“I had often heard” [wrote the sore-tried Duke] “of the ravages wrought in family life by these absurd and unreasonable female friendships, but I never thought that it would be you, Evelyn, who would bring them home to me. I won’t repeat the arguments I have used a hundred times in vain. But once again I implore and demand that you should find some kind, responsible person to look after Miss Le Breton—I don’t care what you pay—and that you yourself should come home to me and the children and the thousand and one duties you are neglecting.
“As for the spring month in Scotland, which I generally enjoy so much, that has been already entirely ruined. And now the season is apparently to be ruined also. On the Shropshire property there is an important election coming on, as I am sure you know; and the Premier said to me only yesterday that he hoped you were already up and doing. The Grand Duke of C⸺ will be in London within the next fortnight. I particularly want to show him some civility. But what can I do without you—and how on earth am I to explain your absence?
“Once more, Evelyn, I beg and I demand that you should come home.”
To which the Duchess had rushed off a reply without a post’s delay.
“Oh, Freddie, you are such a wooden-headed darling! As if I hadn’t explained till I’m black in the face. I’m glad, anyway, you didn’t say command; that would really have made difficulties.
“As for the election, I’m sure if I was at home I should think it very good fun. Out here I am extremely doubtful whether we ought to do such things as you and Lord M⸺ suggest. A duke shouldn’t interfere in elections. Anyway, I’m sure it’s good for my character to consider it a little—though I quite admit you may lose the election.
“The Grand Duke is a horrid wretch, and if he wasn’t a grand duke you’d be the first to cut him. I had to spend a whole dinnertime last year in teaching him his proper place. It was very humiliating, and not at all amusing. You can have a men’s dinner for him. That’s all he’s fit for.
“And as for the babies, Mrs. Robson sends me a telegram every morning. I can’t make out that they have had a finger-ache since I went away, and I am sure mothers are entirely superfluous. All the same, I think about them a great deal, especially at night. Last night I tried to think about their education—if only I wasn’t such a sleepy creature! But, at any rate, I never in my life tried to think about it at home. So that’s so much to the good.
“Indeed, I’ll come back to you soon, you poor, forsaken, old thing! But Julie has no one in the world, and I feel like a Newfoundland dog who has pulled someone out of the water. The water was deep; and the life’s only just coming back; and the dog’s not much good. But he sits there, for company, till the doctor comes, and that’s just what I’m doing.
“I know you don’t approve of the notions I have in my head now. But that’s because you don’t understand. Why don’t you come out and join us? Then you’d like Julie as much as I do; everything would be quite simple; and I shouldn’t be in the least jealous.
“Dr. Meredith is coming here, probably tonight, and Jacob should arrive tomorrow on his way to Venice, where poor Chudleigh and his boy are.”
The breva, or fair-weather wind, from the north was blowing freshly yet softly down the lake. The afternoon sun was burning on Bellaggio, on the long terrace of the Melzi villa, on the white mist of fruit-blossom that lay lightly on the green slopes above San Giovanni.
Suddenly the Duchess and the boatman left the common topics of every day by which the Duchess was trying to improve her Italian—such as the proposed enlargement of the Bellevue Hotel, the new villas that were springing up, the gardens of the Villa Carlotta, and so forth. Evelyn had carelessly asked the old man whether he had been in any of the fighting of ’59, and in an instant, under her eyes, he became another being. Out rolled a torrent of speech; the oars lay idly on the water; and through the man’s gnarled and wrinkled face there blazed a high and illumining passion. Novara and its beaten king, in ’49; the ten years of waiting, when a whole people bode its time, in a gay, grim silence; the grudging victory of Magenta; the fivefold struggle that wrenched the hills of San Martino from the Austrians; the humiliations and the rage of Villafranca—of all these had this wasted graybeard made a part. And he talked of them with the Latin eloquence and facility, as no veteran of the north could have talked; he was in a moment the equal of these great affairs in which he had mingled; so that one felt in him the son of a race which had been rolled and polished—a pebble, as it were, from rocks which had made the primeval framework of the world—in the main course and stream of history.
Then from the campaign of ’59 he fell back on the Five Days of Milan in ’48—the immortal days, when a populace drove out an army, and what began almost in jest ended in a delirium, a stupefaction of victory. His language was hot, broken, confused, like the street fighting it chronicled. Afterwards—a further sharpening and blanching of the old face—and he had carried them deep into the black years of Italy’s patience and Austria’s revenge. Throwing out a thin
