“In the first place,” replied Beatrice, firmly, “I shall never marry any one. That is absolutely certain. In the next place, I shall not re-read the novel; and to prove that I shan't, I shall insist on your taking it with you when you leave to-day. And finally, I'm nowhere near convinced that you're right about my being... well, you might as well say the raw material, the rough ore, as the virgin gold. It's only a bare possibility. But even the possibility had not occurred to me before. Now that it has, I shall be on my guard. I shall know how to prevent any possible developments.”
“In the first place,” said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, with equal firmness, “wild horses couldn't induce me to take the novel. Wait till you're alone. A hundred questions about it will come flocking to your mind; you'd be miserable if you had n't it to refer to. In the next place, the poison will work and work. Say what you will, it's flattery that wins us. In the third place, he'll tell you. Finally, you'll make a good Catholic of him, and marry him. It's absurd, it's iniquitous, anyhow, for a young and beautiful woman like you to remain a widow. And your future husband is a man of talent and distinction, and he's not bad-looking, either. Will you stick to your title, now, I wonder? Or will you step down, and be plain Mrs. Marchdale? No--the Honourable Mrs.--excuse me--'Mr. and the Honourable Mrs. Marchdale.' I see you in the 'Morning Post' already. And will you continue to live in Italy? Or will you come back to England?”
“Oh, my good Kate, my sweet Kate, my incorrigible Kate, what an extravagantly silly Kate you can be when the mood takes you,” Beatrice laughed.
“Kate me as many Kates as you like, the man is really not bad-looking. He has a nice lithe springy figure, and a clean complexion, and an open brow. And if there's a suggestion of superciliousness in the tilt of his nose, of scepticism in the twirl of his moustaches, and of obstinacy in the squareness of his chin--ma foi, you must take the bitter with the sweet. Besides, he has decent hair, and plenty of it--he'll not go bald. And he dresses well, and wears his clothes with an air. In short, you'll make a very handsome couple. Anyhow, when your family are gathered round the evening lamp to-night, I 'll stake my fortune on it, but I can foretell the name of the book they'll find Trixie Belfont reading,” laughed Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
For a few minutes, after her friend had left her, Beatrice sat still, her head resting on her hand, and gazed with fixed eyes at Monte Sfiorito. Then she rose, and walked briskly backwards and forwards, for a while, up and down the terrace. Presently she came to a standstill, and leaning on the balustrade, while one of her feet kept lightly tapping the pavement, looked off again towards the mountain.
The prospect was well worth her attention, with its blue and green and gold, its wood and water, its misty-blushing snows, its spaciousness and its atmosphere. In the sky a million fluffy little cloudlets floated like a flock of fantastic birds, with mother-of-pearl tinted plumage. 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 balustrade, 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 Duchessa'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 Duchessa'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 supposititious 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 passion, 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, nobody. In her view, you are just a harmless nobody, whose society she tolerates for kindness' sake--and faute de mieux. It is precisely because she deems you a nobody--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 circumspect. 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.