The Diary of a Man of Fifty

She dropped her head a little to one side.  “For an Englishman—no!”

“Ah,” said I, laughing, “you are quite as clever as your mother.”

“And they tell me that you are a great soldier,” she continued; “you have lived in India.  It was very kind of you, so far away, to have remembered our poor dear Italy.”

“One always remembers Italy; the distance makes no difference.  I remembered it well the day I heard of your mother’s death!”

“Ah, that was a sorrow!” said the Countess.  “There’s not a day that I don’t weep for her.  But che vuole?  She’s a saint its paradise.”

“Sicuro,” I answered; and I looked some time at the ground.  “But tell me about yourself, dear lady,” I asked at last, raising my eyes.  “You have also had the sorrow of losing your husband.”

“I am a poor widow, as you see.  Che vuole?  My husband died after three years of marriage.”

I waited for her to remark that the late Count Scarabelli was also a saint in paradise, but I waited in vain.

“That was like your distinguished father,” I said.

“Yes, he too died young.  I can’t be said to have known him; I was but of the age of my own little girl.  But I weep for him all the more.”

Again I was silent for a moment.

“It was in India too,” I said presently, “that I heard of your mother’s second marriage.”

The Countess raised her eyebrows.

“In India, then, one hears of everything!  Did that news please you?”

“Well, since you ask me—no.”

“I understand that,” said the Countess, looking at her open fan.  “I shall not marry again like that.”

“That’s what your mother said to me,” I ventured to observe.

She was not offended, but she rose from her seat and stood looking at me a moment.  Then—“You should not have gone away!” she exclaimed.  I stayed for another hour; it is a very pleasant house.

Two or three of the men who were sitting there seemed very civil and intelligent; one of them was a major of engineers, who offered me a profusion of information upon the new organisation of the Italian army.  While he talked, however, I was observing our hostess, who was talking with the others; very little, I noticed, with her young Inglese.  She is altogether charming—full of frankness and freedom, of that inimitable disinvoltura which in an Englishwoman would be vulgar, and which in her is simply the perfection of apparent spontaneity.  But for all her spontaneity she’s as subtle as a needle-point, and knows tremendously well what she is about.  If she is not a consummate coquette . . . What had she in her head when she said that I should not have gone away?—Poor little Stanmer didn’t go away.  I left him there at midnight.

12th.—I found him today sitting in the church of Santa Croce, into which I wandered to escape from the heat of the sun.

In the nave it was cool and dim; he was staring at the blaze of candles on the great altar, and thinking, I am sure, of his incomparable Countess.  I sat down beside him, and after a while, as if to avoid the appearance of eagerness, he asked me how I had enjoyed my visit to Casa Salvi, and what I thought of the padrona.

“I think half a dozen things,” I said, “but I can only tell you one now.  She’s an enchantress.  You shall hear the rest when we have left the church.”

“An enchantress?” repeated Stanmer, looking at me askance.

He is a very simple youth, but who am I to blame him?

“A charmer,” I said “a fascinatress!”

He turned away, staring at the altar candles.

“An artist—an actress,” I went on, rather brutally.

He gave me another glance.

“I think you are telling me all,” he said.

“No, no, there is more.”  And we sat a long time in silence.

At last he proposed that we should go out; and we passed in the street, where the shadows had begun to stretch themselves.

“I don’t know what you mean by her being an actress,” he said, as we turned homeward.

“I suppose not.  Neither should I have known, if any one had said that to me.”

“You are thinking about the mother,” said Stanmer.  “Why are you always bringing her in?”

“My dear boy, the analogy is so great it forces itself upon me.”

He stopped and stood looking at me with his modest, perplexed young face.  I thought he was going to exclaim—“The analogy be hanged!”—but he said after a moment—

“Well, what does it prove?”

“I can’t say it proves anything; but it suggests a great many things.”

“Be so good as to mention a few,” he said, as we walked on.

“You are not sure of her yourself,” I began.

“Never mind that—go on with your analogy.”

“That’s a part of it.  You are very much in love with her.”

“That’s a part of it too, I suppose?”

“Yes, as I have told you before.  You are in love with her, and yet you can’t make her out; that’s just where I was with regard to Madame de Salvi.”

“And she too was an enchantress, an actress, an artist, and all the rest of it?”

“She was the most perfect coquette I ever knew, and the most dangerous, because the most finished.”

“What you mean, then, is that her daughter is a finished coquette?”

“I rather think so.”

Stanmer walked along for some moments in silence.

“Seeing that you suppose me to be a—a great admirer of the Countess,” he said at last, “I am rather surprised at the freedom with which you speak of her.”