"My romance is over, my April dream is ended," said the Princess, with
an air, perhaps a feint, of listless melancholy, to Frau Brandt.
"What mean you?" asked Frau Brandt, unmoved.
"My cobbler's son has disappeared--has vanished in a blaze of glory,"
her Serene Highness explained, and laughed.
"I don't understand," said Frau Brandt. "He has not left Sant'
Alessina?"
"No, but he isn't a cobbler's son at all--he's merely been masquerading
as one--his name is not Brown, Jones, or Robinson--his name is the
high-sounding name of Blanchemain, and he's heir to an English peerage."
"Ah, so? He is then noble?" Frau Brandt inferred, raising her eyes, with
satisfaction.
"As noble as need be. An English peer is marriageable. So here's adieu
to my cottage in the air."
"Here's good riddance to it," said Frau Brandt.
That evening, at the hour of sunset, Maria Dolores met John in the
garden.
"You had a visitor this afternoon," she announced. "A most inspiritingly
young old lady, as soft and white as a powder-puff, in a carriage that
was like a coach-and-four. Lady Blanchemain. She is leaving to-morrow
for England. She desired me to give you her farewell blessing."
"It will be doubly precious to me by reason of the medium through which
it comes," said John, with his courtliest obeisance.
There was a little pause, during which she looked at the western sky.
But presently, "Why did you tell me you had an uncle who was a farmer?"
she asked, beginning slowly to pace down the pathway.
"Did I tell you that? I suppose I had a boastful fit upon me," John
replied.
"But it very much misled me," said Maria Dolores.
"Oh, it's perfectly true," said John.
"You are the heir to a peerage," said Maria Dolores.
John had a gesture.
"There you are," he said; "and my uncle, the peer, spends much of his
time and most of his money breeding sheep and growing turnips. If that
isn't a farmer, I should like to know what is."
"I hope you displayed less reticence regarding your station in the world
to that woman you were in love with," said she.
"That woman I _was_ in love with?" John caught her up. "That woman I
_am_ in love with, please."
"Oh? Are you still in love with her?" Maria Dolores wondered. "It is so
long since you have spoken of her, I thought your heart was healed."
"If I have not spoken of her, it has been because I was under the
impression that you had tacitly forbidden me to do so," John informed
her.
"So I had," she admitted. "But I find that there is such a thing--as
being too well obeyed."
She brought out her last words, after the briefest possible suspension,
hurriedly, in a voice that quailed a little, as if in terror of its own
audacity. John, with tingling pulses, turned upon her. But she,
according to her habit at such times, refused him her eyes. He could
see, though, that her eyelashes trembled.
"Oh," he cried, "I love her so much, I need her so, I suppose I shall
end by doing the dishonourable thing."
"Did you ever tell her that you were Lord Blanchemain's heir?" she
asked.
"I never thought of it. Why should I?" said John.
"When you were bemoaning your poverty, as an obstacle to marriage, you
might have remembered that your birth counted for something. With us
Austrians, for example, birth counts for almost everything,--for
infinitely more than money."
"I think," said John, as one impersonally generalizing, "that a
fortune-hunter with a tuft is the least admirable variety of that
animal. I wish you could see what beautiful little rose-white ears she
has, and the lovely way in which her dark hair droops about them."
"How long ago was it," mused she, "that love first made people fancy
they saw beauties which had no real existence?"
"Oh, the moment you see a thing, it acquires real existence," John
returned. "The act of seeing is an act of creation. The thing you see
has real existence on your retina and in your mind, if nowhere else, and
that is the realest sort of real existence."
"Then she must thank you as the creator of her 'rose-white' ears,"
laughed Maria Dolores. "I wonder whether that sunset has any real
existence, and whether it is really as splendid as it seems."
The west had become a vast sea of gold, a pure and placid sea of
many-tinted gold, bounded and intersected and broken into innumerable
wide bays and narrow inlets by great cloud-promontories, purple and rose
and umber. Directly opposite, just above the crest-line of the hills,
hung the nearly full moon, pale as a mere phantom of itself.
And from somewhere in the boscage at the garden's end came a
lool-lool-lool-lioo-liô, deep and long-drawn, liquid and complaining,
which one knew to be the preliminary piping-up of Philomel.
"If some things," said John, "derive their beauty from the eye of the
beholder, the beauty of other things is determined by the presence or
absence of the person you long to share all beautiful visions with. The
sky, the clouds, the whole air and earth, this evening, seem to me
beauty in its ultimate perfection."
Maria Dolores softly laughed, softly, softly. And for a long time, by
the marble balustrade that guarded this particular terrace of the
garden, they stood in silence. The western gold burned to red, and more
sombre red; the cloud-promontories gloomed purpler; the pale moon
kindled, and shone like ice afire, with its intense cold brilliancy; the
olive woods against the sky lay black; a score of nightingales, near and
far, were calling and sobbing and exulting; and two human spirits
yearned with the mystery of love.
"My income," said John, all at once, brusquely coming to earth, "is
exactly six hundred pounds a year. I suppose two people _could_ live on
that, though I'm dashed if I see how. Of course we couldn't live in
England, where that infernal future peerage would put us under a
thousand obligations; but I dare say we might find a garret here in
Italy. The question is, would she be willing, or have I any right to
ask her, to marry me, on the condition of leaving her own money
untouched, and living with me on mine?
"Apropos of future peerages and things," said Maria Dolores, "do you
happen to know whether she has any rank of her own to keep up?"
"I don't care twopence about her rank," said John.
"Do you happen to know her name?" she asked.
"I know what I wish her name was," John promptly answered. "I wish to
Heaven it was Blanchemain."
Maria Dolores gazed, pensive, at the moon. "He does not even know her
name," she remarked, on a key of meditation, "though he fears," she
sadly shook her head, "he fears it may be Smitti."
"Oh, I say!" cried John, wincing, with a kind of sorry giggle; and I
don't know whether he looked or felt the more sheepish. His face showed
every signal of humiliation, he tugged nervously at his beard, but his
eyes, in spite of him, his very blue blue eyes were full of vexed
amusement.
The bell in the clock-tower struck eight.
"There--it is your hour for going to Annunziata," said Maria Dolores.
"You have not answered my question?" said John.
"I will think about it," said she.