Chapter 8

“The poor man thought it so, to be sure,” said Peter; “he fretted and fumed a good deal, and kicked against the pricks. Here, there, now, anon, he would enjoy his brief little vision of her--then she would vanish into the deep inane. So, in the end--he had to take it out in something--he took it out in writing a book about her. He propped up a mental portrait of her on his desk before him, and translated it into the character of Pauline. In that way he was able to spend long delightful hours alone with her every day, in a kind of metaphysical intimacy. He had never heard her voice--but now he heard it as often as Pauline opened her lips. He owned her--he possessed her--she lived under his roof--she was always waiting for him in his study. She is real to you? She was inexpressibly, miraculously real to him. He saw her, knew her, felt her, realised her, in every detail of her mind, her soul, her person--down to the very intonations of her speech--down to the veins in her hands, the rings on her fingers--down to her very furs and laces, the frou-frou of her skirts, the scent upon her pocket-handkerchief. He had numbered the hairs of her head, almost.”

Again the Duchessa mused for a while in silence, opening and shutting her fan, and gazing into its opals.

“I am thinking of it from the woman's point of view,” she said, by and by. “To have played such a part in a man's life--and never to have dreamed it! Never even, very likely, to have dreamed that such a man existed--for it's entirely possible she didn't notice him, on those occasions when he saw her. And to have been the subject of such a novel--and never to have dreamed that, either! To have read the novel perhaps--without dreaming for an instant that there was any sort of connection between Pauline and herself! Or else--what would almost be stranger still--not to have read the novel, not to have heard of it! To have inspired such a book, such a beautiful book--yet to remain in sheer unconscious ignorance that there was such a book! Oh, I think it is even more extraordinary from the woman's point of view than from the man's. There is something almost terrifying about it. To have had such an influence on the destiny of someone you've never heard of! There's a kind of intangible sense of a responsibility.”

“There is also, perhaps,” laughed Peter, “a kind of intangible sense of a liberty taken. I'm bound to say I think Wildmay was decidedly at his ease. To appropriate in that cool fashion the personality of a total stranger! But artists are the most unprincipled folk unhung. Ils prennent leur bien la, ou ils le trouvent.”

“Oh, no,” said the Duchessa, “I think she was fair game. One can carry delicacy too far. He was entitled to the benefits of his discovery--for, after all, it was a discovery, was n't it? You have said yourself how indispensable the eye of the beholder is--'the seeing eye.' I think, indeed, the whole affair speaks extremely well for Mr. Wildmay. It is not every man who would be capable of so purely intellectual a passion. I suppose one must call his feeling for her a passion? It indicates a distinction in his nature. He can hardly be a mere materialist. But--but I think it's heart-rending that he never met her.”

“Oh, but that's the continuation of the story,” said Peter. “He did meet her in the end, you know.”

“He did meet her!” cried the Duchessa, starting up, with a sudden access of interest, whilst her eyes lightened. “He did meet her? Oh, you must tell me about that.”

And just at this crisis the Cardinal and Emilia appeared, climbing the terrace steps.

“Bother!” exclaimed the Duchessa, under her breath. Then, to Peter, “It will have to be for another time--unless I die of the suspense.”

After the necessary greetings were transacted, another elderly priest joined the company; a tall, burly, rather florid man, mentioned, when Peter was introduced to him, as Monsignor Langshawe. “This really is her chaplain,” Peter concluded. Then a servant brought tea.

“Ah, Diamond, Diamond, you little know what mischief you might have wrought,” he admonished himself, as he walked home through the level sunshine. “In another instant, if we'd not been interrupted, you would have let the cat out of the bag. The premature escape of the cat from the bag would spoil everything.”

And he hugged himself, as one snatched from peril, in a qualm of retroactive terror. At the same time he was filled with a kind of exultancy. All that he had hoped had come to pass, and more, vastly more. Not only had he been received as a friend at Ventirose, but he had been encouraged to tell her a part at least of the story by which her life and his were so curiously connected; and he had been snatched from the peril of telling her too much. The day was not yet when he could safely say, “Mutato nomine.....” Would the day ever be? But, meanwhile, just to have told her the first ten lines of that story, he could not help feeling, somehow advanced matters tremendously, somehow put a new face on matters.

“The hour for which the ages sighed may not be so far away as you think,” he said to Marietta. “The curtain has risen upon Act Three. I fancy I can perceive faint glimmerings of the beginning of the end.”

XIX

All that evening, something which he had not been conscious of noticing especially when it was present to him--certainly he had paid no conscious attention to its details--kept recurring and recurring to Peter's memory: the appearance of the prettily-arranged terrace-end at Ventirose: the white awning, with the blue sky at its edges, the sunny park beyond; the warm-hued carpets on the marble pavement; the wicker chairs, with their bright cushions; the table, with its books and bibelots--the yellow French books, a tortoise-shell paperknife, a silver paperweight, a crystal smelling-bottle, a bowlful of drooping poppies; and the marble balustrade, with its delicate tracery of leaves and tendrils, where the jessamine twined round its pillars.

This kept recurring, recurring, vividly, a picture that he could see without closing his eyes, a picture with a very decided sentiment. Like the gay and gleaming many-pinnacled facade of her house, it seemed appropriate to her; it seemed in its fashion to express her. Nay, it seemed to do more. It was a corner of her every-day environment; these things were the companions, the witnesses, of moments of her life, phases of herself, which were hidden from Peter; they were the companions and witnesses of her solitude, her privacy; they were her confidants, in a way. They seemed not merely to express her, therefore, but to be continually on the point--I had almost said of betraying her. At all events, if he could only understand their silent language, they would prove rich in precious revelations. So he welcomed their recurrences, dwelt upon them, pondered them, and got a deep if somewhat inarticulate pleasure from them.

On Thursday, as he approached the castle, the last fires of sunset were burning in the sky behind it--the long irregular mass of buildings stood out in varying shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of red: the grey stone, dark, velvety indigo; the pink stucco, pink still, but with a transparent blue penumbra over it; the white marble, palely, scintillantly amethystine. And if he was interested in her environment, now he could study it to his heart's content: the wide marble staircase, up which he was shown, with its crimson carpet, and the big mellow painting, that looked as if it might be a Titian, at the top; the great saloon, in which he was received, with its polished mosaic floor, its frescoed ceiling, its white-and-gold panelling, its hangings and upholsteries of yellow brocade, its satinwood chairs and tables, its bronzes, porcelains, embroideries, its screens and mirrors; the long dining-hall, with its high pointed windows, its slender marble columns supporting a vaulted roof, its twinkling candles in chandeliers and sconces of cloudy Venetian glass, its brilliant table, its flowers and their colours and their scents.

He could study her environment to his heart's content, indeed--or to his heart's despair. For all this had rather the effect of chilling, of depressing him. It was very splendid; it was very luxurious and cheerful; it was appropriate and personal to her, if you like; no doubt, in its fashion, in its measure, it, too, expressed her. But, at that rate, it expressed her in an aspect which Peter had instinctively made it his habit to forget, which he by no means found it inspiriting to remember. It expressed, it emphasised, her wealth, her rank; it emphasised the distance, in a worldly sense, between her and himself, the conventional barriers.

And she...

She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she was all that she had ever been--and yet--and yet--Well, somehow, she seemed indefinably different. Somehow, again, the distance, the barriers, were emphasised. She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she was all that she had ever been; but, somehow, to-night, she seemed very much the great lady, very much the duchess....

“My dear man,” he said to himself, “you were mad to dream for a single instant that there was the remotest possibility of anything ever happening.”

The only other guests, besides the Cardinal and Monsignor Langshawe, were an old Frenchwoman, with beautiful white hair, from one of the neighbouring villas, Madame de Lafere, and a young, pretty, witty, and voluble Irishwoman, Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, from an hotel at Spiaggia. In deference, perhaps, to the cloth of the two ecclesiastics, none of the women were in full evening-dress, and there was no arm-taking when they went in to dinner. The dinner itself was of a simplicity which Peter thought admirable, and which, of course, he attributed to his Duchessa's own good taste. He was not yet familiar enough with the Black aristocracy of Italy, to be aware that in the matter of food and drink simplicity is as much the criterion of good form amongst them, as lavish complexity is the criterion of good form amongst the English-imitating Whites.

The conversation, I believe, took its direction chiefly from the initiative of Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. With great sprightliness and humour, and with an astonishing light-hearted courage, she rallied the Cardinal upon the neglect in which her native island was allowed to languish by the powers at Rome. “The most Catholic country in three hemispheres, to be sure,” she said; “every inch of its soil soaked with the blood of martyrs. Yet you've not added an Irish saint to the Calendar for I see you're blushing to think how many ages; and you've taken sides with the heretic Saxon against us in our struggle for Home Rule--which I blame you for, though, being a landowner and a bit of an absentee, I 'm a traitorous Unionist myself.”

The Cardinal laughingly retorted that the Irish were far too fine, too imaginative and poetical a race, to be bothered with material questions of government and administration. They should leave such cares to the stolid, practical English, and devote the leisure they would thus obtain to the further exercise and development of what someone had called “the starfire of the Celtic nature.” Ireland should look upon England as her working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of Irish saints to the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their excessive number. “'T is an embarrassment of riches. If we were once to begin, we could never leave off till we had canonised nine-tenths of the dead population.”

Monsignor Langshawe, at this (making jest the cue for earnest), spoke up for Scotland, and deplored the delay in the beatification of Blessed Mary. “The official beatification,” he discriminated, “for she was beatified in the heart of every true Catholic Scot on the day when Bloody Elizabeth murdered her.”

And Madame de Lafere put in a plea for Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and the little Dauphin.

“Blessed Mary--Bloody Elizabeth,” laughed the Duchessa, in an aside to Peter; “here is language to use in the presence of a Protestant Englishman.”

“Oh, I'm accustomed to 'Bloody Elizabeth,'” said he. “Was n't it a word of Cardinal Newman's?”

“Yes, I think so,” said she. “And since every one is naming his candidate; for the Calendar, you have named mine. I think there never was a saintlier saint than Cardinal Newman.”

“What is your Eminence's attitude towards the question of mixed marriages?” Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.

Peter pricked up his ears.

“It is not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in England,” his Eminence replied; “but in the abstract, and other things equal, my attitude would of course be one of disapproval.”

“And yet surely,” contended she, “if a pious Catholic girl marries a Protestant man, she has a hundred chances of converting him?”

“I don't know,” said the Cardinal. “Would n't it be safer to let the conversion precede the marriage? Afterwards, I 'm afraid, he would have a hundred chances of inducing her to apostatise, or, at least, of rendering her lukewarm.”

“Not if she had a spark of the true zeal,” said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. “Any wife can make her husband's life a burden to him, if she will conscientiously lay herself out to do so. The man would be glad to submit, for the sake of peace in his household. I often sigh for the good old days of the Inquisition; but it's still possible, in the blessed seclusion of the family circle, to apply the rack and the thumbscrew in a modified form. I know a dozen fine young Protestant men in London whom I'm labouring to convert, and I feel I 'm defeated only by the circumstance that I'm not in a position to lead them to the altar in the full meaning of the expression.”

“A dozen?” the Cardinal laughed. “Aren't you complicating the question of mixed marriages with that of plural marriage?”

“'T was merely a little Hibernicism, for which I beg your Eminence's indulgence,” laughed she. “But what puts the most spokes in a proselytiser's wheel is the Faith itself. If we only deserved the reputation for sharp practice and double dealing which the Protestants have foisted upon us, it would be roses, roses, all the way. Why are we forbidden to let the end justify the means? And where are those accommodements avec le ciel of which we've heard? We're not even permitted a few poor accommodements avec le monde.”

“Look at my uncle's face,” whispered the Duchessa to Peter. The Cardinal's fine old face was all alight with amusement. “In his fondness for taking things by their humorous end, he has met an affinity.”

“It will be a grand day for the Church and the nations, when we have an Irish Pope,” Mrs. O'Donovan Florence continued. “A good, stalwart, militant Irishman is what's needed to set everything right. With a sweet Irish tongue, he'd win home the wandering sheep; and with a strong Irish arm, he'd drive the wolves from the fold. It's he that would soon sweep the Italians out of Rome.”

“The Italians will soon be swept out of Rome by the natural current of events,” said the Cardinal. “But an Irish bishop of my acquaintance insists that we have already had many Irish Popes, without knowing it. Of all the greatest Popes he cries, 'Surely, they must have had Irish blood.' He's perfectly convinced that Pius the Ninth was Irish. His very name, his family-name, Ferretti, was merely the Irish name, Farrity, Italianised, the good bishop says. No one but an Irishman, he insists, could have been so witty.”

Mrs. O'Donovan Florence looked intensely thoughtful for a moment.... Then, “I 'm trying to think of the original Irish form of Udeschini,” she declared.

At which there was a general laugh.

“When you say 'soon,' Eminence, do you mean that we may hope to see the Italians driven from Rome in our time?” enquired Madame de Lafere.

“They are on the verge of bankruptcy--for their sins,” the Cardinal answered. “When the crash comes--and it can't fail to come before many years--there will necessarily be a readjustment. I do not believe that the conscience of Christendom will again allow Peter to be deprived of his inheritance.”

“God hasten the good day,” said Monsignor Langshawe.

“If I can live to see Rome restored to the Pope, I shall die content, even though I cannot live to see France restored to the King,” said the old Frenchwoman.

“And I--even though I cannot live to see Britain restored to the Faith,” said the Monsignore.

The Duchessa smiled at Peter.

“What a hotbed of Ultramontanes and reactionaries you have fallen into,” she murmured.

“It is exhilarating,” said he, “to meet people who have convictions.”

“Even when you regard their convictions as erroneous?” she asked.

“Yes, even then,” he answered. “But I'm not sure I regard as erroneous the convictions I have heard expressed to-night.”

“Oh--?” she wondered. “Would you like to see Rome restored to the Pope?”

“Yes,” said he, “decidedly--for aesthetic reasons, if for no others.”

“I suppose there are aesthetic reasons,” she assented. “But we, of course, think there are conclusive reasons in mere justice.”

“I don't doubt there are conclusive reasons in mere justice, too,” said he.

After dinner, at the Cardinal's invitation, the Duchessa went to the piano, and played Bach and Scarlatti. Her face, in the soft candlelight, as she discoursed that “luminous, lucid” music, Peter thought... But what do lovers always think of their ladies' faces, when they look up from their pianos, in soft candlelight?

Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, taking her departure, said to the Cardinal, “I owe your Eminence the two proudest days of my life. The first was when I read in the paper that you had received the hat, and I was able to boast to all my acquaintances that I had been in the convent with your niece by marriage. And the second is now, when I can boast forevermore hereafter that I've enjoyed the honour of making my courtesy to you.”

“So,” said Peter, as he walked home through the dew and the starlight of the park, amid the phantom perfumes of the night, “so the Cardinal does n't approve of mixed marriages and, of course, his niece does n't, either. But what can it matter to me? For alas and alas--as he truly said--it's hardly a question of actuality.”

And he lit a cigarette.

XX

“So he did meet her, after all?” the Duchessa said.

“Yes, he met her in the end,” Peter answered.

They were seated under the gay white awning, against the bright perspective of lawn, lake, and mountains, on the terrace at Ventirose, where Peter was paying his dinner-call. The August day was hot and still and beautiful--a day made of gold and velvet and sweet odours. The Duchessa lay back languidly, among the crisp silk cushions, in her low, lounging chair; and Peter, as he looked at her, told himself that he must be cautious, cautious.

“Yes, he met her in the end,” he said.

“Well--? And then--?” she questioned, with a show of eagerness, smiling into his eyes. “What happened? Did she come up to his expectations? Or was she just the usual disappointment? I have been pining--oh, but pining--to hear the continuation of the story.”

She smiled into his eyes, and his heart fluttered. “I must be cautious,” he told himself. “In more ways than one, this is a crucial moment.” At the same time, as a very part of his caution, he must appear entirely nonchalant and candid.

“Oh, no--tutt' altro,” he said, with an assumption of nonchalant airiness and candid promptness. “She 'better bettered' his expectations--she surpassed his fondest. She was a thousand times more delightful than he had dreamed--though, as you know, he had dreamed a good deal. Pauline de Fleuvieres turned out to be the feeblest, faintest echo of her.”

The Duchessa meditated for an instant.

“It seems impossible. It's one of those situations in which a disenchantment seems the foregone conclusion,” she said, at last.

“It seems so, indeed,” assented Peter; “but disenchantment, there was none. She was all that he had imagined, and infinitely more. She was the substance--he had imagined the shadow. He had divined her, as it were, from a single angle, and there were many angles. Pauline was the pale reflection of one side of her--a pencil-sketch in profile.”

The Duchessa shook her head, marvelling, and smiled again.

“You pile wonder upon wonder,” she said. “That the reality should excel the poet's ideal! That the cloud-capped towers which looked splendid from afar, with all the glamour of distance, should prove to be more splendid still, on close inspection! It's dead against the accepted theory of things. And that any woman should be nicer than that adorable Pauline! You tax belief. But I want to know what happened. Had she read his book?”

“Nothing happened,” said Peter. “I warned you that it was a drama without action. A good deal happened, no doubt, in Wildmay's secret soul. But externally, nothing. They simply chatted together--exchanged the time o' day--like any pair of acquaintances. No, I don't think she had read his book. She did read it afterwards, though.”

“And liked it?”

“Yes--she said she liked it.”

“Well--? But then-?” the Duchessa pressed him, insistently. “When she discovered the part she had had in its composition--? Was n't she overwhelmed? Wasn't she immensely interested--surprised--moved?”

She leaned forward a little. Her eyes were shining. Her lips were slightly parted, so that between their warm rosiness Peter could see the exquisite white line of her teeth. His heart fluttered again. “I must be cautious, cautious,” he remembered, and made a strenuous “act of will” to steady himself.

“Oh, she never discovered that,” he said.

“What!” exclaimed the Duchessa. Her face fell. Her eyes darkened--with dismay, with incomprehension. “Do you--you don't--mean to say that he didn't tell her?” There was reluctance to believe, there was a conditional implication of deep reproach, in her voice.

Peter had to repeat his act of will.

“How could he tell her?” he asked.

She frowned at him, with reproach that was explicit now, and a kind of pained astonishment.

“How could he help telling her?” she cried. “But--but it was the one great fact between them. But it was a fact that intimately concerned her--it was a fact of her own destiny. But it was her right to be told. Do you seriously mean that he did n't tell her? But why did n't he? What could have possessed him?”

There was something like a tremor in her voice. “I must appear entirely nonchalant and candid,” Peter remembered.

“I fancy he was possessed, in some measure, by a sense of the liberty he had taken by a sense of what one might, perhaps, venture to qualify as his 'cheek.' For, if it was n't already a liberty to embody his notion of her in a novel--in a published book, for daws to peck at--it would have become a liberty the moment he informed her that he had done so. That would have had the effect of making her a kind of involuntary particeps criminis.”

“Oh, the foolish man!” sighed the Duchessa, with a rueful shake of the head. “His foolish British self-consciousness! His British inability to put himself in another person's place, to see things from another's point of view! Could n't he see, from her point of view, from any point of view but his own, that it was her right to be told? That the matter affected her in one way, as much as it affected him in another? That since she had influenced--since she had contributed to--his life and his art as she had, it was her right to know it? Couldn't he see that his 'cheek,' his real 'cheek,' began when he withheld from her that great strange chapter of her own history? Oh, he ought to have told her, he ought to have told her.”

She sank back in her chair, giving her head another rueful shake, and gazed ruefully away, over the sunny landscape, through the mellow atmosphere, into the golden-hazy distance.

Peter looked at her--and then, quickly, for caution's sake, looked elsewhere.