IV
There was a sound of wheels on gravel, of horses' hoofs on stone, and Lady Blanchemain's great high-swung barouche, rolling superbly forth from the avenue, drew up before the Castle, Lady Blanchemain herself, big and soft and sumptuous in silks and laces, under a much-befurbelowed, much-befringed, lavender-hued silk sunshade, occupying the seat of honour. John hastened across the garden, hat in hand, to welcome her.
"Jump in," she commanded, with a smile, and an imperious sweep of the arm. "I have come to take you for a drive."
The footman (proud man) held open the door, and John jumped in. But just as the footman (with an air) had closed the door behind him, and before the coachman had touched up his horses, there came a rhythm of running footsteps, and the voice of Annunziata called, insistently, "Prospero! Prospero!" Then, all out of breath, her pale cheeks pink, her curls in disarray, Annunziata arrived beside the carriage, and, no wise abashed by that magnificent equipage, nor by the magnificent old lady throning in it, (no wise abashed, but, from the roundness of her eyes, a good deal surprised and vastly curious), she explained, gasping, "A telegram," and held up to John a straw-coloured envelope.
"Thank you," said he, taking it, and waving a friendly hand. "But you should not run so fast," he admonished her, with concern.
Whereupon the carriage drove off, Annunziata standing and watching, always round-eyed, till it was out of sight.
"What an interesting-looking child!" said Lady Blanchemain.
"Yes," said John. "I should have liked to introduce her to you."
"Who is she?" asked the lady.
"She's the private detective I told you of. She's my affinity. She's the young limb o' mischief for whom I ravaged your stores of marchpane. She's the niece of the parroco."
"Hum!" said Lady Blanchemain. "Why does she call you—what was it?—Prospero?"
"She's an optimist. She's a bird of good omen," answered John. "She's satisfied herself, by consulting an oracle, that Fortune has favours up her sleeve for me. She encouragingly anticipates them by calling me Prospero before the fact."
Lady Blanchemain softly laughed. "That's very nice of her, and very wise. Aren't you going to read your telegram?"
"I didn't know whether you'd permit," said John.
"Oh pray," said she, with a gesture.
The carriage by this time had left the garden, and the coachman had turned his horses' heads northwards, away from the lake, towards the Alps, where their snowy summits, attenuated by the sun and the distance and the blue air, looked like vapours rising into the sky.
John tore open his envelope, read, frowned, and uttered a half-stifled ejaculation,—something that sounded rather like "I say!" and vaguely like "By Jove!"
"No bad news, I hope?" inquired the lady, sympathetic, and trying to speak as if she didn't know what curiosity meant.
"Excellent news, on the contrary," said John, "but a bolt from the blue." And he offered her the paper.
"Am on my way to Rome," she read aloud. "Could I come to you for a day? Winthorpe, Hotel Cavour, Milan."—"Winthorpe?" She pursed her lips, as one tasting something. "I don't know the name. Who is he? What's his County?" she demanded,—she, who carried the County Families in her head.
John chuckled. "He hasn't got a County—he's only an American," he said, pronouncing that genial British formula with intention.
"Oh," sighed Lady Blanchemain, her expectations dashed; and drawing in her skirts, she sank a little deeper into her corner.
"He hasn't got a County," repeated John. "But he's far and away the greatest swell I know."
"A swell? An American?" Lady Blanchemain pressed down her lips, and gave a movement to her shoulders.
"An aristocrat, a patrician," said John.
"Fudge!" said Lady Blanchemain. "Americans and Australians—they're anything you like, but they're never that."
John laughed. "I adore," he said, "our light and airy British way of tarring Americans and Australians with the same brush,—the descendants of transported convicts and the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers!"
"Is your Winthorpe man a descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers?" asked Lady Blanchemain, dryly.
"Indeed he is," said John. "He's descended from ten separate individuals who made the first voyage in the Mayflower. And he holds, by-the-by, intact, the lands that were ceded to his family by the Indians the year after. That ought to recommend him to your Ladyship,—an unbroken tenure of nearly three hundred years."
"Old acres," her ladyship admitted, cautiously, "always make for respectability."
"Besides," John carelessly threw out, "he's a baronet."
Lady Blanchemain sat up. "A baronet?" she said. "An American?"
"Alas, yes," said John, "a mere American. And one of the earliest creations,—by James the First, no less. His patent dates from 1612. But he doesn't use the title. He regards it, he pretends, as merged in a higher dignity."
"What higher dignity?" asked the lady, frowning.
"That of an American citizen, he says," chuckled John.
"Brrr!" she breathed, impatient.
"And moreover," John gaily continued, "besides being descended from the Pilgrim Fathers, he's descended in other lines from half the peerage of Seventeenth Century England. And to top up with, if you please, he's descended from Alfred the Great. He's only an American, but he can show a clear descent bang down from Alfred the Great! I think the most exquisite, the most subtle and delicate pleasure I have ever experienced has been to see English people, people of yesterday, cheerfully patronizing him."
"You've enlarged my sphere of knowledge," said Lady Blanchemain, grimly. "I had never known that there was blood in America. Does this prodigious personage talk through his nose?"
"Worse luck, no," said John. "I wish he did—a little—just enough to smack of his soil, to possess local colour. No, he talks for all the world like you or me,—which exposes him to compliments in England. 'An American? Really?' our tactful people cry, when he avows his nationality 'Upon my word, I should never have suspected it.'"
"I suppose, with all the rest, he's rich?" asked Lady Blanchemain.
"Immensely," assented John. "Speaking of Fortune and her favours, she's withheld none from him."
"Then he's good-looking, too?"
"He looks like a Man," said John.
"Hum!" said Lady Blanchemain, moving. "If I had received a wire from a creature of such proportions, I've a feeling I'd answer it."
"I've a very similar feeling myself," laughed John. "When we turn back, if you think your coachman can be persuaded to stop at the telegraph office in the village, I'll give my feeling effect."
"I think we might turn back now," said Lady Blanchemain. "It's getting rather gloomy here." She looked round, with a little shudder, and then gave the necessary order. The valley had narrowed to what was scarcely more than a defile between two dark and rugged hillsides, —pine-covered hillsides that shut out the sun, smiting the air with chill and shadow, and turning the Rampio, whose brawl seemed somehow to increase the chill, turning the sparkling, sportive Rampio to the colour of slate. "It puts one in mind of brigands," she said, with another little shudder. But though the air was chilly, it was wonderfully, keenly fragrant with the incense of the pines.
"Well," she asked, when they were facing homewards, "and your woman? What of her?"
"Nothing," said John. "Or, anyhow, very little." (It would be extremely pleasant, he felt suddenly, to talk of her; but at the same time he felt an extreme reluctance to let his pleasure be seen.)
"But your private detective?" said Lady Blanchemain. "Weren't her investigations fruitful?"
"Not very," said he. "She learnt little beyond her name and age."
"And what is her name?" asked the lady.
"Her name is Maria Dolores," answered John, (and he experienced a secret joy, strange to him, in pronouncing it).
"Maria Dolores?" said Lady Blanchemain, (and he experienced a secret joy in hearing it). "Maria Dolores—what?"
"My detective didn't discover her Pagan name," said John.
"So that you are still in doubt whether she's the daughter of a miller?" Lady Blanchemain raised her eyebrows.
"Oh, no: I think she's a miller's daughter safely enough," said he. "But she's an elaborately chiselled and highly polished one. Her voice is like ivory and white velvet; and to hear her speak English is a revelation of the hidden beauties of that language."
"Hum!" said Lady Blanchemain, eyeing him. "So you've advanced to the point of talking with her?"
"Well," answered John, weighing his words, "I don't know whether I can quite say that. But accident threw us together for a minute or two this afternoon, and we could scarcely do less, in civility, than exchange the time of day."
"And are you in love with her?" asked Lady Blanchemain.
"I wonder," said he. "What do you think? Is it possible for a man to be in love with a woman he's seen only half a dozen times all told, and spoken with never longer than a minute or two at a stretch?"
"Was it only a minute or two—really?" asked Lady Blanchemain, wooing his confidence with a glance.
"No," said John. "It was probably ten minutes, possibly fifteen. But they passed so quickly, it's really nearer the truth to describe them as one or two."
Lady Blanchemain shifted her sunshade, and screwed herself half round, so as to face him, her soft old eyes full of smiling scrutiny and suspicion.
"I never can tell whether or not you're serious," she complained. "If you are serious,—well, à quand le mariage?"
"The marriage?" cried John. "How could I marry her? Such a thing's out of all question.
"Why?" asked she.
"A miller's daughter!" said John. "Would you have me marry the daughter of a miller?"
"You said yourself yesterday—" the lady reminded him.
"Ah, yes," said he. "But night brings counsel."
"If she's well educated," said Lady Blanchemain, "if she's well-bred, what does it matter about her father? Though a nobody in Austria, where nothing counts but quarterings, he's probably what we'd call a gentleman in England. Suppose he's a barrister? Or the editor of a newspaper? Or—"
She paused, thoughtful-eyed, to think of respectable professions. At last she gave up the effort.
"Well, anything decent," she concluded, "so long as he had plenty of money."
"Ah," said John, sadly, and with perhaps mock humility. "If he had plenty of money, he'd never consent to his daughter marrying a son of poverty like me."
"Pooh! For a title?" cried Lady Blanchemain. "Besides, you have prospects. Isn't your name Prospero?"
"I have precious little faith in oracles," said John.
"I advise you to have more," said Lady Blanchemain, with a smile that seemed occult.
And now her carriage entered the village, and she put him down at the telegraph office.
"Don't wait," said John. "The walk from here to the Castle is nothing, and it would take you out of your way."
"Well, good-bye, then," said she. "And cultivate more faith in oracles—when they're auspicious."
Alone, she drew from some recondite fold of her many draperies a letter, an unsealed letter, which she opened, spread out, and proceeded to read. It was a long letter in her ladyship's own handsome, high-bred, old-fashioned handwriting; and it was addressed to Messrs. Farrow, Bernscot, and Tisdale, Solicitors, Lincoln's Inn Fields, London. She read it twice through, and at last (with a smile that seemed occult) restored it to its envelope. "Stop at the Post Office," she said to her coachman, as they entered Roccadoro; and to her footman, giving him the letter, "Have that registered, please."
Annunziata lay in wait for John in the garden. She ran up, and seized him by the arm. Then, skipping beside him, as he walked on, "Who was she? Where did she come from? Where did she take you? Whom was the telegram from?" she demanded in a breath, nestling her curls against his coat-sleeve.
"Piano, piano," remonstrated John. "One question at a time. Now, begin again."
"Whom was the telegram from?" she obeyed, beginning at the end.
"Ah," said he, "the telegram was from my friend Prospero. He's coming here to-morrow. We must ask your uncle whether he can give him a bed."
"And the old lady?" pursued Annunziata. "Who was she?"
"The old lady was my fairy godmother," said John, building better than he knew.