The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  The Countess looked at me gravely. “What do you call it when a man does that?”

  “It depends upon the case.”

  “Sometimes,” said the Countess in French, “it’s a lachete.”

  “Yes, and sometimes it’s an act of wisdom.”

  “And sometimes,” rejoined the Countess, “it’s a mistake.”

  I shook my head. “For me it was no mistake.”

  She began to laugh again. “Caro Signore, you’re a great original. What had my poor mother done to you?”

  I looked at our young Englishman, who still had his back turned to us and was staring up at the picture. “I will tell you some other time,” I said.

  “I shall certainly remind you; I am very curious to know.” Then she opened and shut her fan two or three times, still looking at me. What eyes they have! “Tell me a little,” she went on, “if I may ask without indiscretion. Are you married?”

  “No, Signora Contessa.”

  “Isn’t that at least a mistake?”

  “Do I look very unhappy?”

  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.”

  I confessed that I was surprised at it myself. “But it’s on account of the interest I take in you.”

  “I am immensely obliged to you!” said the poor boy.

  “Ah, of course you don’t like it. That is, you like my interest—I don’t see how you can help liking that; but you don’t like my freedom. That’s natural enough; but, my dear young friend, I want only to help you. If a man had said to me—so many years ago—what I am saying to you, I should certainly also, at first, have thought him a great brute. But after a little, I should have been grateful—I should have felt that he was helping me.”

  “You seem to have been very well able to help yourself,” said Stanmer. “You tell me you made your escape.”

  “Yes, but it was at the cost of infinite perplexity—of what I may call keen suffering. I should like to save you all that.”

  “I can only repeat—it is really very kind of you.”

  “Don’t repeat it too often, or I shall begin to think you don’t mean it.”

  “Well,” said Stanmer, “I think this, at any rate—that you take an extraordinary responsibility in trying to put a man out of conceit of a woman who, as he believes, may make him very happy.”

  I grasped his arm, and we stopped, going on with our talk like a couple of Florentines.

&
nbsp; “Do you wish to marry her?”

  He looked away, without meeting my eyes. “It’s a great responsibility,” he repeated.

  “Before Heaven,” I said, “I would have married the mother! You are exactly in my situation.”

  “Don’t you think you rather overdo the analogy?” asked poor Stanmer.

  “A little more, a little less—it doesn’t matter. I believe you are in my shoes. But of course if you prefer it, I will beg a thousand pardons and leave them to carry you where they will.”

  He had been looking away, but now he slowly turned his face and met my eyes. “You have gone too far to retreat; what is it you know about her?”

  “About this one—nothing. But about the other—”

  “I care nothing about the other!”

  “My dear fellow,” I said, “they are mother and daughter—they are as like as two of Andrea’s Madonnas.”

  “If they resemble each other, then, you were simply mistaken in the mother.”

  I took his arm and we walked on again; there seemed no adequate reply to such a charge. “Your state of mind brings back my own so completely,” I said presently. “You admire her—you adore her, and yet, secretly, you mistrust her. You are enchanted with her personal charm, her grace, her wit, her everything; and yet in your private heart you are afraid of her.”

  “Afraid of her?”

  “Your mistrust keeps rising to the surface; you can’t rid yourself of the suspicion that at the bottom of all things she is hard and cruel, and you would be immensely relieved if some one should persuade you that your suspicion is right.”

  Stanmer made no direct reply to this; but before we reached the hotel he said—”What did you ever know about the mother?”

  “It’s a terrible story,” I answered.

  He looked at me askance. “What did she do?”

  “Come to my rooms this evening and I will tell you.”

  He declared he would, but he never came. Exactly the way I should have acted!

  14th.—I went again, last evening, to Casa Salvi, where I found the same little circle, with the addition of a couple of ladies. Stanmer was there, trying hard to talk to one of them, but making, I am sure, a very poor business of it. The Countess—well, the Countess was admirable. She greeted me like a friend of ten years, toward whom familiarity should not have engendered a want of ceremony; she made me sit near her, and she asked me a dozen questions about my health and my occupations.

  “I live in the past,” I said. “I go into the galleries, into the old palaces and the churches. Today I spent an hour in Michael Angelo’s chapel at San Loreozo.”

  “Ah yes, that’s the past,” said the Countess. “Those things are very old.”

  “Twenty-seven years old,” I answered.

  “Twenty-seven? Altro!”

  “I mean my own past,” I said. “I went to a great many of those places with your mother.”

  “Ah, the pictures are beautiful,” murmured the Countess, glancing at Stanmer.

  “Have you lately looked at any of them?” I asked. “Have you gone to the galleries with HIM?”

  She hesitated a moment, smiling. “It seems to me that your question is a little impertinent. But I think you are like that.”

  “A little impertinent? Never. As I say, your mother did me the honour, more than once, to accompany me to the Uffizzi.”

  “My mother must have been very kind to you.”

  “So it seemed to me at the time.”

  “At the time only?”

  “Well, if you prefer, so it seems to me now.”

  “Eh,” said the Countess, “she made sacrifices.”

  “To what, cara Signora? She was perfectly free. Your lamented father was dead—and she had not yet contracted her second marriage.”

  “If she was intending to marry again, it was all the more reason she should have been careful.”

  I looked at her a moment; she met my eyes gravely, over the top of her fan. “Are YOU very careful?” I said.

  She dropped her fan with a certain violence. “Ah, yes, you are impertinent!”

  “Ah no,” I said. “Remember that I am old enough to be your father; that I knew you when you were three years old. I may surely ask such questions. But you are right; one must do your mother justice. She was certainly thinking of her second marriage.”

  “You have not forgiven her that!” said the Countess, very gravely.

  “Have you?” I asked, more lightly.

  “I don’t judge my mother. That is a mortal sin. My stepfather was very kind to me.”

  “I remember him,” I said; “I saw him a great many times—your mother already received him.”

  My hostess sat with lowered eyes, saying nothing; but she presently looked up.

  “She was very unhappy with my father.”

  “That I can easily believe. And your stepfather—is he still living?”

  “He died—before my mother.”

  “Did he fight any more duels?”

  “He was killed in a duel,” said the Countess, discreetly.

  It seems almost monstrous, especially as I can give no reason for it- -but this announcement, instead of shocking me, caused me to feel a strange exhilaration. Most assuredly, after all these years, I bear the poor man no resentment. Of course I controlled my manner, and simply remarked to the Countess that as his fault had been so was his punishment. I think, however, that the feeling of which I speak was at the bottom of my saying to her that I hoped that, unlike her mother’s, her own brief married life had been happy.

  “If it was not,” she said, “I have forgotten it now.”—I wonder if the late Count Scarabelli was also killed in a duel, and if his adversary … Is it on the books that his adversary, as well, shall perish by the pistol? Which of those gentlemen is he, I wonder? Is it reserved for poor little Stanmer to put a bullet into him? No; poor little Stanmer, I trust, will do as I did. And yet, unfortunately for him, that woman is consummately plausible. She was wonderfully nice last evening; she was really irresistible. Such frankness and freedom, and yet something so soft and womanly; such graceful gaiety, so much of the brightness, without any of the stiffness, of good breeding, and over it all something so picturesquely simple and southern. She is a perfect Italian. But she comes honestly by it. After the talk I have just jotted down she changed her place, and the conversation for half an hour was general. Stanmer indeed said very little; partly, I suppose, because he is shy of talking a foreign tongue. Was I like that—was I so constantly silent? I suspect I was when I was perplexed, and Heaven knows that very often my perplexity was extreme. Before I went away I had a few more words tete-a-tete with the Countess.

  “I hope you are not leaving Florence yet,” she said; “you will stay a while longer?”

  I answered that I came only for a week, and that my week was over.

  “I stay on from day to day, I am so much interested.”

  “Eh, it’s the beautiful moment. I’m glad our city pleases you!”

  “Florence pleases me—and I take a paternal interest to our young friend,” I added, glancing at Stanmer. “I have become very fond of him.”

  “Bel tipo inglese,” said my hostess. “And he is very intelligent; he has a beautiful mind.”

  She stood there resting her smile and her clear, expressive eyes upon me.

  “I don’t like to praise him too much,” I rejoined, “lest I should appear to praise myself; he reminds me so much of what I was at his age. If your beautiful mother were to come to life for an hour she would see the resemblance.”

  She gave me a little amused stare.

  “And yet you don’t look at all like him!”

  “Ah, you didn’t know me when I was twenty-five. I was very handsome! And, moreover, it isn’t that, it’s the mental resemblance. I was ingenuous, candid, trusting, like him.”

  “Trusting? I remember my mother once telling me that you were the most suspicious and jealous of men!”

  “I fell
into a suspicious mood, but I was, fundamentally, not in the least addicted to thinking evil. I couldn’t easily imagine any harm of any one.”

  “And so you mean that Mr. Stanmer is in a suspicions mood?”

  “Well, I mean that his situation is the same as mine.”

  The Countess gave me one of her serious looks. “Come,” she said, “what was it—this famous situation of yours? I have heard you mention it before.”

  “Your mother might have told you, since she occasionally did me the honour to speak of me.”

  “All my mother ever told me was that you were—a sad puzzle to her.”

  At this, of course, I laughed out—I laugh still as I write it.

  “Well, then, that was my situation—I was a sad puzzle to a very clever woman.”

  “And you mean, therefore, that I am a puzzle to poor Mr. Stanmer?”

  “He is racking his brains to make you out. Remember it was you who said he was intelligent.”

  She looked round at him, and as fortune would have it, his appearance at that moment quite confirmed my assertion. He was lounging back in his chair with an air of indolence rather too marked for a drawing- room, and staring at the ceiling with the expression of a man who has just been asked a conundrum. Madame Scarabelli seemed struck with his attitude.

  “Don’t you see,” I said, “he can’t read the riddle?”

  “You yourself,” she answered, “said he was incapable of thinking evil. I should be sorry to have him think any evil of ME.”

  And she looked straight at me—seriously, appealingly—with her beautiful candid brow.

  I inclined myself, smiling, in a manner which might have meant—”How could that be possible?”

  “I have a great esteem for him,” she went on; “I want him to think well of me. If I am a puzzle to him, do me a little service. Explain me to him.”

  “Explain you, dear lady?”

  “You are older and wiser than he. Make him understand me.”

  She looked deep into my eyes for a moment, and then she turned away.

  26th.—I have written nothing for a good many days, but meanwhile I have been half a dozen times to Casa Salvi. I have seen a good deal also of my young friend—had a good many walks and talks with him. I have proposed to him to come with me to Venice for a fortnight, but he won’t listen to the idea of leaving Florence. He is very happy in spite of his doubts, and I confess that in the perception of his happiness I have lived over again my own. This is so much the case that when, the other day, he at last made up his mind to ask me to tell him the wrong that Madame de Salvi had done me, I rather checked his curiosity. I told him that if he was bent upon knowing I would satisfy him, but that it seemed a pity, just now, to indulge in painful imagery.