“I observe,” said Pandolfini, who bore the title of Cavaliere, but was invariably addressed, according to Italian use and wont, by his Christian name. He spoke good but formal English, avoiding the contractions with which we break the solemnity of our speech. “I observe that it is the epithet for the young lady—unselfish. All the English say so. Is there not, then, another epithet which will mean something more large, more fine?”
“What could be finer than unselfishness?” said Mrs. Hunstanton, raising her eyebrows. “Mind, I don’t apply it as so many people do; and I was not talking of Sophy, whose chief claim is that she is young and pretty, but of her aunt: or rather, indeed, of Diana.”
“Ah, Diana!” said her husband; “that is a different thing altogether.”
“And who, then, is Diana?” said Pandolfini, smiling. He had heard the name a great many times; but that any one should be ignorant who Diana was seemed so unlikely to the little party, that the Italian, though a constant visitor, knew nothing of her but her name.
“Oh, Diana! Why, you know she—— Who is that, my dear, at the door? We don’t expect any one, do we, to-night?”
“I don’t expect any one—unless you have forgotten what night it was, as I’ve known you to do, and asked somebody——”
“Why, why!” said Mr. Hunstanton—“God bless me! listen: if I did not know she was safe in England I should say that voice—— My dear!—why, it is! Diana, her very self!”
The Italian stood behind backs, smiling and looking on. The room was large and but partially lighted, with frescoes on the walls shining out here and there where there was light enough to see them. He saw a lady come in against one of these illuminated bits of wall, relieved against a mass of dark-crimson drapery, holding out her hands. She was in black, with a lace veil wound about her head. The smile faded off his face as he stood and gazed. He had been thinking of Sophy’s type of English womankind, which was what he had seen most, with that same amused, indulgent, kind semi-contempt which had been in Diana’s mind. But here he was stopped suddenly short. The beautiful face which met his look without being aware of it was pale, partly by nature, partly by fatigue. Her hair was dark, shining with a soft gloss, yet ruffled over her forehead by a tendency to curl which had often disturbed Diana: her eyes of that lustrous and dewy grey which is so rare: her face as perfect in its somewhat long oval as if it had been painted by Luini, but not weak as Luini’s faces sometimes are. She stood smiling, putting out her hands, which looked like snow through the cloud of drooping lace. “Yes, it is Diana—the last person in the world you expected to see!” she said.
Pandolfini felt the words echo down to the very bottom of his heart. Surely the very last person in the world he had expected to see,—such a woman as he had been looking for all his life! Fortunately he was in the shade, and she was occupied with her friends and the welcome they gave; and though she saw there was a stranger present, could not see, and therefore could not be offended by, his gaze. And an Italian can gaze at a woman without impertinence as a man of no other nation can. If she is beautiful, is it not the homage he owes her? and if she is not beautiful, it is kind to make her think so—to give the admiration due to her sex, if not to her. Presently, however, he awoke to the recollection that English susceptibilities were sometimes shocked by this simple homage. He did not go away as an Englishman would have done, but he went to one of the distant windows, and, half hidden in the curtains, looked on still while they put her in a chair, discharging volleys of questions—while they offered her everything, dinner, tea, wine, all that a traveller might be supposed to require, and she replied with soft laughter and explanations, declaring herself fully refreshed and rested. Then there was a flutter and a rush, and the two little ladies from the third floor came rushing in, called by Reginald, and blotted out the beautiful new-comer with their embracings. When the party remembered him at last, and brought him out of the shadow and presented him to the stranger, Pandolfini, much against his will, had to go away. Not even his Italian simplicity was proof against the little chill that came over the English group as he was brought (of course by good Mr. Hunstanton’s officious kindness) into the midst of it. “I must not disturb the happiness of the re-seeing,” he said in his formal English, carefully pronouncing every syllable. Sophy had been sent by her aunt to fetch something as he got his hat in the anteroom, and lingered a moment in the great gloomy staircase, lighted only by the little coiled taper she carried, and by the lamp of the servant who stood ready to show him the way down that dark cavern of stairs. It made a curious picture,—the light all centring in Sophy’s whiteness, her muslin dress, and the flower face that bloomed over it in all the English glory of complexion. She lingered to say good-night to him, putting out her soft little hand. “You are happy to-night?” he said, looking at her with that kind smile. “How can I help it?” cried Sophy, but with a curious wistful look in her eyes; “Diana has come.” Then she ran with a thrill and vibration of light and brightness up into the dark, carrying her taper, and he more heavily went down to the night and the outside world.
Diana has come! He kept saying it to himself all the way back to his lodging, trying to harden the soft syllables in the English way—then melting, softening over them, taking them back to his own tongue. The moon was large in the sky, stooping out of the blue, wondering at him—she, too, who was Diana. He laughed to himself softly, and then—strange!—felt his eyes full of tears. Why, in the name of every sylvan goddess?—because an English lady whom he had never seen before had suddenly appeared in the big, dim, painted room, where her country-people were staying—the most natural of incidents. What could he do but laugh at himself thus suddenly startled into—sentiment. Yes, that was the word—a foolish word, meaning a foolish thing. But why that filling of the eyes? He was an Anglo-maniac, and it vexed him to feel how southern he was, how unrestrained, overcome in that foolish Italian way by feeling. An Englishman would not have been capable of these absurd tears. And as he pursued his way in the moonlight all the length of the Lung’ Arno the bells began to strike their prolonged Italian twenty-two hours, for it was ten o’clock: and every chime all over the city (for need I say every clock was a little behind its brother?), prolonging the twenty-two into half a hundred, struck out the same sound that was in his heart: Di—ana—Diana—Diana! She had come—she whom no one had heard of till to-day.