's confidences,” she warned him; but there was something in her eyes, there was a glow, a softness, that seemed at the same time to invite them.
“No,” he said, “better than telling you who she is, I will tell you where I first saw her. It was at the Francais, in December, four years ago, a Thursday night, a subscription night. She sat in one of the middle boxes of the first tier. She was dressed in white. Her companions were an elderly woman, English I think, in black, who wore a cap; and an old man, with white moustache and imperial, who looked as if he might be a French officer. And the play—.”
He broke off, and looked at the Duchessa. She kept her eyes down.
“Yes—the play?” she questioned, in a low voice, after a little wait.
“The play was Monsieur Pailleron's 'Le monde ou l'on s'ennuie',” he said.
“Oh,” said she, still keeping her eyes down. Her voice was still very low. But there was something in it that made Peter's heart leap.
“The next time I saw her,” he began...
But then he had to stop. He felt as if the beating of his heart must suffocate him.
“Yes—the next time?” she questioned.
He drew a deep breath. He began anew—
“The next time was a week later, at the Opera. They were giving Lohengrin. She was with the same man and woman, and there was another, younger man. She had pearls round her neck and in her hair, and she had a cloak lined with white fur. She left before the opera was over. I did not see her again until the following May, when I saw her once or twice in London, driving in the Park. She was always with the same elderly Englishwoman, but the military-looking old Frenchman had disappeared. And then I saw her once more, a year later, in Paris, driving in the Bois.”
The Duchessa kept her eyes down. She did not speak.
Peter waited as long as flesh-and-blood could wait, looking at her.
“Well?” he pleaded, at last. “That is all. Have you nothing to say to me?”
She raised her eyes, and for the tiniest fraction of a second they gave themselves to his. Then she dropped them again.
“You are sure,” she asked, “you are perfectly sure that when, afterwards, you met her, and came to know her as she really is—you are perfectly sure there was no disappointment?”
“Disappointment!” cried Peter. “She is in every way immeasurably beyond anything that I was capable of dreaming. Oh, if you could see her, if you could hear her speak, if you could look into her eyes—if you could see her as others see her—you would not ask whether there was a disappointment. She is... No; the language is not yet invented, in which I could describe her.”
The Duchessa smiled, softly, to herself.
“And you are in love with her—more or less?” she asked.
“I love her so that the bare imagination of being allowed to tell her of my love almost makes me faint with joy. But it is like the story of the poor squire who loved his queen. She is the greatest of great ladies. I am nobody. She is so beautiful, so splendid, and so high above me, it would be the maddest presumption for me to ask her for her love. To ask for the love of my Queen! And yet—Oh, I can say no more. God sees my heart. God knows how I love her.”
“And it is on her account—because you think your love is hopeless—that you are going away, that you are going back to England?”
“Yes,” said he.
She raised her eyes again, and again they gave themselves to his. There was something in them, there was a glow, a softness ...
“Don't go,” she said.
Up at the castle—Peter had hurried down to the villa, dressed, and returned to the castle to dine—he restored the snuff-box to Cardinal Udeschini.
“I am trebly your debtor for it,” said the Cardinal.
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