The Lady Paramount | Page 3

nice, who knows what may happen? I planned it ever so long ago," she proclaimed, with an ingenuousness that was almost brazen, "and made all my preparations. Then I sat down and waited for the day when I should be free and independent."
Her eyes melted again, deprecating his censure, beseeching his indulgence, yet still, with a little glint of raillery, defying him to do his worst.
His hand sawed the air, his foot tapped the ground.
"Free and independent, free and independent," he fumed, in derision. "Fine words, fine words. And you made all your preparations beforehand, in secrecy; and you 're not sly? Misericordia di Dio!"
He groaned impotently; he shook his bony old fist at the stars in the firmament.
"Perhaps you will admit," he questioned loftily, "that there are decencies to be observed even by the free and independent? It is not decent for you to travel alone. If you mean a single word of what you say, why are n't you accompanied by the Baronessa?"
"The Baronessa fatigues me," Susanna answered gently. "And I exasperate her and try her patience cruelly. She 's always putting spokes in my wheel, and I 'm always saying and doing things she disapproves of. Ah, if she only suspected the half of the things I don't say or do, but think and feel!"
She nodded with profound significance.
"We belong," she pointed out, "to discrepant generations. I 'm so intensely modern, and she 's so irredeemably eighteen-sixty. I 've only waited for this blessed day of liberty to cut adrift from the Baronessa. And the pleasure will be mutual, I promise you. She will enjoy a peace and a calm that she has n't known for ages. Ouf! I feel like Europe after the downfall of Napoleon."
She gave her shoulders a little shake of satisfaction.
"The Baronessa," she said, and I 'm afraid there was laughter in her tone, "is a prisoner for the night on Isola Nobile." I 'm afraid she tittered. "I gave orders that the launch was to start off the moment she put her foot aboard it, and on no account was it to turn back, and on no account was any boat to leave the island till to-morrow morning. I expect she 'll be rather annoyed--and puzzled. But--cosa vuole? It's all in the day's work."
Then her voice modulated, and became confidential and exultant.
"I 'm going to have such a delicious plunge. See--to-night I have put on pearls, and diamonds, and rings, that the Baronessa would never let me wear. And I 've got a whole bagful of books, to read in the train--Anatole France, and Shakespeare, and Gyp, and Pierre Loti, and Moli��re, and Max Beerbohm, and everybody: all the books the Baronessa would have died a thousand deaths rather than let me look at. That's the nuisance of being a woman of position--you 're brought up never to read anything except the Lives of the Saints and the fashion papers. I 've had to do all my really important reading by stealth, like a thief in the night. Ah," she sighed, "if I were only a man, like you! But as for observing the decencies," she continued briskly, "you need have no fear. I 'm going to the land of all lands where (if report speaks true) one has most opportunities of observing them--I 'm going to England, and I 'll observe them with both eyes. And I 'm not travelling alone." She spurned the imputation. "There are Rosina and Serafino; and at the end of my journey I shall have Miss Sandus. You remember that nice Miss Sandus?" she asked, smiling up at him. "She is my fellow-conspirator. We arranged it all before she went away last autumn. I 'm to go to her house in London, and she will go with me to Craford. She 's frantically interested about my cousin. She thinks it's the most thrilling and romantic story she has ever heard. And she thoroughly sympathises with my desire to make friends with him, and to offer him some sort of reparation."
The Commendatore was pacing nervously backwards and forwards, being, I suppose, too punctilious an old-school Latin stickler for etiquette to interrupt.
But now, "Curse her for a meddlesome Englishwoman," he spluttered violently. "To encourage a young girl like you in such midsummer folly. A young girl?--a young hoyden, a young tom-boy. What? You will travel from here to London without a chaperon? And books--French novels--gr-r-r! I wish you had never been taught to read. I think it is ridiculous to teach women to read. What good will they get by reading? You deserve--upon my word you deserve . . . Well, never mind. Oh, body of Bacchus!"
He wrung his hands, as one in desperation.
"A young girl, a mere child," he cried, in a wail to Heaven; "a mere"--he