Part 38

“I believe it will never be four o'clock again,” he said, in despair, finally; and once more had out his watch. It was half-past three. He scowled at the instrument's bland white face. “You have no bowels, no sensibilities--nothing but dry little methodical jog-trot wheels and pivots!” he exclaimed, flying to insult for relief. “You're as inhuman as a French functionary. Do you call yourself a sympathetic comrade for an impatient man?” He laid it open on his rustic table, and waited through a last eternity. At a quarter to four he crossed the river. “If I am early--tant pis!” he decided, choosing the lesser of two evils, and challenging Fate.

He crossed the river, and stood for the first time in the grounds of Ventirose--stood where she had been in the habit of standing, during their water-side colloquies. He glanced back at his house and garden, envisaging them for the first time, as it were, from her point of view. They had a queer air of belonging to an era that had passed, to a yesterday already remote. They looked, somehow, curiously small, moreover--the garden circumscribed, the two-storied house, with its striped sunblinds, poor and petty. He turned his back upon them--left them behind. He would have to come home to them later in the day, to be sure; but then everything would be different. A chapter would have added itself to the history of the world; a great event, a great step forward, would have definitely taken place. He would have been received at Ventirose as a friend. He would be no longer a mere nodding acquaintance, owing even that meagre relationship to the haphazard of propinquity. The ice-broken, if you will, but still present in abundance--would have been gently thawed away. One era had passed; but then a new era would have begun.

So he turned his back upon Villa F'loriano, and set off, high-hearted, up the wide lawns, under the bending trees--whither, on four red-marked occasions, he had watched her disappear--towards the castle, which faced him in its vast irregular picturesqueness. There were the oldest portions, grimly mediaeval, a lakeside fortress, with ponderous round towers, meurtrieres, machiolations, its grey stone walls discoloured in fantastic streaks and patches by weather-stains and lichens, or else shaggily overgrown by creepers. Then there were later portions, rectangular, pink-stuccoed, with rusticated work at the corners, and, on the blank spaces between the windows, quaint allegorical frescoes, faded, half washed-out. And then there were entirely modern-looking portions, of gleaming marble, with numberless fanciful carvings, spires, pinnacles, reliefs--wonderfully light, gay, habitable, and (Peter thought) beautiful, in the clear Italian atmosphere, against the blue Italian sky.

“It's a perfect house for her,” he said. “It suits her--like an appropriate garment; it almost seems to express her.”

And all the while, as he proceeded, her voice kept sounding in his ears; scraps of her conversation, phrases that she had spoken, kept coming back to him.

One end of the long, wide marble terrace had been arranged as a sort of out-of-door living-room. A white awning was stretched overhead; warm-hued rugs were laid on the pavement; there were wicker lounging-chairs, with bright cushions, and a little table, holding books and things.

The Duchessa rose from one of the lounging-chairs, and came forward, smiling, to meet him.

She gave him her hand--for the first time.

It was warm--electrically warm; and it was soft--womanly soft; and it was firm, alive--it spoke of a vitality, a temperament. Peter was sure, besides, that it would be sweet to smell; and he longed to bend over it, and press it with his lips. He might almost have done so, according to Italian etiquette. But, of course, he simply bowed over it, and let it go.

“Mi trova abbandonata,” she said, leading the way back to the terrace-end. There were notes of a peculiar richness in her voice, when she spoke Italian; and she dwelt languorously on the vowels, and rather slurred the consonants, lazily, in the manner Italian women have, whereby they give the quality of velvet to their tongue. She was not an Italian woman; Heaven be praised, she was English: so this was just pure gain to the sum-total of her graces. “My uncle and my niece have gone to the village. But I 'm expecting them to come home at any moment now--and you'll not have long, I hope, to wait for your snuff.”

She flashed a whimsical little smile into his eyes. Then she returned to her wicker chair, glancing an invitation at Peter to place himself in the one facing her. She leaned back, resting her head on a pink silk cushion.

Peter, no doubt, sent up a silent prayer that her uncle and her niece might be detained at the village for the rest of the afternoon. By her niece he took her to mean Emilia: he liked her for the kindly euphemism. “What hair she has!” he thought, admiring the loose brown masses, warm upon their background of pink silk.

“Oh, I'm inured to waiting,” he replied, with a retrospective mind for the interminable waits of that interminable day.

The Duchessa had taken a fan from the table, and was playing with it, opening and shutting it slowly, in her lap. Now she caught Peter's eyes examining it, and she gave it to him. (My own suspicion is that Peter's eyes had been occupied rather with the hands that held the fan, than with the fan itself--but that's a detail.)

“I picked it up the other day, in Rome,” she said. “Of course, it's an imitation of the French fans of the last century, but I thought it pretty.”

It was of white silk, that had been thinly stained a soft yellow, like the yellow of faded yellow rose-leaves. It was painted with innumerable plump little cupids, flying among pale clouds. The sticks were of mother-of=pearl. The end-sticks were elaborately incised, and in the incisions opals were set, big ones and small ones, smouldering with green and scarlet fires.

“Very pretty indeed,” said Peter, “and very curious. It's like a great butterfly's wing is n't it? But are n't you afraid of opals?”

“Afraid of opals?” she wondered. “Why should one be?”

“Unless your birthday happens to fall in October, they're reputed to bring bad luck,” he reminded her.

“My birthday happens to fall in June but I 'll never believe that such pretty things as opals can bring bad luck,” she laughed, taking the fan, which he returned to her, and stroking one of the bigger opals with her finger tip.

“Have you no superstitions?” he asked.

“I hope not--I don't think I have,” she answered. “We're not allowed to have superstitions, you know--nous autres Catholiques.”

“Oh?” he said, with surprise. “No, I did n't know.”

“Yes, they're a forbidden luxury. But you--? Are you superstitious? Would you be afraid of opals?”

“I doubt if I should have the courage to wear one. At all events, I don't regard superstitions in the light of a luxury. I should be glad to be rid of those I have. They're a horrible inconvenience. But I can't get it out of my head that the air is filled with a swarm of malignant little devils, who are always watching their chance to do us an ill turn. We don't in the least know the conditions under which they can bring it off; but it's legendary that if we wear opals, or sit thirteen at table, or start an enterprise on Friday, or what not, we somehow give them their opportunity. And one naturally wishes to be on the safe side.”

She looked at him with doubt, considering.

“You don't seriously believe all that?” she said.

“No, I don't seriously believe it. But one breathes it in with the air of one's nursery, and it sticks. I don't believe it, but I fear it just enough to be made uneasy. The evil eye, for instance. How can one spend any time in Italy, where everybody goes loaded with charms against it, and help having a sort of sneaking half-belief in the evil eye?”