The Cardinal\'s Snuff Box

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THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX

BY HENRY HARLAND

I

"The Signorino will take coffee?" old Marietta asked, as she
set the fruit before him.

Peter deliberated for a moment; then burned his ships.

"Yes," he answered.

"But in the garden, perhaps?" the little brown old woman
suggested, with a persuasive flourish.

"No," he corrected her, gently smiling, and shaking his head,
"not perhaps--certainly."

Her small, sharp old black Italian eyes twinkled, responsive.

"The Signorino will find a rustic table, under the big
willow-tree, at the water's edge," she informed him, with a good
deal of gesture. "Shall I serve it there?"

"Where you will. I leave myself entirely in your hands," he
said.

So he sat by the rustic table, on a rustic bench, under the
willow, sipped his coffee, smoked his cigarette, and gazed in
contemplation at the view.

Of its kind, it was rather a striking view.

In the immediate foreground--at his feet, indeed--there was the
river, the narrow Aco, peacock-green, a dark file of poplars on
either bank, rushing pell-mell away from the quiet waters of
the lake. Then, just across the river, at his left, stretched
the smooth lawns of the park of Ventirose, with glimpses of
the many-pinnacled castle through the trees; and, beyond,
undulating country, flourishing, friendly, a perspective of
vineyards, cornfields, groves, and gardens, pointed by
numberless white villas. At his right loomed the gaunt mass
of the Gnisi, with its black forests, its bare crags, its
foaming ascade, and the crenelated range of the Cornobastone;
and finally, climax and cynosure, at the valley's end,
Monte Sfiorito, its three snow-covered summits almost
insubstantial-seeming, floating forms of luminous pink vapour,
in the evening sunshine, against the intense blue of the sky.

A familiar verse had come into Peter's mind, and kept running
there obstinately.

"Really," he said to himself, "feature for feature, down to the
very 'cataract leaping in glory,' the scene might have been got
up, apres coup, to illustrate it." And he began to repeat the
beautiful hackneyed words, under his breath . . . .

But about midway of the third line he was interrupted.

II

"It's not altogether a bad sort of view--is it?" some one said,
in English.

The voice was a woman's. It was clear and smooth; it was
crisp-cut, distinguished.

Peter glanced about him.

On the opposite bank of the Aco, in the grounds of Ventirose,
five or six yards away, a lady was standing, looking at him,
smiling.

Peter's eyes met hers, took in her face . . . . And suddenly
his heart gave a jump. Then it stopped dead still, tingling,
for a second. Then it flew off, racing perilously.--Oh, for
reasons--for the best reasons in the world: but thereby hangs
my tale.

She was a young woman, tall, slender, in a white frock, with a
white cloak, an indescribable complexity of soft lace and airy
ruffles, round her shoulders. She wore no hat. Her hair,
brown and warm in shadow, sparkled, where it caught the light,
in a kind of crinkly iridescence, like threads of glass.

Peter's heart (for the best reasons in the world) was racing
perilously. "It's impossible--impossible--impossible"--the
words strummed themselves to its rhythm. Peter's wits (for had
not the impossible come to pass?) were in a perilous confusion.
But he managed to rise from his rustic bench, and to achieve a
bow.

She inclined her head graciously.

"You do not think it altogether bad--I hope?" she questioned,
in her crisp-cut voice, raising her eyebrows slightly, with a
droll little assumption of solicitude.

Peter's wits were in confusion; but he must answer her. An
automatic second-self, summoned by the emergency, answered for
him.

"I think one might safely call it altogether good."

"Oh--?" she exclaimed.

Her eyebrows went up again, but now they expressed a certain
whimsical surprise. She threw back her head, and regarded the
prospect critically.

"It is not, then, too spectacular, too violent?" she wondered,
returning her gaze to Peter, with an air of polite readiness to
defer to his opinion. "Not too much like a decor de theatre?"

"One should judge it," his automatic second-self submitted,
"with some leniency. It is, after all, only unaided Nature."

A spark flickered in her eyes, while she appeared to ponder.
(But I am not sure whether she was pondering the speech or its
speaker.)

"Really?" she said, in the end. "Did did Nature build the
villas, and plant the cornfields?"

But his automatic second-self was on its mettle.

"Yes," it asserted boldly; "the kind of men who build villas
and plant cornfields must be classified as natural forces."

She gave a light little laugh--and again appeared to ponder for
a moment.

Then, with another gracious inclination of the head, and an
interrogative brightening of the eyes, "Mr. Marchdale no
doubt?" she hazarded.

Peter bowed.

"I am very glad if, on the whole, you like our little effect,"
she went on, glancing in the direction of Monte Sfiorito. "I"
--there was the briefest suspension--"I am your landlady."

For a third time Peter bowed, a rather more elaborate bow than
his earlier ones, a bow of respectful enlightenment, of feudal
homage.

"You arrived this afternoon?" she conjectured.

"By the five-twenty-five from Bergamo," said he.

"A very convenient train," she remarked; and then, in the
pleasantest manner, whereby the unusual mode of valediction was
carried off, "Good evening."

"Good evening," responded Peter, and accomplished his fourth
bow.

She moved away from the river, up the smooth lawns, between the
trees, towards Castel Ventirose, a flitting whiteness amid the
surrounding green.

Peter stood still, looking after her.

But when she was out of sight, he sank back upon his rustic
bench, like a man exhausted, and breathed a prodigious sigh.
He was absurdly pale. All the same, clenching his fists, and
softly pounding the table with them, he muttered exultantly,
between his teeth, "What luck! What incredible luck! It's
she--it's she, as I 'm a heathen. Oh, what supernatural luck!"

III

Old Marietta--the bravest of small figures, in her neat
black-and-white peasant dress, with her silver ornaments,
and her red silk coif and apron--came for the coffee things.

But at sight of Peter, she abruptly halted. She struck an
attitude of alarm. She fixed him with her fiery little black
eyes.

"The Signorino is not well!" she cried, in the tones of one
launching a denunciation.

Peter roused himself.

"Er--yes--I 'm pretty well, thank you," he reassured her. "I
--I 'm only dying," he added, sweetly, after an instant's
hesitation.

"Dying--!" echoed Marietta, wild, aghast.

"Ah, but you can save my life--you come in the very nick of
time," he said. "I'm dying of curiosity--dying to know
something that you can tell me."

Her stare dissolved, her attitude relaxed. She smiled--relief,
rebuke. She shook her finger at him.

"Ah, the Signorino gave me a fine fright," she said.

"A thousand regrets," said Peter. "Now be a succouring angel,
and make a clean breast of it. Who is my landlady?"

Marietta drew back a little. Her brown old visage wrinkled up,
perplexed.

"Who is the Signorino's landlady?" she repeated.

"Ang," said he, imitating the characteristic nasalised eh of
Italian affirmation, and accompanying it by the characteristic
Italian jerk of the head.

Marietta eyed him, still perplexed--even (one might have
fancied) a bit suspicious.

"But is it not in the Signorino's lease?" she asked, with
caution.

"Of course it is," said he. "That's just the point. Who is
she?"

"But if it is in your lease!" she expostulated.

"All the more reason why you should make no secret of it," he
argued plausibly. "Come! Out with it! Who is my landlady?"

Marietta exchanged a glance with heaven.

"The Signorino's landlady is the Duchessa di Santangiolo," she
answered, in accents of resignation.

But then the name seemed to stimulate her; and she went on "She
lives there--at Castel Ventirose." Marietta pointed towards
the castle. "She owns all, all this country, all these houses
--all, all." Marietta joined her brown old hands together, and
separated them, like a swimmer, in a gesture that swept the
horizon. Her eyes snapped.

"All Lombardy?" said Peter, without emotion.

Marietta stared again.

"All Lombardy? Mache!" was her scornful remonstrance. "Nobody
owns all Lombardy. All these lands, these houses."

"Who is she?" Peter asked.

Marietta's eyes blinked, in stupefaction before such stupidity.

"But I have just 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
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 ones, fluttering in couples;
there were also (I am afraid) a good many gadflies--but che
volete? Who minds a gadfly or two in Italy? On the other side
of the house there were fig-trees and peach-trees, and
artichokes holding their heads high in rigid rows; and a vine,
heavy with great clusters of yellow grapes, was festooned upon
the northern wall.

The morning air was ineffably sweet and keen--penetrant, tonic,
with moist, racy smells, the smell of the good brown earth, the
smell of green things and growing things. The dew was spread
over the grass like a veil of silver gossamer, spangled with
crystals. The friendly country westward, vineyards and white
villas, laughed in the sun at the Gnisi, sulking black in
shadow to the east. The lake lay deep and still, a dark
sapphire. And away at the valley's end, Monte Sfiorito, always
insubstantial-seeming, showed pale blue-grey, upon a sky in
which still lingered some of the flush of dawn.

It was a surprisingly jolly garden, true enough. But though
Peter remained in it all day long--though he haunted the
riverside, and cast a million desirous glances, between the
trees, and up the lawns, towards Castel Ventirose--he enjoyed
no briefest vision of the Duchessa di Santangiolo.

Nor the next day; nor the next.

"Why does n't that old dowager ever come down and look after
her river?" he asked Marietta. "For all the attention she
gives it, the water might be undermining her property on both
sides."

"That old dowager--?" repeated Marietta, blank.

"That old widow woman--my landlady--the Duchessa Vedova di
Santangiolo."

"She is not very old--only twenty-six, twenty-seven," said
Marietta.

"Don't try to persuade me that she is n't old enough to know
better," retorted Peter, sternly.

"But she has her guards, her keepers, to look after her
property," said Marietta.

"Guards and keepers are mere mercenaries. If you want a thing
well done, you should do it yourself," said Peter, with gloomy
sententiousness.

On Sunday he went to the little grey rococo parish church.
There were two Masses, one at eight o'clock, one at ten--and
the church was quite a mile from Villa Floriano, and up a hill;
and the Italian sun was hot--but the devoted young man went to
both.

The Duchessa was at neither.

"What does she think will become of her immortal soul?" he
asked Marietta.

On Monday he went to the pink-stuccoed village post-office.

Before the post-office door a smart little victoria, with a
pair of sprightly, fine-limbed French bays, was drawn up, ducal
coronets emblazoned on its panels.

Peter's heart began to beat.

And while he was hesitating on the doorstep, the door opened,
and the Duchessa came forth--tall, sumptuous, in white, with
a wonderful black-plumed hat, and a wonderful white-frilled
sunshade. She was followed by a young girl--a pretty,
dark-complexioned girl, of fourteen, fifteen perhaps, with
pleasant brown eyes (that lucent Italian brown), and in her
cheeks a pleasant hint of red (that covert Italian red, which
seems to glow through the thinnest film of satin).

Peter bowed, standing aside to let them pass.

But when he looked up, the Duchessa had stopped, and was
smiling on him.

His heart beat harder.

"A lovely day," said the Duchessa.

"Delightful," agreed Peter, between two heart-beats.--Yet he
looked, in his grey flannels, with his straw-hat and his
eyeglass, with his lean face, his even colour, his slightly
supercilious moustaches--he looked a very embodiment of
cool-blooded English equanimity.

"A trifle warm, perhaps?" the Duchessa suggested, with her air
of polite (or was it in some part humorous?) readiness to defer
to his opinion.

"But surely," suggested he, "in Italy, in summer, it is its
bounden duty to be a trifle warm?"

The Duchessa smiled.

"You like it? So do I. But what the country really needs is
rain."

"Then let us hope," said he, "that the country's real needs may
remain unsatisfied."

The Duchessa tittered.

"Think of the poor farmers," she said reproachfully.

"It's vain to think of them," he answered. "'T is an
ascertained fact that no condition of the weather ever contents
the farmers."

The Duchessa laughed.

"Ah, well," she consented, "then I 'll join in your hope that
the fine weather may last. I--I trust," she was so good as to
add, "that you're not entirely uncomfortable at Villa
Floriano?"

"I dare n't allow myself to speak of Villa Floriano," he
replied. "I should become dithyrambic. It's too adorable."

"It has a pretty garden, and--I remember--you admired the
view," the Duchessa said. "And that old Marietta? I trust she
does for you fairly well?" Her raised eyebrows expressed
benevolent (or was it in some part humorous?) concern.

"She does for me to perfection. That old Marietta is a
priceless old jewel," Peter vowed.

"A good cook?" questioned the Duchessa.

"A good cook--but also a counsellor and friend. And with a
flow of language!"

The Duchessa laughed again.

"Oh, these Lombard peasant women. They are untiring
chatterers."

"I 'm not sure," Peter felt himself in justice bound to
confess, "that Marietta is n't equally untiring as a listener.
In fact, there's only one respect in which she has disappointed
me."

"Oh--?" said the Duchessa. And her raised eyebrows demanded
particulars.

"She swears she does n't wear a dagger in her garter--has never
heard of such a practice," Peter explained. "And now," he
whispered to his soul, "we 'll see whether our landlady is up
in modern literature."

Still again the Duchessa laughed. And, apparently, she was up
in modern literature. At any rate--

"Those are Lombard country-girls along the coast," she reminded
him. "We are peaceful inland folk, miles from the sea. But
you had best be on your guard, none the less." She shook her
head, in warning. "Through all this country-side that old
Marietta is reputed to be a witch."

"If she's a witch," said Peter, undismayed, "her usefulness
will be doubled. I shall put her to the test directly I get
home."

"Sprinkle her with holy water?" laughed the Duchessa. "Have a
care. If she should turn into a black cat, and fly away on a
broomstick, you'd never forgive yourself."

Wherewith she swept on to her carriage, followed by her young
companion.

The sprightly French bays tossed their heads, making the
harness tinkle. The footman mounted the box. The carriage
rolled away.

But Peter remained for quite a minute motionless on the
door-step, gazing, bemused, down the long, straight, improbable
village street, with its poplars, its bridge, its ancient stone
cross, its irregular pink and yellow houses--as improbable as a
street in opera-bouffe. A thin cloud of dust floated after the
carriage, a thin screen of white dust, which, in the sun,
looked like a fume of silver.

"I think I could put my finger on a witch worth two of
Marietta," he said, in the end." And thus we see," he added,
struck by something perhaps not altogether novel in his own
reflection, "how the primary emotions, being perennial, tend to
express themselves in perennial formulae."

VI

Back at the villa, he enquired of Marietta who the pretty
brown-eyed young girl might have been.

"The Signorina Emilia," Marietta promptly informed him.

"Really and truly?" questioned he.

"Ang," affirmed Marietta, with the national jerk of the head;
"the Signorina Emilia Manfredi--the daughter of the Duca."

"Oh--? Then the Duca was married before?" concluded Peter,
with simplicity.

"Che-e-e!" scoffed Marietta, on her highest note. "Married?
He?" Then she winked and nodded--as one man of the world to
another. "Ma molto porn! La mamma fu robaccia di Milano. But
after his death, the Duchessa had her brought to the castle.
She is the same as adopted."

"That looks as if your Duchessa's heart were in the right
place, after all," commented Peter.

"Gia," agreed Marietta.

"Hang the right place!" cried he. "What's the good of telling
me her heart is in the right place, if the right place is
inaccessible?"

But Marietta only looked bewildered.

He lived in his garden, he haunted the riverside, he made a
daily pilgrimage to the village post, he thoroughly neglected
the work he had come to this quiet spot to do. But a week
passed, during which he never once beheld so much as the shadow
of the Duchessa.

On Sunday he trudged his mile, through the sun, and up the
hill, not only to both Masses, but to Vespers and Benediction.

She was present at none of these offices.

"The Pagan!" he exclaimed.

VII

Up at the castle, on the broad marble terrace, where clematis
and jessamine climbed over the balustrade and twined about its
pilasters, where oleanders grew in tall marble urns and shed
their roseate petals on the pavement, Beatrice, dressed for
dinner, in white, with pearls in her hair, and pearls round her
throat, was walking slowly backwards and forwards, reading a
letter.

"There is a Peter Marchdale--I don't know whether he will be
your Peter Marchdale or not, my dear; though the name seems
hardly likely to be common--son of the late Mr. Archibald
Marchdale, Q. C., and nephew of old General Marchdale, of
Whitstoke. A highly respectable and stodgy Norfolk family.
I've never happened to meet the man myself, but I'm told he's a
bit of an eccentric, who amuses himself globe-trotting, and
writing books (novels, I believe) which nobody, so far as I am
aware, ever reads. He writes under a pseudonym, Felix--I 'm
not sure whether it's Mildmay or Wildmay. He began life, by
the bye, in the Diplomatic, and was attache for a while at
Berlin, or Petersburg, or somewhere; but whether (in the
elegant language of Diplomacy) he 'chucked it up,' or failed to
pass his exams, I'm not in a position to say. He will be near
thirty, and ought to have a couple of thousand a year--more or
less. His father, at any rate, was a great man at the bar, and
must have left something decent. And the only other thing in
the world I know about him is that he's a great friend of that
clever gossip Margaret Winchfield--which goes to show that
however obscure he may be as a scribbler of fiction, he must
possess some redeeming virtues as a social being--for Mrs.
Winchfield is by no means the sort that falls in love with
bores. As you 're not, either--well, verbum sap., as my little
brother Freddie says."

Beatrice gazed off, over the sunny lawn, with its trees and
their long shadows, with its shrubberies, its bright
flower-beds, its marble benches, its artificial ruin; over the
lake, with its coloured sails, its incongruous puffing
steamboats; down the valley, away to the rosy peaks of Monte
Sfiorito, and the deep blue sky behind them. She plucked a spray
of jessamine, and brushed the cool white blossoms across her
cheek, and inhaled their fairy fragrance.

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