Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (631 page)

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.

Adele 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 hl*e 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 de 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 011 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 Fort.”

“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 Adele. “Come again this evening. There will be a few people here; and, as you have said, when a fe* 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 hia parting bow when Madame de Montevesso, with the two words “d VAnglaise,” 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 un- mistakable. 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 r.ome images and even came to the verge of that state 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.

III

Returning that evening to the Palazzo Brignoli, Cosmo found the lantern under the vaulted roof lighted. There was also a porter in gold-laced livery and a cocked hat who saluted him, and in the white anteroom with red benches along the walls two lackeys made ready to divesthim of his cloak. But a man in sombre garments detained Cosmo, saying that he was the ambassador’s valet, and led him away along a very badly lighted inner corridor. He explained that His Excellency the Ambassador wished to see Monsieur Latham for a few moments in private before Monsieur Latham joined the general company. The ambassador’s cabinet into which he introduced Cosmo was lighted by a pair of candelabra. Cosmo was told that His Excellency was finishing dressing, and then the man disappeared. Cosmo noticed that there were several doors besides the one by which he had entered, which was the least conspicuous of them all, and in fact so inconspicuous, corresponding exactly to a painted panel, that it might have been called a secret door. Other doors were framed in costly woods, lining the considerable thicknesses of the walls. One of them opened without noise and Cosmo saw enter a man somewhat taller than he had expected to see, with a white head, in a coat with softly gleaming embroideries and a broad ribbon across his breast. He advanced, opening his arms wide, and Cosmo, who noticed that one of the hands was holding a snuffbox, submitted with good grace to the embrace of the Marquis d’Armand, whose lips touched his cheeks one after another and whose hands then rested at arm’s length on his shoulder for a moment.

“Sit down, mon enfant,” were the first words spoken, and Cosmo obeyed, facing the armchair into which the Marquis had dropped. A white meagre hand set in fine lace moved the candelabra on the table, and Cosmo good-humouredly submitted to being contemplated in silence. This man in a splendid coat, white-headed and with a broad ribbon across his breast, seemed to have no connection whatever with his father’s guest, whom as a boy he remembered walking with Sir Charles amongst deep shrubberies or writing busily at one end of the long table in the library of Latham Hall, always with the slightly subdued mien of an exile and an air of being worried by the possession of unspeakable secrets which he preserved even when playing at backgammon with Sir Charles in the great drawing room. Cosmo, returning the gaze of the tired eyes, remarked that the ambassador looked old but not at all senile.

At last the Marquis declared that he could detect the lineaments of his old friend in the son’s face, and in a voice that was low and kindly put a series of questions about Sir Charles, about London and his old friends there; questions which Cosmo, especially as to the latter, was not always able to answer fully.

“I forget! You are still so young,” said the ambassador, recollecting himself. This young man sitting here before him with a friendly smile had his friends amongst his own comtemporaries, shared the ideas and the views of his own generation which had grown up since the Revolution, to whom the Revolution was only a historical fact and whose enthusiasms had a strange complexion, for the undisciplined hopes of the young make them reckless in words and sometimes in actions. The Marquis’s own generation had been different. It had had no inducement to be reckless. It had been born to a settled order of things. Certainly a few philosophers had been indulging for years in subversive sentimentalism, but the foundations of Europe seemed unshakable. He noticed Cosmo’s expectant attitude and said:

“I wonder what my dear old friend is thinking of all this.” ^

“It is not very easy to get at my father’s thoughts,” confessed Cosmo. “After all, you must know my father much better than I do, Monsieur le Marquis.”

“In the austerity of his convictions your father was more like a republican of ancient times,” said the Marquis seriously. “Does that surprise you, my young friend? ...” Cosmo shook his head slightly. . . . “Yet we always agreed very well. Your father understood every kind of fidelity. The world had never known him and it will never know him now. But I, who approached him closely, could have nothing but the greatest respect for his character and for his far-seeing wisdom.”

“I am very glad to hear you say this,” interjected Cosmo.

“He was a scornful man,” said the Marquis, then paused and repeated once more: “Yes. Un grand dedaigneux. He was that. But one accepted it from him as one would not from another man, because one felt that it was not the result of mean grievances or disappointed hopes. Now the old order is coming back and, whatever my old friend may think of it, he had his share in that work.”

Cosmo raised his head. “I had no idea,” he murmured.

“Yes,” said the Marquis. “Indirectly if you like. AH I could offer to my Princes was my life, my toil, the sacrifice of my deepest feelings as husband and father. I don’t say this to boast. I could not have acted otherwise. But for my share of the work, risky, often desperate, and continuously hopeless as it seemed to be, I have to thank your father’s help, mon jeune ami. It came out of that fortune which some day will be yours. The only thing in all the activities the penetrating mind of your father was not scornful of was my fidelity. He understood that it was above the intrigues, the lies, the selfish stupidities of that exiles’ life which we all shared with our Princes. They will never know how much they owe to that English gentleman. When parting with my wife and child I was sustained by the thought that his friendship and care were extended over them and would not fail.”