The Cardinal's Snuff-Box Part 32

"Here is your snuff-box," she said to the Cardinal.

The old man put down his Breviary (he was seated by an open window, getting through his office), and smiled at the snuff box fondly, caressing it with his finger. Afterwards, he shook it, opened it, and took a pinch of snuff.

"Where did you find it?" he enquired.

"It was found by that Mr. Marchdale," she said, "in the road, outside the gate. You must have let it drop this morning, when you were walking with Emilia."

"That Mr. Marchdale?" exclaimed the Cardinal. "What a coincidence."

"A coincidence--?" questioned Beatrice.

"To be sure," said he. "Was it not to Mr. Marchdale that I owed it in the first instance?"

"Oh--? Was it? I had fancied that you owed it to me."

"Yes--but," he reminded her, whilst the lines deepened about his humorous old mouth, "but as a reward of my virtue in conspiring with you to convert him. And, by the way, how is his conversion progressing?"

The Cardinal looked up, with interest.

"It is not progressing at all. I think there is no chance of it,"

answered Beatrice, in a tone that seemed to imply a certain irritation.

"Oh--?" said the Cardinal.

"No," said she.

"I thought he had shown 'dispositions'?" said the Cardinal.

"That was a mistake. He has shown none. He is a very tiresome and silly person. He is not worth converting," she declared succinctly.

"Good gracious!" said the Cardinal.

He resumed his office. But every now and again he would pause, and look out of the window, with the frown of a man meditating something; then he would shake his head significantly, and take snuff.

Peter tramped down the avenue, angry and sick.

Her reception of him had not only administered an instant death-blow to his hopes as a lover, but in its ungenial aloofness it had cruelly wounded his pride as a man. He felt snubbed and humiliated. Oh, true enough, she had unbent a little, towards the end. But it was the look with which she had first greeted him--it was the air with which she had waited for him to state his errand--that stung, and rankled, and would not be forgotten.

He was angry with her, angry with circ.u.mstances, with life, angry with himself.

"I am a fool--and a double fool--and a triple fool," he said. "I am a fool ever to have thought of her at all; a double fool ever to have allowed myself to think so much of her; a triple and quadruple and quintuple idiot ever to have imagined for a moment that anything could come of it. I have wasted time enough. The next best thing to winning is to know when you are beaten. I acknowledge myself beaten. I will go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed."

He gazed darkly round the familiar valley, with eyes that abjured it.

Olympus, no doubt, laughed.

XXV

"I shall go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed."

But he took no immediate steps to get them packed.

"Hope," observes the clear-sighted French publicist quoted in the preceding chapter, "hope dies hard."

Hope, Peter fancied, had received its death-blow that afternoon.

Already, that evening, it began to revive a little. It was very much enfeebled; it was very indefinite and diffident; but it was not dead. It amounted, perhaps, to nothing more than a vague kind of feeling that he would not, on the whole, make his departure for England quite so precipitate as, in the first heat of his anger, the first chill of his despair, he had intended. Piano, piano! He would move slowly, he would do nothing rash.

But he was not happy, he was very far from happy. He spent a wretched night, a wretched, restless morrow. He walked about a great deal--about his garden, and afterwards, when the d.a.m.nable iteration of his garden had become unbearable, he walked to the village, and took the riverside path, under the poplars, along the racing Aco, and followed it, as the waters paled and broadened, for I forget how many joyless, unremunerative miles.

When he came home, f.a.gged out and dusty, at dinner time, Marietta presented a visiting card to him, on her handsomest salver. She presented it with a flourish that was almost a swagger.

Twice the size of an ordinary visiting-card, the fashion of it was roughly thus:

IL CARDLE UDESCHINI Sacr: Congr: Archiv: et Inscript: Praef:

Palazzo Udeschini.

And above the legend, was pencilled, in a small oldfashioned hand, wonderfully neat and pretty:--

"To thank Mr. Marchdale for his courtesy in returning my snuff-box."

"The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here," said Marietta. There was a swagger in her accent. There was also something in her accent that seemed to rebuke Peter for his absence.

"I had inferred as much from this," said he, tapping the card. "We English, you know, are great at putting two and two together."

"He came in a carriage," said Marietta.

"Not really?" said her master.

"Ang--veramente," she affirmed.

"Was--was he alone?" Peter asked, an obscure little twinge of hope stirring in his heart.

"No. Signorino." And then she generalised, with untranslatable magniloquence: "Un amplissimo porporato non va mai solo."

Peter ought to have hugged her for that amplissimo porporato. But he was selfishly engrossed in his emotions.

"Who was with him?" He tried to throw the question out with a casual effect, an effect of unconcern.

"The Signorina Emelia Manfredi was with him," answered Marietta, little recking how mere words can stab.

"Oh," said Peter.

"The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was very sorry not to see the Signorino," continued Marietta.