Part 31

“But then--? Oh, please advise me seriously. What can I do? What can a mere unlearned woman do?”

The Cardinal took snuff. He gazed into his amethyst again, beaming at it, as if he could descry something deliciously comical in its depths. He gave a soft little laugh. At last he looked up.

“Well,” he responded slowly, “in an extremity, I should think that a mere unlearned woman might, if she made an effort, ask the heretic to dinner. I 'll come down and stay with you for a day or two, and you can ask him to dinner.”

“You're a perfect old darling,” cried Beatrice, with rapture. “He'll never be able to resist you.”'

“Oh, I 'm not undertaking to discuss theology with him,” said the Cardinal. “But one must do something in exchange for a couple of hundred lire--so I'll come and give you my moral support.”

“You shall have your lovely silver snuffbox, all the same,” said she.

Mark the predestination!

XVI

“CASTEL VENTIROSE, “August 21 st.

“DEAR Mr. Marchdale: It will give me great pleasure if you can dine with us on Thursday evening next, at eight o'clock, to meet my uncle, Cardinal Udeschini, who is staying here for a few days.

“I have been re-reading 'A Man of Words.' I want you to tell me a great deal more about your friend, the author.

Yours sincerely, BEATRICE DI SANTANGIOLO.”

It is astonishing, what men will prize, what men will treasure. Peter Marchdale, for example, prizes, treasures, (and imagines that he will always prize and treasure), the perfectly conventional, the perfectly commonplace little document, of which the foregoing is a copy.

The original is written in rather a small, concentrated hand, not overwhelmingly legible perhaps, but, as we say, “full of character,” on paper lightly blueish, in the prescribed corner of which a tiny ducal coronet is embossed, above the initials “B. S.” curiously interlaced in a cypher.

When Peter received it, and (need I mention?) approached it to his face, he fancied he could detect just a trace, just the faintest reminder, of a perfume--something like an afterthought of orris. It was by no means anodyne. It was a breath, a whisper, vague, elusive, hinting of things exquisite, intimate of things intimately feminine, exquisitely personal. I don't know how many times he repeated that manoeuvre of conveying the letter to his face; but I do know that when I was privileged to inspect it, a few months later, the only perfume it retained was an unmistakable perfume of tobacco.

I don't know, either, how many times he read it, searched it, as if secrets might lie perdu between the lines, as if his gaze could warm into evidence some sympathetic ink, or compel a cryptic sub-intention from the text itself.

Well, to be sure, the text had cryptic subintentions; but these were as far as may be from any that Peter was in a position to conjecture. How could he guess, for instance, that the letter was an instrument, and he the victim, of a Popish machination? How could he guess that its writer knew as well as he did who was the author of “A Man of Words”?

And then, all at once, a shade of trouble of quite another nature fell upon his mind. He frowned for a while in silent perplexity. At last he addressed himself to Marietta.

“Have you ever dined with a cardinal?” he asked.

“No, Signorino,” that patient sufferer replied.

“Well, I'm in the very dickens of a quandary--son' proprio nel dickens d'un imbarazzo.” he informed her.

“Dickens--?” she repeated.

“Si--Dickens, Carlo, celebre autore inglese. Why not?” he asked.

Marietta gazed with long-suffering eyes at the horizon.

“Or, to put it differently,” Peter resumed, “I've come all the way from London with nothing better than a dinner jacket in my kit.”

“Dina giacca? Cosa e?” questioned Marietta.

“No matter what it is--the important thing is what it is n't. It is n't a dress-coat.”

“Non e un abito nero,” said Marietta, seeing that he expected her to say something.