I
It was Sunday. It was early morning. It was raining,--a fine quiet,
determined rain, that blurred the lower reaches of the valley, and
entirely hid the mountain-tops, so that one found it hard not to doubt a
little whether they were still there. Near at hand the garden was as if
a thin web of silver had been cast over it, pale and dim, where wet
surfaces reflected the diffused daylight. And just across the Rampio, on
the olive-clad hillside that rose abruptly from its brink, rather an
interesting process was taking place,--the fabrication of clouds, no
less. The hillside, with its rondure of blue-grey foliage, would lie for
a moment quite bare and clear; then, at some high point, a mist would
begin to form, would appear indeed to issue from the earth, as smoke
from a subterranean fire, white smoke with pearly shadows; would thicken
and spread out; would draw together and rise in an irregular spiral
column, curling, swaying, poising, as if uncertain what to do next; and
at last, all at once making up its mind, (how like a younker or a
prodigal!), would go sailing away, straggling away, amorphous, on a puff
of wind, leaving the hillside clear again;--till, presently, the process
would recommence _da capo_.
John and Annunziata, seated together on a marble bench in the shelter of
the great cloister, with its faded frescoes, at the north-eastern
extremity of the castle buildings, had been watching this element-play
for some minutes in silence. But by-and-by Annunziata spoke.
"What makes the cloud come out of the hill like that?" she asked, her
eyes anxiously questioning his. "I have seen it happen many times, but I
could never understand it. There cannot be a fire underneath?"
"If _you_ can't understand it, Mistress Wisdom," responded John, smiling
on her, "you surely mustn't expect a featherpate like me to. Between
ourselves, I don't believe any one can really understand it, though
there's a variety of the human species called scientists who might
pretend they could. It's all a part of that great scheme of miracles by
which God's world goes on, Nature, which nobody can really understand in
the very least. All that the chaps called scientists can really do is to
observe and more or less give names to the miracles. They can't explain
'em."
"It is great pleasure to watch such things," said Annunziata. "It is a
great blessing to be allowed to see a miracle performed with your own
eyes."
"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 shines, 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 association, 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 attitude 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 glass 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. "Mass."
She held out her hand, took John's, and, like a mother, led the meek and
unquestioning young man to his duties.