The Cardinal's Snuff Box

And after that, for I forget how many days, Peter and the

Duchessa did not meet; and so he sank low and lower in his

mind.

Nothing that can befall us, optimists aver, is without its

value; and this, I have heard, is especially true if we happen

to be literary men. All is grist that comes to a writer's

mill.

By his present experience, accordingly, Peter learned--and in

the regretful prose of some future masterpiece will perhaps be

enabled to remember--how exceeding great is the impatience of

the lovesick, with what febrile vehemence the smitten heart can

burn, and to what improbable lengths hours and minutes can on

occasions stretch themselves.

He tried many methods of distraction.

There was always the panorama of his valley--the dark-blue

lake, pale Monte Sfiorito, the frowning Gnisi, the smiling

uplands westward. There were always the sky, the clouds, the

clear sunshine, the crisp-etched shadows; and in the afternoon

there was always the wondrous opalescent haze of August,

filling every distance. There was always his garden--there

were the great trees, with the light sifting through high

spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds,

the bees, the butterflies, with their colour, and their

fragrance, and their music; there was his tinkling fountain,

in its nimbus of prismatic spray; there was the swift, symbolic

Aco.

And then, at a half-hour's walk, there was the pretty

pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top church, its odd

little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded frescoed

house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian life:

--the cobbler tapping in his stall; women gossiping at their

toilets; children sprawling in the dirt, chasing each other,

shouting; men drinking, playing mora, quarrelling, laughing,

singing, twanging mandolines, at the tables under the withered

bush of the wine-shop; and two or three more pensive citizens

swinging their legs from the parapet of the bridge, and angling

for fish that never bit, in the impetuous stream below.

Peter looked at these things; and, it is to be presumed, he saw

them. But, for all the joy they gave him, he, this cultivator

of the sense of beauty, might have been the basest unit of his

own purblind Anglo-Saxon public. They were the background for

an absent figure. They were the stage-accessories of a drama

whose action was arrested. They were an empty theatre.

He tried to read. He had brought a trunkful of books to Villa

Floriano; but that book had been left behind which could fix

his interest now.

He tried to write--and wondered, in a kind of daze, that any

man should ever have felt the faintest ambition to do a thing

so thankless and so futile.