And now she was alone in Casa Felice. She had not even brought her French maid, but had engaged an Italian. She was resolved to isolate herself with people who had never seen her as a beautiful woman.
CHAPTER XIX
LADY HOLME never forgot that first evening at Casa Felice. The strangeness of it was greater than the strangeness of any nightmare. When she was shut up in her bedroom in London she had thought she realised all the meaning of the word loneliness. Now she knew that then she had not begun to realise it. For she had been in her own house, in the city which contained a troop of her friends, in the city where she had reigned. And although she knew that she would reign no more, she had not grasped the exact meaning of that knowledge in London. She had known a fact but not fully felt it. She had known what she now was but not fully felt what she now was. Even when Fritz, muttering almost terrified exclamations, had stumbled out of the bedroom, she had not heard the dull clamour of finality as she heard it now.
She was an exile. She was an outcast among women. She was no longer a beautiful woman, she was not even a plain woman—she was a dreadful-looking human being.
The Italian servants by whom she was surrounded suddenly educated her in the lore of exact knowledge of herself and her present situation.
Italians are the most charming of the nations, but Italians of the lower classes are often very unreserved in the display of their most fugitive sensations, their most passing moods. The men, especially when they are young, are highly susceptible to beauty in women. They are also—and the second emotion springs naturally enough from the first—almost childishly averse from female ugliness. It is a common thing in Italy to hear of men of the lower classes speak of a woman’s plainness with brutality, with a manner almost of personal offence. They often shrink from personal ugliness as Englishmen seldom do, like children shrinking from something abnormal—a frightening dwarf, a spectre.
Now that Lady Holme had reached the “hiding-place” for which she had longed, she resolved to be brutal with herself. Till now she had almost perpetually concealed her disfigured face. Even her servants had not seen it. But in this lonely house, among these strangers, she knew that the inevitable moment was come when she must begin the new life, the terrible life that was henceforth to be hers. In her bedroom she took off her hat and veil, and without glancing into the glass she came downstairs. In the hall she met the butler. She saw him start.
“Can I have tea?” she said, looking at him steadily.
“Yes, signora,” he answered, looking down.