Читать книгу No Way Home - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 11

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Florio San Quirico was given the best chamber in the house. It looked, by a tall window, on the Forest. The floor was tiled in dark red, the sparse furniture was of lime-wood; from the tester of the bed hung white linen curtains; the room had an ascetic air, as if it belonged to a recluse who meditated in loneliness. There was a shelf of books in gold tooled leather, with ties of pink floss silk hanging beneath the spines.

"Perhaps," thought the Bolognese, "some lonely student left them here."

His own appointments, few but beautiful and costly, looked conspicuous in the clean, gaunt room, sweet from the pine odours of the Forest, as did his tall elegant figure in the plain yet rich travelling attire, his auburn hair fastened by a silver gilt buckle of intricate design, reflected (as if a creature of another world) in the long, tarnished mirror.

He leaned in the window place and gazed into the fragrant darkness of the dense trees that were immobile in the stillness of the night. Above sparkled the stars in a remote pallor of pale light.

"Why not," he thought, playing with his mood, "leave them to their destiny? They are all passionate—one is foolish—caught in a web. Why not let them be?"

"Leave them to their destiny." What did he mean by that easy phrase, he asked himself. What was their destiny, and how could he influence it? The answer was easy. He had already influenced it when he had sent Mr. Campion to Schaffhausen; he would further influence it when he presented himself at Wilhelmsruhe. He was sufficiently detached from their fortunes to be able to direct them. He felt the power of the puppet master who pulls the strings. There had been no satisfaction in sending the blundering Englishman to Switzerland; there would be some satisfaction in breaking up the artful extravaganza the fugitives had invented. And more in having them at his mercy. He had penetrated their disguises as soon as he had had Bonino's report from Dinkelsbuhl. He was amused by the obtuseness of the pursuer who had been under the same roof with the pursued and not known it, completely deceived by a wig, and a mask, by the change of master into man.

It was a clever trick, no doubt, and one that might have baffled any one not closely interested in the fugitives, but that it would not even have aroused the suspicions of Mr. Campion, was to Florio San Quirico, not only astonishing, it was ridiculous. Yet that word was not to be associated with the heavy, manly and dignified personage who had, in such desperate emotion so haughtily controlled, spoken with him at Bode's in Stuttgart.

He was relieved by the pine air of the Forest, flowing over him as he pushed the casement wider. The weather had been hot, redolent of the hot perfumes of the vintage that the citizens of Stuttgart declared caused a nervous malaise in the city surrounded by terrace on terrace of vines, now come to full fruitage.

There was some caution in his nature and he had been precisely taught to consider well before he took any action; some philosophy, too, he possessed and he knew that Bonino's entreaties were justified. Florio San Quirico had many noble obligations and agreeable duties awaiting him in Bologna. He had never irked at his life, though perhaps a certain weariness likely to the affliction of a man who kept himself apart from the tumults of a restless age, full of wars, revolutions and conflicts. He partly despised himself that he did not go abroad to some theatre of turmoil and there receive his quietus. For him there was yet no final riddance of malaise, even though his escape from Bologna had so utterly changed his life.

A dreamy lassitude overcame him. He had sent Bonino to bed in the closet. The house seemed deserted, the chamber even emptier than the usual impersonal room of an inn. Was this Helen worth this siege of this Troy? He had almost persuaded himself that for him she was the very quiddity of life, but almost only.

The two candles on the dressing table burnt straightly in the unmoving air; their reflections in the oval mirror made four points of light in the high ceilinged, bare room. Here was but one of the toys with which he had been wont to beguile himself. In his valise was a packet of sealed letters that had been forwarded to him through Papal nuncios on the first stages of his flight. Bonino had collected these without any hint as to the whereabouts of his master, who had never opened them. He knew from whom they came, members of his family, from friends at the University, at the Academies of Arts and Learning. Now, for some while, there had been no letters following; all trace of him had been lost in his native town.

He thought now of his brick arcaded palace in Bologna and of the Villa Aria where, from the flat roof, the gaze could range from the Apennines to the Adriatic, with some nostalgia. As he blew out the candles, he seemed to extinguish hopes. He felt chilled from the night air that had been so refreshing after the close mustiness of the vintage heat at Stuttgart, took off his coat and lay on the strange bed with a sigh, his head aching, and his heart empty.