Part 19 (1/2)
”Yes, give me it.”
Caesar read the book, learned the intricacies of the game, and the next few evenings he acquitted himself so well that the Countess of San Martino marched off to her room with burning cheeks and almost in tears.
”What a cad you are!” Laura said to him at lunch some days later, laughing. ”You are fleecing those women.”
”It's their own fault. Why did they take advantage of my innocence?”
”They have decided to go and play in Carminatti's room without telling you.”
”I'm glad of it.”
”Do you know, _bambino_, I have to go away for a few days.”
”Where?”
”To Naples. Come with me.”
”No; I have things to do here. I will take you to the station.”
”Ah, you rascal! You are a Don Juan.”
”No, dear sister. I am a financier.”
”I can see your victims from here. But I shall put them on their guard.
You are a blood-thirsty hyena. You like to collect hearts the way the Red-skins did scalps.”
”You mean coupons.”
”No, hearts. You like to pretend to be simple, because you are wicked. I will tell the Countess Brenda and her daughter.”
”What are you going to tell them?”
”That you are wicked, that you have a hyena's heart, that you want to ruin them.”
”Don't tell them that, because it will make them fall in love with me. A hyena-hearted man is always run after by the ladies.”
”You are right. Come along, go to Naples with me.”
”Is your husband such a terrible bore, little sister?”
”A little more cream and a little less impertinence, _bambino_,” said Laura, holding out her plate with a comic gesture.
Caesar burst out laughing, and after lunch he took Laura to the station and remained in Rome alone. His two chief occupations consisted in making love respectfully to the Countess Brenda and going to walk with Preciozi.
The Countess Brenda was manifestly coming around; in the evening Caesar would take a seat beside her and start a serious conversation about religious and philosophical matters. The Countess was a well-educated and religious woman; but beneath all her culture one could see the ardent dark woman, still young, and with intense eyes.
Caesar made it a spiritual training to talk to the Countess. She often turned the conversation to questions of love, and discussed them with apparent keenness and insight, but it was evident that all her ideas about love came out of novels. Beyond a doubt, her calm, vulgar husband did not fill up the emptiness of her soul, because the Countess was discontented and had a vague hope that somewhere, above or beneath the commonplaces of the day, there was a mysterious region where the ineffable reigned.