My Friend Prospero Part 5

"I've never in my life set eyes on her before," he solemnly averred.

She scrutinized him sharply.

"Hand on heart?" she doubted.

And he, supporting her scrutiny without flinching, answered, "Hand on heart."

"Well, then," concluded she, with a laugh, "it looks as if I were even more of an old witch than I boasted--and my thumbs p.r.i.c.ked to some purpose. Here's the lady of the piece already arrived. There, she's going away. How well she walks! Have after her--have after her quick, and begin your courts.h.i.+p."

The smiling young woman, her lilac dress softly bright in the sun, was moving slowly down the garden path, towards the cloisters; and now she entered them, and disappeared. But John, instead of "having after her,"

remained at his counsellor's side, and watched.

"She came from that low doorway, beyond there at the right, where the two cypresses are; and she came at the very climax of my vaticination,"

said her ladys.h.i.+p. "Without a hat, you'll hardly dispute it's probable she's staying in the house."

"No--it certainly would seem so," said John. "I'm all up a tree."

"The garden looks rather dreary and empty, now that she has left, doesn't it?" she asked. "Yet it looked jolly enough before her advent.

And see--the lizards (there are four of them, aren't there?) that whisked away from the dial at her approach, have come back. Well, _your_ work's cut out. I suppose it wouldn't be possible for you to give a poor woman a dish of tea?"

"I was on the very point of proposing it," said John. "May I conduct you to my quarters?"

PART SECOND

I

Rather early next morning John was walking among the olives. He had gone (straight from his bed, and in perhaps the least considered of toilets: an old frieze ulster, ornamented with big b.u.t.tons of mother-of-pearl, a pair of Turkish slippers, a bathing-towel over his shoulder, and for head-covering just his uncombed native thatch) he had gone for a swim, some half a mile upstream, to a place he knew where the Rampio--the madcap Rampio, all shallows and rapids--rests for a moment in a pool, wide and deep, translucent, inviting, and, as you perceive when you have made your plunge, of a most a.s.sertive chill. Now he was on his leisurely way home, to the presbytery and what pa.s.sed there for breakfast.

The hill-side rose from the river's bank in a series of irregular terraces, upheld by rough stone walls. The gnarled old trees bent towards each other and away like dwarfs and crook-backs dancing a fantastic minuet; and in the gra.s.s beneath them, where the sun shot his fiery darts and cast his net of shadows, Chloris had scattered innumerable wildflowers: hyacinths, the colour of the sky; violets, that threaded the air for yards about with their sentiment-provoking fragrance; tulips, red and yellow; sometimes a tall, imperial iris; here and there little white nodding companies of jonquils. Here and there, too, the dusty-green reaches were pointed by the dark spire of a cypress, alone, in a kind of glooming isolation; here and there a blossoming peach or almond, gaily pink, sent an inexpressible little thrill of gladness to one's heart. The air was sweetened by many incense-breathing things besides the violets,--by moss and bark, the dew-laden gra.s.s, the moist brown earth; and it was quick with music: bees droned, leaves whispered, birds called, sang, gossiped, disputed, and the Rampio played a crystal accompaniment.

John swung onwards at ease, while lizards, with tails that seemed extravagantly long, fled from before his feet, terrible to them, no doubt, as an army with banners, for his Turkish slippers, though not in their pristine youth, were of scarlet leather embroidered in a rich device with gold. And presently (an experience unusual at that hour in the olive wood) he became aware of a human voice.

"Ohe! My good men, there! Will you be so kind as to gather me some of those anemones? Here is a lira for your pains."

It was a feminine voice; it was youthful and melodious; it was finished, polished, delicately modulated. And its inflection was at once confident and gracious,--clearly the speaker took it for granted that she would receive attention, and she implied her thanks abundantly beforehand. It was a voice that evoked in the imagination a charming picture of fresh, young, confident, and gracious womanhood.

"h.e.l.lo!" said John to himself. "Who is there in this part of the world with a voice like that?"

And he felt it would not be surprising if on glancing round he should behold--as, in fact, he did--the stranger of yesterday, the Unknown of the garden.

II

She stood on one of the higher terraces, (a very charming picture indeed, bright and erect, in the warm shadow of the olives), and was calling down to a couple of peasants at work on the other side of the stream. Between the thumb and forefinger of an ungloved fair right hand, she held up a silver lira.

Anemones, said she! Near to where the men were working, by the river's brink, there was a s.p.a.ce of level ground, perhaps a hundred feet long, and tapering from half that breadth to a point. And this was simply crimson and purple with a countless host of anemones.

She called to the men, and one seeing and hearing her would have thought they must abandon everything, and spring to do her bidding. But they didn't. Pausing only long enough to give her a phlegmatic stare, as if in doubt whether conceivably she could have the impertinence to be addressing _them_, and vouchsafing not a word, each went calmly on with his employment;--very, very calmly, _piano_, _piano_, gently, languidly, filling small baskets with fallen olives, and emptying them upon outspread canvas sheets. There are, and more's the pity, two types of Italian peasant. There's the old type, which we knew in our youth, and happily it still survives in some numbers,--the peasant who, for all his rags and tatters, has manners that will often put one's own to shame, and, with a _simpatia_ like second-sight, is before one's wishes, in his eagerness to serve and please. And there is the new type, which we know to our disgust, and unhappily it multiplies like vermin,--the peasant who has lent his ear to the social democrat, and, his heart envenomed by cla.s.s hatred, meets your civility with black glances and the behaviour of a churl in the sulks.

So, though her voice was sweet to hear, and though, standing there in the warm penumbra of the olive orchard, tall and erect and graceful, in her bright frock, she made a charming picture, and though she offered a silver lira as a prize, the men merely stared at her churlishly, and went on with their work--languidly, sluggishly, as men who deemed the necessity to work an outrage, and weren't going to condone it by working with anything like a will.

Now, John Blanchemain, as I have previously mentioned, was an unselfconscious sort of fellow. In his unselfconsciousness, forgetting several trifles that might properly have weighed with him, (forgetting the tarnished gorgeousness of his Turkish slippers for example, and his towzled head, and the bathing-towel that flowed like a piece of cla.s.sic drapery from his shoulder), obeying impulse and instinct, he flung himself into the breach.

"Brutes," he muttered between his teeth. Then, in his easiest man-of-the-worldy accents, "If you can wait two minutes," he called aloud to her. And therewith he went scrambling down the terraces and picked his way from stone to stone across the shallows, to the field of anemones, where their satiny petals, like crisping wavelets, all a-ripple in the moving air, s.h.i.+mmered with constantly changing lights.

And in a twinkling he had gathered a great armful, and was clambering back.

"I beg of you," he said, in his abrupt fas.h.i.+on, holding them out to her, and slightly bowing, with that nothing-doubting a.s.surance of his, while his blue eyes (to put her entirely at her ease) smiled, frank and friendly and serene, into her dark ones.

But hers seemed troubled. She looked at the flowers, she looked at John, I think she even looked at her lira. Her eyes seemed undecided.

"Do pray take them," said he, still smiling, still frank and a.s.sured, but as if a little puzzled, a little amused, by her hesitation, and more airily a man-of-the-world than ever, his tone one of high detachment, to spare her any possible feeling of personal obligation, and to place his performance in the light of a matter of course,--as if indeed he had done nothing more than pick up and return, say, a handkerchief she might have dropped. "You were right," he owned to his thought of Lady Blanchemain; "she is beautiful." Here, at close quarters with her, one's perception of her beauty became acute,--here, under the grey old trees, in the leafy dimness, alone with her, at two paces from her, where the birds sang and the violets gave forth their fragrant breath. He saw that her eyes were beautiful (soft and deep and luminous, despite their trouble), and her low white brow, and the dark ma.s.ses of her hair, under her garden-hat, and the rose in her cheeks, and the red-rose of her mouth. And he saw and felt the beauty and the vitality of her strong young body.

But meanwhile she had stretched forth, rather timidly, that ungloved fair hand of hers, and taken the flowers.

"You are very good, I am sure. Thank you very much," she said, rather faintly, with a grave little inclination of the head.

John, always with magnificent a.s.surance, put up his hand, to doff a man-of-the-worldy hat, and bow himself away;--and it encountered his bare locks, bare, and still wet from recent ducking. Whereupon, suddenly, the trifles he had forgotten were remembered, and at last (in the formula of the criminologist) "he realized his position:" hatless and uncombed, with the bathing-towel slung from his shoulder, in that weather-beaten old frieze coat with its ridiculous b.u.t.tons, in those awful Turkish slippers,--offering, with his grand manner, flowers to a woman he didn't know, and smiling, to put her at her ease! His pink face burned to a livelier pink, his ears went hot, his heart went cold.

The bow he finally accomplished was the blighted bud of the bow he had projected; and, as the earth didn't, of its charity, open and engulf him, he hastened as best he could, and with a painful sense of slinking, to remove his crestfallen person from her range of view.

When these unselfconscious fellows are startled into selfconsciousness, I fancy they take it hard. I don't know how long it was before John had done heaping silent curses, silent but savage, upon himself; his luck, his "beastly officiousness," upon the whole afflicting incident: curses that he couldn't help diversifying now and then with a catch of splenetic laughter, as a vision of the figure he had cut would recurrently

"--_flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude_."

"Oh, you _ape!_" he groaned. "Rigged out like Pudding Jack, and, with your ineffable simagrees, offering a strange woman flowers!"

If _she_ had only laughed, had only smiled, it wouldn't have been so bad, it would have shown that she understood. "But through it all," he writhed to recollect, "she was as solemn as a mourner. I suppose she was shocked--perhaps she was frightened--very likely she took me for a tramp. I wonder she didn't crown my beat.i.tude by giving me her lira.

These foreigners do so lack certain discernments."

And with that rather an odd detail came back to him. _Was_ she a foreigner? For it came vaguely back that he, impulsive and unthinking, had spoken to her throughout in English. "And anyhow,"--this came distinctly back,--"it was certainly in English that she thanked me."

III

What pa.s.sed for breakfast at the presbytery was the usual Continental evasion of that repast,--bread and coffee, despatched in your apartment.

But at noon the household met to dine.