My Friend Prospero Part 20

"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 s.h.i.+nes, 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 a.s.sociation, 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."

"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 att.i.tude 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 gla.s.s 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. "Ma.s.s."

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 bal.u.s.trade, 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 a.s.sisted at the mystical sacrifice of the Lamb of G.o.d!) 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 Ma.s.s 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 Ma.s.s 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 a.s.sented, "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 Ma.s.s 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 circ.u.mstantial portrait. And all through Ma.s.s 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 Ma.s.s, 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 a.s.sumed 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n 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 a.s.sured 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 G.o.d 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 Doppelganger."