Chapter 4

So, for an instant, Anthony stood at Susanna's threshold, looking into her antechamber, breathless almost with his sense of her imminence;--and then the tall flunkey said, in the fastidious accents of flunkeydom, "Net et _em_, sir;" and all my hero's high-strung emotion must spend itself in the depositing of a card.

As they turned away, and the summer landscape again met him with its warm breath and radiant smile, he gloomed at it savagely, from eyes of deep rebuke, as at a thing that had beguiled him with false promises, wronged and defrauded him. And he flew out petulantly at poor Adrian--

"Here's a pretty dance you 've led me, for the pleasure of a word with Mr. Yellowplush."

"Oh?" said Adrian, taken aback. "I expected you 'd be relieved. You did n't want to see them. And the exigencies of the case are satisfied by leaving cards."

"I could have sent my card by you," growled Anthony.

"You 've had a lovely walk, with a lovely comrade, in lovely weather," said Adrian.

"The weather is simply brazen," Anthony declared.

V

Judged by the standards of a cit, countrymen, I believe, are generally early risers; but even for a countryman, Anthony, next morning, rose at an unlikely hour. The tall clock in the hall, accenting with its slow sardonic tick the silence of the sleeping house, marked a quarter to five, as he undid the heavy old-fashioned fastenings of the door, the oaken bar, the iron bolts and chains, and let himself out.

He let himself out; but then he stood still for a minute on the terrace, arrested by the exquisite shock of the wonderful early air: the wonderful light, keen air, a fabric woven of elfin filaments, the breathings of green lives: an aether distilled of secret essences, in the night, by the earth and the sea,--for there was the sea's tang, as well as the earth's balm, there was the bitter-sweet of the sea and the earth at one.

He stood for a minute, stopped by the exquisite shock of it; and then he set forth for an aimless morning ramble.

The dew clung in big iridescent crystals to the grass, where the sheep were already wide-awake and eager at their breakfasts; it gleamed like sprinkled rubies on the scarlet petals of the poppies, and like fairies' draughts of yellow wine in the enamelled hollows of the buttercups; on the brown earth of the pathways, where the long shadows were purple, it lay white like hoar-frost. The shadows were still long, the sunbeams still almost level; the sun shone gently, as through an imperceptible thin veil, gilding with pinkish gold the surfaces it touched--glossy leaves, and the rough bark of tree-trunks, and the points of the spears of grass. A thicker veil, a gauze of pearl and silver, dimmed the blue of the sea, and blurred the architecture of the cliffs. On the sea's edge lay a long grey cloud, a long, low, soft cloud, flat, like a band of soft grey velvet. The cloud was grey indeed; but (as if prismatic fires were smouldering there) its grey held in solution all the colours of the spectrum, so that you could discern elusive rose-tints, fugitive greens, translucent reflections of amethyst and amber.

The morning was inexpressibly calm and peaceful--yet it was busy with sound and with movement. Rooks, those sanctimonious humbugs, circled overhead, cawing thieves' warnings, that had the twang of sermons, to other rooks, out of sight in neighbouring seed-fields. Lapwings, humbugs too, but humbugs in a prettier cause, started from the shrubberies where their eggs were hidden, and fluttered lamely towards the open. Sparrows innumerable were holding their noisy, high-spirited disputations; blackbirds were repeating and repeating that deep melodious love-call of theirs, which they have repeated from the beginning of the world, and no ear has ever tired of; finches were singing, greenfinches, chaffinches; thrushes were singing, singing ecstatically in the tree-tops, and lower down the imitative little blackcaps were trying to imitate them. Recurrently, from a distance, came the soft iterations of a cuckoo. Bees went about their affairs with a mien of sombre resolution, mumbling to themselves, in stolid monotone, "It-'s-got-to-be-done-and-it-'s-dogged-that-does-it, it-'s-got-to-be-done-and-it-'s-dogged-that-does-it," and showing thus that even the beautiful task of flying from flower to flower and gathering honey, may, if you are a bee, fail to interest you, and necessitate an act of will; while butterflies, charmed by the continual surprises, satisfied by the immediate joys, of the present moment, flitted irresponsibly, capriciously, whithersoever a bright colour beckoned, and gave no thought to the moments that had not yet come. Everywhere there was business, rumour, action; but everywhere, none the less, there was the ineffable peace of early morning, of the hours when man--the peace-destroyer?--is still at rest. And everywhere, everywhere, there was the wonderful pristine air, the virginal air, that seemed to penetrate beyond the senses, and to reach the imagination, a voice whispering untranslatable messages, waking mystic surmises of things unknown but somehow kindred.

Anthony strolled on at random, down the purple-shaded paths, under the spreading oaks and bending elms, over the sun-tipped greensward, satisfied, like the butterflies, by the experiences of the passing moment, enjoying, in leisurely intimacy, the aspects and vicissitudes of his way; for a melancholy man, curiously cheerful; the tears of things, the flat and unprofitable uses of the world, forgotten: for a melancholy man, even curiously elated: elated--oh, more than likely without recognising it--as one is to whom the house of life has discovered a new chamber-door, and, therewith, new promises of adventure. He strolled on at random, swinging his stick nonchalantly, . . . till, all at once, he saw something that brought him, and the heart within him, to a simultaneous standstill: something he had been more or less sub-consciously thinking of the whole time, perhaps?--for it brought him to a standstill, as if he saw his thought made flesh.

He had just mounted a little knoll, and now, glancing down before him, he saw, not twenty yards away, under a hawthorn in full blossom,--

"Madame Torrebianca, as I am alive," he gasped.

VI

Susanna was standing under the tree, gazing intently upwards; and she was vehemently shaking her fist at its foliage, and making, from the point of her lips, a sound, sibilant, explosive (something like "Ts-s-s! Ts-s-s-s! Ts-s-s-s-s!"), that was clearly meant as an intimidation. She had on a dark-blue frock, blue flannel I think, plain to the verge of severity: a straight-falling jacket, a straight, loose skirt: plain, but appropriate to the hour no doubt; and, instead of a hat, she wore a scarf of black lace, draped over her black hair mantilla-wise.

Anthony, glowing with a sense that he was in great luck, and trying to think what practical step he should take to profit by it, watched her for a minute before she caught sight of him. An obvious practical step, she having evidently some trouble on her hands, might have been to approach her with an offer of assistance. But if all who love are poets, men near to love will be poets budding; and who was it said that the obvious is the one thing a poet is incapable of seeing?

When, however, she did catch sight of him, abruptly, without hesitation, she called him to her.

"Come here--come here at once," she called, and made an imperious gesture. (I wonder whether she realised who he was, or thought no further as yet, in her emergency, than just that here, providentially, was a man who could help.)

Marvelling, palpitating, Anthony flew to obey.

"Look," said Susanna, breathlessly, pointing into the tree. "What is one to do? He won't pay the slightest attention to me, and I have nothing that I can throw."

She had, in her left hand, a small leather-bound book, apparently a prayer-book, and, twisted round her wrist, a red-coral rosary; but I suppose she would not have liked to throw either of these.

Bewildered a little by the suddenness with which the situation had come to pass, but conscious, acutely, exultantly conscious of it as a delectable situation,--exultantly conscious of her nearness to him, of their solitude together, there in the privacy (as it were) of the morning,--and tingling to the vibrations of her voice, to the freshness and the warmth of her strong young beauty, Anthony was still able, vaguely, half-mechanically, to lift his eyes, and look in the direction whither she pointed. . .

The spectacle that met him banished immediately, for the moment, all preoccupations personal.

On one of the lower of the flowering branches, but high enough to be beyond arm's reach, or even cane's reach, in the crook of the bough, crouched, making ready to spring, a big black cat, the tip of his tail twitching with contained excitement, his yellow eyes fixed murderously on the branch next above: where, in the agitation of supreme distress, a chaffinch, a little grey hen-chaffinch, was hopping backwards and forwards, sometimes rising a few inches into the air, but always returning to the branch, and uttering a succession of terrified, agonised, despairing tweets.

It was a hateful thing to see. It was the genius of cruelty made manifest in a single intense tableau.

"Why does n't the bird fly away?" Susanna painfully questioned. She was pale, and her lips were strained; she looked sick and hopeless. "Is she fascinated? The cat will surely get her."

"No--her nest must be somewhere there--she is guarding her nestlings," said Anthony.

Then he raised his stick menacingly, and, in tones of stern command, addressed the cat.

"Patapouf! I am ashamed of you. Come down--come down from there--come down directly."

And he emphasised each staccato summons by a sharp rap of his stick against the highest point of the tree that he could reach.

The cat turned his head, to look--and the spell was broken. His attitude relaxed. Anthony put his hands on the tree, and made as if to climb it. The cat gave a resigned shrug of the shoulders, and came scrambling down. Next instant, (if you please), unabashed, tail erect, back arched, he was rubbing his whiskers against Anthony's legs, circling round them, s-shaping himself between them, and purring conciliations, as who should say, "There, there. Though you _have_ spoiled sport, I won't quarrel with you, and I _am_ delighted to see you." The bird, twittering, flew up, and disappeared in the higher foliage.

Susanna breathed a deep sigh of relief.

"Oh, thank you, thank you," she said, with fervour. Then she shook her finger, and frowned, at Patapouf. "Oh, you bad cat! You cruel cat!" And raising eyes dark with reproach to Anthony's, "Yet he seems to be a friend of yours?" she wondered. (By this time, of course, she must have realised who he was. Very likely she had her emotions.)

Anthony, the bird in safety, could tingle anew to the deep notes of her voice, could exult anew in their dual solitude.

"Yes," he acknowledged, "Patapouf is a friend of mine--he is even a member of my household. You must try not to think too ill of him. He really is n't half a bad sort at bottom. But he 's English, and he lives in the country. So, a true English country gentleman, he has perhaps an exaggerated passion for the pleasures of the chase--and when questions touching them arise, seems simply to be devoid of the ethical sense. He 's not a whit worse than his human neighbours--and he 's a hundred times handsomer and more intelligent."

Susanna, smiling a little, looked down at Patapouf, and considered.

"He is certainly very handsome," she agreed. "And--Patapouf? I like his name. I will not think too ill of him if he will promise never again to try to catch a--a _fringuello_. I don't remember the English for _fringuello_?"

Her glance and her inflection conveyed a request to be reminded.

But Anthony shook his head.

"And I shall at once proceed to forget it. _Fringuello_ is so much prettier."

Susanna gave a light little trill of laughter.

"What a delicious laugh," thought he that heard it.

And, laughing, "But before it has quite gone from you, do, pray, for my instruction, just pronounce it once," she pleaded.

"How extraordinarily becoming to her that mantilla is," he thought. "How it sets off her hair and her complexion--how it brings out the sparkle of her eyes."

Her fine black hair, curling softly about her brow, and rippling away, under the soft black lace, in loose abundance; her warm, clear complexion; the texture of her skin, firm and smooth, with tiny blue veins faintly showing at the temples; her sparkling, spirited dark eyes, their merriment, their alertness, their graver underglow; the spirited, high carriage of her head; that dark-blue, simple, appropriate frock; and then her figure, upright, nervous, energetic, with its fluent lines, with its fragrance of youth and of womanhood,--oh, he was acutely conscious of them, he was thrilled by his deep sense of their nearness to him, alone there, in the wide sunny circle of green landscape, in the seclusion of that unfrequented hour.

"The word comes back to me dimly," he said, "as--as something like _finch_."

"Finch?" said Susanna. "Thank you very much. Ah, yes,"--with an air of recalling it,--"_finch_, to be sure. You are right," she smiled, "_fringuello_ is prettier."

"What an adorable mouth," thought he. "The red of it--the curves it takes--and those incredible little white teeth, like snow shut in a rose."

"And this is a morning meet for pretty words, is it not?" he suggested. "It might strike an unprejudiced observer as rather a pretty morning."

"Oh, I should be less reticent," said Susanna. "If the unprejudiced observer had his eyes open, would n't it strike him as a perfectly lovely morning?"

"We must not run the risk of spoiling it," Anthony cautioned her, diminishing his voice, "by praising it too warmly to its face."

She gave another light trill of laughter.

"Her laugh is like rainbow-tinted spray. It is a fountain-jet of musical notes, each note a cut gem," thought the infatuated fellow.

"I trust," he hazarded, "that you will not condemn me for a swaggerer, if I lay claim to share with you a singularity. The morning is a morning like another. God is prodigal of lovely mornings. But we two are singular in choosing to begin it at its sweeter end."

"Yes," Susanna assented, "that is a singularity--in England. But in Italy, or in the part of Italy where my habits were formed, it is one of our lazy customs. We like always to be abroad in time to enjoy what we call 'the hours immaculate,'--_l'ure immacolae_, in our dialect."

"The hours immaculate? It is an uncommonly fine description," approved Anthony. "They will be a race of poets in your part of Italy?"

The graver underglow in Susanna's eyes eclipsed, for an instant, their dancing surface lights.

"They _were_ a race of poets," she said regretfully, "before they learned how to read and write. But now, with the introduction of popular education,"--she shook her head,--"the poetry is dying out."

"Ah," said Anthony, with a meaning flourish of his stick, "there it is. The poetic spirit always dies at the advance of that ghastly fetich." Then he spoke sententiously. "Popular education is a contrivance of the devil, whereby he looks to extinguish every last saving grace from the life of the populace. Not poetry only, but all good things and all good feelings,--religion, reverence, courtesy,--sane contentment, rational ambition,--the right sort of humility, the right sort of pride,--they all go down before it: whilst, in the ignorance which it disseminates, blasphemy, covetousness, bumptiousness, bad taste (and bad art and bad literature, to gratify it), every form of wrong-headedness and wrong-heartedness flourish like the seven plagues of Egypt. But it was all inevitable from the day that meddling German busybody invented printing--if not from the day his heathenish precursor invented letters."

He delivered these sentiments with a good deal of warmth.

Susanna's eyes brightened. I am not sure there was n't a quick little flash of raillery in their brightness.

"I would seem," she mused, "to have touched by accident upon a subject that is near your heart."

Anthony threw up a deploring hand.

"There!" he grieved. "The subjects that are near my heart, it is the study of my life to exclude from my conversation. But sometimes one forgets oneself."

Susanna smiled,--a smile, perhaps, that implied a tacit memorandum and reflection, a subdued, withheld, occult little smile. Again, I am not sure it had n't its tinge of raillery.

"And since I _have_ forgotten myself," Anthony pursued, "I wonder whether you will bear with me if I continue to do so twenty seconds longer?"

"Oh, I beg of you," Susanna politely hastened to accede.

"There is another subject equally near my heart," said he.

Her eyes were full of expectancy.

"Yes--?" she encouraged him.

"I was disappointed not to find you at home when I called yesterday," said he. "I rejoice for a hundred reasons that chance has led to our meeting this morning. Not to mention ninety-nine of them, I am anxious to discharge, with as little loss of time as may be, the very onerous debt I owe you."

Susanna opened her eyes, in puzzlement.

"A debt? I am your creditor unawares."

"My debt of apologies and condolences," he explained.

She knitted her brows, in mental effort.

"I am ignorant alike of my grievance and of your offence," she said.

"I am deeply sensible of your magnanimity," said he; "but I will not abuse it. They have let you the ugliest house in the United Kingdom; and, as the owner, the ultimate responsibility must come home to me."

"Oh," cried Susanna.

It was a gay, treble little cry, that told him he had been fortunate enough to amuse as well as to surprise her. She shook her head, while her eyes were liquid with mirth.

"The house is ugly?" she enquired. "I have read of it as 'a vast and imposing edifice in the style of the Renaissance.'"

"As a confessor of the True Faith," Anthony warned her, "you must never believe what you read in the _County History_. It was compiled by a Protestant clergyman; it teems with misinformation; it ought to be placed upon the Index. The house in question is a vast and pompous contiguity of stucco, in the style of 1830. It looks like a Riviera hotel a good deal run to seed. It looks like a shabby relation of Buckingham Palace. It looks like a barrack decorated with the discoloured trimmings of a bride-cake."

"Ah, well, be it so," consented Susanna. "The house is ugly--but it is comfortable. And, in any case, your conscience is too sensitive. The ultimate responsibility for my having taken it comes home to no one, unless--well, to be strictly just, unless to a grandfather of mine, who has been dead these many long years."

Which pronouncement may very possibly have struck her listener as enigmatic. But I daresay he felt that he scarcely knew her well enough to press for an elucidation. And, anyhow, without pause, she went on--

"Besides, everything else--the park, the country--is beyond words beautiful."

"Yes," acquiesced Anthony, "the country is beautiful, at this season. That's why everyone abandons it, and scuttles up to town."

Susanna's face lighted, with interest.

"Indeed? Is _that_ the reason? I had observed the fact, but I was at a loss to think what the reason for it could be."

"No," said Anthony, eating his words, "that is not the reason. It were base to deceive you. A normally-constituted Englishman no more objects to beauty, than a deep-sea fish objects to dry weather or the income-tax. He abandons the country during the three pleasantest months of the year, not because it is beautiful, for he is sublimely unconscious that it's beautiful, but because, during those months, in the country, there's nothing that he can course, hunt, or shoot."

Susanna pondered.

"I see," she said. "And is--is there anything that he can course, hunt, or shoot in town?"

"Not exactly," Anthony admitted. "But there are people--to whom he can do the next best thing. There are people whom he can bore. It is an interim sport. It is an annual national tournament. The good knights flock together from the four corners of England, to tilt at one another, and try who shall approve himself the most indefatigable, the most indomitable bore."

Susanna gazed dreamily at the distance for a moment. Then, with sudden actuality, "Apropos of interim sports," she demanded, "what are you going to do about that cat of yours?" A movement of her head indicated Patapouf.

Hovering near them, Patapouf was busy with a game of make-believe--pretending that the longish grass was a jungle, and himself a tiger, stalking I know not what visionary prey: now gingerly, with slow calculated liftings and down-puttings of his feet, stealing a silent march; now, flat on his belly, rapidly creeping forward; now halting, recoiling, masking himself behind some inequality of the ground, peering warily over it, while his tail swayed responsive to the eager activity of his brain; and now, having computed the range to a nicety, his haunches wagging, now, with a leap all grace and ruthlessness,--a flash of blackness through the air,--springing upon the creature of his fancy.

Susanna and Anthony watched him for a little without speaking.

"You can't deny that he has imagination," said Anthony, at length, turning towards her.

"He is beautiful and clever," said Susanna, "I could wish he were as virtuous. This, of course, is sheer play-acting. He 's simply waiting till our backs are turned, to renew his designs upon the bird's nest."

"When I turn my back I 'll carry him with me," Anthony answered. But in his soul he said: "What 's the good of telling her that that will only be to defer the evil moment? Of course he has marked the tree. He will come back to it at his leisure."

"I beg your pardon," said Susanna. "That will merely be to put the evil off. The cat certainly knows the tree. Directly he 's at liberty, he will come back."

"Oh--?" faltered Anthony, a trifle disconcerted. "Oh? Do--do you think so?"

"Yes," she said. "There 's not a doubt of it. But I am acquainted with a discipline, which, if I have your sanction to apply it, will unnerve Monsieur Patapouf, so far as this particular tree is concerned, until the end of time. Cats have a very high sense of their personal freedom--they hate to be tied up. Well, if we tie Monsieur Patapouf to this tree, so that he can't get away, and leave him alone here for an hour or two, he will conceive such a distaste for everything connected with this tree that he will never voluntarily come within speaking distance of it again."

"Really? That seems very ingenious," commented Anthony.

"'T is an old wives' remedy," said Susanna. "You don't happen to have such a thing as a piece of string in your pocket? It does n't matter. But you have a penknife? Thank you. Now please catch your cat."

Anthony called Patapouf, exerting those blandishments one must exert who would coax a hesitating cat.

Patapouf, by a series of étapes and délours, approached, and was secured.

Susanna, meanwhile, having laid her rosary and prayer-book on the grass, unbuttoned her blue flannel jacket, and removed from round her waist, where it was doing duty as a belt, a broad band of cherry-coloured ribbon. This, with Anthony's penknife, she slitted and ripped several times lengthwise, till she had obtained a yard or two of practicable tether.

"Now, first, we must make him a collar," she said, measuring off what she deemed ribbon sufficient for that purpose.