I spoke, by the bye, of her "old" face, her "old" eyes. She is, to be sure, in so far as mere numbers of years tell, an old woman. But I once heard her throw out, in the heat of conversation, the phrase, "a young old thing like me;" and I thought she touched a truth.
Well, then, the footman, in his masterful way, pulled the bell-cord; Lady Blanchemain contemplated the landscape, and had her opinion of a generation that could liken it to the drop-scene of a theatre; and in due process of things the bell was answered.
It was answered by a man in a costume that struck my humorous old friend as pleasing: a sallow little man whose otherwise quite featureless suit of tweeds was embellished by scarlet worsted shoulder-knots. With lack-lustre eyes, from behind the plexus of the grille, he rather stolidly regarded the imposing British equipage, and waited to be addressed.
Lady Blanchemain addressed him in the language of Pistoja. Might one, she inquired, with her air of high affability, in her distinguished old voice, might one visit the castle?--a question purely of convention, for she had not come hither without an assurance from her guide-book.
Shoulder-knots, however,--either to flaunt his attainments, or because indeed Pistoiese (what though the polyglot races of Italy have agreed upon it as a lingua franca) offered the greater difficulties to his Lombardian tongue,--replied in French.
"I do not think so, Madame," was his reply, in a French sufficiently heavy and stiff-jointed, enforced by a dubious oscillation of the head.
Lady Blanchemain's black eyebrows shot upwards, marking her surprise; then drew together, marking her determination.
"But of course one can--it's in the guide-book," she insisted, and held up the red-bound volume.
The sceptic gave a shrug, as one who disclaimed responsibility and declined discussion.
"Me, I do not think so. But patience! I will go and ask," he said; and, turning his back, faded from sight in the depths of the dark tunnel-like porte-cochère.
Vexed, perplexed, Lady Blanchemain fidgeted a little. To have taken this long drive for nothing!--sweet though the weather was, fair though the valley: but she was not a person who could let the means excuse the end. She neither liked nor was accustomed to see her enterprises balked,--to see doors remain closed in her face. Doors indeed had a habit of flying open at her approach. Besides, the fellow's manner,--his initial stare and silence, his tone when he spoke, his shrug, his exhortation to patience, and something too in the conduct of his back as he departed,--hadn't it lacked I don't know what of becoming deference? to satisfy her amour-propre, at any rate, that the mistake, if there was a mistake, sprang from no malapprehension of her own, she looked up chapter and verse. Yes, there the assurance stood, circumstantial, in all the convincingness of the sturdy, small black type:--