“You make me smile, dearest wife; you positively amuse me. The man is to be regarded, like a courier, as a mere vehicle for the conveyance of an august document of the heart. He would hardly commit the absurdity, I think, of associating his own personal insignificance with the message he was employed to deliver, any more than the fiddle, could it speak, would claim to be other than a vulgar structure of wood and string, obedient only to the hand of its master, and denuded of all importance the moment that hand was withdrawn. Believe me, ma chérie, the percipience of the unelect is not so negligible a quantity as you would seem to imagine. This instrument—if indeed an instrument it is—will play its part with a full sense of the momentary distinction that part confers upon it, yet without a thought but of sinking thereafter into the oblivion which is its necessary destiny. If it were otherwise, there remain means to persuade it. Yet it cannot be otherwise. I think I may answer forourdaughter that she will entertain no delusions as to the relative values of the hand and of the instrument upon which it plays. Which, certainly, is quite enough said upon that small subject.”
Yet it was a very small subject who once crept through the keyhole of the King’s treasury and robbed his Magnificence’s coffers.
Isabellamistrusted few people and disliked nobody for long. She was one of those happily constituted girls who are troubled with no problems, have no quarrel with destiny, and never resent their not having been born boys. She had endearing looks and a fine spirit, but without self-consciousness in the one, or arrogance in the other. She was never in arms for the prerogatives of her sex, because it never occurred to her that they were being either questioned or abused. If she coquetted at all, it was more with women than with men; yet she was equally natural with both. As sweet a princess as Perdita—as sweet a milkmaid she would have been, had fortune deposed her. Impressionable, poor child—it was a pity only that nature, not sparing her the softest of hearts, should have done so little to protect its own rich achievement from harm. But nature, bent only on relentless propagation, designs these triumphant things as lures.
Isabella, during all her young life, had endeared herself with whomsoever she had visited. Grandpapa Louis, the cynic and impure, doted upon hischarmante; haughty grandmamma in Spain had, on her death, left her the solitary bequest devoted by that opulent lady to her lord’s relations. Isabella did not want the money, but she wept over that proof of affection; while papa Philip tried not to weep, tears of chagrin, over being left out in the cold. However, in that dismal poverty of the exchequer, something to somebody was better than nothing to nobody; and I have no doubt that the legacy was taken into account in all subsequent dispositions of the young Infanta’s “household.”
Wealth, after all, is like the other things, size and sound, relative. We are not to suppose, you and I, that, because a certain thousand a year might appear to us opulence, a duke might not consider himself a pauper on fifty times that income. I do not know what the revenues of Parma represented to Don Philip in hard cash; I do know that he was constantly and piteously complaining to his royal relatives of his embarrassments. One man’s affluence is another man’s necessity; else you and I again might have criticised the expenditure of the Parmese Court, have commented on the waste, the idle profusion of a State, which, for mere vanity’s sake, must boast a superfluity of service which it was inadequate to support; have suggested a drastic economy here, a wholesale retrenchment there. We should have been assured, no doubt, that all thatcouldbe donehadbeen done, and that only the indispensable remained—a possibly unanswerable statement from the opposite to our own point of view. From that standpoint the emptiness of the great palace at Colorno, during the absence of the Court, was so qualified an emptiness that its superfluous inmates could still have peopled a substantial villa or two, and left something over for emergencies, Besides the personal staff, which included attendants, preceptors, valets and grooms sufficient—with a lady of the wardrobe, twofemmes de chambre, and some minor officials attached to Isabella alone—the gardens, the stables, the kitchens, the guard-house all gave indolent occupation to a small garrison of retainers, who, mostly idle and mostly gossips, numbered amongst themselves none, perhaps, quite so pert and so voluble as Fanchette Becquet, the Infanta’s firstfemme de confiance.
Fanchette, who hailed from Paris, had attained her present post more through private and particular interest than through particular merit. There were reasons for this, it was understood, which it was not necessary to divulge, but of which the girl herself was fully sensible, and of which she would have been the last not to take ample advantage. There was no high-born lady of the Court who presumed, or was allowed to presume, so much on her position as Fanchette. Her very audacity and insolence of retort possessed for certain masculine minds a charm which was a perpetual source of indulgence and profit to her. The duke himself had been known to suffer her impertinences with an enjoying relish which redounded in no ways to her disadvantage. In style and temper she was a veritable Parisianmondaine, dapper and pretty, though her lips were a little thin and her nose a little sharp. She had no heart at all, but her emotions, easily responsive to small provocation, blinded herself and others to that defect.
Fanchette one evening was “finishing” her young lady in preparation for a descent to the audience chamber—to which was coming M. du Tillot, Marquis de Felino and Secretary of State—and was taking full advantage of the licence allowed her tongue by a spoiling mistress.
“It is fortunate, is it not, your Highness,” she said, with a little simper, “that somebody whom we know does not approve of rouge for ladies?”
She was daintily fitting, as she spoke, a spray of natural pink rose-buds into the silken fillet which bound the girl’s unpowdered chestnut-brown hair. Isabella’s laced bodice was of the simplest, meet sheath for the flower-like neck and bosom which emerged from it. Asacque, like a drooped petal, fell from between her shoulder-blades; her slender hips were innocent of the grotesque abomination of hoops. So she was permitted, in that court of burlesque and man-millinery, to indulge her own humorousnaïveté. It gave her an odd distinction, not unagreeable to papa’s pride. He would sternly repress any inclination detected in others to ape, servilely, that natural innocence; Isabelita should be the only sweet Arcadian in Parma. If she was to be Hebe in a raree show, she alone should display the delicious novelty of acting humanly, while the puppets, reversing their part, looked on and applauded. And yet, to Isabella herself, hers was no part at all, but only the most natural of instincts.
“Fanchette,” she said; “your voice sounds very demure; or else I am very stupid. Was it weighted, or was it not, with some meaning I did not understand?”
“Only that mademoiselle’s cheek, so sensitive to sudden changes of feeling, is its own best interpreter.”
“Interpreter of what, and to whom, Fanchette?”
“Ah! I have blundered,” said the maid; “and now I am full of confusion. It would be too daring in me to suggest.”
“Well, I will not ask you to,” said Isabella. “Does my cheek satisfy you now? But it does not blush for what you think; only to be made the target to gossips and impertinents.”
“O, mademoiselle! O, your Highness! Let me go and weep my heart out in solitude. I have offended you, and without the least little thought of offence. O, let me go, mademoiselle!”
“Don’t be silly, Fanchette. I am not blaming you for the idle chatter you repeat. People may think what they like about rouge, without its affecting my fortunes, that is all. Sensitive! There is nobody in the world so absurdly sensitive as yourself, I believe. Come——”
She rose to her feet, with a coaxing smile. The maid held in her hand a little ornament of paste and silver with which she had been about to fasten the flowers into place; Isabella took the trinket from her, and, putting an arm round the over-slim waist, tried the effect of the thing against Fanchette’s own powdered locks.
“It is like sparkles of ice through mist,” she said. “It suits you ever so much better than it does me. Will you accept it for your own, Fanchette, and bring me something else?”
Fanchette sobbed, wiping an eye which yet had a covetous side-glance for the toy.
“I’m sure I meant no presumption,” she gurgled; “or to abuse the confidence your Highness reposes in me. I only thought your Highness would approve sincerity better than an affectation of ignorance, which your Highness must know could not be real.”
Isabella sighed.
“There, girl,” she said—“there. To be sure I like sincerity.”
“Where what is to be is an open secret,” continued Fanchette—“and somebody’s tastes so coincide with your Highness’s; I—I thought your Highness would be gratified to know.”
Isabella laughed, and then sighed again, as she released her hold, with a little conciliatory pat, and reseated herself—a movement which gave Fanchette an opportunity furtively to examine her prize.
“I daresay I am,” said the Infanta. “It is gratifying, at least——” she stopped.
“It is gratifying, at least,” said the maid, who had resumed her duties, “to learn, as your Highness was about to remark, that philosophy can so concern itself with natural beauties. But indeed there are other proofs that a fine complexion is not the only thing honoured in Vienna.”
“I suppose I ought not to ask you what you mean, Fanchette.”
“Mademoiselle has not heard of the Chevalier Tiretta?”
“No.”
“Such a voice, your Highness, and such a man! He is a gift from the archduke to his Excellency, and has been ravishing the Courts of Parma with his music these days past. They say——”
“Well?”
“I hardly like to repeat.”
“Do not, then.”
“That somebody in love has made this nightingale his avant-coureur to overture his passion.”
“Do they say, girl? I think, indeed, your idle fancy is the only gossip.”
Fanchette’s head was seen in the mirror to nod itself, and her strait lips to smile.
“It is not fancy, at least,” she said, “but simple reason, your Highness, to deduce from this singer that philosophy may have its sentimental side. Else it would not choose for its close intimacy—as is whispered to be the case—so picturesque a comrade, or, having chosen, select him for a mission so romantic.”
Isabella rose. There was a little stately chill in her young aspect.
“That is quite enough,” she said. “I do not wish to listen to any more of this nonsense, or to seem to encourage you to repeat it. Give me my fan and mouchoir, please. It is time for me to descend.”
At the door a couple of powderedvalets-de-chambregreeted the young lady, low-bowing, and, candle in hand, preceded her down the broad stairway to thesalle-d’audience. It was a fine chamber, bemirrored, bemarbled, with a pillared balcony through which the soft night air flowed in. Penury or plenty, there was nothing here, no seat, no ornament, no picture, between the painted ceiling and the rich, deep carpet, but declared itself in terms of gilt and splendour a thing of luxury. The room was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of wax candles set in girandoles, and as Isabella, announced by a gentleman usher, entered it, each separate flame bowed to her as to the goddess for whom they had all been waiting.
There were only three people present—thegouvernante, in an elaborate toilette and stupendous hoop; M. du Tillot, short, complacent, in a blaze of silk and embroidery; and a second gentleman, a stranger, somewhat soberly dressed, who stood in the background, bowing low, so that his face showed foreshortened. The Secretary of State came forward, beaming, ingratiatory, tripping on his fat little pumps. He bowed elaborately over the hand which Isabella gave him, and kissed it as if he were negotiating an oyster.
“I greet your Highness,” he said, “on behalf of the Court, myself, and, above all, his Excellency, your father, who, I rejoice to inform you, is very well.”
“And my maman, monseigneur?” asked Isabella, her eyes full and shining.
“She writes in the best of spirits,” said du Tillot: “like one who finds in the promised fruition of her hopes a glad new lease of life.” He was a kind old man. The formality achieved, he pressed the little palm, and, looking at the lowered lids, “we will do our best, will we not, my child,” he said, “to justify maman in her convalescence?”
“I want maman to be well above all things in the world,” said Isabella simply; and then thegouvernantestruck in in her high throaty voice:
“Eh bien! It is very well to wish for others what our self-will is inclined to deny them.”
It seemed unnecessary, but madam had that way of grudging its perfect bloom to harmony, to which certain minds, having a mistaken sense of humour, are wont, seemingly irresistibly, to be moved. She could not forego her grumble, even where policy counselled silence. She would deliberately invite offence, and then, resenting being treated as offensive, would study, though she had to bide her time for it, to make herself as unendurable as possible.
“Am I self-willed?” asked Isabella, appealing to the minister. But, though she spoke plaintively, there was a spark of ominous colour in her cheek.
“You are your mother’s true daughter,” answered du Tillot, with a glance of annoyance at the marquise. “You will yield to loving reason what you would ever refuse to dictation. But that is neither here nor there in the light of my present business, which is to introduce to your Highness’s good favour—” he wheeled, with an expressive gesture—“the person of the Chevalier Tiretta, a gentleman of the Viennese Court, and as admirable a musician and improvisatore as he is a soldier of tried merit.”
Isabella was conscious of a little thrill and shock, as she turned to the hitherto unregarded stranger. Then a flush mantled her face from chin to brow, and she dropped a curtsey quite repellent in its frigidity. She knew him at once; how could she fail to? or to associate this and that in the sudden leap of recognition? A sense of indignation, of recoil as from an astounding revelation, were the predominant emotions in her mind. Then Fanchette’s gossip, and the one conclusion to be drawn from it!—she hardly heard the purring phrases of the Secretary of State, as he improved upon his opening:
“His Excellency, your father, deploring his prolonged absence from his child, sends her this voice to interpret sweetly for him the love his heart is withheld from expressing. He entreats her to share with him a treasure his affection will not permit him to monopolise, and to preserve and honour it against his soon return.”
Isabella’s cheek, as if to vindicate Fanchette’s claim, had gone from red to white. She turned her back on the stranger.
“I needed no such proof of my papa’s love,” she said to du Tillot; “or of any instrument, however accommodating, to interpret it to me. But you will assure him from me, monsieur, that his daughter will not fail to give honour where honour is due.”
“Heyday!” cried the marquise—she had been effervescing where she sat, her eyes glassy, and a mirthless smile on her fat old lips. “This is not self-will, to be sure! This is a graceful yielding to reason, and a fine reception of his Excellency’s honoured protégé. What do you mean, child, abusing your father’s consideration and insulting his deputy in this fashion?”
All this, to be sure, was grievously embarrassing to the stranger, who had to stand during this dispute, feeling very much like an actor who has come forward to make an unwelcome explanation and holds his ground biding an abatement in the storm of hisses and orange peel which greets him. His mouth twitched, it is true, and there was a ghost of a twinkle in his mournful eyes; otherwise his aspect was one of profound wonder and deprecation. But the Gonzalès, wrought up now to the full fury of her resentment, would by no means consent to forego, in the face of this wounded appeal, the moral triumph it afforded her. She got to her feet, fuming and ejaculating, and, while M. du Tillot arched his brows in lost amazement over the scene, hurried across to the chevalier, and, seizing his two hands in hers, panted out a flurry of apology, explanation, protest:—
“No wonder you look surprised, monsieur; no wonder you look hurt. This reception of his Excellency’s gift, of an honoured subject and comrade moreover of one whose least recommendation should entitle its bearer to our utmost attention and consideration—it is unaccountable, it is infamous, it reflects upon my careful tuition in a way which is humiliating to a degree. I beg you to attribute to nothing but a spoilt caprice this seeming abuse of a favour, which others, lessself-willed, can appreciate at its worth; to forget a slight——”
But here du Tillot, grim and peremptory, thought fit to interfere.
“The chevalier,” said he, “is, I am sure, more taken aback over this tirade than over any imaginary provocation to it. Her Highness said nothing to which exception could be taken by a reasonable mind. And as to the fine instrument—if monsieur will forgive me the figure of speech—she has as yet heard its virtues only trumpeted by others.”
He turned to Isabella, with a smile. The girl was quite white.
“I did not mean to imply such offence,” she said. “If my manner suggested a ‘spoilt caprice,’ monsieur will know how to interpret it at its true value.”
She would say no more. She seated herself on a sofa, and set to fanning her face, as if its aspect were not already chill enough.
Du Tillot, puzzled by the equivocalness of her words, met the situation, nevertheless, with diplomatic tact. This romantic essay—if, indeed, it were one, as privately surmised—had not opened propitiously. Possibly the girl’s prejudice against her royal suitor was more deep-seated than they supposed. Yet how couldshehave guessed this troubadour’s presumptive mission? It was merely conjecture with the best of them. It would seem that only to be accredited from Vienna was offence enough in her eyes. At the same time he was furiously angered with the marquise over her outburst. What did the old fool, manœuvring to bring about this situation, and then spoiling it by belittling her charge in the eyes of Austria’s representative? He could have slapped her gross old arms, viciously, and with joy.
But he did nothing so impolitic. On the contrary, he tripped over to the cross old lady, and bantered her charmingly and playfully on her temper. The ardour of her spirit, he said, bespoke the youth which was perennially reluctant in her to quit the temple of its triumphs and conquests. But was not the generosity of sentiment, characteristic of that vernal condition, a little apt sometimes to wax unnecessarily hot in defence of its enthusiasms? There had been no slight intended here, he would answer for it, either to an exquisite gift or to her fine appreciation of it.
“Enthusiasms!” cried madam—but she was already mollified. “I assert nothing, for my part, but an unquestioning faith in the perfection of those accents which the tenderest regard has chosen to be its interpreter.”
“And which shall answer to your faith, I give my word,” said du Tillot.
Madam laughed high.
“After such assurance,” she said, “the chevalier has no choice but to submit his credentials. What shall it be, monsieur—love, friendship, philosophy? Say philosophy as applied to love.”
The stranger’s mandolin was lying on the harpsichord. He lifted it, with the quietest air of acquiescence, and caressing it in his arms, as if it had been a dear infant, touched out a disconnected note or two. Thence his fingers seemed to wander haphazard over the strings, seeking, while his abstracted eyes pursued their theme, the point where thought and setting should blend into one alliance, melodious and expressive. And presently the words came:
“Apply philosophy to love, as salve is applied to a wound: and, lo! as the wound is healed, so is the salve infected with its virus. If love, then, shall live, philosophy must die.”
So ran his theme, followed, with an infinite elaboration of word and note, to the little rippling cadenza on which it ended. It was very finished, very clever; but with scarce a suggestion of real feeling behind it. Only the soft flexibility of the voice seemed to suggest itself a medium for nobler inspirations. It was very sweet in quality and very moving.
The marquise applauded the improvisation sky-high. “What do you think now, little grudger?” she said, with a triumphant look at Isabella. “Has not monsieur justified in himself his Highness’s gift? It is for you, in turn, to propose the theme.”
“I think,” responded the young lady, coldly, but with a faint rose of colour on her cheek, “that love is a vulgar complaint and philosophy a rare one. I would let love, for my part, be the one to die, since he is the easier spared. Monsieur, perhaps, will sing us his requiem.”
Monsieur bowed low, a smile in his eyes, while madam, shooting a significant glance at du Tillot, set to fanning herself scornfully.
Once again the fingers fluttered lightly on the strings, and once again gradually disentangled from them, as it were a flowering spray from a thicket, a tender Lydian measure:
“Love died of Isabel, and lay at rest,Slain by the cold sweet arrows from her breast.And, as he quiet slept, came IsabelTo view the cruel work she’d done so well;When, as is wont to hap, the wound she’d givenBroke forth anew, denouncing her to heaven.For whom Death answered, dropping from above:‘Now is my reign established, quit of Love!For my sake did you do this thing?’ Then she:‘Ah, no! But that I loved Philosophy.’So, hardly had she spoke when, with a spring,Love rose, and, laughing joyously, took wing.”
“Love died of Isabel, and lay at rest,Slain by the cold sweet arrows from her breast.And, as he quiet slept, came IsabelTo view the cruel work she’d done so well;When, as is wont to hap, the wound she’d givenBroke forth anew, denouncing her to heaven.For whom Death answered, dropping from above:‘Now is my reign established, quit of Love!For my sake did you do this thing?’ Then she:‘Ah, no! But that I loved Philosophy.’So, hardly had she spoke when, with a spring,Love rose, and, laughing joyously, took wing.”
“Love died of Isabel, and lay at rest,
Slain by the cold sweet arrows from her breast.
And, as he quiet slept, came Isabel
To view the cruel work she’d done so well;
When, as is wont to hap, the wound she’d given
Broke forth anew, denouncing her to heaven.
For whom Death answered, dropping from above:
‘Now is my reign established, quit of Love!
For my sake did you do this thing?’ Then she:
‘Ah, no! But that I loved Philosophy.’
So, hardly had she spoke when, with a spring,
Love rose, and, laughing joyously, took wing.”
Madam, at the finish, broke into rapturous applause: “Il fait tourner la chance!” she cried, with a rocking laugh. “Il fait tourner la chance. O, that was very well indeed, monsieur! You have the true genius for improvisation.”
But du Tillot, secretly watchful, shook his head just perceptibly.
“I hope not too daring,” he thought, noticing the girl’s face.
Isabella neither applauded nor dissented. A liberty, her aspect might have denoted, was best rebuked by contemptuous silence. Only when presently the marquise called the stranger to her side, she rose, as if in quick avoidance of his neighbourhood, and addressed herself exclusively for the rest of the evening to the Secretary of State.
But when the gentlemen were gone—one of them in the stinging consciousness of an obeisance unacknowledged—she turned upon thegouvernantewith real anger in her eyes:
“Did you not recognise him, madame?”
The old lady actually quailed before the inquisition of that look.
“What if I did?” she said sullenly: “What then?”
“And draw the only conclusion that one can draw from his presence here?”
“You are a fool and a prude,” cried the marquise, bursting out suddenly between fury and trepidation. “My God, I think I have never known such another. All this to-do about a piece of pleasantry that was nothing in itself, and should count for less than nothing in the context of that sincere and noble nature which condescends to honour you with its regard. The selection by such a prince of an instrument to sing his devotion in your ears should be enough to convince you of the high character of his deputy. But whether you like the chevalier or not, and whatever your sense of filial duty, you have got to endure him, that is all—aye, and to listen to him, too.”
“It will not be your fault, at least, madame,” said Isabella, “if my ears by this time are not inured to offence,” and, very pale, with her head high, she walked out of the room.
Andso we reach a situation which, having no least authority to complicate itself, must suffice us in its simplicity to the end. It is a situation as old as the human drama; it has formed the groundwork for a thousand tales of passion and infidelity, more fierce, more involved than this that I relate; it embraces for its essentials but three characters, the lady, and the diffident lover, and the false friend. Yet, although our version may not rank in poignancy with the tragedy of the Rimini, or in homeliness with the courtship of Miles Standish, it can claim for its main details that virtue of truth which ennobles even little calamities above the finest ecstacies of the imagination.
It is into a brief idyll of love and summer, then, that we are now to penetrate. Would it might begin and end there in the green gardens—to flow, in Tennyson’s words:
“... sweetly on and on,Calming itself to the long-wished-for end,Full to the banks, close on the promised good.”
“... sweetly on and on,Calming itself to the long-wished-for end,Full to the banks, close on the promised good.”
“... sweetly on and on,
Calming itself to the long-wished-for end,
Full to the banks, close on the promised good.”
But, alas! though the spirit of romance plead to us, soft as his loveliest temptress to St. Anthony, our historical conscience must remain cold and deaf to its entreaties. As things happened, so must they be recorded.
The lady, and the lover, and the false friend. It is such a simple tale, and so haunted by precedent, that the least sophisticated reader, given these premises, could surely write it for himself. Only remember that no such friend was ever false by design. Nor was this one. He began by detesting his task, not from conscientious motives, but because he went into it branded by the wounding stigma of her who was its object. He knew in what comparative light she would regard his advocacy; and he knew that in his own conscious acceptance of that estimate was foretold the failure of his mission. What value were to be attached to the praises of such a man?—so would run her thoughts. To be belauded by him were to be implied despicable. So he would only end by confirming the very complaint he was sent to alleviate—and serve those right who had commissioned him. It would do them no harm to learn that to strain devotion too far were to have it snap and recoil on themselves. At this beginning of things he really believed that he hated the young Infanta—a sentiment certainly little conducive to the successful accomplishment of his business.
And it did nothing to put him on better terms with himself to realise with what contemptuous confidence he was delegated to this task. Joseph or Philip—it was all the same moral of princely omnipotence. He was with both of them just the insensate instrument, to be played upon, to evoke certain emotions at command, and then to be dispensed with as a mere mechanical agent that had served its purpose. That he might prove a self-conscious agent, possessing feelings and passions of his own, never seemed to occur to either of them as remotely conceivable. He was just turned loose into the green pastures of Colorno, as a lowly steer might be entrusted to the company of a pedigree heifer—entrusted to excite her interest, that is to say, in the royal bull which was to succeed him by and by.
He laughed, putting that image to himself; yet really it was a not exaggerated one. Only, apart from the pledges of so-called friendship, he was doubtful of his own capacity to excite. If the lady started with a prejudice, he started with a grudge, and the two between them seemed inimical to a right sentimental understanding. Supposing panegyric were merely to react through him upon its subject? In that case the logical course would be to represent Joseph as undesirable. Yet he hardly dared to risk such a chance. No, he would be faithful to his mission, and, if that failed—well,hehad not been the one to initiate the business of the green intaglio. They must fight it out among themselves.
And in the meanwhile he would act according to his lights. For some days after his installation at the palace he was scrupulous in obliterating himself so far as Isabella was concerned. He saw the marquise privately, and took pains to convince her, against her more truculent judgment, that his policy for the moment lay in self-effacement. Time and opportunity, he said, would best decide the manner of his next approach. He brought her to agree with him, the more easily as that old intriguing bosom could yet find, in the attentions of a personable male creature, the shadow of an ancient thrill. She admired his bright volubility—for, the chevalier’s tongue once loosened, he gave it full exercise—she admired his romantic looks and more romantic songs. They were all for her for this time being; and for her the frank confidence which confessed, confirming her suspicions, the true purpose of his mission. They were conspirators together, very humorous and understanding.
In truth, the man did not know how to begin. That unforeseen antipathy seemed to blight his inspiration, and he was glad of the respite. He spent much of his time, while so temporising, in wandering about the spacious grounds. They were fair in the Italian style, with formal walks, and fountains, and colonnades of marble; better still, with remoter green recesses where one might lose oneself amidst flowering thickets, set here and there with sunk gardens and lily-ponds. One morning, when so strolling, he came plump, turning a leafy corner, upon Madame Gonzalès and her young charges. Those were three in all, the two younger, Ferdinand and Louise, sharing, pretty equally between them some fifteen years. These youngsters drove in a little chaise, with a pretty white goat to draw it, and Isabelita walked smiling at the head. Tiretta saw the smile fade and the slender figure stiffen in the moment of his appearance. He bit his lip, as he stopped to greet the cavalcade with a bow.
“Ah, monsieur!” cried the marquise, with a quick wrathful glance at the young lady; “this is well encountered. We are all hot and tired, and would welcome someone who would amuse us.”
They had halted near a rustic bench, and thereon the old lady seated herself, fanning her moist face fretfully.
“Charmed,” said Tiretta. “What shall I do—turn Catherine-wheels down the alley, or run after my own tail, like a puppy?”
The little eight-year-old boy laughed gleefully. “Is that your tail, monsieur?” he said, stretching out to touch the chevalier’s sword.
“Like the scorpion’s, I fain would think, young sir,” said Tiretta. “It hath a sting in it for those who would approach it rashly.”
The boy, pulling at the reins, looked up with large indolent eyes. “Woa, Belletto! Stand still, little hog! Are you a soldier, monsieur?”
“I am what they call a soldier of fortune, sir. I fight, when I fight, to vindicate and extol her name, as the Knight of la Mancha fought for his Dulcinea. You have heard of him?”
“Haven’t I, just! But I would rather, for my part, fight for my country.”
Isabelita’s little hand, for all the feigned abstraction of Isabelita’s eyes and thoughts, touched the child’s shoulder approvingly. He looked round at her. “Wouldn’tyou, Lita?” he said.
“What, dear?” she answered, stooping to him.
“Wouldn’t you rather fight for your country than for Mademoiselle Fortune?”
“Of course, Ferdy. How can you ask such a question?”
“There was never a knight in the world more worthy than this Quixote to wear his spurs,” said Tiretta.
She was impelled to answer him against her will:
“There was never one who despised fortune more, or owed so little to her.”
“I do not despise her,” said Tiretta quietly. “If I did, I could not serve her as disinterestedly as this don served his peerless one. But a man must have his ideal to inspire him, though it be no better than a purse of fairy gold, and though it leave him in the end as poor as he began.”
“My God, what nonsense you all talk!” cried the marquise crossly; “and monsieur is the most wilful of the lot. He is a brave soldier, and he has fought for Spain.”
“Is Spain your country?” asked Ferdinand.
“I fight for fortune—always for fortune, I tell you,” said Tiretta, with an obstinate smile.
The little boy touched his sword again.
“With this, monsieur? Has it killed many people?”
The Gonzalès laughed loudly.
“It has killed one person,” said Tiretta, “whose blood, mademoiselle your sister will likely tell you, has dishonoured it for ever.”
“Whose?” said the child eagerly. “Tell me, monsieur.”
Tiretta drew out the blade—an elastic strip of steel, long toughened by use—and ran his finger along it.
“It belonged,” he said, “to an old friend of mine. I thought him one of the noblest of men; but since, like myself, he was a mere soldier of fortune, that may be nothing but my prejudice. He had fought successfully in a number of causes; but in the cause of self-interest he failed. He had many and grave faults—a persistent craze for gambling; an arrogant temper; a furious hatred of the people. To hear him fulminate, one would have thought he ranked them with the grass—ready, on the least provocation, to mow them down by the acre. But he played straight, while others robbed him; out of his lean purse he pensioned a dishonest rogue grown crippled in his service; his temper never impaired his perfect honour. And, as to his hatred of the people—why here, after all, was the moral of it. He met his death rescuing a drunken old woman, horrible, hideous, debased, from the hands of a party of miscreants. But she was a woman, you understand. That was in Castille; and there I stood by his bedside, and received this weapon from his hands as a last bequest. I have tried to honour it since, but never to such honour as when, in piercing that scoundrel heart, it was used by him nobly to falsify the asserted principles of a lifetime. At least, so, being another soldier of fortune, I regard its distinction.”
He slipped the blade back into its scabbard, while the children, only half understanding him, regarded the act in silent curiosity.
“ButamI amusing you?” he cried, with a laugh, to the marquise. “As a soldier of fortune, I could bring many such pretty tales out of my pack.”
“Pooh!” said the old lady impatiently. “Why do you take this perverse pleasure in misrepresenting yourself? We know, monsieur, what we know; and that does not conceive the case of a certain exalted mind stooping to intimacy with a worthless adventurer. There are patrons whose simple favour speaks all that is needed for the high merit of those they distinguish by it.”
“I am not denying it, God forbid, madam,” cried Tiretta. “I would not so dishonour his Highness’s noble character as to pretend it could find pleasure in base friendships. As a prince, he is without littleness; as a man, his instincts always lead him towards the highest.”
“It is so, without question,” said the marquise, nodding her head delightedly.
“Nevertheless,” said Tiretta, “I hold by my title. It hath the warrant of the noblest gentleman ever born of imagination or fact. And so I do not use it in irony or self-depreciation, but as a title to be defended like a king’s.”
“Eh bien!” said madam indulgently; “let it remain, then, as a question of terms. Be to yourself what you will; to us you shall be the knight-errant. Eh, Isabelita?”
“Pray do not ask me, madam,” responded the girl coldly. “I am not a judge of what constitutes a knight-errant.”
She quite foresaw the angry protest her tone would evoke; and yet she would affect no other. Everything this man said offended her. She saw only design and insincerity behind it. This mission he was engaged to fulfil must always be paramount in his mind, and her consciousness of that preoccupation made her suspicious of his every sentiment. She thought it a pity that one so recommended by his looks and soldierly reputation should condescend to lend himself to such finical, rather contemptible practices. But no doubt he had been demoralised by flattery. There was nothing in the world like a fine voice to convert a man into an insufferable coxcomb. The insolence of the light laugh with which he received her snub spoke a whole volume for his impregnable self-complacency. It brought a flush to her cheeks.
But the laugh had in reality spoken no more than a tickle of that humour which accepts its own failures whimsically.
“Stuff and nonsense!” cried the marquise. “You were ready enough with your definitions when you wanted to contradict monsieur. But one can no more produce reason from temper than grapes from a thistle or music from that tree.”
“Cannot one?” said Tiretta, hastily interposing with a droll look. “Ah, but I do not feel so sure!”
There was a knot of frayed bullion hanging from his sword hilt, and, picking delicately, he unwound from it a single strand of gold wire a yard or so in length. This, after testing, he carried to a branch that overhung the walk, and, fitting it taut within a natural bow made by the wood, contrived a tonic resonant string, which, daintily touched, answered to his manipulation like that of a fairy guitar.
“Now,” he said, his head bent to the string and his fingers lightly caressing it? “shall we see if the little tree will sing to us?”
“Yes, yes!” cried the children breathlessly.
“You must be very quiet,” he said. “It will speak, if it speaks at all, so soft and shy that a sound would frighten it.”
They sat as dumb as mice—as dumb as the hot motionless air about them. And presently his fingers moved—the merest phantom of music; and in the low phantom of a voice he took up their tale:
“What music in the little tree?The wind, the bird, the humming-bee.They yield their secrets up, and singWith tirra-lirra down my string.The cricket with his shrilling call,The little cheeping mouse and all,They skip and dance like anythingAs ‘tirra-lirra’ sounds my string.Then ‘Tap!’ the hidden wood-chuck. HarkHis tiny baton on the bark!And nightingale stands up to singHis tirra-lirra down my string.”
“What music in the little tree?The wind, the bird, the humming-bee.They yield their secrets up, and singWith tirra-lirra down my string.The cricket with his shrilling call,The little cheeping mouse and all,They skip and dance like anythingAs ‘tirra-lirra’ sounds my string.Then ‘Tap!’ the hidden wood-chuck. HarkHis tiny baton on the bark!And nightingale stands up to singHis tirra-lirra down my string.”
“What music in the little tree?
The wind, the bird, the humming-bee.
They yield their secrets up, and sing
With tirra-lirra down my string.
The cricket with his shrilling call,
The little cheeping mouse and all,
They skip and dance like anything
As ‘tirra-lirra’ sounds my string.
Then ‘Tap!’ the hidden wood-chuck. Hark
His tiny baton on the bark!
And nightingale stands up to sing
His tirra-lirra down my string.”
The wire snapped, and the singer threw up his arms with a resigning laugh.
“More, more!” cried the children delightedly; and thegouvernanteapplauded with all her might: “Brava, bravissima! It was the most perfect, the most wonderful thing!”
It was wonderful really. This man had the inexplicable gift. He could have produced music out of a key, or a saucepan-lid, or an old shoe, like Paganini or some other. He seemed to think in it, and the appropriate words fitted themselves rhythmically to the sounds. It was all done without the least appearance of effort; and there was the woodpecker’s tap and the nightingale’s trill unmistakable in their context. Of course the verse given is an adaptation, and I daresay a bad one, of the original; but it supplies the sense.
Isabella was moved, as she could hardly fail to be. Certainly his voice was a beautiful one—she would grant him that. He had the right to be conceited about it—if he was conceited. But she felt all at once a doubt. He had sung so prettily and naturally, and solely for the children’s sake. Perhaps, after all, what she had thought the confident effrontery of his manner betokened no more than the conscious independence of a free spirit. He would not be overruled, she remembered, about his self-imposed title. That hardly looked like conceit. If she could only believe a little in his personal genuineness, she might excuse him more. It was something in his favour, at least, that he had undertaken a task so unwelcome as this must be from considerations of pure friendship. Yet had he done so? He was a soldier of fortune—he himself had declared it—and the lure he followed must always and necessarily be a golden one.
And straight, on the thought, the unwarranted meanness of the accusation so recoiled upon herself as to make her seem, in its silent utterance, the contemptible one. That momentary revulsion of feeling wrought its mood, penitent and characteristic. It was always this affectionate child’s instinct to propitiate where she thought she had hurt; and, if only in thought, thought none the less must plead for absolution.
The little Louise, leaning from her place, had caught the chevalier’s arm in both her own and was nestling her plump cheek against it. That was pretty and significant. It showed he was a man whom children naturally trusted and liked.
“Look,” said the little maid; “that is Lita’s own lily-pond down there. Lita loves lilies.”
He felt the inopportuneness of the allusion, and his lips twitched a trifle as he responded:
“Do you know what water-lilies are, ragazzina? No? They are the little washing basins of the nixies.”
“They do not hold water, monsieur.”
“Ah! we who live on land wash in water, you see; but those who live in the water wash in sunshine. If you look very carefully, you will see they are all full of it.”
A sweet voice spoke to him:
“I am very proud of my pond, monsieur.”
He acknowledged the concession with a little grave inclination of the head: “You have reason to be, Madonna”—and turned and addressed himself to the child again.
Thenext day opened wild and wet. In the night a west wind had driven in from the sea, and drawn a rushing curtain over the rainbow summer of the gardens. Isabella, for no reason that she could define, felt strangely restless and uneasy. She was not wont to weather moods, or to feel impatience over enforced confinements to her rooms. Now, quite inexplicably, that prospect seemed insufferable; something in her cried out for space and freedom; the call of the wind and the rain reached to her for the first time, as though an unsuspected door in her heart had suddenly blown open. As sin or fever dreams of water, eternally of a cool and cleansing stream, so her soul turned with longing to the cold purification of the storm. And presently, unable to resist, she put on cloak and hood, and slipped out undetected into the gardens.
The rain came in her face and blew it as pink as a flower; the wind snatched at her hair, and caught and played with a fluttering wisp of it. As she went on, a spirit of exhilaration rose to possess her, quite alone and at liberty as she was. State and observance seemed unreal things; there was not a soul abroad to remind her of them; she and nature were in one confidence together, as if, like old companions long mistily estranged, they were as mistily reunited.
Involuntarily, it seemed, her steps took her towards the spot associated with an incident of yesterday. There was a woven arbour near by the lily-pond, and her thoughts settled there, as in a hermitage sweet for meditation. She would like to sit and watch the drops plash in the water; she pictured the lilies drunk to satiety on the element they loved, and expanding their gorged cups till they could stretch no further; she foretasted the wet solitude of it all as a refuge from strange unrecognised emotions, a little distressful yet a little sweet, which seemed suddenly to have overtaken her, flowing from some primeval source.
The flowering borders, as she passed them, were all gravel-splashed and sodden. She saw an early blossom that she loved, a little blue starry thing of the fennel tribe, and stopped to shake its heavy-hanging sprays free of water, and to pluck one and put it in her bosom. Then she went on.
As she neared the arbour an instant panic seized her. Some sound, more self-betraying than her own light footfall, had penetrated to her through the flapping shutters of the wind—a voice, a tuneful vibration. She stood transfixed, her thoughts poised on the prick of swift escape. And then she flushed a little and remembered herself. She was the Infanta, mistress of her own actions and of her chosen retreat. Very resolute she stepped on, the trampling rain covering her approach, and paused once more, herself unseen, within close hearing of the sound.
It was the stranger, alone apparently within the arbour, and communing with himself through the medium most natural to him. For the first time she heard him, witless of any audience, delivering up his soul like an unconscious bird. She felt it like a revelation, while she stood spell-bound. There was no forced cleverness here, no artificial display, even of the sort that had won the children’s hearts; it was just moving thought transmuted into music.
She hardly gathered the import of the words, nor desired to. It was enough that they blent themselves inevitably with the haunting melody his fingers drew from the strings, and spoke with it a language that was articulate only to the soul. The effect was no more nor less than a sensuous selection of sweet sounds, gathered, as they offered themselves, into a fragrant bouquet, whose scent, to speak in symbols, touched the deep tears of things.
Suddenly conscious of something warmer than a raindrop on her cheek, Isabella started and moved. The music ceased on the instant. She took her shamefaced courage in hand, and entered the arbour.
He rose from the bench on which he had been seated, looking as if he saw an apparition. She smiled at him a little faintly.
“You did not know, monsieur, that this place was sacred to my meditations?”
“I did not know, Madonna. What can I do to expiate such desecration?”
“Not speak in mockery, at least.”
“Ah! Do I?”
“Your eyes betray you, I think. I will be candid with you, monsieur. It is not the first time I have read them so. Is it that you regard your mission with so little seriousness?” He was startled enough—on the point of prevaricating. “Will you not tell me the truth?” she said sincerely.
His brows bent a little.
“Will you have it, Madonna?” he answered in a moment. “See, I entered here, all unguessing of its holiness, to brood alone. The weather, I thought, secured me. But there are others, it seems, who feel its fascination no less. Will you not forgive the innocent sacrilege, and bid me go?”
“Are we, then, so distasteful to you that you must leave us in order to brood alone—on your injuries, perhaps?”
“I have injuries; but I do not wish to speak of them.”
“Monsieur, I stood a little while outside—I say it to my shame—listening to you. That is to confess; and will you not reciprocate my candour?Please, monsieur.”
The pretty entreaty quite disarmed him.
“I will speak the truth,” he said. “Do you ask me if I take my mission seriously? My answer to that is that his Highness the Archduke might choose a finer advocate to sound his praises, but never one more earnest or convinced.”
She looked down, drawing in the dust with the point of her little shoe.
“I have always heard of him as a very grave and virtuous prince,” she murmured.
“Believe it true, I beg you,” said Tiretta. “His ideals are the ideals of a conscientious ruler and a noble gentleman. He has wisdom beyond his years, but free of pedantry, most sweet and natural affections, a fine presence, and a will which, if strong, is neither arrogant nor obstinate.”
She did not answer for a little; and then she looked up.
“Well, you have fulfilled your part,” she said. “Was there need to make such a mystery about it?”
“There was so little, it seems,” he answered, “that your Highness has guessed it unspoken.”
“And yet, monsieur, is it the whole?”
“What more, Madonna?”
“Why, this paragon of a prince should surely need no panegyrist so to recommend him, unless, indeed, there were a conscious flaw somewhere in his perfection.”
He looked down in his turn; then suddenly up again, and boldly.
“If high-born ladies,” he said, “will masquerade as rustic wenches, wading for lilies, it is no sin to accept them as they appear.”
She drew back quickly.
“I think you may go, monsieur,” she said.
He bowed, and was leaving, when she stopped him.
“One moment. That sword of yours—so dedicated—a fine comment on your yesterday’s sentiment! A woman is a woman, is she not, and therefore to be saved insult?”
The chevalier’s handsome pale face seemed to go a thought whiter.
“It is not in the code,” he said, “that princes may not bestow insults. Your Highness took full advantage of that prerogative in refusing the token.” His eyes were suddenly burning; his lips set grim as judgment. “I have some reason, perhaps, to brood over my injuries,” he said. “They have known no salve, your Highness will understand, since, for friendship’s sake, I essayed a thankless task.”
He was again turning to go, and again she delayed him.
“Monsieur, I entreat you. A friend, I know, may act for a friend against his better inclination, and only because he is a friend. I do not doubt the independence of your mind or the honour of your principles.”
Tiretta bowed stiffly, but in silence.
“I ask you to forgive me,” she said.
It was so sweet and unexpected that for the moment he was quite taken back. Then his face flushed through all its even pallor.
“It is I who should be the petitioner,” he said. “I am your Highness’s sworn henchman from this hour.”
She smiled, rather tremulously, and, turning, signified with a gesture that she would prefer to be the one to go.
“No, monsieur: the grove shall be sacred to its songster. I beg you to continue to consecrate it. As for me, I am frightened already over the scolding I shall get if madame detects me returning through the rain.”
He ventured to delay her one moment:
“I am to be permitted to speak henceforth, as a true ambassador, what my heart dictates?”
“O, fie, monsieur!” she said; “to think that perfection could need any trumpeting!” And, with those smiling ambiguous words, she left him.
For some moments after she was gone Tiretta stood motionless, frowning into vacancy. Then, with a sigh, he stirred, and, perceiving in the act a little spray of some blue flower which had fallen from her bosom to the ground, stooped, and secured it, and held the thing wonderingly in his hand.
“Love-in-a-mist!” he whispered: “So in the strange North lands—my lands—they call it. Love-in-a-mist!”
A coupleof communications, relating to the rather fantastic business in hand, were despatched about this date from Colorno, the one by Tiretta and the other by thegouvernante. The soldier wrote,inter alia, to his royal friend and patron:
“You will recall your words, that in thisaffaire—one of policy, it is true, but still anaffaire—you were determined to woo your own way—c’est-à-dire, the way of a prince, who cannot desire plums but he must have a lackey to put them into his mouth for him. Well, as your Highness’s lackey, I have the honour to inform your Highness that the plum forthcoming is a very blooming and delectable one, promising satisfaction on all the points specified, and indeed, I think, on others supernumerary. The question is merely if the plum, for her part, wishes to be devoured; but, even so, there is always a sweet provocation in coyness. Rest assured, at least, that I have left nothing undone to commend to it the fine taste of the connoisseur for whose enjoyment it is distinguished in being selected. I put it so for the reason that, whether by way of intuition or tittle-tattle, my mission, as I soon discovered, was suspect. That made my task none the easier; and none the easier the allaying of the prejudice which, as your Highness correctly surmised,didexist against yourself. There is no blinking the fact that the lady had learnt to associate the Count of Falckenstein of a certain occasion with the heir to the Austrian throne, and that the knowledge stood at first in the way of a perfect reconciliation between her impressions of fact and the laudatory image, even a little strained, which I was moved to draw of your Highness. But that impression, I flatter myself, and the true devotion which gives fervour to my poor art, is surely if slowly in process of readjusting itself; and I look confidently to the near time when the complete conversion I anticipate shall see eye to eye with me in the regard of your Highness’s true character, its essential greatness and nobility. In the meanwhile I pray that that state of grace may be quickly forthcoming, in order to my release from a task to which nothing but my sense of friendship (I say it with all deference) could reconcile me. Carpet-mongering is not to my taste, nor am I pleased to have my soul sit and grin like a monkey on a hurdy-gurdy, while I grind out the music to order. Improvisation to command is a pure paradox, is it not? So that, to end, if your Highness is dissatisfied with my progress, I have only to suggest that I possess another instrument at least as familiar to my hand as the mandolin, and as ready to ring true in the service of Austria, and that your father the Emperor waits at this moment for recruits in Silesia.”
This missive the young archduke received and pondered in his cabinet at Schönbrunn. He frowned over it a good deal; it interested and yet irritated him. Truth to tell, this romantic venture of his had, in the multitudinous pressure of State affairs, got rather crowded out of his mind. Fervours and enthusiasms have a distressing way of dwindling, like toy balloons, when put aside after an exciting game, and of incontinently bursting when one seeks to re-inflate them. So this unphilosophical afflatus had come to appear just a little limp and puckered to Joseph now he was invited to resume it, and to threaten, if incautiously reblown, to explode into thin air. The private mission it had inspired appeared to him all at once an extravagance, and more calculated to cheapen than to vindicate the imperial virtues which were its theme. This affected humility was perhaps a bad precedent to set in view of future relations; after all, he was answerable to no one but himself for his principles and actions; and he was particularly annoyed in that connection to learn that his purpose had been more or less divined. Tiretta must have managed very badly to make such a thing possible. He trusted at least that the suspicion was limited to Colorno, since he had an idea that the Empress, were it to reach her ears, would strongly disapprove his action. On the whole, he regretted having embarked on a project which had grown, or was growing, distasteful to his better sense of fitness.
And yet—that vision! The archduke was unphilosophically impressionable, as has been said, to feminine attractions, and fain, where women were concerned, to be admired for himself rather than his position. Perhaps, all considered, as things had progressed so far and so favourably, it would be folly to recall his advocate at the crucial moment. At the same time there was something in that advocate’s tone which disturbed him. Under its veneer of homage he seemed to detect a shadow of mockery, a humorous independence of mind, an imperfect conception of the sacro-sanctity of the task imposed. Humour, if the “something” was due to that objectionable quality, was quite out of place in a matter so momentous. He would be relieved to be satisfactorily done with a man whom he had never really fathomed or understood.
He answered Tiretta, commending what he had accomplished, advising the nicest tact, and promising to recall him the moment, in the deputy’s own opinion, his mission was fulfilled.
To the Duke of Parma Madame Gonzalès wrote as follows:
“Your daughter appears irreconcilable in the matter of the chevalier. There is so far so little cause for that apprehension once hinted at in correspondence by her august mother, that the difficulty is to make either the man or his mission endurable in the girl’s eyes. I should doubt the policy of continuing M. le chevalier at Colorno, were it not that I cannot conceive of such an advocate failing in the long run to impress himself. But how often we know the divinely inspired preacher to end by creating between others the emotional ardour which he is incapable of feeling or attracting on his own account. Such, I trust, will result from this propagandism of sweet sounds, and to the most desirable effect. The man is very cunning, like a veritable troubadour, in singing the praises of his prince. There is no direct allusion, but the reference is unmistakable. At present, there is no denying, the seed has fallen on difficult ground; but I have hopes. She listens, at least, and her comments decreasingly savour of coldness and irony. Yet, it would be to deceive ourselves to pretend that she is as yet more than a potential convert. Last night M. Tiretta, being entreated to our entertainment, and demanding, as is his wont, a text, I gave him the posy he wore in his bosom, a little spray of the blossom we call St. Catherine’s flower. ‘It is the blue flower of martyrdom,’ I said; and he answered, ‘Then shall it inspire me to sing of one I know in Vienna who is willing to die for his faith.’ And so he improvised most meltingly on that theme; yet to barren effect so far as her Highness was concerned. I have seldom known her more chill and unresponsive to a sweet ending. Her face was like a stone. Eh, bien! we must console ourselves with the thought that the uttermost resistance often betokens the near point of surrender.”
Don Philip, as has been hinted, fathered his pretty daughter in a tendency to what Mirabeau called “le don terrible de la familiarité”; only what in her proceeded from an open and affectionate disposition, in him was accountable to sheer weakness of character. He was a vain, useless, good-natured man, whose foolishness, perhaps pathetically beautified in the case of his first-born, was to find its supreme expression in the person of Ferdinand the second child, in whom a vicious imbecility came to develop itself. But Philip himself was not vicious, save in the sense of the mischief that is wrought through idleness. He frittered away his time in small local excitements; he devoted the most of his mornings to the mysteries of the toilet; he played faro and enjoyed an occasional intrigue; he patronised the Mass, the opera, and the promenade, each in its due proportion; he now and then entertained, for his highest intellectual distraction, some traveller of distinction visiting Parma. As to money, he could never master its significance; as to business, he detested it. On both counts his ministers had a bad time of it with him, and his familiars, of whom he had several, a remarkably good one. The confusion in the exchequer was their opportunity, and they took full advantage of it. The duke was easily responsive to prayers for assistance, especially if they emanated from people “d’un état peu remarquable.” He had the liking of the petty mind for impressing by his bounty those of such a far social inferiority that the full measure of his condescension could be felt between them. Amongst his closest intimates were the Messieurs la Roque and la Coque, two men of indifferent birth, who caused endless trouble in the matter of palace factions. The former was middle-aged, crafty, smooth-tongued and a flatterer; the latter was a pert coxcomb and braggart, jealous and mischievous. He had a minor faculty for music, which his conceit magnified into genius; could set mediocre verses of “the right butterwoman’s rank to market” order, to compositions as vulgarly primitive. One might find his like in a hundred popular balladmongers of to-day—men who have the gift to touch out emotional chords to clap-trap sentiments. He and Don Philip, whose measure he exactly fitted, wasted much time together producing and practising over a number of such little sticky effusions. They were sometimes moved to tears over their own lucubrations.
His Excellency was at his toilet, his two friends being present, when the marquise’s letter was brought in to him. Its delivery had to be delayed, pending the performance of an important rite. This was no less than the placing of the ducal wig in position on the ducal poll. M. Frisson, theperruquier, spotlessly aproned and with a comb stuck in the side-frizzle of his own bob-jerom, as a clerk sticks a pen behind his ear, received the august erection from an attendant who had just brought it in from the powdering-closet, and, delicately shaking and blowing on it, poised it a moment over the cropt scalp, with the air of an archbishop officiating at a coronation, before he deftly lowered it into place. It was an action of ineffable and unfaltering elegance, necessitating none but the most trifling of after-touches to complete the effect—a slight joining of the flats, so to speak, with a fragrant grease-stick, a whiff of powder, a just more perceptible distribution of the rouge on the cheekbones. His fingers fluttered like butterflies tasting the honey of flowers; he stood back finally to admire his own work; a valet offered the duke a lacedmouchoirheavily scented with tuberose; and the ceremony was accomplished.
Don Philip, exhaling incense, proceeded leisurely, the attendants being dismissed, to read thegouvernante’scommunication. But first he put it from him with a nose of disgust.
“Toilet-vinegar,” he said. “The very ink reeks of it. What odds on the writer?”
“Ten to one on the Gonzalès,” cried la Coque.
“No takers,” said the duke, and, frowning, perused the thing at arm’s length. Both men sat eyeing him, the one inquisitively, the other covertly, as he read the letter. He pished and anathema’d over it a good deal.
“Twenty gold ducats to a lira that she asks her wages in it!” cried la Coque impulsively, as the duke made an end.
Philip sniggered. “Taken,” he said, and tossed the letter across to the speaker.
La Coque made a wry face, and la Roque laughed softly and enjoyingly. He was a full-bodied man, with small drooping-lidded eyes and a small moist mouth.
“Look before you leap, my little Charles, is a ver-y good proverb,” he said.
“Bah! good for cardsharpers,” retorted la Coque angrily.
“Is that,” said the other smoothly, “a specific innuendo or a generalisation?”
“Supposing it is the former?” said la Coque insolently.
“Then I repudiate it, with——”
“With what?” demanded the coxcomb, rising.
“With considerable indignation,” said la Roque.
The duke made a laughing gesture.
“Put down your crest, bully-boy; and either read the letter or hand it me back.”
La Coque’s curiosity got the better of his temper, and, reseating himself, he obeyed, muttering below his breath. After a while he looked up, a very sneering expression on his pert combative face:
“Her Highness shows a better judgment in music than some other people—that is all I have got to remark,” he said.
Don Philip prepared to amuse himself at his friend’s expense. He was always ready to exact such payment for the familiarity he invited.
“Meaning,” he said, with a just perceptible wink at the other intimate, “that she shows signs of succumbing after all to what, for our part, we found instantly irresistible.”
“I neither meant that, nor detect here any such indication,” was the glowering answer.
“You puzzle me, Charles,” said the duke. “Whatdidyou mean then, may I ask?”
“I meant just what I said.”
“Was ever such a cross enigma!” protested Philip to la Roque. “Here is our daughter, though in an unaccommodating mood, almost confessing herself at last a captive to the charm to which we all yielded at the first assault, and our friend will have us insensible by comparison. But I say we shall refuse to surrender to the Infanta that first place in appreciating M. Tiretta, in taking which we were all unanimous.”
“Say with one exception,” cried la Coque.
“One? Yourself, do you mean?”
“Certainly I do.”
“What! You valued him at first at something lower than the rest of us?”
He knew very well the spiteful jealousy aroused in this rival bosom by the stranger’s success, and delighted to prick and goad it.
La Coque ignored the exclamation. His patron’s amiable purpose was perfectly plain to him.
“I recognise, at this moment, M. Tiretta’s art to be supreme,” he said; “only I spell it, for my part, with a little a.”
“‘Elles ne sont point bonnes,’ remarked the little low fox of the big high mulberries,” murmured la Roque silkily.
The other darted a malignant glance at the speaker, but restrained himself. The duke, his nose wrinkled in a covert snigger, saw something in the insolent face which stiffened his own.
“An innuendo, Charles my friend?” he said. “Or are you meaning nothing but to belittle, after your way, M. Tiretta’s gift?”
La Coque set his white teeth and nodded. He looked very much like a snapping terrier, whom it would be dangerous to handle incautiously.
“I do not belittle his gift,” he said. “I spell it with a smaller letter than you, that is all.”
“And with another significance—you imply something,” said the duke, after frowning at him awhile. “What is it?”
“Perhaps my ears,” replied la Coque, “are more sensitive than most to the subtle nuances of sound—to discords, disharmonies, so slight as to be imperceptible to less exquisite understandings. Perhaps her Highness is likewise constituted, so that within this Tiretta’s mellifluous tones she is able to detect a something insidious, incorrect, which at once fascinates and repels her.”
The duke did not answer; and presently he went on:
“I was over at Colorno yesterday, and listening—not to him, you may be sure, but to one who observes things, and reports to me in confidence. See clever Hyacinth laugh to himself there, as if he guesses who that someone may be. This Hyacinth of ours, monsieur, has a marvellous gift for detecting smoke by its smell. Put his fat nose above a hearth, and ten to one he will instruct you presently where the fire burns. That is not the case with her Highness’s governess, whom we may certainly commend for an old fool—saving her marquisate. She cannot see an inch beyondhernose in any direction; and, when it comes to smoke, a man may blow it in her eyes in the name of flattery, and she will go blind rather than not accommodate him.”
The duke, still staring with a perplexed expression and still silent, made a gesture to have the letter returned to him. Receiving it from la Coque’s hands, he sat awhile studying and frowning over its opening sentences. Presently he looked up.
“I find no shadow of justification here,” he said, “for such an innuendo.”
“What innuendo, monsieur?”
“That—that——” Don Philip rose suddenly to his feet, angry excitement in his eyes. “Are you daring to imply that this man is capable of such a mad abuse of his mission?”
La Coque, his lids stretched, his chin hanging, looked the picture of stupefied innocence.
“Why, what can your Excellency mean?” he said.
“What didyoumean, sir, by your art with a little a?”
“Nothing whatever, but that I do not rate the chevalier’s capacity for music so high as you do.”
“And that was all?”
“What else, in heaven’s name?”
“You suggest that he blinds the marquise’s eyes—to what?”
“O, to nothing in particular!”