Chapter 4

"Scusi," said Annunziata. "I was trying to think of the name of this flower." She stooped and picked up the flower, which had slipped from her lap to the ground when she rose. Then she held it at arm's length, for inspection.

"Oh?" asked the lady, smiling at the flower, as she had smiled at its possessor. "Isn't it a narcissus?"

"Yes," said Annunziata. "It is a narcissus. But I was trying to think of its particular name."

The lady looked as if she did not quite understand. "Its particular name?"

"It is a narcissus," explained Annunziata, "just as I am a girl. But it must also have its particular name, just as I have mine. It is a soul doing its Purgatory--a very good soul. If you are very good, then, when you die, you do your Purgatory as a flower. But it is not such an easy Purgatory--oh, no. For look: the flower is beautiful, but it is blind, and cannot see; and it is fragrant, but it cannot smell; and people admire it and praise it, but it is deaf, and cannot hear. It can only wait, wait, wait, and think of God. But it is a short Purgatory. A few days, and the flower will fade, and the soul will be released. I think this flower's name is Cecilia, it is so white."

The smile in the lady's eyes had brightened, as she listened; and now she gave a little laugh, a little, light, musical, pleased and friendly laugh.

"Yes," she said. "I have sometimes wondered myself whether flowers might not be the Purgatory of very good souls. I am glad to learn from you that it is true. And yes, I should think that this flower's name was sure to be Cecilia. Cecilia suits it perfectly. What, if one may ask, is _your_ particular name?"

"Mariannunziata," said its bearer, not to make two bites of a cherry.

The lady's eyes grew round. "Dear me! A little short name like that?" she marvelled.

"No," returned Annunziata, with dignity. "My name in full is longer. My name in full is Giuliana Falconieri Maria Annunziata Casalone. Is that not long enough?"

"Yes," the lady admitted, "that is just long enough." And she laughed again.

"What is _your_ name?" inquired Annunziata.

"My name is Maria Dolores," the lady answered. "You see, we are both named Maria."

"Of course," said Annunziata. "All Christians should be named Maria."

"So they should," agreed the lady. "Do you ever tell people how old you are?"

"Yes," said Annunziata, "if they wish to know. Why not?"

The smile in the lady's eyes shone brighter than ever. "Do you think you could be persuaded to tell me?"

"With pleasure," said Annunziata. "I am eleven years and five months. And you?"

"I am just twice as old. I am twenty-two years and ten months. So, when you are fifty, how old shall I be?"

"No," said Annunziata, shaking her head. "That trick has been tried with me before. My friend Prospero has tried it with me. You hope I will say that you will be a hundred. But it is not so. When I am fifty, you will be sixty-one, going on sixty-two."

Still again the lady laughed, apparently with great amusement.

"What a little bundle of wisdom you are!" she exclaimed.

"Yes. My friend Prospero also says that I am wise," answered Annunziata. "I like to see you laugh," she mentioned, looking critically at the face above her. "You have beautiful teeth, they are so white and shining, and so small, and your lips are so red."

"Oh," said the lady, laughing more merrily than ever. "Then you must be very entertaining, and I will laugh a great deal."

Still looking critically at the lady's face, "Are you not," demanded Annunziata, "the person who has come to visit the Signora Brandi?"

"Signora Brandi?" The lady considered. "Yes, I suppose I must be. At any rate, I am the person who has come to visit Frau Brandt."

"Frao Branta? We call her Signora Brandi here," said Annunziata. "Are you related to her?"

"No," said the lady, who always seemed inclined to laugh, though Annunziata had no consciousness of being very entertaining. "I am not related to her. I am only her friend."

"She is an Austrian," said Annunziata. "This castle belongs to Austrians. Once upon a time, very long ago, before I was born, all this country belonged to Austrians. Are you, too, an Austrian?"

"Yes." The lady nodded. "I, too, am an Austrian."

"And yet," remarked Annunziata, "you speak Italian just as I do."

"It is very good of you to say so," laughed the lady.

"No--it is the truth," said Annunziata.

"But is it not good to tell the truth?" the lady asked.

"No," said Annunziata. "It is only a duty." And again she shook her head, slowly, darkly, with an effect of philosophic melancholy. "That is very strange and very hard," she pointed out. "If you do not do that which is your duty, it is bad, and you are punished. But if you do do it, that is not good,--it is only what you ought to do, and you are not rewarded." And she fetched her breath in the saddest of sad little sighs. Then, briskly covering her cheerfulness, "And you speak English, besides," she said.

"Oh?" wondered the lady. "Are you a clairvoyante? How do you know that I speak English?"

"My friend Prospero told me so," said Annunziata.

"Your friend Prospero?" the lady repeated. "You quote your friend Prospero very often. Who is your friend Prospero?"

"He is a signore," said Annunziata. "He has seen you, he has seen your form, in the garden and in the olive wood."

"Oh," said the lady.

"And I suppose he must have heard you speak English," Annunziata added. "He lives at the presbytery."

"And where, by-the-by, do _you_ live?" asked the lady.

"I live at the presbytery too," said Annunziata. "I am the niece of the parroco. I am the orphan of his only brother. My friend Prospero lives with us as a boarder. He is English."

"Indeed?" said the lady. "Prospero is a very odd name for an Englishman."

"Prospero is not his name," said Annunziata. "His name is Gian. That is English for Giovanni."

"But why, then," the lady puzzled, "do you call him Prospero?"

"Prospero is a name I have given him," explained Annunziata. "One day I told his fortune. I can tell fortunes--with olive-stones, with playing-cards, or from the lines of the hand. I will tell you yours, if you wish. Well, one day, I told Prospero's, and everything came out so prosperously for him, I have called him Prospero ever since. He will be rich, though he is poor; and he will marry a dark woman, who will also be rich; and they will have many, many children, and live in peace to the end of their lives. But there!" Annunziata cried out suddenly, with excitement, waving the hand that held her narcissus. "There is my friend Prospero now, coming in the gig."

Down the avenue, sure enough, a gig was coming, a sufficiently shabby, ancient gig, drawn, however, at a very decent pace by a very decent-looking horse, and driven by John Blanchemain.

"_Ciao_, Prospero!" called Annunziata, as he passed.

And John took off his hat, a modish Panama, and bowed and smiled to her and to the lady. And one adept in reading the meaning of smiles might have read three or four separate meanings in that smile of his. It seemed to say to Annunziata, "Ah, you rogue! So already you have waylaid her, and made her acquaintance." To the lady: "I congratulate you upon your companion. Isn't she a diverting little monkey?" To himself: "And I congratulate _you_, my dear, upon being clothed and in your right mind, and upon having a proper hat to make your bow with." And to the universe at large "By Jove, she _is_ good-looking. Standing there before that marble bench, in the cool green light, under the great ilexes, with her lilac frock and her white sunshade, and Annunziata all in grey beside her,--what a subject for a painting, if only there were any painters who knew how to paint!"

"He is going to a dinner at Roccadoro," said Annunziata, while John's back grew small and smaller in the distance. "Did you see, he had a portmanteau under the seat? He is going to a dinner of ceremony, and he will have his costume of ceremony in the portmaneau. I wonder what he will bring back with him for me. When he goes to Roccadoro he always brings something back for me. Last time it was a box of chocolate cigars. I should like to see him in his costume of ceremony. Wouldn't you?"

But the lady merely laughed. And then, taking Annunziata's chin in her hand, she looked down into her big clear eyes, and said, "I must be off now, to join Signora Brandi. But I cannot leave without telling you how glad I am to have met you, and what pleasure I have derived from your conversation. I hope we shall meet often. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Signorina," said Annunziata, becoming formally polite again. "I shall always be at your service." And she dropped another courtesy. "If you will come to see me at the presbytery," she hospitably added, "I will show you my tame kid."

"You are all that is most kind," responded the lady, and went off smiling towards the castle.

Annunziata curled herself up in her old corner of the marble bench, and appeared to relapse into profound thought.

V

A curious little intimate inward glow, a sense, somewhere deep down in his consciousness, of elation and well-being, accompanied John all the way to Roccadoro, mingling with and sweetening whatever thoughts or perceptions occupied his immediate attention. This was a "soul-state" that he knew of old, and he had no difficulty in referring it to its cause. It was the glow and the elation which he was fortunate enough always to experience when his eye had been fed with a fresh impression of beauty; and he knew that he owed it to-day to the glimpse he had had, in the cool light under the ilexes, of a slender figure in lilac and a tiny figure in grey, beside a soft-complexioned old marble bench in the midst of a shadowy, sunny, brown and green Italian garden.

The drive to Roccadoro from Sant' Alessina is a pleasant drive. The road follows for the most part the windings of the Rampio, so that you are seldom out of sight of its gleaming waters, and the brawl of it, now louder, now less loud, is perpetually in your ears. To right and left you have the tender pink of blossoming almonds, with sometimes the scarlet flame of a pomegranate; and then the blue-grey hills, mantled in a kind of transparent cloth-of-gold, a gauze of gold, woven of haze and sunshine; and then, rosy white, with pale violet shadows, the snow-peaks, cut like cameos upon the brilliant azure of the sky. And sometimes, of course, you rattle through a village, with its crumbling, stained, and faded yellow-stuccoed houses, its dazzling white canvas awnings, its church and campanile, and its life that seems to pass entirely in the street: men in their shirt sleeves, lounging, smoking, spitting (else the land were not Italy!), or perhaps playing cards at a table under the leafless bush of the wine-shop; women gossiping over their needlework, or, gathered in sociable knots, combing and binding up their sleek black hair; children sprawling in the kindly dirt; the priest, biretta on head, nose in breviary, drifting slowly upon some priestly errand, and "getting through his office;" and the immemorial goatherd, bare-legged, in a tattered sugar-loaf hat, followed by his flock, with their queer anxious faces, blowing upon his Pan's-pipes (shrill strains, in minor mode and plagal scale, a music older than Theocritus), or stopping, jealously watched by the customer's avid Italian eyes, to milk "_per due centesimi_"--say, a farthing's worth--into an outstretched, close-clutched jug. Sometimes the almond orchards give place to vineyards, or to maize fields, or to dusky groves of walnut, or to plantations of scrubby oak where lean black pigs forage for the delectable acorn. Sometimes the valley narrows to a ravine, and signs of cultivation disappear, and the voice of the Rampio swells to a roar, and you become aware, between the hills that rise gloomy and almost sheer beside you, of a great solitude: a solitude that is intensified rather than diminished by the sight of some lonely--infinitely lonely--grange, perched far aloft, at a height that seems out of reach of the world. What possible manner of human beings, you wonder, can inhabit there, and what possible dreary manner of existence can they lead? But even in the most solitary places you are welcomed and sped on by a chorus of bird-songs. The hillsides resound with bird-songs continuously for the whole seven miles,--and continuously, at this season, for the whole four-and-twenty hours. Blackbirds, thrushes, blackcaps, goldfinches, chaffinches, sing from the first peep of dawn till the last trace of daylight has died out, and then the nightingales begin and keep it up till dawn again. And everywhere the soft air is aromatic with a faint scent of rosemary, for rosemary grows everywhere under the trees. And everywhere you have the purity and brilliancy and yet restraint of colour, and the crisp economy of line, which give the Italian landscape its look of having been designed by a conscious artist.

In and through his enjoyment of all these pleasantnesses, John felt that agreeable glow which he owed to his glimpse of the woman in the garden; and when at last he reached the Hotel Victoria, and, having dressed, found himself alone for a few moments with Lady Blanchemain, in the dim and cool sitting-room where she awaited her guests, he hastened to let her know that he shared her own opinion of the woman's charms.

"Your beauty decidedly _is_ a beauty," he declared. "I wish you could have seen her as I saw her an hour ago, with a white sunshade, against a background of ilexes. It's a thousand pities that painting should be a forgotten art."

But Lady Blanchemain (magnificent in purple velvet, with diamonds round her throat and in her hair) didn't seem interested.

"Do you know," she said, "I made yesterday one of the most ridiculous blunders of my life. It's been preying upon my mind ever since. I generally have pretty trustworthy perceptions, and perhaps this is a symptom of failing powers. I told myself positively that you were an Eton and Balliol man. It never occurred to me till I was halfway home that, as a Papist, you'd be nothing of the sort."

"No," said John; "I'm afraid I'm Edgbaston and Paris. The way her hair grows low about her brow, and swoops upwards and backwards in a sort of tidal wave, and breaks loose in little curling tendrils,--it's absolutely lyrical. And the smile at the bottom of her eyes is exactly like silent music. And her mouth is a couplet in praise of love, with two red lips for rhymes. And her chin is a perfect epithalamium of a chin. And then her figure! And then her lilac frock! Oh, it's a thousand, thousand pities that painting should he a forgotten art."

"What, the same lilac frock?" said Lady Blanchemain, absently. "Yet you certainly have the Eton voice," she mused. "And if I don't pay you the doubtful compliment of saying that you have the Balliol manner, you have at least a kind of subtilized reminiscence of it."

"I must keep a guard upon myself," said John. "She's visiting an Austrian woman who lives in a remote wing of the castle,--the pavilion beyond the clock, in fact,--an Austrian woman of the exhilarating name of Brandi."

"I'm rather in luck for my dinner to-night," said Lady Blanchemain. "I've got Agnes Scope, the niece of the Duke of Wexmouth. She arrived here this morning with her aunt, Lady Louisa. Of course I'm putting you next to her. As, besides being an extremely nice girl and an heiress, she's an ardent pervert to Romanism,--well, a word to the wise."

"Yes, I know her," said John. "We don't get on a bit. She moves on far too high a plane for a groundling like me. She's intellectual and earnest, and my ignorance and light-mindedness wound her to the quick. She'll end, as I've told her to her face, by writing books,--serious novels, probably,--which she'll illuminate with beautiful irrelevant quotations from Browning and Cardinal Newman."

"Bother," said Lady Blanchemain. "You're perverse."

"Besides," said John, "she's engaged."

"Engaged--?" faltered Lady Blanchemain.

"Yes--to an intellectual and earnest man, named Blake--Bernard Blake--a grandson of the famous Blake of Cambridge."

Lady Blanchemain fixed him with darkening eyes.

"Are you sure?" she pleaded.

"I saw it officially stated in the _Morning Post_," was John's relentless answer.

"What a nuisance," said Lady Blanchemain, fanning. Her fan was of amber tortoise-shell, with white ostrich feathers, and the end sticks bore her cypher and coronet in gold.

"What a jolly fan," said John.

"Well, well," said Lady Blanchemain, reconciling herself. Then, after an instant of pensiveness, "So you're already laid low by her beauty. But you haven't found out yet who she is?"

"Who who is?" said John, looking all at sea.

"Tut. Don't tease. Your woman at the castle."

"My woman at the castle appeared to leave you cold," he complained. "I arrived full of her, and you wouldn't listen."

"So you're already in love with her?" said Lady Blanchemain.

"No--not yet," said he. "As yet I merely recognize in her admirable material for a painting, and regret that such material should go begging for the lack of a painter. But by this time to-morrow--who can tell?"

"Have you found out who she is?" asked Lady Blanchemain.

"No--not yet," said he. "As yet I've merely found out that she's visiting an Austrian Signora Brandi, who lives (I can't think why) in the pavilion beyond the clock. But by this time to-morrow!" His gesture spoke volumes of prospective information.

"She looked like a gentlewoman," reflected his friend.

"For all the world," said he.

"Yet, if she's an Austrian--" She paused and pondered.

"Why? What's the difficulty?" said he.

"To know whether she is _born_," said Lady Blanchemain. "Among Austrians, unless you're born, you're impossible, you're nowhere. Brandi doesn't sound born, does it? We mustn't let you become enamoured of her if she isn't born."

"Brandi sounds tremendously _un_born," assented John. "And if like visits like, Signora Brandi's visitor will probably be unborn too. But to me that would rather add an attraction,--provided she's _bred_. I'm not an Austrian. I'm a Briton and a democrat. I feel it is my destiny, if ever I am to become enamoured at all, to become enamoured of the daughter of a miller,--of a rising miller, who has given his daughter advantages. 'Brèd, not Born: or the Lady of the Mill'--that shall be the title of my humble heart-history. If this woman could prove to me that she was the daughter of a miller, I'm not sure I shouldn't become enamoured of her on the spot. Well, I shall know to-morrow. By this time to-morrow I shall possess her entire _dossier_. It may interest you to learn that I am employing a detective to investigate her."

"A detective? What do you mean?" said Lady Blanchemain.

"A private detective, a female detective, whom, the next time you come to Sant' Alessina, I'll introduce to you," said John.

"What on earth do you mean?" said Lady Blanchemain.

"The most amusing, the most adorable little detective unhung," said he. "People are all love and laughter whenever they look at her. She'll worm its inmost secrets from my sphinx's heart."

"What pleasure can you take in practising upon a poor old woman who only by a sort of fluke isn't your grandmother?" said she.

"Lady Louisa FitzStephen, Miss Scope," said her servant, opening the door.

VI

The nightingales sang him home, and the moon lighted him, the liquid moon of April and Italy. As he approached the castle, through the purple and silver garden, amid the mysterious sweet odours of the night, he glanced up vaguely at the pavilion beyond the clock. He glanced up vaguely, but next second he was no longer vague.

There, on a low-hung balcony, not ten feet above him, full in the moonlight, stood a figure in white--all in white, with a scarf of white lace thrown over her dark hair. The nightingales sang and sobbed, the moon rained its amethystine fire upon the earth, the earth gave forth its mysterious sweet night odours, and she stood there motionless, and breathed and gazed and listened.

But at the sound of wheels in the avenue, she turned slightly, and looked down. Her face was fair and delicate and pure in the moonlight, and her eyes shone darkly bright.

She turned, and looked down, and her eyes met John's.

"Given the hour and the place, I wonder whether I ought to bow," he thought.

Before he could make up his mind, however, his hand had automatically raised his hat.

She inclined her head in acknowledgment, and something softly changed in her face.

"She smiled!" he said, and caught his breath, with a kind of astonished exultancy.

That soft change in her face came and went and came again through all his dreams.

PART THIRD

I

"Good morning, Prospero," said Annunziata.

"Good morning, Wide-awake," responded John.

He was in the octagonal room on the _piano nobile_ of the castle, where his lost ladies of old years smiled on him from their frames. He had heard an approaching patter of feet on the pavement of the room beyond; and then Annunziata's little grey figure, white face, and big grave eyes, had appeared, one picture the more, in the vast carved and gilded doorway.

"I have been looking everywhere for you," she said, plaintive.

"Poor sweetheart," he commiserated her. "And can't you find me?"

"I couldn't," said Annunziata, bearing on the tense. "But I have found you _now_."

"Oh? Have you? Where?" asked he.

"_Where?_" cried she, with a disdainful movement. "But _here_, of course."

"I wouldn't be too cocksure of that," he cautioned her. "_Here_ is a mighty evasive bird. For, suppose we were elsewhere, then _there_ would be here, and here would be somewhere else."

"No," said Annunziata, with resolution. "Where a person is, that is always _here_."

"You speak as if a person carried his here with him, like his hat," said John.

"Yes, that is how it is," said Annunziata, nodding.

"You have a remarkably solid little head,--for all its curls, there's no confusing it," said he. "Well, have you your report, drawn up, signed, sealed, sworn to before a Commissioner for Oaths, and ready to be delivered?"

"My report--?" questioned Annunziata, with a glance.

"About the Form," said John. "I caught you yesterday red-handed in the fact of pumping it."

"Yes," said Annunziata. "Her name is Maria Dolores."

"A most becoming name," said he.

"She is very nice," said Annunziata.

"She looks very nice," said he.

"She is twenty-two years and ten months old," continued his informant.

"Fancy. As middle-aged as that," commented he.

"Yes. She is an Austrian."

"Ah."

"And as I told you, she is visiting the Signora Brandi. Only, she calls her Frao Branta."

"Frao Branta?" John turned the name on his tongue. "Branta? Branta?" What familiar German name, at the back of his memory, did it half evoke? Suddenly he had a flash. "Can you possibly mean Frau Brandt?"

Annunziata gave a gesture of affirmation.

"Yes, that is it," she said. "You sound it just as she did!"

"I see," said John. "And Brandt, if there are degrees of unbirth, is even more furiously unborn than Brandi."

"Unborn--?" said Annunziata, frowning.

"Not noble--not of the aristocracy," John explained.

"Very few people are noble," said Annunziata.

"All the more reason, then, why you and I should be thankful that we are," said he.

"You and I?" she expostulated, with a shrug of her little grey shoulders. "_Machè!_ We are not noble."

"Aren't we? How do you know?" asked John. "Anyhow," he impressively moralized, "we can try to be."

"No," said she, with conclusiveness, with fatalism. "It is no good trying. Either you are noble or simple,--God makes you so,--you cannot help it. If I were noble, I should be a contessina. If you were noble, you would be a gransignore.

"And my unassuming appearance assures you that I'm not?" said he, smiling.

"If you were a gransignore," she instructed him, "you would never be such friends with me--you would be too proud."