Stanmer had listened to all this with extreme attention. “Why didn’t she contradict it?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I am bound to believe it was for the same reason. I was horrified, at any rate, by the whole story. I was extremely shocked at the Countess’s want of dignity in continuing to see the man by whose hand her husband had fallen.”
“The husband had been a great brute, and it was not known,” said Stanmer.
“Its not being known made no difference. And as for Salvi having been a brute, that is but a way of saying that his wife, and the man whom his wife subsequently married, didn’t like him.”
Stanmer hooked extremely meditative; his eyes were fixed on mine. “Yes, that marriage is hard to get over. It was not becoming.”
“Ah,” said I, “what a long breath I drew when I heard of it! I remember the place and the hour. It was at a hill-station in India, seven years after I had left Florence. The post brought me some English papers, and in one of them was a letter from Italy, with a lot of so-called ‘fashionable intelligence.’ There, among various scandals in high life, and other delectable items, I read that the Countess Bianca Salvi, famous for some years as the presiding genius of the most agreeable salon in Florence, was about to bestow her hand upon Count Camerino, a distinguished Bolognese. Ah, my dear boy, it was a tremendous escape! I had been ready to marry the woman who was capable of that! But my instinct had warned me, and I had trusted my instinct.”
“‘Instinct’s everything,’ as Falstaff says!” And Stanmer began to laugh. “Did you tell Madame de Salvi that your instinct was against her?”
“No; I told her that she frightened me, shocked me, horrified me.”
“That’s about the same thing. And what did she say?”
“She asked me what I would have? I called her friendship with Camerino a scandal, and she answered that her husband had been a brute. Besides, no one knew it; therefore it was no scandal. Just your argument! I retorted that this was odious reasoning, and that she had no moral sense. We had a passionate argument, and I declared I would never see her again. In the heat of my displeasure I left Florence, and I kept my vow. I never saw her again.”