The Count continued his stroll away from the band. He returned slowly, he said. I can imagine him enjoying to the full, but with his usual tranquillity, the balminess of this southern night and the sounds of music softened delightfully by the distance.
Presently, he approached for the third time the man on the garden seat, still leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. It was a dejected pose. In the semi-obscurity of the alley his high shirt collar and his cuffs made small patches of vivid whiteness. The Count said that he had noticed him getting up brusquely as if to walk away, but almost before he was aware of it the man stood before him asking in a low, gentle tone whether the signore would have the kindness to oblige him with a light.
The Count answered this request by a polite “Certainly,” and dropped his hands with the intention of exploring both pockets of his trousers for the matches.
“I dropped my hands,” he said, “but I never put them in my pockets. I felt a pressure there—”
He put the tip of his finger on a spot close under his breastbone, the very spot of the human body where a Japanese gentleman begins the operations of the Harakiri, which is a form of suicide following upon dishonour, upon an intolerable outrage to the delicacy of one’s feelings.
“I glance down,” the Count continued in an awestruck voice, “and what do I see? A knife! A long knife—”
“You don’t mean to say,” I exclaimed, amazed, “that you have been held up like this in the Villa at half-past ten o’clock, within a stone’s throw of a thousand people!”
He nodded several times, staring at me with all his might.
“The clarionet,” he declared, solemnly, “was finishing his solo, and I assure you I could hear every note. Then the band crashed fortissimo, and that creature rolled its eyes and gnashed its teeth hissing at me with the greatest ferocity, ‘Be silent! No noise or—‘”
I could not get over my astonishment.