“Don’t gaze at my blushes,” said Madame de Montevesso in an even tone tinged with a little mockery and a little bitterness. “Would you believe that when I was a girl I was so shy that I used to blush crimson whenever anybody looked at me or spoke to me? It’s a failing which does not meet with much sympathy. And yet my suffering was very real. It would reach such a pitch at times that I was ready to cry.”
“Shall I go away?” asked Cosmo in a deadened voice. He waited for a moment while she seemed to debate in her mind the answer to the question. In his fear of being sent away he went on: “God knows I don’t want to leave you. And after all the Count is coming back and …”
“Oh, yes, he is coming back. Sit down. Yes. It would be better. Sit down. …” Cosmo sat down where he could see her admirable shoulders, the roundness of her averted head, coiffée en boucles and girt with a gold circlet, the shadowy retreating view of her profile. The long drapery of her train flowed to the ground in a dark blue shimmer. … “He is inevitable. He has always been inevitable,” came further from her lips which he couldn’t see, for the mirror above the mantelpiece reflected nothing but her forehead with the gold mist of her hair above.
Cosmo remained silent. For nothing in the world would he have made a sound. He held his breath with expectation; and in the extreme tension of his whole being the lights grew dim around him, while her white shoulders, the thick clustering curls, the arm on which she leaned, and the other bare arm hanging inert by her side, seemed the only source of light in the room.
“You don’t know me at all,” began the Countess de Montevesso. “I don’t charge you with forgetting; but the little you may remember of me cannot be of any use. It is only natural that I should be a stranger to you. But you cannot be a stranger to me. For one thing you were a boy and then you were not a child of outcasts without a country, of refugees with a ruined past and with no future. You were a young Latham, as rooted in your native soil as the old trees of your park. Even then there seemed to me something enviable about you.”
She turned her head a little to glance at him. “You had no idea what it was like after we had gone to London. My ignorance of the world was so profound that I felt ill at ease in it. I hoped I had an attractive face, but I only discovered that I was pretty from the remarks of the people in the street I overheard. I spent my life by the side of my mother’s couch. I never went out except attended by my father or by Aglae. My only amusement was to play a game of chess now and then with an old doctor, also a refugee, who looked after my mother, or listen to the conversation of the people who came to see us. Amongst them there were all the prominent men and women of the old regime. Refugees. They seldom spoke the truth to each other, and yet they were no more stupid than the rest of the world. Nobody could be more good-natured and better company, more frivolous or more inconsiderate. I have seen women of the highest rank work ten hours a day to get bread for their children, but they also slandered one another, told falsehoods about their conduct and their work, and quarrelled among themselves in the style of washerwomen. Morals were even looser than in the times before the Revolution. Manners were forgotten. Every transgression was excused in those who were regarded as good royalists. I don’t mean this to apply to the great body of the refugees. Some of them led irreproachable lives. Round our Princes there were some most absurd intrigues. I didn’t know much of all this, but I remember my poor father’s helpless indignations and my own appalled disgust at the things I could not help hearing and seeing.”
She turned her head to look at Cosmo. “I am telling you all this to give you some idea of the air I had to breathe,” she said in a changed tone. “I don’t think it contaminated me. I felt its odiousness; but all this seemed without remedy. I didn’t even suffer much from it. What I suffered most from was our domestic anxieties; my mother’s fears lest the small resources we had to live on should fail us altogether. Our daily crust of bread seemed to depend on political events in Europe, and they were going against us. Battles, negotiations, everything. A blight seemed to have fallen on the royalist cause. My mother didn’t conceal her distress. What touched me more still was the careworn, silent anxiety of my poor father.”
She paused, looking at Cosmo intently, meeting his eyes fixed on her face. “I was getting on for sixteen,” she continued. “No one ever paid the slightest attention to me. The only genuine passion in my heart was filial love. … But is it any good in going on? And then I can’t tell what you may have heard already.”
“All I have heard,” said Cosmo in a tone of profound respect, “is that Adèle de Montevesso’s life has been irreproachable.”
“I remember the time when all the world was doing its best to make it impossible. Would it shock you very much if I told you that I don’t care at all about its good opinion now? There was a time when it would put the worst construction possible on my distress, on
