The Colonel settled himself with a bored expression and listened. He greatly disliked duelling in his regiment, and invariably hindered an encounter if he could. In his young days a great misfortune had happened to him; in a senseless quarrel he had severely wounded a brother officer, who had become consumptive in consequence and had died two years later.
He listened patiently to Castiglione’s story, and then delivered himself of a general prediction.
‘That infernal cousin of mine will be the death of one of us yet!’ He sent an inch of heavy ash from his cigar into the fire with a vicious flick. ‘Why the devil did you go to see her?’ he asked, very unreasonably.
Castiglione smiled but said nothing. He knew well enough that Teresa Crescenzi had tried to marry Casalmaggiore, and that the latter had been forced to make a regular defence.
‘There’s only one way to deal with such women,’ he observed. ‘Marry them and separate within six months. Then you need never see them again! What are you going to do?’
‘That is precisely what I have come to ask you, as my chief. The honour of the regiment is the only question that matters to me. I shall do whatever you advise. De Maurienne expects to hear from me after five o’clock. As for the cause of the quarrel, Donna Teresa must be quite mad.’
‘Mad?’ Casalmaggiore laughed. ‘You don’t know her! Don’t you see that it is all a trick to make de Maurienne compromise her by fighting a duel for her, and that he will be forced to marry her afterwards, for decency’s sake?’
Castiglione looked at his colonel with sincere admiration, for such tortuous reasoning could never have taken shape in his own rather simple brain, though he now saw that no other explanation of Teresa’s conduct was possible. The Duca smiled and pushed his delicate grey moustaches from his lips with the dry tip of his cigar, which he never by any chance placed between them. He seemed able to draw in the smoke by some mysterious means without even touching the tobacco, for in smoking, as in everything else, he was a thorough epicure.
‘I hope,’ he said, his words following the fresh cloud he blew, ‘that de Maurienne will at least have the sense to act as I suggested just now. In France he can do better. He can be divorced without difficulty. Fancy the satisfaction of divorcing Teresa! Can you see her expression? And she would be “a defenceless woman” again in no time. Of all the offensive forms of defencelessness!’
He laughed softly to himself.