But at this May broke out with a round oath. Farewell it should never be. What cared he for his uncle’s fortune, or for the estate in Brookline, when his future lay in Poland? He would have a little left; he could win more by his own exertions. For a moment his impetuosity almost overbore her resistance. But then the Paris salon was a necessity; and half of her own estate and all of poor Polacco’s had been seized by foreign despots. She would think it over. She would give him an answer that night. And then there came a lover’s parting; and May went back to his hotel, not wholly desperate, and got the engagement-ring he had ordered, and sent it to her. It was of small diamonds; but then there was a necklace, sent from Paris, of perfect Oriental pearls. A woman could afford to get engaged once a month, for such a necklace.
And he had gone back that evening, and he had found a letter. The countess had gone, leaving the note behind her. It was edged with deep black; and May took it now from his pocket-book, yellow and worn, with a smile that would have been cynical had it not been slightly nervous.
“Très-cher!” it began, “I cannot bear” (it was all in French, but we will make clumsy English of the countess’s delicate phrase, as did May, when he read it now) “that your love for me should be your ruin. It is too late for me to deny that you also have my heart; I can only fly. Otherwise my woman’s weakness would destroy either you or myself. I shall go by the morning train to Frankfurt, where I shall stop two days. If you do not wish to betray me, seek not my refuge out. I shall keep the ring as a pledge” (she says nothing about the necklace, it occurred to May, at this late date)—“a pledge that I shall be faithful to you, as, I hope, you to me. For what are six or seven years?” (At her age! thought May, with a shudder.) “I will devote them to my unhappy countrymen.” (Compatriotes was the original, which may be feminine.) “But wait for me until you are free; and perhaps, who knows? my Italy redeemed! I will join you, and be one with you forever. Meantime you will travel, possibly forget me! But on the fourteenth of August, 1886, you will be at home. On that day you will hear from me!”
May laid the letter down and shuddered. This was most unquestionably the fourteenth day of August in the year eighteen hundred and eighty-six. He seized nervously the glass of claret; but, as he raised it to his lips, looked through the blinds, in the direction of the house. His second glass of claret fell unheeded to the floor.
A carriage was standing before the front door, and beside it stood a footman in livery.
Scene Third
THE ADMINISTRATION
I.
THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS.
The three years following May’s unhappy affair with the Countess Polacca de Valska had been uneventful. He had not plunged again into foreign parts, but became a student of the barbarities of civilization. He saw what is termed the world, particularly that manifestation of it which attains its most perfect growth in London and Paris. Perhaps it would be too much to say that he forgot the Countess de Valska, but certainly his feelings toward that unhappy fair one underwent certain modifications. And as he was in the meantime in the receipt of some twenty thousand a year from the estate of the late John Austin, he by degrees became more reconciled to the extremely practical view the cruel countess had taken of their duties in relation to that gentleman’s will.
He very often wondered as to who might be the residuary legatee. It would be a wild freak, that he was sure of. It was quite on the cards for Uncle Austin to have provided that, since his nephew did not want the money, it might go to the devil for all he cared—or to the Total Abstinence Society.
It is more sad to say that, as time went by, certain metaphysical doubts as to the objective reality of the Cascadegli and the Siberian mine began to obtrude themselves. Faith of the most stubborn description remained to him, so far as the countess’s Paris salon and her beautiful self was concerned, but he failed to see the necessary connection between Trouville, Baden-Baden, Italia Irredenta, and the Parisian police. And Serge had removed himself, for an encumbrance, in a singularly accommodating way.