Produced by Al Haines THE LADY PARAMOUNT By HENRY HARLAND _Author of_ "THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX" JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD LONDON & NEW YORK -- MCMII Copyright, 1902 BY JOHN LANE All rights reserved To EDMUND GOSSE The Lady Paramount I On the twenty-second anniversary of Susanna's birth, old Commendatore Fregi, her guardian, whose charge, by the provisions of her father's will, on that day terminated, gave a festa in her honour at his villa in Vallanza. Cannon had been fired in the morning: two-and-twenty salvoes, if you please, though Susanna had protested that this was false heraldry, and that it advertised her, into the bargain, for an old maid. In the afternoon there had been a regatta. Seven tiny sailing-boats, monotypes,--the entire fleet, indeed, of the Reale Yacht Club d'Ilaria--had described a triangle in the bay, with Vallanza, Presa, and Veno as its points; and I need n't tell anyone who knows the island of Sampaolo that the Marchese Baldo del Ponte's _Mermaid_, English name and all, had come home easily the first. Then, in the evening, there was a dinner, followed by a ball, and fire-works in the garden. Susanna was already staying at the summer palace on Isola Nobile, for already--though her birthday falls on the seventeenth of April--the warm weather had set in; and when the last guests had gone their way, the Commendatore escorted her and her duenna, the Baroness Casaterrena, down through the purple Italian night, musical with the rivalries of a hundred nightingales, to the sea-wall, where, at his private landing-stage, in the bat-haunted glare of two tall electric lamps, her launch was waiting. But as he offered Susanna his hand, to help her aboard, she stepped quickly to one side, and said, with a charming indicative inclination of the head, "The Baronessa." The precedence, of course, was rightfully her own. How like her, and how handsome of her, thought the fond old man, thus to waive it in favour of her senior. So he transferred his attention to the Baroness. She was a heavy body, slow and circumspect in her motions; but at length she had safely found her place among the silk cushions in the stern, and the Commendatore, turning back, again held out his hand to his sometime ward. As he was in the act of doing so, however, his ears were startled by a sound of puffing and of churning which caused him abruptly to face about. "Hi! Stop!" he cried excitedly, for the launch was several yards out in the bay; and one could hear the Baroness, equally excited, expostulating with the man at the machine: "He! Ferma, ferma!" "It's all right," said Susanna, in that rather deep voice of hers, tranquil and leisurely; "my orders." And the launch, unperturbed, held its course towards the glow-worm lights of Isola Nobile. The Commendatore stared. . . . For a matter of five seconds, his brows knitted together, his mouth half open, the Commendatore stared, now at Susanna, now after the bobbing lanterns of the launch,--whilst, clear in the suspension, the choir of nightingales sobbed and shouted. "_Your_ orders?" he faltered at last. Many emotions were concentrated in the pronoun. "Yes," said Susanna, with a naturalness that perhaps was studied. "The first act of my reign." He had never known her to give an order before, without asking permission; and this, in any case, was such an incomprehensible order. How, for instance, was she to get back to the palace? "But how on earth," he puzzled, "will you get back to----" "Oh, I 'm not returning to Isola Nobile tonight," Susanna jauntily mentioned, her chin a little perked up in the air. Then, with the sweetest smile--through which there pierced, perhaps, just a faint glimmer of secret mischief?--"I 'm starting on my wander-year," she added, and waved her hand imperially towards the open sea. It was a progression of surprises for the tall, thin old Commendatore. No sooner had Susanna thus bewilderingly spoken, than the rub and dip of oars became audible, rhythmically nearing; and a minute after, from the outer darkness, a row-boat, white and slender, manned by two rowers in smart nautical uniforms, shot forward into the light, and drew up alongside the quay. "A boat from the _Fiorimondo_," he gasped, in stupefaction. "Yes," said Susanna, pleasantly. "The _Fiorimondo_ takes me as far as Venice. There I leave it for the train." The Commendatore's faded old blue eyes flickered anxiously. "I can't think I am dreaming," he remarked, with a kind of vague plaintiveness; "and of course you are not serious. My dear, I don't understand." "Oh, I 'm as serious as mathematics," she assured him. She gave her head a little pensive movement of affirmation, and lifted her eyes to his, bright with an expression of trustful candour. This was an expression she was somewhat apt to assume when her mood was a teasing one; and it generally had the effect of breaking down the Commendatore's gravity. "You are a witch," he would laugh, availing himself without shame of the way-worn reproach, "a wicked, irresistible little witch." "The thing," she explained, "is as simple as good-day. I 'm starting on my travels--to see the world--Paris, which I have only seen once--London, which I have never seen--the seaports of Bohemia, the mountains of Thule, which I have often seen from a distance, in the mists on the horizon. The _Fiorimondo_ takes me as far as Venice. That is one of the advantages of owning a steam-yacht. Otherwise, I should have to go by the Austrian-Lloyd packet; and that would n't be half so comfortable." Her eyes, still raised to the Commendatore's, melted in a smile;--a smile seemingly all innocence, persuasiveness, tender appeal for approbation, but (I 'm afraid) with an undergleam that was like a mocking challenge. He, perforce, smiled too, though with manifest reluctance; and at the same time he frowned. "My dear, if it were possible, I should be angry with you. This is scarcely an appropriate hour for mystifications." "_That_ it is n't," agreed Susanna, heartily. And she put up her hand, to cover a weary little yawn. "But there 's _no_ mystification. There 's a perfectly plain statement of fact. I 'm starting to-night for Venice." He studied her intently for a moment, fixedly, pondering something. Then, all at once, the lines of dismay cleared from his lean old ivory-yellow face. "Ha! In a ball-dress," he scoffed, and pointed a finger at Susanna's snowy confection of tulle and satin and silver embroidery, all a-shimmer in the artificial moonlight of the electric lamps, against the background of southern garden,--the outlines and masses, dim and mysterious in the night, of palms and cypresses, of slender eucalyptus-trees, oleanders, magnolias, of orange-trees, where the oranges hung, amid the dark foliage, like dull-burning lanterns. A crescent of diamonds twinkled in the warm blackness of her hair. She wore a collar of pearls round her throat, and a long rope of pearls that descended to her waist, and was then looped up and caught at the bosom by an opal clasp. A delicate perfume, like the perfume of violets, came and went in the air near her. She held a great fluffy fan of white feathers in one hand, and in the other carried loose her long white gloves; and gems sparkled on her fingers. The waters under the sea-wall beside her kept up a perpetual whispering, like a commentary on the situation. The old man considered these things, and his misgivings were entirely dissipated. "Ha!" he scoffed, twisting his immense iron-grey moustaches with complacency. "I can't guess what prank you may be up to, but you are never starting for Venice in a ball-dress. You 're capable of a good deal, my dear, but you 're not capable of that." "Oh, I 'm capable of anything and everything," Susanna answered, cheerfully ominous. "Besides," she plausibly admonished him, "you might do me the justice of supposing that I have changes aboard the _Fiorimondo_. My maid awaits me there with quite a dozen boxes. So--you see. Oh, and by the bye," she interjected, "Serafino also is coming with me. He'll act as courier--buy my tickets, register my luggage; and then, when we reach our ultimate destination, resume his white cap and apron. My ultimate destination, you must know," she said, with a lightness which, I think, on the face of it was spurious, "is a little village in England--a little village called Craford; and"--she smiled convincingly--"I hear that the cuisine is not to be depended upon in little English villages." All the Commendatore's anxieties had revived. This time he frowned in grim earnest. "_Créforrrd_!" he ejaculated. The word fell like an explosion; and there was the climax of horrified astonishment in those reverberating r's. "I think you are mad," he said. "Or, if you are not mad, you are the slyest young miss in Christendom." Susanna's eyes darkened, pathetic, wistful. "Ah, don't be cross," she pleaded. "I 'm not mad, and I 'm not sly. But I 'm free and independent. What's the good of being free and independent," she largely argued, "if you can't do the things you want to? I 'm going to Craford to realise the aspiration of a lifetime. I 'm going to find out my cousin, and make his acquaintance, and see what he 's like. And then--well, if he 's nice, who knows what may happen? I planned it ever so long ago," she proclaimed, with an ingenuousness that was almost brazen, "and made all my preparations. Then I sat down and waited for the day when I should be free and independent." Her eyes melted again, deprecating his censure, beseeching his indulgence, yet still, with a little glint of raillery, defying him to do his worst. His hand sawed the air, his foot tapped the ground. "Free and independent, free and independent," he fumed, in derision. "Fine words, fine words. And you made all your preparations beforehand, in secrecy; and you 're not sly? Misericordia di Dio!" He groaned impotently; he shook his bony old fist at the stars in the firmament. "Perhaps you will admit," he questioned loftily, "that there are decencies to be observed even by the free and independent? It is not decent for you to travel alone. If you mean a single word of what you say, why are n't you accompanied by the Baronessa?" "The Baronessa fatigues me," Susanna answered gently. "And I exasperate her and try her patience cruelly. She 's always putting spokes in my wheel, and I 'm always saying and doing things she disapproves of. Ah, if she only suspected the half of the things I don't say or do, but think and feel!" She nodded with profound significance. "We belong," she pointed out, "to discrepant generations. I 'm so intensely modern, and she 's so irredeemably eighteen-sixty. I 've only waited for this blessed day of liberty to cut adrift from the Baronessa. And the pleasure will be mutual, I promise you. She will enjoy a peace and a calm that she has n't known for ages. Ouf! I feel like Europe after the downfall of Napoleon." She gave her shoulders a little shake of satisfaction. "The Baronessa," she said, and I 'm afraid there was laughter in her tone, "is a prisoner for the night on Isola Nobile." I 'm afraid she tittered. "I gave orders that the launch was to start off the moment she put her foot aboard it, and on no account was it to turn back, and on no account was any boat to leave the island till to-morrow morning. I expect she 'll be rather annoyed--and puzzled. But--cosa vuole? It's all in the day's work." Then her voice modulated, and became confidential and exultant. "I 'm going to have such a delicious plunge. See--to-night I have put on pearls, and diamonds, and rings, that the Baronessa would never let me wear. And I 've got a whole bagful of books, to read in the train--Anatole France, and Shakespeare, and Gyp, and Pierre Loti, and Molière, and Max Beerbohm, and everybody: all the books the Baronessa would have died a thousand deaths rather than let me look at. That's the nuisance of being a woman of position--you 're brought up never to read anything except the Lives of the Saints and the fashion papers. I 've had to do all my really important reading by stealth, like a thief in the night. Ah," she sighed, "if I were only a man, like you! But as for observing the decencies," she continued briskly, "you need have no fear. I 'm going to the land of all lands where (if report speaks true) one has most opportunities of observing them--I 'm going to England, and I 'll observe them with both eyes. And I 'm not travelling alone." She spurned the imputation. "There are Rosina and Serafino; and at the end of my journey I shall have Miss Sandus. You remember that nice Miss Sandus?" she asked, smiling up at him. "She is my fellow-conspirator. We arranged it all before she went away last autumn. I 'm to go to her house in London, and she will go with me to Craford. She 's frantically interested about my cousin. She thinks it's the most thrilling and romantic story she has ever heard. And she thoroughly sympathises with my desire to make friends with him, and to offer him some sort of reparation." The Commendatore was pacing nervously backwards and forwards, being, I suppose, too punctilious an old-school Latin stickler for etiquette to interrupt. But now, "Curse her for a meddlesome Englishwoman," he spluttered violently. "To encourage a young girl like you in such midsummer folly. A young girl?--a young hoyden, a young tom-boy. What? You will travel from here to London without a chaperon? And books--French novels--gr-r-r! I wish you had never been taught to read. I think it is ridiculous to teach women to read. What good will they get by reading? You deserve--upon my word you deserve . . . Well, never mind. Oh, body of Bacchus!" He wrung his hands, as one in desperation. "A young girl, a mere child," he cried, in a wail to Heaven; "a mere"--he paused, groping for an adequate definition--"a mere irresponsible female orphan! And nobody with power to interfere." Susanna drew herself up. "Young?" she exclaimed. "A mere child? I? Good gracious, I 'm _twenty-two_." She said it, scanning the syllables to give them weight, and in all good faith I think, as who should say, "I 'm fifty." "You really can't accuse me of being young," she apodictically pronounced. "I 'm twenty-two. Twenty-two long years--aïe, Dio mio! And I look even older. I could pass for twenty-five. If," was her suddenly-inspired concession, "if it will afford you the least atom of consolation, I 'll _tell_ people that I am twenty-five. _There_." She wooed him anew with those melting eyes, and her tone was soft as a caress. "It is n't every man that I 'd offer to sacrifice three of the best years of my life for--and it is n't every man that I 'd offer to tell fibs for." She threw back her head, and stood in an attitude to invite inspection. "Don't I look twenty-five?" she asked. "If you had n't the honour of my personal acquaintance, would it ever occur to you that I 'm what you call 'a young girl'? Would n't you go about enquiring of every one, 'Who is that handsome, accomplished, and perfectly dressed woman of the world?'" And she made him the drollest of little quizzical moues. In effect, with her tall and rather sumptuously developed figure, with the humour and vivacity, the character and decision, of her face, with the glow deep in her eyes, the graver glow beneath the mirth that danced near their surface,--and then too, perhaps, with the unequivocal Southern richness of her colouring: the warm white and covert rose of her skin, the dense black of her undulating abundant hair, the sudden, sanguine red of her lips,--I think you would have taken her for more than twenty-two. There was nothing of the immature or the unfinished, nothing of the tentative, in her aspect. With no loss of freshness, there were the strength, the poise, the assurance, that we are wont to associate with a riper womanhood. Whether she looked twenty-five or not, she looked, at any rate, a completed product; she looked distinguished and worth while; she looked alive, alert: one in whom the blood coursed swiftly, the spirit burned vigorously; one who would love her pleasure, who could be wayward and provoking, but who could also be generous and loyal; she looked high-bred, one in whom there was race, as well as temperament and nerve. The Commendatore, however, was a thousand miles from these considerations. He glared fiercely at her--as fiercely as it was _in_ his mild old eyes to glare. He held himself erect and aloof, in a posture that was eloquent of haughty indignation. "I will ask your Excellency a single question. Are you or are you not the Countess of Sampaolo?" he demanded sternly. But Susanna was incorrigible. "At your service--unless I was changed at nurse," she assented, dropping a curtsey; and an imp laughed in her eyes. "And are you aware," the Commendatore pursued, with the tremor of restrained passion in his voice, "that the Countess of Sampaolo, a countess in her own right, is a public personage? Are you aware that the actions you are proposing--which would be disgraceful enough if you were any little obscure bourgeoise--must precipitate a public scandal? Have you reflected that it will all be printed in the newspapers, for men to snigger at in their cafes, for women to cackle over in their boudoirs? Have you reflected that you will make yourself a nine-days' wonder, a subject for tittle-tattle with all the gossip-mongers of Europe? Are you without pride, without modesty?" Susanna arched her eyebrows, in amiable surprise. "Oh?" she said. "Have I omitted to mention that I 'm to do the whole thing in masquerade? How stupid of me. Yes,"--her voice became explanatory,--"it's essential, you see, that my cousin Antonio should never dream who I really am. He must fancy that I 'm just anybody--till the time comes for me to cast my domino, and reveal the fairy-princess. So I travel under a nom-de-guerre. I 'm a widow, a rich, charming, dashing, not too-disconsolate widow; and my name . . . is Madame Fregi." She brought out the last words after an instant's irresolution, and marked them by a hazardous little smile. "What!" thundered the Commendatore. "You would dare to take _my_ name as a cloak for your escapades? I forbid it. Understand. I peremptorily forbid it." He stamped his foot, he nodded his outraged head, menacingly. But Susanna was indeed incorrigible. "Dear me," she grieved; "I hoped you would be touched by the compliment. How strange men are. Never mind, though," she said, with gay resignation. "I 'll call myself something else. Let's think. . . . Would--would Torrebianca do?" Her eyes sought counsel from his face. Torrebianca, I need n't remind those who are familiar with Sampaolo, is the name of a mountain, a bare, white, tower-like peak of rock, that rises in the middle of the island, the apex of the ridge separating the coast of Vallanza from the coast of Orca. "Madame Torrebianca? La Nobil Donna Susanna Torrebianca?" She tried the name on her tongue. "Yes, for an impromptu, Torrebianca is n't bad. It's picturesque, and high-sounding, and yet not--not _invraisemblable_. You don't think it _invraisemblable_? So here 's luck to that bold adventuress, that knightess-errant, the widow Torrebianca." She raised her fluffy white fan, as if it were a goblet from which to quaff the toast, and flourished it aloft. The poor old Commendatore was mumbling helpless imprecations in his moustache. One caught the word "atrocious" several times repeated. "And now," said Susanna brightly, "kiss me on both cheeks, and give me your benediction." She moved towards him, and held up her face. But he drew away. "My child," he began, impressively, "I have no means to constrain you, and I know by experience that when you have made up that perverse little mind of yours, one might as well attempt to reason with a Hebrew Jew. Therefore I can only beg, I can only implore. I implore you not to do this fantastic, this incredible, this unheard-of thing. I will go on my knees to you. I will entreat you, not for my sake, but for your own sake, for the sake of your dead father and mother, to put this ruinous vagary from you, to abandon this preposterous journey, and to stay quietly here in Sampaolo. Then, if you must open up the past, if you must get into communication with your distant cousin, I 'll help you to find some other, some sane and decorous method of doing so." Still once again Susanna's eyes melted, but there was no mockery in them now. "You are kind and patient," she said, with feeling; "and I hate to be a brute. Yet what is there to do? I can't alter my resolution. And I can't bear to refuse you when you talk to me like that. So--you must forgive me if I take a brusque way of escaping the dilemma." She ran to the edge of the quay, and sprang lightly into her boat. "Avanti--avanti," she cried to the rowers, who instantly pushed the boat free, and bent upon their oars. Then she waved her disfranchised guardian a kiss. "Addio, Commendatore. I 'll write to you from Venice." II It was gay June weather, in a deep green English park: a park in the south of England, near the sea, where parks are deepest and greenest, and June weather, when it is n't grave, is gaiest. Blackbirds were dropping their liquid notes, thrushes were singing, hidden in the trees. Here and there, in spaces enclosed by hurdles, sheep browsed or drowsed, still faintly a-blush from recent shearing. The may was in bloom, the tardy may, and the laburnum. The sun shone ardently, and the air was quick with the fragrant responses of the earth. A hundred yards up the avenue, Anthony Craford stopped his fly, a shabby victoria, piled with the manifold leather belongings of a traveller, and dismounted. "I 'll walk the rest of the way," he said to the flyman, giving him his fare. "Drive on to the house. The servants will take charge of the luggage." "Yes, sir," answered the flyman, briskly, and flicked his horse: whereat, displaying a mettle one was by no means prepared for, the horse dashed suddenly off in a great clattering gallop, and the ancient vehicle behind him followed with a succession of alarming leaps and lurches. "See," declaimed a voice, in a sort of whimsical recitative, "See how the young cabs bound, As to the tabor's sound,--" a full-bodied baritone, warm and suave, that broke, at the end, into a note or two of laughter. Anthony turned. On the greensward, a few paces distant, stood a man in white flannels: rather a fat man, to avow the worst at once, but, for the rest, distinctly a pleasant-looking; with a smiling, round, pink face, smooth-shaven, and a noticeable pair of big and bright blue eyes. "Hello. Is that you, old Rosygills?" Anthony said, with a phlegm that seemed rather premeditated. "Now, what a question," protested the other, advancing to meet him. He walked with an odd kind of buoyant, measured step, as if he were keeping time to a silent dance-tune. "All I can tell you is that it's someone very nice and uncommonly like me. You should know at your age that a person's identity is quite the most mysterious mystery under heaven. You really must n't expect me to vouch for mine. How-d'ye-do?" He extended, casually, in the manner of a man preoccupied, a plump, pink left hand. With his right hand he held up and flaunted, for exhibition, a drooping bunch of poppies, poignantly red and green: the subject, very likely, of his preoccupation, for, "Are n't they beauties?" he demanded, and his manner had changed to one of fervour, nothing less. "They 're the spoils of a raid on Farmer Blogrim's chalk-pit. If eyes were made for seeing, see and admire--admire and confess your admiration." He shook them at Anthony's face. But as Anthony looked at them with composure, and only muttered, "H'm," "Oh, my little scarlet starlets," he purred and chirped to the blossoms, "_would n't_ the apathetic man admire you?" And he clasped them to his bosom with a gesture that was reminiscent of the grateful prima-donna. "They look exactly as if I had plucked them from the foreground of a Fifteenth Century painting, don't they?" he went on, holding them off again. "Florentine, of course. Ah, in those days painting was a fine art, and worth a rational being's consideration,--in those days, and in just that little Tuscan corner of the world. But you," he pronounced in deep tones, mournfully, "how cold, how callous, you are. Have you no soul for the loveliness of flowers?" Anthony sighed. He was a tall young man, (thirty, at a guess), tall and well set-up, with grey eyes, a wholesome brown skin, and a nose so affirmatively patrician in its high bridge and slender aquilinity that it was a fair matter for remark to discover it on the face of one who actually chanced to be of the patrician order. Such a nose, perhaps, carried with it certain obligations--an obligation of fastidious dressing, for example. Anthony, at any rate, was very fastidiously dressed indeed, in light-grey tweeds, with a straw hat, and a tie that bespoke a practised hand beside a discerning taste. But his general air, none the less,--the expression of his figure and his motions, as well as of his face and voice,--was somehow that of an indolent melancholy, a kind of unresentful disenchantment, as if he had long ago perceived that cakes are mostly dough, and had accommodated himself to the perception with a regret that was half amusement. His friend, by contrast, in loose white flannels, with a flannel shirt and a leather belt, with yellowish hair, waving, under a white flannel cricket-cap, a good inch longer than the conventional cut, was plainly a man who set himself above the modes: though, in his plump, pink way debonair and vivacious, not so tall as Anthony, yet tall enough never to be contemned as short, and verging upon what he was fain to call "the flower of a sound man's youth, the golden, gladsome, romantic age of forty," he looked delightfully fresh, and wide-awake, and cheerful, and perfectly in the scheme of the blue day and the bird-notes and the smiling country. Permit me to introduce Mr. Adrian Willes, by vocation a composer and singer of songs, and--"contrapuntally," as he would explain--Anthony Craford's housemate, monitor, land-agent, and man of business. Anthony sighed. "I 'll tell you what I admire," he answered drily. "I admire the transports of delight with which you hail my unexpected home-coming. The last you knew, I was in California; and here I might have tumbled from the skies." Adrian regarded him with an eye in which, I think, kindled a certain malicious satisfaction. "Silence," he said, "is the perfectest herald of joy. Besides, you must n't flatter yourself that your home-coming is so deucedly unexpected, either. I 've felt a pricking in my thumbs any time these three months; and no longer ago than yesterday morning, I said to my image in the glass, as I was shaving, 'I should n't wonder if Tony turned up to-morrow,' said I." "That was merely your uneasy conscience," Tony expounded. "When the cat's away, the mice are always feeling prickings in their thumbs." "Oh, if you stoop to bandying proverbs," retaliated Adrian, "there's a proverb about a penny." He raised his bunch of poppies, and posed it aloft before him, eyeing it, his head cocked a little to one side, in critical enjoyment. "Shall we set out for the house?" he asked. "No," said Anthony, promptly, with decision. "_I 'll_ set out for the house; and _you_ (unless your habits have strangely altered) will frisk and gambol round about me. Come on." And taking Adrian's arm, he led the way, amid the summer throng of delicate scents and sounds, under the opulent old trees, over the gold-green velvet of the turf, on which leaves and branches were stencilled by the sun, as in an elaborate design for lace, towards a house that was rather famous in the neighbourhood--I was on the point of saying for its beauty: but are things ever famous in English neighbourhoods for their mere beauty?--for its quaintness, and in some measure too, perhaps, for its history:--Craford Old Manor, a red-brick Tudor house, low, and, in the rectangular style of such houses, rambling; with a paved inner court, and countless tall chimneys, like minarets; with a secret chapel and a priests' "hiding-hole," for the Crafords were one of those old Catholic families whose boast it is that they "have never lost the Faith"; with a walled formal garden, and a terrace, and a sun-dial; with close-cropped bordures of box, and yews clipped to fantastic patterns: the house so placed withal, that, while its north front faced the park, its south front, ivy-covered, looked over a bright lawn and bright parterres of flowers, down upon the long green levels of Rowland Marshes, and away to the blue sea beyond,--the blue sea, the white cliffs, the yellow sands. Anthony and Adrian, arm in arm, sauntered on without speaking, till they attained the crest of a sweeping bit of upland, and the house and the sea came in view. Here they halted, and stood for a minute in contemplation of the prospect. "The sea," said Adrian, disengaging his arm, that he might be free to use it as a pointer, and then pointing with it, "the sea has put on her bluest frock, to honour your return. And behold, decked in the hues of Iris, that gallant procession of cliffs, like an army with banners, zigzagging up from the world's rim, to bid you welcome. Oh, you were clearly not unexpected. If no smoke rises from yonder chimneys,--if your ancestral chimney-stone is cold,--that's merely because, despite the season, we 're having a spell of warmish weather, and we 've let the fires go out. 'T is June. Town 's full; country 's depopulated. In Piccadilly, I gather from the public prints, vehicular traffic is painfully congested. Meanwhile, I 've a grand piece of news for your private ear. Guess a wee bit what it is." "Oh, I 'm no good at guessing," said Anthony, with languor, as they resumed their walk. "Well--what will you give me, then, if I 'll blurt it out?" asked Adrian, shuffling along sidewise, so that he might face his companion. "My undivided attention--provided you blurt it briefly," Anthony promised. "Oh, come," Adrian urged, swaying his head and shoulders. "Betray a little curiosity, at least." "Curiosity is a vice I was taught in my youth to suppress," said Anthony. "A murrain on your youth," cried Adrian, testily. "However, since there 's no quieting you otherwise, I suppose, for the sake of peace, I 'd best tell you, and have done with it. Well, then,"--he stood off, to watch the effect of his announcement,--"Craford's Folly is let." "Ah?" said Anthony, with no sign of emotion. Adrian's face fell. "Was there ever such inhumanity?" he mourned. "I tell him that--thanks to my supernatural diligence in his affairs--his own particular millstone is lifted from his neck. I tell him that a great white elephant of a house, which for years has been eating its head off, and keeping him poor, is at last--by my supernatural diligence--converted into an actual source of revenue. And 'Ah?' is all he says, as if it did n't concern him. Blow, blow, thou winter wind,--thou art not so unkind as Man's ingratitude." "Silence," Anthony mentioned, "is the perfectest herald of joy." "Pish, tush," said Adrian. "A fico for the phrase. I 'll bet a shilling, all the same,"--and he scanned Anthony's countenance apprehensively,--"that you 'll be wanting money?" "It's considered rather low," Anthony generalised, "to offer a bet on what you have every ground for regarding as a certainty." "A certainty?" groaned Adrian. He tossed his plump arms heavenwards. "There it is! He 's wanting money." And his voice broke, in something like a sob. "Do you know," he asked, "how many pounds sterling you 've had the spending of during the past twelvemonth? Do you know how many times your poor long-suffering bankers have written to me, with tears in their eyes, to complain that your account was overdrawn, and would I be such a dear as to set it right? No? You don't? I could have sworn you did n't. Well, I do--to my consternation. And it is my duty to caution you that the estate won't stand it--to call that an estate," he divagated, with a kind of despairing sniff, "which is already, by the extravagances of your ancestors, shrunken to scarcely more than three acres and a cow. You 're wanting money? What do you _do_ with your money? What secret profligacy must a man be guilty of, who squanders such stacks of money? Burst me, if I might n't as well be steward to a bottomless pit. However, Providence be praised,--and my own supernatural diligence,--I 'm in command of quite unhoped-for resources. Craford New Manor is let." "So you remarked before," said Anthony, all but yawning. "And shall again, if the impulse seizes me," Adrian tartly rejoined. "The circumstance is a relevant and a lucky one for the man you 're fondest of, since he's wanting money. If it were n't that the new house is let, he 'd find my pockets in the condition of Lord Tumtoddy's noddle. However, the saints are merciful, I 'm a highly efficient agent, and the biggest, ugliest, costliest house in all this countryside is let." "Have it so, dear Goldilocks," said Anthony, with submission. "I 'll ne'er deny it more." "There would be no indiscretion," Adrian threw out, "in your asking whom it's let to." "Needless to ask," Anthony threw back. "It's let to a duffer, of course. None but a duffer would be duffer enough to take it." "Well, then, you 're quite mistaken," said Adrian, airily swaggering. "It's let to a lady." "Oh, there be lady duffers," Anthony apprised him. "It's very ungallant of you to say so." Adrian frowned disapprobation. "This lady, if you can bear to hear the whole improbable truth at once, is an Italian lady." "An Italian lady? Oh?" Anthony's interest appeared to wake a little. Adrian laughed. "I expected that would rouse you. A Madame Torrebianca." "Ah?" said Anthony; and his interest appeared to drop. "Yes--la Nobil Donna Susanna Torrebianca. Is n't that a romantic name? A lady like the heroine of some splendid old Italian story,--like Pompilia, like Francesca,--like Kate the Queen, when her maiden was binding her tresses. Young, and dark, and beautiful, and altogether charming." "H'm. And not a duffer? An adventuress, then, clearly," said Anthony. "You 'll never get the rent." "Nothing of the sort," Adrian asserted, with emphasis. "A lady of the highest possible respectability. Trust me to know. A scrupulous Catholic, besides. It was partly because we have a chapel that she decided to take the house. Father David is hand and glove with her. And rich. She gave the very best of banker's references. 'Get the rent,' says he--as if I had n't got my quarter in advance. I let furnished--what? Well, that's the custom--rent payable quarterly in advance. And cultivated. She's read everything, and she prattles English like you or me. She had English governesses when she was a kiddie. And appreciative. She thinks I 'm without exception the nicest man she 's ever met. She adores my singing, and delights in all the brilliant things I say. She says things that are n't half bad herself, and plays my accompaniments with really a great deal of sympathy and insight. And Tony dear,"--he laid his hand impressively on Tony's arm, while his voice sank to the pitch of deep emotion,--"she has a cook--a cook--ah, me!" He smacked his lips, as at an unutterable recollection. "She brought him with her from Italy. He has a method of preparing sweetbreads--well, you wait. His name is Serafino--and no wonder. And she has the nicest person who was ever born to live with her: a Miss Sandus, Miss Ruth Sandus, a daughter of the late Admiral Sir Geoffrey Sandus. She 's a dove, she 's a duck, she 's a darling; she 's completely won my heart. And I"--he took a few skipping steps, and broke suddenly into song-- "'And I, and I have hers!' We dote upon each other. She calls me her Troubadour. She has the prettiest hands of any woman out of Paradise. She 's as sweet as remembered kisses after death. She 's as sharp as a needle. She 's as bright as morning roses lightly tipped with dew. She has a house of her own in Kensington. And she's seventy-four years of age." Anthony's interest appeared to wake again. "Seventy-four? You call that young?" he asked, with the inflection of one who was open to be convinced. Adrian bridled. "You deliberately put a false construction on my words. I was alluding to Miss Sandus, as you 're perfectly well aware. Madame Torrebianca is n't seventy-four, nor anything near it. She's not twenty-four. Say about twenty-five and a fraction. With such hair too--and such frocks--and eyes. Oh, my dear!" He kissed his fingers, and wafted the kiss to the sky. "Eyes! Imagine twin moons rising over a tropical--" "_Allons donc_," Anthony repressed him. "Contain yourself. Where is Madame Torrebianca's husband?" "Ah," said Adrian, with a sudden lapse of tone. "Where is Madame Torrebianca's husband? That's the question. Where?" And he winked suggestively. "How can I tell you where he is? If I could tell you that, you don't suppose I 'd be wearing myself to a shadow with uncongenial and ill-remunerated labour, in an obscure backwater of the country, like this, do you? If I could tell you that, I could tell you the secretest secrets of the sages, and I should be making my everlasting fortune--oh, but money hand over fist--as the oracle of a general information bureau, in Bond Street, or somewhere. I should be a millionaire, and a celebrity, and a regular cock-of-the-walk. Where is Madame Torrebianca's husband? Ay! Gentle shepherd, tell me where?" "Ah?" wondered Anthony, off his guard. "A mysterious disappearance?" "Bravo!" crowed Adrian, gleefully. "I am not only witty myself, but the cause of wit in others." He patted Anthony on the shoulder. "A mysterious disappearance. The _mot_ is capital. That's it, to a hair's breadth. Oft thought before, but ne'er so well expressed. The gentleman (as the rude multitude in their unfeeling way would put it) is dead." "On the whole," mused Anthony, looking him up and down with a reflective eye, "you 're an effulgent sort of egotist, as egotists go; but you yield much cry for precious little wool." "Yes, dead," Adrian repeated, pursuing his own train of ideas. "Donna Susanna is a widow, a poor lone widow, a wealthy, eligible widow. You must be kind to her." "Why don't you marry her?" Anthony enquired. "Pooh," said Adrian. "Why don't you?" Anthony insisted. "If she 's really rich? You don't dislike her--you respect her--perhaps, if you set your mind to it, you could even learn to love her. She 'd give you a home and a position in the world; she 'd make a sober citizen of you; and she 'd take you off my hands. You know whether you 're an expense--and a responsibility. Why don't you marry her? You owe it to me not to let such an occasion slip." "Pooh," said Adrian. But he looked conscious, and he laughed a deliriously conscious laugh. "What nonsense you do talk. I 'm too young, I 'm far too young, to think of marrying." "See him blush and giggle and shake his pretty curls," said Anthony, with scorn, addressing the universe. By this time they had skirted the house, and come round to the southern front, where the sunshine lay unbroken on the lawn, and the smell of the box hedges, strong in the still air, seemed a thing almost ponderable: the low, long front, a mellow line of colour, with the purple of its old red bricks and the dark green of its ivy, sunlit against the darker green of the park, and the blue of the tender English sky. The terrace steps were warm under their feet, as they mounted them. In terra-cotta urns, at intervals upon the terrace balustrade, roses grew, roses red and white; and from larger urns, one at either side of the hall-door, red and white roses were espaliered, intertwining overhead. The hall-door stood open; but the hall, as they entered it from the brightness without, was black at first, like a room unlighted. Then, little by little, it turned from black to brown, and defined itself:--"that hackneyed type of Stage-property hall," I have heard Adrian lament, "which connotes immediately a lost will, a family secret, and the ghost of a man in armour"; "a noble apartment, square and spacious, characteristic of the period when halls were meant to serve at need as guard-rooms," says the _County History_. Square and spacious it was certainly, perhaps a hackneyed type none the less: the ceiling and the walls panelled in dark well-polished oak; the floor a pavement of broad stone flags, covered for the most part now by a faded Turkey carpet; the narrow windows, small-paned and leaded, set in deep stone embrasures; a vast fireplace jutting across a corner, the Craford arms emblazoned in the chimney-piece above; and a wide oak staircase leading to the upper storey. The room was furnished, incongruously enough, in quite a modern fashion, rather shabbily, and I daresay rather mannishly. There were leather arm-chairs and settles, all a good deal worn, and stout tables littered with books and periodicals. The narrow windows let in thin slants of mote-filled sunshine, vortices of gold-dust; and on the faded carpet, by the door, lay a bright parallelogram, warming to life its dim old colours. The rest of the room seemed twilit. Someone had been too wise to defeat that good oak panelling by hanging pictures on it. "Not a creature is stirring," said Adrian, "not even a mouse. Sellers--oh, what men daily do, not knowing what they do!--is shut up in the scullery, I suppose, torturing his poor defenceless fiddle. That 's what it is to be a musical boot-and-knife boy. And Wickersmith will be at his devotions. He tells me he never gets leisure for his morning meditation till luncheon 's cleared away. And that's what it is to be a pious butler. I 'm doubting whether there was anyone to disembarrass that flyman of yours of your luggage. So he 's probably driven off with it all to his humble, happy home. I see none of it about. Never mind. There 'll be some of your old things in Mrs. W.'s camphor-chest, perhaps; or if it comes to a pinch, I can lend you a garment or so of my own,--and then won't Craford of Craford cut a figure of fun! You will make her acquaintance . . . Let me see. To-day is Wednesday. We 'll call on her to-morrow." "On whom?" asked Anthony, looking blank. "Have we been talking of Queen Berengaria?" Adrian, with his nose in the air, enquired. "On _whom?_ says you. We 'll call to-morrow afternoon." "Not I," said Anthony. "Not to-morrow?" Adrian raised his eyebrows, well-marked crescents of reddish-brown above his ruddy face, and assumed thereby a physiognomy of almost childlike naïveté. "Ah, well, on Friday, then;--though Friday is unlucky, and one rarely shines on a day of abstinence, anyhow. It's all a fallacy about fish being food for the brain. Meat, red meat, is what the brain requires." He slapped his forehead. "But Friday, since you prefer it." Anthony seated himself on the arm of a leather chair, and, with calculated deliberation, produced his cigarette-case, selected a cigarette, returned his cigarette-case to his pocket, took out his matchbox, struck a match, and got his cigarette alight. "No, dear Nimbletongue," he said at last, through a screen of smoke, "not Friday, either." He smiled, shaking his head. Disquiet began to paint itself in Adrian's mien. "Name your own day." He waited, anxious, in suspense. Anthony chuckled. "My own day is no day. I have n't the faintest desire to make the good woman's acquaintance, and I shall not call on her at all." Adrian stretched out appealing hands. "But Anthony--" he adjured him. "No," said Anthony, with determination. "I 'm not a calling man. And I 've come down here for rest and recreation. I 'll pay no calls. Let that be understood. Calls, quotha! And in the country, at that. Oh, don't I know them? Oh, consecrated British dulness! The smug faces, the vacuous grins; the lifeless, limping attempts at conversation; the stares of suspicious incomprehension if you chance to say a thing that has a point; and then, the thick, sensible, slightly muddy boots. I 'll pay no calls. And as for making acquaintances--save me from those I 've made already. In broad England I can recall but three acquaintances who are n't of a killing sameness;--and one of those," he concluded sadly, with a bow to his companion, "one of those is fat, and grows old." "Poor lad," Adrian commiserated him. "You are tired and overwrought. Go to your room, and have a bath and a brush up. That will refresh you. Then, at half-past four, you can renew the advantages of my society at tea in the garden. Oh, you 'll find your room quite ready. I 've felt a pricking in my thumbs any time these three months. Shall I send Wick?" "Yes, if you will be so good," said Anthony. He rose, and moved towards the staircase. Adrian waited till he had reached the top. Then, "You 'll meet her whether you like or not on Sunday. Where on earth do you suppose she hears her Mass?" he called after him. "Oh, hang," Anthony called back. For, sure enough, unless she drove seven miles to Wetherleigh, where could she hear her Mass, but as his guest, in the chapel of his house? III Susanna was seated on the moss, at the roots of a wide-spreading oak. She was leaning back, so that she could look up, up, through vistas of changing greens,--black-green to gold-green,--through a thousand labyrinthine avenues and counter-avenues of leaves and branches, with broken shafts of sunlight caught in them here and there, to the glimpses of blue sky visible beyond. The tree gave you a sense of great spaces, and depths, and differences, like a world; and it was full of life, like a city. Birds came and went and hopped from bough to bough, twittering importantly of affairs to them important; squirrels scampered over the rough bark, in sudden panic haste, darting little glances, sidewise and behind, after pursuers that (we will hope) were fancied; and other birds, out of sight in the loftier regions, piped their insistent calls, or sang their tireless epithalamiums. Spiders hung in their gossamer lairs, only too tensely motionless not to seem dead; but if a gnat came--with what swift, accurate, and relentless vigour they sprang upon and garotted him. Sometimes a twig snapped, or a young acorn fell, or a caterpillar let himself down by a long silken thread. And the air under the oak was tonic with its good oaken smell. Susanna was leaning back in a sort of reverie, held by the charm of these things. "We have no trees like this in Italy," she was vaguely thinking. "The trees and the wild creatures are never so near to one there; one never gets so intimate with them; Nature is not so accessible and friendly." She remembered having read somewhere that such enjoyment as she was now experiencing, the enjoyment of commune with the mere sweet out-of-door things of the earth, was a Pagan enjoyment, and un-Christian; and her mind revolted at this, and she thought, "No. There would n't be any enjoyment, if one did n't know that 'God's in His Heaven, all 's right with the world.'" And just then her reverie was interrupted. . . "He has arrived. I have seen him--what you call _seen_--with my own eyes seen. There are about two yards of him; and a very spruce, gentlemanlike, well-knit, and attractive two yards they are." Thus,
{'title': 'The Lady Paramount by Henry Harland', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}