The White Sister

by F. Marion Crawford

Yet his house was not much more than a mile from the gate, by a good high-road; whence it is clear that his solitude was a matter of choice and not of necessity. He had few friends, however, and none who showed any inclination to come and see him, though his acquaintances were numerous; for he had been rather popular in society when a young subaltern, and had been welcome wherever his elder brother Giovanni took him.

Giovanni had been very reticent about his affairs, even with his own family, and during that last winter in Rome, when he had fallen in love with Angela Chiaromonte, Ugo had been stationed in Pavia and had known nothing of the affair. Ugo had a vague recollection that Giovanni was supposed to have been unduly devoted to the gay Marchesa del Prato when he had been a mere stripling of a sub-lieutenant, fresh from the Military Academy and barely twenty, though the Marchesa had been well over thirty, even then. Ugo had been introduced to her long afterwards, when she was the Princess Chiaromonte, and she had shown that she liked him, and had asked him to a dance, to which he had not gone simply because he had given up dancing.

The Princess, however, had misunderstood his reason for not accepting her invitation and had supposed that he kept away because he had known Angela's story and resented, for his brother's sake, the treatment the girl had received. In an hour of idleness, it now occurred to her that she might find out whether she had been mistaken in this.

For some one had spoken of Giovanni on the previous evening, in connection with a report that had lately reached Rome to the effect that an Italian officer, hitherto supposed to have been among the dead after the battle of Dogali, had been heard of and was living in slavery somewhere in the interior of Africa. A newspaper had made a good story of the matter, out of next to nothing, and it had been a subject of conversation during two or three days. The lady who told it to the Princess Chiaromonte had been one of her most assiduous and intimate enemies for years, and, in order to make her uncomfortable, advanced the theory that the officer in question was no other than Giovanni Severi himself.

The Princess was not so easily disturbed, however, and smiled in her designing friend's face. The poor man was dead and buried, she said, and every one knew it. The report rested on nothing more substantial than a letter said to have been written by an English traveller and lion-hunter to one of the secretaries at the British Embassy in Washington, who was said, again, to have mentioned the fact to an Italian colleague, who had repeated it in writing to his sister, who lived somewhere in Piedmont and had spoken of it to some one else; and so on, till the story had reached the ears of a newspaper paragraph-writer who was hard up for a 'stick' of 'copy.' All this the Princess knew, or invented, and she ran off her explanation with a fluency that disconcerted her assailant.

The immediate result was that she bethought her of Ugo Severi, whom she had passed lately in her motor as he was riding leisurely along the road beyond Monteverde. She had noticed him because her chauffeur had slackened speed a little, and she had nodded to him, though it was not likely that he should recognise her face through her veil. She had thought no more about him at the time, but she now telephoned to a friend at headquarters to find out where he was living, and she soon learned that he was in charge of the magazine.

After a little reflection, she wrote him a note, recalling their acquaintance and the fact that she had known his poor brother very well. She had never seen a powder magazine, she said; would he show the one at Monteverde to her and two or three friends, next Wednesday?

Ugo answered politely that this was quite impossible without a special permission from the Commander-in-Chief or the War Office, and that he greatly regretted his inability to comply with her request. As he was a punctilious man, though he lived almost like a hermit, he took the trouble to send his orderly into the city on the following afternoon with a couple of cards to be left at the Palazzo Chiaromonte for the Prince and Princess, in accordance with Roman social custom.

A few days later a smart 'limousine' drew up to the door of Ugo's little house and a footman rang the old-fashioned bell, which went on tinkling in the distance for a long time after the rusty chain had been pulled. Ugo's Sicilian orderly opened the door at last in a leisurely way and appeared on the threshold in grey linen fatigue dress; on seeing the car and the Princess he straightened himself and saluted.

His master was riding, he said, and would not come home for an hour. The Princess wrote a message on a card, asking if Ugo would come and see her any day after five o'clock, and she wrote down the number of her telephone. She gave the card to the man, and by way of impressing its importance on him, added that she was a very old friend of the family and had known the Captain's mother as well as the brother who had been lost in Africa. She also smiled sweetly, for the Sicilian was a handsome young man; she had a way of smiling at handsome men when she was speaking to them, especially if she wished them to remember what she said.