The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “But I thought you wanted so much to put me out of conceit of our friend.”

  “I admit I am inconsistent, but there are various reasons for it. In the first place—it’s obvious—I am open to the charge of playing a double game. I profess an admiration for the Countess Scarabelli, for I accept her hospitality, and at the same time I attempt to poison your mind; isn’t that the proper expression? I can’t exactly make up my mind to that, though my admiration for the Countess and my desire to prevent you from taking a foolish step are equally sincere. And then, in the second place, you seem to me, on the whole, so happy! One hesitates to destroy an illusion, no matter how pernicious, that is so delightful while it lasts. These are the rare moments of life. To be young and ardent, in the midst of an Italian spring, and to believe in the moral perfection of a beautiful woman— what an admirable situation! Float with the current; I’ll stand on the brink and watch you.”

  “Your real reason is that you feel you have no case against the poor lady,” said Stanmer. “You admire her as much as I do.”

  “I just admitted that I admired her. I never said she was a vulgar flirt; her mother was an absolutely scientific one. Heaven knows I admired that! It’s a nice point, however, how much one is hound in honour not to warn a young friend against a dangerous woman because one also has relations of civility with the lady.”

  “In such a case,” said Stanmer, “I would break off my relations.”

  I looked at him, and I think I laughed.

  “Are you jealous of me, by chance?”

  He shook his head emphatically.

  “Not in the least; I like to see you there, because your conduct contradicts your words.”

  “I have always said that the Countess is fascinating.”

  “Otherwise,” said Stanmer, “in the case you speak of I would give the lady notice.”

  “Give her notice?”

  “Mention to her that you regard her with suspicion, and that you propose to do your best to rescue a simple-minded youth from her wiles. That would be more loyal.” And he began to laugh again.

  It is not the first time he has laughed at me; but I have never minded it, because I have always understood it.

  “Is that what you recommend me to say to the Countess?” I asked.

  “Recommend you!” he exclaimed, laughing again; “I recommend nothing. I may be the victim to be rescued, but I am at least not a partner to the conspiracy. Besides,” he added in a moment, “the Countess knows your state of mind.”

  “Has she told you so?”

  Stanmer hesitated.

  “She has begged me to listen to everything you may say against her. She declares that she has a good conscience.”

  “Ah,” said I, “she’s an accomplished woman!”

  And it is indeed very clever of her to take that tone. Stanmer afterwards assured me explicitly that he has never given her a hint of the liberties I have taken in conversation with—what shall I call it?—with her moral nature; she has guessed them for herself. She must hate me intensely, and yet her manner has always been so charming to me! She is truly an accomplished woman!

  May 4th.—I have stayed away from Casa Salvi for a week, but I have lingered on in Florence, under a mixture of impulses. I have had it on my conscience not to go near the Countess again—and yet from the moment she is aware of the way I feel about her, it is open war. There need be no scruples on either side. She is as free to use every possible art to entangle poor Stanmer more closely as I am to clip her fine-spun meshes. Under the circumstances, however, we naturally shouldn’t meet very cordially. But as regards her meshes, why, after all, should I clip them? It would really be very interesting to see Stanmer swallowed up. I should like to see how he would agree with her after she had devoured him—(to what vulgar imagery, by the way, does curiosity reduce a man!) Let him finish the story in his own way, as I finished it in mine. It is the same story; but why, a quarter of a century later, should it have the same denoument? Let him make his own denoument.

  5th.—Hang it, however, I don’t want the poor boy to be miserable.

  6th.—Ah, but did my denoument then prove such a happy one?

  7th.—He came to my room late last night; he was much excited.

  “What was it she did to you?” he asked.

  I answered him first with another question. “Have you quarrelled with the Countess?”

  But he only repeated his own. “What was it she did to you?”

  “Sit down and I’ll tell you.” And he sat there beside the candle, staring at me. “There was a man always there—Count Camerino.”

  “The man she married?”

  “The man she married. I was very much in love with her, and yet I didn’t trust her. I was sure that she lied; I believed that she could be cruel. Nevertheless, at moments, she had a charm which made it pure pedantry to be conscious of her faults; and while these moments lasted I would have done anything for her. Unfortunately they didn’t last long. But you know what I mean; am I not describing the Scarabelli?”

  “The Countess Scarabelli never lied!” cried Stanmer.

  “That’s just what I would have said to any one who should have made the insinutation! But I suppose you are not asking me the question you put to me just now from dispassionate curiosity.”

  “A man may want to know!” said the innocent fellow.

  I couldn’t help laughing out. “This, at any rate, is my story. Camerino was always there; he was a sort of fixture in the house. If I had moments of dislike for the divine Bianca, I had no moments of liking for him. And yet he was a very agreeable fellow, very civil, very intelligent, not in the least disposed to make a quarrel with me. The trouble, of course, was simply that I was jealous of him. I don’t know, however, on what ground I could have quarrelled with him, for I had no definite rights. I can’t say what I expected—I can’t say what, as the matter stood, I was prepared to do. With my name and my prospects, I might perfectly have offered her my hand. I am not sure that she would have accepted it—I am by no means clear that she wanted that. But she wanted, wanted keenly, to attach me to her; she wanted to have me about. I should have been capable of giving up everything—England, my career, my family—simply to devote myself to her, to live near her and see her every day.”

  “Why didn’t you do it, then?” asked Stanmer.

  “Why don’t you?”

  “To be a proper rejoinder to my question,” he said, rather neatly, “yours should be asked twenty-five years hence.”

  “It remains perfectly true that at a given moment I was capable of doing as I say. That was what she wanted—a rich, susceptible, credulous, convenient young Englishman established near her en permanence. And yet,” I added, “I must do her complete justice. I honestly believe she was fond of me.” At this Stanmer got up and walked to the window; he stood looking out a moment, and then he turned round. “You know she was older than I,” I went on. “Madame Scarabelli is older than you. One day in the garden, her mother asked me in an angry tone why I disliked Camerino; for I had been at no pains to conceal my feeling about him, and something had just happened to bring it out. ‘I dislike him,’ I said, ‘because you like him so much.’ ‘I assure you I don’t like him,’ she answered. ‘He has all the appearance of being your lover,’ I retorted. It was a brutal speech, certainly, but any other man in my place would have made it. She took it very strangely; she turned pale, but she was not indignant. ‘How can he be my lover after what he has done?’ she asked. ‘What has he done?’ She hesitated a good while, then she said: ‘He killed my husband.’ ‘Good heavens!’ I cried, ‘and you receive him!’ Do you know what she said? She said, ‘Che voule?’”

  “Is that all?” asked Stanmer.

  “No; she went on to say that Camerino had killed Count Salvi in a duel, and she admitted that her husband’s jealousy had been the occasion of it. The Count, it appeared, was a monster of jealousy— he had led her a dreadful life. He himself, meanwhile, had been anything b
ut irreproachable; he had done a mortal injury to a man of whom he pretended to be a friend, and this affair had become notorious. The gentleman in question had demanded satisfaction for his outraged honour; but for some reason or other (the Countess, to do her justice, did not tell me that her husband was a coward), he had not as yet obtained it. The duel with Camerino had come on first; in an access of jealous fury the Count had struck Camerino in the face; and this outrage, I know not how justly, was deemed expiable before the other. By an extraordinary arrangement (the Italians have certainly no sense of fair play) the other man was allowed to be Camerino’s second. The duel was fought with swords, and the Count received a wound of which, though at first it was not expected to be fatal, he died on the following day. The matter was hushed up as much as possible for the sake of the Countess’s good name, and so successfully that it was presently observed that, among the public, the other gentleman had the credit of having put his blade through M. de Salvi. This gentleman took a fancy not to contradict the impression, and it was allowed to subsist. So long as he consented, it was of course in Camerino’s interest not to contradict it, as it left him much more free to keep up his intimacy with the Countess.”

  Stanmer had listened to all this with extreme attention. “Why didn’t SHE contradict it?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I am bound to believe it was for the same reason. I was horrified, at any rate, by the whole story. I was extremely shocked at the Countess’s want of dignity in continuing to see the man by whose hand her husband had fallen.”

  “The husband had been a great brute, and it was not known,” said Stanmer.

  “Its not being known made no difference. And as for Salvi having been a brute, that is but a way of saying that his wife, and the man whom his wife subsequently married, didn’t like him.”

  Stanmer hooked extremely meditative; his eyes were fixed on mine. “Yes, that marriage is hard to get over. It was not becoming.”

  “Ah,” said I, “what a long breath I drew when I heard of it! I remember the place and the hour. It was at a hill-station in India, seven years after I had left Florence. The post brought me some English papers, and in one of them was a letter from Italy, with a lot of so-called ‘fashionable intelligence.’ There, among various scandals in high life, and other delectable items, I read that the Countess Bianca Salvi, famous for some years as the presiding genius of the most agreeable seen in Florence, was about to bestow her hand upon Count Camerino, a distinguished Bolognese. Ah, my dear boy, it was a tremendous escape! I had been ready to marry the woman who was capable of that! But my instinct had warned me, and I had trusted my instinct.”

  “‘Instinct’s everything,’ as Falstaff says!” And Stanmer began to laugh. “Did you tell Madame de Salvi that your instinct was against her?”

  “No; I told her that she frightened me, shocked me, horrified me.”

  “That’s about the same thing. And what did she say?”

  “She asked me what I would have? I called her friendship with Camerino a scandal, and she answered that her husband had been a brute. Besides, no one knew it; therefore it was no scandal. Just YOUR argument! I retorted that this was odious reasoning, and that she had no moral sense. We had a passionate argument, and I declared I would never see her again. In the heat of my displeasure I left Florence, and I kept my vow. I never saw her again.”

  “You couldn’t have been much in love with her,” said Stanmer.

  “I was not—three months after.”

  “If you had been you would have come back—three days after.”

  “So doubtless it seems to you. All I can say is that it was the great effort of my life. Being a military man, I have had on various occasions to face time enemy. But it was not then I needed my resolution; it was when I left Florence in a post-chaise.”

  Stanmer turned about the room two or three times, and then he said: “I don’t understand! I don’t understand why she should have told you that Camerino had killed her husband. It could only damage her.”

  “She was afraid it would damage her more that I should think he was her lover. She wished to say the thing that would most effectually persuade me that he was not her lover—that he could never be. And then she wished to get the credit of being very frank.”

  “Good heavens, how you must have analysed her!” cried my companion, staring.

  “There is nothing so analytic as disillusionment. But there it is. She married Camerino.”

  “Yes, I don’t lime that,” said Stanmer. He was silent a while, and then he added—”Perhaps she wouldn’t have done so if you had remained.”

  He has a little innocent way! “Very likely she would have dispensed with the ceremony,” I answered, drily.

  “Upon my word,” he said, “you HAVE analysed her!”

  “You ought to he grateful to me. I have done for you what you seem unable to do for yourself.”

  “I don’t see any Camerino in my case,” he said.

  “Perhaps among those gentlemen I can find one for you.”

  “Thank you,” he cried; “I’ll take care of that myself!” And he went away—satisfied, I hope.

  10th.—He’s an obstinate little wretch; it irritates me to see him sticking to it. Perhaps he is looking for his Camerino. I shall leave him, at any rate, to his fate; it is growing insupportably hot.

  11th.—I went this evening to bid farewell to the Scarabelli. There was no one there; she was alone in her great dusky drawing-room, which was lighted only by a couple of candles, with the immense windows open over the garden. She was dressed in white; she was deucedly pretty. She asked me, of course, why I had been so long without coming.

  “I think you say that only for form,” I answered. “I imagine you know.”

  “Che! what have I done?”

  “Nothing at all. You are too wise for that.”

  She looked at me a while. “I think you are a little crazy.”

  “Ah no, I am only too sane. I have too much reason rather than too little.”

  “You have, at any rate, what we call a fixed idea.”

  “There is no harm in that so long as it’s a good one.”

  “But yours is abominable!” she exclaimed, with a laugh.

  “Of course you can’t like me or my ideas. All things considered, you have treated me with wonderful kindness, and I thank you and kiss your hands. I leave Florence tomorrow.”

  “I won’t say I’m sorry!” she said, laughing again. “But I am very glad to have seen you. I always wondered about you. You are a curiosity.”

  “Yes, you must find me so. A man who can resist your charms! The fact is, I can’t. This evening you are enchanting; and it is the first time I have been alone with you.”

  She gave no heed to this; she turned away. But in a moment she came back, and stood looking at me, and her beautiful solemn eyes seemed to shine in the dimness of the room.

  “How COULD you treat my mother so?” she asked.

  “Treat her so?”

  “How could you desert the most charming woman in the world?”

  “It was not a case of desertion; and if it had been it seems to me she was consoled.”

  At this moment there was the sound of a step in the ante-chamber, and I saw that the Countess perceived it to be Stanmer’s.

  “That wouldn’t have happened,” she murmured. “My poor mother needed a protector.”

  Stanmer came in, interrupting our talk, and looking at me, I thought, with a little air of bravado. He must think me indeed a tiresome, meddlesome bore; and upon my word, turning it all over, I wonder at his docility. After all, he’s five-and-twenty—and yet I MUST add, it DOES irritate me—the way he sticks! He was followed in a moment by two or three of the regular Italians, and I made my visit short.

  “Good-bye, Countess,” I said; and she gave me her hand in silence. “Do you need a protector?” I added, softly.

  She looked at me from head to foot, and then, almost angrily—”Yes, Signore.”

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sp; But, to deprecate her anger, I kept her hand an instant, and then bent my venerable head and kissed it. I think I appeased her.

  BOLOGNA, 14th.—I left Florence on the 11th, and have been here these three days. Delightful old Italian town—but it lacks the charm of my Florentine secret.

  I wrote that last entry five days ago, late at night, after coming back from Casa Salsi. I afterwards fell asleep in my chair; the night was half over when I woke up. Instead of going to bed, I stood a long time at the window, looking out at the river. It was a warm, still night, and the first faint streaks of sunrise were in the sky. Presently I heard a slow footstep beneath my window, and looking down, made out by the aid of a street lamp that Stanmer was but just coming home. I called to him to come to my rooms, and, after an interval, he made his appearance.

  “I want to bid you good-bye,” I said; “I shall depart in the morning. Don’t go to the trouble of saying you are sorry. Of course you are not; I must have bullied you immensely.”

  He made no attempt to say he was sorry, but he said he was very glad to have made my acquaintance.

  “Your conversation,” he said, with his little innocent air, “has been very suggestive.”

  “Have you found Camerino?” I asked, smiling.

  “I have given up the search.”

  “Well,” I said, “some day when you find that you have made a great mistake, remember I told you so.”

  He looked for a minute as if he were trying to anticipate that day by the exercise of his reason.

  “Has it ever occurred to you that YOU may have made a great mistake?”

  “Oh yes; everything occurs to one sooner or later.”

  That’s what I said to him; but I didn’t say that the question, pointed by his candid young countenance, had, for the moment, a greater force than it had ever had before.