The White Sister | Page 7

all till he was nearly thirty years of age and
on the first wave of his high success; but he had read about the past,
and to his unspoiled sight and vivid imagination Rome was still
romantic and the greatest city in the world, ancient or modern; and
somehow when he thought of his picture and of Angela's face, and
remembered the scene at the telephone, he felt that he was himself just
within the sphere of some mysterious and tragic action which he could
not yet understand, but which might possibly affect his own life.
'This is a serio-comic world,' he said to himself as he slowly made his
way down the Corso, watching the faces of the people he passed,
because he never passed a face in the street without glancing at it,
stopping now and then to look into a shop window where there was
nothing to see that he had not seen a thousand times elsewhere,
smoking cigarettes without number, thinking of Angela's portrait, and
mechanically repeating his little epigram over and over again, to a sort
of tune in his head, with variations and transpositions that meant
nothing at all.
'This is a serio-comic world. This is a comico-serious world. This
world is a serious comico-serial. This is a worldly-serious comedy.'
And so forth, and so on; and a number of more or less good-looking
women of the serio-comic world, whose portraits he had painted, and
several more or less distinguished men who had sat to him, passed the
man of genius and greeted him as if they were rather pleased to show
that they knew him; but they would have been shocked if they could
have heard the silly words the great painter was mechanically repeating
to himself as he idled along the pavement, musing on the picture he
hoped to keep, and already regarded as his masterpiece and chief
treasure.
CHAPTER II
The excellent Madame Bernard had been Angela's governess before the
child had been sent to the convent, on the Trinità dei Monti, and
whenever she was at home for the holidays, and also during the brief

interval between her leaving school and going into society; and after
that, during the winter which preceded Prince Chiaromonte's death, she
had accompanied the motherless girl to concerts and had walked with
her almost daily in the mornings. She was one of those thoroughly
trustworthy, sound-minded, well-educated Frenchwomen of the middle
class of whom many are to be found in the provinces, though the type
is rare in Paris; nearly fifty years of age, she had lived twenty years in
Rome, always occupying the same little apartment in a respectable
street of Trastevere, where she had a spare room which she was glad to
let to any French or English lady of small means who came to Rome
for a few months in the winter and spring.
Angela sent her maid for Madame Bernard on the day of the
catastrophe, since her aunt neither offered to take her in at once nor
seemed inclined to suggest any arrangement for the future. The
Marchesa did, indeed, take charge of everything in the Palazzo
Chiaromonte within an hour of her brother-in-law's death; she locked
the drawers of his private desk herself, sent for the notary and had the
customary seals placed on the doors of the inner apartments 'in the
name of the heirs'; she spoke with the undertaker and made every
arrangement for the customary lying in state of the body during the
following night and day; saw to the erection of the temporary altar at
which masses for the dead would be celebrated almost without
interruption from midnight to noon by sixteen priests in succession;
gave full instructions to the effect that the men-servants should take
their turn of duty in regular watches, day and night, until the funeral;
and finally left the palace, after showing herself to be an exceedingly
practical woman.
When she went away, she was holding her handkerchief to her eyes
with both hands and she forgot her parasol; but she remembered it as
she was just going out by the postern, her carriage being outside
because the gates were shut, and she sent her footman back for it and
for the little morocco bag in which she carried her handkerchief and
card-case. It was a small matter, but the porter, the footman, and the
butler upstairs all remembered it afterwards, and the footman himself,
while coming down, took the trouble to look into the little wallet, and

saw that the card-case was there, but nothing else; for the Marchesa
sometimes carried certain little cigarettes in it, which the man had
found particularly good. But to-day there was not even one.
Madame Bernard arrived in tears, for she was a warm-hearted woman,
and