Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (629 page)

“I wonder,” said Cosmo, “whether you could manage to obtain for me a quiet talk with that man on the next occasion he comes here.”

Spire received this overture in profound silence.

“Do you think you could?” insisted Cosmo.

A dispassionate raising of the eyebrows preceded the apparently irrelevant remark. “The worst of this house, sir, is that it seems open to all sorts of rabble.”

“I see. Well, try to think of some way, Spire. You may go now.”

Spire, carrying the boots, walked as far as the door, where he turned for a moment. “The only way I can think of, sir,” he said, “would be to make friends with that young woman.” Before Cosmo could recover from the surprise at the positive statement Spire had gone out and had shut the door.

Cosmo slept heavily but fitfully, with moments of complete oblivion interrupted by sudden starts, when he would lie on his back with open eyes, wondering for a moment where he was, and then fall asleep again before he had time to make a movement. In the morning the first thing he did was to scribble a note to the Countess de Montevesso to ask her permission to call that very morning. While writing the address he smiled to himself at the idea that it was after all the little Adele whom he remembered but dimly, mostly as a fair head hovering near his father’s armchair in the big drawing room, the windows of which opened on the western terrace. As a schoolboy during his holidays he saw the two girls, Adele and his sister, mostly in the evening. He had his own out-of-door pursuits while those girls stayed upstairs with their governess. Remembering how he used to catch glimpses of them, the fair and the dark, walking in the Park, he felt a greater curiosity to see the Countess de Montevesso than if he had never seen her before. He found it impossible to represent her to himself grown up, married for years, the daughter of an ambassador.

When the family of D’Armand departed from Latham Hall, it was as if a picture had faded, a picture of faces, attitudes, and colours, leaving untouched the familiar background of his Yorkshire home, on to which he could never recall them distinctly. He would be meeting a complete stranger and he wondered whether that lady, who, young as she still was, had lived through tragic-times and had seen so many people, would remember him at all. Him personally. For as to his home he had no doubt she had not forgotten; neither the stones, nor the woods, nor the streams. And as to the people Cosmo had a distinct notion that she was more familiar with his father than he and Henrietta ever had been. His father was not a man whom anybody could forget. And that Countess de Montevesso, more difficult for him to imagine than a complete stranger, would remember his mother better than he could himself. She had seen so much more of her day after day for something like three years; whereas he was at home only at intervals and while there took Lady Latham for granted, a kind, serene presence, beautifully dressed.

He handed the note to Spire with orders to send it off by one of the ragged idlers about the hotel door. There would be an answer. Then, approaching the window, he perceived that he could not see very much out of it. It was too high above the piazza, which furthermore was masked by the jutting balconies. But the sky was blue with a peculiar deep brilliance and the sunlight slanted over the roofs of the houses on the other side of the piazza. When he opened the window the keen pure air roused his vitality. The faint murmur of voices from below reached him very much as it had reached him downstairs the night before through the closed shutters of the dining room, as if the population of the town had never gone to bed.

While Spire was serving his breakfast in his room he wondered what the Countess de Montevesso would look like. The same fair head but higher above the ground and with the hair no longer flowing over the shoulders, but done up no doubt most becomingly and perhaps turned darker with age. It would be the hair of the daughter of an ambassador, able to judge of men and affairs, a woman of position, a very fine lady. Perhaps just a fine lady; but the memory of the child came to him with renewed force, gracious, quiet, with something timid and yet friendly in all its gestures, with his father’s hand smoothing the fair hair. . . . No. Not merely a fine lady.

Cosmo had no inborn aptitude for mere society life. Though not exactly shy, he lacked that assurance of manner which his good looks and his social status ought to have given him. He suspected there was too much mockery in the world, and the undoubted friendliness he had met with, especially from women, seemed to him always a little suspect, the effect not of his own merit, of which he had no idea, but of a shallow, good-natured compassion. He imagined himself awkward in company. The very brilliance of the entertainments, of which he had seen already a good many, was apt to depress his spirits. Often during talk with some pretty woman he would feel that he was not meant for that sort of life, and then suddenly he would withdraw into his shell. In that way he had earned for himself the reputation of being a little strange. He was to a certain extent aware of it, but he was not aware that this very thing made him interesting.

A gust of diffidence came over him while he was trying to eat some breakfast. “I really don’t want to see that Countess,” he thought. Then remembering the intonation in his father’s voice when talking of Adele, he wondered whether perchance he would find an uncommon personality. Cosmo had a profound belief in his father, though he was well aware that he had never understood him thoroughly. . . . But if she is a woman out of the common, he reflected further, then she can’t possibly be interested in a rough schoolboy grown into a young man of no particular importance. No doubt she would be amiable enough. . . .

“Clear away all these things, Spire,” he said, “and go downstairs to see if the messenger is back.”

The messenger was not back yet; and assisted by Spire, Cosmo began to dress himself with extreme care. The tying of his neckcloth was an irritating affair, and so was Spire’s perfectly wooden face while he was holding up the glass to him for that operation. Cosmo spoiled two neckcloths and became extremely dissatisfied with the cut and colour of various articles of attire which Spire presented to him one after another. The fashions for men were perfectly absurd. By an effort of mind Cosmo overcame this capricious discontent with familiar things and finished his dressing. Then he sent Spire once more downstairs to inquire if the messenger was back. Obediently, Spire disappeared, but once gone it did not seem as though he meant to return at all. There was no Spire. There was no bell-pull in the room either.

Cosmo stuck his head out through the door. Absolute silence reigned in the well of the stairs. A woman in black, on her knees beside a pail of water and scrub- bing the floor of the corridor, looked up at him. Cosmo drew his head in. She was a pitiful hag. ... He was sure of a gracious reception, of course. He was also sure of meeting a lot of people of all sorts. He wondered what sort of society she received. Everybody, no doubt; Austrians, Italians, French; all the triumphant reactionaries, all the depressed heads bobbing up again after the storm, venomous, revengeful, oppressive, odious. What the devil had become of Spire?

The long window right down to the floor had remained open. Suddenly the sound of a drum reached Cosmo’s ears. Stepping out on a balcony, he saw a company of infantry in white coats marching across a distant corner of the piazza. Austrians! Yes, their time had come. A voice behind him said: “The messenger is back, sir.” Cosmo stepped in and saw Spire empty-handed. “There’s a verbal answer, sir.”

“What is it? You haven’t spoken with the messenger, have you?”

“I have seen him, sir, but I got the message through the innkeeper. He speaks a little English. The lady would be glad to see you as soon after the fourth hour as possible. They have their own way of reckoning time, but as far as I can understand it, sir, it means something between ten and eleven. At any rate, it’s what Cantelucci says, and he can tell the time by an English watch all right.”

I “Shut the window, Spire. I don’t want to hear that drum. Yes, it would mean as soon after ten as possible, but why has the fellow been so long? Is it very far?”

“No, sir, I think it’s quite close, really. He was so long because he has been trying to give your note to the lady herself and there was some difficulty about it. That innkeeper tells me that instead of handing it to the porter the fellow got in through the kitchen door and was dodging about a passage for some time.”

Cosmo looked fixedly at Spire, whose face expressed no opinion whatever on those proceedings.

“Dodging in a passage,” repeated Cosmo. “But did he see the lady herself?”

“Apparently not, sir. Cantelucci slanged him for being so long, but he said he thought he was acting for the best. He would have been there yet if a black woman hadn’t come along and snatched the letter out of his hand. It was she too who brought down the message from the lady.”

“Oh, yes,” said Cosmo. “Don’t you remember there was a black maid?”

“Yes, sir, I remember perfectly well, in the housekeeper’s room. She learned to talk English very quickly, but she was a little spitfire.”

“Was she?”

Spire busied himself in brushing Cosmo’s hat while he remarked in an explanatory tone: “She could never understand a joke, sir.”

He attended Cosmo into the hall, where Cantelucci with his usual intense gravity and a deep bow asked whether the signore would want a carriage. Cosmo, however, preferred walking; therefore the youth who had taken Cosmo’s note was directed to guide the English milord to the Palazzo Brignoli. He had a tousled head of hair and wore a jacket that might have belonged at one time to a hussar’s uniform, with all its trimmings and buttons cut off and a ragged hole in each elbow. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes rolled expressively, and his smile discovered a set of very sound teeth.

“Si, si, Palazzo Rosso,” he said.

Cantelucci explained in his imperturbable and solemn manner that the populace gave that name to the Palace on account of the red granite of which it was built, and the thin-faced lad, bounding forward, preceded Cosmo across the piazza, looking over his shoulder from time to time. Cosmo’s doubts and apprehensions disappeared before the inevitable charm and splendour of the town. At the corner of a narrow lane and a small open space with some trees growing in the centre of it the ragged guide stopped and, pointing at a dark and magnificent building, left him alone. Massive and sombre, ornate and heavy, with a dark aspect and enormous carvings, the Palace where little Adele was living had to Cosmo’s eye the air of a sumptuous prison. The portal with its heavy iron-studded doors was reached by a flight of shallow steps, a segment of a wide circle, guarded on each side by an enormous griffin seated, tensely alert with wing and claw, on a high and narrow pedestal. On ascending the steps Cosmo discovered that the heavy door was ajar, just enough to let him slip in; and, at once, from the gloom of the arched passage he saw the inner sunshine on the oleanders of the inner court, flagged with marble, from whence a broad staircase ascended to the colonnaded gallery of the first floor.

Cosmo had seen no porter or other living soul, and there was no sound of any sort, no appearance of movement anywhere. Even the leaves of the oleanders kept perfectly still. In the light of the morning a slanting shadow cut the western wall into two triangles, one dark, the other glowing as with a red fire; and Cosmo remained for a moment spellbound by a strong impression of empty grandeur, magnificence, and solitude.

A voice behind him, issuing from somewhere in the big gateway through which he had passed, cried: “Ascend, signore!” Cosmo began to mount the open staircase, embarrassed as though he had been watched by thousands of eyes. In the gallery he hesitated, for the several doors he could see remained closed, and the only sound that reached his ears was the gentle plashing of the fountain in the court below him.

Before he had made up his mind the door in front of him opened fairly wide, but he could not see the person till he had entered an anteroom with narrow red and gilt settees ranged along its white walls. The door shut behind him and, turning round, he confronted a dark, plump mulatto woman who was staring at him with an expression of intense admiration. She clapped her hands in ecstasy and, opening her mouth, exhibited her white teeth in a low cackling laugh.

“Bonjour, Aglae,” said Cosmo readily.

The woman laughed again in sheer delight. “You remember my name, Mr. Cosmo! You quite frighten me, you grow so big. I remember you climb tree and throw nice ripe apple to the black girl. . . .” Her eyes gleamed and rolled absurdly.

Cosmo was so strangely touched by this extremely slight reminiscence of his tree-climbing boyhood, that when she added, “That was a good time,” he was quite ready to agree, thereby provoking another burst of delightful laughter. But Aglae was controlling herself obviously. Her laughter was subdued. It had not the unbounded freedom of sound that used to reverberate exotically in the dark passages at the back of Latham Hall; though there, too, Aglae tried to subdue it in view of rebukes or sarcastic comments in the servants’ hall. It stopped suddenly and Aglae in a tone of sober respect wanted to know how the Seignior was. Cosmo said that his father was very well.

“He a very great gentleman,” commented Aglae. “I always tremble when I see him. You very fine gentleman too, Mr. Cosmo.”

She moved to one of the inner doors, but as Cosmo was following her she raised her hand to prevent him and opened the door only a little way, then came back and said in a lower tone, “It’s to hear the bell better when it rings. . . . Will you wait a little bit here?” she asked anxiously.

“I will,” said Cosmo, “but surely you don’t want to tremble before me. What is the matter?”

“Nothing at all is the matter.” Aglae tossed her head, tied up in a bandana handkerchief, with something of the spirit of the old days.

Cosmo was amused. “I no tremble before you,” she continued. “I always like you very much. I am glad with all my heart to see you here.”

All the time she turned her ear to the door she had left the least bit ajar. She had on a high-waisted white calico dress, white stockings, and Genoese slippers on her feet. Her dark brown hands moved uneasily.