“That is exactly the question—exactly the question. My dear fellow, that is just what I wanted to say to you. You ought to have a wife.”
Pandolfini gave a quick look up into his friend’s eyes. What he thought or hoped he might find there who can tell? Many things were possible to his Italian ideas that no Englishman would have thought possible. From whom might this suggestion come? His heart gave a wild leap upward, then sank with a sudden plunge and chill. What a fool, what a miserable vain fool he was! She to hold out a little finger, a corner of her handkerchief, to him or any man! His eyes fell, and his heart; he shook his head.
“Come, come, Pandolfini! that is the way with all you foreign fellows. You are as afraid of marriage as if it were purgatory. You have had full time to have your fling surely. I don’t mean to insinuate anything against you. So far as I know, you have always been the most irreproachable of men. But supposing that you hadn’t, why, you have had time enough to have your fling. How old are you, forty? Well, then, it is time to range yourself as the French say. An English wife would be the making of you——”
“Hunstanton,” cried the Italian, “all this that you are saying is as blasphemy. Is it to me you speak of ranging myself, of accepting unwillingly marriage, of having an English wife offered to me like a piece of useful furniture? It is that you do not know me—do not know anything about me—notwithstanding buon amico, that you are my best friend.”
Mr. Hunstanton looked at him with complacent yet humorous eyes. “Aha!” he said, “didn’t I divine it! I knew, of course, how the wind was blowing. Bravo, Pandolfini! so you are hit, eh? I knew it, man! I saw it sooner than you did yourself.”
Pandolfini looked at the light-hearted yet sympathetic Englishman with a glow upon his dark face of more profound emotion than Mr. Hunstanton knew anything about. He held out his hands in the fulness of his heart. Instinct told him that this was not the man to whom to speak of Diana—although the Englishman was fond of Diana too in his way. But his heart melted to the friend who had divined his love. Mr. Hunstanton, too, was touched by a confession so frank yet so silent. He got up and patted his friend on the shoulder. “To be sure,” he said, his voice even trembling a little, “you mustn’t have any shyness with an old man. I divined it all the time.”
There was a little pause, during which this delightful and effusive confidant resumed his seat. He kept silence by sheer force of the emotion which he saw in the other’s face, though it was almost unintelligible to him. Why should he take it so very seriously? Mr. Hunstanton was on the very eve of bursting forth when Pandolfini himself began—
“But to what good? She is more young, more rich, more highly gifted than I. What hope have I to win her! She with all the world at her feet! I—nobody. Ah, it is not want of seeing. I see well—not what you say, my good friend, but what all your poets have said. That is what a woman is—a woman of the English. But, amico mio, do not let us deceive ourselves. What hope is there for such a one as I?”
“Hope! why, every hope in the world,” cried the cheerful counsellor. “Talk about the poets: what is it that Shakespeare says? Shakespeare, you know, the very chief of them—
‘She is a woman, therefore to be wooed;
She is a woman, therefore to be won.’