Early the next morning Mr. Cardan and his hostess left the house and
walked rapidly away through the fields in the direction of the lake.
They had told the old woman that they would be back to a late breakfast.
Mr. Elver was not yet awake; Mr. Cardan had left instructions that he
was not to be called before half-past nine.
The ground was still wet with dew when they set out; the poplar trees
threw shadows longer than themselves. The air was cool; it was a
pleasure to walk. Mr. Cardan strode along at four miles an hour; and
like a diver out of water, like a soaring bird reduced to walk the
earth, Miss Elver trotted along at his side, rolling and hopping as she
walked, as though she were mounted, not on feet, but on a set of
eccentric wheels of different diameters. Her face seemed to shine with
happiness; every now and then she looked at Mr. Cardan with shy
adoration, and if she happened to catch his eye she would blush, turn
away her head and laugh. Mr. Cardan was almost appalled by the extent of
his success and the ease with which it had been obtained. He might make
a slave of the poor creature, might keep her shut up in a rabbit-hutch,
and, provided he showed himself now and again to be worshipped, she
would be perfectly happy. The thought made Mr. Cardan feel strangely
guilty.
“When we’re married,” said Miss Elver suddenly, “shall we have some
children?”
Mr. Cardan smiled rather grimly. “The trouble about children,” he said,
“is that the bears might eat them. You can never be quite sure of bears.
Remember Elisha’s bears and those bad children.”
Miss Elver’s face became thoughtful. She walked on for a long time in
silence.
They came to the lake, lying placid and very bright under the pale
early-morning sky. At the sight of it Miss Elver clapped her hands with
pleasure; she forgot in an instant all her troubles. The fatal
incompatibility between bears and children ceased to preoccupy her.
“What lovely water!” she cried, and bending down she picked up a pebble
from the path and threw it into the lake.
But Mr. Cardan did not permit her to linger. “There’s no time to lose,”
he said, and taking her arm he hurried her on.
“Where are we going to?” asked Miss Elver.
He pointed to the village on the further shore of the lake. “From
there,” he said, “we’ll take some sort of cab or cart.”
The prospect of driving in a cart entirely reconciled Miss Elver to
parting at such short notice with the lake. “That’ll be lovely,” she
declared, and trotted on so fast that Mr. Cardan had to quicken his pace
in order to keep up with her.
While the little carriage was being made ready and the horse put in and
harnessed—hastelessly, as these things are always done in Italy, with
dignity and at leisure—Mr. Cardan went to visit the grocer’s brother.
Now that he had come so far it would be foolish to miss the opportunity
of seeing the treasure. The grocer’s brother was himself a grocer, and
so like his relative that Mr. Cardan could almost fancy it was Miss
Thriplow’s virtuous and simple friend from the hill-top to whom he was
now speaking in the plain. When Mr. Cardan explained his business the
man bowed, wreathed himself in smiles, laughed and blew acetylene into
his face just as his brother had done. He expatiated on the beauty and
the antiquity of his treasure, and when Mr. Cardan begged him to make
haste and show him the sculpture, he would not suffer himself to be
interrupted, but went on lyrically with his description, repeating the
same phrases again and again and gesticulating until he began to sweat.
At last, when he considered Mr. Cardan worked up to a due state of
preliminary enthusiasm, the grocer opened the door at the back of the
shop and mysteriously beckoned to his visitor to follow him. They walked
down a dark passage, through a kitchen full of tumbling children on whom
one had to be careful not to tread, across a little yard and into a
mouldering out-house. The grocer led the way, walking all the time on
tip-toe and speaking only in a whisper—for what reason Mr. Cardan could
not imagine, unless it was to impress him with the profound importance
of the affair and perhaps to suggest that the beauty and antiquity of
the work of art were such that it was only barefoot and in silence that
it should be approached.
“Wait there,” he whispered impressively, as they entered the out-house.
Mr. Cardan waited. The grocer tiptoed across to the further corner of
the shed. Mysteriously draped in sacking, something that might have been
an ambushed man stood motionless in the shadow. The grocer halted in
front of it and, standing a little to one side so as to give Mr. Cardan
an uninterrupted view of the marvel to be revealed, took hold of a
corner of the sacking and with a magnificent dramatic gesture whisked it
off.
There emerged the marble effigy of what in the imagination of a
monumental mason of 1830 figured as a Poet. A slenderer Byron with yet
more hyacinthine hair and a profile borrowed from one of Canova’s
Greeks, he stood, leaning against a truncated column, his marble eyes
turned upwards in pursuit of the flying Muse. A cloak hung lankly from
his shoulders; a vine leaf was all the rest of his costume. On the top
of the truncated column lay a half-opened marble scroll, which the
Poet’s left hand held down for fear it should be blown clean away by the
wind of inspiration. His right, it was evident, had originally poised
above the virgin page a stylus. But the hand, alas, and the whole
forearm almost to the elbow were gone. At the base of the column was a
little square tablet on which, if the figure had ever been put to its
proper monumental use, should have been written the name and claims to
fame of the poet upon whose tomb it was to stand. But the tablet was
blank. At the time this statue was carved there had evidently been a
dearth of lyrists in the principality of Massa Carrara.
“È bellissimo!” said the grocer’s brother, standing back and looking at
it with a connoisseur’s enthusiasm.
“Davvero,” Mr. Cardan agreed. He thought sadly of his recumbent
Etruscan, his sarcophagus by Jacopo della Quercia, his Romanesque demon.
Still, he reflected, even a bas-relief by Giotto would hardly have
brought him five and twenty thousand pounds.
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