Chapter 8

"Not an atom," he easily confessed. "The part of spectator seems to me by far the pleasantest. To sit in the stalls and watch the incredible jumble-show, the reason-defying topsy-turvydom of it, the gorgeous, squalid, tearful, and mirthful pageantry, the reckless inconsequences, the flagrant impossibilities; to watch the Devil ramping up and down like a hungry lion, and to hear the young-eyed cherubim choiring from the skies: what better entertainment could the heart of man desire?"

"But are we here merely to be entertained?" she sweetly preached, while John's blue eyes somewhat mischievously laughed, and he felt it hard that he couldn't stop her rose-red mouth with kisses. "Aren't we here to be, as the old-fashioned phrase goes, of use in the world? Besides, now that you are in love, surely you will never sit down weakly, and say, 'I am too poor to marry,' and so give up your love,--like your friend Winthorpe indeed, but for ignoble instead of noble motives. Surely you will set to work with determination, and earn money, and make it possible to marry. Or else your love must be a very poor affair." And her adorable little hands, as they lay ("like white lilies," thought John) upon the pale-green fabric of her gown, unclasped themselves, opened wide for an instant, showing the faint pink of their palms, then lightly again interlaced their fingers.

He laughed. "You are delicious," he said to her fervently, in silence. "My love is all right," he said aloud. "I love her as much as it is humanly possible to love. I love her with passion, with tenderness; with worship, with longing; I love her with wonder; I love her with sighs, with laughter. I love her with all I have and with all I am. And I owe one to Winthorpe for having unwittingly opened my eyes to my condition. But earning money? I've a notion it's difficult. What could I do?"

"Have you no profession?" she asked.

"Not the ghost of one," said he, with nonchalance.

"But is there no profession that appeals to you--for which you feel that you might have a taste?" Her dark eyes were very earnest.

"Not the ghost of one," said he, dissembling his amusement. "Professions--don't they all more or less involve sitting shut up in stuffy offices, among pigeon-holes full of dusty and futile papers, doing tiresome tasks for the greater glory of other people, like a slave in the hold of a galley? No, if I'm to work, I must work at something that will keep me above decks--something that will keep me out of doors, in touch with the air and the earth. I might become an agricultural labourer,--but that's not very munificently paid; or a farmer,--but that would require perhaps more capital than I could command, and anyhow the profits are uncertain. I've an uncle who's a bit of a farmer, and year in, year out, I believe he makes a loss. 'Well, what's left? ... Ah, a gardener. I don't think I should half mind being a gardener."

Maria Dolores looked as if she weren't sure whether or not to take him seriously.

"A gardener? That's not very munificently paid either, is it?" she suggested, trying her ground.

"Alas, I fear not," sighed John. Then he made a grave face. "But would you have me entirely mercenary? Money isn't everything here below."

Maria Dolores smiled. She saw that for the moment at least he was not to be taken seriously.

"True," she agreed, "though it ran in my mind that to earn money, so that you might marry, was your only motive for going to work at all."

"I had forgotten that," said the light-minded fellow. "I was thinking of occupations that would keep one in touch with the earth. A gardener's occupation keeps him constantly in the charmingest possible sort of touch with her, and the most intimate."

"Do they call the earth _her_ in English?" asked Maria Dolores. "I thought they said _it_."

"I'm afraid, for the greater part, they do," answered John. "But it's barbarous of them, it's unfilial. Our brown old mother,--fancy begrudging her the credit of her sex! Our brown and green old mother; our kindly, bounteous mother; our radiant, our queenly mother, old, and yet perennially, radiantly young. Look at her now," he cried, circling the garden with his arm, and pointing to the farther landscape, "look at her, shining in her robes of pearl and gold, shining and smiling,--one would say a bride arrayed for the altar. Such is her infinite variety. Her infinite variety, her infinite abundance, the fragrance and the sweetness of her,--oh, I could fall upon my face and worship her, like a Pagan of Eld. The earth and all that grows and lives upon her, the blossoming tree, the singing bird,--I could build temples to her."

"And the crawling snake?" put in Maria Dolores, a gleam at the bottom of her eyes.

"The crawling snake," quickly retorted John, "serves a most useful purpose. He establishes the _raison d'être_ of man. Man and his heel are here to crush the serpent's head."

Maria Dolores leaned back, softly laughing.

"Your infatuation for the earth is so great," she said, "mightn't your lady-love, if she suspected it, be jealous?"

"No," said John, "it is the earth that might be jealous, for, until I saw my lady-love, she was the undivided mistress of my heart. For the rest, my lady-love enjoys, upon this point, my entire confidence. I have kept nothing from her."

"That is well," approved Maria Dolores. "And the sky and the sea," still softly laughing, she asked, "have they no place in your affections?

"The sky is her tiring-maiden, and I love the sky for that," said John. "'Tis the sky that clothes her in her many-coloured raiment, and holds the light whereby her beauty is made manifest. And the sea is a jewel that she bears upon her bosom,--a magical jewel, whence, with the sky's aid, she draws the soft rain that is her scent and her cosmetic. 'Fragrant the fertile earth after soft showers.' Do you know, I could almost forgive the dour and detestable Milton everything for the sake of those seven words. They show that in the sense of smell he had at least one attribute of humanity."

Maria Dolores' dark eyes were quizzical.

"The dour and detestable Milton?" she exclaimed. "Poor Milton! What has he done to merit such anathema?

"It isn't what he has done, but what he was," said John. "That he was dour nobody will deny, dour and sour and inhuman. Ask those unfortunate, long-suffering daughters of his, if you doubt it. _They_ could tell you stories. But he was worse. He was a scribe and a Pharisee, a pragmatical, self-righteous, canting old scribe and Pharisee. And he was worse still, and still worse yet. He was--what seems to me to-day the worstest thing unhung--he was a Puritan. Like Winthorpe's, his blood was black and icy and vinegarish. Like Winthorpe--But there. I mustn't abuse Winthorpe any more, and I must try to forgive Milton. Milton wrote seven good words, and Winthorpe unwittingly opened a lover's eyes to his condition."

He paused, and smiled down upon her, and his newly opened (and very blue) blue eyes said much. Her eyes were dreaming on the landscape, where it shone in pearl and gold. However, as she gave no sign of finding his conversation wearisome, he took heart, and continued.

"For when he told me how he had put his love away, never again to see her, and how at that moment she would be scrubbing floors (or taking the discipline, perhaps?) in a convent of Ursulines, suddenly, and without any action of the will on my part, there rose before me the vision of a certain woman;--a woman I knew a little, admired immensely, very much liked, but didn't for an instant suppose I was seriously in love with. And involuntarily, with the vision of her before me, I asked myself whether, _mutatis mutandis_, I could have done as he had, and in a flash I saw that I could not,--that not for the wealth of Ormus and of Ind could I or would I give her up, if once I had her. So, by that token, and by the uncommon wrath with which his tale inflamed me," John, with a rhetorical flourish, perorated, "I discovered that I loved." And again his eyes said much.

Hers were still on the prospect.

"Yet if you only know her a little, how can you love her?" she asked, in a musing voice.

"Did I say I only know her a little?" asked John. "I know her a great deal. I know her through and through. I know that she is pure gold, pure crystal; that she is made of all music, all light, all sweetness, and of all shadow and silence and mystery too, as women should be. I know that earth holds naught above her. I do not care to employ superlatives, so, to put it in the form of an understatement, I know that she is simply and absolutely perfect. If you could see her! If you could see her eyes, her deep-glowing, witty, humorous, mischievous, innocent eyes, with the soul that burns in them, the passion that sleeps. If you could see the black soft masses of her hair, and her white brow, and the pale-rose of her cheeks, and the red-rose of her lovely smiling mouth. If you could see her figure, slender and strong, and the grace and pride of her carriage,--the carriage of an imperial princess. If you could see her hands,--they lie in her lap like languid lilies. And her voice,--'tis the colour of her mouth and the glow of her eyes made audible. And if you could whisper to yourself her melodious and thrice adorable name. I know her a great deal. When I said that I only knew her a little, I meant it in the sense that she only knows me a little,--which after all, alas, for practical purposes comes to the same thing."

He had spoken with emphasis, with fervour, his pink face animated and full of intention. Maria Dolores kept her soft-glowing eyes resolutely away from him, but I think the soul that burned in them (if not the passion that slept) was vaguely troubled. _Qui pane d'amour_--how does the French proverb run? Did she vaguely feel perhaps that the seas they were sailing were perilous? Anyhow, as John saw with sinking heart, she was at the point of putting an end to their present conjunction,--she was preparing to rise. He would have given worlds to offer a helping hand, but (however rich in worlds) he was, for the occasion, poor in courage. When love comes in at the door, assurance as like as not will fly out of the window. So she rose unaided.

"Let us hope," she said, giving him a glance in which he perceived an under-gleam as of not unfriendly mockery, "that she will soon come to know you better."

"Heaven forbid!" cried he, with a fine simulation of alarm. "It is upon her ignorance of my true character that I base such faint hopes as I possess of some day winning her esteem."

Maria Dolores laughed, nodded, and lightly moved away.

"My son," said John to himself, "you steered precious close to the wind. You had best be careful."

And then he was conscious of a sudden change in things. The garden smiled about him, the valley below laughed in the breeze, the blackcaps sang, the many windows of the Castle glistened in the sun; but their beauty and their pleasantness had departed, had retired with her into the long, low, white-walled, red-roofed pavilion. He was conscious of a sudden change in things, and of a sudden acute and bitter depression within himself.

"These are great larks," he said; "great larks while they last,--but what's the good of them in the end? What do they lead to? What's the good of coquetting with blisses that can't be yours?" And he breathed a prodigious sigh. "When shall I see her again?" he asked, and thereupon was seized by his old terror--his terror of yesterday, though it seemed to him a terror he had known all his life--lest he should never see her again. "She's only a visitor. What's to prevent her leaving this very night?"

The imagination was intolerable. He entered the Castle court, and climbed the staircase of honour, and rambled through the long suites of great empty rooms, empty of everything save the memory of the past and the portraits of the dead, there, if he might, for a time at least, to lose himself and to forget her.

V

"Who is the young man you have been talking with so long?" asked Frau Brandt, as Maria Dolores came into her sitting-room, a vast, square, bare room, with a marble floor and a painted ceiling, with Venetian blinds to shelter it from the sun, and a bitter-sweet smell, as of rosemary or I know not what other aromatic herb, upon its cool air.

"Oh? You saw us?" said Maria Dolores, answering the question with question.

"Him I have seen many times--every day for a week at least," said Frau Brandt. "But I never before saw you talking with him. Who is he?" She was a small, brown, square-built, black-haired, homely-featured old woman, in a big, round starched white cap and a flowing black silk gown. She sat in an uncushioned oaken armchair by the window, with some white knitting in her bony, blunt-fingered brown hands, and tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles on her nose. But the spectacles couldn't hide the goodness or the soundness or the sweetness that looked forth from her motherly old honest brown eyes.

"He is a young man who lives _en pension_ at the presbytery," said Maria Dolores, "a young Englishman."

"So?" said Frau Brandt. "What is his name?"

"I don't know," said Maria Dolores, with disengagement real or feigned. "His Christian name, I believe, is John."

"But his family name?" persisted Frau Brandt.

"It is probably Brown, Jones, or Robinson," said Maria Dolores. "Or it may even be Black, Smith, or Johnson. Most Englishmen are named one or the other."

"So?" said Frau Brandt. "But is it prudent or seemly for you to talk familiarly with a young man whose name is unknown to you?"

"Why not?" asked Maria Dolores, raising her eyebrows, as if surprised. "He seems a very harmless young man. I don't think he will eat me. And he is English,--and I like English people. And he is intelligent,--his conversation amuses me. And he has nice easy, impetuous manners,--so different from the formality and restraint of Austrian young men. What can his name matter?"

"But"--Frau Brandt looked up impressively over her spectacles, and her voice was charged with gravity, for she was about to ask a question to the Teutonic mind of quite supreme importance--"but is he noble?" It was to her what--nay, more than what--the question, "Is he respectable?" would have been to an Englishwoman.

Maria Dolores laughed.

"Oh, no," she said. "At least I have every reason to believe not, and I devoutly hope not. He belongs I expect to what they call in England the middle class. He has an uncle who is a farmer."

Frau Brandt's good old brown eyes showed her profoundly shocked, and expressed profound reprehension.

"But you were speaking with him familiarly--you were speaking with him almost as an equal," she pronounced in bated accents, in accents of consternation.

Again Maria Dolores laughed.

"True," she assented gaily, "and that is exactly what I couldn't do if he _were_ noble. Then I should have to remember our respective positions. But where the difference of rank is so great, one can talk familiarly without fear. _Ça n'engage à rien_."

Frau Brandt nodded her head, for full half a minute, with many meanings; she nodded it now up and down, and now shook it sidewise.

"I do not like it," she said, at last. "Your brother would not like it. It is not becoming. Well, thanks be to Heaven, he is only English."

"Oh, of course," agreed Maria Dolores, "if he were Austrian, it would be entirely different."

"But is it fair to the young man himself?" pursued Frau Brandt. "Is he aware that he is hobanobbing with a Serene Highness? You treat him as an equal. What if he should fall in love with you?"

"What indeed! But he won't," laughed Maria Dolores, possibly with a mental reservation.

"Who can tell?" said Frau Brandt. "His eyes, when he looked at you, had an expression. But there is a greater danger still. You are both at the dangerous age. He is good-looking. What if your heart should become interested in him?"

"Oh, in that case," answered Maria Dolores, lightly, her chin a little in the air, "I should marry him--if he asked me."

"What!" cried Frau Brandt, half rising from her chair.

"Yes," said Maria Dolores, cheerfully unexcited. "He is a man of breeding and education, even if he isn't noble. If I loved a man, I shouldn't give one thought to his birth. I'm tired of all our Austrian insistence upon birth, upon birth and quarterings and precedencies. If ever I love, I shall love some one just for what he is, for what God has made him, and for nothing else. It wouldn't matter if his father were a cobbler--if I loved him, I'd marry him." Her chin higher in the air, she had every appearance of meaning what she said.

Frau Brandt had sunk back in her chair, and was nodding her white-capped old head again.

"Oh, my child, my child," she grieved. "Will you never rid your fancy of these high-flown, unpractical, romantic whimsies? It all comes of reading poetry." She herself, good woman, read little but her prayers.

"Oh, my dear true Heart," responded Maria Dolores, laughing. She crossed the room, and placed her hand affectionately upon Frau Brandt's shoulder. "My dearest old Nurse! Do not distress yourself. This is not yet a question of actuality. Let us not cry before we are hurt." And she stooped, and kissed her nurse's brown old brow.

But afterwards she stood looking with great pensiveness out of the window, stood so for a long while; and I fancy there was a softer glow than ever in her soft-glowing eyes, and perhaps a livelier rose in her pale-rose cheeks.

"What are you thinking so deeply about?" Frau Brandt asked by-and-by.

Maria Dolores woke with a little start, and turned from the window, and laughed again.

"Oh, thinking about my cobbler's son, of course," she said.

VI

Annunziata, seeking him to announce that supper was ready, found John, seated in his chamber of dead ladies, his arms folded, his legs crossed, his eyes fixed, a frown upon his prone brow; his spirit apparently rapt in a brown study.

"Eh! Prospero!" she called.

Whereat he came to himself glanced up, glanced round, changed his posture, and finally, rising, blew his preoccupations from him in a deep, deep sigh.

"Oh, what a sigh!" marvelled Annunziata, making big eyes. "What are you sighing so hard for?"

John looked at her, and smiled.

"Sighing for my miller's daughter, my dear," he said.

And, as he followed her to the presbytery, he sang softly to himself--

_"It is the miller's daughter, And she is grown so dear, so dear, That I would be the jewel That trembles in her ear."_

PART FIFTH

I

It was Sunday. It was early morning. It was raining,--a fine quiet, determined rain, that blurred the lower reaches of the valley, and entirely hid the mountain-tops, so that one found it hard not to doubt a little whether they were still there. Near at hand the garden was as if a thin web of silver had been cast over it, pale and dim, where wet surfaces reflected the diffused daylight. And just across the Rampio, on the olive-clad hillside that rose abruptly from its brink, rather an interesting process was taking place,--the fabrication of clouds, no less. The hillside, with its rondure of blue-grey foliage, would lie for a moment quite bare and clear; then, at some high point, a mist would begin to form, would appear indeed to issue from the earth, as smoke from a subterranean fire, white smoke with pearly shadows; would thicken and spread out; would draw together and rise in an irregular spiral column, curling, swaying, poising, as if uncertain what to do next; and at last, all at once making up its mind, (how like a younker or a prodigal!), would go sailing away, straggling away, amorphous, on a puff of wind, leaving the hillside clear again;--till, presently, the process would recommence _da capo_.

John and Annunziata, seated together on a marble bench in the shelter of the great cloister, with its faded frescoes, at the north-eastern extremity of the castle buildings, had been watching this element-play for some minutes in silence. But by-and-by Annunziata spoke.

"What makes the cloud come out of the hill like that?" she asked, her eyes anxiously questioning his. "I have seen it happen many times, but I could never understand it. There cannot be a fire underneath?"

"If _you_ can't understand it, Mistress Wisdom," responded John, smiling on her, "you surely mustn't expect a featherpate like me to. Between ourselves, I don't believe any one can really understand it, though there's a variety of the human species called scientists who might pretend they could. It's all a part of that great scheme of miracles by which God's world goes on, Nature, which nobody can really understand in the very least. All that the chaps called scientists can really do is to observe and more or less give names to the miracles. They can't explain 'em."

"It is great pleasure to watch such things," said Annunziata. "It is a great blessing to be allowed to see a miracle performed with your own eyes."

"So it is," agreed John. "And if you keep your eyes well open, there's not a minute of the livelong day when you mayn't see one."

"It is very strange," said Annunziata, "but when the sun shines, then I love the sunny weather, and am glad that it does not rain. Yet when it does rain, then I find that I love the rain too, that I love it just as much as the sun,--it is so fresh, it smells so good, the raindrops are so pretty, and they make such a pretty sound where they fall, and the grey light is so pleasant."

"Our loves," said John, "are always very strange. Love is the rummest miracle of them all. It is even more difficult to account for than the formation of clouds on the hillside."

"We love the things that give us pleasure," said Annunziata.

"And the people, sometimes, who give us pain," said John.

"We love the people, first of all, who are related to us," said Annunziata, "and then the people we see a great deal of--just as I love, first of all, my uncle, and then you and Marcella the cook."

"Who brings in the inevitable veal," said John. "Thank you, Honeymouth." He bowed and laughed, while Annunziata's grave eyes wondered what he was laughing at. "But it isn't every one," he pointed out, "who has your solid and well-balanced little head-piece. It isn't every one who keeps his love so neatly docketed, or so sanely submitted to the sway of reason. Some of us love first of all people who aren't related to us in the remotest degree, and people we've seen hardly anything of and know next to nothing about."

Annunziata deprecatingly shook her head.

"It is foolish to love people we know nothing about," she declared, in her deep voice, and looked a very sage delivering judgment.

"True enough," said John. "But what would you have? Some of us are born to folly, as the sparks fly upward. You see, there's a mighty difference between love and love. There's the love which is affection, there's the love which is cupboard-love, and there's the love which is just simply love-love and nothing else. The first, as you have truly observed, has its roots in consanguinity or association, the second in a lively hope of future comfits, and either is sufficiently explicable. But the third has its roots apparently in mere haphazard and causelessness, and isn't explicable by any means whatsoever, and yet is far and away the violentest of the three. It falls as the lightning from the clouds, and strikes whom it will. Though I mix my metaphors fearlessly, like a man, I trust, with your feminine intuition, you follow me?"

"No," said Annunziata, without compunction, her eyes on the distance. "I don't know what you mean."