One of them was an old lady in a wheeled chair. She was not less than seventy years old, and might or might not have once been beautiful. Her chair was slowly propelled by an Italian woman. She herself was obviously Italian. Not so, however, the little gentleman who walked assiduously beside her. Him I guessed to be English. He was a very stout little gentleman, with gleaming spectacles and a full blond beard, and he seemed to radiate cheerfulness. I thought at first that he might be the old lady’s resident physician; but no, there was something subtly un-professional about him: I became sure that his constancy was gratuitous, and his radiance real. And one day, I know not how, there dawned on me a suspicion that he was—who?—some one I had known—some writer—what’s-his-name—something with an M—Maltby—Hilary Maltby of the long-ago!
At sight of him on the morrow this suspicion hardened almost to certainty. I wished I could meet him alone and ask him if I were not right, and what he had been doing all these years, and why he had left England. He was always with the old lady. It was only on my last day in Lucca that my chance came.
I had just lunched, and was seated on a comfortable bench outside my hotel, with a cup of coffee on the table before me, gazing across the faded old sunny piazza and wondering what to do with my last afternoon. It was then that I espied yonder the back of the putative Maltby. I hastened forth to him. He was buying some pink roses, a great bunch of them, from a market-woman under an umbrella. He looked very blank, he flushed greatly, when I ventured to accost him. He admitted that his name was Hilary Maltby. I told him my own name, and by degrees he remembered me. He apologised for his confusion. He explained that he had not talked English, had not talked to an Englishman, ‘for—oh, hundreds of years.’ He said that he had, in the course of his long residence in Lucca, seen two or three people whom he had known in England, but that none of them had recognised him. He accepted (but as though he were embarking on the oddest adventure in the world) my invitation that he should come and sit down and take coffee with me. He laughed with pleasure and surprise at finding that he could still speak his native tongue quite fluently and idiomatically. ‘I know absolutely nothing,’ he said, ‘about England nowadays—except from stray references to it in the Corriere della Sera; nor did he show the faintest desire that I should enlighten him. ‘England,’ he mused, ‘—how it all comes back to me!’
‘But not you to it?’
‘Ah, no indeed,’ he said gravely, looking at the roses which he had laid carefully on the marble table. ‘I am the happiest of men.’
He sipped his coffee, and stared out across the piazza, out beyond it into the past.
‘I am the happiest of men,’ he repeated. I plied him with the spur of silence.
‘And I owe it all to having once yielded to a bad impulse. Absurd, the threads our destinies hang on!’
Again I plied him with that spur. As it seemed not to prick him, I repeated the words he had last spoken. ‘For instance?’ I added.
‘Take,’ he said, ‘a certain evening in the spring of ‘95. If, on that evening, the Duchess of Hertfordshire had had a bad cold; or if she had decided that it WOULDN’T be rather interesting to go on to that party—that Annual Soiree, I think it was—of the Inkwomen’s Club; or again—to go a step further back—if she hadn’t ever written that one little poem, and if it HADN’T been printed in “The Gentlewoman,” and if the Inkwomen’s committee HADN’T instantly and unanimously elected her an Honorary Vice-President because of that one little poem; or if—well, if a million-and-one utterly irrelevant things hadn’t happened, don’t-you-know, I shouldn’t be here.... I might be THERE,’ he smiled, with a vague gesture indicating England.