“A young man like myself, a romantic, must have a confidante, one who
feels and understands, one who has lived.” I bowed again in melancholy
admission of the fact. “It will be hard to go.”
He looked really troubled. His handsome warmly-tinted face wore an
expression of gravity that made him seem much older. His eyes, usually
alert and full of laughter, were wistfully dejected.
“I have loved her,” he said quietly.
For the first time in our acquaintance it seemed to me that the count
was speaking from that center of feeling that we call the heart. He
appeared no longer an irresponsible, almost elfish youth, but a man
who, as he himself expressed it, had lived. I was impressed.
“Have you told her?” I asked.
He shook his head murmuring:
“I decide to and I put it off. It is too hard. I fear what I may say.”
A sudden idea took possession of me. Writing it down in cold blood
it sounds like the deranged fancy of a lunatic. At the moment when
it came, I regarded it not only as a possible solution of all
our difficulties, but as an inspiration. My only excuse is that
self-preservation is the law of nature. I was drowning and I caught at
a straw.
“Do you really love Lizzie Harris?” I asked in a voice tense to the
trembling point.
“Very really.”
“More than that other lady, the thin one who wore the fur dress?”
“Much more.”
“More than any woman you have ever known?”
“A hundred times more.”
We must have presented an absurdly solemn appearance, I planting my
questions like a detective administering the third degree, the count
nodding automatically as he jerked out his answers, his eyes fixed on
me with an almost fierce stare.
“Why don’t you marry her?”
That was my inspiration. It seems to me the most inexplicable
aberration that ever seized a sane woman--only for the moment I wasn’t
sane. One of the curious points about it was that I never thought of
Lizzie at all, whether she would want him or not. All I saw was the
count transformed into a genie, unexpectedly come to my aid. I make no
doubt if she had shown reluctance I would have counseled him to kidnap
her as his ancestors kidnaped the Sabine women.
His expression brought me back to sense. He was looking at me with a
blank unbelieving surprise as if I had suggested something beyond the
limits of human endeavor. If I had urged him to inaugurate a conspiracy
against his king or an exploring party to the moon, he could not have
appeared more astonished.
“Marry her!” he ejaculated.
“Yes, marry her. You love her, you’ve just said so.”
“Most assuredly I do, to distraction.”
“Then why do you look so surprised?”
“But marriage--me?” He laid a finger on his breast and tapped on the
top button of his waistcoat, regarding me from beneath raised brows.
His expression was that of an intelligent person who can not believe
that he has heard aright. It made me angry.
“Yes, you. I could hardly be alluding to anybody else after what you’ve
just said.”
“But, my dear lady--” he sent a roving glance round the room as if
hunting for some one who would explain, then came back to me. As he met
my eyes he smiled, deprecatingly, almost tenderly, the smile with which
maturity greets the preposterous antics of a child. “Is it a joke you
make?”
“No, it is not,” I answered, “and I don’t see why you should think it
was. When you love a person you marry them, don’t you?”
“Alas, not always. I could never marry Miss Harris. She is not of my
order.”
“Order?” I was the one who ejaculated now.
“Exactly. Whomever I may love I only marry in my order.”
My inspiration collapsed, pierced by this unexpected and unfamiliar
word. For a moment we sat regarding each other. I don’t know how
I looked but I don’t think it could have been as abject as I felt
or the count, who is one of the most amiable of youths, would have
wanted to know what was the matter. If I had had my wits about me I
should have pretended it was a joke but I was too ashamed and crushed
to pretend anything. In the embarrassing pause I tried to smile, a
feeble propitiatory smile, which he answered in kind, brightly and
reassuringly. I saw he expected me to go on, and I didn’t know how to
go on except to argue it out with him.
“What does your order matter if you love a person?”
“But everything. It is, as you say here, what we’re there for.”
“But you do marry out of your class. Italian nobles have married
American women who were without family.”
He gave a gay smile, jerking his head with a little agreeing movement
toward his shoulder:
“Ah, truly, yes, but with fortunes--large fortunes. We need them, we
have not got the huge moneys in Italy that you have here. But the
adorable Miss Harris has nothing. Figure to yourself, Mrs. Drake; she
must work for her living. If I come home to my father with a story
like that, what happens? He is enraged, he turns me out--and then _I_
have to work for _my_ living.” He gave a delightful boyish laugh. “At
what?--pasting letters in a book? That is all I know.”
“Foreigners are very hard for Americans to understand,” I muttered,
wondering if any foreigner of any race would ever have understood why
a respectable American widow should offer her friend in marriage to an
unwilling Italian count.
He leaned from his chair, pointing the smoking cigarette at me. His
melancholy had vanished. He was a boy again, a light-hearted Latin boy,
intrigued and amused at the sentimental point of view obtaining under
the stars and stripes.
“It is you who are hard for us to understand--so loving money and so
loving love. And which you like the best we can’t find out. For us
one is here and one is there.” He pointed with the cigarette to two
opposite corners of the room. “Miss Harris I adore but I do not marry
her.” He planted his romance in the left-hand corner with a jab of his
cigarette. “And I marry a lady whom I may not love, but who has fortune
and who is of my class.” He planted her in the opposite corner with a
second jab. “They are so far apart.” And he waved the cigarette between
the two, with a sweep wide enough to indicate the distance that severed
sentiment from obligation.
That was the end of it. I pulled myself together and led the
conversation into a comparison of national characteristics. I don’t
know what he thought of me, probably that I was a horrible example of
what can be produced by a romance-ridden country.
When I think of it now (if I cared a farthing what happened to me) I
would be quite scared. I wonder if I’ve inherited a queer strain from
any of my forebears. They don’t look like it, but you can’t tell from
portraits and miniatures. In their days it was the fashion to paint out
all discreditable characteristics as, in ours, it is the highest merit
to paint them in. Could it be possible that one of those pop-eyed,
tight-mouthed women ever swerved from “a sweet reasonableness” and
bequeathed the tendency to me? I’ve read somewhere that while the
inclination to wrong-doing may not be transmitted, the weakened will
can pass on. Is my lunacy of to-day, my distracted waverings, my
temptations to disloyalty, the result of some one else’s lapse from the
normal? (The lamp’s going out. With the room getting dim I can see
the moonlight in a clear wash of silver on the windows.) It wasn’t the
little Huguenot lady. But her husband opposite, the formidable Puritan
in the wig, was one of the jury who condemned the witches. That may be
it. His cruelty is coming back to be paid for by his descendant--the
poor old witches are getting even at last. Perhaps my descendants will
some day writhe in atonement for my faults. But I have no descendants!
I never will have.
It’s the lamp’s last sputter--going out as I’m going out. In a minute
it will be dark, with the moonlight filling the gulfs of the backyards
and I, alone in the night, listening to the stillness, wondering if I
was only created to be an expiatory offering.