Part 11

“You never can tell whether a woman will have you or not, until you offer yourself. And even if she refuses you, is that a ground for despair? My own husband asked me three times, and three times I said no. And then he took to writing verses--and I saw there was but one way to stop him. So we were married. Ask her; ask her again--and again. You can always resort in the end to versification. And now,” the lady concluded, rising, “I have spoken, and I leave you to your fate. I'm obliged to return to the hotel, to hold a bed of justice. It appears that my innocent darlings, beyond there, innocent as they look, have managed among them to break the electric light in my sitting-room. They're to be arraigned before me at three for an instruction criminelle. Put what I 've said in your pipe, and smoke it--'tis a mother's last request. If I 've not succeeded in determining you, don't pretend, at least, that I haven't encouraged you a bit. Put what I 've said in your pipe, and see whether, by vigorous drawing, you can't fan the smouldering fires of encouragement into a small blaze of determination.”

Peter resumed his stroll backwards and forwards by the lakeside. Encouragement was all very well; but... “Shall I--shall I not? Shall I--shall I not? Shall I--shall I not?” The eternal question went tick-tack, tick-tack, to the rhythm of his march. He glared at vacancy, and tried hard to make up his mind.

“I'm afraid I must be somewhat lacking in decision of character,” he said, with pathetic wonder.

Then suddenly he stamped his foot.

“Come! An end to this tergiversation. Do it. Do it,” cried his manlier soul.

“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.”

“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.

XXVI

And then Marietta fell ill.

One morning, when she came into his room, to bring his tea, and to open the Venetian blinds that shaded his windows, she failed to salute him with her customary brisk “Buon giorno, Signorino.”

Noticing which, and wondering, he, from his pillow, called out, “Buon' giorno, Marietta.”

“Buon' giorno, Signorino,” she returned but in a whisper.

“What's the matter? Is there cause for secrecy?” Peter asked.

“I have a cold, Signorino,” she whispered, pointing to her chest. “I cannot speak.”

The Venetian blinds were up by this time; the room was full of sun. He looked at her. Something in her face alarmed him. It seemed drawn and set, it seemed flushed.

“Come here,” he said, with a certain peremptoriness. “Give me your hand.”

She wiped her brown old hand backwards and forwards across her apron; then gave it to him.

It was hot and dry.

“Your cold is feverish,” he said. “You must go to bed, and stay there till the fever has passed.”

“I cannot go to bed, Signorino,” she replied.

“Can't you? Have you tried?” asked he.

“No, Signorino,” she admitted.

“Well, you never can tell whether you can do a thing or not, until you try,” said he. “Try to go to bed; and if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.”

“I cannot go to bed. Who would do the Signorino's work?” was her whispered objection.