LUCINDA’S mental idiosyncrasy resisted any attempt at idealization; for all that she had accused me of making the attempt. Though she would not persist in cruelty, and would remove herself from the temptation to it when once she had realized what it was, yet she could be, and had been, cruel. In like manner she could be hard and callous, very inaccessible to sentimentality, to that obvious appeal to the emotions which takes its strength from our common humanity, with its common incidents—its battle, murder, and sudden death—and so on. She did not accept these things at their face value, or in what one may call their universal aspect. In her inner mind—she was not very articulate, or at all theoretical, about it—but in her inner mind she seemed to re-value each of such incidents by an individual and personal standard which, in its coolness and intellectual detachment, certainly approached what most of us good human creatures—so ready to cry, as we are so ready to laugh—would call a degree of callousness. There was a considerable clear-sightedness in this disposition of hers, but also fully that amount of error which (as I suppose) our own personality always introduces into our judgments of people. We see them through our own spectacles, which sometimes harden and sometimes soften the outlines of the objects regarded—among which is included the wearer of the spectacles.
She had loved Arsenio once; she had cleaved unto him with a fidelity to which—in these days—her own word “primitive” must be allowed to be the most obviously applicable; remorse had smitten her over her cruelty to him. All the same, in a measure she erred about him, judging his love solely by the standard of his conduct, his romance in the light of his frivolity and shamelessness, his sensibility by his failure adequately to understand a subtle and specialized sensibility in herself. That, at least, was the attitude to which her years of association with him—now intimate, now distant and aloof—had brought her. It was not, of course, to be attributed in anything like its entirety to the girl whom he had kissed at Cragsfoot, or whom he had loved at Venice, or carried off from Waldo. Her final judgment of him was the result of what is called, in quite another connection, a progressive revelation.
Thus it happened that his tragic death was—to put it moderately—no more tragic to her than it was to me his friend rather by circumstances than choice or taste, by interest and amusement more than by affection. She took him at his word, so to say, and accepted the note of ironical comedy which he himself was responsible for importing into the occurrence. Keen-eyed for that aspect, and in a bitter way keenly appreciative of it, she was blind to any other, and indeed reluctant to try to see it—almost afraid that, even dead, he might befool her again, still irremediably suspicious that he was deceiving her by lies and posturings. As a result, she was really and truly—in the depths of her soul—unmoved by the catastrophe, and not unamused by the trappings with which Arsenio had be-draped it—or, rather, his previously rehearsed but never actually presented, version of it.
For the outside observer—comparatively outside, anyhow—and for the amateur of comedy and its material—human foibles, prejudices, ambitions—there was amusement to be had. As soon as Lucinda’s decision to renounce the inheritance—except the palazzo which, as she observed to me, had been honestly come by, and honestly preserved by being let out in lodgings—Arsenio’s last will and testament became an animated topic of the day—and a rather controversial one. The clericals and their journals—Signor Panizzi’s black reactionaries and pro-Austrians—paid lip-service to the ten thousand lire for masses, but could not refrain from some surprise at the choice of trustees which the lamented Don Arsenio—a good Catholic and of old noble stock—had made (the trustees were all pestilent, as I had suspected); while the other side—the patriots, the enlightened, the radicals, the pestilents, while most gratefully acknowledging his munificence, and belauding the eminent gentlemen to whom he had confided his trust, pointed out with satisfaction how the spirit of progress and enlightenment had proved too strong in the end even for a man of Don Arsenio’s clerical antecedents and proclivities. As for Signor Panizzi, both sides agreed that his finger had been in the pie; his position as first and dominating trustee was for the one a formidable menace to, and for the other a sufficient guarantee of, a wise, beneficial, and honest administration of the fund.
Under the spur of this public interest and discussion, Don Arsenio’s funeral assumed considerable dimensions, and was in fact quite an affair—with a sprinkling of “Blacks,” a larger sprinkling of “pestilents,” a big crowd of curious Venetian citizens, a religious service of much pomp conducted by Father Garcia, followed at the graveside (the priests and the “Blacks” having withdrawn with significant ceremony) by a fiery panegyric from Signor Panizzi. Altogether, when I next go to Venice, I shall not be surprised to see a statue of Arsenio there; I hope that the image will wear a smile on its face—a smile of his old variety.
Lucinda did not attend the ceremony; it would have been too much for her feelings—for some of her feelings, at all events. But to my surprise I saw Godfrey Frost there. I had been thrust, against my will, into the position of one of the chief mourners; he kept himself more in the background, and did not join me until the affair was finished. Then we extricated ourselves from the crowd as soon as we could, and made our way back together, ending up by sitting down to a cup of coffee on the Piazza. I had seen and heard nothing of him since his disordered exit from my apartment, just before the catastrophe. I had indeed been inclined to conclude that he had left Venice and, not thinking that his condolences would be well received, had left none behind him. But here he was—and in a gloomy and disgruntled state of mind, as it seemed. He had been thinking things over, no doubt—with the natural conclusion that he had not got much profit or pleasure out of the whole business, out of that acquaintance with the Valdez’s, which he had once pursued so ardently.
“I didn’t choose to seem to run away,” he told me, “in case there was any investigation, or a trial, or anything of that kind. Besides”—he added this rather reluctantly—“I had a curiosity to see the last of the fellow. But they tell me I shan’t be wanted, as things have turned out, and I’m off to-morrow—going home, Julius.”
There was evidently more that he wanted to say. I smoked in silence.
“I don’t want to see Lucinda—Madame Valdez,” he blurted out, after a pause. “But I wish you’d just say that I’m sorry if I annoyed her. I’ve made a fool of myself; I’m pretty good at business; but a fool outside it—so far, at least. I don’t understand what she was up to, but—well, I’m willing to suppose——”
I helped him out. “You’re willing to give a lady the benefit of the doubt? It’s usual, you know. I’ve very little doubt that she’ll make friends with you now, if you like.”