Venetian Masque

The barnabotto leader found here the cool reception which was everywhere being vouchsafed him nowadays. He fortified himself in a scorn of them, which was genuine enough. Simpering, affected, presumptuously critical and self-assertive, they made up a noisy group to be found in every age and in every society.

There was a great deal of talk of Liberty, the Age of Reason and the Rights of Man; and a great deal of ill-digested matter from the encyclopædists was being tossed about by these pseudo-intellectuals, over ices and coffee and malvoisie. There was also some scandal. But even this was dressed-up in intellectual rags, implying on the part of those who mongered it a breadth of outlook as startling as it would have been indefensible by any reasonable canons.

He was fretted by impatience until the last of them had departed.

Then the Vicomtesse reproached him with the disgruntled air and manner he had paraded among her friends.

'Friends?' he said. He was very bitter. 'Faith, if you find your friends among these posturing pimps and these silly spirituelle baggages I can believe anything of you. Nothing surprises me any more. Not even that you should stoop to betraying me.'

She accommodated herself of her black-and-gold settee, and spread on either side of her the blue panniers of her gown. 'Oh, I see. Your ill-humour is rooted in jealousy again.' She sighed. 'You grow intolerably tiresome, Leonardo.'

'I have, of course, no cause. Your loyalty renders my suspicions shameful. They emanate from the intemperance of my own mind. That is what you would say, is it not?'

'Something of the kind.'

'You would be wise to leave flippancy. I am not in the humour for it. And you had better not provoke me more than you have done already.'

But the dainty little lady laughed at him. 'You are not threatening me, by any chance?'

He looked down upon her malevolently. 'My God! Are you quite shameless?'

'It must be that I follow your example, Leonardo, although with less cause for shame.'

'What I ask myself is whether a woman ever had cause for more.'

'Your mother, perhaps, Leonardo.'

He stooped and seized her wrist viciously. 'Will you curb that pert tongue of yours before I do you a mischief? I will not have my mother's name on your lips, you jade.'

She rose, suddenly white and fierce, a galled jade, indeed, under his insult. She wrenched her wrist from his grasp.

'I think you had better go. Out of my house!' And as he stood sneering at her, she stamped her daintily shod foot. 'Out of my house! Do you hear me?' She twisted away, to reach the bell-rope. But he interposed himself.

'You shall hear me first. You shall render me an account of your betrayal.'

'You fool, I owe you no account. If we are to talk of accounts, you had better think of how you stand in my debt.'

'I have occasion to think of it since you have published it.'

'Published it?' Some of the vixenish anger fell from her in surprise. 'Published it, do you say?'

'Yes, published it, madame. Published it to your paramour, to this damned Englishman from whom you have no secrets. I could forgive your infidelity. After all, I can make allowances for your wanton kind. But I cannot forgive you for betraying that. Do you know what you have done? You have placed me in this man's power. But that, I suppose, is what you intended.'

Her clear blue eyes were fixed upon him now in distress rather than in anger. She passed a slim white hand across her brow, disarranging the golden tendrils that curled on either temple.

'My God, this is Greek to me. You are raving, Leonardo. It is all false, this. I have never said a word to Melville or to anyone of the money you have had from me. That I swear to you. As for the rest . . .' She curled her lip, and shrugged. 'That Melville is not my lover matters little compared with this.'

'That you should have told him this proves him your lover even if I had no other evidence. For you are lying to me. Why is he always here? Why does he always hover about you when you meet elsewhere?'

'Leave that!' she cried impatiently. 'Keep to the main point. Keep to what is really important. This matter of the money. I swear to you again that I have never so much as whispered it.'

'Oh, yes, you'll swear and swear. Perjury has never mattered to women of your kind.' And fiercely, inter-larding his narratives with opprobrium, he told her, with reservations, of his interview that morning with Mr. Melville.

'Now,' he asked at the end, 'will you still think it worth your while to deny your infamy?'

She was too startled even to show resentment of his insults. Her smooth white brow was knit. She pushed him away, and under the force of her will rather than of her hand he fell back and let her pass. She went to resume her seat on the couch, set her elbows on her knees, and took her chin in her hands. Doubting, he watched her and waited.