III
When we returned to take possession, the first person we saw was Principe Montughi. No less suave and impeccable as landlord than as host, he showed us to our rooms, introduced Graziosa, the little peasant girl who was to be our maid, and said dinner would be served at seven o’clock. He was sorry he had neglected to ask what we wished, and at what time we wished it; but if we would be good enough to put up with our first repast, he hoped we could in the future suit ourselves so far as the resources of his inadequate establishment permitted. He then withdrew, and we proceeded to settle ourselves in our new domain.
Not that there was much settling to be done. Our belongings were no more numerous than could be carried in trunks, while the rooms in which we disposed them were preposterously bare. We suspected that the furniture had gone the way of the front gates, which had been so admired by a passing compatriot of ours that the Prince said he had parted with them for ten times their value and had not yet got around to replacing them. Neither had he yet found time to make other repairs that some people might have considered more pressing. But that was a part of our picnic, as we regarded it. We could have furniture and tight windows at home; but we couldn’t have such big cool echoing rooms, or such a loggia, or such a garden, or such a podere, or such an olive yard running down to such a river.
Accordingly we were the more surprised by the dinner which Graziosa presently came to tell us was served on the terrace. It was no picnic art with which our uninstructed underlings had set the table and arranged the flowers and the brass fiorentine we might need later on, with which they had chosen just the right point for looking down the avenue or catching the last light of sunset on the tower. So keenly did we realise it that we were ready to give them credit for the stately setting of the terrace, for the mellowness of cracked marble and foot-worn brick and weathered stone, for the rich evening stillness of the garden and the fluting of the birds among the trees. We felt rather like persons in a play, sitting down to a stage dinner. When the soup came on we wondered whether it would be real.
It was—like the delicious trout that followed it, like the dish of macaroni and frizzled eggplant that formed the irresistible piece of resistance, like the crisp salad which prepared the way for a Gorgonzola I would now commit crimes for, like the far from histrionic Verona which bore us through to the coffee. It was all so real, and so acute a sense of the joy of life filled us when at last Graziosa lighted the wicks of the fiorentine and left us to a platter of walnuts and a carafe of Marsala, that we hadn’t the heart to call her back for nut-crackers. Besides, my wife wanted the secret of that masterpiece of resistance. So she decided to go and ask the old woman herself. And I went along too.
There was more than one piece of foolishness between us, I remember, as we made for the corner of the villa—the one Graziosa had turned as she came and went with our plates. I remember it, and a nightingale in the garden, and our serious agreement that “it” was all “wonderful,” as one unaccountably remembers longest a few of the least serious moments of life. But I remember too the curious change in atmosphere, almost like a breath of chilled air, which we detected even in our foolishness and in that dim light, when the end of the castle lifted its stark mass above us, with the tower darkly overtopping the farther angle. We walked toward it. And presently we made out, beyond a black blotch that suggested a door, two little lighted windows. They twinkled like a pair of eyes, rather too far above the ground for us to look into. I fear we might have done so, then; for in the back of both our heads was a desire to become better acquainted with our romantic domain. A sudden growl in the darkness, however, decided us for the door.
It proved not to be locked. The enormous raftered room into which we stepped, hand still in hand, must have been the original kitchen of the castle. I caught a hasty impression of a vast fireplace, on a central platform under a chimney hood, of tins and coppers and brasses glimmering dully, of Graziosa standing statue-like with a candle. What almost immediately held my eye was a superb three-legged pot of hammered copper full of lettuce heads, standing in the fireplace. Going over to look at it more closely, I became aware that someone else was in the room. My surprise was the greater because this person was not at all the old woman of the farm, or her husband either. It was a man who sat in the shadow at one side in a chef’s white cap. He rose silently from the deal table at which he had been eating the remains of our dinner. And then, to my stupefaction, I recognised the Prince himself.
He took off his white cap and bowed, magnificent as ever. What a feat that was I cannot hope to make clear in a land where we are as used to great changes of fortune as we are to the somewhat inadequate service, at summer hotels, of young gentlemen from the universities. The sense of it flashed for me, as I took in the Prince’s masquerade, into a surprised consciousness of a parallel between the man and his house—in which a sense of strange and lamentable things mingled inarticulately with the recognition of a personal force even deeper than I had suspected.
I wish that had been the only reason for the open-mouthed spectacle we made of ourselves. But the transition from the silk hat to the white cap—under which the flare of the Prince’s eyebrows looked startlingly made up—was so abrupt, it so carried out our earlier stage illusion, that it is no satisfaction to recall how far we were from smiles. The stare we gave, the glances we involuntarily exchanged, were just as gross.
Of course after that first ignoble moment, which I hope was not so long as the telling of it, we were both eager to extend the right hand of fellowship. But Montughi cut the ground from under our feet.
“Graziosa,” he commanded, “the signori have lost their way. Show them up to their rooms.”
I don’t suppose it was five minutes from the time we left the table on the terrace before we found ourselves back in our loggia, watching the receding glimmer of Graziosa’s candle and listening to the echo of her footsteps die away in the dark house.