Джозеф Конрад - Suspense

“Take a light with you. All the lights are out down there. Knock at the marquis’s door and inquire from Bernard, and if the doctor is still there bring him along.”

Father Carpi went out hastily, and Count de Montevesso, keeping the women outside, paced the whole length of the room. The fellow called himself a doctor, whatever else he might have been. Whether he did any good to the child or not—Count de Montevesso stopped and looked fixedly at the bed—this was an extremely favourable opportunity to get in touch with him personally. Who could tell what use could be made of him in his other capacities, apart from the fact that he probably could really prescribe some remedy? Count de Montevesso’s heart was softened paternally. His progress from European barrack–rooms to an Eastern palace left on his mind a sort of bewilderment. He even thought the girl attractive. There she was, a prey of some sort of illness. He bent over her face and instantly a pair of thin bare arms darted from under the blankets and clasped him round the neck with a force that really surprised him. “That one loves me,” he thought. He did not know that she would have hung round anybody’s neck in the passion of obtaining what she wanted. He thought with a sort of dull insight that everybody was a little bit against her. He abandoned his neck to the passionate clasp for a little time, then disengaged himself gently.

“What makes you behave like this?” he asked. “Do you feel a pain anywhere?”

No emotion could change the harshness of his voice, but it was very low and there was an accent in it which the girl could not mistake. She sat up suddenly with her long wild hair covering her shoulders. With her round eyes, the predatory character of her face, the ruffled fury of her aspect, she looked like an angry bird; and there was something bird–like in the screech of her voice.

“Pain. No. But if I didn’t hate them so I would like to die. I would …”

Count de Montevesso put one hand at the back of her head and clapped the other broad palm over her mouth. This action surprised her so much that she didn’t even struggle. When the count took his hands away she remained silent without looking at him.

“Don’t scream like this,” he murmured harshly, but with obvious indulgence. “Your aunts are outside and they will tell the priest all about it.”

Clelia drew up her knees, clasped her hands round them outside the blanket and stared.

“It is just your temper?” suggested Count Helion reproachfully.

“All those dressed–up witches despise me. I am not frightened. And the worst of them is that yellow–haired witch, your wife. If I had gone in there in my bare feet they could not have stared more down on me…. I shall fly at their faces. I can read their thoughts as they put their glasses to their eyes. What animal is this? they seem to ask themselves. I am a brute beast to them.”

A shadow seemed to fall on Count de Montevesso’s face for the moment. Clelia unclasped her fingers, shook her fists at the empty space, then clasped her legs again. These movements full of sombre energy were observed silently by the Count de Montevesso. He uttered the word “Patienza,” which, in its humility, is the word of the ambitious, of the unforgiving, who keep a strict account with the world; a word of indomitable hope. “You wait till you are a little older. You will have plenty of people at your feet; and then you will be able to spurn anybody you like.”

“You mean when I am married,” said Clelia, in a far–away voice, and staring straight over her knees.

“Yes,” said the Count de Montevesso, “but you will first have to learn to be gentle.”

This recommendation apparently missed the ear for which it was destined. For a whole minute Clelia seemed to contemplate some sort of vision with her predatory and pathetic stare. One side of her nightgown had slipped off her shoulder. Suddenly she pushed her scattered hair back, and extending her arm towards Count Helion, patted him caressingly on the cheek.

When she had done patting him he asked unmoved: “Now, what is it you want?”

She was careful not to turn her face his way while she whispered: “I want that young signore that came to–day to make eyes at my aunt.”

“Impossible.”

“Why impossible? I was with them in the morning; they did nothing but look at each other. But I want him for myself.”

“That Englishman! You can’t have an Englishman like this. I am thinking of something better for you, a marquis or a count.”

This was the exact truth, not a sudden idea to meet a hopeless case.

“You have hardly had time to have a good look at him,” added Count Helion.

“I looked at him this evening with all my eyes, with all my soul. I would have sat up all night to look at him. But he got up and turned his back on me. He has no eyes for anybody but my aunt.”

“Did you speak together, you two?”

“Yes,” she said, “he sat down by me and all those witches stared as if he had been making up to a monster. Am I a monster? He too looked at me as if I had been one.”

“Was he rude to you?” asked the Count de Montevesso.

“He was as insolent as all the people I have seen since we came to this town. His heart was black as the heart of all the rest of them. He was gentle to me as one is gentle to an old beggar for the sake of charity. Oh, how I hated him.”

“Well, then,” said Count de Montevesso in a harsh unsympathetic tone, “you may safely despise him.”

Clelia threw herself half out of bed on the neck of Count Helion, who preserved an unsympathetic rigidity, though he did not actually repulse her wild and vehement caress.

“O, dearest uncle of mine,” she whispered ardently into his ear, “he is so handsome! I must have him for myself.”

There was a knocking at the door. Count Helion tore the bare arms from his neck and pushed the girl back into bed.

“Cover yourself up,” he commanded hurriedly. He arranged the blanket at her back. “Lie still and say nothing of all this, and then you need have no fear. But if you breathe a word of this to anybody, then … Come in,” he shouted to the renewed knocking, and had just time to shake his finger at Clelia menacingly before the abbé and the doctor entered the room.

Cosmo walked away with no more than one look back, just before turning the corner, at the tensely alert griffins guarding the portals of the palazzo. At the entrance of his inn a small knot of men on the pavement paused in their low conversation to look at him. After he had passed he heard a voice say: “This is the English milor.” He found the dimly lit hall empty, and he went up the empty staircase into the upper regions of silence. His face, which to the men on the pavement had appeared passionless and pale as marble, looked at him suddenly out of the mirror over the fire–place, and he was startled as though he had seen a ghost.

Spire had been told not to wait for his return. His empty room had welcomed him with a bright flame on the hearth and with lighted candles. He turned away from his own image, and stood with his back to the fire, looking downwards and vaguely oppressed by the profound as if expectant silence around him. The strength and novelty of the impressions received during that day, the intimacy of their appeal, had affected his fortitude. He felt mortally weary and began to undress; but after he got into bed he remained for a time in a sitting posture. For the first time of his life he tasted of loneliness. His father was at least thirty–five years his senior. An age! His sister was just a young girl. Clever, of course. He was very fond of her, but the mere fact of her being a girl raised a wall between them. He had never made any real friends. He had nothing to do; and he did not seem to know what to think of anything in the world. Now, for instance, there was that vanquished fat figure in a little cocked hat…. Still an emperor.