‘No, it is not I,’ said Kate. ‘I should not have gone of my own free will; but yet I am very willing—I am ready to go—it is home,’ she added, hastily, and with meaning. ‘It is the place I love best in the world.’
‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I had thought—I had hoped you loved Italy too.’
‘Oh! so I do, Count Buoncompagni—and I thought I did still more,’ cried the girl, eager to make her hidden and shy, yet brave apology. ‘I thought I could have lived and died here, where people were so good to me. But, you know, whenever I heard the name of home, it made my blood all dance in my veins. I felt I had been making a mistake, and that there was nothing in the world I loved like Langton-Courtenay. I made a great mistake, but I did not mean it. I hope nobody will think it is unkind of me, or that I am fond of change.’
Count Antonio stood and listened to this speech with a grim smile on his face, and a look in his eyes which was new to Kate. He, too, was making a disagreeable discovery, and he did not like it. He made her a bow, but he did not make any answer. He stood by her side a few moments, and then he asked her suddenly, ‘May I get you some tea?—can I bring you anything?’ with a forced quietness; and when Kate said ‘No,’ he went away, and devoted himself for all the rest of the evening to Lady Caryisfort. There was pique in his manner, but there was something more, which she could not make out; and she sat rather alone for the rest of the evening. She was left to feel her mistake, to wonder, to be somewhat offended and affronted; and went back to the Lung-Arno impatient to hurry over all the packing, and get home at once. But she never found out that in thus taking the weight of the breaking off on her own shoulders, she had saved Count Antonio a great deal of trouble.
When Lady Caryisfort found out what had passed, her amusement was very great. ‘She will go now and think all her life that she has done him an injury, and broken his heart, and all kinds of nonsense,’ she said to herself. ‘Poor Antonio! what a horrible thing money is! But he has escaped very cheaply, thanks to Kate, and she will make a melancholy hero of him, poor dear child, for the rest of her life.’
In this, however, Lady Caryisfort, not knowing all the circumstances, was wrong; for Kate felt vaguely that there was something more than the honourable despair of a young Paladin in her Count’s acceptance of her explanation. He accepted it too readily, with too little attempt to resist or remonstrate. She was more angry than pitiful, ignorant as she was. A man who takes a woman so entirely at her first word almost insults her, even though the separation is her own doing. Kate felt this vaguely, and a hot blush rose to her cheek for two or three days after, at the very mention of Antonio’s name.
The person, however, who felt this breaking off most was old Francesca, who had gone to an extra mass for weeks back, to promote the suit she had so much at heart. She cried herself sick when she saw it was all over, and said to herself, she knew something evil would happen as soon as il vecchio came. Il vecchio’s appearance was always the signal for mischief. He had come, and now once more the party was on the wing, and she herself was to be torn from her native place, the Florence she adored, for this old man’s caprice. Francesca thought with a little fierce satisfaction that, when his soul went to purgatory, there would be nobody to pray him out, and that his penance would be long enough. The idea gave her a great deal of satisfaction. She would not help him out, she was certain—not so much as by a single prayer.
But all the time she got on with her packing, and the ladies began to frequent the shops to buy little souvenirs of Florence. It was a busy time, and there was a great deal of movement, and so much occupation that the members of the little party lost sight of each other, as it were, and pursued their different preparations in their own way. ‘She is packing,’ or, ‘she is shopping,’ was said, first of one, and then of another; and no further questions were asked. And thus the days crept on, and the time approached when they were to set out once more on the journey home.