She was not wishing that she never had been born, while, gathering suggestion from Spanish ballad and Sicilian tale, she plotted a development of the story in every point worthy of herself. Her scene firmly imagined and finished off with the right artistic touches, she could actually hum that afternoon. When Bianca, helping Battistina to hunt for the vegetable-knife needed to prepare supper, asked her whether she had seen anything of it, she could answer by a careless snatch of song.
At ten precisely, without the necessity to ring, the little door cut in the large one yielded to Giulio’s hand. He was fortified to meet his lady just inside, but the great hallway was empty. Surprised, he took a few doubtful steps, made up his mind, and fell to pacing the floor. After a while, he stopped under the middle arch, sent an absent glance from window to window up the white shaft to the square of blue, and composed himself to wait where he stood, arms crossed, feet well apart. He was a trifle pale, and with his troubled air appeared more grown-up than when, six or seven weeks ago, with the desert ahead of the long empty season in town, he had wondered what resources of distraction the streets, his only hope, might afford.
Half an hour passed. The shutter inside the window above and opposite moved; Camilla’s hand appeared, beckoning him to mount the stairs.
She met him at the door of the primo piano, but when he would have taken her hand she hurried before him, into Mademoiselle Heller’s own sacred sitting-room, where the chairs were in ghostly covers and the chandelier was muffled in a gauze bag. The closed windows kept out the heat and noise, kept in the faint musty smell. She turned, they looked at each other, and she smiled, as it struck him, a singular smile.
“You wished to see me,” he said.
“I did. But I have seen you already. For twenty minutes I watched you from behind the shutter when you did not know I was there; you were standing under the arch. And—I believe it saved your life. See what I had brought.” She showed him a little knife, bright and pointed, with a handle of horn. (It must be said that her dagger looked rather like a vegetable-knife.) He gave a just perceptible start. His heart had naturally jumped. But he knew, deep down, that the dagger was part of play-acting. With a gesture intended insolently to reassure, she threw it on the table, and smiled the singular smile which twisted her lips to an expression of such excessive irony. “Be not afraid. I had never seen your face when you were trying to cover your fear and inventing lies to tell me. After that spectacle, I decided you were not worthy of my powder. No, you need fear nothing from that silly stiletto, either for yourself or for me. I am not sure which I meant it for. Both, perhaps.”
“Come, Camilla,” he began, in the low, soft, ultra-reasonable tone which any man knows is the one to adopt with excited, unreasonable women. “Come! This is hardly the speech to hold to me. You are too agitated to know what you are saying. It seems to me that after such a letter as you wrote, threatening me—nientedimeno!—with a blow on the cheek wherever you met me, before everybody, it is I rather than you who have the right to call myself offended. If I am here, it is because I love you in spite of your bad treatment of me, and I wish to explain.”
This gentle and well-intentioned speech was interrupted by a sort of human feminine rendering of a leonine roar from Camilla. “Zurigo! Zurigo! Ha!” she exclaimed, “those are your tactics, are they? What you are thinking is that in a few days more you will depart for Zurigo. You need only keep up this comedy for a few days and then you can drop me without fear. All you will have to do is not to write.” Her eyes flared up intense and green; she took a pantherine step nearer. “But I—” she smacked the varnished table startlingly with the flat of her palm—“I do not admit that I am a person who can be dropped. And you are here in order that I may drop you first, and in such a manner as you cannot mistake or forget. You shall know yourself quite certainly, my fine sir, to have been discarded. But I wish you to remember for another time.” Another pantherine step nearer. His manhood, of which he was at the moment intensely conscious, forbade his receding by an inch. “I wish you to remember, for another time, that one does not so lightly take up and throw over persons like me. A man of nothing, like yourself, takes a puny wax doll to make love to and then neglect, knowing that it is safe.” She was under his very nose. “I wish you to learn the danger there is in making love to—to tigresses! Will you remember hereafter—” his head was suddenly clutched, he felt claws through his hair—“to keep to your own kind and let alone such creatures as could eat you at a bite? A man should be the stronger, while you—I could dare, fight, love, ten to your one. I saw it while you stood down there. Will you remember?”
The pain of her iron finger-nails in his scalp was fairly unendurable, but he stood it with boyish dignity, like a little Spartan; for one thing, certain that if he tried to free himself he would come forth all the more sorrily scratched; for another, not finding this maltreatment by passionate feminine fingers altogether disagreeable. His eyes were half closed, an enigmatic smile played over his lips. At the same time, he was intensely on the alert, ready to prevent her making him ridiculous beyond a certain limit.