Three-Cornered Halo Read Online Free Page B

hen, and Spanish (fam.), pollo —a youth.
    â€  Query from vision — visitation — arrival: the Vision is referred to throughout the translations as The Arrivalment.

CHAPTER THREE

    â€˜T HE island of San Juan el Pirata seen from the deck of the gay little vaporetto which plies between Barrequitas and Piombino on the mainland, looks like an outsize cathedral, rising abruptly up out of the sea. Perched fantastically at the tip of its spire, is the fairy-tale palace of the Grand Duke. To the west, built up from the sheer rock face, is the prison—a dark, dank old fortress where, in the splendid old piratical days, a countless toll of prisoners mouldered into merciful death; balancing it to the east is the Duomo, which houses the illustrious bones of the founder, and to the north the cobbled streets thrust their way down to the quays of the fishing boats. But looking southward over the sunlit blue sea starred with a dozen tiny satellite islands, what would be the façade of the cathedral slopes down, crumbling and pine-clad, to an indentation of little bays; and here, above many-flowered terraces, stand the long lines of the Bellomare Hotel, whose boast it is that every room faces into the sunshine and over the sea.…’
    Mr Cecil crossed by the vaporetto on the same day, as it happened, as Miss Cockrill and her cousin, late in the September after the dinner party at which he had met Cousin Hat. He saw them standing together at the rails—a small, thin—and yet oddly sturdy—little woman in a shapeless linen dress and a flat round hat which looked as if it had once been high and curvacious and generously wreathed, but had been painstakingly reduced, by some steam-roller method, to its present indeterminate amalgamation of flowers and straw: the typical ‘shady hat’ in fact, of the elderly Englishwoman abroad; and a younger woman of the type, reflected Mr Cecil, that it was quite impossible to ‘dress’—the droopy type, long drooping back that looked not strong enough to support the height—a standard rose, as it were, without proper staking: long, yearning face, long nose, long narrow hands and feet—long skirt, alas! of madly unfashionable length, jutting out in ill-considered gores, like a cardboard bell. Winsome on her earlier visit had fallen in love with Juanese folk-weave and taken home yards of it to be made up by a clever little woman she had found in Sittingbourne, to her own designs. She, too, wore a straw hat, wreathed with (of course) wild flowers; and the mauve beads. But she wore on the ring-finger of her right hand, a very beautiful opal. He saw his friend Tomaso’s eyes light up as they noticed it. Tomaso was the finest goldsmith in Barrequitas, he owned the Joyeria there, the jeweller’s shop, now that his father, dear old Pedro di Goya, was dead. After a while, Mr Cecil saw that he was manœuvring to speak to the owner of the ring. Tomaso loved all lovely things.
    On this occasion the rooms had been ordered well in advance and the ladies found themselves admirably accommodated, looking out, as promised, over the terraced gardens and down to the sea. Mr Cecil arrived unheralded; but Mr Cecil, of course, is a law unto himself on the island of San Juan. He said as much as he made his way that evening, passing easily among the hotel guests sitting sipping Juanellos on the pebble-patterned terrace under the twisted grey wistaria boughs; stopping for a word here, a word there, in his high, gay voice, a slightly battered, middle-ageing popinjay, with the ormolu forelock and fluttering hands carefully cultivated for the benefit of admiring ladies in the world of haute couture (for Mr Cecil’s exaggerations are by no means without calculation, and conceal a good, hard, not un-cynical business head); and the dear little paunch, not part of the deliberate décor, but which slappings and pummellings and foam-bathings galore, alas! fail