IV

Half-way down the long straight avenue of ilex-trees that led from the

castle to the principal entrance of the garden, Annunziata, in her

pale-grey pinafore (that was so like a peplum), with her hair waving

about her shoulders, was curled up in the corner of a marble bench,

gazing with great intentness at a white flower that lay in her lap. It

was the warmest and the peacefullest moment of the afternoon. The sun

shone steadily; not a leaf stirred, not a shadow wavered; and the

intermittent piping of a blackbird, somewhere in the green world

overhead, seemed merely to give a kind of joyous rhythm to the silence.

"Mercy upon me! Who ever saw so young a maiden so deeply lost in

thought!" exclaimed a voice.

Annunziata, her reverie thus disturbed, raised a pair of questioning

eyes.

A lady was standing before her, smiling down upon her, a lady in a frock

of lilac-coloured muslin, with a white sunshade.

Annunziata, who, when she liked, could be the very pink of formal

politeness, rose, dropped a courtesy, and said: "Buon giorno,

Signorina."

"Buon giorno," responded the smiling lady. "Buon giorno--and a penny for

your thoughts. But I'm sure you could never, never tell what it was you

were thinking so hard about."

"Scusi," said Annunziata. "I was trying to think of the name of this

flower." She stooped and picked up the flower, which had slipped from

her lap to the ground when she rose. Then she held it at arm's length,

for inspection.

"Oh?" asked the lady, smiling at the flower, as she had smiled at its

possessor. "Isn't it a narcissus?"

"Yes," said Annunziata. "It is a narcissus. But I was trying to think of

its particular name."

The lady looked as if she did not quite understand. "Its particular

name?"

"It is a narcissus," explained Annunziata, "just as I am a girl. But it

must also have its particular name, just as I have mine. It is a soul

doing its Purgatory--a very good soul. If you are very good, then, when

you die, you do your Purgatory as a flower. But it is not such an easy

Purgatory--oh, no. For look: the flower is beautiful, but it is blind,

and cannot see; and it is fragrant, but it cannot smell; and people

admire it and praise it, but it is deaf, and cannot hear. It can only

wait, wait, wait, and think of God. But it is a short Purgatory. A few

days, and the flower will fade, and the soul will be released. I think

this flower's name is Cecilia, it is so white."

The smile in the lady's eyes had brightened, as she listened; and now

she gave a little laugh, a little, light, musical, pleased and friendly

laugh.

"Yes," she said. "I have sometimes wondered myself whether flowers might

not be the Purgatory of very good souls. I am glad to learn from you

that it is true. And yes, I should think that this flower's name was

sure to be Cecilia. Cecilia suits it perfectly. What, if one may ask, is

_your_ particular name?"

"Mariannunziata," said its bearer, not to make two bites of a cherry.

The lady's eyes grew round. "Dear me! A little short name like that?"

she marvelled.

"No," returned Annunziata, with dignity. "My name in full is longer. My

name in full is Giuliana Falconieri Maria Annunziata Casalone. Is that

not long enough?"

"Yes," the lady admitted, "that is just long enough." And she laughed

again.

"What is _your_ name?" inquired Annunziata.

"My name is Maria Dolores," the lady answered. "You see, we are both

named Maria."

"Of course," said Annunziata. "All Christians should be named Maria."

"So they should," agreed the lady. "Do you ever tell people how old you

are?"

"Yes," said Annunziata, "if they wish to know. Why not?"

The smile in the lady's eyes shone brighter than ever. "Do you think you

could be persuaded to tell me?"

"With pleasure," said Annunziata. "I am eleven years and five months.

And you?"

"I am just twice as old. I am twenty-two years and ten months. So, when

you are fifty, how old shall I be?"

"No," said Annunziata, shaking her head. "That trick has been tried with

me before. My friend Prospero has tried it with me. You hope I will say

that you will be a hundred. But it is not so. When I am fifty, you will

be sixty-one, going on sixty-two."

Still again the lady laughed, apparently with great amusement.

"What a little bundle of wisdom you are!" she exclaimed.

"Yes. My friend Prospero also says that I am wise," answered Annunziata.

"I like to see you laugh," she mentioned, looking critically at the face

above her. "You have beautiful teeth, they are so white and shining, and

so small, and your lips are so red."

"Oh," said the lady, laughing more merrily than ever. "Then you must be

very entertaining, and I will laugh a great deal."

Still looking critically at the lady's face, "Are you not," demanded

Annunziata, "the person who has come to visit the Signora Brandi?"

"Signora Brandi?" The lady considered. "Yes, I suppose I must be. At any

rate, I am the person who has come to visit Frau Brandt."

"Frao Branta? We call her Signora Brandi here," said Annunziata. "Are

you related to her?"

"No," said the lady, who always seemed inclined to laugh, though

Annunziata had no consciousness of being very entertaining. "I am not

related to her. I am only her friend."

"She is an Austrian," said Annunziata. "This castle belongs to

Austrians. Once upon a time, very long ago, before I was born, all this

country belonged to Austrians. Are you, too, an Austrian?"

"Yes." The lady nodded. "I, too, am an Austrian."

"And yet," remarked Annunziata, "you speak Italian just as I do."

"It is very good of you to say so," laughed the lady.

"No--it is the truth," said Annunziata.

"But is it not good to tell the truth?" the lady asked.

"No," said Annunziata. "It is only a duty." And again she shook her

head, slowly, darkly, with an effect of philosophic melancholy. "That is

very strange and very hard," she pointed out. "If you do not do that

which is your duty, it is bad, and you are punished. But if you do do

it, that is not good,--it is only what you ought to do, and you are not

rewarded." And she fetched her breath in the saddest of sad little

sighs. Then, briskly covering her cheerfulness, "And you speak English,

besides," she said.

"Oh?" wondered the lady. "Are you a clairvoyante? How do you know that I

speak English?"

"My friend Prospero told me so," said Annunziata.

"Your friend Prospero?" the lady repeated. "You quote your friend

Prospero very often. Who is your friend Prospero?"

"He is a signore," said Annunziata. "He has seen you, he has seen your

form, in the garden and in the olive wood."

"Oh," said the lady.

"And I suppose he must have heard you speak English," Annunziata added.

"He lives at the presbytery."

"And where, by-the-by, do _you_ live?" asked the lady.

"I live at the presbytery too," said Annunziata. "I am the niece of the

parroco. I am the orphan of his only brother. My friend Prospero lives

with us as a boarder. He is English."

"Indeed?" said the lady. "Prospero is a very odd name for an

Englishman."

"Prospero is not his name," said Annunziata. "His name is Gian. That is

English for Giovanni."

"But why, then," the lady puzzled, "do you call him Prospero?"

"Prospero is a name I have given him," explained Annunziata. "One day I

told his fortune. I can tell fortunes--with olive-stones, with

playing-cards, or from the lines of the hand. I will tell you yours, if

you wish. Well, one day, I told Prospero's, and everything came out so

prosperously for him, I have called him Prospero ever since. He will be

rich, though he is poor; and he will marry a dark woman, who will also

be rich; and they will have many, many children, and live in peace to

the end of their lives. But there!" Annunziata cried out suddenly, with

excitement, waving the hand that held her narcissus. "There is my friend

Prospero now, coming in the gig."

Down the avenue, sure enough, a gig was coming, a sufficiently shabby,

ancient gig, drawn, however, at a very decent pace by a very

decent-looking horse, and driven by John Blanchemain.

"_Ciao_, Prospero!" called Annunziata, as he passed.

And John took off his hat, a modish Panama, and bowed and smiled to her

and to the lady. And one adept in reading the meaning of smiles might

have read three or four separate meanings in that smile of his. It

seemed to say to Annunziata, "Ah, you rogue! So already you have waylaid

her, and made her acquaintance." To the lady: "I congratulate you upon

your companion. Isn't she a diverting little monkey?" To himself: "And I

congratulate _you_, my dear, upon being clothed and in your right mind,

and upon having a proper hat to make your bow with." And to the universe

at large "By Jove, she _is_ good-looking. Standing there before that

marble bench, in the cool green light, under the great ilexes, with her

lilac frock and her white sunshade, and Annunziata all in grey beside

her,--what a subject for a painting, if only there were any painters

who knew how to paint!"

"He is going to a dinner at Roccadoro," said Annunziata, while John's

back grew small and smaller in the distance. "Did you see, he had a

portmanteau under the seat? He is going to a dinner of ceremony, and he

will have his costume of ceremony in the portmaneau. I wonder what he

will bring back with him for me. When he goes to Roccadoro he always

brings something back for me. Last time it was a box of chocolate

cigars. I should like to see him in his costume of ceremony. Wouldn't

you?"

But the lady merely laughed. And then, taking Annunziata's chin in her

hand, she looked down into her big clear eyes, and said, "I must be off

now, to join Signora Brandi. But I cannot leave without telling you how

glad I am to have met you, and what pleasure I have derived from your

conversation. I hope we shall meet often. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Signorina," said Annunziata, becoming formally polite again.

"I shall always be at your service." And she dropped another courtesy.

"If you will come to see me at the presbytery," she hospitably added,

"I will show you my tame kid."

"You are all that is most kind," responded the lady, and went off

smiling towards the castle.

Annunziata curled herself up in her old corner of the marble bench, and

appeared to relapse into profound thought.

V

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

sunshine; 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 pass

entirely in the street: men in their shirt 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-shell, 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," assented 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. 'Brèd, not Born: or the Lady of the Mill'--that shall be the

title 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.