“I have so few friends,” said the count, when our reconciliation was complete, “and I am so much in need of advice, that I venture to trouble you, my dear Fyffe, in a matter of great delicacy.”
I told him, I forget precisely in what terms, that I was entirely at his service; and after another hesitating pause he blurted out the truth.
“I have received an offer for my daughter's hand. The proposal comes to me from the Honorable Mr. Brunow. I owe him the same debt I owe to you, and I own that I should be reluctant to hurt his feelings by a refusal. His offer came to me last night, and took me by surprise. I should have been less troubled in dealing with it if he had not assured me that, with my consent, he is fairly certain of my daughter's. I should be wrong,” he added—“I should be altogether wrong if I claimed any authority over her. I have not the right to such a voice in her affairs as I should have if she had been bred under my own care. But Brunow, in spite of the debt I owe him, is not the man I should have chosen for her. You have known him for many years. I am gravely troubled, my dear Fyffe. Tell me what I should do.”
I am not exaggerating when I say that if the count had stabbed-me he would hardly have hurt or amazed me more. I had heard Brunow's butterfly protestations about his affection for Miss Rossano, and my eyes had certainly not been less open to his defects of character because he was a rival to my own hopes; but I had never regarded him as being altogether serious. I knew that he was irretrievably in debt, and I had never really feared until that moment that his opposition would take real form. A lover is always jealous, and I had envied my rival his faculty of small talk, his cheery, easy temper, and those touches of gallant attention of which practice and nature had made him master. I had been very angry sometimes at his success in pleasing. But a certain contempt had always mingled with my anger, and I had never really been afraid of him. Yet in the count's declaration of Brunow's belief that Miss Rossano was not indifferent to him I could see more than a touch of reason. She was always gay in his presence, always ready to laugh at his genial and charming nonsense—would come out of her gravest humor at any moment to meet his badinage half way.
I was thinking of all these things, and suffering sorely, when the count's voice recalled me to myself.
“I admit, I know, I feel the delicacy of the situation.”
“I am the last man in the world,” I said, “to be consulted on this question.”
“Surely not that!” cried the count.
“The last man in the world,” I repeated. “I can have no voice in the matter one way or the other.”
I felt, even as I spoke, that my words and tones alike were too brusque and imperative, but I was wounded to the heart, and alarmed alike for Miss Rossano and myself. Brunow was certainly not the man to make her happy, whatever fancy he might have inspired in her mind, and yet it was no business of mine to say so. I was his rival, and my opinion of him was naturally biassed. For the moment I hated him, but I had self-control enough left to feel that that fact bound me all the more to silence.