Cumnor in person they may still suspect you of being his emissary?«

»Certainly, and I see only one way to parry that.«

»And what may that be?«

I hesitated a moment. »To make love to the niece.«

»Ah,« cried my friend, »wait till you see her!«

 

 

II

»I must work the garden – I must work the garden,« I said to myself five minutes later and while I waited, upstairs, in the long, dusky sala, where the bare scagliola floor gleamed vaguely in a chink of the closed shutters. The place was impressive, yet looked somehow cold and cautious. Mrs. Prest had floated away, giving me a rendezvous at the end of half an hour by some neighbouring water-steps; and I had been let into the house, after pulling the rusty bell-wire, by a small red-headed and white-faced maid-servant, who was very young and not ugly and wore clicking pattens and a shawl in the fashion of a hood. She had not contented herself with opening the door from above by the usual arrangement of a creaking pulley, though she had looked down at me first from an upper window, dropping the cautious challenge which in Italy precedes the act of admission. I was irritated as a general thing by this survival of mediæval manners, though as so fond, if yet so special, an antiquarian I suppose I ought to have liked it; but, with my resolve to be genial from the threshold at any price, I took my false card out of my pocket and held it up to her, smiling as if it were a magic token. It had the effect of one indeed, for it brought her, as I say, all the way down. I begged her to hand it to her mistress, having first written on it in Italian the words: »Could you very kindly see a gentleman, a travelling American, for a moment?« The little maid was n't hostile – even that was perhaps something gained. She coloured, she smiled and looked both frightened and pleased. I could see that my arrival was a great affair, that visits in such a house were rare and that she was a person who would have liked a bustling place. When she pushed forward the heavy door behind me I felt my foot in the citadel and promised myself ever so firmly to keep it there. She pattered across the damp stony lower hall and I followed her up the high staircase – stonier still, as it seemed – without an invitation. I think she had meant I should wait for her below, but such was not my idea, and I took up my station in the sala. She flitted, at the far end of it, into impenetrable regions, and I looked at the place with my heart beating as I had known it to do in dentists' parlours. It had a gloomy grandeur, but owed its character almost all to its noble shape and to the fine architectural doors, as high as those of grand frontages, which, leading into the various rooms, repeated themselves on either side at intervals. They were surmounted with old faded painted escutcheons, and here and there in the spaces between them hung brown pictures, which I noted as speciously bad, in battered and tarnished frames that were yet more desirable than the canvases themselves. With the exception of several straw-bottomed chairs that kept their backs to the wall the grand obscure vista contained little else to minister to effect. It was evidently never used save as a passage, and scantly even as that. I may add that by the time the door through which the maid-servant had escaped opened again my eyes had grown used to the want of light.

I had n't meanwhile meant by my private ejaculation that I must myself cultivate the soil of the tangled enclosure which lay beneath the windows, but the lady who came toward me from the distance over the hard shining floor might have supposed as much from the way in which, as I went rapidly to meet her, I exclaimed, taking care to speak Italian: »The garden, the garden – do me the pleasure to tell me if it's yours!«

She stopped short, looking at me with wonder; and then, »Nothing here is mine,« she answered in English, coldly and sadly.

»Oh you're English; how delightful!« I ingenuously cried. »But surely the garden belongs to the house?«

»Yes, but the house does n't belong to me.« She was a long lean pale person, habited apparently in a dull-coloured dressing-gown, and she spoke very simply and mildly. She did n't ask me to sit down, any more than years before – if she were the niece – she had asked Mrs. Prest, and we stood face to face in the empty pompous hall.

»Well then, would you kindly tell me to whom I must address myself? I'm afraid you'll think me horribly intrusive, but you know I must have a garden – upon my honour I must!«

Her face was not young, but it was candid; it was not fresh, but it was clear. She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not ›dressed,‹ and long fine hands which were – possibly – not clean. She clasped these members almost convulsively as, with a confused alarmed look, she broke out: »Oh don't take it away from us; we like it ourselves!«

»You have the use of it then?«

»Oh yes. If it was n't for that –!« And she gave a wan vague smile.

»Is n't it a luxury, precisely? That's why, intending to be in Venice some weeks, possibly all summer, and having some literary work, some reading and writing to do, so that I must be quiet and yet if possible a great deal in the open air – that's why I've felt a garden to be really indispensable. I appeal to your own experience,« I went on with as sociable a smile as I could risk. »Now can't I look at yours?«

»I don't know, I don't understand,« the poor woman murmured, planted there and letting her weak wonder deal – helplessly enough, as I felt – with my strangeness.

»I mean only from one of those windows – such grand ones as you have here – if you'll let me open the shutters.« And I walked toward the back of the house. When I had advanced halfway I stopped and waited as in the belief she would accompany me. I had been of necessity quite abrupt, but I strove at the same time to give her the impression of extreme courtesy.