I
It was Sunday. It was early morning. It was raining,—a fine quiet, determined rain, that blurred the lower reaches of the valley, and entirely hid the mountain-tops, so that one found it hard not to doubt a little whether they were still there. Near at hand the garden was as if a thin web of silver had been cast over it, pale and dim, where wet surfaces reflected the diffused daylight. And just across the Rampio, on the olive-clad hillside that rose abruptly from its brink, rather an interesting process was taking place,—the fabrication of clouds, no less. The hillside, with its rondure of blue-grey foliage, would lie for a moment quite bare and clear; then, at some high point, a mist would begin to form, would appear indeed to issue from the earth, as smoke from a subterranean fire, white smoke with pearly shadows; would thicken and spread out; would draw together and rise in an irregular spiral column, curling, swaying, poising, as if uncertain what to do next; and at last, all at once making up its mind, (how like a younker or a prodigal!), would go sailing away, straggling away, amorphous, on a puff of wind, leaving the hillside clear again;—till, presently, the process would recommence da capo.
John and Annunziata, seated together on a marble bench in the shelter of the great cloister, with its faded frescoes, at the north-eastern extremity of the castle buildings, had been watching this element-play for some minutes in silence. But by-and-by Annunziata spoke.
"What makes the cloud come out of the hill like that?" she asked, her eyes anxiously questioning his. "I have seen it happen many times, but I could never understand it. There cannot be a fire underneath?"
"If you can't understand it, Mistress Wisdom," responded John, smiling on her, "you surely mustn't expect a featherpate like me to. Between ourselves, I don't believe any one can really understand it, though there's a variety of the human species called scientists who might pretend they could. It's all a part of that great scheme of miracles by which God's world goes on, Nature, which nobody can really understand in the very least. All that the chaps called scientists can really do is to observe and more or less give names to the miracles. They can't explain 'em."
"It is great pleasure to watch such things," said Annunziata. "It is a great blessing to be allowed to see a miracle performed with your own eyes."
"So it is," agreed John. "And if you keep your eyes well open, there's not a minute of the livelong day when you mayn't see one."
"It is very strange," said Annunziata, "but when the sun shines, then I love the sunny weather, and am glad that it does not rain. Yet when it does rain, then I find that I love the rain too, that I love it just as much as the sun,—it is so fresh, it smells so good, the raindrops are so pretty, and they make such a pretty sound where they fall, and the grey light is so pleasant."
"Our loves," said John, "are always very strange. Love is the rummest miracle of them all. It is even more difficult to account for than the formation of clouds on the hillside."
"We love the things that give us pleasure," said Annunziata.
"And the people, sometimes, who give us pain," said John.
"We love the people, first of all, who are related to us," said Annunziata, "and then the people we see a great deal of—just as I love, first of all, my uncle, and then you and Marcella the cook."
"Who brings in the inevitable veal," said John. "Thank you, Honeymouth." He bowed and laughed, while Annunziata's grave eyes wondered what he was laughing at. "But it isn't every one," he pointed out, "who has your solid and well-balanced little head-piece. It isn't every one who keeps his love so neatly docketed, or so sanely submitted to the sway of reason. Some of us love first of all people who aren't related to us in the remotest degree, and people we've seen hardly anything of and know next to nothing about."
Annunziata deprecatingly shook her head.
"It is foolish to love people we know nothing about," she declared, in her deep voice, and looked a very sage delivering judgment.
"True enough," said John. "But what would you have? Some of us are born to folly, as the sparks fly upward. You see, there's a mighty difference between love and love. There's the love which is affection, there's the love which is cupboard-love, and there's the love which is just simply love-love and nothing else. The first, as you have truly observed, has its roots in consanguinity or association, the second in a lively hope of future comfits, and either is sufficiently explicable. But the third has its roots apparently in mere haphazard and causelessness, and isn't explicable by any means whatsoever, and yet is far and away the violentest of the three. It falls as the lightning from the clouds, and strikes whom it will. Though I mix my metaphors fearlessly, like a man, I trust, with your feminine intuition, you follow me?"
"No," said Annunziata, without compunction, her eyes on the distance. "I don't know what you mean."
"Thank Heaven you don't, pray Heaven you never may," said her inconsequential friend. "For love-love is a plague. You meet a person, for example, in a garden. You know nothing whatever about her, not even her name, though you fear it may be Schmidt. You meet her not more than half a dozen times all told. And suddenly one morning you wake up to discover that she has become to you the person of first importance in the world. She is practically a total stranger to you, she's of a different nationality, a different rank, yet she's infinitely the most precious and important person in the world. When you're absent from her you can do nothing but think of her, gloating with throes of aromatic pain over the memory of your last meeting with her, longing with soul-hunger for your next. The merest flutter of her gown, modulation of her voice, glance of her eye, will throw your heart into a palpitation. You look in the direction of the house that she inhabits, and you feel the emotions of a Peri looking at the gate of Eden. And it gives you the strangest sort of strange joy to talk about her, though of course you take pains to talk about her in veiled terms, obliquely, so that your listener shan't guess whom you are talking about. In short, she is the be-all and the end-all of your existence,—and you don't even know her name, though you fear it may be Schmidt."
He lolled back at ease on the marble bench, and twirled his yellow-red moustaches, fancy free.
"But you do know her name," said Annunziata, simply, in her deepest voice, holding him with a gaze, lucent and serious, that seemed almost reproachful. "Her name is Maria Dolores."
The thing was tolerably unexpected. What wonder if it put my hero out of countenance? His attitude grew rigid, his pink skin three shades pinker; his blue eyes stared at her, startled. So for a second; then he relaxed, and laughed, laughed long and heartily, perhaps a little despitefully too, at his own expense. ... But he must try, if he might, to repair the mischief.
"My poor child," he said, resting his hand on her curls, and gently smoothing them. "You are what the French call an enfant terrible. You are what the English call a deuced sharp little pickle. And I must try, if I can, without actually lying, to persuade you that you are utterly mistaken, utterly and absolutely mistaken,"—he raised his voice, for greater convincingness,—"and that her name is nothing distantly resembling the name that you have spoken, and that in fact her name is Mrs. Harris, and that in fine there is no such person, and that I was merely talking hypothetically, in abstractions; I must draw a herring across the trail, I must raise a dust, and throw a lot of it into your amazingly clear-sighted little eyes. Now, is it definitely impressed upon you that her name is not—the thrice-adorable name you mentioned?"
"I thought it was," answered Annunziata. "I am sorry it is not." And then she dismissed the subject. "See, it is raining harder. See how the rain comes down in long strings of beads,—see how it is like a network of long strings of glass beads falling through the air. When the rain comes down like that, it means that after the rain stops it will be very hot. To-morrow it will be very hot."
The bell in the clock-tower tolled out seven solemn strokes; then the lighter-toned and nimbler-tongued bell of the church began to ring.
"Come," peremptorily said Annunziata, jumping up. "Mass."
She held out her hand, took John's, and, like a mother, led the meek and unquestioning young man to his duties.