The Cardinals Snuff-Box | Page 3

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 bits of greensward. There was a fountain, plashing melodious coolness, in a nimbus of spray which the sun touched to rainbow pinks and yellows. There were vivid parterres of flowers, begonia and geranium. There were oleanders, with their heady southern perfume; there were pomegranate-blossoms, like knots of scarlet crepe; there were white carnations, sweet-peas, heliotrope, mignonette; there were endless roses. And there were birds, birds, birds. Everywhere you heard their joyous piping, the busy flutter of their wings. There were goldfinches, blackbirds, thrushes, with their young--the plumpest, clumsiest, ruffle-feathered little blunderers, at the age ingrat, just beginning to fly, a terrible anxiety to their parents--and there were also (I regret to own) a good many rowdy sparrows. There were bees and bumblebees; there were brilliant, dangerous-looking dragonflies; there were butterflies, blue ones and white