“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.
IV
He showed us our place, did the Principe, and we sat in it.
I won’t say that we didn’t wriggle in it a little, at first. We naturally wanted to show him that if we had broken into his kitchen we were no pair of mere inquisitive snoopers, and that the fact of our having caught him in cap and apron could not make the slightest difference in our relations—unless to improve them. But that was precisely what the Principe would not let us do. Such overtures as we made in that direction encountered a stony impassivity which taught us our own unwilling rôle. This was to make two personages of our landlord and of our cook. The former was the impeccable gentleman of the world we had accidentally met at Bassano, who honoured us with an occasional call and who once a week drove splendidly away to town in the old caleche which remained the rest of the time at our disposal. The latter was an invisible chef of no less distinguished qualities. If when we took in the situation and realised that we would never be able to scold our cook we both felt a certain dismay, it was speedily dispelled by the discovery that our cook never required a scolding. But never did he in one character refer to the other. And never, after one or two futile attempts, did we.
The thing was really preposterous. There we were, the three of us, cut off from the world as if we had been castaways on a desert island, and the man went on to the end pretending now not to be Prince and now not to be cook. A hundred times I was on the edge of bursting out: “Come, my dear fellow, don’t make things so hard for yourself and for us.” Only—I never did! On the contrary, we sometimes went so far as to ask ourselves whether the two personages might not be separate after all.
We smiled when we recalled our simple anticipations in becoming co-tenants of Castello Montughi. One of them had been that we should at last see something of what the sojourner in Italy so rarely does, an Italian interior. Whereas we discovered that, like everybody else, we were to see nothing at all. Perhaps it was our pique at finding ourselves in so curious and unexpected a subjection that searched for any possible flaw in the Prince’s acting, that divined a secret source of indifference under his pride. More was there than we knew, but we didn’t much matter one way or the other. I presume we felt it because we thought—and I still think—one reason for our singular relation was that we brought him a breath, such as it was, from a wider world than Val Sugana. At all events it was impossible for us to be indifferent about him. Who on earth was he? We could not help asking each other that question, or feeling sure that it had an answer. And what had brought him to the straits in which we found him? And why, most of all, did he inhabit this tumble-down castle in the Dolomites when such a personality as his could not fail elsewhere to make its mark?
We kept our questions to ourselves, however. We also kept, after that first misadventure, to our part of the house. But I would create an entirely false impression if I seemed to insinuate that we breathed an air of Maeterlinck or of Poe. What would you? The year was yet young, we ourselves were by no means old, we happened to have stumbled at a moment not the least romantic in life into a setting of the most romantic. Nor did Montughi’s eccentricity make it less so. The half-ruined castle, the lonely valley, the rushing river, reacted upon our new-world sensitiveness to such stimuli in a way we could scarcely have resisted. Such twilights as darkened our deserted garden and our great echoing rooms demanded a ghost. And we devoutly continued to believe in the princess who should inhabit the tower.
We took her, like her tower and her loggia and her enchanted avenue of cypresses, for granted—as a piece of the Argument from Design, whereby all things existed for the edification of two wandering Americans who had not long been married. We also took her, it must be said in further disclaimer of that insinuation to which I have just alluded, with giggles. Was she not red-haired, whose head we were one day to behold in a casement or an embrasure of the tower? On that we usually agreed. My wife, however, held that the mysterious lady was a flame of Montughi’s for whom he had ruined himself and whom he had borne away to this solitary retreat to be free of the world and its conventions, to say nothing of importunate husbands. Whereas according to my own less decorative theory our princess was an elderly female relative, possibly a wife but probably a maiden aunt, who suffered from a Jane Eyre-ish disability of the mental organs, requiring a régime of country air and close surveillance.
In any case, she remained even more obstinately invisible than our princely cook. But while it of course kept alive our more or less humorous speculations to see, after dark, slits of light in the irregularly spaced loopholes of the tower, or sometimes to hear notes from a faraway violin which was doubtless a gramophone, we elaborately avoided the other side of the castle. Although we could laugh about Montughi, we did not wish to give him another occasion for putting us in the wrong. For the same reason we pretended at first to be cool toward Graziosa and the good old people at the podere. And I presume it was not wholly our imagination that sensed a reserve under their Latin manners. That pretense did not last long, however. There is a fatal affinity between exiles in Italy and those who serve them. Moreover our unwillingness to use the Prince’s gate too often, or to lacerate ourselves by crawling through the barbed wire of our own, made it necessary for us to go in and out of the farmyard. So we ended by becoming fast friends with the peasants who lived there. Also with their dragon, the watchdog of the place. This was a huge white shaggy creature whom my wife christened Abracadabra and whom we promptly set about corrupting. He was always let loose at night.