Dreaminess was making ready a few private telegrams, breaking
without undue harshness the melancholy news: “Poor Lizzie has ceased
articulating,” she did not think she could improve on it, and indeed
had written it several times in her most temperamental hand, when the
Archduchess had started suddenly cackling about Vienna.
“_Ssssh_, Lizzie--I never can write when people talk!”
“I want Teddywegs.”
“The Countess Yvorra took him for a run round the courtyard.”
“I think I must undertake a convenience next for dogs.... It is
disgraceful they have not got one already, poor creatures,” the
Archduchess crooned accepting the proffered glass.
“Yes, yes, dear,” the Queen exclaimed rising and crossing to the window.
The bitter odour of the oleander flowers outside oppressed the
breathless air and filled the room as with a faint funereal music. So
still a day. Tending the drooping sun-saturated flowers, a gardener
with long ivory arms alone seemed animate.
“Pull up your skirt, Marquise! Pull it up.... It’s dragging, a little,
in the water.”
“_Judica me, Deus_,” in imperious tones, the priest by the bedside
besought: “_et discerne causam meum de gente non sancta. Parce, Domine!
Parce populo tuo--! ne in aeternum irascaris nobis_.”
“A whale! A whale!”
“_Sustinuit anima mea in verbo ejus speravit anima mea in Domino._”
“Elsie?” A look of wondrous happiness overspread the Archduchess’
face--She was wading--wading again among the irises and rushes;
wading, her hand in Princess Elsie’s hand, through a glittering golden
sea, towards the wide horizon.
The plangent cry of a peacock, rose disquietingly from the garden.
“I’m nothing but nerves, doctor,” her Dreaminess lamented, fidgeting
with the crucifix that dangled at her neck upon a chain. _Ultra_
feminine, she disliked that another--even _in extremis_--should absorb
_all_ the limelight.
“A change of scene, ma’am, would be probably beneficial,” Dr Cuncliffe
Babcock replied, eyeing askance the Countess of Tolga who unobtrusively
entered:
“The couturiers attend your pleasure, ma’am,” in impassive undertones
she said: “to fit your mourning.”
“Oh tell them the Queen is too tired to try on now,” her Dreaminess
answered repairing in agitation towards a glass.
“They would come here, ma’am,” the Countess said, pointing persuasively
to the little anteroom of the Archduchess, where two nuns of the
Flaming-Hood were industriously telling their beads.
“----I don’t know why, but this glass refuses to flatter me!”
“_Benedicamus Domino! Ostende nobis Domine misericordiam tuam. Et
salutare tuum da nobis!_”
“Well just a toque,” the Queen sadly assented.
“_Indulgentiam absolutionem et remissionem peccatorum nostrorum tribuat
nobis omnipotens et misericors Dominus._”
“Guess who is at the Ritz, ma’am, this week!” the Countess demurely
murmured.
“Who is at the Ritz this week, I can’t,” the Queen replied.
“_Nobody!_”
“Why how so?”
“The Ambassadress of England, it seems has alarmed the world away. I
gather they mean to prosecute!”
The Archduchess sighed.
“I want mauve sweet-peas,” she listlessly said.
“Her spirit soars; her thoughts are in the _Champs-Elysées_,” the
Countess exclaimed, withdrawing noiselessly to warn the milliners.
“Or in the garden,” the Queen reflected, returning to the window. And
she was standing there, her eyes fixed half wistfully upon the long
ivory arms of the kneeling gardener, when the Angel of Death (who had
sat unmoved throughout the day) arose.
It was decided to fix a period of mourning of fourteen days for the
late Archduchess.
VII
Swans and sunlight. A little fishing boat with coral sails. A lake all
grey and green. Beatitude intense. Consummate calm. It was nice to be
at the Summer-Palace after all.
“The way the air will catch your cheek and make a rose of it,” the
Countess of Tolga breathed. And as none of the company heeded her: “How
sweetly the air takes one’s cheek,” she sighed again.
The post-prandial exercise of the members of the Court through the
palace grounds was almost an institution.
The first half of the mourning prescribed, had as yet not run its
course, but the tongues of the Queen’s ladies had long since made an
end of it.
“I hate dancing with a fat man,” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi was saying:
“for if you dance at all near him, his stomach hits you, while if you
pull away, you catch either the scent of his breath or the hair of his
beard.”
“But, you innocent baby, _all_ big men haven’t beards,” Countess Medusa
Rappa remarked.
“Haven’t they? Never mind. Everything’s so beautiful,” the young girl
inconsequently exclaimed: “Look at that Thistle! and that Bee! O, you
darling!”
“Ah, how one’s face unbends in gardens!” the Countess of Tolga said,
regarding the scene before her, with a faraway pensive glance.
Along the lake’s shore, sheltered from the winds by a ring of wooded
hills, shewed many a proud retreat, mirroring its marble terraces to
the waveless waters of the lake.
Beneath a twin-peaked crag (known locally as the White Mountain whose
slopes frequently would burst forth into patches of garlic that from
the valley resembled snow) nestled the Villa Clement, rented each
season by the Ambassador of the Court of St James, while half-screened
by conifers and rhododendrons, and in the lake itself, was St
Helena--the home and place of retirement of a “fallen” minister of the
Crown.
Countess Medusa Rappa cocked her sunshade; “Whose boat is that,” she
asked, “with the azure oars?”
“It looks nothing but a pea-pod!” the Countess of Tolga declared.
“It belongs to a darling, with delicious lips and eyes like brown
chestnuts,” Mademoiselle de Lambèse informed.
“Ah!... Ah!... Ah!... Ah!...” her colleagues crooned.
“A sailor?”
The Queen’s maid nodded: “There’s a partner, though,” she added, “A
blue-eyed, gashed-cheeked angel....”
Mademoiselle de Nazianzi looked away.
“I love the lake with the white wandering ships,” she sentimentally
stated, descrying in the distance the prince.
It was usually towards this time, the hour of the siesta, that the
lovers would meet and taste their happiness, but, to-day, it seemed
ordained otherwise.
Before the heir apparent had determined whether to advance or retreat,
his father and mother were upon him, attended by two dowagers newly
lunched.
“The song of the pilgrim women, how it haunts me,” one of the dowagers
was holding forth: “I could never tire of that beautiful, beautiful
music! Never tire of it. Ne-ver....”
“Ta, ta, ta, ta,” the Queen vociferated girlishly, slipping her arm
affectionately through that of her son’s.
“How spent you look, my boy.... Those eyes....”
His Weariness grimaced.
“They’ve just been rubbing in Elsie!” he said.
“Who?”
“‘Vasleine’ and ‘Nanny-goat’!”
“Well?”
“Nothing will shake me.”
“What are your objections?”
“She’s so extraordinarily uninteresting!”
“Oh Yousef!” his mother faltered: “_Do you wish to break my heart_?”
“We had always thought you too lacking in initiative,” King William
said (tucking a few long hairs back into his nose) “to marry against
our wishes.”
“They say she walks too wonderfully,” the Queen courageously pursued.
“What? Well?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God for it.”
“And can handle a horse as few others can!”
Prince Yousef closed his eyes.
He had not forgotten how as an undergraduate in England he had come
upon the princess once while out with the hounds. And it was only by a
consummate effort that he was able to efface the sinister impression
she had made--her lank hair falling beneath a man’s felt-hat, her habit
skirt torn to tatters, her full cheeks smeared in blood; the blood, so
it seemed, of her “first” fox.
A shudder seized him.
“No, nothing can possibly shake me,” he murmured again.
With a detached, cold face, the Queen paused to inhale a rose.
(Oh you gardens of Palaces...! How often have you witnessed agitation
and disappointment? You smooth, adorned paths...! How often have you
known the extremes of care ...?)
“It would be better to do away I think next year with that bed of
cinerarias altogether,” the Queen of Pisuerga remarked, “since persons
won’t go round it.”
Traversing the flower plat now, with the air of a black-beetle with a
purpose, was the Countess Yvorra.
“We had supposed you higher-principled, Countess,” her sovereign
admonished.
The Countess slightly flushed.
“I’m looking for groundsel for my birds, Sire,” she said--“for my
little dickies!”
“We understand your boudoir is a sort of menagerie,” His Majesty
affirmed.
The Countess tittered.
“Animals love me,” she archly professed. “Birds perch on my breast if
only I wave.... The other day a sweet red robin came and stayed for
hours...!”
“The Court looks to you to set a high example,” the Queen declared,
focusing quizzically a marble shape of Leda green with moss, for whose
time-corroded plinth the late Archduchess’ toy-terrier was just then
shewing a certain contempt.
The Countess’ long, slightly pulpy fingers strayed nervously towards
the rosary at her thigh.
“With your majesty’s consent,” she said, “I propose a campaign to the
Island.”
“What? And beard the Count?”
“The salvation of one so fallen, in my estimation should be worth
hereafter (at the present rate of exchange, but the values vary) ... a
Plenary perpetual-indulgence: I therefore,” the Countess said, with an
upward fleeting glance (and doubtless guileless of intention of irony),
“feel it my _duty_ to do what I can.”
“I trust you will take a bodyguard when you go to St Helena?”
“And pray tell Count Cabinet from us,” the King looked implacable: “we
forbid him to serenade the Court this year! or to throw himself into
the Lake again or to make himself a nuisance!”
“He was over early this morning, Willie,” the Queen retailed: “I saw
him from a window. Fishing, or feigning to! And with white kid gloves,
and a red carnation.”
“Let us catch him stepping ashore!” the King displayed displeasure.
“And as usual the same mignon youth had the charge of the tiller.”
“I could tell a singular story of that young man,” the Countess said:
“for he was once a choir-boy at the Blue Jesus. But, perhaps, I would
do better to spare your ears....”
“You would do better, a good deal, to spare my cinerarias,” her
Dreaminess murmured, sauntering slowly on.
Sun so bright, trees so green, it was a perfect day. Through the
glittering fronds of the palms shone the lake like a floor of silver
glass strewn with white sails.
“It’s odd,” the King observed, giving the dog Teddywegs a sly prod with
his cane, “how he follows Yousef.”
“He seems to know!” the Queen replied.
A remark that so annoyed the Prince that he curtly left the garden.
VIII
But this melancholy period of _crêpe_, a time of idle secrets, and
unbosomings, was to prove fatal to the happiness of Mademoiselle de
Nazianzi. She now heard she was not the first in the Prince’s life, and
that most of the Queen’s maids, indeed, had had identical experiences
with her own. She furthermore learned, amid ripples of laughter, of
her lover’s relations with the Marquesa Pizzi-Parma and of his light
dealings with the dancer April Flowers, a negress (to what depths??)
at a time when he was enjoying the waxen favours of the wife of his
Magnificence, the Master of the Horse.
Chilled to the point of numbness, the mortified girl had scarcely
winced, and when on repairing to her room a little later, she had
found his Weariness wandering in the corridor on the chance of a
surreptitious kiss, she had bolted past him without look, or word, and
sharply closed her door.
The Court had returned to colours when she opened it again, and such
had been the trend of her meditations, that her initial steps were
directed, with deliberate austerity, towards the basilica of the Palace.
Except for the Countess Yvorra, with an _écharpe de décence_ drawn over
her hair, there was no one in it.
“I thank Thee God for this _escape_,” she murmured falling
to her knees before the silver branches of a cross: “It is
terrible; for I did so love him .........................
...............................................
..................................................... and oh how could
he ever with _a negress_? .......................................
...................................................... Pho
..................................... ........... I fear this
complete upset has considerably aged me............................
....... But to Thee I cling........................................
...................................................................
................................................ Preserve me at all
times from the toils of the wicked, and forgive him, as _I_ hope to
forgive him soon.” Then kindling several candles with a lingering
hand, she shaped her course towards the Kennels, called Teddywegs to
her and started, with an aching heart, for a walk.
It was a day of heavy somnolence. Skirting the Rosery where gardeners
with their slowly moving rakes were tending the sandy paths, she chose
a neglected footway that descended towards the lake. Indifferent to
the vivacity of Teddywegs, who would race on a little before her, then
wait with leonine accouchments of head until she had almost reached
him, when he would prick an ear and spring forward with a yap of
exhortation, she proceeded leisurely, and with many a pause, wrapped in
her own mournful thoughts.
Alack! Among the court circle there was no one to whom in her
disillusion she could look for solace, and her spirit yearned for
Sister Ursula, and the Convent of the Flaming-Hood.
Wending her way amid the tall trees, she felt she had never cared for
Yousef as she had for Ursula ... and broodingly, in order to ease her
heart, she began comparing the two together as she walked along.
After all what had he ever said that was not either commonplace or
foolish? Whereas Sister Ursula’s talk was invariably pointed; and often
indeed so delicately, that words seemed almost too crude a medium to
convey her ethereal meanings, and she would move her evocative hands,
and flash her aura, and it was no fault of hers if you hadn’t a peep of
the beyond. And the infinite tenderness of her least caress. Yousef’s
lips had seldom conveyed to hers the spell of Ursula’s; and once indeed
lately, when he had kissed her, there had been an unsavoury aroma of
tobacco and _charcuterie_, which, to deal with, had required both
tact and courage.... Ah dear Hood! What harmony life had held within.
Unscrupulous and deceiving men might lurk around its doors (they often
did) coveting the chaste, but Old Jane, the porteress, would open to no
man beyond the merest crack. And how right they were the nuns in their
mistrust of man! Sister Ursula one day had declared, in uplifted mood,
that “marriage was obscene.” Was it--? ...??... Perhaps it might be--!
How appalling if it was!
She had reached the lake.
Beneath a sky as white as platinum it lay, pearly, dove-like,
scintillating capriciously where a heat-shrouded sun kindled its torpid
waters into fleeting diamonds. A convulsive breeze strayed gratefully
from the opposite shore, descending from the hills that rose up all
veiled, and without detail, against the brilliant whiteness of the
morning.
Sinking down upon the shingle by an upturned boat, she heaved a brief
sigh, and drawing from her vanity-case the last epistles of the Prince,
she began methodically to arrange them in their proper sequence.
(_1_) “What is the matter with my Dearest Girl?”
(_2_) “My own tender little Lita, I do not understand--”
(_3_) “Darling, what’s this--?”
(_4_) “Beloved one, I swear--”
(_5_) “Your cruel silence--”
If published in a dainty brochure format about the time of his
Coronation, they ought to realise no contemptible sum, and the proceeds
might go to Charity, she reflected, thrusting them back again carefully
into the bag.
Then, finding the shingle too hard through her thin gown to remain
seated long, she got up, and ran a mournful race with Teddywegs along
the shore.
Not far along the lake was the “village,” with the Hôtel d’Angleterre
et du Lac, its stucco, belettered-walls professing: “Garages, Afternoon
Tea, Modern Comfort!” Flitting by this, and the unpretentious pier
(where long, blonde fishing-nets lay drying in the sun), it was a
relief to reach the remoter plage beyond.
Along the banks stretched vast brown carpets of corn and rye, broken by
an occasional olive-garth, beneath whose sparse shade the heavy-eyed
oxen blinked and whisked their tails, under the attacks of the
water-gnats that were swarming around.
Musing on Negresses--and Can-Can dancers in particular--she strolled
along a strand all littered with shells and little jewel-like stones.
The sun shone down more fiercely now, and soon, for freshness sake, she
was obliged to take to the fields.
Passing among the silver drooping olives, relieved here and there by a
stone-pine, or slender cypress-tree eternally green, she sauntered on,
often lured aside to pluck the radiant wild-flowers by the way. On the
banks the pinkest cyclamens were in bloom, and cornflowers of the hue
of paradise, and fine-stemmed poppies flecked with pink.
“Pho! A Negress ...” she murmured, following the flight of some
waterfowl towards the opposite shore.
The mists had fallen from the hills, revealing old woods wrapped in the
blue doom of Summer.
Beyond those glowing heights, towards this hour, the nuns, each in her
cool, shuttered, cell, would be immersed in noontide prayer.
“Ursula--for thee!” she sighed, proffering her bouquet in the direction
of the town.
A loud splash ... the sight of a pair of delicate legs (mocking the
Law’s requirements under the Modesty Act as relating to bathers)....
Mademoiselle de Nazianzi turned and fled. She had recognised _the
Prince_.[5]
IX
And in this difficult time of spiritual distress, made more trying
perhaps because of the blazing midsummer days, and long, pent feverish
nights, Mademoiselle de Nazianzi turned in her tribulation towards
religion.
The Ecclesiastical set at Court, composed of some six, or so,
ex-Circes, under the command of the Countess Yvorra, were only too
ready to welcome her, and invitations to meet Monsignor this, or
“Father” that, who constantly were being _coaxed_ from their musty
sacristies and wan-faced acolytes in the capital, in order that they
might officiate at Masses, Confessions and Breakfast-parties _à la
fourchette_, were lavished daily upon the bewildered girl.
Messages, and hasty informal lightly-pencilled notes, too, would
frequently reach her; such as: “I shall be pouring out cocoa after
dinner in bed. Bring your biscuits and join me!” ... or a rat-a-tat
from a round-eyed page and: “The Countess’ comp’ts and she’d take it a
Favour if you can make a ‘Station’ with her in chapel later on,” or:
“The Marchioness will be birched to-morrow, and _not_ to-day.”
O, the charm, the flavour of the religious world! Where match it for
interest or variety!
An emotion approaching sympathy had arisen, perhaps a trifle
incongruously, between the injured girl and the Countess Yvorra, and
before long, to the amusement of the sceptical element of the Court,
the Countess and her Confessor, Father Nostradamus, might often be
observed in her society.
“I need a cage-companion, Father, for my little bird,” the Countess one
evening said, as they were ambling, all the three of them before Office
up and down the perfectly tended paths: “ought it to be of the same
species and sex, or does it matter? For as I said to myself just now
(while listening to a thrush), _All_ birds are His creatures.”
The priest discreetly coughed.
“Your question requires reflection,” he said: “What is the bird?”
“A hen canary!--and with a voice, Father! Talk of soul!!”
“H--m ... a thrush and a canary, I would not myself advise.”
Mademoiselle de Nazianzi tittered.
“Why not let it go?” she asked, turning her eyes towards the
window-panes of the palace, that glanced like rows of beaten-gold in
the evening sun.
“A hawk might peck it!” the Countess returned, looking up as if for
one, into a sky as imaginative, and as dazzling as Shelley poetry.
“Even the Court,” Father Nostradamus ejaculated wryly, “will peck at
times.”
The Countess’ shoulder-blades stiffened.
“After over thirty years,” she said, “I find Court-life _pathetic_....”
“Pathetic?”
“Tragically pathetic....”
Mademoiselle de Nazianzi considered wistfully the wayward outline of
the hills.
“I would like to escape from it all for a while,” she said, “and
travel.”
“I must hunt you out a pamphlet, by and by, dear child, on the ‘Dangers
of Wanderlust.’”
“The Great Wall of China and the Bay of Naples! It seems so frightful
never to have seen them!”
“I have never seen the Great Wall, either,” the Countess said, “and
I don’t suppose, my dear, I ever shall; though I once did spend a
fortnight in Italy.”
“Tell me about it.”
The Countess became reminiscent.
“In Venice,” she said, “the indecent movements of the Gondolieri quite
affected my health, and, in consequence, I fell a prey to a sharp
nervous fever. My temperature rose and it rose, ah, yes ... until I
became quite ill. At last I said to my maid (she was an English girl
from _Wales_, and almost equally as sensitive as me): ‘Pack.... Away!’
And we left in haste for Florence. Ah, and Florence, too, I regret to
say I found very far from what it ought to have been!!! I had a window
giving on the Arno, and so I could _observe_.... I used to see some
curious sights! I would not care to scathe your ears, my Innocent,
by an inventory of one half of the wantonness that went on; enough to
say the tone of the place forced me to fly to Rome, where beneath the
shadow of dear St Peter’s I grew gradually less distressed.”
“Still, I should like, all the same, to travel!” Mademoiselle de
Nazianzi exclaimed, with a sad little snatch of a smile.
“We will ask the opinion of Father Geordie Picpus, when he comes again.”
“It would be more fitting,” Father Nostradamus murmured (professional
rivalry leaping to his eye), “if Father Picpus kept himself free of the
limelight a trifle more!”
“Often I fear our committees would be corvés without him....”
“Tchut.”
“He is very popular ... too popular, perhaps ...” the Countess
admitted. “I remember on one occasion in the Blue Jesus, witnessing
the Duchess of Quaranta and Madame Ferdinand Fishbacher, fight like
wild cats as to which should gain his ear--(any girl might envy Father
Geordie his ear)--at Confession next. The odds seemed fairly equal,
until the Duchess gave the Fishbacher-woman, such a violent push--(well
down from behind, in the crick of the joints)--that she overturned The
Confessional Box, with Father Picpus within: and when we scared ladies,
standing by, had succeeded in dragging him out, he was too shaken,
naturally as you can gather, to absolve anyone else _that_ day.”
“He has been the object of so many unseemly incidents, that one can
scarcely recall them all,” Father Nostradamus exclaimed, stooping to
pick up a dropped pocket-handkerchief with “remembrance” knots tied to
three of the corners.
“Alas.... Court life is not uplifting,” the Countess said again,
contemplating her muff of _self-made_ lace, with a half-vexed forehead.
What that muff contained was a constant problem for conjecture; but
it was believed by more than one of the maids-in-waiting to harbour
“goody” books and martyrs’ bones.
“By generous deeds and Brotherly love,” Father Nostradamus exclaimed,
“we should endeavour to rise above it!”
With the deftness of a virtuoso, the Countess seized, and crushed with
her muff, a pale-winged passing gnat.
“Before Life,” she murmured, “that saddest thing of all, was thrust
upon us, I believe I was an angel....”
Father Nostradamus passed a musing hand across his brow.
“It may be,” he replied, “and it very well may be,” he went on, “that
our ante-nativity was a little more brilliant, a little more _h--m_
...; and there is nothing unorthodox in thinking so.”
“O what did I do then to lose my wings?? What did I ever say to Them?!
Father, Father. How did I annoy God? Why did He put me here?”