My Friend Prospero Part 21

Maria Dolores was silent for a little. They had come to the southern end of the cloisters, where the b.u.t.tresses of the Castle walls, all s.h.a.ggy-mantled in a green overgrowth of creepers, fall precipitously away, down the steep face of a natural cliff. They stopped here, and stood looking off. The rain had held up, though the valley was still misty with its vapours. Whiffs of velvety air, warm and sweet, blew in their faces, lightly stirred the dark hair about her brow, and, catching the flowery edge of her black lace mantilla, set it fluttering.

"That is a very good story," she said, by-and-by, with a sober glance, behind which there was the glint of laughter. "In view of it, however, I suppose there will be no use in my delivering a message I am charged with for you from my friend Frau Brandt."

"Oh?" questioned John. "What message?"

"Frau Brandt has received from the owner of the Castle the privilege of hearing Ma.s.s from the tribune; and she wished me to invite you in her name hereafter to hear Ma.s.s from there with us. But I suppose, in view of your 'lesson,' that is an invitation which you will decline?" The glint of laughter shone brighter in her eyes, and her mouth had a tiny pucker, amiably derisive.

John looked at her, his blue eyes bold.

"That is an invitation which I am terribly tempted to accept," he said, in a voice of unconcealed emotion, of patent meaning; and beneath his bold gaze, her dark eyes dropped, while I think a blush faintly swept her cheeks. "And first of all," he added, "pray express to Frau Brandt my grateful thanks for it--and let me thank you also for your kindness in conveying it. If, in spite of my temptation, I _don't_ accept it, that will be for a very special reason, and one quite unconnected with my 'lesson.'"

Maria Dolores probably knew her danger. She turned, and began to walk backwards, towards the point where you can pa.s.s from the cloisters, through the great porte-cochere, into the garden, and so on to the pavilion beyond the clock. She probably knew her danger; but she was human, but she was a woman. Besides, she had reached the porte-cochere, and thus commanded a clear means of escape. So, coming to a standstill here, "What is the very special reason?" she asked, in a low voice, keeping her eyes from his.

His were bolder than ever. Infinite admiration of her burned in them, infinite delight in her, desire for her; at the same time a kind of angry hopelessness darkened them, and a kind of bitter amus.e.m.e.nt, as of one amused at his own sad plight.

"I wish I were rich," he exclaimed, irritably, between his teeth.

"Oh? Is _that_ the very special reason?" asked she, with two notes of laughter.

"No," said he, "but it has a connection with it. You see, I'm in love."

"Yes," said she. "I remember your telling me so."

"Well, I wish I were rich," said he. "Then I might pluck up courage to ask the woman I love to be my wife."

"Money isn't everything here below," said she. "I have your own word for that."

"What else counts," said he, "when you wish to ask a woman to marry you?"

"Oh, many things," said she. "Difference of rank, for example."

"That wouldn't count with me," said the democratic fellow, handsomely.

"I shouldn't give two thoughts to differences of rank."

Maria Dolores smiled--at her secret reflections, I suppose.

"But poverty puts it out of all question," John moodily went on. "I couldn't ask a woman to come and share with me an income of sixpence a week. Especially as I have grounds for believing that she's in rather affluent circ.u.mstances herself. Oh, I wish I were rich!" He repeated this aspiration in a groan.

"Poor, poor young man!" she commiserated him, while her eyes, which she held perseveringly averted, were soft with sympathy and gay with mirth.

"When do you begin your gardening?"

"Oh, don't mock me!" he cried, with an imploring gesture. "You know, joking apart, that it's child's play for a man of my age, with no profession and no special talent, to fancy he can turn to and earn money. I might, if I made supernatural exertions, and if Fortune went out of her way to favour me, add a maximum of another sixpence to my weekly budget. No, there's never a hope for me on sea or land. I must e'en bear it, though I cannot grin withal."

"Ah, well," said Maria Dolores, to comfort him, "these attacks, I have read, are often as short as they are sharp. Let us trust you'll soon rally from this one. How long have they generally lasted in the past?"

John's face grew dark with upbraiding; the sea-blue of his eyes, the gold of his hair and beard, the pink of his complexion visibly grew dark.

"You are so needlessly unkind," he said, "that you don't deserve to hear the true answer to your question."

She studied the half-obliterated fresco on the wall beside her.

"All the same," said he, "you _shall_ hear it. If falling in love were my habit, no doubt I shouldn't take it so hard. But the simple truth, though I am thirty years old, is that I have never before felt so much as a heart-flutter for any woman. And, since you cite your reading, _I_ have read that a fire which may merely singe the surface of green wood, will entirely consume the dry."

She continued to study the ancient painting. Her fingers were playing with the ends of her lace veil.

"Besides," he went on, "if I had been in love a dozen times, it wouldn't signify. For I should have been in love with ordinary usual human women. They're the only sort I ever met--till I met her. She's of a totally different order--as distinct from them as ... What shall I say? Oh, as unlike them as starfire is unlike dull clay.

Starfire--starfire--the wonderful, high, white-burning starfire of her spirit, that's the thing that strikes you most in her. It s.h.i.+nes through her. It s.h.i.+nes in her eyes, it s.h.i.+nes in her hair, her adorable, soft, dark, warm and fragrant hair; it s.h.i.+nes in her very voice; it s.h.i.+nes in every word she utters, even in the unkindest."

"Dear me! what an alarmingly refulgent person you depict!" laughed Maria Dolores, her eyes still on the wall.

"I have no gift for word-painting," said John; "though I doubt if the words are yet invented that could fitly paint my lady. She grows in beauty day by day. It's a literal fact--every fresh time I see her, she is perceptibly more lovely than the last, more love-compelling in her loveliness. But 'tis a thing unpaintable, indescribable, as indescribable as the perfume of a rose. Oh, why haven't I five thousand a year?"

"You harp so persistently upon your desire for money," suggested Maria Dolores, "one might infer she was a commodity, to be bought and sold.

You begin at the wrong end. What good would five or fifty thousand a year do you, if you had not begun by winning her love?

"No, I begin at the proper end, worse luck," John answered, glooming.

"For, without a decent income, I have no right even to try to win her love.

"And that being so," questioned Maria Dolores, "I hope you conscientiously avoid her society, or, when you meet, make yourself consistently disagreeable to her?

"There's no need for such precautions," John replied. "There's no fear for her. She regards me as a casual and pa.s.sing acquaintance. So I make myself no more disagreeable than I am by nature. And if I avoided her society, (which I am far from doing), it would be not for her sake, but for my own. For, though her society is to me a kind of antic.i.p.ation of the joys of Heaven, yet when I leave it and find myself alone, the reaction is dreary in the superlative degree; and the fear, which perpetually haunts me (for I know nothing of her plans), lest I shall never see her again, is agonizing as a foretaste of--Heaven's antipode.

Oh, I love her!"

He took, involuntarily I dare say, a step in her direction. She retreated under the vaulting of the _porte-cochere_.

"You seem," she commented, "to be getting a good deal of emotional experience,--which doubtless some day you will find of value. Why not, instead of gardener, embark as novelist or poet? Here is material you could then turn to account."

"Ah, there you are," he complained, piteously, "mocking me again. Ah, well, if you must have your laugh, have it, and welcome. A man can learn to take the bitter with the sweet."

"To spare you that discomfort," said she, moving deeper into the archway, while John's face fell, "I will bid you good-bye. I am to report, then, that you decline my friend's invitation with thanks?"

"With my most grateful thanks," he was able intensively to rejoin, in spite of his dismay at the imminence of her departure.

"And for a very special reason?" she harked back, now, suddenly, for the first time since they had touched thin ice, giving him a glance.

It was the fleetingest of fleeting glances, it was merry and ironic, but there was something in it which brought a flame to his blue eyes.

"For the very special reason," he answered, with vehemence, "that I fear the presence near me of--" He held his breath for a second, the flame in his eyes enveloping her; then, with an abrupt change of tone and mien, he ended, "--of Frau Brandt might distract my attention from the sermon."

She laughed, and said, "Good-bye."

"Good-bye," said John. And when she was halfway through the tunnel-like pa.s.sage, "I suppose you know you are leaving me to a day as barren as the Desert of Sahara?" he called after her.

"Oh, who can tell what a day may bring forth?" called she, but without looking back.

For a long while John's faculties were kept busy, trying to determine whether that was a promise, a menace, or a mere word in the air.