My Friend Prospero

"Good morning, Prospero," said Annunziata.

"Good morning, Wide-awake," responded John.

He was in the octagonal room on the piano nobile of the castle, where his lost ladies of old years smiled on him from their frames. He had heard an approaching patter of feet on the pavement of the room beyond; and then Annunziata's little grey figure, white face, and big grave eyes, had appeared, one picture the more, in the vast carved and gilded doorway.

"I have been looking everywhere for you," she said, plaintive.

"Poor sweetheart," he commiserated her. "And can't you find me?"

"I couldn't," said Annunziata, bearing on the tense. "But I have found you now."

"Oh? Have you? Where?" asked he.

"Where?" cried she, with a disdainful movement. "But here, of course."

"I wouldn't be too cocksure of that," he cautioned her. "Here is a mighty evasive bird. For, suppose we were elsewhere, then there would be here, and here would be somewhere else."

"No," said Annunziata, with resolution. "Where a person is, that is always here."

"You speak as if a person carried his here with him, like his hat," said John.

"Yes, that is how it is," said Annunziata, nodding.

"You have a remarkably solid little head,-for all its curls, there's no confusing it," said he. "Well, have you your report, drawn up, signed, sealed, sworn to before a Commissioner for Oaths, and ready to be delivered?"

"My report-?" questioned Annunziata, with a glance.

"About the Form," said John. "I caught you yesterday red-handed in the fact of pumping it."

"Yes," said Annunziata. "Her name is Maria Dolores."

"A most becoming name," said he.

"She is very nice," said Annunziata.

"She looks very nice," said he.

"She is twenty-two years and ten months old," continued his informant.

"Fancy. As middle-aged as that," commented he.

"Yes. She is an Austrian."

"Ah."

"And as I told you, she is visiting the Signora Brandi. Only, she calls her Frao Branta."

"Frao Branta?" John turned the name on his tongue. "Branta? Branta?" What familiar German name, at the back of his memory, did it half evoke? Suddenly he had a flash. "Can you possibly mean Frau Brandt?"

Annunziata gave a gesture of affirmation.

"Yes, that is it," she said. "You sound it just as she did!"

"I see," said John. "And Brandt, if there are degrees of unbirth, is even more furiously unborn than Brandi."

"Unborn-?" said Annunziata, frowning.

"Not noble-not of the aristocracy," John explained.

"Very few people are noble," said Annunziata.

"All the more reason, then, why you and I should be thankful that we are," said he.

"You and I?" she expostulated, with a shrug of her little grey shoulders. "Machè! We are not noble."

"Aren't we? How do you know?" asked John. "Anyhow," he impressively moralized, "we can try to be."

"No," said she, with conclusiveness, with fatalism. "It is no good trying. Either you are noble or simple,-God makes you so,-you cannot help it. If I were noble, I should be a contessina. If you were noble, you would be a gransignore.

"And my unassuming appearance assures you that I'm not?" said he, smiling.

"If you were a gransignore," she instructed him, "you would never be such friends with me-you would be too proud."

John laughed.

"You judge people by the company they keep. Well, I will apply the same principle of judgment to your gossip, Maria Dolores. By-the-by," he broke off to inquire, "what is her Pagan name?"

"Her Pagan name? What is that?" asked Annunziata.

"Maria Dolores, I take it, is her Christian name, come by in Holy Baptism," said John. "But I suppose she will have a Pagan name, come by in the way of the flesh, to round it off with,-just as, for instance, a certain flame of mine, whose image, when I die, they'll find engraved upon my heart, has the Pagan name of Casalone."

Annunziata looked up, surprised. "Casalone? That is my name," she said.

"Yes," said John. "Yours will be the image."

Annunziata gave her head a toss. "Maria Dolores did not tell me her Pagan name," she said.

"At any rate," said he, "to judge by the company she keeps, we may safely classify her as unborn. She is probably the daughter of a miller,-of a miller (to judge also a little by the frocks she wears) in rather a large way of business, who (to judge finally by her cultivated voice, her knowledge of languages, and her generally distinguished air) has spared no expense in the matter of her education. I shouldn't wonder a bit if she could even play the piano."

"No," agreed Annunziata, "that is very likely. But why"-she tilted upwards her inquisitive little profile-"why should you think she is the daughter of a miller?"

"Miller," said John, "I use as a generic term. Her father may be a lexicographer or a dry-salter, a designer of dirigible balloons or a manufacturer of air-pumps; he may even be a person of independent means, who lives in a big, new, stuccoed villa in the suburbs of Vienna, and devotes his leisure to the propagation of orchids: yet all the while a miller. By miller I mean a member of the Bourgeoisie: a man who, though he be well to do, well educated, well bred, does not bear coat-armour, and is therefore to be regarded by those who do with their noses in the air,-especially in Austria. Among Austrians, unless you bear coat-armour, you're impossible, you're nowhere. We mustn't let you become enamoured of her if she doesn't bear coat-armour."

Annunziata's eyes, during this divagation, had wandered to the window, the tall window with its view of the terraced garden, where the mimosa bloomed and the blackcaps carolled. Now she turned them slowly upon John, and he saw from their expression that at last she was coming to what for her (as he had known all along) was the real preoccupation of the moment. They were immensely serious, intensely concerned, and at the same time, in their farther recesses, you felt a kind of fluttering shyness, as if I dare not were hanging upon I would.

"Tell me," she began, on a deep note, a deep coaxing note.... Then I dare not got the better, and she held back.... Then I would took his courage in both hands, and she plunged. "What have you brought for me from Roccadoro?" And after one glance of half-bashful, all-impassioned supplication, she let her eyes drop, and stood before him suspensive, as one awaiting the word of destiny.

John's "radiant blondeur," his yellow beard, pink face, and sea-blue eyes, lighted up, more radiant still, with subcutaneous laughter.

"The shops were shut," he said. "I arrived after closing time."

But something in his tone rendered this grim announcement nugatory. Annunziata drew a long breath, and looked up again. "You have brought me something, all the same," she declared with conviction; and eagerly, eyes gleaming, "What is it? What is it?" she besought him.

John laughed. "You are quite right," he said. "If one can't buy, beg, or borrow, in this world, one can generally steal."

Annunziata drew away, regarded him with misgiving. "Oh, no; you would never steal," she protested.

"I'm not so sure-for one I loved," said he. "What would you have liked me to bring you?"

Annunziata thought. "I liked those chocolate cigars," she said, her face soft with reminiscence of delight.

"Ah, but we mustn't have it toujours perdrix," said John. "Do you, by any chance, like marchpane?"

"Marchpane?-I adore it," she answered, in an outburst of emotion.

"You have your human weaknesses, after all," John laughed. "Well, I stole a pocketful of marchpane."

Annunziata drew away again, her little white forehead furrowed. "Stole?" she repeated, reluctant to believe.

"Yes," said he, brazenly, nodding his head.

"Oh, that was very wrong," said Annunziata, sadly shaking hers.

"No," said he. "Because, in the first place, it's a matter of proverbial wisdom that stolen marchpane's sweetest. And, in the next place, I stole it quite openly, under the eye of the person it belonged to, and she made no effort to defend her property. Seeing which, I even went so far as to explain to her why I was stealing it. 'There's a young limb o' mischief with a sweet tooth at Sant' Alessina,' I explained, 'who regularly levies blackmail upon me. I'm stealing this for her.' And then the lady I was stealing from told me I might steal as much as ever I thought good."

"Oh-h-h," said Annunziata, a long-drawn Oh of relief. "Then you didn't steal it-she gave it to you."

"Well," said John, "if casuistry like that can ease your conscience-if you feel that you can conscientiously receive it-" And he allowed his inflection to complete the sentence.

"Give it to me," said Annunziata, holding out her hands, and dancing up and down in glee and in impatience.

"Nenni-dà," said John. "Not till after dinner. I'm not going to be a party to the spoiling of a fair, young, healthy appetite."

Pain wrote itself upon Annunziata's brow. "Oh," she grieved, "must I wait till after dinner?"

"Yes," said John.

For a breathing-space she struggled. "Would it be bad of me," she asked, "if I begged for just a little now?"

"Yes," said John, "bad and bootless. You'd find me as unyielding as adamant."

"Ah, well," sighed Annunziata, a deep and tremulous sigh. "Then I will wait."

And, like a true philosopher, she proceeded to occupy her mind with a fresh interest. She looked round the room, she looked out of the window. "Why do you stay here? It is much pleasanter in the garden," she remarked.

"I came here to seek for consolation. To-day began for me with a tragic misadventure," John replied.

Annunziata's eyes grew big, compassionating him, and, at the same time, bespeaking a lively curiosity.

"Poor Prospero," she gently murmured. "What was it?" on tip-toe she demanded.

"Well," he said, "when I rose, to go for my morning swim, I made an elaborate toilet, because I hoped to meet a certain person whom, for reasons connected with my dignity, I wished to impress. But it was love's labour lost. The certain person is an ornament of the uncertain sex, and didn't turn up. So, to console myself, I came here."

Annunziata looked round the room again. "What is there here that can console you?"

"These," said John. His hand swept the pictured walls.

"The paintings?" said she, following his gesture. "How can they console you?"

"They're so well painted," said he, fondly studying the soft-coloured canvases. "Besides, these ladies are dead. I like dead ladies."

Annunziata looked critically at the pictures, and then at him with solemn meaning. "They are very pretty-but they are not dead," she pronounced in her deepest voice.

"Not dead?" echoed John, astonished. "Aren't they?"

"No," said she, with a slow shake of the head.

"Dear me," said he. "And, when they're alone here and no one's looking, do you think they come down from their frames and dance? It must be a sight worth seeing."

"No," said Annunziata. "These are only their pictures. They cannot come down from their frames. But the ladies themselves are not dead. Some of them are still in Purgatory, perhaps. We should pray for them." She made, in parenthesis as it were, a pious sign of the Cross. "Some are perhaps already in Heaven. We should ask their prayers. And others are perhaps in Hell," she pursued, inexorable theologian that she was. "But none of them is dead. No one is dead. There's no such thing as being dead."

"But then," puzzled John, "what is it that people mean when they talk of Death?"

"I will tell you," said Annunziata, her eyes heavy with thought. "Listen, and I will tell you." She seated herself on the big round ottoman, and raised her face to his. "Have you ever been at a pantomime?" she asked.

"Yes," said John, wondering what could possibly be coming.

"Have you been at the pantomime," she continued earnestly, "when there was what they call a transformation-scene?"

"Yes," said John.

"Well," said she, "last winter I was taken to the pantomime at Bergamo, and I saw a transformation-scene. You ask me, what is Death? It is exactly like a transformation-scene. At the pantomime the scene was just like the world. There were trees, and houses, and people, common people, like any one. Then suddenly click! Oh, it was wonderful. Everything was changed. The trees had leaves of gold and silver, and the houses were like fairy palaces, and there were strange lights, red and blue, and there were great garlands of the most beautiful flowers, and the people were like angels, with gems and shining clothes. Well, you understand, at first we had only seen one side of the scene;-then click! everything was turned round, and we saw the other side. That is like life and death. Always, while we are alive, we can see only one side of things. But there is the other side, the under side. Never, so long as we are alive, we can never, never see it. But when we die,-click! It is a transformation-scene. Everything is turned round, and we see the other side. Oh, it will be very different, it will be wonderful. That is what they call Death."

It was John's turn to be grave. It was some time before he spoke. He looked down at her, with a kind of grave laughter in his eyes, admiring, considering. What could he say? ... What he did say, at last, was simply, "Thank you, my dear."

Annunziata jumped up.

"Oh, come," she urged. "Let's go into the garden. It is so much nicer there than here. There are lots of cockchafers. Besides"-she held out as an additional inducement-"we might meet Maria Dolores."

"No," said John. "Though the cockchafers are a temptation, I will stop here. But go you to the garden, by all means. And if you do meet Maria Dolores, tell her what you have just told me. I think she would like to hear it."

"All right," consented Annunziata, moving towards the door. "I'll see you at dinner. You won't forget the marchpane?"

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