Butthis melancholy period ofcrêpe, a time of idle secrets, and unbosomings, was to prove fatal to the happiness of Mademoiselle de Nazianzi. She now heard she was not the first in the Prince’s life, and that most of the Queen’s maids, indeed, had had identical experiences with her own. She furthermore learned, amid ripples of laughter, of her lover’s relations with the Marquesa Pizzi-Parma and of his light dealings with the dancer April Flowers, a negress (to what depths??) at a time when he was enjoying the waxen favours of the wife of his Magnificence, the Master of the Horse.
Chilled to the point of numbness, the mortified girl had scarcely winced, and when on repairing to her room a little later, she had found his Weariness wandering in the corridor on the chance of a surreptitious kiss, she had bolted past him without look, or word, and sharply closed her door.
The Court had returned to colours when she opened it again, and such had been the trend of her meditations, that her initial steps were directed, with deliberate austerity, towards the basilica of the Palace.
Except for the Countess Yvorra, with anécharpe de décencedrawn over her hair, there was no one in it.
“I thank Thee God for thisescape,” she murmured falling to her knees before the silver branches of a cross: “It is terrible; for I did so love him ......................... ............................................... ............................................... ...... and oh how could he ever witha negress? ....................................... ................................................ ...... Pho ..................................... ........... I fear this complete upset has considerably aged me............................ ....... But to Thee I cling................... ................................................ ................................................ Preserve me at all times from the toils of the wicked, and forgive him, asIhope to forgive him soon.” Then kindling severalcandles with a lingering hand, she shaped her course towards the Kennels, called Teddywegs to her and started, with an aching heart, for a walk.
It was a day of heavy somnolence. Skirting the Rosery where gardeners with their slowly moving rakes were tending the sandy paths, she chose a neglected footway that descended towards the lake. Indifferent to the vivacity of Teddywegs, who would race on a little before her, then wait with leonine accouchments of head until she had almost reached him, when he would prick an ear and spring forward with a yap of exhortation, she proceeded leisurely, and with many a pause, wrapped in her own mournful thoughts.
Alack! Among the court circle there was no one to whom in her disillusion she could look for solace, and her spirit yearned for Sister Ursula, and the Convent of the Flaming-Hood.
Wending her way amid the tall trees, she felt she had never cared for Yousef as she had for Ursula ... and broodingly, in order to ease her heart, she began comparing the two together as she walked along.
After all what had he ever said that was not either commonplace or foolish? Whereas Sister Ursula’s talk was invariably pointed; and often indeed so delicately, that words seemed almost too crude a medium to convey her ethereal meanings, and she would move her evocative hands, and flash her aura, and it was no fault of hers if you hadn’t a peep of the beyond. And the infinite tenderness of her least caress. Yousef’s lips had seldom conveyed to hers the spell of Ursula’s; and once indeed lately, when he had kissed her, there had been an unsavoury aroma of tobacco andcharcuterie, which, to deal with, had required both tact and courage.... Ah dear Hood! What harmony life had held within. Unscrupulous and deceiving men might lurk around its doors (they often did) coveting the chaste, but Old Jane, the porteress, would open to no man beyond the merest crack. And how right they were the nuns in their mistrust of man! Sister Ursula one day had declared, in uplifted mood, that “marriage was obscene.” Was it—? ...?? ... Perhaps it might be—! How appalling if it was!
She had reached the lake.
Beneath a sky as white as platinum it lay, pearly, dove-like, scintillating capriciously where a heat-shrouded sun kindled its torpid waters into fleeting diamonds. A convulsive breeze strayed gratefully from the opposite shore, descending from the hills that rose up all veiled, and without detail, against the brilliant whiteness of the morning.
Sinking down upon the shingle by an upturned boat, she heaved a brief sigh, and drawing from her vanity-case the last epistles of the Prince, she began methodically to arrange them in their proper sequence.
(1) “What is the matter with my Dearest Girl?”
(2) “My own tender little Lita, I do not understand—”
(3) “Darling, what’s this—?”
(4) “Beloved one, I swear—”
(5) “Your cruel silence—”
If published in a dainty brochure format about the time of his Coronation, they ought to realise no contemptible sum, and the proceeds might go to Charity, she reflected, thrusting them back again carefully into the bag.
Then, finding the shingle too hard through her thin gown to remain seated long, she got up, and ran a mournful race with Teddywegs along the shore.
Not far along the lake was the “village,” with the Hôtel d’Angleterre et du Lac, its stucco, belettered-walls professing: “Garages, Afternoon Tea, Modern Comfort!” Flitting by this, and the unpretentious pier (where long, blonde fishing-nets lay drying in the sun), it was a relief to reach the remoter plage beyond.
Along the banks stretched vast brown carpets of corn and rye, broken by an occasional olive-garth, beneath whose sparse shade the heavy-eyed oxen blinked and whisked their tails, under the attacks of the water-gnats that were swarming around.
Musing on Negresses—and Can-Can dancers in particular—she strolled along a strand all littered with shells and little jewel-like stones.
The sun shone down more fiercely now, and soon, for freshness sake, she was obliged to take to the fields.
Passing among the silver drooping olives,relieved here and there by a stone-pine, or slender cypress-tree eternally green, she sauntered on, often lured aside to pluck the radiant wild-flowers by the way. On the banks the pinkest cyclamens were in bloom, and cornflowers of the hue of paradise, and fine-stemmed poppies flecked with pink.
“Pho! A Negress ...” she murmured, following the flight of some waterfowl towards the opposite shore.
The mists had fallen from the hills, revealing old woods wrapped in the blue doom of Summer.
Beyond those glowing heights, towards this hour, the nuns, each in her cool, shuttered, cell, would be immersed in noontide prayer.
“Ursula—for thee!” she sighed, proffering her bouquet in the direction of the town.
A loud splash ... the sight of a pair of delicate legs (mocking the Law’s requirements under the Modesty Act as relating to bathers).... Mademoiselle de Nazianzi turned and fled. She had recognisedthe Prince.5
Andin this difficult time of spiritual distress, made more trying perhaps because of the blazing midsummer days, and long, pent feverish nights, Mademoiselle de Nazianzi turned in her tribulation towards religion.
The Ecclesiastical set at Court, composed of some six, or so, ex-Circes, under the command of the Countess Yvorra, were only too ready to welcome her, and invitations to meet Monsignor this, or “Father” that, who constantly were beingcoaxedfrom their musty sacristies and wan-faced acolytes in the capital, in order that they might officiate at Masses, Confessions and Breakfast-partiesà la fourchette, were lavished daily upon the bewildered girl.
Messages, and hasty informal lightly-pencilled notes, too, would frequently reach her; such as: “I shall be pouring out cocoa after dinner in bed. Bring yourbiscuits and join me!” ... or a rat-a-tat from a round-eyed page and: “The Countess’ comp’ts and she’d take it a Favour if you can make a ‘Station’ with her in chapel later on,” or: “The Marchioness will be birched to-morrow, andnotto-day.”
O, the charm, the flavour of the religious world! Where match it for interest or variety!
An emotion approaching sympathy had arisen, perhaps a trifle incongruously, between the injured girl and the Countess Yvorra, and before long, to the amusement of the sceptical element of the Court, the Countess and her Confessor, Father Nostradamus, might often be observed in her society.
“I need a cage-companion, Father, for my little bird,” the Countess one evening said, as they were ambling, all the three of them before Office up and down the perfectly tended paths: “ought it to be of the same species and sex, or does it matter? For as I said to myself just now (while listening to a thrush),Allbirds are His creatures.”
The priest discreetly coughed.
“Your question requires reflection,” he said: “What is the bird?”
“A hen canary!—and with a voice, Father! Talk of soul!!”
“H—m ... a thrush and a canary, I would not myself advise.”
Mademoiselle de Nazianzi tittered.
“Why not let it go?” she asked, turning her eyes towards the window-panes of the palace, that glanced like rows of beaten-gold in the evening sun.
“A hawk might peck it!” the Countess returned, looking up as if for one, into a sky as imaginative, and as dazzling as Shelley poetry.
“Even the Court,” Father Nostradamus ejaculated wryly, “will peck at times.”
The Countess’ shoulder-blades stiffened.
“After over thirty years,” she said, “I find Court-lifepathetic....”
“Pathetic?”
“Tragically pathetic....”
Mademoiselle de Nazianzi considered wistfully the wayward outline of the hills.
“I would like to escape from it all for a while,” she said, “and travel.”
“I must hunt you out a pamphlet, by and by, dear child, on the ‘Dangers of Wanderlust.’”
“The Great Wall of China and the Bay of Naples! It seems so frightful never to have seen them!”
“I have never seen the Great Wall, either,” the Countess said, “and I don’t suppose, my dear, I ever shall; though I once did spend a fortnight in Italy.”
“Tell me about it.”
The Countess became reminiscent.
“In Venice,” she said, “the indecent movements of the Gondolieri quite affected my health, and, in consequence, I fell a prey to a sharp nervous fever. My temperature rose and it rose, ah, yes ... until I became quite ill. At last I said to my maid (she was an English girl fromWales, and almost equally as sensitive as me): ‘Pack.... Away!’ And we left in haste for Florence. Ah, and Florence, too, I regret to say I found very far from what it ought to have been!!! I had a window giving on the Arno, and so I couldobserve.... I used to see some curious sights! I would not careto scathe your ears, my Innocent, by an inventory of one half of the wantonness that went on; enough to say the tone of the place forced me to fly to Rome, where beneath the shadow of dear St Peter’s I grew gradually less distressed.”
“Still, I should like, all the same, to travel!” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi exclaimed, with a sad little snatch of a smile.
“We will ask the opinion of Father Geordie Picpus, when he comes again.”
“It would be more fitting,” Father Nostradamus murmured (professional rivalry leaping to his eye), “if Father Picpus kept himself free of the limelight a trifle more!”
“Often I fear our committees would be corvés without him....”
“Tchut.”
“He is very popular ... too popular, perhaps ...” the Countess admitted. “I remember on one occasion in the Blue Jesus, witnessing the Duchess of Quaranta and Madame Ferdinand Fishbacher, fight like wild cats as to which should gain his ear—(any girl might envy Father Geordie his ear)—at Confession next. The oddsseemed fairly equal, until the Duchess gave the Fishbacher-woman, such a violent push—(well down from behind, in the crick of the joints)—that she overturned The Confessional Box, with Father Picpus within: and when we scared ladies, standing by, had succeeded in dragging him out, he was too shaken, naturally as you can gather, to absolve anyone elsethatday.”
“He has been the object of so many unseemly incidents, that one can scarcely recall them all,” Father Nostradamus exclaimed, stooping to pick up a dropped pocket-handkerchief with “remembrance” knots tied to three of the corners.
“Alas.... Court life is not uplifting,” the Countess said again, contemplating her muff ofself-madelace, with a half-vexed forehead. What that muff contained was a constant problem for conjecture; but it was believed by more than one of the maids-in-waiting to harbour “goody” books and martyrs’ bones.
“By generous deeds and Brotherly love,” Father Nostradamus exclaimed, “we should endeavour to rise above it!”
With the deftness of a virtuoso, the Countess seized, and crushed with her muff, a pale-winged passing gnat.
“Before Life,” she murmured, “that saddest thing of all, was thrust upon us, I believe I was an angel....”
Father Nostradamus passed a musing hand across his brow.
“It may be,” he replied, “and it very well may be,” he went on, “that our ante-nativity was a little more brilliant, a little moreh—m...; and there is nothing unorthodox in thinking so.”
“O what did I do then to lose my wings?? What did I ever say to Them?! Father, Father. How did I annoy God? Why did He put me here?”
“My dear child, you ask me things I do not know; but it may be you were the instrument appointed above to lead back to Him our neighbour yonder,” Father Nostradamus answered, pointing with his breviary in the direction of St Helena.
“Never speak to me of that wretched old man.”
For despite the ablest tactics, the mostdiplomatic angling, Count Cabinet had refused to rally.
“We followed the sails of your skiff to-day,” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi sighed, “until the hazes hid them!”
“I had a lilac passage.”
“You delivered the books?”
The Countess shrugged.
“I shall never forget this afternoon,” she said. “He was sitting in the window over a decanter of wine when I floated down upon him; but no sooner did he see me, than he gave a sound, like a bleat of a goat, and disappeared: I was determined however to call! There is no bell to the villa, but two bronze door-knockers, well out of reach, are attached to the front-door. These with the ferrule of my parasol I tossed and I rattled, until an adolescent, with Bougainvillea at his ear, came and looked out with an insolent grin, and I recognised Peter Passer from the Blue Jesus grown quite fat.”
“Eh mon Dieu!” Father Nostradamus half-audibly sighed.
“Eh mon Dieu ...” Mademoiselle deNazianzi echoed, her gaze roving over the palace, whose long window-panes in the setting sun gleamed like sumptuous tissues.
“So that,” the Countess added, “I hardly propose to venture again.”
“What a site for a Calvary!” Father Nostradamus replied, indicating with a detached and pensive air the cleft in the White Mountain’s distant peaks.
“I adore the light the hills take on when the sun drops down,” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi declared.
“It must be close onSalut....”
It was beneath the dark colonnades by the Court Chapel door that they received the news from the lips of a pair of vivacious dowagers that the Prince was to leave the Summer-Palace on the morrow to attend “the Manœuvres,” after which it was expected his Royal Highness would proceed “to England.”
Andmeanwhile the representatives of the Court of St James were enjoying the revivifying country air and outdoor-life of the Villa Clement. It was almost exquisite how rapidly the casual mode of existence adopted during the summer villeggiatura by their Excellencies, drew themselves and their personnel together, until soon they were as united and assans gêneas the proverbial family party. No mother, in the “acclimatization” period, could have dosed her offspring more assiduously than did her Excellency the attachés in her charge; flavouring her little inventions frequently with rum or gin until they resembled cocktails. But it was Sir Somebody himself if anyone that required a tonic. Lady Something’s pending litigation, involving as it did the crown, was fretting the Ambassador more than he cared to admit, and the Hon. Mrs Chilleywater, ever alert, told “Harold” that the injudiciouschatter of the Ambassadress (who even now notwithstanding her writ, would say to every other visitor that came to the villa: “Have you heard about the Ritz?? The other night we were dining at the Palace, and I heard the King,”etc.) was wearing their old Chief out.
And so through the agreeable vacation life there twitched the grim vein of tension.
One day disturbed by her daughter’s persistent trilling of the latest coster songWhen I sees ’im I topple giddy, Lady Something gathered up her morning letters and stepped out upon the lawn.
Oh so formal, oh so slender towered the Cypress-trees against the rose-farded hills and diamantine waters of the lake. The first hint of Autumn was in the air; and over the gravel paths, and in the basins of the fountains, a few shed leaves lay hectically strewn already.
Besides an under-stamped missive, with a foreign postmark, from her Majesty the Queen of the Land of Dates beginning “My dear Gazel,” there was a line from the eloquent, and moderately-victorious, youngbarrister, engaged in the approaching suit with the Ritz: He had spared himself no pains he assured his client in preparing the defence, which was he said to bethe respectability of Claridge’s.
“Why bring in Claridge’s? ...?” the Ambassadress murmured, prodding with the tip of her shoe a decaying tortoiseshell leaf; “but anyway,” she reflected, “I’m glad the proceedings fall in winter, as I always look well in furs.”
And mentally she was wrapped in leopard skins and gazing round the crowded court saluting with a bunch of violets an acquaintance here and there, as her eyes fell on Mrs Chilleywater seated in the act of composition beneath a cedar-tree.
Mrs Chilleywater extended a painful smile of welcome which revealed her pointed teeth and pale-hued gums, repressing, simultaneously, an almost irresistible inclination to murder.
“What!... Another writ?” she suavely asked.
“No, dear; but these legal menwillwrite....”
“I love your defender. He has an air of d’Alembert sympathetic soul.”
“He proposes pleading Claridge’s.”
“Claridge’s?”
“Its respectability.”
“Are hotels ever respectable,—I ask you. Though, possibly, the horridest are.”
“Aren’t they all horrid!”
“Natürlich; but do you know those cheap hotels where the guests are treated like naughty children?”
“No. I must confess I don’t,” the Ambassadress laughed.
“Ah, there you are....”
Lady Something considered a moment a distant gardener employed in tying Chrysanthemum blooms to little sticks.
“I’m bothered about a cook,” she said.
“And I, about a maid! I dismissed Ffoliott this morning—well I simplyhadto—for a figure salient.”
“So awkward out here to replace anyone; I’m sure I don’t know....” the Ambassadress replied, her eyes hovering tragically over the pantaloons strained tosplittingpoint, of the stooping gardener.
“It’s a pretty prospect....”
“Life is a compound!” Lady Something defined it at last.
Mrs Chilleywater turned surprised. “Not even Socrates,” she declared, “said anything truer than that.”
“A compound!” Lady Something twittered again.
“I should like to put that into the lips of Delitsiosa.”
“Who’s Delitsiosa?” the Ambassadress asked as a smothered laugh broke out beside her.
Mrs Chilleywater looked up.
“I’d forgotten you were there. Strange thing among the cedar-boughs,” she said.
The Hon. Lionel Limpness tossed a slippered foot flexibly from his hammock.
“You may well ask ‘who’s Delitsiosa’!” he exclaimed.
“She is my new heroine,” Mrs Chilleywater replied, after a few quick little clutches at her hair.
“I trust you won’t treat her, dear, quite so shamefully as your last.”
The Authoress tittered.
“Delitsiosa is the wife of Marsden Didcote,” she said, “the manager of a pawn-shop in the district of Maida Vale, and in the novel he seduces an innocent seamstress, Iris Drummond, who comes in one day to redeem her petticoat (and really I don’t know how I did succeed in drawing the portrait of a little fool!) ... and when Delitsiosa, her suspicions aroused, can no longer doubt or ignore her husband’s intimacy with Iris, already engaged to a lusty young farmer in Kent—(some boy)—she decides to yield herself to the entreaties of her brother-in-law Percy, a junior partner in the firm, which brings about the great tussle between the two brothers on the edge of the Kentish cliffs. Iris and Delitsiosa—Iris is anticipating a babelet soon—are watching them from a cornfield, where they’re boiling a kettle for afternoon tea; and oh, I’ve such a darling description of a cornfield. I make youfeelEngland!”
“No really, my dear,” Lady Something exclaimed.
“Harold pretends it would be wonderful, arranged as an Opera ... with duos andthings and aLiebestodfor Delitzi towards the close.”
“No, no,” Mr Limpness protested: “What would become of our modern fiction at all if Victoria Gellybore Frinton gave herself up to the stage?”
“That’s quite true, strange thing among the cedar-boughs,” Mrs Chilleywater returned fingering the floating strings of the bandelette at her brow: “It’s lamentable; yet who is there doing anything at present for English Letters...? Who among us to-day,” she went on peering up at him, “is carrying on the tradition of Fielding? Who really cares? I knowIdo what I can ... and there’s Madam Adrian Bloater, of course. But I can think of no one else;—we two.”
Mr Limpness rocked, critically.
“I can’t bear Bloater’s books,” he demurred.
“To be frank, neither can I. I’m very fond of Lilian Bloater, I adore herwelt-bürgerlichenature, but I feel like you about her books; Icannotread them. If only she would forget Adrian; but she will thrust him headlong into all her work.HaveIever drawn Harold? No. (Although many of the public seem to think so!) And please heaven, howevergreatmy provocation at times may be, I never shall!”
“And there I think you’re right,” the Ambassadress answered, frowning a little as the refrain that her daughter was singing caught her ear.
“And when I sees ’imMy heart goes BOOM!...And I topple over;I topple over, over, over,All for Love!”
“And when I sees ’imMy heart goes BOOM!...And I topple over;I topple over, over, over,All for Love!”
“I dreamt last night my child was on the Halls.”
“There’s no doubt, she’d dearly like to be.”
“Her Father would never hear of it!”
“And when she sees meO, when she sees me—
“And when she sees meO, when she sees me—
(The voice slightly false was Harold’s)
Her heart goes BOOM!...And she topples over;She topples over, over, over,All for Love!”
Her heart goes BOOM!...And she topples over;She topples over, over, over,All for Love!”
“There; they’ve routed Sir Somebody....”
“And when anything vexes him,” Lady Something murmured, appraising the Ambassador’s approaching form with a glassy eye, “he always, you know, blames me!”
Shorn of the sombre, betailed attire, so indispensable for the town-duties of a functionary, Sir Somebody, while rusticating, usually wore a white-twill jacket, and black multi-pleated pantaloons; while for headgear, he would favour a Mexican sugar-loaf, or green-draped pugaree: “He looks half-Irish,” Lady Something would sometimes say.
“Infernal Bedlam,” he broke out: “the house is sheer pandemonium.”
“I found it so too, dear,” Lady Something agreed; “and so,” she added, removing a fallen tree-bug tranquilly from her hair, “I’ve been digesting my letters out here upon the lawn.”
“And no doubt,” Sir Somebody murmured, fixing the placid person of his wife, with a keen psychological glance: “you succeed, my dear, in digesting them?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“...” the Ambassador displayed discretion.
“We’re asked to a Lion hunt in the Land of Dates; quite anentreatinginvitation from the dear Queen—; really most pressing and affectionate, but Princess Elsie’s nuptial negotiations and this pending Procès with the Ritz, may tie us here for some time.”
“Ah Rosa.”
“Why these constant moans? ...? A clairvoyant once told me I’d ‘the bump of Litigation’—acause célèbreunmistakably defined; so it’s as well, on the whole, to have it over.”
“And quite probably; had your statement been correct——”
The Ambassadress gently glowed
“I’m told it’s simply swarming!” she impenitently said.
“Oh Rosa, Rosa....”
“And if you doubt it at all, here is an account direct from the Ritz itself,” her Excellency replied, singling out a letter from among the rest: “It is from dear oldGeneral Sir Trotter-Stormer. He says: ‘I am the only guest here. I must say, however, the attendance is beyond all praise, moresoignéand better than I’ve ever known it to be, but after what you told me, dear friend, I feeldistinctly uncomfortablewhen the hour for bye-bye comes!’”
“Pish; what evidence, pray, is that?”
“I regard it as of the very first importance! Sir Trotter admits—a distinguished soldier admits, his uneasiness; and who knows, he is so brave about concealing his woes—his two wives left him!—what he may not have patiently and stoically endured?”
“Less I am sure, my dear, than I of late in listening sometimes to you.”
“I will write I think and press him for a more detailed report....”
The Ambassador turned away.
“She should no more be trusted with ink than a child with firearms!” he declared, addressing himself with studious indirectness to a garden-snail.
Lady Something blinked.
“Life is a compound,” she murmured again.
“Particularly for women!” the Authoress agreed.
“Ah, well,” the Ambassadress majestically rose: “I must be off and issue household orders; although I derive hardly my usual amount of enjoyment at present, I regret to say, from my morning consultations with the cook....”
Ithad been once the whim, and was now the felicitous habit of the Countess of Tolga to present Count Cabinet annually with a bouquet of flowers. It was as if Venus-Anadyomene herself, standing6on a shell and wafted by all the piquant whispers of the town and court, would intrude upon the flattered exile (with her well-wired orchids, and malicious, soulless, laughter), to awaken delicate, pagan images, of a trecento, Tuscan Greece.
But upon this occasion desirous of introducing some new features, the Countess decided on presenting the fallen senator with a pannier of well-grown, early pears, a small “heath,” and the Erotic Poems bound in half calf with tasteful tooling of a Schoolboy Poet, cherishable chiefly, perhaps, for the vignette frontispiece of the author. Moreover, acting on an impulseshe was never able afterwards to explain, she had invited Mademoiselle Olga Blumenghast to accompany her.
Never had summer shown a day more propitiously clement, than the afternoon in mid-Autumn they prepared to set out.
Fond of a compliment, when not too frankly racy,7and knowing how susceptible the exile was to clothes, the Countess had arrayed herself in a winter gown of kingfisher-tinted silk turning to turquoise, and stencilled in purple at the arms and neck with a crisp Greek-key design; while a voluminous violet veil, depending behind her to a point, half-concealed a tricorne turquoise toque from which arose a shaded lilac aigrette branching several ways.
“I shall probably die with heat, and of course it’s most unsuitable; but poor old man, he likes to recall the Capital!” the Countess panted, as, nursing heath, poems and pears, she followed Mademoiselle Olga Blumenghast blindly towards the shore.
Oars, and swaying drying nets, a skylinelost in sun, a few moored craft beneath the little rickety wooden pier awaiting choice:— “The boatmen, to-day, darling, seem all so ugly; let’s take a sailing-boat and go alone!”
“I suppose there’s no danger, darling?” the Countess replied, and scarcely had she time to make any slight objection, than the owner of a steady wide-bottomed boat—theCalypso—was helping them to embark.
The Island of St Helena, situated towards the lake’s bourne, lay distant some two miles or more, and within a short way of the open sea.
With sails distended to a languid breeze the shore eventually was left behind; and the demoiselle cranes, in mid-lake, were able to observe there were two court dames among them.
“Although he’s dark, Vi,” Mademoiselle Olga Blumenghast presently exclaimed, dropping her cheek to a frail hand upon the tiller, “although he’s dark, it’s odd how he gives one the impression somehow of perfect fairness!”
“Who’s that, darling?” the Countessmurmured, appraising with fine eyes, faintly weary, the orchid-like style of beauty of her friend.
“Ann-Jules, of course.”
“I begin to wish, do you know, I’d brought Pomegranates, and worn something else!”
“What are those big burley-worleys?”
“Pears....”
“Give me one.”
“Catch, then.”
“Not that I could bear to be married; especially likeyou, Vi!”
“A marriage like ours, dear, was so utterly unworthwhile....”
“I’m not sure, dear, that I comprehend altogether?”
“Seagulls’ wings as they fan one’s face....”
“It’s vile and wrong to shoot them: but oh! How I wish your happiness depended, even ever so little, on me.”
The Countess averted her eyes.
Waterfowl, like sadness passing, hovered, and soared overhead, casting their dark, fleeting shadows to the white, drowned clouds, in the receptive waters of the lake.
“I begin to wish I’d brought grapes,” she breathed.
“Heavy stodgy pears. So do I.”
“Or a few special peaches,” the Countess murmured, taking up the volume of verse beside her, with a little, mirthless, half-hysterical laugh.
To a Faithless Friend.
To V.O.I. and S.C.P.
For Stephen.
When the Dormitory Lamp burns Low.
Her gaze travelled over the Index.
“Read something, dear,” Mademoiselle Blumenghast begged, toying with the red-shaded flower in her burnished curls.
“Gladly; but oh, Olga!” the Countess crooned.
“What!”
“Where’s the wind?”
It had gone.
“We must row.”
There was nothing for it.
To gain the long, white breakwater, with the immemorial willow-tree at its end, that was the most salient feature of the island’s approach, required, nevertheless, resolution.
“It’s so far, dear,” the Countess kept on saying. “I had no idea how far it was! Had you any conception at all it was so far?”
“Let us await the wind, then. It’s bound to rally.”
But no air swelled the sun-bleached sails, or disturbed the pearly patine of the paralysed waters.
“I shall never get this peace, I only realise itexists...” the Countess murmured with dream-glazed eyes.
“It’s astonishing ... the stillness,” Mademoiselle Blumenghast murmured, with a faint tremor, peering round towards the shore.
On the banks young censia-trees raised their boughs like strong white whips towards the mountains, upon whose loftier heights lay, here and there, a little stray patch of snow.
“Come hither, ye winds, come hither!” she softly called.
“Oh, Olga! Do we really want it?” the Countess in agitation asked, discarding her hat and veil with a long, sighing breath.
“I don’t know, dear; no; not, not much.”
“Nor I,—at all.”
“Let us be patient then.”
“It’s all so beautiful it makes one want to cry.”
“Yes; it makes one want to cry,” Mademoiselle Blumenghast murmured, with a laugh that in brilliance vied with the October sun.
“Olga!”
“So,” as theCalypsolurched: “lend me your hanky, dearest.”
“Olga—? —? Thou fragile, and exquisite thing!”
Meanwhile Count Cabinet was seated with rod-and-line at an open window, idly ogling a swan. Owing to the reluctance of tradespeople to call for orders, the banished statesman was often obliged to supplement the larder himself. But hardly had he been angling ten minutes to-day, when lo! a distinguished mauvish fish with vivid scarlet spots. Pondering on the mysteries of the deep, and of the subtle variety thereis in Nature, the veteran ex-minister lit a cigar. Among the more orthodox types that stocked the lake, such as carp, cod, tench, eels, sprats, shrimps, etc., this exceptional fish must have known its trials and persecutions, its hours of superior difficulty ... and the Count, with a stoic smile recalled his own. Musing on the advantages and disadvantages of personality, of “party” viewpoints, and of morals in general, the Count was soon too self-absorbed to observe the approach of his “useful” secretary and amanuensis, Peter Passer.
More valet perhaps than secretary, and more errand-boy than either, the former chorister of the Blue Jesus had followed the fallen statesman into exile at a moment when the Authorities of Pisuerga were making minute enquiries for sundry missing articles,8from theTrésorof theCathedral, and since the strain of constant choir-practice is apt to be injurious for a youngster suffering from a delicate chest, the adolescent had been willing enough to accept, for a time, at least, a situation in the country.
“O, sir,” he exclaimed, and almost in his excitement forgetting altogether the insidious, lisping tones he preferred as a rule to employ: “O, sir, here comes that old piece of rubbish again with a fresh pack of tracts!”
“Collect yourself, Peter, pray do: what, lose our heads for a visit?” the Count said getting up and going to a glass.
“I’ve noticed, sir, it’s impossible to live on an island long without feeling its effects; youcan’tescape being insular!”
“Or insolent.”
“Insular, sir!”
“No matter much, but if it’s the Countess Yvorra, you might shew her round the garden this time, perhaps, for a change,” the Count replied, adjusting a demure-looking fly, of indeterminate sex, to his line.
And brooding on life and baits, and whatAwill come for whileBwon’t, the Count’s thoughts grew almost humorous as the afternoon wore on.
Evening was approaching, when weary of the airs of a common carp, he drew in, at length, his tackle.
Like a shawl of turquoise silk the lake seemed to vie, in serenity and radiance, with the bluest day in June, and it was no surprise, on descending presently for a restricted ramble—(the island, in all, amounted to scarcely one acre)—to descry the invaluable Peter enjoying a pleasant swim.
When not boating or reading or feeding his swans, to watch Peter’s fancy-diving off the terrace end, was perhaps the favourite pastime of the veteranviveur: to behold the lad trip along the riven breakwater, as naked as a statue, shoot out his arms and spring, theFlying-head-leapor theBacksadilla, was a beautiful sight, looking up now and again—but more oftennow—from a volume of old Greek verse; while to hear him warbling in the waterwith his clear alto voice—of Kyries and Anthems he knew no end—would often stir the old man to the point of tears. Frequently the swans themselves would paddle up to listen, expressing by the charmed or rapturous motions of their necks (recalling to the exile the ecstasies of certain musical, or “artistic” dames at Concert-halls, or the Opera House, long ago) their mute appreciation, their touched delight....
“Old goody Two-shoes never came, sir,” Peter archly lisped, admiring his adventurous shadow upon the breakwater wall.
“How is that?”
“Becalmed, sir,” Peter answered, culling languidly a small, nodding rose, that was clinging to the wall:
“O becalmed is my soulI rejoice in the Lord!”
“O becalmed is my soulI rejoice in the Lord!”
At one extremity of the garden stood the Observatory, and after duly appraising various of Peter’s neatest feats, the Count strolled away towards it. But before he could reach the Observatory, he had first to pass his swans.
They lived, with an ancient water-wheel, beneath a cupola of sun-glazed tiles, sheltered, partially, from the lake by a hedge of towering red geraniums, and the Count seldom wearied of watching these strangely gorgeous creatures as they sailed out and in through the sanguine-hued flowers. A few, with their heads sunk back beneath their wings, had retired for the night already; nevertheless, the Count paused to shake a finger at one somnolent bird, in disfavour for pecking Peter: “Jealous, doubtless of the lad’s grace,” he mused, fumbling with the key of the Observatory door.
The unrivalled instrument that the Observatory contained, whose intricate lenses were capable of drawing even the remote Summer-Palace to within an appreciable range, was, like most instruments of merit, sensitive to the manner of its manipulation; and fearing lest the inexpert tampering of a homesick housekeeper (her native village was visible in clear weather, with the aid of a glass) should break or injure the delicate lenses, theCount kept the Observatory usually under key.
But the inclination to focus the mundane and embittered features of the fanatic Countess, as she lectured her boatmen for forgetting their oars, or, being considerably superstitious, to count the moles on their united faces as an esoteric clue to the Autumn Lottery, waned a little before the mystery of the descending night.
Beneath a changing tide of deepening shadow, the lifeless valleys were mirroring to the lake the sombreness of dusk. Across the blue forlornness of the water, a swan, here and there, appeared quite violet, while coiffed in swift clinging, golden clouds, the loftiest hills alone retained the sun.
A faint nocturnal breeze, arising simultaneously with the Angelus-bell, seemed likely to relieve, at the moon’s advent, the trials to her patience of the Countess Yvorra: “who must be cursing,” the Count reflected, turning the telescope about with a sigh, to suit her sail.
Ah poignant moments when the heartstops still! Not since the hour of his exile had the Count’s been so arrested.
From the garden Peter’s voice rose questingly; but the Count was too wonder-struck, far, to heed it.
Caught in the scarlet radiance of the afterglow, the becalmed boat, for one brief and most memorable second, was his to gaze on.
In certain lands with what diplomacy falls the night, and how discreetly is the daylight gone: Those dimmer-and-dimmer, darker-and-lighter twilights of the North, so disconcerting in their playfulness, were unknown altogether in Pisuerga. There, Night pursued Day, as though she meant it. No lingering, or arctic sentiment! No concertinaishness.... Hard on the sun’s heels, pressed Night. And the wherefore of her haste; Sun-attraction? Impatience to inherit? An answer to such riddles as these may doubtless be found by turning to the scientists’ theories on Time and Relativity.
Effaced in the blue air of evening became everything, and with the darkness returned the wind.
“Sir, sir?... Ho, Hi, hiiiiiiiiiiii!!” Peter’s voice came again.
But transfixed, and loath just then for company, the Count made no reply.
A green-lanterned barge passed slowly, coming from the sea, and on the mountain-side a village light winked wanly here and there.
“Oh, why was I notsooner?” he murmured distractedly aloud.
“Oh Olga!”
“Oh Vi!”
“... I hope you’ve enough money for the boat, dear? ...?”
“...!!?”
“Tell me, Olga: Is my hat all sideways?”
“................”
The long windows of the Summer-Palace were staring white to the moon, as the Countess of Tolga, her aigrettes castingheroicshadows and hugging still her heath, re-entered the Court’s precincts on the arm of her friend.
Oneevening, as Mrs Montgomery was readingVanity Fairfor the fifteenth time, there came a tap at the door. It was not the first interruption since opening the cherished green-bound book, and Mrs Montgomery seemed disinclined to stir. With the Court about to return to winter quarters, and the Summer-Palace upside down, the royal governess was still able to command her habitual British phlegm. It had been decided, moreover, that she should remain behind in the forsaken palace with the little prince, the better to “prepare” him for his forthcoming Eton exam.
Still, with disputes as to the precedence of trunks and dress-baskets simmering in the corridors without, it was easier to enjoy the Barley-sugar stick in one’s mouth, than the Novel in one’s hand.
“Thank God I’m not touchy!” MrsMontgomery reflected, rolling her eyes lazily about the little white wainscoted room.
It was as if something of her native land had crept in through the doorway with her, so successfully had she inculcated its tendencies, or spiritual Ideals, upon everything around.
A solitary teapot, on a bracket, above the door, twoJubileeplates, some peacocks’ feathers, an image of a little Fisher-boy in bathing-drawers and a broken hand;—“a work of delicate beauty!” A mezzotint:The Coiffing of Maria—these were some of the treasures which the room contained.
“A blessing to be sure when the Court has gone!” she reflected half-rising to drop a curtsy to Prince Olaf who had entered.
“Word from your country,” sententiously he broke out: “My brother’s betrothed! So need I go on with my preparation?”
“Put your tie straight! And just look at your socks all tumbling down. Such great jambons of knees!... What will become of you, I ask myself, when you’re a lower boy at Eton.”
“How can I be a lower boy when I’m a Prince?”
“Probably, the Rev. Ruggles-White, when you enter his House, will be able to explain.”
“I won’t be a lower boy! I willnot!”
“Cs, Cs.”
“Damn the democracy.”
“Fie, sir.”
“Down with it.”
“For shame.”
“Revenge.”
“That will do: and now, let me hear your lessons: I should like,” Mrs Montgomery murmured, her eyes set in detachment upon the floor; “the present-indicative tense of the VerbTo be! Adding the words, Political h-Hostess;—more for the sake of the pronunciation than for anything else.”
And after considerable persuasion, prompting, and “bribing,” with various sorts of sweets: