Chapter 9

"Thank Heaven you don't, pray Heaven you never may," said her inconsequential friend. "For love-love is a plague. You meet a person, for example, in a garden. You know nothing whatever about her, not even her name, though you fear it may be Schmidt. You meet her not more than half a dozen times all told. And suddenly one morning you wake up to discover that she has become to you the person of first importance in the world. She is practically a total stranger to you, she's of a different nationality, a different rank, yet she's infinitely the most precious and important person in the world. When you're absent from her you can do nothing but think of her, gloating with throes of aromatic pain over the memory of your last meeting with her, longing with soul-hunger for your next. The merest flutter of her gown, modulation of her voice, glance of her eye, will throw your heart into a palpitation. You look in the direction of the house that she inhabits, and you feel the emotions of a Peri looking at the gate of Eden. And it gives you the strangest sort of strange joy to talk about her, though of course you take pains to talk about her in veiled terms, obliquely, so that your listener shan't guess _whom_ you are talking about. In short, she is the be-all and the end-all of your existence,--and you don't even know her name, though you fear it may be Schmidt."

He lolled back at ease on the marble bench, and twirled his yellow-red moustaches, fancy free.

"But you do know her name," said Annunziata, simply, in her deepest voice, holding him with a gaze, lucent and serious, that seemed almost reproachful. "Her name is Maria Dolores."

The thing was tolerably unexpected. What wonder if it put my hero out of countenance? His attitude grew rigid, his pink skin three shades pinker; his blue eyes stared at her, startled. So for a second; then he relaxed, and laughed, laughed long and heartily, perhaps a little despitefully too, at his own expense. ... But he must try, if he might, to repair the mischief.

"My poor child," he said, resting his hand on her curls, and gently smoothing them. "You are what the French call an _enfant terrible_. You are what the English call a deuced sharp little pickle. And I must try, if I can, without actually lying, to persuade you that you are utterly mistaken, utterly and absolutely mistaken,"--he raised his voice, for greater convincingness,--"and that her name is nothing distantly resembling the name that you have spoken, and that in fact her name is Mrs. Harris, and that in fine there is no such person, and that I was merely talking hypothetically, in abstractions; I must draw a herring across the trail, I must raise a dust, and throw a lot of it into your amazingly clear-sighted little eyes. Now, is it definitely impressed upon you that her name is _not_--the thrice-adorable name you mentioned?"

"I thought it was," answered Annunziata. "I am sorry it is not." And then she dismissed the subject. "See, it is raining harder. See how the rain comes down in long strings of beads,--see how it is like a network of long strings of glass beads falling through the air. When the rain comes down like that, it means that after the rain stops it will be very hot. To-morrow it will be very hot."

The bell in the clock-tower tolled out seven solemn strokes; then the lighter-toned and nimbler-tongued bell of the church began to ring.

"Come," peremptorily said Annunziata, jumping up. "Mass."

She held out her hand, took John's, and, like a mother, led the meek and unquestioning young man to his duties.

II

Of course there are no such heretical inventions as pews in the parish church of Sant' Alessina. You sit upon orthodox rush-bottomed chairs, you kneel upon orthodox bare stones. But at the Epistle side of the altar, at an elevation of perhaps a yard from the pavement, there is a recess in the wall, enclosed by a marble balustrade, and hung with faded red curtains, which looks, I'm afraid, a good deal like a private box at a theatre, and is in fact the tribune reserved for the masters of the Castle. (In former days those masters were the Sforzas. So, from this tribune, the members of that race of iron and blood, of fierceness and of guile, have assisted at the mystical sacrifice of the Lamb of God!) Heretofore, during John's residence at the presbytery, the tribune had stood vacant. To-day it was occupied by Maria Dolores and Frau Brandt. Maria Dolores, instead of wearing a hat, had adopted the ancient and beautiful use of draping a long veil of black lace over her dark hair.

John knelt in the middle of the church, in the thick of the ragged, dirty, unsavoury villagers. When Mass was over, he returned to the cloisters, and there, face to face, he met the lady of his dreams.

She graciously inclined her head.

"Good morning," she said, smiling, in a voice that seemed to him full of morning freshness.

"Good morning," he responded, wondering whether she could hear the tremor of his heart. "Though, in honest truth, it's rather a bad morning, isn't it?" he submitted, posing his head at an angle, dubious and reflective, that seemed to raise the question to a level of philosophic import.

"Oh, with these cloisters, one shouldn't complain," said she, glancing indicatively round. "One can still be out of doors, and yet not get the wetting one deserves. And the view is so fine, and these faded old frescoes are so droll."

"Yes," said he, his wits, for the instant, in a state of suspended animation. "The view is fine, the frescoes are droll."

She looked as if she were thinking about something.

"Don't you find it," she asked, after a moment, with the slightest bepuzzled drawing together of her eyebrows, "a trifle unpleasant, hearing Mass from where you do?"

John looked blank.

"Unpleasant? No. Why?" he asked.

"I should think it might be disagreeable to be hemmed in and elbowed by those extraordinarily ragged and dirty people," she explained. "It's a pity they shouldn't clean themselves up a little before coming to church."

"Ah, yes," he assented, "a little cleaning up wouldn't hurt them; that's very certain. But," he set forth, in extenuation, "it's not the custom of the country, and the fact that it isn't has its good significance, as well as its bad. It's one of the many signs of how genuinely democratic and popular the Church is in Italy,--as it ought to be everywhere. It is here essentially the Church of the people, the Church of the poor. It is the one place where the poorest man, in all his rags, and with the soil of his work upon him, feels perfectly at ease, perfectly at home, perfectly equal to the richest. It is the one place where a reeking market-woman, with her basket on her arm, will feel at liberty to take her place beside the great lady, in her furs and velvets, and even to ask her, with a nudge, to move up and make room. That is as it should be, isn't it?"

"No doubt, no doubt," agreed Maria Dolores, beginning to pace backwards and forwards over the lichen-stained marble pavement, (stained as by the hand of an artist, in wavy veins of yellow or pale-green, with here and there little rosettes of scarlet), while John kept beside her. "All the same, I should not like to kneel quite in the very heart of the crowd, as you do."

"You are a delicate and sensitive woman," he reminded her. "I am a man, and a moderately tough one. However, I must admit that until rather recently I had exactly your feeling. But I got a lesson." He broke off and gave a vague little laugh, vaguely rueful, as at a not altogether pleasant reminiscence.

"What was the lesson?" she asked.

"Well," said he, "if you care to know, it was this. The first time that I attended Mass here, desiring to avoid the people, I sought out a far corner of the church, behind a pillar, where there was no one. But as soon as I had got myself well established there, up hobbled a deformed and lame old man, and plumped himself down beside me, so close that our coat-sleeves touched. I think he was the most repulsive-looking old man I have ever seen; he was certainly the dirtiest, the grimiest, and his rags were extravagantly foul. I will spare you a more circumstantial portrait. And all through Mass I was sick with disgust and sore with resentment. Why should he come and rub his coat-sleeve against mine, when there was room in plenty for him elsewhere? The next time I went to church, I chose a different corner, as remote as might be from my former one; but again, no sooner was I well installed, than, lo and behold, the same unspeakable old man limped up and knelt with me, cheek by jowl. And so, if you can believe it, the next time, and so the next. It didn't matter where I placed myself, there he was sure to place himself too. You will suppose that, apart from my annoyance, I was vastly perplexed. Why should he pursue me so? Who was he? What was he after? And for enlightenment I addressed myself to Annunziata. 'Who is the hideous old man who always kneels beside me?' I asked her. She had not noticed any one kneeling beside me, she said; she had noticed, on the contrary, that I always knelt alone, at a distance. 'Well,' said I, 'keep your eyes open to-day, and you will see the man I mean.' So we went to Mass, and sure enough, no sooner had I found a secluded place, than my old friend appeared and joined me, dirtier and more hideous and if possible more deformed than ever.

"Yes?" said Maria Dolores, with interest, as he paused.

"When we came out of church, I asked Annunziata who he was," continued John. "And she said that though she had kept her eyes open, according to my injunction, she had failed to see any one kneeling beside me--that, on the contrary, she had seen me," he concluded, with an insouciance that was plainly assumed for its dramatic value, "kneeling alone, at a distance from every one."

Maria Dolores' face was white. She frowned her mystification.

"What!" she exclaimed, in a half-frightened voice.

"That is precisely the ejaculation that fell from my own lips at the time," said John. "Then I gave her a minute description of the old man, in all his ugliness. And then she administered my lesson to me."

"Yes? What was it?" questioned Maria Dolores, her interest acute.

"Speaking in that oracular vein of hers, her eyes very big, her face very grave, she assured me that my horrible old man had no objective existence. She informed me cheerfully and calmly that he was an image of my own soul, as it appeared, corrupted and aged and deformed by the sins of a lifetime, to God and to the Saints. And she added that he was sent to punish me for my pride in thinking myself different to the common people, and in seeking to hold myself aloof. Since then," John brought his anecdote to a term, "I have always knelt in the body of the church, and I have never again seen my Doppelgänger."

Maria Dolores was silent for a little. They had come to the southern end of the cloisters, where the buttresses of the Castle walls, all shaggy-mantled in a green overgrowth of creepers, fall precipitously away, down the steep face of a natural cliff. They stopped here, and stood looking off. The rain had held up, though the valley was still misty with its vapours. Whiffs of velvety air, warm and sweet, blew in their faces, lightly stirred the dark hair about her brow, and, catching the flowery edge of her black lace mantilla, set it fluttering.

"That is a very good story," she said, by-and-by, with a sober glance, behind which there was the glint of laughter. "In view of it, however, I suppose there will be no use in my delivering a message I am charged with for you from my friend Frau Brandt."

"Oh?" questioned John. "What message?"

"Frau Brandt has received from the owner of the Castle the privilege of hearing Mass from the tribune; and she wished me to invite you in her name hereafter to hear Mass from there with us. But I suppose, in view of your 'lesson,' that is an invitation which you will decline?" The glint of laughter shone brighter in her eyes, and her mouth had a tiny pucker, amiably derisive.

John looked at her, his blue eyes bold.

"That is an invitation which I am terribly tempted to accept," he said, in a voice of unconcealed emotion, of patent meaning; and beneath his bold gaze, her dark eyes dropped, while I think a blush faintly swept her cheeks. "And first of all," he added, "pray express to Frau Brandt my grateful thanks for it--and let me thank you also for your kindness in conveying it. If, in spite of my temptation, I _don't_ accept it, that will be for a very special reason, and one quite unconnected with my 'lesson.'"

Maria Dolores probably knew her danger. She turned, and began to walk backwards, towards the point where you can pass from the cloisters, through the great porte-cochère, into the garden, and so on to the pavilion beyond the clock. She probably knew her danger; but she was human, but she was a woman. Besides, she had reached the porte-cochère, and thus commanded a clear means of escape. So, coming to a standstill here, "What is the very special reason?" she asked, in a low voice, keeping her eyes from his.

His were bolder than ever. Infinite admiration of her burned in them, infinite delight in her, desire for her; at the same time a kind of angry hopelessness darkened them, and a kind of bitter amusement, as of one amused at his own sad plight.

"I wish I were rich," he exclaimed, irritably, between his teeth.

"Oh? Is _that_ the very special reason?" asked she, with two notes of laughter.

"No," said he, "but it has a connection with it. You see, I'm in love."

"Yes," said she. "I remember your telling me so."

"Well, I wish I were rich," said he. "Then I might pluck up courage to ask the woman I love to be my wife."

"Money isn't everything here below," said she. "I have your own word for that."

"What else counts," said he, "when you wish to ask a woman to marry you?"

"Oh, many things," said she. "Difference of rank, for example."

"That wouldn't count with me," said the democratic fellow, handsomely. "I shouldn't give two thoughts to differences of rank."

Maria Dolores smiled--at her secret reflections, I suppose.

"But poverty puts it out of all question," John moodily went on. "I couldn't ask a woman to come and share with me an income of sixpence a week. Especially as I have grounds for believing that she's in rather affluent circumstances herself. Oh, I wish I were rich!" He repeated this aspiration in a groan.

"Poor, poor young man!" she commiserated him, while her eyes, which she held perseveringly averted, were soft with sympathy and gay with mirth. "When do you begin your gardening?"

"Oh, don't mock me!" he cried, with an imploring gesture. "You know, joking apart, that it's child's play for a man of my age, with no profession and no special talent, to fancy he can turn to and earn money. I might, if I made supernatural exertions, and if Fortune went out of her way to favour me, add a maximum of another sixpence to my weekly budget. No, there's never a hope for me on sea or land. I must e'en bear it, though I cannot grin withal."

"Ah, well," said Maria Dolores, to comfort him, "these attacks, I have read, are often as short as they are sharp. Let us trust you'll soon rally from this one. How long have they generally lasted in the past?"

John's face grew dark with upbraiding; the sea-blue of his eyes, the gold of his hair and beard, the pink of his complexion visibly grew dark.

"You are so needlessly unkind," he said, "that you don't deserve to hear the true answer to your question."

She studied the half-obliterated fresco on the wall beside her.

"All the same," said he, "you _shall_ hear it. If falling in love were my habit, no doubt I shouldn't take it so hard. But the simple truth, though I am thirty years old, is that I have never before felt so much as a heart-flutter for any woman. And, since you cite your reading, _I_ have read that a fire which may merely singe the surface of green wood, will entirely consume the dry."

She continued to study the ancient painting. Her fingers were playing with the ends of her lace veil.

"Besides," he went on, "if I had been in love a dozen times, it wouldn't signify. For I should have been in love with ordinary usual human women. They're the only sort I ever met--till I met her. She's of a totally different order--as distinct from them as ... What shall I say? Oh, as unlike them as starfire is unlike dull clay. Starfire--starfire--the wonderful, high, white-burning starfire of her spirit, that's the thing that strikes you most in her. It shines through her. It shines in her eyes, it shines in her hair, her adorable, soft, dark, warm and fragrant hair; it shines in her very voice; it shines in every word she utters, even in the unkindest."

"Dear me! what an alarmingly refulgent person you depict!" laughed Maria Dolores, her eyes still on the wall.

"I have no gift for word-painting," said John; "though I doubt if the words are yet invented that could fitly paint my lady. She grows in beauty day by day. It's a literal fact--every fresh time I see her, she is perceptibly more lovely than the last, more love-compelling in her loveliness. But 'tis a thing unpaintable, indescribable, as indescribable as the perfume of a rose. Oh, why haven't I five thousand a year?"

"You harp so persistently upon your desire for money," suggested Maria Dolores, "one might infer she was a commodity, to be bought and sold. You begin at the wrong end. What good would five or fifty thousand a year do you, if you had not begun by winning her love?

"No, I begin at the proper end, worse luck," John answered, glooming. "For, without a decent income, I have no right even to try to win her love.

"And that being so," questioned Maria Dolores, "I hope you conscientiously avoid her society, or, when you meet, make yourself consistently disagreeable to her?

"There's no need for such precautions," John replied. "There's no fear for her. She regards me as a casual and passing acquaintance. So I make myself no more disagreeable than I am by nature. And if I avoided her society, (which I am far from doing), it would be not for her sake, but for my own. For, though her society is to me a kind of anticipation of the joys of Heaven, yet when I leave it and find myself alone, the reaction is dreary in the superlative degree; and the fear, which perpetually haunts me (for I know nothing of her plans), lest I shall never see her again, is agonizing as a foretaste of--Heaven's antipode. Oh, I love her!"

He took, involuntarily I dare say, a step in her direction. She retreated under the vaulting of the _porte-cochère_.

"You seem," she commented, "to be getting a good deal of emotional experience,--which doubtless some day you will find of value. Why not, instead of gardener, embark as novelist or poet? Here is material you could then turn to account."

"Ah, there you are," he complained, piteously, "mocking me again. Ah, well, if you must have your laugh, have it, and welcome. A man can learn to take the bitter with the sweet."

"To spare you that discomfort," said she, moving deeper into the archway, while John's face fell, "I will bid you good-bye. I am to report, then, that you decline my friend's invitation with thanks?"

"With my most grateful thanks," he was able intensively to rejoin, in spite of his dismay at the imminence of her departure.

"And for a very special reason?" she harked back, now, suddenly, for the first time since they had touched thin ice, giving him a glance.

It was the fleetingest of fleeting glances, it was merry and ironic, but there was something in it which brought a flame to his blue eyes.

"For the very special reason," he answered, with vehemence, "that I fear the presence near me of--" He held his breath for a second, the flame in his eyes enveloping her; then, with an abrupt change of tone and mien, he ended, "--of Frau Brandt might distract my attention from the sermon."

She laughed, and said, "Good-bye."

"Good-bye," said John. And when she was halfway through the tunnel-like passage, "I suppose you know you are leaving me to a day as barren as the Desert of Sahara?" he called after her.

"Oh, who can tell what a day may bring forth?" called she, but without looking back.

For a long while John's faculties were kept busy, trying to determine whether that was a promise, a menace, or a mere word in the air.

III

"Rain before seven, clear before eleven," is as true, or as untrue, in Lombardy as it is in other parts of the world. The rain had held up, and now, in that spirited phrase of Corvo's, "here came my lord the Sun," splendidly putting the clouds to flight, or chaining them, transfigured, to his chariot-wheels; clothing the high snow-peaks in a roseate glory, (that seemed somehow, I don't know why, to accent their solitude and their remoteness); flooding the valley with ethereal amber; turning the swollen Rampio to a river of fire while the nearer hillsides, the olive woods, the trees in the Castle garden, glistened with a million million crystals, and the petals of the flowers were crystal-tipped; while the breath of the earth rose in long streamers of luminous incense, and the sky gleamed with every tender, every brilliant, tint of blue, from the blue of pale forgetmenots to the blue of larkspur.

John, contemplating this spectacle, (and thinking of Maria Dolores? revolving still her cryptic valediction?), all at once, as his eye rested on the shimmer at the valley's end which he knew to be the lake, lifted up his hand and clapped his brow. "By Jove," he muttered, "if I wasn't within an ace of clean forgetting!" The sight of the lake had fortunately put him in mind that he was engaged to-day to lunch with Lady Blanchemain at Roccadoro.

He found her ladyship, in a frock all concentric whirls of crisp white ruffles, vigorously wielding a fan, and complaining of the heat. (Indeed, as Annunziata had predicted, it had grown markedly warmer.) "I shall fly away, if this continues; I shall fly straight to town, and set my house in order for the season. When do _you_ come?" she asked, smiling on him from her benign old eyes.

"I don't come," answered John. "I rather like town in autumn and winter, when it's too dark to see its ugliness, but save me from it in the clear light of summer."

"Fudge," said Lady Blanchemain. "London's the most beautiful capital in Europe--it's grandiose. And it's the only place where there are any people.

"Yes," said John, "but, as at Nice and Homburg, too many of them are English. And there's a liberal scattering, I've heard, of Jews?"

"Oh, Jews are all right--when they aren't Jewy," said Lady Blanchemain, with magnanimity. "I know some very nice ones. I was rather hoping you would be a feature of my Sunday afternoons."

"I'm not a society man," said John. "I've no aptitude myself for patronizing or toadying, and I don't particularly enjoy being patronized or toadied to."

"Is that the beginning and end of social life in England?" Lady Blanchemain inquired, delicately sarcastic.

"As I have seen it, yes," asseverated John. "The beginning, end, and middle of social life in England, as in Crim-Tartary, is worship of the longest pigtail,--a fetichism sometimes grosser, sometimes subtler, sometimes deliberate, often unconscious and instinctive. Every one you meet is aware that his pigtail is either longer or shorter than yours, and accordingly, more or less subtly, grossly, unconsciously or deliberately, swaggers or bends the knee. It's a state of things I've tried in vain to find diverting."

"It's a state of things you'll find prevailing pretty well in all places where the human species breeds," said Lady Blanchemain. "The only difference will be a question of what constitutes the pigtail. And are you, then, remaining at Sant' Alessina?"

"For the present," answered John.

"Until--?" she questioned.