My Friend Prospero Part 6

The dining-room, on the ground floor, long and low, with a vaulted ceiling, whitewashed, and a pavement of worn red tiles, was a clean, bare room, that (pervaded by a curious, dry, not unpleasant odour) seemed actually to smell of bareness, as well as of cleanliness. There was a table, there was a dresser, there were a few unpainted deal chairs, rush-bottomed (exactly like the chairs in the church, in all Italian churches), and there was absolutely nothing else, save a great black and white Crucifix attached to the wall. But, by way of compensation, its windows opened southwards, flooding it with suns.h.i.+ne, and commanding the wonderful perspective of the valley,--the blue-grey hills, the snow-peaks, the blossoming low-lands, and the far-away opalescence that you knew to be the lake.

At noon the parroco, his niece Annunziata, and his boarder met to dine.

The parroco was a short, stout, florid, black-haired, hawk-nosed, fierce-looking, still youngish man, if five-and-forty may be reckoned youngish, with a pair of thin lips and powerful jaws which, for purposes of speech, he never opened if he could help it. Never,--till Sunday came: when, mounting the pulpit, he opened them indeed, and his pent-up utterance burst forth in a perfect torrent of a sermon, a wild gush of words, shouted at the topmost stress of a remarkably l.u.s.ty voice, arresting for a minute or two by reason of the sheer physical energy it represented, and then for a long half hour exquisitely tiresome. But on week-days he maintained a prodigious silence, and this (as, though fierce-looking, he wasn't in the least really fierce) it would often be John's malicious study to tempt him to break. Besides, to-day, John was honestly concerned with the pursuit of knowledge.

Accordingly, grace being said, "You never told me," he began, a.s.suming a mien of intelligent interest, "that the castle was haunted." He looked at the Napoleonic profile of Don Ambrogio, but from the tail of his eye he kept a watch as well upon Annunziata, and he saw that that wise little maiden became attentive.

"No," said Don Ambrogio, between two spoonfuls of soup.

"You will conceive my astonishment, then," continued John, urbanely, "when I discovered that it was."

"It isn't," said Don Ambrogio. He gave himself diligently to the business of the hour; his spoon flew backwards and forwards like a shuttle. His napkin, tucked into his Roman collar, protected his bosom, an effective white cuira.s.s.

"Oh? Not the castle?" questioned John. "Only the garden? And the olive wood? True, on reflection, I've never seen it in the house."

"Nothing here is haunted," said the parroco. He made a signal to Annunziata, who rose to change the plates. Her big eyes were alight, her serious little face was alert; but she would never dream of speaking in the presence of her uncle. Marcella, the cook, brought in the inevitable veal.

"Oh, for that," insisted John, courteous but firm, "I beg your pardon. I myself have seen it on two occasions; and, lest you should fancy it a subjective illusion, I may tell you that it was yesterday seen simultaneously by another."

"It? It? What is _it_?" asked the parroco, his beaked and ensanguined visage fiercer-looking than ever, as he fell upon the inevitable veal with a somewhat dull carving-knife.

"Ah," said John, "now you make me regret that I haven't a talent for word-painting. It's the form of a woman, a young woman, tall, slender, in some pale diaphanous garment, that appears here, appears there, remaining distinctly visible for some minutes, and then disappears. No, it isn't a subjective illusion. And it isn't, either," the unscrupulous creature added, after a pause, raising his voice, and speaking with emphasis, as if to repel the insinuation, while the darkness of disenchantment swept the face of Annunziata, "it isn't, either, as some imaginative people might too hastily conclude, a wraith, a phantom, an insubstantial vapour. It's a real material form, that lives and breathes, and even, if driven to it, speaks. There's nothing supernatural about it,--unless, indeed, we take the transcendental view that Nature herself is supernatural. I was wondering, Don Ambrogio, whether, without violating a confidence, you could tell me whose form it is?"

"Nossignore," said Don Ambrogio, economizing his breath.

"Ah," sighed John, nodding resignedly, "I feared as much. Divining that I would inst.i.tute inquiries, she has stolen a march upon me, and pledged you to secrecy."

"Nossignore," disavowed Don Ambrogio, raising eyes the sincerity of which there could be no suspecting.

John's face took on an expression of aggrieved surprise.

"But then why won't you tell me?"

"I cannot tell you because I do not know," said Don Ambrogio.

"Oh, I see," said John. "And yet," he argued meditatively, "that's hard to conceive. I don't for a moment mean that I doubt it--but it's hard to conceive, like the atomic theory, and some of the articles of religion.

(I hear, by-the-by, that the scientists are throwing the atomic theory over. Oh, fickle scientists! Oh, s.h.i.+fting sands of science!) Surely there can't be many such tall slender forms, in diaphanous garments, appearing and disappearing here and there in your parish? And one would suppose, antecedently, that you'd know them all."

"A peasant, a villager," said Don Ambrogio.

"I put it to you as an observer of life," said John, "do peasants, do villagers, wear diaphanous garments?"

"A visitor, a sight-seer, from some place on the lake," said Don Ambrogio.

"I put it to you as a student of probabilities," said John, "would a visitor, would a sight-seer, from some place on the lake, walk in the garden of the castle without a hat? And would she appear at Sant'

Alessina on two days in succession?"

But Don Ambrogio had finished his veal, and when he had finished his veal he always left the table, first twice devoutly making the sign of the Cross, and then with a bow to John, p.r.o.nouncing the formula, "You will graciously permit? My affairs call me. A thousand regrets." To-day he slightly amplified that formula. "A thousand regrets," he said, "and as many excuses for my inability to afford the information desired."

After his departure, John turned to Annunziata, where, in her grey cotton pinafore, her lips parted, her big eyes two lively points of interrogation, she sat opposite to him, impatient to take up the theme.

"Well, Mistress Wisdom!" he saluted her, smiling, and waving his hand.

"It is a good and wholesome thing for the young to witness the discomfiture of the wicked. Your uncle retreats with flying colours. He made, to be sure, a slender dinner, but that's his daily habit. If you have tears to shed, shed them for me. I have made none at all."

From points of interrogation, Annunziata's eyes changed to abysses of wonder, and, big as they were, seemed to grow measurably bigger.

"You have made no dinner?" she protested, in that strangely deep voice of hers, with its effect of immense solemnity.

"No, poor dear," said John, with pathos, "no, I have made no dinner."

"But you have eaten a great deal," exclaimed Annunziata, frowning, nonplussed. "And you are still eating."

"Quite so," responded John, "though I think it's perhaps the merest trifle unhandsome of you to fling it in my face. I have eaten a great deal, and I am still eating. That is what I come to table for. In an orderly life like mine there is a place for everything. I come to table to eat, just as I go to bed to sleep and to church to say my prayers.

Would you have me sleep at table, eat in church, and say my prayers in bed? Eating, however, has nothing to do with the case. I spoke of dining--I said I had not dined. Now you shall be the judge. The question is, can a Christian man dine twice on the same day? Answer me that."

"Oh, no," answered Annunziata, her pale face very sober, and she lengthened out her vowels in deprecation of the idea. "At least, it would be gluttony if he did."

"There you are," cried John. "And gluttony is not the undeadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. So, then, unless you would have me guilty of the deadly sin of gluttony, you must agree that I have not dined. For I am going to dine this evening. I am going to dine at the Hotel Victoria at Roccadoro. I am going to dine with a lady. I am going to dine in all the pomp and circ.u.mstance of my dress-suit, with a white tie and pumps. And you yourself have said it, a Christian man may not, without guilt of gluttony, dine twice on the same day. Therefore it is the height of uncharitableness, it's a deliberate imputation of sin, to contend that I have dined already."

Annunziata followed his reasoning thoughtfully, and then gravely set him right.

"No," she said, with a drop of the eyelids and a quick little shake of the head, "you do not understand. I will explain." Her eyes were wide open again, and bright with zeal for his instruction. "You have dined already. That is a certain truth, because this meal is dinner, and you have eaten it. But to-night you are going to a dinner of ceremony--and that is different. A dinner of ceremony does not count. It is the same as a supper. My uncle himself once went to a dinner of ceremony at Bergamo. No, it will not be gluttony for you to go to a dinner of ceremony."

"You speak like a little pope," said John, with enthusiasm. "In matters of Faith and Morals I believe you are infallible. If you could guess the load you have lifted from my conscience!" And he pushed a hearty ouf.

"I am glad," said Annunziata. And then she attempted to hark back.

Curiosity again lighting her eyes, "This form that you have seen in the garden--" she began.

"Don't try to change the subject," John interrupted. "Let us cultivate sequence in our ideas. What I am labouring with hammer and tongs to drag from you is the exact date at which, somewhere between the years of our salvation 1387 and 1455, you sat for your portrait to the beatified painter Giovanni of Fiesole. Now, be a duck, and make a clean breast of it."

Annunziata's eyes clouded. A kind of scorn, a kind of pity, and a kind of patient longanimity looked from them.

"That is folly," she said, on the deepest of her deep notes, with a succession of slow, reflective, side-wise nods.

"Folly--?" repeated John, surprised, but bland. "Oh? Really?"

"Sit for my portrait between the years 1387 and 1455,--how could I?"

scoffed Annunziata.

"Why? What was to prevent you?" innocently questioned he.

"_Ma come!_ I was not yet alive," said she.

John looked at her with startled eyes, and spoke with animation.

"Weren't you? Word of honour? Are you sure? How do you know? Have you any definite recollection that you weren't? Can you clearly recall the period in question, and then, reviewing it in detail, positively attest that you were dead? For there's no third choice. A person must either be alive or dead. And how, if you weren't alive, how ever did it come to pa.s.s that there should be a perfect portrait of you from Giovanni's brush in the Convent of Saint Mark at Florence? Your grave little white face, and your wise little big eyes, and your eager little inquisitive profile, and your curls flowing about your shoulders, and your pinafore that's so like a peplum,--there they all are, precisely as I see them before me now. And how was Giovanni able to do them if you weren't alive? Perhaps you were pre-mortally alive in Heaven? Giovanni's cell, as is well known, had a window that opened straight into Heaven. Perhaps he saw you through that window, and painted you without your knowing it.

The name they give your portrait, by-the-by, would rather seem to confirm that theory. What do you think they call it? They call it an _un angiolo_. I've got a copy of it in England. When you come to London to visit the Queen I'll show it to you."

Annunziata gave her flowing curls a toss.