The Cardinals Snuff-Box | Page 3

told you," she cried "She is the Duchessa di
Santangiolo."
"Who is the Duchessa di Santangiolo?" he asked.
Marietta, blinking harder, shrugged her shoulders.
"But"--she raised her voice, screamed almost, as to one deaf --"but the
Duchessa di Santangiolo is the Signorino's landlady la, proprietaria di
tutte queste terre, tutte queste case, tutte, tutte."
And she twice, with some violence, reacted her comprehensive gesture,
like a swimmer's.
"You evade me by a vicious circle," Peter murmured.
Marietta made a mighty effort-brought all her faculties to a
focus--studied Peter's countenance intently. Her own was suddenly
illumined.
"Ah, I understand," she proclaimed, vigorously nodding. "The
Signorino desires to know who she is personally!"

"I express myself in obscure paraphrases," said he; "but you, with your
unfailing Italian simpatia, have divined the exact shade of my
intention."
"She is the widow of the Duca di Santangiolo," said Marietta.
"Enfin vous entrez dans la voie des aveux," said Peter.
"Scusi?" said Marietta.
"I am glad to hear she's a widow," said he. "She--she might strike a
casual observer as somewhat young, for a widow."
"She is not very old," agreed Marietta; "only twenty-six, twenty-seven.
She was married from the convent. That was eight, nine years ago. The
Duca has been dead five or six."
"And was he also young and lovely?"
Peter asked.
"Young and lovely! Mache!" derided Marietta. "He was past forty. He
was fat. But he was a good man."
"So much the better for him now," said Peter.
"Gia," approved Marietta, and solemnly made the Sign of the Cross.
"But will you have the kindness to explain to me," the young man
continued, "how it happens that the Duchessa di Santangiolo speaks
English as well as I do?"
The old woman frowned surprise.
"Come? She speaks English?"
"For all the world like an Englishman," asseverated Peter.
"Ah, well," Marietta reflected, "she was English, you know."

"Oho!" exclaimed Peter. "She was English! Was she?" He bore a little
on the tense of the verb. "That lets in a flood of light. And--and what,
by the bye, is she now?" he questioned.
"Ma! Italian, naturally, since she married the Duca," Marietta replied.
"Indeed? Then the leopard can change his spots?" was Peter's inference.
"The leopard?" said Marietta, at a loss.
"If the Devil may quote Scripture for his purpose, why may n't I?" Peter
demanded. "At all events, the Duchessa di Santangiolo is a very
beautiful woman."
The Signorino has seen her?" Marietta asked.
"I have grounds for believing so. An apparition--a phantom of
delight--appeared on the opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco, and
announced herself as my landlady. Of course, she may have been an
impostor--but she made no attempt to get the rent. A tall woman, in
white, with hair, and a figure, and a voice like cooling streams, and an
eye that can speak volumes with a look."
Marietta nodded recognition.
"That would be the Duchessa."
"She's a very beautiful duchessa," reiterated Peter.
Marietta was Italian. So, Italian--wise, she answered, "We are all as
God makes us."
"For years I have thought her the most beautiful woman in Europe,"
Peter averred.
Marietta opened her eyes wide.
"For years? The Signorino knows her? The Signorino has seen her
before?"

A phrase came back to him from a novel he had been reading that
afternoon in the train. He adapted it to the occasion.
"I rather think she is my long-lost brother."
"Brother--?" faltered Marietta.
"Well, certainly not sister," said Peter, with determination. "You have
my permission to take away the coffee things."

IV
Up at the castle, in her rose-and-white boudoir, Beatrice was writing a
letter to a friend in England.
"Villa Floriano," she wrote, among other words, "has been let to an
Englishman--a youngish, presentable-looking creature, in a dinner
jacket, with a tongue in his head, and an indulgent eye for
Nature--named Peter Marchdale. Do you happen by any chance to
know who he is, or anything about him?"

IV
Peter very likely slept but little, that first night at the villa; and more
than once, I fancy, he repeated to his pillow his pious ejaculation of the
afternoon: "What luck! What supernatural luck!" He was up, in any
case, at an unconscionable hour next morning, up, and down in his
garden.
"It really is a surprisingly jolly garden," he confessed. "The agent was
guiltless of exaggeration, and the photographs were not the perjuries
one feared."
There were some fine old trees, lindens, acacias, chestnuts, a
flat-topped Lombardy pine, a darkling ilex, besides the willow that
overhung the river, and the poplars that stiffly stood along its border.

Then there was the peacock-blue river itself, dancing and singing as it
sped away, with a thousand diamonds flashing on its surface--floating,
sinking, rising --where the sun caught its ripples. There were some
charming