And her eyes waited, intently.

"Oh," said Peter, "it's one of those stories that can scarcely be told.

There's hardly any thing to take hold of. It's without incident, without progression--it's all subjective--it's a drama in states of mind.

Pauline was a 'thing seen,' indeed; but she wasn't a thing known: she was a thing divined. Wildmay never knew her--never even knew who she was--never knew her name--never even knew her nationality, though, as the book shows, he guessed her to be an Englishwoman, married to a Frenchman. He simply saw her, from a distance, half-a-dozen times perhaps. He saw her in Paris, once or twice, at the theatre, at the opera; and then later again, once or twice, in London; and then, once more, in Paris, in the Bois. That was all, but that was enough. Her appearance--her face, her eyes, her smile, her way of carrying herself, her way of carrying her head, her gestures, her movements, her way of dressing--he never so much as heard her voice--her mere appearance made an impression on him such as all the rest of womankind had totally failed to make. She was exceedingly lovely, of course, exceedingly distinguished, n.o.ble-looking; but she was infinitely more. Her face her whole person--had an expression! A spirit burned in her--a prismatic, aromatic fire. Other women seemed dust, seemed dead, beside her. She was a garden, inexhaustible, of promises, of suggestions. Wit, capriciousness, generosity, emotion--you have said it--they were all there. Race was there, nerve. s.e.x was there--all the mystery, magic, all the essential, elemental principles of the Feminine, were there: she was a woman. A wonderful, strenuous soul was there: Wildmay saw it, felt it.

He did n't know her--he had no hope of ever knowing her--but he knew her better than he knew any one else in the world. She became the absorbing subject of his thoughts, the heroine of his dreams. She became, in fact, the supreme influence of his life."

The d.u.c.h.essa's eyes had not lost their intentness, while he was speaking. Now that he had finished, she looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, and mused for a moment in silence. At last she looked up again.

"It's as strange as anything I have ever heard," she said, "it's furiously strange--and romantic--and interesting. But--but--" She frowned a little, hesitating between a choice of questions.

"Oh, it's a story all compact of 'buts,'" Peter threw out laughing.

She let the remark pa.s.s her--she had settled upon her question.

"But how could he endure such a situation?" she asked. "How could he sit still under it? Did n't he try in any way--did n't he make any effort at all--to--to find her out--to discover who she was--to get introduced to her? I should think he could never have rested--I should think he would have moved heaven and earth."

"What could he do? Tell me a single thing he could have done," said Peter. "Society has made no provision for a case like his. It 's absurd--but there it is. You see a woman somewhere; you long to make her acquaintance; and there's no natural bar to your doing so--you 're a presentable man she's what they call a lady--you're both, more or less, of the same monde. Yet there 's positively no way known by which you can contrive it--unless chance, mere fortuitous chance, just happens to drop a common acquaintance between you, at the right time and place. Chance, in Wildmay's case, happened to drop all the common acquaintances they may possibly have had at a deplorable distance. He was alone on each of the occasions when he saw her. There was no one he could ask to introduce him; there was no one he could apply to for information concerning her. He could n't very well follow her carriage through the streets--dog her to her lair, like a detective. Well--what then?"

The d.u.c.h.essa was playing with her fan again.

"No," she agreed; "I suppose it was hopeless. But it seems rather hard on the poor man--rather baffling and tantalising."

"The poor man thought it so, to be sure," said Peter; "he fretted and fumed a good deal, and kicked against the p.r.i.c.ks. Here, there, now, anon, he would enjoy his brief little vision of her--then she would vanish into the deep inane. So, in the end--he had to take it out in something--he took it out in writing a book about her. He propped up a mental portrait of her on his desk before him, and translated it into the character of Pauline. In that way he was able to spend long delightful hours alone with her every day, in a kind of metaphysical intimacy. He had never heard her voice--but now he heard it as often as Pauline opened her lips. He owned her--he possessed her--she lived under his roof--she was always waiting for him in his study. She is real to you? She was inexpressibly, miraculously real to him. He saw her, knew her, felt her, realised her, in every detail of her mind, her soul, her person--down to the very intonations of her speech--down to the veins in her hands, the rings on her fingers--down to her very furs and laces, the frou-frou of her skirts, the scent upon her pocket-handkerchief. He had numbered the hairs of her head, almost."

Again the d.u.c.h.essa mused for a while in silence, opening and shutting her fan, and gazing into its opals.

"I am thinking of it from the woman's point of view," she said, by and by. "To have played such a part in a man's life--and never to have dreamed it! Never even, very likely, to have dreamed that such a man existed--for it's entirely possible she didn't notice him, on those occasions when he saw her. And to have been the subject of such a novel--and never to have dreamed that, either! To have read the novel perhaps--without dreaming for an instant that there was any sort of connection between Pauline and herself! Or else--what would almost be stranger still--not to have read the novel, not to have heard of it! To have inspired such a book, such a beautiful book--yet to remain in sheer unconscious ignorance that there was such a book! Oh, I think it is even more extraordinary from the woman's point of view than from the man's.

There is something almost terrifying about it. To have had such an influence on the destiny of someone you've never heard of! There's a kind of intangible sense of a responsibility."

"There is also, perhaps," laughed Peter, "a kind of intangible sense of a liberty taken. I'm bound to say I think Wildmay was decidedly at his ease. To appropriate in that cool fashion the personality of a total stranger! But artists are the most unprincipled folk unhung. Ils prennent leur bien la, ou ils le trouvent."

"Oh, no," said the d.u.c.h.essa, "I think she was fair game. One can carry delicacy too far. He was ent.i.tled to the benefits of his discovery--for, after all, it was a discovery, was n't it? You have said yourself how indispensable the eye of the beholder is--'the seeing eye.' I think, indeed, the whole affair speaks extremely well for Mr. Wildmay. It is not every man who would be capable of so purely intellectual a pa.s.sion.

I suppose one must call his feeling for her a pa.s.sion? It indicates a distinction in his nature. He can hardly be a mere materialist. But--but I think it's heart-rending that he never met her."

"Oh, but that's the continuation of the story," said Peter. "He did meet her in the end, you know."

"He did meet her!" cried the d.u.c.h.essa, starting up, with a sudden access of interest, whilst her eyes lightened. "He did meet her? Oh, you must tell me about that."

And just at this crisis the Cardinal and Emilia appeared, climbing the terrace steps.

"Bother!" exclaimed the d.u.c.h.essa, under her breath. Then, to Peter, "It will have to be for another time--unless I die of the suspense."

After the necessary greetings were transacted, another elderly priest joined the company; a tall, burly, rather florid man, mentioned, when Peter was introduced to him, as Monsignor Langshawe. "This really is her chaplain," Peter concluded. Then a servant brought tea.

"Ah, Diamond, Diamond, you little know what mischief you might have wrought," he admonished himself, as he walked home through the level sunshine. "In another instant, if we'd not been interrupted, you would have let the cat out of the bag. The premature escape of the cat from the bag would spoil everything."

And he hugged himself, as one s.n.a.t.c.hed from peril, in a qualm of retroactive terror. At the same time he was filled with a kind of exultancy. All that he had hoped had come to pa.s.s, and more, vastly more. Not only had he been received as a friend at Ventirose, but he had been encouraged to tell her a part at least of the story by which her life and his were so curiously connected; and he had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from the peril of telling her too much. The day was not yet when he could safely say, "Mutato nomine....." Would the day ever be? But, meanwhile, just to have told her the first ten lines of that story, he could not help feeling, somehow advanced matters tremendously, somehow put a new face on matters.

"The hour for which the ages sighed may not be so far away as you think," he said to Marietta. "The curtain has risen upon Act Three. I fancy I can perceive faint glimmerings of the beginning of the end."

XIX

All that evening, something which he had not been conscious of noticing especially when it was present to him--certainly he had paid no conscious attention to its details--kept recurring and recurring to Peter's memory: the appearance of the prettily-arranged terrace-end at Ventirose: the white awning, with the blue sky at its edges, the sunny park beyond; the warm-hued carpets on the marble pavement; the wicker chairs, with their bright cushions; the table, with its books and bibelots--the yellow French books, a tortoise-sh.e.l.l paperknife, a silver paperweight, a crystal smelling-bottle, a bowlful of drooping poppies; and the marble bal.u.s.trade, with its delicate tracery of leaves and tendrils, where the jessamine twined round its pillars.

This kept recurring, recurring, vividly, a picture that he could see without closing his eyes, a picture with a very decided sentiment.

Like the gay and gleaming many-pinnacled facade of her house, it seemed appropriate to her; it seemed in its fashion to express her. Nay, it seemed to do more. It was a corner of her every-day environment; these things were the companions, the witnesses, of moments of her life, phases of herself, which were hidden from Peter; they were the companions and witnesses of her solitude, her privacy; they were her confidants, in a way. They seemed not merely to express her, therefore, but to be continually on the point--I had almost said of betraying her.

At all events, if he could only understand their silent language, they would prove rich in precious revelations. So he welcomed their recurrences, dwelt upon them, pondered them, and got a deep if somewhat inarticulate pleasure from them.

On Thursday, as he approached the castle, the last fires of sunset were burning in the sky behind it--the long irregular ma.s.s of buildings stood out in varying shades of blue, against varying, dying shades of red: the grey stone, dark, velvety indigo; the pink stucco, pink still, but with a transparent blue penumbra over it; the white marble, palely, scintillantly amethystine. And if he was interested in her environment, now he could study it to his heart's content: the wide marble staircase, up which he was shown, with its crimson carpet, and the big mellow painting, that looked as if it might be a t.i.tian, at the top; the great saloon, in which he was received, with its polished mosaic floor, its frescoed ceiling, its white-and-gold panelling, its hangings and upholsteries of yellow brocade, its satinwood chairs and tables, its bronzes, porcelains, embroideries, its screens and mirrors; the long dining-hall, with its high pointed windows, its slender marble columns supporting a vaulted roof, its twinkling candles in chandeliers and sconces of cloudy Venetian gla.s.s, its brilliant table, its flowers and their colours and their scents.

He could study her environment to his heart's content, indeed--or to his heart's despair. For all this had rather the effect of chilling, of depressing him. It was very splendid; it was very luxurious and cheerful; it was appropriate and personal to her, if you like; no doubt, in its fashion, in its measure, it, too, expressed her. But, at that rate, it expressed her in an aspect which Peter had instinctively made it his habit to forget, which he by no means found it inspiriting to remember. It expressed, it emphasised, her wealth, her rank; it emphasised the distance, in a worldly sense, between her and himself, the conventional barriers.

And she...

She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she was all that she had ever been--and yet--and yet--Well, somehow, she seemed indefinably different. Somehow, again, the distance, the barriers, were emphasised. She was very lovely, she was entirely cordial, friendly, she was all that she had ever been; but, somehow, to-night, she seemed very much the great lady, very much the d.u.c.h.ess....

"My dear man," he said to himself, "you were mad to dream for a single instant that there was the remotest possibility of anything ever happening."

The only other guests, besides the Cardinal and Monsignor Langshawe, were an old Frenchwoman, with beautiful white hair, from one of the neighbouring villas, Madame de Lafere, and a young, pretty, witty, and voluble Irishwoman, Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, from an hotel at Spiaggia.

In deference, perhaps, to the cloth of the two ecclesiastics, none of the women were in full evening-dress, and there was no arm-taking when they went in to dinner. The dinner itself was of a simplicity which Peter thought admirable, and which, of course, he attributed to his d.u.c.h.essa's own good taste. He was not yet familiar enough with the Black aristocracy of Italy, to be aware that in the matter of food and drink simplicity is as much the criterion of good form amongst them, as lavish complexity is the criterion of good form amongst the English-imitating Whites.

The conversation, I believe, took its direction chiefly from the initiative of Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. With great sprightliness and humour, and with an astonishing light-hearted courage, she rallied the Cardinal upon the neglect in which her native island was allowed to languish by the powers at Rome. "The most Catholic country in three hemispheres, to be sure," she said; "every inch of its soil soaked with the blood of martyrs. Yet you've not added an Irish saint to the Calendar for I see you're blushing to think how many ages; and you've taken sides with the heretic Saxon against us in our struggle for Home Rule--which I blame you for, though, being a landowner and a bit of an absentee, I 'm a traitorous Unionist myself."

The Cardinal laughingly retorted that the Irish were far too fine, too imaginative and poetical a race, to be bothered with material questions of government and administration. They should leave such cares to the stolid, practical English, and devote the leisure they would thus obtain to the further exercise and development of what someone had called "the starfire of the Celtic nature." Ireland should look upon England as her working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of Irish saints to the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their excessive number. "'T is an embarra.s.sment of riches. If we were once to begin, we could never leave off till we had canonised nine-tenths of the dead population."

Monsignor Langshawe, at this (making jest the cue for earnest), spoke up for Scotland, and deplored the delay in the beatification of Blessed Mary. "The official beatification," he discriminated, "for she was beatified in the heart of every true Catholic Scot on the day when b.l.o.o.d.y Elizabeth murdered her."

And Madame de Lafere put in a plea for Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and the little Dauphin.

"Blessed Mary--b.l.o.o.d.y Elizabeth," laughed the d.u.c.h.essa, in an aside to Peter; "here is language to use in the presence of a Protestant Englishman."

"Oh, I'm accustomed to 'b.l.o.o.d.y Elizabeth,'" said he. "Was n't it a word of Cardinal Newman's?"

"Yes, I think so," said she. "And since every one is naming his candidate; for the Calendar, you have named mine. I think there never was a saintlier saint than Cardinal Newman."

"What is your Eminence's att.i.tude towards the question of mixed marriages?" Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.

Peter p.r.i.c.ked up his ears.

"It is not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in England,"

his Eminence replied; "but in the abstract, and other things equal, my att.i.tude would of course be one of disapproval."

"And yet surely," contended she, "if a pious Catholic girl marries a Protestant man, she has a hundred chances of converting him?"