“I did beat her faithfully,” she declared with the calmness of old age and conscious rectitude. The lips of M. de Montevesso twitched slightly. “I did really, though often feeling too weary to raise my arm. Then I would throw a shawl over my head and go in the rain to speak to Father Paul. He had taught her to read and write. He is full of charity. He would shrug his shoulders and tell me to put my trust in God. It was all very well for him to talk like that. True that on your account I was the greatest person for miles around. I had the first place everywhere. But now that you made us come out here just because of your fancy to turn the child into a Contessa, all my poor senses leave my old body. For, you know, if I did beat her, being entrusted with your authority, everybody else in the village waited on a turn of her finger. She was full of pride and wilfulness then. Now since you have introduced her amongst all these grandissimi signori of whom she had only heard as one hears of angels in heaven, she seems to have lost her head with the excess of pride and obstinacy. What is one to do? The other day on account of something I said she fastened her ten fingers into my gray hair. …” She threw her shawl off and raised her creased eyelids. … “This gray hair, on the oldest head of your family, Helion. If it hadn’t been for Maria she would have left me a corpse on the floor.” The mild bearing of the old woman had a dignity of its own, but at this point it broke down and she became agitated.
“Many a time I sat up in my bed thinking half the night. I am an old woman. I can read the signs. This is a matter for priests. When I was a big girl in our village they had to exorcise a comely youth, a herdsman. I am not fit to talk of such matters. But you, Helion, could say a word or two to Father Paul. He would know what to do … or get the Bishop …”
“Amazing superstition,” Count Helion exclaimed in a rasping growl. “The days of priests and devils are gone,” he went on angrily, but paused as if struck with a sudden doubt or a new idea. The old woman shook her head slightly. In the depths of her native valley all the days were alike in their hopes and fears as far back as she could remember. She did not know how she had offended her brother and emitted a sigh of resignation.
“What’s the trouble now?” Count Helion asked brusquely.
The old woman shrugged her shoulders expressively. Count Helion insisted. “There must be some cause.”
“The cause, as I am a sinner, can be no other but that young signore that came out with you and to whom you bowed so low. I didn’t know you had to bow to anybody unless perhaps to the King who has come back lately. But then a king is anointed with holy oils! I couldn’t believe my eyes. What kind of prince was that?” She waited, screwing her eyes up at Count Helion, who looked down at her inscrutably and at last condescended to say:
“That was an Englishman.”
She moaned with astonishment and alarm. A heretic! She thought no heretic could be good-looking. Didn’t they have their wickedness written on their faces?
“No,” said Count Helion. “No man has that, and no woman, either.”
Again he paused to think. “Let us go in now,” he added.
The big room (all the rooms in that Palazzo were big unless they happened to be mere dark and airless cupboards), which they entered as quietly as if a sick person had been lying in there at the point of death, contained amongst its gilt furniture also a few wooden stools and a dark walnut table brought down from the farmhouse for the convenience of its rustic occupants. A priest sitting in a gorgeous armchair held to the light of a common brass oil lamp an open book, the shadow of which darkened a whole corner of the vast space between the high walls decorated with rare marbles, long mirrors, and heavy hangings. A few small pieces of washing were hung out to dry on a string stretched from a window latch to the back of a chair. A common brazier stood in the fireplace and, near it, a gaunt, bony woman dressed in black with a white handkerchief on her head was stirring something in a little earthen pot. Ranged at the foot of a dais bearing a magnificent but dismantled couch of state were two small wooden bedsteads, on one of which lay the girl whom Cosmo knew only as “Clelia, my husband’s niece,” with a hand under her cheek. The other cheek was much flushed; a tangle of loose black hair covered the pillow. Whether from respect for the priest or from mere exhaustion she was keeping perfectly still under her bedclothes pulled up to her very neck so that only her head remained uncovered.
At the entrance of the Count the priest closed his book and stood up, but the woman by the mantelpiece went on stirring her pot. Count Helion returned a “Bonsoir, Abbé” to the priest’s silent bow, put down the candelabra on a console, and walked straight to the bedstead. The other three people, the gaunt woman still with her pot in her hand, approached it too but kept their distance.
The girl Clelia remained perfectly still under the downward thoughtful gaze of Count Helion. In that face half buried in the pillow one eye glittered full of tears. She refused to make the slightest sound in reply to Count Helion’s questions, orders, and remonstrances. Even his coaxings, addressed to her in the same
