Madame herself was as obstreperous and intolerable as, in their excitement, she found her young charges. She waxed shrilly voluble over the information that Isabella was confined to her rooms with a headache. It was monstrous, unnatural, she cried, thus to shut herself away in the face of this imminent arrival, to dissociate herself from the atmosphere of general rejoicing that prevailed. Her relations with the Infanta had long been strained; she was never so gratified as when she could cite evidence of unnaturalness against this natural soul. It is always for such as she to suspect hypocrisy in what is purely genuine.
“Like mistress like Nan.” Amongst those rendered especially captious by the coming event was to be numbered, it seemed, Mademoiselle Becquet. Fanchette bristled with spines; it was dangerous to touch her—almost to approach. Propitiation only appeared to feed her choler, as oil fire. She screamed at her inferiors; was insolent and defiant towards authority, defending her mistress against the charge of undutifulness with a fury which ended by actually routing that formidable autocrat, the utterer of the slander. She was in that state, it appeared, to which we are all, whether Fanchettes or otherwise, occasionally subject, when our whole nervous system seems transferred, like Hartley Coleridge’s fantastic skeleton, to the outside of us, for every breath, however softly sympathetic, to gall. Now a tempest of voice and whisking petticoats, now a white rush of tears into solitudes which gave no relief, she was eternally on the move, and eternally inviting retort for the sake of retaliating on it tooth and claw. She left her mark, indeed, on one overconfident gallant, who derisively offered to confess and absolve her for the nominal penance of a kiss. Her nails ploughed a furrow in his cheek which it would take a month to obliterate. As he stood cursing and ruefully laughing, the sight of the running blood appeared for the first time to sober her. She stood gazing at it fascinated; then suddenly, putting her hands to her face, turned and ran. Whither she disappeared none cared to know or enquire; it was comfort enough that the wildcat had retreated for the time being to its fastnesses.
She did not issue from them again until late in the afternoon, and then only upon receipt of a private communication from a correspondent, which was put into her hand by an emissary sent to seek her for the purpose. She was in the Infanta’s rooms, but not with her mistress, when the message that someone awaited her without, on particular business, reached her. The shrinking page who delivered it could not but observe how her cheeks blenched at the word. He could not but marvel, moreover, after recent storms, at the apparent tranquillity with which she accepted it. She asked him, with an affectation of carelessness, where the messenger was to be found, and, learning that it was at that door into the corridor where she had once before encountered Tiretta, dismissed him with a smile and a pretty vifs remerciments that made his heart throb. Then, when he was well gone, she rose—a little unsteadily.
A wave of blood seemed to sweep through her brain, making her momentarily giddy. She put out a hand to a chair-back, and stood supporting herself. It had come—but only what she had expected, looked for. She was desperately pledged to the issue, and there was no escape from it at this last. It was even a relief to her to be called from the horrible suspense of inaction. Suddenly the memory of that crimson streak she had torn upon the insolent face returned to her. A red light came to her eyes; the blood-ensign of “women who love brave men,” in Bissy’s creed. She was not going to falter now, or be untrue to her ideal of manliness. Besides, the end justified the means. Taking herself forcibly in hand, she went down the stairs to the door into the corridor.
This was a deserted part of the building, and now even unwontedly quiet by reason of the Infanta’s desire for repose. Thus, and for such purpose, to take advantage of its abandonment might have seemed a double treachery to some people. Such moral niceties were beyond Fanchette’s appreciation. She descended softly and found a man at the door.
He was a strong truculent-looking fellow, unknown to her—swagger in his attitude, an inhuman animalism in his small sunken eyes and bushy-bearded face, on which a thick smear of lip stood prominent. She had had no personal intercourse with his kind; but the hall-mark of the assassino-prezzolato was stamped on his every feature. He was well enough dressed to pass for a fanfaron; but she knew, without seeing them, what there was under his cloak to point the moral of his trade. Face to face with the loathly thing she had helped to call into being, a revulsion against her own bestial weapons seized her. This brute to hold a fine destiny in his hands! Her narrow lips went up, as in the presence of something physically offensive. She had no fear for herself—not an atom.
The man swept off his hat with a leer, that in its suggestion of hidden confidences was fulsome. He produced and handed to her a little folded tuck of paper.
“Un’ lettera amorosa, signora,” he said, in rather guttural Italian, his nose wrinkling. “The sender awaits a reply.”
She plucked the thing apart, and, barely glancing at its message, crumpled it in her hand, and answered:
“Tell him I will come.”