My Friend Prospero. Harland Henry
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She stood in the path, beside a sun-dial, from which she appeared to be taking the time of day, a crumbling ancient thing of grey stone, green and brown with mosses; and she was smiling pleasantly to herself the while, all unaware of the couple who watched her from above. She wore a light-coloured garden-frock, and was bare-headed, as one belonging to the place. She was young—two or three and twenty, by her aspect: young, slender, of an excellent height, and, I hope you would have agreed, a beautiful countenance. She studied the sun-dial, and smiled; and what with her dark eyes and softly chiselled features, the pale rose in her cheeks and the deeper rose of her mouth, with her hair too, almost black in shadow, but where the sun touched it turning to sombre red—yes, I think you would have agreed that she was beautiful. Lady Blanchemain, at any rate, found her so.
"She's quite lovely," she declared. "Her face is exquisite—so sensitive, so spiritual; so distinguished, so aristocratic. And so clever," she added, after a suspension.
"Mm!" said John, his forehead wrinkled, as if something were puzzling him.
"She has a figure—she holds herself well," said Lady Blanchemain.
"Mm!" said John.
"I suppose," said she, "you're too much a mere man to be able to appreciate her frock? It's the work of a dressmaker who knows her business. And that lilac muslin (that's so fashionable now) really does, in the open air, with the country for background, show to immense advantage. Come—out with it. Tell me all about her. Who is she?"
"That's just what I'm up a tree to think," said John. "I can't imagine. How long has she been there? From what direction did she come?"
"Don't try to hoodwink me any longer," remonstrated the lady, unbelieving.
"I've never in my life set eyes on her before," he solemnly averred.
She scrutinized him sharply.
"Hand on heart?" she doubted.
And he, supporting her scrutiny without flinching, answered, "Hand on heart."
"Well, then," concluded she, with a laugh, "it looks as if I were even more of an old witch than I boasted—and my thumbs pricked to some purpose. Here's the lady of the piece already arrived. There, she's going away. How well she walks! Have after her—have after her quick, and begin your courtship."
The smiling young woman, her lilac dress softly bright in the sun, was moving slowly down the garden path, towards the cloisters; and now she entered them, and disappeared. But John, instead of "having after her," remained at his counsellor's side, and watched.
"She came from that low doorway, beyond there at the right, where the two cypresses are; and she came at the very climax of my vaticination," said her ladyship. "Without a hat, you'll hardly dispute it's probable she's staying in the house."
"No—it certainly would seem so," said John. "I'm all up a tree."
"The garden looks rather dreary and empty, now that she has left, doesn't it?" she asked. "Yet it looked jolly enough before her advent. And see—the lizards (there are four of them, aren't there?) that whisked away from the dial at her approach, have come back. Well, your work's cut out. I suppose it wouldn't be possible for you to give a poor woman a dish of tea?"
"I was on the very point of proposing it," said John. "May I conduct you to my quarters?"
PART SECOND
I
Rather early next morning John was walking among the olives. He had gone (straight from his bed, and in perhaps the least considered of toilets: an old frieze ulster, ornamented with big buttons of mother-of-pearl, a pair of Turkish slippers, a bathing-towel over his shoulder, and for head-covering just his uncombed native thatch) he had gone for a swim, some half a mile upstream, to a place he knew where the Rampio—the madcap Rampio, all shallows and rapids—rests for a moment in a pool, wide and deep, translucent, inviting, and, as you perceive when you have made your plunge, of a most assertive chill. Now he was on his leisurely way home, to the presbytery and what passed there for breakfast.
The hill-side rose from the river's bank in a series of irregular terraces, upheld by rough stone walls. The gnarled old trees bent towards each other and away like dwarfs and crook-backs dancing a fantastic minuet; and in the grass beneath them, where the sun shot his fiery darts and cast his net of shadows, Chloris had scattered innumerable wildflowers: hyacinths, the colour of the sky; violets, that threaded the air for yards about with their sentiment-provoking fragrance; tulips, red and yellow; sometimes a tall, imperial iris; here and there little white nodding companies of jonquils. Here and there, too, the dusty-green reaches were pointed by the dark spire of a cypress, alone, in a kind of glooming isolation; here and there a blossoming peach or almond, gaily pink, sent an inexpressible little thrill of gladness to one's heart. The air was sweetened by many incense-breathing things besides the violets—by moss and bark, the dew-laden grass, the moist brown earth; and it was quick with music: bees droned, leaves whispered, birds called, sang, gossiped, disputed, and the Rampio played a crystal accompaniment.
John swung onwards at ease, while lizards, with tails that seemed extravagantly long, fled from before his feet, terrible to them, no doubt, as an army with banners, for his Turkish slippers, though not in their pristine youth, were of scarlet leather embroidered in a rich device with gold. And presently (an experience unusual at that hour in the olive wood) he became aware of a human voice.
"Ohé! My good men, there! Will you be so kind as to gather me some of those anemones? Here is a lira for your pains."
It was a feminine voice; it was youthful and melodious; it was finished, polished, delicately modulated. And its inflection was at once confident and gracious—clearly the speaker took it for granted that she would receive attention, and she implied her thanks abundantly beforehand. It was a voice that evoked in the imagination a charming picture of fresh, young, confident, and gracious womanhood.
"Hello!" said John to himself. "Who is there in this part of the world with a voice like that?"
And he felt it would not be surprising if on glancing round he should behold—as, in fact, he did—the stranger of yesterday, the Unknown of the garden.
II
She stood on one of the higher terraces, (a very charming picture indeed, bright and erect, in the warm shadow of the olives), and was calling down to a couple of peasants at work on the other side of the stream. Between the thumb and forefinger of an ungloved fair right hand, she held up a silver lira.
Anemones, said she! Near to where the men were working, by the river's brink, there was a space of level ground, perhaps a hundred feet long, and tapering from half that breadth to a point. And this was simply crimson and purple with a countless host of anemones.
She called to the men, and one seeing and hearing her would have thought they must abandon everything, and spring to do her bidding. But they didn't. Pausing only long enough to give her a phlegmatic stare, as if in doubt whether conceivably she could have the impertinence to be addressing them, and vouchsafing not a word, each went calmly on with his employment;—very, very calmly, piano, piano, gently, languidly, filling small baskets with fallen olives, and emptying them upon outspread canvas sheets. There are, and more's the pity, two types of Italian peasant. There's the old type, which we knew in our youth, and happily it still survives in some numbers—the