The shadows were lengthening now. The sunshine glanced from the smooth surface of the lake as from burnished metal, and falling on the coloured sails of the fishing-boats, made them gleam like sails of crimson silk.

But I wonder how much of this Beatrice really saw.

She plucked an oleander from one of the tall marble urns set along the bal.u.s.trade, and pressed the pink blossom against her face, and, closing her eyes, breathed in its perfume; then, absent-minded, she let it drop, over the terrace, upon the path below.

"It's impossible," she said suddenly, aloud. At last she went into the house, and up to her rose-and-white retiring-room. There she took a book from the table, and sank into a deep easy-chair, and began to turn the pages.

But when, by and by, approaching footsteps became audible in the stone-floored corridor without, Beatrice hastily shut the book, thrust it back upon the table, and caught up another so that Emilia Manfredi, entering, found her reading Monsieur Anatole France's "Etui de nacre."

"Emilia," she said, "I wish you would translate the I Jongleur de Notre Dame' into Italian."

XXII

Peter, we may suppose, returned to Villa Floriano that afternoon in a state of some excitement.

"He ought to have told her--"

"It was her right to be told--"

"What could her rank matter--"

"A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman--"

"She would have despised the conventional barriers--"

"No woman could be proof against such a compliment--"

"The case was peculiar--ordinary rules could not apply to it--"

"Every man gets the wife he deserves--and he had certainly gone a long way towards deserving her--"

"He should simply have told her the story of his book and of her part in it--he need n't have mentioned love--she would have understood--"

The d.u.c.h.essa's voice, clear and cool and crisp-cut, sounded perpetually in his ears; the words she had spoken, the arguments she had urged, repeated and repeated themselves, danced round and round, in his memory.

"Ought I to have told her--then and there? Shall I go to her and tell her to-morrow?"

He tried to think; but he could not think. His faculties were in a whirl--he could by no means command them. He could only wait, inert, while the dance went on. It was an extremely riotous dance. The d.u.c.h.essa's conversation was reproduced without sequence, without coherence--scattered fragments of it were flashed before him fitfully, in swift disorder. If he would attempt to seize upon one of those fragments, to detain and fix it, for consideration--a speech of hers, a look, an inflection--then the whole experience suddenly lost its outlines, his recollection of it became a jumble, and he was left, as it were, intellectually gasping.

He walked about his garden, he went into the house, he came out, he walked about again, he went in and dressed for dinner, he sat on his rustic bench, he smoked cigarette after cigarette.

"Ought I to have told her? Ought I to tell her to-morrow?"

At moments there would come a lull in the turmoil, an interval of quiet, of apparent clearness; and the answer would seem perfectly plain.

"Of course, you ought to tell her. Tell her--and all will be well. She has put herself in the supposit.i.tious woman's place, and she says, 'He ought to tell her.' She says it earnestly, vehemently. That means that if she were the woman, she would wish to be told. She will despise the conventional barriers--she will be touched, she will be moved. 'No woman could be proof against such a compliment.' Go to her to-morrow, and tell her--and all will be well."

At these moments he would look up towards the castle, and picture the morrow's consummation; and his heart would have a convulsion.

Imagination flew on the wings of his desire. She stood before him in all her sumptuous womanhood, tender and strong and glowing. As he spoke, her eyes lightened, her eyes burned, the blood came and went in her cheeks; her lips parted. Then she whispered something; and his heart leapt terribly; and he called her name--"Beatrice! Beatrice!" Her name expressed the inexpressible--the adoring pa.s.sion, the wild hunger and wild triumph of his soul. But now she was moving towards him--she was holding out her hands. He caught her in his arms--he held her yielding body in his arms. And his heart leapt terribly, terribly. And he wondered how he could endure, how he could live through, the hateful hours that must elapse before tomorrow would be to-day.

But "hearts, after leaps, ache." Presently the whirl would begin again; and then, by and by, in another lull, a contrary answer would seem equally plain.

"Tell her, indeed? My dear man, are you mad? She would simply be amazed, struck dumb, by your presumption. I can see from here her incredulity--I can see the scorn with which she would wither you. It has never dimly occurred to her as conceivable that you would venture to be in love with her, that you would dare to lift your eyes to her--you who are nothing, to her who is all. Yes--nothing, n.o.body. In her view, you are just a harmless n.o.body, whose society she tolerates for kindness' sake--and faute de mieux. It is precisely because she deems you a n.o.body--because she is profoundly conscious of the gulf that separates you from her--that she can condescend to be amiably familiar. If you were of a rank even remotely approximating to her own, she would be a thousand times more circ.u.mspect. Remember--she does not dream that you are Felix Wildmay. He is a mere name to her; and his story is an amusing little romance, perfectly external to herself, which she discusses with entirely impersonal interest. Tell her by all means, if you like Say, 'I am Wildmay--you are Pauline.' And see how amazed she will be, and how incensed, and how indignant."

Then he would look up at the castle stonily, in a mood of desperate renunciation, and vaguely meditate packing his belongings, and going home to England.

At other moments a third answer would seem the plain one: something between these extremes of optimism and pessimism, a compromise, it not a reconciliation.

"Come! Let us be calm, let us be judicial. The consequences of our actions, here below, if hardly ever so good as we could hope, are hardly ever so bad as we might fear. Let us regard this matter in the light of that guiding principle. True, she does n't dream that you are Wildmay.

True, if you were abruptly to say to her, 'I am Wildmay--you are the woman,' she would be astonished--even, if you will, at first, more or less taken aback, disconcerted. But indignant? Why? What is this gulf that separates you from her? What are these conventional barriers of which you make so much? She is a d.u.c.h.ess, she is the daughter of a lord, and she is rich. Well, all that is to be regretted. But you are neither a plebeian nor a pauper yourself. You are a man of good birth, you are a man of some parts, and you have a decent income. It amounts to this--she is a great lady, you are a small gentleman. In ordinary circ.u.mstances, to be sure, so small a gentleman could not ask so great a lady to become his wife. But here the circ.u.mstances are not ordinary. Destiny has meddled in the business. Small gentleman though you are, an unusual and subtle relation-ship has been established between you and your great lady. She herself says, 'Ordinary rules cannot apply--he ought to tell her.' Very good: tell her. She will be astonished, but she will see that there is no occasion for resentment. And though the odds are, of course, a hundred to one that she will not accept you, still she must treat you as an honourable suitor. And whether she accepts you or rejects you, it is better to tell her and to have it over, than to go on forever dangling this way, like the poor cat in the adage. Tell her--put your fate to the touch--hope nothing, fear nothing--and bow to the event."

But even this temperate answer provoked its counter-answer.

"The odds are a hundred to one, a thousand to one, that she will not accept you. And if you tell her, and she does not accept you, she will not allow you to see her any more, you will be exiled from her presence.

And I thought, you did not wish to be exiled from her presence, You would stake, then, this great privilege, the privilege of seeing her, of knowing her, upon a. chance that has a thousand to one against it. You make light of the conventional barriers--but the princ.i.p.al barrier of them all, you are forgetting. She is a Roman Catholic, and a devout one.

Marry a Protestant? She would as soon think of marrying a Paynim Turk."

In the end, no doubt, a kind of exhaustion followed upon his excitement.

Questions and answers suspended themselves; and he could only look up towards Ventirose, and dumbly wish that he was there. The distance was so trifling--in five minutes he could traverse it--the law seemed absurd and arbitrary, which condemned him to sit apart, free only to look and wish.

It was in this condition of mind that Marietta found him, when she came to announce dinner.

Peter gave himself a shake. The sight of the brown old woman, with her homely, friendly face, brought him back to small things, to actual things; and that, if it was n't a comfort, was, at any rate, a relief.

"Dinner?" he questioned. "Do peris at the gates of Eden DINE?"

"The soup is on the table," said Marietta.

He rose, casting a last glance towards the castle.

Towers and battlements...

Bosomed high in tufted trees, Where perhaps some beauty lies, The cynosure of neighbouring eyes."

He repeated the lines in an undertone, and went in to dinner. And then the restorative spirit of nonsense descended upon him.

"Marietta," he asked, "what is your att.i.tude towards the question of mixed marriages?"

Marietta wrinkled her brow.

"Mixed marriages? What is that, Signorino?"

"Marriages between Catholics and Protestants," he explained.

"Protestants?" Her brow was still a network. "What things are they?"