“Sir.”
“I would not willingly forget that vision. See, take this ring” (he pulled a green intaglio from his finger)—“carry it to her; say that the Count of Falckenstein presents his duty to the nixie of the pool, and begs her to accept of this gage in token of his thraldom. No delay—not a moment—or you will be too late.”
Tiretta, in his jack-boots, splashed back across the ford. He found the wicket unfastened, and entered; a short hedgy lane carried him to the chestnut trees and the patch of sward over against the islet. He half expected to find the apparition vanished beyond recall—a dream, an hallucination. But there she stood withdrawn into the green, a flushed and laughing reality. Her sodden skirts clung about her; they were hemmed with mud as if, a lily herself, she had been uprooted from the water; her raised hands sought to restore symmetry to her disordered locks; there was a gleam of snowy teeth, a flush of translucent rose—he thought he had never seen a picture so captivating. And hovering about the vision’s footsteps was a little grotesque boy, comical, preposterous—a dwarf in fantastic keeping.
He advanced; she saw him, and was stricken into a stone-eyed Undine.
“Madam,” he said, “I bring a gage from the Count of Falckenstein yonder to the nixie of the water. He bids me say that he will redeem it at her will.”
CHAPTER II.
AQUAVIVA
If we are to accept the testimony of Louis XV., an experienced judge in such matters, the beauty of his granddaughter, eldest child of Don Philip of Parma, was in need of no servile flattery to recommend it. The little Infanta was, in truth, at seventeen, most that heart could desire, sweet, unaffected, full of charm and playfulness. Indeed, in the eyes of some, she erred on the side of condescension, being a little disposed, like her father, to familiarity with her inferiors. Yet, on right occasion, she could assume a pretty air of dignity, consciously summoned, one might think, to the protection of a yielding over-lovable disposition. She could not bear to hurt; and though she was wilful, and possessed, and could not always resist the temptation to indulge, a strong sense of humour, her atonements generally more than expiated the faults that induced them. To men, her eyes seemed always asking pardon for the cruelty of their own kindness.
The pretty princess was born in December. She arrived, “when all sweets were over, to bless the year,” even like our own little princess Elizabeth, who came with the snow one Childermas day, and passed away with it, like other holy innocents, in her brief spring. Isabella’s full name was Isabelle Marie Louise Antoinette—either so, or written in Italian, or Spanish, as you please. To her kinsfolk she was always Isabelita. They spoke French for the most part in Parma; for although Don Philip was a son of the fifth haughty monarch of that name of Spain, his royal spouse was by far the more forceful spirit of the pair, a true and steadfast daughter of France, and her will and tastes prevailed above those of her vain good-natured husband. Wherefore it was that this twelfth year of the duke’s enjoyment of his Italian possessions found the court largely weeded of its original Spanish dependants, and savouring more of Paris than of Madrid in its councils and pastimes.
Isabella commonly spoke French; and so, through long habit of resignation, did her gouvernante, the Marquise de Gonzalès, a fat old rabâcheuse, who, wishful long ago to escape this tiresome servitude of hers, had only been induced to stay on in view of the inability of the ducal exchequer to settle her account. She was a twaddling, scandalmongering old woman, who “passait pour aimer l’intrigue”—not the best mentor for an impressionable young girl, one would think. But, indeed, the old lady’s wits were never the servants of her inclinations, and I think Isabella measured her fairly enough, her pretence and her harmlessness, and was never, though she dutifully submitted, more or Jess, to her duennaship, in the least danger of imbibing from her principles derogatory to her maidenhood. At the same time the girl, not ignorant of the financial difficulties which had almost persistently beset the duchy, was prepared to suffer sweetly enough the almost arrogant show of authority which the Marquise’s consciousness of grievance emboldened her to assume.
The two drove out one fair June morning to visit the gardens of the queer old Aquaviva, a whimsical protégé of the young lady. They lay, these gardens, a mile or two from Colorno, along the right bank of the little river Parma, and were designed for nothing else than the production of perfumery. The gouvernante, hot and languid, elected to remain in the carriage under the shadow of a friendly group of trees; so Isabella alighted alone. She had hardly entered the garden, through a green gate in a hedge, before she was launched upon a very wilderness of flowers. Or at least so it might have appeared to one who knew nothing of the inner economics of that profuse and dazzling disorder. Here were roses, not by the bed but by the acre, bickering flame, as the heat-haze dances from the ground, of orange and crimson and scarlet; fields of jasmine in orderly rows, knitted in like hop-binds with horizontal stakes, and loading the air with perfume; plantations of yellow cassia, of jonquil, of tuberose, of geranium, each, on inspection, seen to be differentiated from all others, the whole forming a vast mosaic of flower groups, whose pattern symbolised the triumph of Aquaviva over some natural conditions obstructive of his enterprise. For Aquaviva, transferring at one time his little capital and his extensive knowledge from the flower-farms of Grasse in the Cannes Valley, where he had been horticulturally educated, to his native plains of Colorno, which were quite a degree higher in latitude, had had to circumvent and conquer many difficulties before establishing his gardens on the productive footing which was to make of them something more than a joy to the eye and a feast to the nostrils.