My Friend Prospero Part 18

He laughed. "You are delicious," he said to her fervently, in silence.

"My love is all right," he said aloud. "I love her as much as it is humanly possible to love. I love her with pa.s.sion, with tenderness; with wors.h.i.+p, with longing; I love her with wonder; I love her with sighs, with laughter. I love her with all I have and with all I am. And I owe one to Winthorpe for having unwittingly opened my eyes to my condition.

But earning money? I've a notion it's difficult. What could I do?"

"Have you no profession?" she asked.

"Not the ghost of one," said he, with nonchalance.

"But is there no profession that appeals to you--for which you feel that you might have a taste?" Her dark eyes were very earnest.

"Not the ghost of one," said he, dissembling his amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Professions--don't they all more or less involve sitting shut up in stuffy offices, among pigeon-holes full of dusty and futile papers, doing tiresome tasks for the greater glory of other people, like a slave in the hold of a galley? No, if I'm to work, I must work at something that will keep me above decks--something that will keep me out of doors, in touch with the air and the earth. I might become an agricultural labourer,--but that's not very munificently paid; or a farmer,--but that would require perhaps more capital than I could command, and anyhow the profits are uncertain. I've an uncle who's a bit of a farmer, and year in, year out, I believe he makes a loss. 'Well, what's left? ... Ah, a gardener. I don't think I should half mind being a gardener."

Maria Dolores looked as if she weren't sure whether or not to take him seriously.

"A gardener? That's not very munificently paid either, is it?" she suggested, trying her ground.

"Alas, I fear not," sighed John. Then he made a grave face. "But would you have me entirely mercenary? Money isn't everything here below."

Maria Dolores smiled. She saw that for the moment at least he was not to be taken seriously.

"True," she agreed, "though it ran in my mind that to earn money, so that you might marry, was your only motive for going to work at all."

"I had forgotten that," said the light-minded fellow. "I was thinking of occupations that would keep one in touch with the earth. A gardener's occupation keeps him constantly in the charmingest possible sort of touch with her, and the most intimate."

"Do they call the earth _her_ in English?" asked Maria Dolores. "I thought they said _it_."

"I'm afraid, for the greater part, they do," answered John. "But it's barbarous of them, it's unfilial. Our brown old mother,--fancy begrudging her the credit of her s.e.x! Our brown and green old mother; our kindly, bounteous mother; our radiant, our queenly mother, old, and yet perennially, radiantly young. Look at her now," he cried, circling the garden with his arm, and pointing to the farther landscape, "look at her, s.h.i.+ning in her robes of pearl and gold, s.h.i.+ning and smiling,--one would say a bride arrayed for the altar. Such is her infinite variety.

Her infinite variety, her infinite abundance, the fragrance and the sweetness of her,--oh, I could fall upon my face and wors.h.i.+p her, like a Pagan of Eld. The earth and all that grows and lives upon her, the blossoming tree, the singing bird,--I could build temples to her."

"And the crawling snake?" put in Maria Dolores, a gleam at the bottom of her eyes.

"The crawling snake," quickly retorted John, "serves a most useful purpose. He establishes the _raison d'etre_ of man. Man and his heel are here to crush the serpent's head."

Maria Dolores leaned back, softly laughing.

"Your infatuation for the earth is so great," she said, "mightn't your lady-love, if she suspected it, be jealous?"

"No," said John, "it is the earth that might be jealous, for, until I saw my lady-love, she was the undivided mistress of my heart. For the rest, my lady-love enjoys, upon this point, my entire confidence. I have kept nothing from her."

"That is well," approved Maria Dolores. "And the sky and the sea," still softly laughing, she asked, "have they no place in your affections?

"The sky is her tiring-maiden, and I love the sky for that," said John.

"'Tis the sky that clothes her in her many-coloured raiment, and holds the light whereby her beauty is made manifest. And the sea is a jewel that she bears upon her bosom,--a magical jewel, whence, with the sky's aid, she draws the soft rain that is her scent and her cosmetic.

'Fragrant the fertile earth after soft showers.' Do you know, I could almost forgive the dour and detestable Milton everything for the sake of those seven words. They show that in the sense of smell he had at least one attribute of humanity."

Maria Dolores' dark eyes were quizzical.

"The dour and detestable Milton?" she exclaimed. "Poor Milton! What has he done to merit such anathema?

"It isn't what he has done, but what he was," said John. "That he was dour n.o.body will deny, dour and sour and inhuman. Ask those unfortunate, long-suffering daughters of his, if you doubt it. _They_ could tell you stories. But he was worse. He was a scribe and a Pharisee, a pragmatical, self-righteous, canting old scribe and Pharisee. And he was worse still, and still worse yet. He was--what seems to me to-day the worstest thing unhung--he was a Puritan. Like Winthorpe's, his blood was black and icy and vinegarish. Like Winthorpe--But there. I mustn't abuse Winthorpe any more, and I must try to forgive Milton. Milton wrote seven good words, and Winthorpe unwittingly opened a lover's eyes to his condition."

He paused, and smiled down upon her, and his newly opened (and very blue) blue eyes said much. Her eyes were dreaming on the landscape, where it shone in pearl and gold. However, as she gave no sign of finding his conversation wearisome, he took heart, and continued.

"For when he told me how he had put his love away, never again to see her, and how at that moment she would be scrubbing floors (or taking the discipline, perhaps?) in a convent of Ursulines, suddenly, and without any action of the will on my part, there rose before me the vision of a certain woman;--a woman I knew a little, admired immensely, very much liked, but didn't for an instant suppose I was seriously in love with.

And involuntarily, with the vision of her before me, I asked myself whether, _mutatis mutandis_, I could have done as he had, and in a flash I saw that I could not,--that not for the wealth of Ormus and of Ind could I or would I give her up, if once I had her. So, by that token, and by the uncommon wrath with which his tale inflamed me," John, with a rhetorical flourish, perorated, "I discovered that I loved." And again his eyes said much.

Hers were still on the prospect.

"Yet if you only know her a little, how can you love her?" she asked, in a musing voice.

"Did I say I only know her a little?" asked John. "I know her a great deal. I know her through and through. I know that she is pure gold, pure crystal; that she is made of all music, all light, all sweetness, and of all shadow and silence and mystery too, as women should be. I know that earth holds naught above her. I do not care to employ superlatives, so, to put it in the form of an understatement, I know that she is simply and absolutely perfect. If you could see her! If you could see her eyes, her deep-glowing, witty, humorous, mischievous, innocent eyes, with the soul that burns in them, the pa.s.sion that sleeps. If you could see the black soft ma.s.ses of her hair, and her white brow, and the pale-rose of her cheeks, and the red-rose of her lovely smiling mouth. If you could see her figure, slender and strong, and the grace and pride of her carriage,--the carriage of an imperial princess. If you could see her hands,--they lie in her lap like languid lilies. And her voice,--'tis the colour of her mouth and the glow of her eyes made audible. And if you could whisper to yourself her melodious and thrice adorable name. I know her a great deal. When I said that I only knew her a little, I meant it in the sense that she only knows me a little,--which after all, alas, for practical purposes comes to the same thing."

He had spoken with emphasis, with fervour, his pink face animated and full of intention. Maria Dolores kept her soft-glowing eyes resolutely away from him, but I think the soul that burned in them (if not the pa.s.sion that slept) was vaguely troubled. _Qui pane d'amour_--how does the French proverb run? Did she vaguely feel perhaps that the seas they were sailing were perilous? Anyhow, as John saw with sinking heart, she was at the point of putting an end to their present conjunction,--she was preparing to rise. He would have given worlds to offer a helping hand, but (however rich in worlds) he was, for the occasion, poor in courage. When love comes in at the door, a.s.surance as like as not will fly out of the window. So she rose unaided.

"Let us hope," she said, giving him a glance in which he perceived an under-gleam as of not unfriendly mockery, "that she will soon come to know you better."

"Heaven forbid!" cried he, with a fine simulation of alarm. "It is upon her ignorance of my true character that I base such faint hopes as I possess of some day winning her esteem."

Maria Dolores laughed, nodded, and lightly moved away.

"My son," said John to himself, "you steered precious close to the wind.

You had best be careful."

And then he was conscious of a sudden change in things. The garden smiled about him, the valley below laughed in the breeze, the blackcaps sang, the many windows of the Castle glistened in the sun; but their beauty and their pleasantness had departed, had retired with her into the long, low, white-walled, red-roofed pavilion. He was conscious of a sudden change in things, and of a sudden acute and bitter depression within himself.

"These are great larks," he said; "great larks while they last,--but what's the good of them in the end? What do they lead to? What's the good of coquetting with blisses that can't be yours?" And he breathed a prodigious sigh. "When shall I see her again?" he asked, and thereupon was seized by his old terror--his terror of yesterday, though it seemed to him a terror he had known all his life--lest he should never see her again. "She's only a visitor. What's to prevent her leaving this very night?"

The imagination was intolerable. He entered the Castle court, and climbed the staircase of honour, and rambled through the long suites of great empty rooms, empty of everything save the memory of the past and the portraits of the dead, there, if he might, for a time at least, to lose himself and to forget her.

V

"Who is the young man you have been talking with so long?" asked Frau Brandt, as Maria Dolores came into her sitting-room, a vast, square, bare room, with a marble floor and a painted ceiling, with Venetian blinds to shelter it from the sun, and a bitter-sweet smell, as of rosemary or I know not what other aromatic herb, upon its cool air.

"Oh? You saw us?" said Maria Dolores, answering the question with question.

"Him I have seen many times--every day for a week at least," said Frau Brandt. "But I never before saw you talking with him. Who is he?" She was a small, brown, square-built, black-haired, homely-featured old woman, in a big, round starched white cap and a flowing black silk gown.

She sat in an uncus.h.i.+oned oaken armchair by the window, with some white knitting in her bony, blunt-fingered brown hands, and tortoise-sh.e.l.l-rimmed spectacles on her nose. But the spectacles couldn't hide the goodness or the soundness or the sweetness that looked forth from her motherly old honest brown eyes.

"He is a young man who lives _en pension_ at the presbytery," said Maria Dolores, "a young Englishman."

"So?" said Frau Brandt. "What is his name?"

"I don't know," said Maria Dolores, with disengagement real or feigned.

"His Christian name, I believe, is John."