The White Sister | Page 4

she could not decide at once, but as her glance met his a delicate radiance tinged her cheeks for a moment, as if the rosy light of a clear dawn were reflected in her face. The young soldier's eyes flashed as he watched her; he drew his breath audibly, and then bit his upper lip as if to check the sound and the sensation that had caused it. Angela heard and saw, for she understood what moved him, so far as almost childlike simplicity can have intuition of what most touches a strong man. She was less like the portrait now than a moment earlier; her lips, just parting in a little half-longing, half-troubled smile, were like dark rose leaves damp with dew, her eyelids drooped at the corners for an instant, and the translucent little nostrils quivered at the mysterious thrill that stirred her maiden being.
The two young people had not known each other quite a year, for she had never seen Severi till she had left the convent to go out into society and to take her place at her widowed father's table as his only child; but at their first meeting Giovanni had felt that of all women he had known, none but she had ever called his nature to hers with the longing cry of the natural mate. At first she was quite unconscious of her power, and for a long time he looked in vain for the slightest outward sign that she was moved when she saw him making his way to her in a crowded drawing-room, or coming upon her suddenly out of doors when she was walking in the villa with her old governess, the excellent Madame Bernard, or riding in the Campagna with her father. Giovanni's duties were light, and he had plenty of time to spare, and his pertinacity in finding her would have been compromising if he had been less ingeniously tactful. It was by no means easy to meet her in society either, for, in spite of recent social developments, Prince Chiaromonte still clung to the antiquated political mythology of Blacks and Whites, and strictly avoided the families he persisted in calling 'Liberals,' on the ground that his father had called them so in 1870, when he was a small boy. It was not until he had bored himself to extinction in the conscientious effort to take the girl out, that he appealed to his sister-in-law to help him, though he knew that neither she nor his brother was truly clerical at heart. Even then, if it had been clear to him that Giovanni Severi had made up his mind to marry Angela if he married at all, the Prince would have forced himself to bear agonies of boredom night after night, rather than entrust his daughter to the Marchesa; but such an idea had never entered his head, and he would have scouted the suggestion that Angela would ever dare to encourage a young man of whom he had not formally approved; and while she was meeting Giovanni almost daily, and dancing with him almost every evening, her father was slowly negotiating an appropriate marriage for her with the eldest son of certain friends who were almost as clerical and intransigent as himself. The young man was a limp degenerate, with a pale face, a weak mouth, and an inherited form of debility which made him fall asleep wherever he was, if nothing especial happened to keep his eyes open; he not only always slept from ten at night till nine the next morning with the regularity of an idiot, but he went to sleep wherever he sat down, in church, at dinner, and even when he was driving. Neither his own parents nor Prince Chiaromonte looked upon this as a serious drawback in the matter of marriage. A man who slept all day and all night was a man out of mischief, not likely to grumble nor to make love to his neighbour's wife; he would therefore be a model husband. When he fell asleep in the drawing-room in summer, his consort would sit beside him and brush away the flies; in winter she would be careful to cover him up lest he should catch cold; at mass she could prick him with a hat-pin to keep him awake; as for the rest, she would bear one of the oldest names in Europe, her husband would be a strictly religious and moral person, and she would be very rich. What more could any woman ask? Evidently nothing, and Prince Chiaromonte therefore continued to negotiate the marriage in the old-fashioned manner, without the least intention of speaking about it to Angela till everything was altogether settled between the family lawyers, and the wedding could take place in six