“Yes--but,” he reminded her, whilst the lines deepened about his humorous old mouth, “but as a reward of my virtue in conspiring with you to convert him. And, by the way, how is his conversion progressing?”
“It is not progressing at all. I think there is no chance of it,” answered Beatrice, in a tone that seemed to imply a certain irritation.
“I thought he had shown 'dispositions'?” said the Cardinal.
“That was a mistake. He has shown none. He is a very tiresome and silly person. He is not worth converting,” she declared succinctly.
He resumed his office. But every now and again he would pause, and look out of the window, with the frown of a man meditating something; then he would shake his head significantly, and take snuff.
Peter tramped down the avenue, angry and sick.
Her reception of him had not only administered an instant death-blow to his hopes as a lover, but in its ungenial aloofness it had cruelly wounded his pride as a man. He felt snubbed and humiliated. Oh, true enough, she had unbent a little, towards the end. But it was the look with which she had first greeted him--it was the air with which she had waited for him to state his errand--that stung, and rankled, and would not be forgotten.
He was angry with her, angry with circumstances, with life, angry with himself.
“I am a fool--and a double fool--and a triple fool,” he said. “I am a fool ever to have thought of her at all; a double fool ever to have allowed myself to think so much of her; a triple and quadruple and quintuple idiot ever to have imagined for a moment that anything could come of it. I have wasted time enough. The next best thing to winning is to know when you are beaten. I acknowledge myself beaten. I will go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed.”
He gazed darkly round the familiar valley, with eyes that abjured it.
“I shall go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed.”
But he took no immediate steps to get them packed.
“Hope,” observes the clear-sighted French publicist quoted in the preceding chapter, “hope dies hard.”
Hope, Peter fancied, had received its death-blow that afternoon. Already, that evening, it began to revive a little. It was very much enfeebled; it was very indefinite and diffident; but it was not dead. It amounted, perhaps, to nothing more than a vague kind of feeling that he would not, on the whole, make his departure for England quite so precipitate as, in the first heat of his anger, the first chill of his despair, he had intended. Piano, piano! He would move slowly, he would do nothing rash.