The Cardinal's Snuff-Box Part 23

"I hope not--I don't think I have," she answered. "We're not allowed to have superst.i.tions, you know--nous autres Catholiques."

"Oh?" he said, with surprise. "No, I did n't know."

"Yes, they're a forbidden luxury. But you--? Are you superst.i.tious?

Would you be afraid of opals?"

"I doubt if I should have the courage to wear one. At all events, I don't regard superst.i.tions in the light of a luxury. I should be glad to be rid of those I have. They're a horrible inconvenience. But I can't get it out of my head that the air is filled with a swarm of malignant little devils, who are always watching their chance to do us an ill turn. We don't in the least know the conditions under which they can bring it off; but it's legendary that if we wear opals, or sit thirteen at table, or start an enterprise on Friday, or what not, we somehow give them their opportunity. And one naturally wishes to be on the safe side."

She looked at him with doubt, considering.

"You don't seriously believe all that?" she said.

"No, I don't seriously believe it. But one breathes it in with the air of one's nursery, and it sticks. I don't believe it, but I fear it just enough to be made uneasy. The evil eye, for instance. How can one spend any time in Italy, where everybody goes loaded with charms against it, and help having a sort of sneaking half-belief in the evil eye?"

She shook her head, laughing.

"I 've spent a good deal of time in Italy, but I have n't so much as a sneaking quarter-belief in it."

"I envy you your strength of mind," said he. "But surely, though superst.i.tion is a luxury forbidden to Catholics, there are plenty of good Catholics who indulge in it, all the same?"

"There are never plenty of good Catholics," said sire. "You employ a much-abused expression. To profess the Catholic faith, to go to Ma.s.s on Sunday and abstain from meat on Friday, that is by no means sufficient to const.i.tute a good Catholic. To be a good Catholic one would have to be a saint, nothing less--and not a mere formal saint, either, but a very real saint, a saint in thought and feeling, as well as in speech and action. Just in so far as one is superst.i.tious, one is a bad Catholic. Oh, if the world were populated by good Catholics, it would be the Millennium come to pa.s.s."

"It would be that, if it were populated by good Christians--wouldn't it?" asked Peter.

"The terms are interchangeable," she answered sweetly, with a half-comical look of defiance.

"Mercy!" cried he. "Can't a Protestant be a good Christian too?"

"Yes," she said, "because a Protestant can be a Catholic without knowing it."

"Oh--?" he puzzled, frowning.

"It's quite simple," she explained. "You can't be a Christian unless you're a Catholic. But if you believe as much of Christian truth as you've ever had a fair opportunity of learning, and if you try to live in accordance with Christian morals, you are a Catholic, you're a member of the Catholic Church, whether you know it or not. You can't be deprived of your birthright, you see."

"That seems rather broad," said Peter; "and one had always heard that Catholicism was nothing if not narrow."

"How could it be Catholic if it were narrow?" asked she. "However, if a Protestant uses his intelligence, and is logical, he'll not remain an unconscious Catholic long. If he studies the matter, and is logical, he'll wish to unite himself to the Church in her visible body. Look at England. See how logic is multiplying converts year by year."

"But it's the glory of Englishmen to be illogical," said Peter, with a laugh. "Our capacity for not following premisses to their logical consequences is the princ.i.p.al source of our national greatness. So the bulk of the English are likely to resist conversion for centuries to come--are they not? And then, nowadays, one is so apt to be an indifferentist in matters of religion--and Catholicism is so exacting.

One remains a Protestant from the love of ease."

"And from the desire, on the part of a good many Englishmen at least, to sail in a boat of their own--not to get mixed up with a lot of foreign publicans and sinners--no?" she suggested.

"Oh, of course, we're insular and we're Pharisaical," admitted Peter.

"And as for one's indifference," she smiled, "that is most probably due to one's youth and inexperience. One can't come to close quarters with the realities of life--with sorrow, with great joy, with temptation, with sin or with heroic virtue, with death, with the birth of a new soul, with any of the awful, wonderful realities of life--and continue to be an indifferentist in matters of religion, do you think?"

"When one comes to close quarters with the awful, wonderful realities of life, one has religious moments," he acknowledged. "But they're generally rather fugitive, are n't they?"

"One can cultivate them--one can encourage them," she said. "If you would care to know a good Catholic," she added, "my niece, my little ward, Emilia is one. She wants to become a Sister of Mercy, to spend her life nursing the poor."

"Oh? Would n't that be rather a pity?" Peter said. "She's so extremely pretty. I don't know when I have seen prettier brown eyes than hers."

"Well, in a few years, I expect we shall see those pretty brown eyes looking out from under a sister's coif. No, I don't think it will be a pity. Nuns and sisters, I think, are the happiest people in the world--and priests. Have you ever met any one who seemed happier than my uncle, for example?"

"I have certainly never met any one who seemed sweeter, kinder," Peter confessed. "He has a wonderful old face."

"He's a wonderful old man," said she. "I 'm going to try to keep him a prisoner here for the rest of the summer--though he will have it that he's just run down for a week. He works a great deal too hard when he's in Rome. He's the only Cardinal I've ever heard of, who takes practical charge of his t.i.tular church. But here in the country he's out-of-doors all the blessed day, hand in hand with Emilia. He's as young as she is, I believe. They play together like children--and make--me feel as staid and solemn and grown-up as one of Mr. Kenneth Grahame's Olympians."

Peter laughed. Then, in the moment of silence that followed, he happened to let his eyes stray up the valley.

"h.e.l.lo!" he suddenly exclaimed. "Someone has been painting our mountain green."

The d.u.c.h.essa turned, to look; and she too uttered an exclamation.

By some accident of reflection or refraction, the snows of Monte Sfiorito had become bright green, as if the light that fell on them had pa.s.sed through emeralds. They both paused, to gaze and marvel for a little. Indeed, the prospect was a pleasing one, as well as a surprising--the sunny lawns, the high trees, the blue lake, and then that bright green mountain.

"I have never known anything like those snow-peaks for sailing under false colours," Peter said. "I have seen them every colour of the calendar, except their native white."

"You must n't blame the poor things," pleaded the d.u.c.h.essa. "They can't help it. It's all along o' the distance and the atmosphere and the sun."

She closed her fan, with which she had been more or less idly playing throughout their dialogue, and replaced it on the table. Among the books there--French books, for the most part, in yellow paper--Peter saw, with something of a flutter (he could never see it without something of a flutter), the grey-and-gold binding of "A Man of Words."

The d.u.c.h.essa caught his glance.

"Yes," she said; "your friend's novel. I told you I had been re-reading it."

"Yes," said he.

"And--do you know--I 'm inclined to agree with your own enthusiastic estimate of it?" she went on. "I think it's extremely--but extremely--clever; and more--very charming, very beautiful. The fatal gift of beauty!"

And her smile reminded him that the application of the tag was his own.

"Yes," said he.

"Its beauty, though," she reflected, "is n't exactly of the obvious sort--is it? It does n't jump at you, for instance. It is rather in the texture of the work, than on the surface. One has to look, to see it."

"One always has to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing," he safely generalised. But then--he had put his foot in the stirrup--his hobby bolted with him. "It takes two to make a beautiful object. The eye of the beholder is every bit as indispensable as the hand of the artist. The artist does his work--the beholder must do his. They are collaborators. Each must be the other's equal; and they must also be like each other--with the likeness of opposites, of complements. Art, in short, is entirely a matter of reciprocity. The kind of beauty that jumps at you is the kind you end by getting heartily tired of--is the skin-deep kind; and therefore it is n't really beauty at all--it is only an approximation to beauty--it may be only a simulacrum of it."

Her eyes were smiling, her face was glowing, softly, with interest, with friendliness and perhaps with the least suspicion of something else--perhaps with the faintest glimmer of suppressed amus.e.m.e.nt; but interest was easily predominant.

"Yes," she a.s.sented.... But then she pursued her own train of ideas.

"And--with you--I particularly like the woman--Pauline. I can't tell you how much I like her. I--it sounds extravagant, but it's true--I can think of no other woman in the whole of fiction whom I like so well--who makes so curiously personal an appeal to me. Her wit--her waywardness--her tenderness--her generosity--everything. How did your friend come by his conception of her? She's as real to me as any woman I have ever known she's more real to me than most of the women I know--she's absolutely real, she lives, she breathes. Yet I have never known a woman resembling her. Life would be a merrier business if one did know women resembling her. She seems to me all that a woman ought ideally to be. Does your friend know women like that--the lucky man? Or is Pauline, for all her convincingness, a pure creature of imagination?"

"Ah," said Peter, laughing, "you touch the secret springs of my friend's inspiration. That is a story in itself. Felix Wildmay is a perfectly commonplace Englishman. How could a woman like Pauline be the creature of his imagination? No--she was a 'thing seen.' G.o.d made her. Wildmay was a mere copyist. He drew her, tant bien que mal, from the life from a woman who's actually alive on this dull globe to-day. But that's the story."

The d.u.c.h.essa's eyes were intent.

"The story-? Tell me the story," she p.r.o.nounced in a breath, with imperious eagerness.