The White Sister | Page 4

care a straw whether Angela's
father liked the picture or not, being in love with it himself, and much
more anxious to keep it than to be paid for it.
'When shall I see you again?' Giovanni had asked of Angela, almost in

a whisper, while the Marchesa was speaking.
Instead of answering she shook her head, for 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