“Let me go!” she cried again in a strangled voice, and convulsing, struck him on the side of the head with her free hand. At that moment the laces gave, her hand came round his head instead of against it, drawing his face down in a long sobbing kiss, through which a murmur, softer than a whisper; “All right, oh, all right, go on.” (There was one little flash of triumph across her mind, one trouble solved, Cleudi would never want her now.)
Afterward, he knelt to kiss her skirt-hem. Her lips were compressed at the center, a little raised at the corners. “Now I understand,” said she; but he did not, and all the way home was eaten by the most dreadful cold fear that she would revenge herself on him with a witchery that would leave him stark idiot or smitten with dreadful disease. And the other, the other; his mind would not form her name, and there was a cry within him.
II
All three of them were waiting, with that man of Count Cleudi’s—the olive-skinned one with such intense eyes—what was his name? Lalette curtsied; Uncle Bontembi smiled. Said Cleudi; “Mathurin, the baskets. I commenced to think we should miss the pleasure of your company tonight, charming Demoiselle Lalette, and my heart was desolated.”
“Oh,” she said, (thinking—what if they knew?). “But here is Uncle Bontembi who will tell you that to be desolate of heart is to serve evil and not true religion, since God wishes us to be happy; for since he has created us in his image, it must be an image of delight.”
“You reason like an angel, Demoiselle Lalette; permit that I salute you.” She moved just enough to make his kiss fall on her cheek. Dame Leonalda simpered, but there was, flick and gone again, a frown across Cleudi’s high-cheekboned face. “What a lovely color your daughter has!”
Mathurin laid out the table with napkins which he unfolded from the baskets. There were oysters packed in snow; bubbling wine; a pastry of truffles and pike-livers; small artichokes pickled entire, peaches that must have come from the south, since it was only peach-blossom time in Dossola; white bread; a ham enriched with spices; honeyed small sweetmeats of dwarf fruit. (If he were only more to me and less for himself, thought Lalette, he might be possible; for he does not stint.) They sat down with herself and her mother opposite each other and the two men at the sides of the table, so small that knees touched. Mathurin the servant stood beside her chair, but flitted round to give to the rest as occasion demanded. Cleudi discoursed—a thousand things, eating with his left hand and letting his right now and again drop to touch the fabric over Lalette’s leg, which, laughing with talk and wine, she did not deny him. (An aura, like a perfume of virility and desire and pleasure, emanated from him; Lalette felt as though she were swaying slightly in her seat.)
“Lalette Asterhax; the name has fifteen letters,” said Cleudi, “and the sum of one and five is six, which fails by one the mystical number of seven. Look also, how you may take it by another route, L being the twelfth letter of the alphabet, so that to it, there is added one for A, another twelve for the second L and so on, the sum of all being eighty-seven.” (He has prepared this in advance, she thought.) “Being itself summed up again this eighty-seven is fifteen, so it is evident that you will be incomplete and thus lacking in happiness, until united with a man who can supply the missing figures.”
“I am not sure that the Church would approve your doctrine,” said Uncle Bontembi. He had moved his chair around to place his arm over the back of Dame Leonalda’s, and she had thrown her head back to rest on the arm.
“You are clearly wrong, my friend,” said Cleudi. “The Church itself takes cognizance of the power of numbers, which are the sign-manual of enlistment under God against evil, rather than being the protection itself, as some ignorant persons would make them. Look, does not the Church in Dossola have seven Episcopals? Are there not seven varieties of angels, and is it not dulcet to make seven prayers within the period? Whereas it is the heretical followers of the Prophet who deny the value of numbers.”