Chapter 2

"Why don't I? Or why doesn't my uncle? My uncle is a temperamental conservative, a devotee to his traditions--the sort of man who will never do anything that hasn't been the constant habit of his forebears. He would no more dream of healing a well-established family feud than of selling the family plate. And I--well, surely, it would never be for me to make the advances."

"No, you're right," acknowledged Lady Blanchemain. "The advances should come from her. But people have such a fatal way--even without being temperamental conservatives--of leaving things as they find them. Besides, never having seen you, she couldn't know how nice you are. All the same, I'll confess, if you insist upon it, that she ought to be ashamed of herself. Come--let's make it up."

She rose, a great soft glowing vision of benignancy, and held out her hand, now gloveless, her pretty little smooth plump right hand, with its twinkling rings.

"Oh!" cried the astonished young man, the astonished, amused, moved, wondering, and entirely won young man, his sea-blue eyes wide open, and a hundred lights of pleasure and surprise dancing in them.

The benignant vision floated towards him, and he took the little white hand in his long lean brown one.

VIII

When the first stress of their emotion had in some degree spent itself Lady Blanchemain, returning to her place on the ottoman, bade John sit down beside her.

"Now," she said, genially imperative, whilst all manner of kindly and admiring interest shone in her face, "there are exactly nine million and ninety-nine questions that you'll be obliged to answer before I've done with you. But to begin, you must clear up at once a mystery that's been troubling me ever since you dashed to my rescue at the gate. What in the name of Reason is the cause of your residence in this ultramundane stronghold?"

John--convict me of damnable iteration if you must: Heaven has sent me a laughing hero--John laughed.

"Oh," he said, "there are several causes--there are exactly nine million and ninety-eight."

"Name," commanded Lady Blanchemain, "the first and the last."

"Well," obeyed he, pondering, "I should think the first, the last, and perhaps the chief intermediate, would be--the whole blessed thing." And his arm described a circle which comprehended the castle and all within it, and the countryside without.

"It has a pleasant site, I'll not deny," said Lady Blanchemain. "But don't you find it a trifle far away? And a bit up-hill? I'm staying at the Victoria at Roccadoro, and it took me an hour and a half to drive here."

"But since," said John, with a flattering glance, "since you _are_ here, I have no further reason to deplore its farawayness. So few places are far away, in these times and climes," he added, on a note of melancholy, as one to whom all climes and times were known.

"Hum!" said Lady Blanchemain, matter-of-fact. "Have you been here long?"

"Let me see," John answered. "To-day is the 23rd of April. I arrived here--I offer the fact for what it may be worth--on the Feast of All Fools."

"_Absit omen_," cried she. "And you intend to stay?"

"Oh, I'm at least wise enough not to fetter myself with intentions," answered John.

She looked about, calculating, estimating.

"I suppose it costs you the very eyes of your head?" she asked.

John giggled.

"Guess what it costs--I give it to you in a thousand."

She continued her survey, brought it to a period.

"A billion a week," she said, with finality. John exulted.

"It costs me," he told her, "six francs fifty a day--wine included."

"What!" cried she, mistrusting her ears.

"Yes," said he.

"Fudge!" said she, not to be caught with chaff.

"It sounds like a traveller's tale, I know; but that's so often the bother with the truth," said he. "Truth is under no obligation to be _vraisemblable_. I'm here _en pension_."

Lady Blanchemain sniffed.

"Does the Prince of Zelt-Neuminster take in boarders?" she inquired, her nose in the air.

"Not exactly," said John. "But the Parroco of Sant' Alessina does. I board at the presbytery."

"Oh," said Lady Blanchemain, beginning to see light, while her eyebrows went up, went down. "You board at the presbytery?"

"For six francs fifty a day--wine included," chuckled John.

"Wine, and apparently the unhindered enjoyment of--the whole blessed thing," supplemented she, with a reminder of his comprehensive gesture.

"Yes--the run of the house and garden, the freedom of the hills and valley."

"I understand," she said, and was mute for a space, readjusting her impressions. "I had supposed," she went on at last, "from the handsome way in which you snubbed that creature in shoulder-knots, and proceeded to do the honours of the place, that you were little less than its proprietor."

"Well, and so I could almost feel I am," laughed John. "I'm alone here--there's none my sway to dispute. And as for the creature in shoulder-knots, what becomes of the rights of man or the bases of civil society, if you can't snub a creature whom you regularly tip? For five francs a week the creature in shoulder-knots cleans my boots (indifferent well), brushes my clothes, runs my errands (indifferent slow),--and swallows my snubs as if they were polenta."

"And tries to shoo intrusive trippers from your threshold--and gets an extra plateful for his pains," laughed the lady. "Where," she asked, "does the Prince of Zelt-Neuminster keep himself?"

"In Vienna, I believe. Anyhow, at a respectful distance. The parroco, who is also his sort of intendant, tells me he practically never comes to Sant' Alessina."

"Good easy man," quoth she. "Yes, I certainly supposed you were his tenant-in-fee, at the least. You have an air." And her bob of the head complimented him upon it.

"Oh, we Marquises of Carabas!" cried John, with a flourish.

She regarded him doubtfully.

"Wouldn't you find yourself in a slightly difficult position, if the Prince or his family should suddenly turn up?" she suggested.

"I? Why?" asked John, his blue eyes blank.

"A young man boarding with the parroco for six francs a day--" she began.

"Six francs fifty, please," he gently interposed.

"Make it seven if you like," her ladyship largely conceded. "Wouldn't your position be slightly false? Would they quite realize who you were?"

"What could that possibly matter? wondered John, eyes blanker still.

"I could conceive occasions in which it might matter furiously," said she. "Foreigners can't with half an eye distinguish amongst us, as we ourselves can; and Austrians have such oddly exalted notions. You wouldn't like to be mistaken for Mr. Snooks?"

"I don't know," John reflected, vistas opening before him. "It might be rather a lark."

"Whrrr!" said Lady Blanchemain, fanning herself with her pocket-handkerchief. Then she eyed him suspiciously. "You're hiding the nine million other causes up your sleeve. It isn't merely the 'whole blessed thing' that's keeping an eaglet of your feather alone in an improbable nest like this--it's some one particular thing. In my time," she sighed, "it would have been a woman."

"And no wonder," riposted John, with a flowery bow.

"You're very good--but you confuse the issue," said she. "In my time the world was young and romantic. In this age of prose and prudence--_is_ it a woman?"

"The world is still, is always, young and romantic," said John, sententious. "I can't admit that an age of prose and prudence is possible. The poetry of earth is never dead, and no more is its folly. The world is always romantic, if you have the three gifts needful to make it so."

"_Is_ it a woman?" repeated Lady Blanchemain.

"And the three gifts are," said he, "Faith, and the sense of Beauty, and the sense of Humour."

"And I should have thought, an attractive member of the opposite sex," said she. "_Is_ it a woman?"

"Well," he at last replied, appearing to take counsel with himself, "I don't know why I should forbid myself the relief of owning up to you that in a sense it is."

"Hurray!" cried she, moving in her seat, agog, as one who scented her pet diversion. "A love affair! I'll be your confidante. Tell me all about it."

"Yes, in a sense, a love affair," he confessed.

"Good--excellent," she approved. "But--but what do you mean by 'in a sense'?"

"Ah," said he, darkly nodding, "I mean whole worlds by that."

"I don't understand," said she, her face prepared to fall.

"It isn't one woman--it's a score, a century, of the dear things," he announced.

Her face fell. "Oh--?" she faltered.

"It's a love affair with a type," he explained.

She frowned upon him. "A love affair with a type--?"

"Yes," said he.

She shook her head. "I give you up. In one breath you speak like a Mohammedan, in the next like--I don't know what."

"With these," said John, his band stretched towards the wall. "With the type of the Quattrocento."

He got upon his feet, and moved from picture to picture; and a fire, half indeed of mischief; but half it may be of real enthusiasm, glimmered in his eyes.

"With these lost ladies of old years; these soft-coloured shadows, that were once rosy flesh; these proud, humble, innocent, subtle, brave, shy, pious, pleasure-loving women of the long ago. With them; with their hair and eyes and jewels, their tip-tilted, scornful, witty little noses, their 'throats so round and lips so red,' their splendid raiment; with their mirth, pathos, passion, kindness and cruelty, their infinite variety, their undying youth. Ah, the pity of it! Their undying youth--and they so irrevocably dead. Peace be to their souls! See," he suddenly declaimed, laughing, "how the sun, the very sun in heaven, is contending with me, as to which of us shall do them the greater homage, the sun that once looked on their living forms, and remembers--see how he lights memorial lamps about them," for the sun, reflected from the polished floor, threw a sheen upon the ancient canvases, and burned bright in the bosses of the frames. "Give me these," he wound up, "a book or two, and a jug of the parroco's 'included wine'--my wilderness is paradise enow."

Lady Blanchemain's eyes, as she listened, had become deep wells of disappointment, then gushing fountains of reproach.

"Oh, you villain!" she groaned, when he had ended, shaking her pretty fist. "So to have raised my expectations, and so to dash them!--Do you _really_ mean," still clinging to a shred of hope, she pleaded, "really, really mean that there's no--no actual woman?"

"I'm sorry," said John, "but I'm afraid I really, really do."

"And you're not--not really in love with any one?"

"No--not really," he said, with a mien that feigned contrition.

"But at your age--how old are you?" she broke off to demand.

"Somewhere between twenty-nine and thirty, I believe," he laughed.

"And in such a romantic environment, and not on account of a woman! It's downright unnatural," she declared. "It's flat treason against the kingly state of youth."

"I'm awfully sorry," said John. "Yet, after all, what's the good of repining? Nothing could happen even if there were a woman."

Lady Blanchemain looked alarmed.

"Nothing could happen? What do you mean? You're not _married_? If you are, it must be secretly, for you're put down as single in Burke."

"To the best of my knowledge," John reassured her, laughing, "Burke is right. And I prayerfully trust he may never have occasion to revise his statement."

"For mercy's sake," cried she, "don't tell me you're a woman-hater!"

"That's just the point," said he. "I'm an adorer of the sex."

"Well, then?" questioned she, at a loss. "How can you 'prayerfully' wish to remain a bachelor? Besides, aren't you heir to a peerage? What of the succession?"

"That's just the point," he perversely argued. "And you know there are plenty of cousins."

"Just the point! just the point!" fretted Lady Blanchemain. "What's just the point? Just the point that you aren't a woman-hater?--just the point that you're heir to a peerage? You talk like Tom o' Bedlam."

"Well, you see," expounded John, unruffled, "as an adorer of the sex, and heir to a peerage, I shouldn't want to marry a woman unless I could support her in what they call a manner becoming her rank--and I couldn't."

"Couldn't?" the lady scoffed. "I should like to know why not?"

"I'm too--if you will allow me to clothe my thought in somewhat homely language--too beastly poor."

"_You--poor?_" ejaculated Lady Blanchemain, falling back.

"Ay--but honest," asseverated John, to calm her fears.

She couldn't help smiling, though she resolutely frowned.

"Be serious," she enjoined him. "Doesn't your uncle make you a suitable allowance?"

"I should deceive you," answered John, "if I said he made me an _un_suitable one. He makes me, to put it in round numbers, exactly no allowance whatsoever."

"The--old--curmudgeon!" cried Lady Blanchemain, astounded, and fiercely scanning her words.

"No," returned John, soothingly, "he isn't a curmudgeon. But he's a very peculiar man. He's a Spartan, and he lacks imagination. It has simply never entered his head that I could _need_ an allowance. And, if you come to that, I can't say that I positively do. I have a tiny patrimony--threepence a week, or so--enough for my humble necessities, though scarcely perhaps enough to support the state of a future peeress. No, my uncle isn't a curmudgeon; he's a very fine old boy, of whom I'm immensely proud, and though I've yet to see the colour of his money, we're quite the best of friends. At any rate, you'll agree that it would be the deuce to pay if I were to fall in love.

"Ffff," breathed Lady Blanchemain, fanning. "What did I say of an age of prose and prudence? Yet you don't _look_ cold-blooded. What does money matter? _Dominus providebit_. Go read Browning. What's 'the true end, sole and single' that we're here for? Besides, have you never heard that there are such things as marriageable heiresses in the world?"

"Oh, yes, I've heard that," John cheerfully assented. "But don't they almost always squint or something? I've heard, too, that there are such things as tufted fortune-hunters, but theirs is a career that requires a special vocation, and I'm afraid I haven't got it."

"Then you're no true Marquis of Carabas," the lady took him smartly up.

"You've found me out--I'm only a _faux-marquis_," he laughed.

"Thrrr!" breathed Lady Blanchemain, and for a little while appeared lost in thought. By-and-by she got up and went to the window, and stood looking out. "I never saw a lovelier landscape," she said, musingly. "With the grey hills, and the snow-peaks, and the brilliant sky, with the golden light and the purple shadows, and the cypresses and olives, with the river gleaming below there amongst the peach-blossoms, and--isn't that a blackcap singing in the mimosa? It only needs a pair of lovers to be perfect--it _cries_ for a pair of lovers. And instead of them, I find--what? A hermit and celibate. Look here. Make a clean breast of it. _Are_ you cold-blooded?" she asked from over her shoulder.

John merely giggled.

"It would serve you right," said she, truculently, "if some one were to rub your eyes with love-in-idleness, to make you dote upon the next live creature that you see."

John merely chuckled.

"I'll tell you what," she proceeded, "I'm a bit of an old witch, and I'll risk a soothword. As there isn't already a woman, there'll shortly be one--my thumbs prick. The stage is set, the scene is too appropriate, the play's inevitable. It was never in the will of Providence that a youth of your complexion should pass the springtime in a spot all teeming with romance like this, and miss a love adventure. A castle in a garden, a flowering valley, and the Italian sky--the Italian sun and moon! Your portraits of these smiling dead women too, if you like, to keep your imagination working. And blackcaps singing in the mimosa. No, no. The lady of the piece is waiting in the wings--my thumbs prick. Give her but the least excuse, she'll enter, and ... Good Heavens, my prophetic soul!" she suddenly, with a sort of catch in her throat, broke off.

She turned and faced him, cheeks flushed, eyes flashing.

"Oh, you hypocrite! You monstrous fibber!" she cried, on a tone of jubilation, looking daggers.

"Why? What's up? What's the matter?" asked John, at fault.

"How _could_ you have humbugged me so?" she wailed, in delight, reverting to the window. "Anyhow, she's charming. She's made for the part. I couldn't pray for a more promising heroine."

"She? Who?" asked he, crossing to her side.

"Who? Fie, you slyboots!" she crowed with glee.

"Ah, I see," said John.

For, below them, in the garden, just beyond the mimosa (all powdered with fresh gold) where the blackcap was singing, stood a woman.

IX

She stood in the path, beside a sun-dial, from which she appeared to be taking the time of day, a crumbling ancient thing of grey stone, green and brown with mosses; and she was smiling pleasantly to herself the while, all unaware of the couple who watched her from above. She wore a light-coloured garden-frock, and was bare-headed, as one belonging to the place. She was young--two or three and twenty, by her aspect: young, slender, of an excellent height, and, I hope you would have agreed, a beautiful countenance. She studied the sun-dial, and smiled; and what with her dark eyes and softly chiselled features, the pale rose in her cheeks and the deeper rose of her mouth, with her hair too, almost black in shadow, but where the sun touched it turning to sombre red,--yes, I think you would have agreed that she was beautiful. Lady Blanchemain, at any rate, found her so.

"She's quite lovely," she declared. "Her face is exquisite--so sensitive, so spiritual; so distinguished, so aristocratic. And so _clever_," she added, after a suspension.

"Mm!" said John, his forehead wrinkled, as if something were puzzling him.

"She has a figure--she holds herself well," said Lady Blanchemain.

"Mm!" said John.

"I suppose," said she, "you're too much a mere man to be able to appreciate her frock? It's the work of a dressmaker who knows her business. And that lilac muslin (that's so fashionable now) really does, in the open air, with the country for background, show to immense advantage. Come--out with it. Tell me all about her. Who _is_ she?"

"That's just what I'm up a tree to think," said John. "I can't imagine. How long has she been there? From what direction did she come?"

"Don't try to hoodwink me any longer," remonstrated the lady, unbelieving.

"I've never in my life set eyes on her before," he solemnly averred.

She scrutinized him sharply.

"Hand on heart?" she doubted.

And he, supporting her scrutiny without flinching, answered, "Hand on heart."

"Well, then," concluded she, with a laugh, "it looks as if I were even more of an old witch than I boasted--and my thumbs pricked to some purpose. Here's the lady of the piece already arrived. There, she's going away. How well she walks! Have after her--have after her quick, and begin your courtship."

The smiling young woman, her lilac dress softly bright in the sun, was moving slowly down the garden path, towards the cloisters; and now she entered them, and disappeared. But John, instead of "having after her," remained at his counsellor's side, and watched.

"She came from that low doorway, beyond there at the right, where the two cypresses are; and she came at the very climax of my vaticination," said her ladyship. "Without a hat, you'll hardly dispute it's probable she's staying in the house."

"No--it certainly would seem so," said John. "I'm all up a tree."

"The garden looks rather dreary and empty, now that she has left, doesn't it?" she asked. "Yet it looked jolly enough before her advent. And see--the lizards (there are four of them, aren't there?) that whisked away from the dial at her approach, have come back. Well, _your_ work's cut out. I suppose it wouldn't be possible for you to give a poor woman a dish of tea?"

"I was on the very point of proposing it," said John. "May I conduct you to my quarters?"

PART SECOND

I

Rather early next morning John was walking among the olives. He had gone (straight from his bed, and in perhaps the least considered of toilets: an old frieze ulster, ornamented with big buttons of mother-of-pearl, a pair of Turkish slippers, a bathing-towel over his shoulder, and for head-covering just his uncombed native thatch) he had gone for a swim, some half a mile upstream, to a place he knew where the Rampio--the madcap Rampio, all shallows and rapids--rests for a moment in a pool, wide and deep, translucent, inviting, and, as you perceive when you have made your plunge, of a most assertive chill. Now he was on his leisurely way home, to the presbytery and what passed there for breakfast.

The hill-side rose from the river's bank in a series of irregular terraces, upheld by rough stone walls. The gnarled old trees bent towards each other and away like dwarfs and crook-backs dancing a fantastic minuet; and in the grass beneath them, where the sun shot his fiery darts and cast his net of shadows, Chloris had scattered innumerable wildflowers: hyacinths, the colour of the sky; violets, that threaded the air for yards about with their sentiment-provoking fragrance; tulips, red and yellow; sometimes a tall, imperial iris; here and there little white nodding companies of jonquils. Here and there, too, the dusty-green reaches were pointed by the dark spire of a cypress, alone, in a kind of glooming isolation; here and there a blossoming peach or almond, gaily pink, sent an inexpressible little thrill of gladness to one's heart. The air was sweetened by many incense-breathing things besides the violets,--by moss and bark, the dew-laden grass, the moist brown earth; and it was quick with music: bees droned, leaves whispered, birds called, sang, gossiped, disputed, and the Rampio played a crystal accompaniment.

John swung onwards at ease, while lizards, with tails that seemed extravagantly long, fled from before his feet, terrible to them, no doubt, as an army with banners, for his Turkish slippers, though not in their pristine youth, were of scarlet leather embroidered in a rich device with gold. And presently (an experience unusual at that hour in the olive wood) he became aware of a human voice.

"Ohé! My good men, there! Will you be so kind as to gather me some of those anemones? Here is a lira for your pains."

It was a feminine voice; it was youthful and melodious; it was finished, polished, delicately modulated. And its inflection was at once confident and gracious,--clearly the speaker took it for granted that she would receive attention, and she implied her thanks abundantly beforehand. It was a voice that evoked in the imagination a charming picture of fresh, young, confident, and gracious womanhood.

"Hello!" said John to himself. "Who is there in this part of the world with a voice like that?"

And he felt it would not be surprising if on glancing round he should behold--as, in fact, he did--the stranger of yesterday, the Unknown of the garden.

II

She stood on one of the higher terraces, (a very charming picture indeed, bright and erect, in the warm shadow of the olives), and was calling down to a couple of peasants at work on the other side of the stream. Between the thumb and forefinger of an ungloved fair right hand, she held up a silver lira.

Anemones, said she! Near to where the men were working, by the river's brink, there was a space of level ground, perhaps a hundred feet long, and tapering from half that breadth to a point. And this was simply crimson and purple with a countless host of anemones.