Part 54

XXV

“I shall go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed.”

But he took no immediate steps to get them packed.

“Hope,” observes the clear-sighted French publicist quoted in the preceding chapter, “hope dies hard.”

Hope, Peter fancied, had received its death-blow that afternoon. Already, that evening, it began to revive a little. It was very much enfeebled; it was very indefinite and diffident; but it was not dead. It amounted, perhaps, to nothing more than a vague kind of feeling that he would not, on the whole, make his departure for England quite so precipitate as, in the first heat of his anger, the first chill of his despair, he had intended. Piano, piano! He would move slowly, he would do nothing rash.

But he was not happy, he was very far from happy. He spent a wretched night, a wretched, restless morrow. He walked about a great deal--about his garden, and afterwards, when the damnable iteration of his garden had become unbearable, he walked to the village, and took the riverside path, under the poplars, along the racing Aco, and followed it, as the waters paled and broadened, for I forget how many joyless, unremunerative miles.

When he came home, fagged out and dusty, at dinner time, Marietta presented a visiting card to him, on her handsomest salver. She presented it with a flourish that was almost a swagger.

Twice the size of an ordinary visiting-card, the fashion of it was roughly thus:

IL CARDLE UDESCHINI Sacr: Congr: Archiv: et Inscript: Praef:

Palazzo Udeschini.

And above the legend, was pencilled, in a small oldfashioned hand, wonderfully neat and pretty:--

“To thank Mr. Marchdale for his courtesy in returning my snuff-box.”

“The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here,” said Marietta. There was a swagger in her accent. There was also something in her accent that seemed to rebuke Peter for his absence.

“I had inferred as much from this,” said he, tapping the card. “We English, you know, are great at putting two and two together.”

“He came in a carriage,” said Marietta.

“Not really?” said her master.

“Ang--veramente,” she affirmed.

“Was--was he alone?” Peter asked, an obscure little twinge of hope stirring in his heart.

“No. Signorino.” And then she generalised, with untranslatable magniloquence: “Un amplissimo porporato non va mai solo.”

Peter ought to have hugged her for that amplissimo porporato. But he was selfishly engrossed in his emotions.

“Who was with him?” He tried to throw the question out with a casual effect, an effect of unconcern.

“The Signorina Emelia Manfredi was with him,” answered Marietta, little recking how mere words can stab.

“Oh,” said Peter.

“The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was very sorry not to see the Signorino,” continued Marietta.

“Poor man--was he? Let us trust that time will console him,” said Peter, callously.

But, “I wonder,” he asked himself, “I wonder whether perhaps I was the least bit hasty yesterday? If I had stopped, I should have saved the Cardinal a journey here to-day--I might have known that he would come, these Italians are so punctilious--and then, if I had stopped--if I had stopped--possibly--possibly--”

Possibly what? Oh, nothing. And yet, if he had stopped... well, at any rate, he would have gained time. The Duchessa had already begun to thaw. If he had stopped... He could formulate no precise conclusion to that if; but he felt dimly remorseful that he had not stopped, he felt that he had indeed been the least bit hasty. And his remorse was somehow medicine to his reviving hope.

“After all, I scarcely gave things a fair trial yesterday,” he said.