"CASTEL VENTIROSE,
"August 21 st.
"DEAR Mr. Marchdale: It will give me great pleasure if you can
dine with us on Thursday evening next, at eight o'clock, to
meet my uncle, Cardinal Udeschini, who is staying here for a
few days.
"I have been re-reading 'A Man of Words.' I want you to tell
me a great deal more about your friend, the author.
Yours sincerely,
BEATRICE DI SANTANGIOLO."
It is astonishing, what men will prize, what men will treasure.
Peter Marchdale, for example, prizes, treasures, (and imagines
that he will always prize and treasure), the perfectly
conventional, the perfectly commonplace little document, of
which the foregoing is a copy.
The original is written in rather a small, concentrated hand,
not overwhelmingly legible perhaps, but, as we say, "full of
character," on paper lightly blueish, in the prescribed corner
of which a tiny ducal coronet is embossed, above the initials
"B. S." curiously interlaced in a cypher.
When Peter received it, and (need I mention?) approached it to
his face, he fancied he could detect just a trace, just the
faintest reminder, of a perfume--something like an afterthought
of orris. It was by no means anodyne. It was a breath, a
whisper, vague, elusive, hinting of things exquisite, intimate
of things intimately feminine, exquisitely personal. I don't
know how many times he repeated that manoeuvre of conveying the
letter to his face; but I do know that when I was privileged to
inspect it, a few months later, the only perfume it retained
was an unmistakable perfume of tobacco.
I don't know, either, how many times he read it, searched it,
as if secrets might lie perdu between the lines, as if his gaze
could warm into evidence some sympathetic ink, or compel a
cryptic sub-intention from the text itself.
Well, to be sure, the text had cryptic subintentions; but these
were as far as may be from any that Peter was in a position to
conjecture. How could he guess, for instance, that the letter
was an instrument, and he the victim, of a Popish machination?
How could he guess that its writer knew as well as he did who
was the author of "A Man of Words"?
And then, all at once, a shade of trouble of quite another
nature fell upon his mind. He frowned for a while in silent
perplexity. At last he addressed himself to Marietta.
"Have you ever dined with a cardinal?" he asked.
"No, Signorino," that patient sufferer replied.
"Well, I'm in the very dickens of a quandary--son' proprio nel
dickens d'un imbarazzo." he informed her.