The Lady Paramount

The Lady Paramount, by Henry
Harland

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Title: The Lady Paramount
Author: Henry Harland
Release Date: November 18, 2006 [EBook #19861]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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PARAMOUNT ***

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THE LADY PARAMOUNT
By HENRY HARLAND

Author of
"THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX"

JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
LONDON & NEW YORK -- MCMII

Copyright, 1902
BY JOHN LANE
All rights reserved

To
EDMUND GOSSE

The Lady Paramount
I
On the twenty-second anniversary of Susanna's birth, old
Commendatore Fregi, her guardian, whose charge, by the provisions of
her father's will, on that day terminated, gave a festa in her honour at
his villa in Vallanza. Cannon had been fired in the morning:
two-and-twenty salvoes, if you please, though Susanna had protested
that this was false heraldry, and that it advertised her, into the bargain,
for an old maid. In the afternoon there had been a regatta. Seven tiny
sailing-boats, monotypes,--the entire fleet, indeed, of the Reale Yacht
Club d'Ilaria--had described a triangle in the bay, with Vallanza, Presa,
and Veno as its points; and I need n't tell anyone who knows the island
of Sampaolo that the Marchese Baldo del Ponte's Mermaid, English

name and all, had come home easily the first. Then, in the evening,
there was a dinner, followed by a ball, and fire-works in the garden.
Susanna was already staying at the summer palace on Isola Nobile, for
already--though her birthday falls on the seventeenth of April--the
warm weather had set in; and when the last guests had gone their way,
the Commendatore escorted her and her duenna, the Baroness
Casaterrena, down through the purple Italian night, musical with the
rivalries of a hundred nightingales, to the sea-wall, where, at his private
landing-stage, in the bat-haunted glare of two tall electric lamps, her
launch was waiting. But as he offered Susanna his hand, to help her
aboard, she stepped quickly to one side, and said, with a charming
indicative inclination of the head, "The Baronessa."
The precedence, of course, was rightfully her own. How like her, and
how handsome of her, thought the fond old man, thus to waive it in
favour of her senior. So he transferred his attention to the Baroness.
She was a heavy body, slow and circumspect in her motions; but at
length she had safely found her place among the silk cushions in the
stern, and the Commendatore, turning back, again held out his hand to
his sometime ward. As he was in the act of doing so, however, his ears
were startled by a sound of puffing and of churning which caused him
abruptly to face about.
"Hi! Stop!" he cried excitedly, for the launch was several yards out in
the bay; and one could hear the Baroness, equally excited,
expostulating with the man at the machine:
"He! Ferma, ferma!"
"It's all right," said Susanna, in that rather deep voice of hers, tranquil
and leisurely; "my orders."
And the launch, unperturbed, held its course towards the glow-worm
lights of Isola Nobile.
The Commendatore stared. . . .

For a matter of five seconds, his brows knitted together, his mouth half
open, the Commendatore stared, now at Susanna, now after the
bobbing lanterns of the launch,--whilst, clear in the suspension, the
choir of nightingales sobbed and shouted.
"Your orders?" he faltered at last. Many emotions were concentrated in
the pronoun.
"Yes," said Susanna, with a naturalness that perhaps was studied. "The
first act of my reign."
He had never known her to give an order before, without asking
permission; and this, in any case, was such an incomprehensible order.
How, for instance, was she to get back to the palace?
"But how on earth," he puzzled, "will you get back to----"
"Oh, I 'm not returning to Isola Nobile tonight," Susanna jauntily
mentioned, her chin a little perked up in the air. Then, with the sweetest
smile--through which there pierced, perhaps, just a faint glimmer of
secret mischief?--"I 'm starting on my wander-year," she added, and
waved her hand imperially towards the open sea.
It was a progression of surprises for the tall, thin old Commendatore.
No sooner had Susanna thus bewilderingly spoken, than the rub and dip
of oars became audible, rhythmically nearing; and a minute after, from
the outer darkness, a row-boat, white and slender, manned by two
rowers in smart nautical uniforms, shot forward into the light, and drew
up alongside