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Updated: June 21, 2025
But though Peter remained in it all day long though he haunted the riverside, and cast a million desirous glances, between the trees, and up the lawns, towards Castel Ventirose he enjoyed no briefest vision of the Duchessa di Santangiolo. Nor the next day; nor the next. "Why does n't that old dowager ever come down and look after her river?" he asked Marietta.
"If I am early tant pis!" he decided, choosing the lesser of two evils, and challenging Fate. He crossed the river, and stood for the first time in the grounds of Ventirose stood where she had been in the habit of standing, during their water-side colloquies. He glanced back at his house and garden, envisaging them for the first time, as it were, from her point of view.
"It's not altogether a bad sort of view is it?" some one said, in English. The voice was a woman's. It was clear and smooth; it was crisp-cut, distinguished. Peter glanced about him. On the opposite bank of the Aco, in the grounds of Ventirose, five or six yards away, a lady was standing, looking at him, smiling. Peter's eyes met hers, took in her face.... And suddenly his heart gave a jump.
"But it would be civil, it would be neighbourly, to ask him to a meal," the Cardinal submitted. "And it would put him in the embarrassing predicament of having either to accept against his will, or to decline and appear ungracious," submitted Beatrice. "No, it is evident that Ventirose does not amuse him." "Bene," said the Cardinal. "Be it as you wish."
Now he raised his ladder to the perpendicular, and let it descend before him, so that, one extremity resting upon the nearer bank, one attained the further, and it spanned the flood. Finally he laid a plank lengthwise upon the hithermost rungs, and advanced to the end of it; then another plank; then a third: and he stood in the grounds of Ventirose.
A chapter would have added itself to the history of the world; a great event, a great step forward, would have definitely taken place. He would have been received at Ventirose as a friend. He would be no longer a mere nodding acquaintance, owing even that meagre relationship to the haphazard of propinquity.
As for your park, I see quite as much of it as I wish to see, from the seclusion of my own pleached garden. I learned long ago the folly of investigating things too closely, the wisdom of leaving things in the vague. At present the park of Ventirose provides me with the raw material for day-dreams.
For alas and alas as he truly said it's hardly a question of actuality." And he lit a cigarette. "So he did meet her, after all?" the Duchessa said. "Yes, he met her in the end," Peter answered. They were seated under the gay white awning, against the bright perspective of lawn, lake, and mountains, on the terrace at Ventirose, where Peter was paying his dinner-call.
Oh, to think, to think," he cried with passion, suddenly breaking into English, "to think that less than a fortnight ago, less than one little brief fortnight ago, she was seated in your kitchen, seated there familiarly, in her wet clothes, pouring tea, for all the world as if she was the mistress of the house!" Days passed. He could not go to Ventirose or, anyhow, he thought he could not.
At last, swiftly, stealthily, almost with the air of a man committing felony, he slipped his snuff-box under the open book, well under it, so that it was completely covered up. On the way back to Ventirose, the Cardinal put his hand in his pocket. "Dear me!" he suddenly exclaimed. "I have lost my snuff box again." He shook his head, as one who recognises a fatality. "I am always losing it."
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