Three-Cornered Halo (2 page)

For this was Innocenta di Perliti—last surviving novice of the order of the Perliti, or Little Pearls, the religious order founded by Juanita and over which she had reigned as abbess until her death, some twenty years earlier.

Juanita has a chapel to herself, of course, in the Cathedral, two demoted saints having been turfed out at the time of her death to make room for her and for her patron, Santa Fina; whose own chapel, over opposite, has been made gay with highly colourful reproductions of the faded Ghirlandaio murals in San Gimignano, of which enchanting, many-towered town, she is patron saint. Innocenta was lighting candles in the chapel when first the three ladies met; bobbing her sketchy genuflexions before Santa Fina—but not, alas! before Juanita. Juanita was not yet entitled to such honours, she regretfully explained: Juanita had no official halo. Candles, yes—at one's own peril, her manner seemed to suggest, Mother Church accepting no responsibility; but there were subtle limits to the respect to be paid to the as yet uncanonised. The table-top, however, hung with its complement of crumbs, upon the great blank, dank red brick wall; and beneath it, clad in a mauve satin dress, her shrunken skull crowned with a tiara of decidedly semi-precious stones, her terrible hands crossed on her mauve satin breast, Juanita herself lay in mummified state in a coffin of glass.

Whatever she may have been in her youth—and the girls of San Juan can hardly help but be lovely, with their clear, olive skins and great, melting, dark brown eyes—Juanita had been, by English standards at least, no beauty by the time she died; small and swarthy, with a considerable moustache and the too short thighs sadly characteristic of the Juanese. Life on a table, moreover, is not conducive to sveltness in the female form, and of her fifty-two years, she had spent thirty-five on her table. A niece of the then Grand Duke, explained Innocenta to the fascinated ladies, she had been brought up by her widowed mother in almost seraglio seclusion in the Palatio; until, in her seventeenth year, she had suddenly developed a pious devotion to Santa Fina, patron saint of San Gimignano, not far from Siena; and, in a vision, had been directed to make a pilgrimage there. Refusing all companionship save that of an aged nurse, she had set off on foot: to return a year later, exhausted and emaciated, staggering beneath the weight of the famous tea-table, which, in obedience to a further vision, she had acquired in San Gimignano and carried all the way back.

“But why?” said Miss Cockrill.

“Senora, this was in honour of Santa Fina.”

“Why should it do Santa Fina any good, to spend one's life on a table?”

Innocenta was astonished. She gestured with a dimpled hand at the pseudo-Ghirlandaio murals. “Senora—Santa Fina spent her life on a table too.”

“Good God!” said Cousin Hat. She went off into a fit of highly unedifying laughter. “How did
she
take a rival pole-squatter?”

Winsome assumed her most exasperating expression, one of gentle patience. “You haven't been listening, dear. Santa Fina is a mediæval saint, she lived two hundred years ago.”

Oh, well, said Cousin Hat, that accounted for it: and one had heard that in those days, the sanitation …

“… and died when she was thirteen,” said Winsome, hastily.

“Lack of exercise. A most unhealthy life for a gel,” said Cousin Hat. A year later her hostess was to say the same of Juanita.

But Juanita had not died in what Innocenta called her childcap. Juanita had lived and flourished, had founded an order of nuns, had written many books, many wonderful, wonderful books—she, Innocenta, was struggling even now to translate them into English: very few people on the island knew English, she herself would never have learned it but for the gentlemans: the gentlemans from the Bellomare Hotel, she amplified, though why he or they—it was difficult to decide—should have promoted her English lessons she did not go on to explain. But the books had been translated into Spanish and into Italian, all of them—the Diaries, the slim vols. of pious exhortation, of aspiration, of reflection, of warning, of prayer.… If one lived on a table there was much time for writing, of course, and space too, that was a consideration. She mused over it, shaking her charming head. But the Senoras, she said, suddenly, apologetically, would not be interested in all this, the Senoras, of course, were not of Mother Church, one understood well that in Inghilterra, no one was Catholica.…

Winsome Foley could not let that pass. It all depended. For, after all, she cried, clasping her narrow hands on the beige lace slopes, after all—what did the word ‘catholic' mean? It meant, did it not?—‘universal.' And perhaps even they, poor benighted heathen from Inghilterra, suggested Winsome, delicately teasing, tenderly ironic with the poor little bigoted creature, perhaps even they might claim to be members of the one great ‘universal' Christian church?—with varying ideas and observances, perhaps, but all happy children together in the same family.…

Winsome Foley was what Mr Cecil would have called Madly High. If the College of Cardinals would but have promoted a Britisher to the Papal Throne, even only once in a while for decency's sake, she might well, she sometimes thought, have joined hands with the Scarlet Woman herself; reserving perhaps a few private judgements on such matters as the Resurrection of the Dead (a horrid and confusing business), the Miracle of the Mass, and—even in the case of an Englishman—the Infallibility of the Pope. But to owe allegiance to a God content to be represented here below by a foreigner was, and must remain, unthinkable to any member of a family whose men had for so many generations conducted themselves as officers and for the most part gentlemen, in the dear Indian Civil. She had therefore evolved for herself a happy mean between Canterbury and Rome, much as Mr Cecil had, in his case perforce, between the sexes, and in roughly the same proportion; and pursued a pious course which she referred to as My Little Garden Path to Heaven, likening her good deeds to flowers and her bad to weeds, and labouring assiduously among them both with the trugs and trowels of an ardent spiritual life. Confident in her own conclusions, she rejected communion with any one branch of the saints, and worshipped in this Church or that as the winds of her garden listed: seeking the sacraments in the spirit of an informed psychotic receiving professional attention, unflagging in early morning devotion to a Mass which she held to be meaningless, and consistent only in seeking religion where religion had artistic appeal—reeling happily home to breakfast day after day, suffocated with incense, dazed by dead language, continually reconcussed by the violence of her genuflexions, and all in homage to what she believed to be nothing but a small round piece of bread. That Winsome, who had, baptismally speaking, never left the Church of England, should carry a torch ignited in the fires of Rome, seemed to herself no incongruity at all; and, had she but known it, such a torch was at this moment being thrust into the embers, all ready to be passed, joyfully sparking, into her eager hand. Winsome Foley was about to adopt her Cause.

Perhaps it was some prerecognition, however, that prompted her to continue with Innocenta when they left the Cathedral. Miss Cockrill, worn out with sightseeing, took her aching feet and stiff neck back to the Bellomare; but Winsome walked up with Innocenta in the soft evening air to the top of the ridge that marks the last outskirts of San Juan's one little town: and there, on a bank, they rested, looking down on to the lovely Toscanita plain with its drift of silvery olives, and to a pink-washed building enclosed by a winding wall. Innocenta pointed it out with loving pride. “E casa mea.”

Winsome was astonished. The place had been shown to her before, but as the convent where Juanita had spent the last—or table—years of her life: La Colombaia, it was called, apparently, ‘the dovecote,' she thought that was so charming! There was another ‘dovecote' down in the town itself, she had seen the name up over the door, ‘Colombaia' and a pretty girl, not yet attained to religious habit, looking out of an upper window: a pious people—all Catholics of course, and every family, no doubt, had one daughter a nun. “I understood this was the convent? Is it not La Colombaia?”

Si, si, agreed Innocenta. A Colombaia. No more a convenuto, she said sadly, now that El Margherita was gone.

“El Margherita is another name for Juanita?”

Ah, the good one, the blessèd one, said Innocenta, fondly.

“Why was she called El Margherita?”

“The name of her, Senorita, was di Perli, Juanita di Perli. Perli are pearls; and margherita also is a pearl—you know, Senorita, our language is much mixing with Spanish and Italian, the two. So she is called El Margherita, the Pearl of San Juan; and her nuns they were called by the people here Le Perliti, the Little Pearls of Santa Fina. This is pretty, Senorita, si?”

Very pretty, quite, quite charming. “And here,” said Winsome, catching the infection, throwing out a long, white knuckley hand, “was their oyster shell?”

This flight of fancy, however, was too much for Innocenta's English. “E Colombaia. No more now el convenuto, no more Perliti. It is I, Senorita, who have the Colombaia.” She lived there, as far as Winsome could make out with half a dozen lovely daughters; no mention of a Mr Innocenta, but still—these foreigners! thought Winsome with a liberal sigh.…

“The house was given to me, Senorita, in el testamento.”

“The will?”

“El testamento d'el Margherita.”

“In the will of …? Do you mean,” said Winsome, quite excited, “that you actually
knew
her?”

Knew her? Knew Juanita? But of course—who had not known Juanita?—who, after all, was but twenty years dead, who for thirty years before that, had (with unflagging spiritual complacency) guided the lives of all the good people of San Juan. As for Innocenta, her heir—no, she had been no relation. The Senorita did not know, perhaps, the meaning of her name?—did not know that in San Juan, as in Italy, an ‘innocento' meant an orphan?

For Innocenta was what her name proclaimed her to be—fatherless, nameless, orphaned by the death of a single parent; one of the countless ‘innocenti' of an island where youth is universally beautiful—where love is happy and easy and not really very severely frowned upon. Juanita, finding the number of applications to enter her sisterhood, after the first flush, somewhat disappointing, had in her later years conceived the simple plan of recruiting their number from the flourishing Barrequitas orphanage; and Innocenta had, almost in childcap, she explained, been taken into the convent with several others so chosen, and there brought up to an almost inevitable acceptance of the religious habit when the time should come. But the time, alas! had never come: not for Innocenta. Juanita had died; and somehow—somehow, said Innocenta wistfully, somehow all the young ones had slipped away and soon, as the old nuns died off, there was no one left. So that now there were no Perliti: only the Colombaia. “E triste?”

“Molto triste,” agreed Winsome. Curiosity, however, struggled with sensibility. There was, for example, the matter of the lovely daughters. “And you too—er—relaxed your vows?”

Innocenta was shocked. Her vows!—no, no, indeed, had she not explained to the Senorita that by the time Juanita died, one had not yet even left the noviceship.…? She had taken no vows; she had been a young girl serving her apprenticeship, that was all.

“You didn't go on and take them?”

“Senorita, I was very young. The Badessa sent for me, she said that I would have a long religious life before me, but soon they would all be gone and I should be alone. This was the Badessa who was made after Juanita died. She was old and very wise.”

“There is another Colombaia in the town? Could you not have gone there?”

Innocenta looked oddly offended; it was one thing, she said, to be mistress of … The Senorita would not imagine …? She broke off, troubled and even a little haughty for one so plump and sweetly smiling. Evidently, pride of possession had somewhat gone to Innocenta's charming head. Winsome hastened to revert to it. “Of course you would remain! The whole convenuto was bequeathed to you?”

Innocenta, placated, explained. It was the custom in many religious houses in those days, in all parts of the world, to leave property to the youngest member of the novitiate, thus avoiding death duties and other like taxes. When the last of the old nuns had died, it had been found that Juanita's possessions were still in Innocenta's name. She had applied to El Exaltida—the father of the present Hereditary Grand Duke—and he had said that she could make good use of the house and had better keep it.… (Evidently, thought Winsome, the daughters had already been in existence and housing them a necessity.)

But what she could not understand, she said, was why the convenuto had ever closed?

The convenuto had closed, in fact, because its original purpose no longer existed. Juanita, arriving back from San Gimignano, a skeleton of her former robust young self, carrying a large, round tea-table and already self-proclaimed mystic and visionary, had had to be accommodated somewhere. The apartments in the Palatio had seemed to the Grand Duke, her uncle, no longer practicable—the widowed mother most heartily agreeing, for embryo saints are uncomfortable bedfellows and La Contessa di Perli, though devout, had no exaggerated taste for asceticism. What to do then? The old nurse had died, it seemed, inconsiderately but perhaps not very astonishingly, on the way home: worn out, murmured the cynical, but in very low tones, for it is dangerous work on the island to criticise the relatives of the Grand Duke, by an over-generous share in the honour of carrying the table. It had ended in his purchasing for his niece the freehold of the pink-washed farmhouse, the owner having received a pressing invitation from the Palace to find himself suddenly obliged to part with it; and in an invitation, also in terms exceedingly hard to refuse, to certain widows and unmarried ladies, to enclose themselves with his niece behind its walls. Since the almost entire function of the order had been to run errands for a dominating female who refused to budge from a table, it is hardly surprising that the community remained small in numbers, however ardent it may have been in spirit; and Juanita's own press-gang methods in co-operating exploitable innocenti, occurred to her too late to save the order when, too soon, she died. Within ten years of that day, the last of the Grand Duke's conscripts had gone to join their belovéd foundress in heaven: the flourishing novice-ship of the last year or two had all dribbled away; and there remained only one loving and simple heart to remember and to dream.…