My Friend Prospero Part 9

A curious little intimate inward glow, a sense, somewhere deep down in his consciousness, of elation and well-being, accompanied John all the way to Roccadoro, mingling with and sweetening whatever thoughts or perceptions occupied his immediate attention. This was a "soul-state"

that he knew of old, and he had no difficulty in referring it to its cause. It was the glow and the elation which he was fortunate enough always to experience when his eye had been fed with a fresh impression of beauty; and he knew that he owed it to-day to the glimpse he had had, in the cool light under the ilexes, of a slender figure in lilac and a tiny figure in grey, beside a soft-complexioned old marble bench in the midst of a shadowy, sunny, brown and green Italian garden.

The drive to Roccadoro from Sant' Alessina is a pleasant drive. The road follows for the most part the windings of the Rampio, so that you are seldom out of sight of its gleaming waters, and the brawl of it, now louder, now less loud, is perpetually in your ears. To right and left you have the tender pink of blossoming almonds, with sometimes the scarlet flame of a pomegranate; and then the blue-grey hills, mantled in a kind of transparent cloth-of-gold, a gauze of gold, woven of haze and suns.h.i.+ne; and then, rosy white, with pale violet shadows, the snow-peaks, cut like cameos upon the brilliant azure of the sky. And sometimes, of course, you rattle through a village, with its crumbling, stained, and faded yellow-stuccoed houses, its dazzling white canvas awnings, its church and campanile, and its life that seems to pa.s.s entirely in the street: men in their s.h.i.+rt sleeves, lounging, smoking, spitting (else the land were not Italy!), or perhaps playing cards at a table under the leafless bush of the wine-shop; women gossiping over their needlework, or, gathered in sociable knots, combing and binding up their sleek black hair; children sprawling in the kindly dirt; the priest, biretta on head, nose in breviary, drifting slowly upon some priestly errand, and "getting through his office;" and the immemorial goatherd, bare-legged, in a tattered sugar-loaf hat, followed by his flock, with their queer anxious faces, blowing upon his Pan's-pipes (shrill strains, in minor mode and plagal scale, a music older than Theocritus), or stopping, jealously watched by the customer's avid Italian eyes, to milk "_per due centesimi_"--say, a farthing's worth--into an outstretched, close-clutched jug. Sometimes the almond orchards give place to vineyards, or to maize fields, or to dusky groves of walnut, or to plantations of scrubby oak where lean black pigs forage for the delectable acorn. Sometimes the valley narrows to a ravine, and signs of cultivation disappear, and the voice of the Rampio swells to a roar, and you become aware, between the hills that rise gloomy and almost sheer beside you, of a great solitude: a solitude that is intensified rather than diminished by the sight of some lonely--infinitely lonely--grange, perched far aloft, at a height that seems out of reach of the world. What possible manner of human beings, you wonder, can inhabit there, and what possible dreary manner of existence can they lead? But even in the most solitary places you are welcomed and sped on by a chorus of bird-songs. The hillsides resound with bird-songs continuously for the whole seven miles,--and continuously, at this season, for the whole four-and-twenty hours.

Blackbirds, thrushes, blackcaps, goldfinches, chaffinches, sing from the first peep of dawn till the last trace of daylight has died out, and then the nightingales begin and keep it up till dawn again. And everywhere the soft air is aromatic with a faint scent of rosemary, for rosemary grows everywhere under the trees. And everywhere you have the purity and brilliancy and yet restraint of colour, and the crisp economy of line, which give the Italian landscape its look of having been designed by a conscious artist.

In and through his enjoyment of all these pleasantnesses, John felt that agreeable glow which he owed to his glimpse of the woman in the garden; and when at last he reached the Hotel Victoria, and, having dressed, found himself alone for a few moments with Lady Blanchemain, in the dim and cool sitting-room where she awaited her guests, he hastened to let her know that he shared her own opinion of the woman's charms.

"Your beauty decidedly _is_ a beauty," he declared. "I wish you could have seen her as I saw her an hour ago, with a white sunshade, against a background of ilexes. It's a thousand pities that painting should be a forgotten art."

But Lady Blanchemain (magnificent in purple velvet, with diamonds round her throat and in her hair) didn't seem interested.

"Do you know," she said, "I made yesterday one of the most ridiculous blunders of my life. It's been preying upon my mind ever since. I generally have pretty trustworthy perceptions, and perhaps this is a symptom of failing powers. I told myself positively that you were an Eton and Balliol man. It never occurred to me till I was halfway home that, as a Papist, you'd be nothing of the sort."

"No," said John; "I'm afraid I'm Edgbaston and Paris. The way her hair grows low about her brow, and swoops upwards and backwards in a sort of tidal wave, and breaks loose in little curling tendrils,--it's absolutely lyrical. And the smile at the bottom of her eyes is exactly like silent music. And her mouth is a couplet in praise of love, with two red lips for rhymes. And her chin is a perfect epithalamium of a chin. And then her figure! And then her lilac frock! Oh, it's a thousand, thousand pities that painting should he a forgotten art."

"What, the same lilac frock?" said Lady Blanchemain, absently. "Yet you certainly have the Eton voice," she mused. "And if I don't pay you the doubtful compliment of saying that you have the Balliol manner, you have at least a kind of subtilized reminiscence of it."

"I must keep a guard upon myself," said John. "She's visiting an Austrian woman who lives in a remote wing of the castle,--the pavilion beyond the clock, in fact,--an Austrian woman of the exhilarating name of Brandi."

"I'm rather in luck for my dinner to-night," said Lady Blanchemain.

"I've got Agnes Scope, the niece of the Duke of Wexmouth. She arrived here this morning with her aunt, Lady Louisa. Of course I'm putting you next to her. As, besides being an extremely nice girl and an heiress, she's an ardent pervert to Romanism,--well, a word to the wise."

"Yes, I know her," said John. "We don't get on a bit. She moves on far too high a plane for a groundling like me. She's intellectual and earnest, and my ignorance and light-mindedness wound her to the quick.

She'll end, as I've told her to her face, by writing books,--serious novels, probably,--which she'll illuminate with beautiful irrelevant quotations from Browning and Cardinal Newman."

"Bother," said Lady Blanchemain. "You're perverse."

"Besides," said John, "she's engaged."

"Engaged--?" faltered Lady Blanchemain.

"Yes--to an intellectual and earnest man, named Blake--Bernard Blake--a grandson of the famous Blake of Cambridge."

Lady Blanchemain fixed him with darkening eyes.

"Are you sure?" she pleaded.

"I saw it officially stated in the _Morning Post_," was John's relentless answer.

"What a nuisance," said Lady Blanchemain, fanning. Her fan was of amber tortoise-sh.e.l.l, with white ostrich feathers, and the end sticks bore her cypher and coronet in gold.

"What a jolly fan," said John.

"Well, well," said Lady Blanchemain, reconciling herself. Then, after an instant of pensiveness, "So you're already laid low by her beauty. But you haven't found out yet who she is?"

"Who who is?" said John, looking all at sea.

"Tut. Don't tease. Your woman at the castle."

"My woman at the castle appeared to leave you cold," he complained. "I arrived full of her, and you wouldn't listen."

"So you're already in love with her?" said Lady Blanchemain.

"No--not yet," said he. "As yet I merely recognize in her admirable material for a painting, and regret that such material should go begging for the lack of a painter. But by this time to-morrow--who can tell?"

"Have you found out who she is?" asked Lady Blanchemain.

"No--not yet," said he. "As yet I've merely found out that she's visiting an Austrian Signora Brandi, who lives (I can't think why) in the pavilion beyond the clock. But by this time to-morrow!" His gesture spoke volumes of prospective information.

"She looked like a gentlewoman," reflected his friend.

"For all the world," said he.

"Yet, if she's an Austrian--" She paused and pondered.

"Why? What's the difficulty?" said he.

"To know whether she is _born_," said Lady Blanchemain. "Among Austrians, unless you're born, you're impossible, you're nowhere. Brandi doesn't sound born, does it? We mustn't let you become enamoured of her if she isn't born."

"Brandi sounds tremendously _un_born," a.s.sented John. "And if like visits like, Signora Brandi's visitor will probably be unborn too. But to me that would rather add an attraction,--provided she's _bred_. I'm not an Austrian. I'm a Briton and a democrat. I feel it is my destiny, if ever I am to become enamoured at all, to become enamoured of the daughter of a miller,--of a rising miller, who has given his daughter advantages. 'Bred, not Born: or the Lady of the Mill'--that shall be the t.i.tle of my humble heart-history. If this woman could prove to me that she was the daughter of a miller, I'm not sure I shouldn't become enamoured of her on the spot. Well, I shall know to-morrow. By this time to-morrow I shall possess her entire _dossier_. It may interest you to learn that I am employing a detective to investigate her."

"A detective? What do you mean?" said Lady Blanchemain.

"A private detective, a female detective, whom, the next time you come to Sant' Alessina, I'll introduce to you," said John.

"What on earth do you mean?" said Lady Blanchemain.

"The most amusing, the most adorable little detective unhung," said he.

"People are all love and laughter whenever they look at her. She'll worm its inmost secrets from my sphinx's heart."

"What pleasure can you take in practising upon a poor old woman who only by a sort of fluke isn't your grandmother?" said she.

"Lady Louisa FitzStephen, Miss Scope," said her servant, opening the door.

VI

The nightingales sang him home, and the moon lighted him, the liquid moon of April and Italy. As he approached the castle, through the purple and silver garden, amid the mysterious sweet odours of the night, he glanced up vaguely at the pavilion beyond the clock. He glanced up vaguely, but next second he was no longer vague.

There, on a low-hung balcony, not ten feet above him, full in the moonlight, stood a figure in white--all in white, with a scarf of white lace thrown over her dark hair. The nightingales sang and sobbed, the moon rained its amethystine fire upon the earth, the earth gave forth its mysterious sweet night odours, and she stood there motionless, and breathed and gazed and listened.

But at the sound of wheels in the avenue, she turned slightly, and looked down. Her face was fair and delicate and pure in the moonlight, and her eyes shone darkly bright.

She turned, and looked down, and her eyes met John's.