So we went to her hotel, which was not the Albergo della Madonna. She received us in her bedroom, for which she apologised charmingly—so charmingly as to make it appear the most natural thing in the world to be received by her in her bedroom. She remembered seeing me in the train, and begged me to sit down. She had a visitor—a gentleman. It was the gentleman who had paid for her luncheon in the restaurant-car. I was introduced, and he was, as I had supposed, an accountant. The lady was less elaborately clad than on the occasion of our previous meeting. Just as her other costume was precisely what it should have been for a restaurant-car, so this was precisely adapted to her present surroundings. She evidently understood dress. And very pretty it was to see her busying herself about the room, entertaining her guests and playing with her little dog. He was not the only little dog she had ever had. Her previous companion, who had been given her by a Neapolitan gentleman, died, and she wept for six weeks and was inconsolable until another friend gave her this one. She thought first of calling him Vesuvio, which was the name of his predecessor, but could not bring herself to do so. Then she had the inspiration to call him Etna, which suited him better, because he was a trifle bigger; it was also a kind of complimentary reference to her first love. While she told us this she was making coffee with a spirit lamp on the chest of drawers. She had a speciality for making coffee, and really it was quite drinkable.
She gave us the story of her life. She was the niece of a cardinal, in whose person were accumulated all the apostolic virtues, and her mother was a French lady of noble birth and almost incredible beauty, who, when Mary, or Mery as she prefers to write it, was about two months old, married the cardinal’s coachman and had eleven more
children. When one draws a conclusion from insufficient data, it is always satisfactory to discover, as one too seldom does, that one was right. I had been right about the gentleman being an accountant, and here I was right again in my surmise that the lady was exceptionally highly connected, so highly that one could overlook her mother’s mésalliance with the coachman. Her uncle was only a bishop at the time of her birth, he became a cardinal soon after Mery’s mother married the coachman, and then he forced the coachman to legitimise Mery, and in this way the coachman became Mery’s legal father; and all this was part of a scheme to accelerate the ecclesiastical preferment of her uncle. Ah! but he was an ambitious man and aspired to the throne of S. Peter. His scheme failed, however, owing to the wicked intrigues of the Jesuits.
Parts of this might have borne, I do not say amplification, for it was quite long enough, but a word or two of elucidation. I have no doubt Mery would have been quite ready to explain everything, for she had nothing to conceal and the subject would have done as well as any other to display her feminine charm, but I did not interrupt, because I have observed that when a thorough woman of business undertakes to elucidate a point of law, she does it so much in the manner of Mrs. Nickleby that she not infrequently leaves it more obscure than she finds it. Mery did not expressly say she was a woman of business, she, in fact, disclaimed any such pretension, but she did it with a delightful mock modesty that forbade us to take her words literally.
No expense was spared over Mery’s education. She was sent to a convent at Marseilles and the nuns were very kind to her, not because of her ecclesiastical connection, but because they were holy women with large and noble hearts. Before her education was completed, however, she was sent for to return home, and oh, what a home it was! Her mother’s health had broken down because the cardinal beat her, her legal father drank instead of protecting his wife, the younger children were uncared-for and the elder
children, though they were growing up, had not Mery’s business capacity and powers of management. She put her shoulder to the wheel, did the marketing, the cooking and the cleaning; she washed and mended the children’s clothes and saw to everything. She hated the life, but woman was born to suffer and she did her duty.
In time her next sister married a music-hall singer—I should say a dramatic artist. Mery, who was now entering upon the heyday of her youth and beauty, was naturally introduced to the friends of her sister’s husband. Every man in the company fell in love with her; all the bachelors proposed, and without her natural firmness, reinforced by the teaching of the holy nuns, she could scarcely have escaped matrimony. There was another thing that helped to save her—she was waiting for her anima gemella. I may here say that her anima gemella has not yet crossed her path and that her real age is twenty-seven. She told us this in confidence and it is not to go any further. For people in restaurant-cars she is any age she thinks proper at the moment, they do not matter, but she will never deceive her friends.
Her sister’s husband was a man of real insight; he divined that Mery was a heaven-inspired dancer, and devoted himself to the development of her genius. She did not say he had taught her to dance; she said he encouraged and developed her natural genius for dancing. She made her debut with a success which the newspapers declared to be even more “phenomenal” than that which attends the debut of every artist. Engagements followed, and soon she was dancing practically all over the globe, creating a furore wherever she went and leaving the younger children’s socks to wash and darn themselves. Her mother was too ill and her legal father too drunk to know what she was doing or where she was doing it, but His Eminence heard and was so much scandalised that when she danced into the Eternal City the doors of the Vatican were closed to her. Cardinals are delightful men,
most of them—and Mery knows because she is on terms of intimacy with every member of the College—but too frequently they have a fault; they do not understand the artistic temperament. Nevertheless, if her uncle could have heard the cheers that greeted her in Shanghai and New York, and the encores that called her back in Cairo and Calcutta, if he could have seen the flowers that choked the wheels of her carriage in St. Petersburg and the diamonds that were showered upon her in Brazil, even his commonplace heart must have been moved.
She did not dance for us because, it seems, they do not dance when they are resting, which was perhaps the psychological reason, but there was also a geographical reason in the want of space, for the room was small and contained, besides Mery and Etna in one arm-chair, another arm-chair and two ordinary chairs occupied by her visitors; also there was the chest of drawers on which she had made the coffee and all such other articles of furniture as one usually sees in a hotel bedroom, including two beds. The extra bed was there because Mery was, she confessed it, of luxurious habits and in the hot weather liked to be able to change and finish the night in a cool bed.