Chapter VIII: Part 8

The Swiss, flourishing his staff of office, marshalled me (I can’t use a less imposing word for the ceremony) slowly, solemnly, across a courtyard, and up a great stone staircase, at the top of which he handed me on to a functionary in black—a functionary with an ominously austere countenance, like an usher to the Inquisition. Poor old Archimede! Later, when I had come to know him well and tip him, I found he was the mildest creature, the amiablest, the most obliging, and that tenebrious mien of his only a congenital accident, like a lisp or a club-foot. But for the present he dismayed me, and I surrendered myself with humility and meekness to his guardianship. He conducted me through a series of vast chambers—you know those enormous, ungenial Roman rooms, their sombre tapestried walls, their formal furniture, their cheerless, perpetual twilight—and out upon a terrace.

The terrace lay in full sunshine. There was a garden below it, a garden with orange-trees, and rosebushes, and camellias, with stretches of greensward, with shrubberies, with a great fountain plashing in the midst of it, and broken, moss-grown statues: a Roman garden, from which a hundred sweet airs came up, in the gentle Roman weather. The balustrade of the terrace was set at intervals with flowering plants, in big urn-shaped vases; I don’t remember what the flowers were, but they were pink, and many of their petals had fallen, and lay scattered on the grey terrace pavement. At the far end, under an awning brave with red and yellow stripes, two ladies were seated—a lady in black, presumably the object of my pious pilgrimage; and a lady in white, whom, even from a distance, I discovered to be young and pretty. A little round table stood between them, with a carafe of water and some tumblers glistening crisply on it. The lady in black was fanning herself with a black lace fan. The lady in white held a book in her hand, from which I think she had been reading aloud. A tiny imp of a red Pomeranian dog had started forward, and was barking furiously.

This scene must have made a deeper impression upon my perceptions than any that I was conscious of at the moment, because it has always remained as fresh in my memory as you see it now. It has always been a picture that I could turn to when I would, and find unfaded: the garden, the blue sky, the warm September sunshine, the long terrace, and the two ladies seated at the end of it, looking towards me, an elderly lady in black, and a young lady in white, with dark hair.

My aunt quieted Sandro (that was the dog’s name), and giving me her hand, said “How do you do?” rather drily. And then, for what seemed a terribly long time, though no doubt it was only a few seconds, she kept me standing before her, while she scrutinised me through a double eye-glass, which she held by a mother-of-pearl handle; and I was acutely aware of the awkward figure I must be cutting to the vision of that strange young lady.

At last, “I should never have recognised you. As a child you were the image of your father. Now you resemble your mother,” Aunt Elizabeth declared; and lowering her glass, she added, “This is your cousin Rosalys.”

I wondered, as I made my bow, why I had never heard before that I had such a pretty cousin, with such a pretty name. She smiled on me very kindly, and I noticed how bright her eyes were, and how white and delicate her face. The little blue veins showed through the skin, and there was no more than just the palest, palest thought of colour in her cheeks. But her lips—exquisitely curved, sensitive lips—were warm red. She smiled on me very kindly, and I daresay my heart responded with an instant palpitation. She was a girl, and she was pretty; and her name was Rosalys; and we were cousins; and I was eighteen. And above us glowed the blue sky of Italy, and round us the golden sunshine; and there, beside the terrace, lay the beautiful old Roman garden, the fragrant, romantic garden.... If at eighteen one isn’t susceptible and sentimental and impetuous, and prepared to respond with an instant sweet commotion to the smiles of one’s pretty cousins (especially when they’re named Rosalys), I protest one is unworthy of one’s youth. One might as well be thirty-five, and a literary hack in London.

After that introduction, however, my aunt immediately reclaimed my attention. She proceeded to ask me all sorts of questions, about myself, about my people, uninteresting questions, disconcerting questions, which she posed with the air of one who knew the answers beforehand, and was only asking as an examiner asks, to test you. And all the while, the expression of her face, of her deprecating straight-lipped mouth, of her half-closed sceptical old eyes, seemed to imply that she already had her opinion of me, and that it wouldn’t in the least be affected by anything I could say for myself, and that it was distinctly not a flattering opinion.

“Well, and what brings you to Rome?” That was one of her questions. I felt like a suspicious character haled before the local magistrate to give an account of his presence in the parish; putting on the best face I could, I pleaded superior orders. I had taken my baccalauréat in the summer; and my father desired me to pass some months in Italy, for the purpose of “patching up my Italian, which had suffered from the ravages of time,” before I returned to Paris, and settled down to the study of a profession.

“H’m,” said she, manifesting no emotion at what (in my simplicity) I deemed rather a felicitous metaphor; and then, as it were, she let me off with a warning. “Look out that you don’t fall into bad company. Rome is full of dangerous people—painters, Bohemians, republicans, atheists. You must be careful. I shall keep my eye upon you.”

By-and-by, to my relief, my aunt’s director arrived, Monsignor Parlaghi, a tall, fat, cheerful, bustling man, who wore a silk cassock edged with purple, and a purple netted sash. When he sat down and crossed his legs, one saw a square-toed shoe with a silver buckle, and an inch or two of purple silk stocking. He began at once to talk with his penitent, about some matter to which I (happily) was a stranger; and that gave me my chance to break the ice with Rosalys.

She had risen to greet the Monsignore, and now stood by the balustrade of the terrace, half turned towards the garden, a slender, fragile figure, all in white. Her dark hair swept away from her forehead in lovely, long undulations, and her white face, beneath it, seemed almost spirit-like in its delicacy, almost immaterial.

“I am richer than I thought. I did not know I had a Cousin Rosalys,” said I.

It looks like a sufficiently easy thing to say, doesn’t it? And besides, hadn’t I carefully composed and corrected and conned it beforehand in the silence of my mind? But I remember the mighty effort of will it cost me to get it said. I suppose it is in the design of nature that Eighteen should find it nervous work to break the ice with pretty girls. At any rate, I remember how my heart fluttered, and what a hollow, unfamiliar sound my voice had; I remember that in the very middle of the enterprise my pluck and my presence of mind suddenly deserted me, and everything became a blank, and for one horrible moment I thought I was going to break down utterly, and stand there staring, blushing, speechless. But then I made a further mighty effort of will, a desperate effort, and somehow, though they nearly choked me, the premeditated words came out.

“Oh, we’re not real cousins,” said she, letting her eyes shine for a second on my face. And she explained to me just what the connection between us was. “But we will call ourselves cousins,” she concluded.

The worst was over; the worst, though Eighteen was still, no doubt, conscious of perturbations. I don’t know how long we stood chatting together there by the balustrade, but presently I said something about the garden, and she proposed that we should go down into it. So she led me to the other end of the terrace, where there was a flight of steps, and we went down into the garden.

The merest trifles, in such weather, with a pretty new-found Cousin Rosalys for a comrade, are delightful, when one is eighteen, aren’t they? It was delightful to feel the yielding turf under our feet, the cool grass curling round our ankles—for in Roman gardens, in those old days, it wasn’t the fashion to clip the grass close, as on an English lawn. It was delightful to walk in the shade of the orange-trees, and breathe the air sweetened by them. The stillness the dreamy stillness of the soft, sunny afternoon was delightful; the crumbling old statues were delightful, statues of fauns and dryads, of Pagan gods and goddesses, Pan and Bacchus and Diana, their noses broken for the most part, their bodies clothed in mosses and leafy vines. And the flowers were delightful; the cyclamens, with which—so abundant were they—the walls of the garden fairly dripped, as with a kind of pink foam; and the roses, and the waxen red and white camellias. It was delightful to stop before the great brown old fountain, and listen to its tinkle-tinkle of cold water, and peer into its basin, all green with weeds, and watch the antics of the goldfishes, and the little rainbows the sun struck from the spray. And my Cousin Rosalys’s white frock was delightful, and her voice was delightful; and that perturbation in my heart was exquisitely delightful—something between a thrill and a tremor—a delicious mixture of fear and wonderment and beatitude. I had dragged myself hither to pay a duty-call upon my grim old dragon of a great-aunt Elizabeth; and here I was wandering amid the hundred delights of a romantic Italian garden, with a lovely, white-robed, bright-eyed sylph of a Cousin Rosalys.

Don’t ask me what we talked about. I have only the most fragmentary recollection. I remember she told me that her father and mother had died in India, when she was a child, and that her father (Aunt Elizabeth’s “ever so much younger brother”) had been in the army, and that she had lived with Aunt Elizabeth since she was twelve. And I remember she asked me to speak French with her, because in Rome she almost always spoke Italian or English, and she didn’t want to forget her French; and “You’re, of course, almost a Frenchman, living in Paris.” So we spoke French together, saying ma cousine and mon cousin, which was very intimate and pleasant; and she spoke it so well that I expressed some surprise. “If you don’t put on at least a slight accent, I shall tell you you’re almost a Frenchman too,” I threatened. “Oh, I had French nurses when I was little,” she said, “and afterwards a French governess, till I was sixteen. I’m eighteen now. How old are you?” I had heard that girls always liked a man to be older than themselves, and I answered that I was nearly twenty. Well, and isn’t eighteen nearly twenty?.... Anyhow, as I walked back to my lodgings that afternoon, through the busy, twisted, sunlit Roman streets, Cousin Rosalys filled all my heart and all my thoughts with a white radiance.

You will conceive whether or not, during the months that followed, I was an assiduous visitor at the Palazzo Zacchinelli. But I couldn’t spend all my time there, and in my enforced absences I needed consolation. I imagine I treated Aunt Elizabeth’s advice about avoiding bad company as youth is wont to treat the counsels of crabbed age. Doubtless my most frequent associates were those very painters and Bohemians against whom she had particularly cautioned me—whether they were also republicans and atheists, I don’t think I ever knew; I can’t remember that I inquired, and religion and politics were subjects they seldom touched upon spontaneously. I dare say I joined the artists’ club, in the Via Margutta, the Circolo Internazionale degli Artisti; I am afraid the Caffe Greco was my favourite café; I am afraid I even bought a wide-awake hat, and wore it on the back of my head, and tried to look as much like a painter and Bohemian myself as nature would permit.

Bad company? I don’t know. It seemed to me very good company indeed. There was Jack Everett, tall and slim and athletic, with his eager aquiline face, his dark curling hair, the most poetic-looking creature, humorous, whimsical, melancholy, imaginative, who used to quote Byron, and plan our best practical jokes, and do the loveliest little cupids and roses in water-colours. He has since married the girl he was even then in love with, and is still living in Rome, and painting cupids and roses. And there was d’.vignac, le vicomte, a young Frenchman, who had been in the Diplomatic Service, and—superlative distinction!—“ruined himself for a woman,” and now was striving to keep body and soul together by giving fencing lessons; witty, kindly, pathetic d’.vignac—we have vanished altogether from each other’s ken. There was Ulysse Tavoni, the musician, who, when somebody asked him what instrument he played, answered cheerily, “All instruments.” I can testify from personal observation that he played the piano and the flute, the guitar, mandoline, fiddle, and French horn, the ’cello and the zither. And there was Kônig, the Austrian sculptor, a tiny man with a ferocious black moustache, whom my landlady (he having called upon me one day when I was out), unable to remember his transalpine name, described to perfection as “un Orlando Furioso—ma molto piccolo.” There was a dear, dreamy, languid, sentimental Pole, blue-eyed and yellow-haired, also a sculptor, whose name I have totally forgotten, though we were sworn to “hearts’ brotherhood,” He had the most astonishing talent for imitating the sounds of animals, the neighing of a horse, the crowing of a cock; and when he brayed like a donkey, all the donkeys within earshot were deceived, and answered him. And then there was Father Flynn, a jolly old bibulous priest from Cork. An uncle of his had fought at Waterloo; it was great to hear him tell of his uncle’s part in the fortunes of the day. It was great, too (for Father Flynn was a fervid Irish patriot), to hear him roar out the “Wearing of the Green.” Between the stanzas he would brandish his blackthorn, stick at Everett, and call him a “murthering English tyrant,” to our huge delectation.

There were others and others and others; but these six are those who come back first to my memory. They seemed to me very good company indeed; very merry, and genial, and amusing; and the life we led together seemed a very pleasant life. Oh, our pleasures were of the simplest nature, the traditional pleasures of Bohemia; smoking and drinking and talking, rambling arm-in-arm through the streets, lounging in studios, going to the play or perhaps the circus, or making excursions into the country. Only, the capital of our Bohemia was Rome. The streets through which we rambled were Roman streets, with their inexhaustible picturesqueness, their unending vicissitudes: with their pink and yellow houses, their shrines, their fountains, their gardens, their motley wayfarers—monks and soldiers; shaggy pifferari, and contadine in their gaudy costumes, and models masquerading as contadine; penitents, beggars, water-carriers, hawkers; priests in their vestments, bearing the Host, attended by acolytes, with burning tapers, who rang little bells, whilst men uncovered and women crossed themselves; and everywhere, everywhere, English tourists, with their noses in Baedeker. It was Rome with its bright sun, and its deep shadows; with its Ghetto, its Tiber, its Castel Sant’ Angelo; with its churches, and palaces, and ruins; with its Villa Borghese and its Pincian Hill; with its waving green Campagna at its gates. We smoked and talked and drank—Chianti, of course, and sunny Orvieto, and fabled Est-Est-Est, all in those delightful pear-shaped, wicker-covered flasks, which of themselves, I fancy, would confer a flavour upon indifferent wine. We made excursions to Tivoli and Frascati, to Monte Cavo and Nemi, to Acqua Acetosa. We patronised Pulcinella, and the marionettes, and (better still) the imitation marionettes. We blew horns on the night of Epiphany, we danced at masked balls, we put on dominoes and romped in the Corso during carnival, throwing flowers and confetti, and struggling to extinguish other people’s moccoli. And on rainy days (with an effort I can remember that there were some rainy days) Everett and I would sit with d’.vignac in his fencing gallery, and talk and smoke, and smoke and talk and talk. D’.vignac was six-and-twenty, Everett was twenty-two, and I was “nearly twenty.” D’.vignac would tell us of his past, of his adventures in Spain and Japan and South America, and of the lady for the love of whom he had come to grief. Everett and I would sigh profoundly, and shake our heads, and exchange sympathetic glances, and assure him that we knew what love was—we were victims of unfortunate attachments ourselves. To each other we had confided everything, Everett and I. He had told me all about his unrequited passion for Maud Eaton, and I had rhapsodised to him by the hour about Cousin Rosalys. “But you, old chap, you’re to be envied,” he would cry. “Here you are in the same town with her, by Jove! You can see her, you can plead your cause. Think of that. I wish I had half your luck. Maud is far away in England, buried in a country-house down in Lancashire. She might as well be on another planet, for all the good I get of her. But you—why, you can see your Cousin Rosalys this very hour if you like! Oh, heavens, what wouldn’t I give for half your luck!” The wheel of Time, the wheel of Time! Everett and Maud are married, but Cousin Rosalys and I.... Heigh-ho! I wonder whether, in our thoughts of ancient days, it is more what we remember or what we forget that makes them sweet? Anyhow, for the moment, we forget the dismal things that have happened since.

Yes, I was in the same town with her, by Jove; I could see her. And indeed I did see her many times every week. Like the villain in a melodrama, I led a double life. When I was not disguised as a Bohemian, in a velvet jacket and a wide-awake, smoking and talking and holding wassail with my boon companions, you might have observed a young man attired in the height of the prevailing fashion (his top-hat and varnished boots flashing fire in the eyes of the Roman populace), going to call on his Aunt Elizabeth. And his Aunt Elizabeth, pleased by such dutiful attentions, rewarded him with frequent invitations to dinner. Her other guests would be old ladies like herself, and old gentlemen, and priests, priests, priests. So that Rosalys and I, the only young ones present, were naturally paired together. After dinner Rosalys would play and sing, while I hung over her piano. Oh, how beautifully she played Chopin! How ravishingly she sang! Schubert’s Wohin, and Rôslein, Rôslein, Rôslein roth; and Gounod’s Sérénade and his Barcarolle:

“Dites la jeune belle,

Où voulez-vous aller?”

And how angelically beautiful she looked! Her delicate, pale face, and her dark, undulating hair, and her soft red lips; and then her eyes—her luminous, mysterious dark eyes, in whose depths, far, far within, you could discern her spirit shining starlike. And her hands, white and slender and graceful, images in miniature of herself; with what incommunicable wonder and admiration I used to watch them as they moved above the keys. “A woman who plays Chopin ought to have three hands—two to play with, and one for the man who’s listening to hold.” That was a pleasantry which I meditated much in secret, and a thousand times aspired to murmur in the player’s ear, but invariably, when it came to the point of doing so, my courage failed me. “You can see her, you can plead your cause.” Bless me, I never dared even vaguely to hint that I had any cause to plead. I imagine young love is always terribly afraid of revealing itself to its object, terribly afraid and terribly desirous. Whenever I was not in Cousin Rosalys’s presence, my heart was consumed with longing to tell her that I loved her, to ask her whether perhaps she might be not wholly indifferent to me; I made the boldest resolutions, committed to memory the most persuasive declarations. But from the instant I was in her presence again—mercy, what panic seized me!

I could have died sooner than speak the words that I was dying to speak, ask the question I was dying to ask.

I called assiduously at the Palazzo Zacchinelli, and my aunt bade me to dinner a good deal, and then one afternoon every week she used to drive with Rosalys on the Pincian. There was one afternoon every week when all Rome drove on the Pincian; was it Saturday? At any rate, you may be very sure I did not let such opportunities escape me for getting a bow and a smile from my cousin. Sometimes she would leave the carriage and join me, while Aunt Elizabeth, with Sandro in her lap, drove on, round and round the consecrated circle; and we would stroll together in the winding alleys, or stand by the terrace and look off over the roofs of the city, and watch the sunset blaze and fade behind St. Peter’s. You know that unexampled view—the roofs of Rome spread out beneath you like the surface of a troubled sea, and the dome of St. Peter’s, an island rising in the distance, and the sunset sky behind it. We would stand there in silence perhaps, at most saying very little, while the sunset burned itself out; and for one of us, at least, it was a moment of ineffable, impossible enchantment. She was so near to me—so near, the slender figure in the pretty frock, with the dark hair, and the captivating hat, and the furs; with her soft glowing eyes, with her exquisite fragrance of girlhood; she was so near to me, so alone with me, despite the crowd about us, and I loved her so! Oh, why couldn’t I tell her? Why couldn’t she divine it? People said that women always knew by intuition when men were in love with them. Why couldn’t Rosalys divine that I loved her, how I loved her, and make me a sign, and so enable me to speak?

Presently—and all too soon—she would return to the carriage, and drive away with Aunt Elizabeth; and I, in the lugubrious twilight, would descend the great marble Spanish staircase (a perilous path, amongst models and beggars and other things) to the Piazza, and seek out Jack Everett at the Caffé Greco. Thence he and I would go off to dine together somewhere, condoling with each other upon our ill-starred passions. After dinner, pulling our hats over our eyes, two desperately tragic forms, we would set ourselves upon the traces of d’.vignac and Kônig and Father Flynn, determined to forget our sorrows in an evening of dissipation, saying regretfully, “These are the evil courses to which the love of woman has reduced us—a couple of the best-meaning fellows in Christendom, and surely born for better ends.” When we were children (hasn’t Kenneth Grahame written it for us in a golden book?) we played at conspirators and pirates. When we were a little older, and Byron or Musset had superseded Fenimore Cooper, some of us found there was an unique excitement to be got from the game of Blighted Beings.

Oh, why couldn’t I tell her? Why couldn’t she divine it, and make me an encouraging sign?

But, of course, in the end I did tell her. It was on the night of my birthday. I had dined at the Palazzo Zacchinelli, and with the dessert a great cake was brought in and set before me. A number of little red candles were burning round it, and embossed upon it in frosting was this device:

A birthday-piece

From Rosalys,

Wishing birthdays more in plenty

To her cousin “nearly twenty.”

And counting the candles, I perceived they were nineteen.

Probably my joy was somewhat tempered by confusion, to think that my little equivocation on the subject of my age had been discovered. As I looked up from the cake to its giver, I met a pair of eyes that were gleaming with mischievous raillery; and she shook her head at me, and murmured, “Oh, you fibber!”

“How on earth did you find out?” I wondered.

“Oh—a little bird,” laughed she.

“I don’t think it’s at all respectful of you to call Aunt Elizabeth a little bird,” said I.

After dinner we went out upon the terrace. It was a warm night, and there was a moon. A moonlit night in Italy—dark velvet shot with silver. And the air was intoxicant with the scent of hyacinths. We were in March; the garden had become a wilderness of spring flowers, narcissuses and jonquils, crocuses, anemones, tulips, and hyacinths; hyacinths, everywhere hyacinths. Rosalys had thrown a bit of white lace over her hair. Oh, I assure you, in the moonlight, with the white lace over her hair, with her pale face, and her eyes, her shining, mysterious eyes—oh, I promise you, she was lovely.

“How beautiful the garden is, in the moonlight, isn’t it?” she said. “The shadows, and the statues, and the fountains. And how sweet the air is. They’re the hyacinths that smell so sweet. The hyacinth is your birthday flower, you know. Hyacinths bring happiness to people born in March.”

I looked into her eyes, and my heart thrilled and thrilled. And then, somehow, somehow... Oh, I don’t remember what I said; only somehow, somehow... Ah, but I do remember very clearly what she answered—so softly, so softly, while her hand lay in mine. I remember it very clearly, and at the memory, even now, years afterwards, I confess my heart thrills again.

We were joined, in a minute or two, by Monsignor Parlaghi, and we tried to behave as if he were not unwelcome.

Adam and Eve were driven from Eden for their guilt; but it was Innocence that lost our Eden for Rosalys and me. In our egregious innocence, we had determined that I should call upon Aunt Elizabeth in the morning, and formally demand her sanction to our engagement! Do I need to recount the history of that interview? Of my aunt’s incredulity, that gradually changed to scorn and anger? Of how I was fleered at and flouted, and taunted with my youth, and called a fool and a coxcomb, and sent about my business with the information that the portals of the Palazzo Zacchinelli would remain eternally closed against me for the future, and that my people “would be written to”? I was not even allowed to see my cousin to say good-bye. “And mind you, we’ll have no letter writing,” cried Aunt Elizabeth. “I shall forbid Rosalys to receive any letters from you.”

Guilt (we are taught) can be annulled, and its punishment remitted, if we do heartily repent. But innocence? Goodness knows how heartily I repented; yet I never found that a pennyweight of the punishment was remitted. At the week’s end I got a letter from my people recalling me to Paris. And I never saw Rosalys again. And some years afterwards she married an Italian, a nephew of Cardinal Badascalchi. And in 1887, at Viareggio, she died....

Eh bien, voilà! There is the little inachieved, the little unfulfilled romance, written for me in her name, Cousin Rosalys. What of it? Oh, nothing—except—except... Oh, nothing. “All good things come to him who waits.” Perhaps. But we know how apt they are to come too late; and—sometimes they come too early.

FLOWER O’ THE CLOVE I

In the first-floor sitting-room of a lodging-house in Great College Street, Westminster, a young man—he was tall and thin, with a good deal of rather longish light-coloured hair, somewhat tumbled about; and he wore a pince-nez, and was in slippers and the oldest of tattered coats—a man of thirty-something was seated at a writing-table, diligently scribbling at what an accustomed eye might have recognised as “copy,” and negligently allowing the smoke from a cigarette to curl round and stain the thumb and forefinger of his idle hand, when the lodging-house maid-servant opened his door, and announced excitedly, “A lady to see you, sir.”

With the air of one taken altogether by surprise, and at a cruel disadvantage, the writer dropped his pen, and jumped up. He was in slippers and a disgraceful coat, not to dwell upon the condition of his hair. “You ought to have kept her downstairs until———” he began, frowning upon the maid; and at that point his visitor entered the room.

She was a handsome, dashing-looking young woman, in a toilette that breathed the very last and crispest savour of Parisian elegance: a hat that was a tangle of geraniums, an embroidered jacket, white gloves, a skirt that frou-froued breezily as she moved; and she carried an amazing silver-hilted sunshade, a thing like a folded gonfalon, a thing of red silk gleaming through draperies of black lace.

Poising lightly near the threshold, with a little smile of interrogation, this bewildering vision said, “Have I the honour of addressing Mr. William Stretton?”

The young man bowed a vague acknowledgment of that name; but his gaze, through the lenses of his pince-nez, was all perplexity and question.

“I’m very fortunate in finding you at home. I’ve called to see you about a matter of business,” she informed him.

“Oh?” he wondered. Then he added, with a pathetic shake of the head, “I’m the last man in the world whom any one could wisely choose to see about a matter of business; but such as I am, I’m all at your disposal.”

“So much the better,” she rejoined cheerily. “I infinitely prefer to transact business with people who are unbusinesslike. One has some chance of overreaching them.”

“You’ll have every chance of over-reaching me,” sighed he.

“What a jolly quarter of the town you live in,” she commented. “It’s so picturesque and Gothic and dilapidated, with such an atmosphere of academic calm. It reminds me of Oxford.”

“Yes,” assented he, “it is a bit like Oxford. Was your business connected——?”

“Oh, it is like Oxford?” she interrupted. “Then never tell me again that there’s nothing in intuitions. I’ve never been in Oxford, but directly I passed the gateway of Dean’s Yard, I felt reminded of it.”

“There’s undoubtedly a lot in intuitions,” he agreed; “and for the future I shall carefully abstain from telling you there isn’t.”

“Those things are gardens, over the way, behind the wall, aren’t they?” she asked, looking out of the window.

“Yes,” he said, “those things are gardens, the gardens of the Abbey. The canons and people have their houses there.”

“Very comfortable and nice,” said she. “Plenty of grass. And the trees aren’t bad, either, for town trees. It must be rather fun to be a canon. As I live,” she cried, turning back into the room, “you’ve got a Pleyel. This is the first Pleyel I’ve seen in England. Let me congratulate you on your taste in pianos.” And with her gloved hands she struck a chord and made a run or two. “You’ll need the tuner soon, though. It’s just the shadow of a shadow out. I was brought up on Pleyels. Do you know, I’ve half a mind to make you a confidence?” she questioned brightly.

“Oh, do make it, I pray you,” he encouraged her.

“Well, then, I believe, if you were to offer me a chair, I believe I could bring myself to sit down,” she admitted.

“I beg your pardon,” he exclaimed; and she sank rustling into the chair that he pushed forward.

“Well, now for my business,” said she. “Would you just put this thing somewhere?” She offered him her sunshade, which he took and handled somewhat gingerly. “Oh, you needn’t be afraid. It’s quite tame,” she laughed, “though I admit it looks a bit ferocious. What a sweet room you’ve got—so manny, and smoky, and booky. Are they all real books?”

“More or less real,” he answered; “as real as any books ever are that a fellow gets for review.”

“Oh, you got them for review?” she repeated, with vivacity. “How terribly exciting. I’ve never seen a book before that’s actually passed through a reviewer’s hands. They don’t look much the worse for it. Whatever else you said about them, I trust you didn’t deny that they make nice domestic ornaments. But this isn’t business. You wouldn’t call this business?” she enquired, with grave curiosity.

“No, I should call this pleasure,” he assured her, laughing.

“Would you?” She raised her eyebrows. “Ah, but then you’re English.”

“Aren’t you?” asked he.

“Do I look English?”

“I’m not sure.” He hesitated for a second, studying her. “You certainly don’t dress English.”

“Heaven forbid Δ She made a fervent gesture. “I’m a miserable sinner, but at least I’m incapable of that. However, if you were really kind, you’d affect just a little curiosity to know the errand to which you owe my presence.”

“I’m devoured by curiosity,” he declared.

Again she raised her eyebrows. “You are? Then why don’t you show it?”

“Perhaps because I have a sense of humour—amongst other reasons,” he suggested, smiling.

“Well, since you’re devoured by curiosity, you must know,” she began; but broke off suddenly—“Apropos, I wonder whether you could be induced to tell me something.”

“I daresay I could, if it’s anything within my sphere of knowledge.” He paused, expectant.

“Then tell me, please, why you keep your Japanese fan in your fireplace,” she requested.

“Why shouldn’t I? Doesn’t it strike you as a good place for it?”

“Admirable. But my interest was psychological. I was wondering by what mental processes you came to hit upon it.”

“Well, then, to be frank, it wasn’t I who hit upon it; it isn’t my Japanese fan. It’s a conceit of my landlady’s. This is an age of paradox, you know. Would you prefer silver paper?”

“Must one have one or the other?”

“You’re making it painfully clear,” he cautioned her, “that you’ve never lived in lodgings.”

“If you go on at this rate,” she retorted, laughing, “I shall never get my task accomplished. Here are twenty times that I’ve commenced it, and twenty times you’ve put me off. Shall we now, at last, proceed seriously to business?”

“Not on my account, I beg. I’m not in the slightest hurry,” protested he.

“You said you were devoured by curiosity.”

“Did I say that?” He knitted his brow.

“Certainly you did.”

“It must have been aphasia. I meant contentment,” he explained.

“Devoured by contentment?”

“Why not, as well as by curiosity?”

“The phrase is novel,” she mused.

“It’s the occupation of my life to seek for novel phrases,” he reminded her. “I’m what somebody or other has called a literary man.”

“And you enjoy what somebody or other has called beating about the bush?”

“Hugely—with such a fellow-beater,” he responded.

“You drive me to extremities.” She shook her head. “I see there’s nothing for it but to plunge in médias res. You must know, then, that I have been asked to call upon you by a friend—by my friend Miss Johannah Rothe—I beg your pardon; I never can remember that she’s changed her name—my friend Miss Johannah Silver—but Silver née Rothe—of Silver Towers, in the County of Sussex.”

“Ah?” said he. “Ah, yes. Then never tell me again that there’s nothing in intuitions. I’ve never met Miss Silver, but directly you crossed the threshold of this room, I began to feel vaguely reminded of her.”

“Oh, there’s a lot in intuitions,” she agreed. “But don’t think to disconcert me. My friend Miss Silver——”

It was his turn to raise his eyebrows. “Your friend?”

“Considering the sacrifice I’m making on her behalf to-day, it’s strange you should throw doubt upon my friendship for her,” she argued.

“You make your sacrifices with a cheerful countenance. I should never have guessed that you weren’t entirely happy. But forgive my interruption. You were about to say that your friend Miss Silver——”

“My occasional friend,” she substituted. “Sometimes, I confess, we quarrel like everything, and remain at daggers drawn for months. She’s such a flightly creature, dear Johannah, she not infrequently gets me into a perfect peck of trouble. But since she’s fallen heir to all this money, you’d be surprised to behold the devotion her friends have shown her. I couldn’t very well refuse to follow their example. One’s human, you see; and one can’t dress like this for nothing, can one?”

“Upon my word, I’m not in a position to answer you. I’ve never tried,” laughed he.

“In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I think we may safely assume one can’t,” said she. “However, here you are, beating about the bush again. I come to you as Johannah’s emissary. She desires me to ask you several questions.”

“Yes?” said he, a trifle uncomfortably.

“She would be glad to know,” his visitor declared, looking straight into his eyes, and smiling a little gravely, “why you have been so excessively nasty to her?”

“Have I been nasty to her?” he asked, with an innocence that was palpably counterfeit.

“Don’t you think you have?” She still looked gravely, smilingly, into his eyes.

“I don’t see how.” He maintained his feint of innocence.

“Don’t you think you’ve responded somewhat ungraciously to her overtures of friendship?” she suggested. “Do you think it was nice to answer her letters with those curt little formal notes of yours? Look. Johannah sat down to write to you. And she began her letter Dear Mr. Stretton. And then she simply couldn’t. So she tore up the sheet, and began another My Dear Cousin Will. And what did she receive in reply? A note beginning Dear Miss Silver. Do you think that was kind? Don’t you think it was the least bit mortifying? And why have you refused in such a stiff-necked way to go down to see her at Silver Towers?”

“Oh,” he protested, “in all fairness, in all logic, your questions ought to be put the other way round.”

“Bother logic! But put them any way you like,” said she.

“What right had Miss Silver to expect me to multiply the complications of my life by rushing into an ecstatic friendship with her? And why, being very well as I am in town just now, why should I disarrange myself by a journey into the country?”

“Why indeed?” she echoed. “I’m sure I can give no reason. Why should one ever do any one else a kindness? Your cousin has conceived a great desire to meet you.”

“Oh, a great desire!” He tossed his head. “One knows these great desires. She’ll live it down. A man named Burrell has been stuffing her up.”

“Stuffing her up?” She smiled enquiringly. “The expression is new to me.”

“Greening her, filling her head with all sorts of nonsensical delusions, painting my portrait for her in all the colours of the rainbow. Oh, I know my Burrell. He’s tried to stuff me up, too, about her.”

“Oh? Has he? What has he said?” she questioned eagerly.

“The usual rubbishy things one does say, when one wants to stuff a fellow up.”

“For instance?”

“Oh, that she’s tremendously good-looking, with hair and eyes and things, and very charming.”

“What a dear good person the man named Burrell must be,” she murmured.

“He’s not a bad chap,” he conceded, “but you must remember that he’s her solicitor.”

“And, remembering that, you weren’t to be stuffed?” she said.

“If she was charming and good-looking, it was a reason the more for avoiding her,” said he.

“Oh?” She looked perplexed.

“There’s nothing on earth so tiresome as charming women. They’re all exactly alike,” asserted he.

“Thank you,” his guest exclaimed, bowing.

“Oh, nobody could pretend that you’re exactly alike,” he assured her hastily. “I own at once that you’re delightfully different. But Burrell has no knack for character drawing.”

“You’re extremely flattering. But aren’t you taking a slightly one-sided point of view? Let us grant, for the sake of the argument, that it is Johannah’s bad luck to be charming and good-looking. Nevertheless, she still has claims on you.”

“Has she?”

“She’s your cousin.”

“Oh, by the left hand,” said he.

She stared for an instant, biting her lip. Then she laughed.

“And only my second or third cousin at that,” he went on serenely.

She looked at him with eyes that were half whimsical, half pleading. “Would you mind being quite serious for a moment?” she asked. “Because Johannah’s situation, absurd as it seems, really is terribly serious for Johannah. I should like to submit it to your better judgment. We’ll drop the question of cousinship, if you wish—though it’s the simple fact that you’re her only blood-relation in this country, where she feels herself the forlornest sort of alien. She’s passed her entire life in Italy and France, you know, and this is the first visit she’s made to England since her childhood. But we’ll drop the question of cousinship. At any rate, Johannah is a human being. Well, consider her plight a little. She finds herself in the most painful, the most humiliating circumstances that can be imagined; and you’re the only person living who can make them easier for her. Involuntarily—in spite of herself—she’s come into possession of a fortune that naturally, morally, belongs to you. She can’t help it. It’s been left to her by will—by the will of a man who never saw her, never had any kind of relations with her, but chose her for his heir just because her mother, who died when Johannah was a baby, had chanced to be his cousin. And there the poor girl is. Can’t you see how like a thief she must feel at the best? Can’t you see how much worse you make it for her, when she holds out her hand, and you refuse to take it? Is that magnanimous of you? Isn’t it cruel? You couldn’t treat her with greater unkindness if she’d actually designed, and schemed, and intrigued, to do you out of your inheritance, instead of coming into it in the passive way she has. After all, she’s a human being, she’s a woman. Think of her pride.”

“Think of mine,” said he.

“I can’t see that your pride is involved.”

“To put it plainly, I’m the late Sir William Silver’s illegitimate son.”

“Well? What of that?”

“Do you fancy I should enjoy being taken up and patronised by his legitimate heir?”

“Oh!” she cried, starting to her feet. “You can’t think I would be capable of anything so base as that.”

And he saw that her eyes had suddenly filled with tears.

“I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon a thousand times,” he said. “You would be utterly incapable of anything that was not generous and noble. But you must remember that I had never seen you. How could I know?”

“Well, now that you have seen me,” she responded, her eyes all smiles again, “now that I have put my pride in my pocket, and bearded you in your den, I don’t mind confiding in you that it’s nearly lunchtime, and also that I’m ravenously hungry. Could you ring your bell, and order up something in the nature of meat and drink? And while you are about it, you might tell your landlady or some one to pack your bag. We take,” she mentioned, examining a tiny watch, that seemed nothing more than a frivolous incrustation of little diamonds and rubies, “we take the three-sixteen for Silver Towers.” II.

Seated opposite her in the railway-carriage, as their train bore them through the pleasant dales and woods of Surrey, Will Stretton fell to studying his cousin’s appearance. “Burrell was right,” he told himself; “she really is tremendously good-looking,” and that, in spite of a perfectly reckless irregularity of feature. Her nose was too small, but it was a delicate, pert, pretty nose, notwithstanding. Her mouth was too large, but it was a beautiful mouth, all the same, softly curved and red as scarlet, with sensitive, humorous little quirks in its corners. Her eyes he could admire without reservation, brown and pellucid, with the wittiest, teasingest, mockingest lights dancing in them, yet at the same time a deeper light that was pensive, tender, womanly. Her hair, too, he decided, was quite lovely, abundant, undulating, black, blue-black even, but fine, but silky, escaping in a flutter of small curls above her brow. “It’s like black foam,” he said. And he would have been ready to go to war for her complexion, though it was so un-English a complexion that one might have mistaken her for a native of the France or Italy she had inhabitated: warm, dusky white, with an elusive shadow of rose glowing through it. Yes, she was tremendously good-looking, he concluded. She looked fresh and strong and real. She looked alert, alive, full of the spring and the joy of life. She looked as if she could feel quick and deep, as if her blood flowed swiftly, and was red. He liked her face, and he liked her figure—it was supple and vigorous. He liked the way she dressed—there was something daring and spirited in the uncompromising, unabashed luxury of it. “Who ever saw such a hat—or such a sunshade?” he reflected.

“There’ll be no coach-and-four to meet us at the station,” she warned him, as they neared their journey’s end, “because I have no horses. But we’ll probably find Madame Dornaye there, piaffer-ing in person. Can you resign yourself to the prospect of driving up to your ancestral mansion in a hired fly?”

“I could even, at a pinch, resign myself to walking,” he declared. “But who is Madame Dornaye?”

“Madame Dornaye is my burnt-offering to that terrible sort of fetich called the County. She’s what might be technically termed my chaperon.”

“Oh, to be sure,” he said; “I had forgotten. Of course, you’d have a chaperon.”

“By no means of course,” she corrected him. “Until the other day I’d never thought of such a thing. But it’s all along o’ the man named Burrell. He insisted that I mustn’t live alone—that I was too young. He has such violent hallucinations about people’s ages. He said the County would be horrified. I must have an old woman, a sound, reliable old woman, to live with me. I begged and implored him to come and try it, but he protested with tears in his eyes that he wasn’t an old woman. So I sent for Madame Dornaye, who is, every inch of her. She’s the widow of a man who used to be a professor at the Sorbonne, or something. I’ve known her for at least a hundred years. She’s connected in some roundabout way with the family of my father’s stepmother. She’s like a little dry brown leaf; and she plays Chopin comme pas un; and she lends me a false air of respectability, I suppose. She calls me Jeanne ma fille, if you can believe it, as if my name weren’t common Johannah. If you chance to please her, she’ll very likely call you Jean mon fils. But see how things turn out. The man named Burrell also insisted that I must put on mourning, as a symbol of my grief for the late Sir William. That I positively refused to think of. So the County’s horrified, all the same—which proves the futility of concessions.”

“Oh?” questioned Will. “What does the County do?”

“It comes and calls on me, and walks round me, and stares, with a funny little deprecating smile, as it I were some outlandish and not very proper animal, cast up by the sea. To begin with, there’s the vicar, with all his wives and daughters. Their emotions are complicated by the fact that I am a Papist. Then there’s old Lord Belgard; and there’s Mrs. Breckenbridge, with her marriageable sons; and there’s the Bishop of Salchester, with his Bishopess, Dean, and Chapter. The dear good people make up parties in the afternoon, to come and have a look at me; and they sip my tea with an air of guilt, as if it smacked of profligacy; and they suppress demure little knowing glances among themselves. And then at last they go away, shaking their heads, and talking me over in awe-struck voices.”

“I can see them, I can hear them,” Will laughed.

“Haven’t you in English a somewhat homely proverbial expression about the fat and the fire?” asked Johannah.

“About the fat getting into the fire? Yes,” said Will.

“Well, then, to employ that somewhat homely proverbial expression,” she went on, “the fat got into the fire at the Bishop’s palace. Mrs. Rawley was kind enough to write and ask us to dinner, and she added that she had heard I sang, and wouldn’t I bring some music? But nobody had ever told me that it’s bad form in England to sing well. So, after dinner, when Mrs. Rawley said, ’Now, Miss Silver, do sing us something,’ I made the incredible blunder of singing as well as I could. I sang the Erlkônig, and Madame Dornaye played the accompaniment, and we both did our very bestest, in our barefaced, Continental way. We were a little surprised, and vastly enlightened, to perceive that we’d shocked everybody. And by-and-by the Bishop’s daughters consented to sing in their turn, and then we saw the correct British style of doing it. If you don’t want to be considered rowdyish and noisy in a British drawing-room, you must sing under your breath, faintly, faintingly, as if you were afraid somebody might hear you.”

“My poor dear young lady,” her cousin commiserated her, “fancy your only just discovering that. It’s one of the foundation-stones of our social constitution. If you sing with any art or with any feeling, you expose yourself to being mistaken for a paid professional.”

“Another thing that’s horrified the County,” pursued Johannah, “is the circumstance that I keep no horses. I don’t like horses—except in pictures. In pictures, I admit at once, they make a very pleasant decorative motive. But in life—they’re too strong and too unintelligent; and they’re perpetually bolting. By-the-bye, please choose a good feeble jaded one, when you engage our fly. I’m devoted to donkeys, though. They’re every bit as decorative as the horse, and they’re really wise—they only baulk. I had a perfect love of a little donkey in Italy; his name was Angelo. If I decide to stay in England, I shall have a spanking team of four donkeys, with scarlet trappings and silver bells. But the County say ’Oh, you must have horses,’ and casts its eyes appealingly to heaven when I say I won’t.”

“The County lacks a sense of situations,” he reflected. “It’s really a deliciously fresh one—a big country house, and not a horse in the stables.”

“Apropos of the house, that brings me to another point,” said she. “The County feels very strongly that I ought to put the house in repair—that dear old wonderful, rambling, crumbling house. They take it as the final crushing evidence of my depravity, that I prefer to leave it in its present condition of picturesque decay. I’m sure you agree with me, that it would be high treason to allow a carpenter or mason to lay a hand on it. By-the-bye, I hope you have no conscientious scruples against speaking French; for Madame Dornaye only knows two words of English, and those she mispronounces. There she is—yes, that little black and grey thing, in the frock. She’s come to meet me, because we had a bet. You owe me five shillings,” she called out to Madame Dornaye, as Will helped her from the carriage. “You see, I’ve brought him.”

Madame Dornaye, who had a pair of humorous old French eyes, responded, blinking them, “Oh, before I pay you, I shall have to be convinced that it is really he.”

“I’m afraid it’s really he,” laughed Will; “but rather than let so immaterial a detail cost you five shillings, I’m prepared to maintain with my dying breath that there’s no such person.”

“Don’t mind him,” interposed Johannah. “He’s trying to flatter you up, because he wants you to call him Jean mon fils, as if his name weren’t common William.” Then, to him, “Go,” she said, with an imperious gesture, “go and find a vehicle with a good tired horse.”