The success of this move had gone far beyond Mr. Courtenay’s highest
hopes. He was unprepared for the suddenness of its acceptance. He went
off and told Lady Caryisfort, with a surprise and satisfaction that was
almost rueful. ‘Since that woman came into my niece’s affairs,’ he said,
‘I have had to sacrifice something for every step I have gained; and I
find that I have made the sacrifice exactly when it suited her--to buy a
concession she was dying to make. I never meant her to set foot in
Langton, and now she is going there as mistress; and just, I am certain,
at the time it suits her to go. This is what happens to a simple-minded
man when he ventures to enter the lists with women. I have a great mind
to put everything in her hands and retire from the field.’
‘I don’t think she is so clever as you give her credit for,’ said Lady
Caryisfort, who was somewhat languid after the night’s exertions. ‘I
suspect it was you who found out the moment that suited you rather than
she.’
But she gave him, in her turn, an account of what she had done, and they
formed an alliance offensive and defensive--a public treaty of
friendship for the world’s inspection, and a secret alliance known only
to themselves, by the conditions of which Lady Caryisfort bound herself
to repair to London and take Kate under her charge when it should be
thought necessary and expedient by the allied powers. She pledged
herself to present the heiress and watch over her and guard her from all
match-makers, that the humble chaperon might be dismissed, and allowed
to go in peace. When he had concluded this bargain Mr. Courtenay went
away with a lighter heart, to make preparations for his niece’s return.
He had been most successful in his pretence to get her away from
Florence; and now this second arrangement to get rid of the relations
who would be no longer necessary, seemed to him a miracle of diplomacy.
He chuckled to himself over it, and rubbed his hands.
‘Kate must not be treated as a child any longer--she is grown up, she
has a judgment of her own,’ he said, with a delicious sense of humour;
and then he listened very gravely to all her enthusiastic descriptions
of what she was to do when she got to Langton. Kate, however, after the
first glow of her resolution, did not feel the matter so easy as it
appeared. She had no thought of the violets, which Francesca swept up,
at the moment; but afterwards the recollection of them came back to her.
She had allowed them to be swept away without a thought. What a cold
heart--what an ungrateful nature--she must have! And poor Antonio! In
the light of Langton, Antonio looked to her all at once impossible--as
impossible as it would be to transplant his old palace to English soil.
No way could the two ideas be harmonised. She puckered her brows over it
till she made her head ache. Count Buoncompagni and Langton-Courtenay!
They would not come together--could not--it was impossible! Indeed the
one idea chased the other from her mind. And how was she to intimate
this strange and cruel fact to him? How was she to show that all his
graceful attentions must be brought to an end?--that she was going home,
and all must be over! And the worst was that it could not be done
gradually; but one way or another must be managed at once.
The next day Lady Caryisfort came, as usual, on her way to the Cascine;
but, to Kate’s surprise and relief, and, it must be owned, also to her
disappointment, Antonio was not there. She declined the next invitation
to Lady Caryisfort’s, inventing a headache for the occasion, and growing
more and more perplexed the longer she thought over that difficult
matter. It was while she was musing thus that Bertie Hardwick one day
managed to get beside her for a moment, while Ombra was talking to his
cousin. Bertie Eldridge had raised a discussion about some literary
matter, and the two had gone to consult a book in the little ante-room,
which served as a kind of library; the other Bertie was left alone with
Kate, a thing which had not happened before for weeks. He went up to her
the moment they were gone, and stood hesitating and embarrassed before
her.
‘Miss Courtenay,’ he said, and waited till she looked up.
Something moved in Kate’s heart at the sound of his voice--some chord of
early recollection--remembrances which seemed to her to stretch so far
back--before the world began.
‘Well, Mr. Hardwick?’ she said, looking up with a smile. Why there
should be something pathetic in that smile, and a little tightness
across her eyelids, as if she could have cried, Kate could not have
told, and neither can I.
‘Are you pleased to go home?--is it with your own will? or did your
uncle’s coming distress you?’ he said, in a voice which was--yes, very
kind, almost more than friendly; brotherly, Kate said to herself.
‘Distress me?’ she said.
‘Yes; I have thought you looked a little troubled sometimes. I can’t
help noticing. Don’t think me impertinent, but I can’t bear to see
trouble in your face.’
Kate made no reply, but she looked up at him--looked him straight in the
eyes. Once more she did not know why she did it, and she did not think
of half the meanings which he saw written in her face. He faltered; he
turned away; he grew red and grew pale; and then came back to her with
an answering look which did not falter; but for the re-entrance of the
others he must have said something. But they came back, and he did not
speak. If he had spoken, what would he have said?
This gave a new direction to Kate’s thoughts, but still it was with a
heavy heart that she entered Lady Caryisfort’s drawing-room, not more
than a week after that evening when Antonio had asked for the violets,
and she had hesitated whether she would give them. She had hesitated! It
was this thought which made her so much ashamed. She had been lonely,
and she had been willing to accept his heart as a plaything; and how
could she say to him now, ‘I am no longer lonely. I am going home; and I
could not take you, a stranger, back, to be master of Langton?’ She
could not say this, and what was she to say? Antonio Buoncompagni was
not much more comfortable; he had been thoroughly schooled, and he had
begun to accept his part. He even saw, and that clearly, that a pretty,
independent bird in the hand, able to pipe as he wished, was better than
a fluttering, uncertain fledgling in the bush; but he had a lively sense
of honour, and he had committed himself. The young lady, he thought,
ought at least to have the privilege of refusing him. ‘Go, then, and be
refused--_pazzo_!’ said his aunt. ‘Most people avoid a refusal, but thou
wishest it. It is a pity that thou shouldst not be satisfied.’ But,
having obtained this permission, the young Count was not, perhaps, so
ready to avail himself of it. He did not care to be rejected any more
than other men, but he was anxious to reconcile his conscience to his
desertion; and he had a tender sense that he himself--Antonio--was not
one to be easily forgotten. He watched Kate from the moment of her
entry, and persuaded himself that she was pale. ‘_Poverina!_’ he said,
beneath his moustache. Alas! the sacrifice must be made; but then it
might be done in a gentle way.
The evening, however, was half over before he had found his way to her
side--a circumstance which filled Kate with wonder, and kept her in a
curious suspense; for she could not talk freely to anyone else while he
was within sight, to whom she had so much (she thought) to say. He came,
and Kate was confused and troubled. Somehow she felt he was changed. Was
he less handsome, less tall, less graceful? What had happened to him?
Surely there was something. He was no longer the young hero who had
dropped on his knee, and kissed her hand for Italy. She was confused,
and could not tell how it was.
‘You are going to leave Florence?’ he said. ‘It is sudden--it is too sad
to think of. Miss Courtenay, I hope it is not you who wish to leave our
beautiful Italy--you, who have understood her so well?’
‘No, it is not I,’ said Kate. ‘I should not have gone of my own free
will; but yet I am very willing--I am ready to go--it is home,’ she
added, hastily, and with meaning. ‘It is the place I love best in the
world.’
‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I had thought--I had hoped you loved Italy too.’
‘Oh! so I do, Count Buoncompagni--and I thought I did still more,’ cried
the girl, eager to make her hidden and shy, yet brave apology. ‘I
thought I could have lived and died here, where people were so good to
me. But, you know, whenever I heard the name of home, it made my blood
all dance in my veins. I felt I had been making a mistake, and that
there was nothing in the world I loved like Langton-Courtenay. I made a
great mistake, but I did not mean it. I hope nobody will think it is
unkind of me, or that I am fond of change.’
Count Antonio stood and listened to this speech with a grim smile on his
face, and a look in his eyes which was new to Kate. He, too, was making
a disagreeable discovery, and he did not like it. He made her a bow, but
he did not make any answer. He stood by her side a few moments, and then
he asked her suddenly, ‘May I get you some tea?--can I bring you
anything?’ with a forced quietness; and when Kate said ‘No,’ he went
away, and devoted himself for all the rest of the evening to Lady
Caryisfort. There was pique in his manner, but there was something more,
which she could not make out; and she sat rather alone for the rest of
the evening. She was left to feel her mistake, to wonder, to be somewhat
offended and affronted; and went back to the Lung-Arno impatient to
hurry over all the packing, and get home at once. But she never found
out that in thus taking the weight of the breaking off on her own
shoulders, she had saved Count Antonio a great deal of trouble.
When Lady Caryisfort found out what had passed, her amusement was very
great. ‘She will go now and think all her life that she has done him an
injury, and broken his heart, and all kinds of nonsense,’ she said to
herself. ‘Poor Antonio! what a horrible thing money is! But he has
escaped very cheaply, thanks to Kate, and she will make a melancholy
hero of him, poor dear child, for the rest of her life.’
In this, however, Lady Caryisfort, not knowing all the circumstances,
was wrong; for Kate felt vaguely that there was something more than the
honourable despair of a young Paladin in her Count’s acceptance of her
explanation. He accepted it too readily, with too little attempt to
resist or remonstrate. She was more angry than pitiful, ignorant as she
was. A man who takes a woman so entirely at her first word almost
insults her, even though the separation is her own doing. Kate felt this
vaguely, and a hot blush rose to her cheek for two or three days after,
at the very mention of Antonio’s name.
The person, however, who felt this breaking off most was old Francesca,
who had gone to an extra mass for weeks back, to promote the suit she
had so much at heart. She cried herself sick when she saw it was all
over, and said to herself, she knew something evil would happen as soon
as _il vecchio_ came. _Il vecchio’s_ appearance was always the signal
for mischief. He had come, and now once more the party was on the wing,
and she herself was to be torn from her native place, the Florence she
adored, for this old man’s caprice. Francesca thought with a little
fierce satisfaction that, when his soul went to purgatory, there would
be nobody to pray him out, and that his penance would be long enough.
The idea gave her a great deal of satisfaction. She would not help him
out, she was certain--not so much as by a single prayer.
But all the time she got on with her packing, and the ladies began to
frequent the shops to buy little souvenirs of Florence. It was a busy
time, and there was a great deal of movement, and so much occupation
that the members of the little party lost sight of each other, as it
were, and pursued their different preparations in their own way. ‘She is
packing,’ or, ‘she is shopping,’ was said, first of one, and then of
another; and no further questions were asked. And thus the days crept
on, and the time approached when they were to set out once more on the
journey home.