II

Returning to his bedroom, Cosmo found the fire of logs still playing fitfully upon the drawn curtains, upon the dim shape of the canopied bed of state, and perceived that Spire as directed had prepared the writing table and had placed a screen round the inviting-looking armchair.

He did not sit down to write. He felt more than ever that in a moment of amused expansion he had made a rash promise to his sister. The difficulty in keeping it had confronted him for the first time in Paris. Henrietta would have liked to hear of people he met, of the great world indulging in the newfound freedom of travel, the English, the French, the Poles, the Germans. Certainly he had seen quite a lot of people; but the problem was as to what could be said about them to a young girl, ignorant of the world, brought up in the country, and having really no notion of what mankind was like. He admitted to himself with introspective sincerity that even he did not exactly know what mankind was really like. He was too much of a novice, and she, obviously, was too innocent to be told of his suspicions and of what it was like. Even to describe the world outwardly was not an easy task⁠—to Henrietta. The world was certainly amusing. Oh yes, it was amusing; but even as he thought that, he felt within him a certain distaste. Just before he had left Paris he had been at a rout given by a great lady. There was a fellow there who somehow became suspected of picking pockets. He was extremely ugly and therefore attracted notice. The great lady, asked if she had invited him, denied ever having seen him before, but he assured her that he had spoken to her already that evening. Her Ladyship then declared that if he was really the man he gave himself out to be, she was not aware that he was in Paris. She imagined him to be in Ireland. Altogether a peculiar story. Cosmo never knew how it had ended because his friend Hollis led him away to introduce him to Mrs. R., who was most affable and entertained him with a complete inventory of her daughter’s accomplishments, the daughter herself being then in the room, obviously quite lovely and clever, but certainly a little odd; for a little later, on his being introduced, she had discoursed to him for half an hour on things of the heart, charmingly, but in a perfectly cool and detached manner. There was also Lady Jane, very much in evidence, very much run after, with a voice of engaging sweetness, but very free, not to say licentious, in her talk. How could he confide his impressions of her to Henrietta? As a matter of fact his head had been rather full of Lady Jane for some time. She had, so to speak, attended him all the way from Paris up to the morning of his arrival at Cantelucci’s inn. But she had now deserted him. Or was it his mind that had dropped her out of a haunting actuality into that region where the jumble of one’s experiences is allowed to rest? But was it possible that a shabby fellow in tight breeches and bad boots, with a peculiarly shaped cap on his head, could have got between him and Lady Jane about the time of sunset?

Cosmo thought suddenly that one’s personal life was a very bizarre thing. He could write to his sister that before he had been three hours in Genoa he had been involved in passing secret correspondence from Italy to the Island of Elba. Henrietta had solemnly charged him to write everything he could find out, hear, or even guess about Napoleon. He had heard certainly a lot of most extraordinary stories; and if he had not made any guesses he had been associating with persons who actually had been doing nothing else; frightened persons, exulting people, cast-down people, frivolous people, people with airs of mystery or with airs of contempt. But by Jove, now he had been in personal touch and had actually helped a man of the people who was mysteriously corresponding with Elba. He could write something about that but, after all, was it worth while? Finally he concluded he wouldn’t write home at all that evening; pushed the table away, and throwing himself into the armchair extended his legs towards the fire. A moody expression settled on his face. His immobility resembled open-eyed sleep with the red spark of the fire in his unwinking eyes, and a perfect insensibility to outward impressions. But he heard distinctly Spire knocking discreetly at the door. Cosmo’s first impulse was to shout that he wasn’t wanted, but he changed his mind. “Come in.”

Spire shut the door carefully, and crossing the room at once put a log on the fire. Then he said:

“Can’t get any hot water this evening, sir. Very sorry, sir. I will see that it won’t happen again.”

At the same time he thought, “Served him right for picking out such an inn to stay at.” Cosmo, still silent, stared at the fire, and when he roused himself at last he perceived Spire in the act of putting down in front of his chair a pair of slippers of shiny leather and red heels.

“Take your boots off, sir?” suggested Spire under his breath.

Cosmo let him do it. “Going to bed now, sir?” asked Spire in the same subdued tone.

“No, but you needn’t wait. I won’t need you any more tonight.”

“Thank you, sir.” Spire lingered, boots in hand. “The two small pistols are on the bedside table, sir. I have looked to the primings. This town is lull of rabble from all parts just now, so I hear. The lock of your door is fairly poor. I shall be sleeping just outside in the corridor, sir. They are going to put me a pallet there.”

“You will be very cold,” protested Cosmo.

“It will be all right, sir. I have got the fur rug out of the carriage. I had everything taken out of the carriage. The yard isn’t safe, sir. Nothing is properly safe in this house, so far as I can see.”

Cosmo nodded absentmindedly. “Oh, wait a moment, Spire. That man, that fellow in the cap, is he still downstairs?”

Spire thought rapidly that he wouldn’t be a party to bringing any of those ragamuffins up to the bedroom. “Gone a long time ago, sir,” he said stolidly.

Cosmo had a vivid recollection of the man’s pose of being settled for an earnest and absorbing conversation to last half the night.

“He doesn’t belong to this house?” he asked.

“No, sir, he only came to talk to a young woman. I left him taking leave of her to come up to you, sir. I suppose he was the man you meant, sir.”

“Yes,” said Cosmo, “I have no doubt about it. He will probably turn up again.”

Spire admitted reluctantly that it was likely. He had been telling a long tale to that young woman. “She is very good-looking, sir.”

“Is she a servant here?”

“Oh no, sir. She came in with that old cutthroat cobbler. They seem to be friendly. I don’t like the looks of the people in this house.”

“I wonder,” said Cosmo, “whether you could manage to obtain for me a quiet talk with that man on the next occasion he comes here.”

Spire received this overture in profound silence.

“Do you think you could?” insisted Cosmo.

A dispassionate raising of the eyebrows preceded the apparently irrelevant remark. “The worst of this house, sir, is that it seems open to all sorts of rabble.”

“I see. Well, try to think of some way, Spire. You may go now.”

Spire, carrying the boots, walked as far as the door, where he turned for a moment. “The only way I can think of, sir,” he said, “would be to make friends with that young woman.” Before Cosmo could recover from the surprise at the positive statement Spire had gone out and had shut the door.

Cosmo slept heavily but fitfully, with moments of complete oblivion interrupted by sudden starts, when he would lie on his back with open eyes, wondering for a moment where he was, and then fall asleep again before he had time to make a movement. In the morning the first thing he did was to scribble a note to the Countess Montevesso to ask her permission to call that very morning. While writing the address he smiled to himself at the idea that it was after all the little Adèle whom he remembered but dimly, mostly as a fair head hovering near his father’s armchair in the big drawing room, the windows of which opened on the western terrace. As a schoolboy during his holidays he saw the two girls, Adèle and his sister, mostly in the evening. He had his own out-of-door pursuits while those girls stayed upstairs with their governess. Remembering how he used to catch glimpses of them, the fair and the dark, walking in the Park, he felt a greater curiosity to see the Countess de Montevesso than if he had never seen her before. He found it impossible to represent her to himself grown up, married for years, the daughter of an ambassador.

When the family of D’Armand departed from Latham Hall, it was as if a picture had faded, a picture of faces, attitudes, and colours, leaving untouched the familiar background of his Yorkshire home, on to which he could never recall them distinctly. He would be meeting a complete stranger and he wondered whether that lady, who, young as she still was, had lived through tragic times and had seen so many people, would remember him at all. Him personally. For as to his home he had no doubt she had not forgotten; neither the stones, nor the woods, nor the streams. And as to the people Cosmo had a distinct notion that she was more familiar with his father than he and Henrietta ever had been. His father was not a man whom anybody could forget. And that Countess of Montevesso, more difficult for him to imagine than a complete stranger, would remember his mother better than he could himself. She had seen so much more of her day after day for something like three years; whereas he was at home only at intervals and while there took Lady Latham for granted, a kind, serene presence, beautifully dressed.

He handed the note to Spire with orders to send it off by one of the ragged idlers about the hotel door. There would be an answer. Then, approaching the window, he perceived that he could not see very much out of it. It was too high above the piazza, which furthermore was masked by the jutting balconies. But the sky was blue with a peculiar deep brilliance and the sunlight slanted over the roofs of the houses on the other side of the piazza. When he opened the window the keen pure air roused his vitality. The faint murmur of voices from below reached him very much as it had reached him downstairs the night before through the closed shutters of the dining room, as if the population of the town had never gone to bed.

While Spire was serving his breakfast in his room he wondered what the Countess of Montevesso would look like. The same fair head but higher above the ground and with the hair no longer flowing over the shoulders, but done up no doubt most becomingly and perhaps turned darker with age. It would be the hair of the daughter of an ambassador, able to judge of men and affairs, a woman of position, a very fine lady. Perhaps just a fine lady; but the memory of the child came to him with renewed force, gracious, quiet, with something timid and yet friendly in all its gestures, with his father’s hand smoothing the fair hair.⁠ ⁠… No. Not merely a fine lady.

Cosmo had no inborn aptitude for mere society life. Though not exactly shy, he lacked that assurance of manner which his good looks and his social status ought to have given him. He suspected there was too much mockery in the world, and the undoubted friendliness he had met with, especially from women, seemed to him always a little suspect, the effect not of his own merit, of which he had no idea, but of a shallow, good-natured compassion. He imagined himself awkward in company. The very brilliance of the entertainments, of which he had seen already a good many, was apt to depress his spirits. Often during talk with some pretty woman he would feel that he was not meant for that sort of life, and then suddenly he would withdraw into his shell. In that way he had earned for himself the reputation of being a little strange. He was to a certain extent aware of it, but he was not aware that this very thing made him interesting.

A gust of diffidence came over him while he was trying to eat some breakfast. “I really don’t want to see that Countess,” he thought. Then remembering the intonation in his father’s voice when talking of Adèle, he wondered whether perchance he would find an uncommon personality. Cosmo had a profound belief in his father, though he was well aware that he had never understood him thoroughly.⁠ ⁠… But if she is a woman out of the common, he reflected further, then she can’t possibly be interested in a rough schoolboy grown into a young man of no particular importance. No doubt she would be amiable enough.⁠ ⁠…

“Clear away all these things, Spire,” he said, “and go downstairs to see if the messenger is back.”

The messenger was not back yet; and assisted by Spire, Cosmo began to dress himself with extreme care. The tying of his neckcloth was an irritating affair, and so was Spire’s perfectly wooden face while he was holding up the glass to him for that operation. Cosmo spoiled two neckcloths and became extremely dissatisfied with the cut and colour of various articles of attire which Spire presented to him one after another. The fashions for men were perfectly absurd. By an effort of mind Cosmo overcame this capricious discontent with familiar things and finished his dressing. Then he sent Spire once more downstairs to inquire if the messenger was back. Obediently, Spire disappeared, but once gone it did not seem as though he meant to return at all. There was no Spire. There was no bellpull in the room either.

Cosmo stuck his head out through the door. Absolute silence reigned in the well of the stairs. A woman in black, on her knees beside a pail of water and scrubbing the floor of the corridor, looked up at him. Cosmo drew his head in. She was a pitiful hag.⁠ ⁠… He was sure of a gracious reception, of course. He was also sure of meeting a lot of people of all sorts. He wondered what sort of society she received. Everybody, no doubt; Austrians, Italians, French; all the triumphant reactionaries, all the depressed heads bobbing up again after the storm, venomous, revengeful, oppressive, odious. What the devil had become of Spire?

The long window right down to the floor had remained open. Suddenly the sound of a drum reached Cosmo’s ears. Stepping out on a balcony, he saw a company of infantry in white coats marching across a distant corner of the piazza. Austrians! Yes, their time had come. A voice behind him said: “The messenger is back, sir.” Cosmo stepped in and saw Spire empty-handed. “There’s a verbal answer, sir.”

“What is it? You haven’t spoken with the messenger, have you?”

“I have seen him, sir, but I got the message through the innkeeper. He speaks a little English. The lady would be glad to see you as soon after the fourth hour as possible. They have their own way of reckoning time, but as far as I can understand it, sir, it means something between ten and eleven. At any rate, it’s what Cantelucci says, and he can tell the time by an English watch all right.”

“Shut the window, Spire. I don’t want to hear that drum. Yes, it would mean as soon after ten as possible, but why has the fellow been so long? Is it very far?”

“No, sir, I think it’s quite close, really. He was so long because he has been trying to give your note to the lady herself and there was some difficulty about it. That innkeeper tells me that instead of handing it to the porter the fellow got in through the kitchen door and was dodging about a passage for some time.”

Cosmo looked fixedly at Spire, whose face expressed no opinion whatever on those proceedings.

“Dodging in a passage,” repeated Cosmo. “But did he see the lady herself?”

“Apparently not, sir. Cantelucci slanged him for being so long, but he said he thought he was acting for the best. He would have been there yet if a black woman hadn’t come along and snatched the letter out of his hand. It was she too who brought down the message from the lady.”

“Oh, yes,” said Cosmo. “Don’t you remember there was a black maid?”

“Yes, sir, I remember perfectly well, in the housekeeper’s room. She learned to talk English very quickly, but she was a little spitfire.”

“Was she?”

Spire busied himself in brushing Cosmo’s hat while he remarked in an explanatory tone: “She could never understand a joke, sir.”

He attended Cosmo into the hall, where Cantelucci with his usual intense gravity and a deep bow asked whether the signore would want a carriage. Cosmo, however, preferred walking; therefore the youth who had taken Cosmo’s note was directed to guide the English milord to the Palazzo Brignoli. He had a tousled head of hair and wore a jacket that might have belonged at one time to a hussar’s uniform, with all its trimmings and buttons cut off and a ragged hole in each elbow. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes rolled expressively, and his smile discovered a set of very sound teeth.

“Si, si, Palazzo Rosso,” he said.

Cantelucci explained in his imperturbable and solemn manner that the populace gave that name to the Palace on account of the red granite of which it was built, and the thin-faced lad, bounding forward, preceded Cosmo across the piazza, looking over his shoulder from time to time. Cosmo’s doubts and apprehensions disappeared before the inevitable charm and splendour of the town. At the corner of a narrow lane and a small open space with some trees growing in the centre of it the ragged guide stopped and, pointing at a dark and magnificent building, left him alone. Massive and sombre, ornate and heavy, with a dark aspect and enormous carvings, the Palace where little Adèle was living had to Cosmo’s eye the air of a sumptuous prison. The portal with its heavy iron-studded doors was reached by a flight of shallow steps, a segment of a wide circle, guarded on each side by an enormous griffin seated, tensely alert with wing and claw, on a high and narrow pedestal. On ascending the steps Cosmo discovered that the heavy door was ajar, just enough to let him slip in; and, at once, from the gloom of the arched passage he saw the inner sunshine on the oleanders of the inner court, flagged with marble, from whence a broad staircase ascended to the colonnaded gallery of the first floor.

Cosmo had seen no porter or other living soul, and there was no sound of any sort, no appearance of movement anywhere. Even the leaves of the oleanders kept perfectly still. In the light of the morning a slanting shadow cut the western wall into two triangles, one dark, the other glowing as with a red fire; and Cosmo remained for a moment spellbound by a strong impression of empty grandeur, magnificence, and solitude.

A voice behind him, issuing from somewhere in the big gateway through which he had passed, cried: “Ascend, signore!” Cosmo began to mount the open staircase, embarrassed as though he had been watched by thousands of eyes. In the gallery he hesitated, for the several doors he could see remained closed, and the only sound that reached his ears was the gentle plashing of the fountain in the court below him.

Before he had made up his mind the door in front of him opened fairly wide, but he could not see the person till he had entered an anteroom with narrow red and gilt settees ranged along its white walls. The door shut behind him and, turning round, he confronted a dark, plump mulatto woman who was staring at him with an expression of intense admiration. She clapped her hands in ecstasy and, opening her mouth, exhibited her white teeth in a low cackling laugh.

“Bonjour, Aglae,” said Cosmo readily.

The woman laughed again in sheer delight. “You remember my name, Mr. Cosmo! You quite frighten me, you grow so big. I remember you climb tree and throw nice ripe apple to the black girl.⁠ ⁠…” Her eyes gleamed and rolled absurdly.

Cosmo was so strangely touched by this extremely slight reminiscence of his tree-climbing boyhood, that when she added, “That was a good time,” he was quite ready to agree, thereby provoking another burst of delightful laughter. But Aglae was controlling herself obviously. Her laughter was subdued. It had not the unbounded freedom of sound that used to reverberate exotically in the dark passages at the back of Latham Hall; though there, too, Aglae tried to subdue it in view of rebukes or sarcastic comments in the servants’ hall. It stopped suddenly and Aglae in a tone of sober respect wanted to know how the Seignior was. Cosmo said that his father was very well.

“He a very-great gentleman,” commented Aglae. “I always tremble when I see him. You very fine gentleman too, Mr. Cosmo.”

She moved to one of the inner doors, but as Cosmo was following her she raised her hand to prevent him and opened the door only a little way, then came back and said in a lower tone, “It’s to hear the bell better when it rings.⁠ ⁠… Will you wait a little bit here?” she asked anxiously.

“I will,” said Cosmo, “but surely you don’t want to tremble before me. What is the matter?”

“Nothing at all is the matter.” Aglae tossed her head, tied up in a bandana handkerchief, with something of the spirit of the old days.

Cosmo was amused. “I no tremble before you,” she continued. “I always like you very much. I am glad with all my heart to see you here.”

All the time she turned her ear to the door she had left the least bit ajar. She had on a high-waisted white calico dress, white stockings, and Genoese slippers on her feet. Her dark brown hands moved uneasily.

“And how is Madame la Comtesse?” asked Cosmo.

“Miss Adèle very well. Anyway she never says anything else. She very great lady now. All the town come here, but she wants to see you alone after all these years.”

“It’s very kind of her,” said Cosmo. “I was wondering whether she remembered me at all.”

Now the excitement of seeing him had worn off, he was surprised at the careworn expression of the mulatto’s face. For a moment it seemed to him like a tragic mask, then came the flash of white teeth, strangely unlike a smile.

“She remember everything,” said Aglae. “She⁠ ⁠… she⁠ ⁠… Mr. Cosmo, you no boy now. I tell you that Miss Adèle had not a moment’s peace since she drive away from your big home in the country one very cold day. I remember very well. Little birds fall dead off the tree. I feel ready to fall dead myself.”

“I was away at school,” said Cosmo. He remembered that on his return the disappearance of those people had not produced a very strong impression on him. In fact, the only thing he had missed was, in the evening, the fair head of the stranger Adèle near the dark head of his sister Henrietta. And the next evening he had not even missed that!

While these thoughts were passing through his head he waited, looking at Aglae with a faint smile of which he was not aware. The mulatto girl seemed to have concentrated all her faculties on listening for the sound of a bell. It came at last. Cosmo heard it, too, very distant, faint and prolonged. A handbell.

“Now,” said Aglae under her breath, and Cosmo followed her through a suite of rooms, magnificent but under-furnished, with the full light excluded by half-closed jalousies. The vista was terminated by a white and gold door at which Aglae stopped and looked back at him over her shoulder with an air of curiosity, anxiety, or was it hesitation? But certainly without a smile. As to his own it had stiffened permanently on his lips. Before turning the handle of the door the mulatto listened for a moment. Then she threw it open, disclosing a room full of light indeed but which Cosmo could not see in its full extent because of a screen cutting off the view. His last thought as he crossed the threshold was, “It will be interesting,” and then he heard the door shut behind him, leaving him as it were alone with the heavy screen of figured velvet and three windows through which sunshine poured in a way that almost blinded him after his long experience of half lights.

He walked clear of the screen, and he was surprised at the vast size of the room. Here and there were other screens and a quite unexpected quantity of elegant furniture amongst which he felt for a moment as if lost. All this shone and gleamed and glowed with colour in the freshness and brilliance of the sunny morning. “Why, there’s nobody here,” he thought with a mingled sense of disappointment and relief. To his left above a square of carpet that was like a flowerbed rose a white mantelpiece which in its proportion and sumptuosity was like a low but much carved portal surmounted by an enormous sheet of glass reaching up to the cornice of the ceiling. He stepped on to the flowers, feeling now somewhat vexed, and only then perceived away at the other end of the room, in a corner beyond a fourth window, a lady seated at a writing table with her back to him. Barred by the gilt openwork of the chair-back he saw her dress, the only bit of blue in the room. There was some white lace about her shoulders, her fair head was bent, she was writing rapidly.

Whoever she was she seemed not to be aware of his presence. Cosmo did not know whether to wait in silence or say something, or merely warn her by a slight cough. What a stupid position, he thought. At that moment the lady put the pen down and rose from her chair brusquely, yet there was a perceptible moment before she turned round and advanced towards him. She was tall. But for the manner of his introduction, which could leave no room for doubt, the impression that this could not be the lady he had come to see would have been irresistible. As it was Cosmo felt apologetic, as though he had come to the wrong house. It occurred to him also that the lady had been from the very first aware of his presence. He was struck by the profundity of her eyes, which were fixed on him. The train of her blue robe followed on the floor. Her well-shaped head was a mass of short fair curls, and while she approached him Cosmo saw the colour leave her cheeks, the passing away of an unmistakable blush. She stopped and said in an even voice:

“Don’t you recognize me?”

He recovered his power of speech but not exactly the command of his thoughts, which were overwhelmed by a variety of strong and fugitive impulses.

“I have never known you,” he said with a tone of the profoundest conviction.

She smiled (Cosmo was perfectly sure that he had never seen that sort of smile or the promise even of anything so enchanting), and sank slowly on to a sofa whose brocaded silk, gray like pure ashes, and the carved frame painted with flowers and picked with gold, acquired an extraordinary value from the colour of her dress and the grace of her attitude. She pointed to an armchair, close by. Cosmo sat down. A very small table of ebony inlaid with silver stood between them, her hand rested on it; and Cosmo looked at it with appreciation, as if it had been an object of art, before he raised his eyes to the expectant face.

“Frankly,” he said, “didn’t you think that a complete stranger had been brought into the room?”

He said this very seriously, and she answered him in a light tone. “For a moment I was afraid to look round. I sat there with my back to you. It was absurd after having been imprudent enough to let you come in the morning. You kept so still that you might have been already gone. I took fright, I jumped up, but I need not have hesitated. You are still the same boy.”

Cosmo paid very little attention to what she said. Without restraint and disguise, in open admiration he was observing her with all his might, saying to himself, “Is it possible⁠—this⁠—Adèle!” He recollected himself, however, sufficiently to murmur that men changed more slowly and perhaps less completely than women. The Countess of Montevesso was not of that opinion, or, at any rate, not in this case.

“It isn’t that at all. I know because I used to look at you with that attention worthy of the heir of the Latham name, whereas you never honoured the French girl by anything more than a casual glance. Why should you have done more? You had the dogs, the horses, your first gun. I remember the gun. You showed it to both of us, to your sister and myself while we were walking in the park. You shouted to us and came across the grass, brandishing your gun, while the governess⁠—I don’t remember her name⁠—screamed at you. Oh mon dieu! N’approaches pas! You paid not the slightest attention to her. You had a flushed face. Of course her screaming frightened us at first, and just as we were preparing to get very interested in your gun you walked off with a look of contempt.”

“Did I behave so badly as that?” said Cosmo, feeling suddenly very much at ease with that lady with whom he had never even exchanged a formal greeting. She had grown more animated. As he was very fond of his sister he answered her numerous questions about Henrietta with interest and pleasure. From that subject the lady on the sofa, who may or may not have been Adèle d’Armand at one time, went on putting a series of questions about the house and all the people in it in a manner that proved a precise and affectionate recollection of those days. The memory of the countryside seemed to have been cherished by her too, and Cosmo’s heart warmed to the subject. She remembered certain spots in the park and certain points of view in the neighbourhood as though she had left them but a year before. She seemed not to have forgotten a single servant in the house. She asked after Spire.

“I have got him with me,” said Cosmo. “Of course he has grown elderly.”

He almost forgot to whom he was speaking. Without associating her very distinctly with the child Adèle, he was taking the Countess de Montevesso for granted. He delighted in seeing her so quiet and so perfectly natural. The first effect of her appearance persisted, with only the added sense of the deep dark blue of her eyes, an impression of living profundity that made his thoughts about her pause. But he was unconsciously grateful to her for the fact that she had never given him a moment of that acute social awkwardness from which he used to suffer so much; though there could not be the slightest doubt that the little Adèle (if there had ever been a little Adèle) was now a very fine lady indeed. But she loved the old place and everything and everybody in it. Of that too there could be no doubt. The few references she made to his mother touched and surprised Cosmo. They seemed to imply some depth in her which he, the son, and Henrietta, the daughter, had failed to penetrate. In contrast with that, Cosmo remarked that after the inquiry after Sir Charles’s health, which was one of her first questions, his father was not mentioned again.

“Are you going to make a stay in Genoa?” she asked after a pause.

“A few days,” said Cosmo, in an irresolute tone, because he did not know what answer was expected to this inquiry, the first which had nothing to do with Yorkshire. His interest in the rest of Italy was, he perceived, very small. But by the association of ideas he thought suddenly of the passing hours. He raised his eyes to a faintly engraved brass disc with black hands hung on the wall above one of the two doors at that end of the room which he was facing. The black hands pointed to eleven, but what prevented his eyes from returning at once to the delighted contemplation of the Countess of Montevesso was the fact that the door below the clock seemed to have moved slightly.

“I intend to see something of Italy,” he said. “My time really is my own, I have nothing special to do. It seems to me that the principal object of my journey has been attained now. I don’t think my father would be surprised to hear that I had turned back after leaving Genoa.”

The Countess looking up at this, their eyes remained fastened together for a time and Cosmo thought: “What on earth am I saying?” He watched her lips move to form the words which quite frightened him.

“Did Sir Charles give you a message for me?”

He thought he had brought this on himself. It was a painful moment. It lasted long enough to give the Countess the time to assume an expression of indifference, startling after the low tone of her question.

“No,” said Cosmo truthfully. “I have only a message for your father.” He waited a moment. “But I will tell you one of the last things Henrietta told me. She told me that when you were married my father could think of nothing for days but you.”

He did not venture to look at her; then added impulsively, “My father loved you dearly. We children could see it very well. Ad⁠—”

“Why don’t you finish my name?” her seductive voice asked.

Cosmo coloured. “Well, you know, I never heard you really called by any other name. It came naturally since I suppose you must be⁠—Adèle.”

Madame de Montevesso, who had been hanging on his lips, was surprised by Cosmo raising his eyes to stare intensely into the part of the room behind her back. Just as he was making his apology he had noticed the door under the clock swing open without any sound at all; and there entered quite noiselessly, too, and with something ambiguous in the very motion, a young girl (nothing could have been more unexpected) in a sort of deshabille of a white skirt and a long pink jacket of some very thin stuff which had a silky shimmer. She made a few steps and stopped. She was rather short, her hair was intensely black and drawn tightly away from her forehead. Cosmo felt sure (though he couldn’t see) that it was done in one long plait at the back. Her face was a short oval, her chin blunt, her nose a little too big and her black eyes perfectly round. Cosmo had the time to notice all this because astonishment prevented him from looking away. The girl advanced slowly if with perfect assurance, and stared unwinkingly at Cosmo, who in the extremity of his embarrassment got up from his chair. The young girl then stopped short and for a moment the three persons in the room preserved an absolute immobility. Then the Countess glanced over her shoulder leisurely and addressed Cosmo.

“This is Clelia, a niece of my husband.” Cosmo made a deep bow to the possessor of the round black eyes. “I didn’t know of her existence till about a fortnight ago,” added Madame de Montevesso carelessly. The round-eyed girl still staring hard made a curtsey to Cosmo. “My husband,” went on Adèle, “has also two old aunts living here. I have never seen them. This house is very big.”

Cosmo resumed his seat and there was a moment of silence. The girl sat down in the chair before the writing table sideways, folded her arms on its back, and rested her chin on her hands. Her round eyes examined Cosmo with a sort of animal frankness. He thought suddenly that it was time to bring his visit to an end. He would have risen at once but for the Countess de Montevesso beginning to speak to him, still in English. She seemed to have guessed what was passing through his mind.

“Don’t go yet for a moment,” she said, in a perfectly unconcerned voice, then paused. “We were talking about your father.”

“As to him,” said Cosmo, “I have nothing more to say. I have told you all the truth as far as I am certain of it.”

She inclined her head slowly and in the same level voice:

“The Court is here and most of the foreign ambassadors. We are waiting here for the arrival of the Queen of Sardinia, who may or may not come within the next month or so. This is considered a good post of observation, but there is very little to observe just now from the diplomatic point of view. Most of us have exhausted almost all emotions. Life has grown suddenly very dull. We gossip a little about each other; we wait for the end of the Vienna Congress and discuss the latest rumour that floats about. Yes. The play is over, the stage seems empty. If I were you I would stay a little longer here.”

“I certainly mean to stay here for some time,” declared Cosmo with sudden resolution.

“That’s right,” she continued in the same indifferent tone. “But wait a few days before you write home. You have awakened old memories in me. Inconceivably distant,” she went on in a voice more expressionless than ever, “and the dormant feelings of what seems quite another age.”

Cosmo smiled at this. The girl with round eyes was keeping perfectly still with her watchful stare. Madame de Montevesso seemed to read Cosmo’s thoughts.

“Yes,” she insisted. “I feel very old and everything is very far. I am twenty-six and I have been married very nearly ten years now.”

Cosmo, looking at her face, thought that those had been the most agitated ten years of European history. He said, “I have no doubt that Yorkshire must seem very far away to you.”

“I suppose you write very often home?” she said.

Cosmo defended himself from being one of those people who write letters about their travels. He had no talent for that; and then what could one write to a young girl like Henrietta and to a man as austere as his father, who had so long retired from the world? Cosmo had found it very difficult. Of course he took care to let them know pretty often that he was safe and sound.

Adèle could see this point of view. She seemed amused by the innocent difficulties of a young man having no one but a father and a sister to write to. She ascertained that he had no intimate friend left behind to whom he could confide his impressions. Cosmo said he had formed none of those intimacies that induce a man to share his innermost thoughts and feelings with somebody else.

“Probably your father was like that too,” said Madame de Montevesso. “I fancy he must have been very difficult to please, and still more difficult to conquer.”

“Oh, as to that,” said Cosmo, “I can safely say I’ve never been conquered,” and he laughed boyishly. He confessed further that he had the habit of thinking contradictorily about most things. “My father was never like that,” he concluded.

The gravity with which she listened to him now disconcerted him secretly. At last she nodded and opined that his difficulties had their source in the liveliness of his sympathies. He declared that he suffered most at times from the difficulty of making himself understood by men of his own age.

“And the women?” she asked quietly.

“Oh, the women!” he said, without the slightest levity. “One would not even try.” He raised his eyes and, obeying a sudden impulse, added: “I think that perhaps you could understand me.”

“That would be because I am so much older,” she said. Cosmo discovered in her delicately modelled face, with all its grace and freshness of youth, an interrogative profundity of expression, the impress of the problems of life and the conflicts of the soul. The great light of day had treated her kindly. Bathed in the sunshine entering through the four windows, she appeared to him wonderful in the glow of her complexion, in the harmony of her form and the composed nobility of her attitude. He felt this wonderfulness of her whole person in some sort physically, and thought that he had looked at her too long. He glanced aside and met the dark girl’s round unwinking stare of a cat ready to fly at one. She had not moved a hair’s breadth, and Cosmo felt reluctant to take his eyes off her exactly as though she had been a fierce cat. He heard the voice of the Countess of Montevesso and had to turn to her.

“Well, wait a few days before you write home about⁠ ⁠… Genoa.”

“I had a mind to begin a letter yesterday,” he said.

“What? Already! Only a few hours after your arrival!”

“Yes. Henrietta is very anxious to hear everything relating to the Emperor Napoleon.”

Madame de Montevesso was genuinely surprised. Her voice lost its equable charm while she asked what on earth could he have had to tell of Napoleon that he could not have written to her from Paris.

“Yes. He is in everybody’s thoughts and on everybody’s lips there,” he said. “Whenever three people come together he is the presence that is with them. But last night⁠ ⁠…”

He was on the point of telling her of his adventure on the tower when she struck in:

“The Congress will put an end to all that presently.” It checked Cosmo’s expansiveness and he said instead:

“It’s very possible. But last night on arriving here I experienced a curious sensation of his nearness. I went down in the evening to look at the Port.”

“He isn’t certainly very far from here. And what are your feelings about him?”

“Oh,” he rejoined lightly, “as about everything else in the world⁠—contradictory.”

Madame de Montevesso rose suddenly, saying:

“I won’t ask you, then, as to your feelings about myself.” Cosmo stood up hastily. He was a little the taller of the two but their faces were nearly on a level. “I should like you to make up your mind about me before you take up your traveller’s pen,” continued Adèle. “Come again this evening. There will be a few people here; and, as you have said, when a few people come together just now Napoleon is always with them, an unseen presence. But you will see my father. Do you remember him at all?”

Cosmo assured her that he remembered the Marquis d’Armand perfectly. He was on the point of making his parting bow when Madame de Montevesso, with the two words “à l’Anglaise,” put out her hand. He took it and forgot himself in the unexpected sensation of this contact. He was in no haste to release it when to his extreme surprise, with a slight movement of her eyes towards the girl at the writing table, Madame de Montevesso said:

“Did you ever see anything like that?”

Cosmo was taken completely aback. He dropped her hand. He did not know what to say, and even if it was proper for him to smile. Madame de Montevesso continued in a voice betraying no sentiment of any kind: “I can never be sure of my privacy now. Do you understand that I am her aunt? She wanders all over this palazzo very much like a domestic animal, only more observant, and she is by no means an idiot. Luckily she knows no language but Italian.”

They had been moving slowly towards the other end of the room, but now Madame de Montevesso stopped and returned Cosmo’s parting bow with a slight inclination of her head. Before passing round the screen between him and the door Cosmo glanced back. The girl on the chair had not stirred.

He had half a hope that the mulatto maid would be waiting for him. But he saw no one. As he crossed the courtyard he might have thought himself leaving an uninhabited house. But the streets through which he made his way to his inn were thronged with people. The day was quite warm. Already on the edge of the pavements, here and there, there was a display of flowers for sale; and at every turn he saw more people who seemed carefree, and the women with their silken shoes and the lace scarves on their heads appeared to him quite charming. The plaza was a scene of constant movement. Here and there a group stood still, conversing in low voices but with expressive gestures. As he approached his hotel he caught an evanescent sight of the man he had met on the tower. His cap was unmistakable. Cosmo mended his pace but the man had disappeared; and after looking in all directions Cosmo went up the steps of the inn. In his room he found Spire folding methodically some clothes.

“I saw that man,” said Cosmo, handing him his hat.

“Was he following you, sir?” asked Spire.

“No, I saw his back quite near this house.”

“I shouldn’t wonder if he were coming here,” opined Spire.

“In any case I wouldn’t have spoken to him in the piazza,” said Cosmo.

“Much better not, sir,” said the servant.

“After all,” said Cosmo, “I don’t know that I have anything to say to him.”

From these words Spire concluded that his master had found something more interesting to occupy his mind. While he went on with his work he talked to Cosmo, who had thrown himself into an armchair, of some repairs needed to the carriage, and also informed him that the English doctor had left a message asking whether Mr. Latham would do him the honour to take his midday meal with him at the same table as last night. After a slight hesitation Cosmo assented, and Spire, saying that he would go and tell them downstairs, left the room.

In the solitude favourable to concentration of thought Cosmo discovered that he could not think connectedly, either of the fair curls of the Countess de Montevesso or of the vague story of her marriage. Strictly speaking he knew nothing of it; and this ignorance interfered with the process of consecutive thinking; but he formed some images and even came to the verge of that state in which one sees visions. The obscurity of her past helped the freedom of his fancies. He had an intuitive conviction that he had seen her in the fullest brilliance of her beauty and of the charm of her mind. A woman like that was a great power, he reflected, and then it occurred to him that, marvellous as she was, she was not her own mistress.

Some church clock striking loudly the hour roused him up, but before he went downstairs he paced the floor to and fro several times. And when he forced himself out of that empty room it was with a profound disgust of all he was going to see and hear, a momentary repulsion towards the claims of the world, like a man tearing himself away from the side of a beloved mistress.