"I shall go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes
packed."
But he took no immediate steps to get them packed.
"Hope," observes the clear-sighted French publicist quoted in
the preceding chapter, "hope dies hard."
Hope, Peter fancied, had received its death-blow that
afternoon. Already, that evening, it began to revive a little.
It was very much enfeebled; it was very indefinite and
diffident; but it was not dead. It amounted, perhaps, to
nothing more than a vague kind of feeling that he would not, on
the whole, make his departure for England quite so precipitate
as, in the first heat of his anger, the first chill of his
despair, he had intended. Piano, piano! He would move slowly,
he would do nothing rash.
But he was not happy, he was very far from happy. He spent a
wretched night, a wretched, restless morrow. He walked about a
great deal--about his garden, and afterwards, when the damnable
iteration of his garden had become unbearable, he walked to the
village, and took the riverside path, under the poplars, along
the racing Aco, and followed it, as the waters paled. and
broadened, for I forget how many joyless, unremunerative miles.
When he came home, fagged out and dusty, at dinner time,
Marietta presented a visiting card to him, on her handsomest
salver. She presented it with a flourish that was almost a
swagger.
Twice the size of an ordinary visiting-card, the fashion of it
was roughly thus: IL CARDLE UDESCHINI
Sacr: Congr: Archiv: et Inscript: Praef: Palazzo Udeschini.
And above the legend, was pencilled, in a small old-fashioned
hand, wonderfully neat and pretty:-"To thank Mr. Marchdale for his courtesy in returning my
snuff-box."
"The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here," said Marietta.
There was a swagger in her accent. There was also something in
her accent that seemed to rebuke Peter for his absence.
"I had inferred as much from this," said he, tapping the card.
"We English, you know, are great at putting two and two
together."
"He came in a carriage," said Marietta.
"Not really?" said her master.
"Ang--veramente," she affirmed.
"Was--was he alone?" Peter asked, an obscure little twinge of
hope stirring in his heart.
"No. Signorino." And then she generalised, with
untranslatable magniloquence: "Un amplissimo porporato non va
mai solo."
Peter ought to have hugged her for that amplissimo porporato.
But he was selfishly engrossed in his emotions.
"Who was with him?" He tried to throw the question out with a
casual effect, an effect of unconcern.