Caesar or Nothing Part 20

"I protestante della simpatia."

Caesar made much of this phrase, because it was apt, and he took it that Carminatti considered the ladies protestants against friendliness, because they had paid no attention to the charms that he displayed in their honour.

_CONSEQUENCES OF THE RAIN_

Two or three days later Mme. Dawson bowed to Caesar on pa.s.sing him in the hall, and asked him:

"Aren't you Spanish?"

"Yes, madam."

"But don't you speak French?"

"Very little."

"My daughter is Spanish too."

"She is a perfect Spanish type."

"Really?" asked the daughter referred to.

"Thoroughly."

"Then I am happy."

In the evening, after dinner, Caesar again joined Mme. Dawson and began to talk with her. The Frenchwoman had a tendency to philosophize, to criticize, and to find out everything. She had no great capacity for admiration, and nothing she saw succeeded in dragging warm eulogies from her lips. There was none of the "_bello! bellissimo!_" of the Italian ladies in her talk, but a series of exact epithets.

Mme. Dawson had left all her capacity for admiration in France, and was visiting Italy for the purpose of arriving as soon as possible at the conclusion that there is no town like Paris, no nation like the French, and it didn't matter much to Caesar whether he agreed or denied it.

Mlle. de Sandoval had a great curiosity about things in Spain and an absurd idea about everything Spanish.

"It seems impossible," thought Caesar, "how stupid French people are about whatsoever is not French."

Mlle. de Sandoval asked Caesar a lot of questions, and finally, with an ironic gesture, said to him:

"You mustn't let us keep you from going to talk with the Countess Brenda. She is looking over at you a great deal."

Caesar became a trifle dubious; indeed, the Countess was looking at him in a fixed and disdainful way.

"The Countess is a very intelligent woman," said Caesar; "I think you would all like her very much."

Mme. Dawson said nothing; Caesar rose, took his leave of the family, and went over to speak to the Countess and her daughter. She received him coldly. Caesar thought he would stay long enough to be polite and then get away, when Carminatti, speaking to him in a very friendly way and calling him "_mio caro_," asked him to introduce him to Mme. Dawson.

He did so, and when he had left the handsome Neapolitan leaning back in a chair beside the French ladies, he made the excuse that he had a letter to write, and said good-night.

"I see that you are an ogre," said Mlle. de Sandoval.

"Do you want me for anything?"

"No, no; you may go when you choose."

Caesar repaired to his room.

"I don't mind those people," he said; "but if they think I am a man made for entertaining ladies, they are very clever."

The next day Mme. Dawson talked with Caesar very affably, and Mlle. de Sandoval made a few ironical remarks about his savage ways.

Of all the family Caesar conceived that Mlle. Cadet was the most intelligent. She was a French country girl, very jovial, blond, with a turned-up nose, and on the whole insignificant looking. When she spoke, her voice had certain falsetto inflexions that were very comical.

Mlle. Cadet was on to everything the moment it happened. Caesar asked her jokingly about the people in the hotel, and he was thunderstruck to find that she had discovered in three or four days who all the guests were and where they came from.

Mlle. Cadet also told him that Carminatti had sent an ardent declaration of love to the Sandoval girl the first day he saw her.

"The devil!" exclaimed Caesar. "What an inflammable Neapolitan it is!

And what did she reply?"

"What would she reply? Nothing."

"As you are already familiar with everything going on here," said Caesar, "I am going to ask you a question: what is the noise in the court every night? I am always thinking of asking somebody."

"Why, it is charging the acc.u.mulator of the lift," replied Mlle. Cadet.

"You have relieved me from a terrible doubt which worried me."

"I have never heard a noise," said Mlle. de Sandoval, breaking into the conversation.

"That's because your room is on the square," Caesar answered, "and the noise is in the court; on the poor side of the house."

"Pshaw! There is no reason to complain," remarked Mlle. Cadet, "if they give us a serenade."

"Do you consider yourself poor?" Mlle. de Sandoval asked Caesar, disdainfully.

"Yes, I consider myself poor, because I am."

During the following days Mme. Dawson and her daughters were introduced to the rest of the people in the hotel, and became intimate with them.

The "Contessina" Brenda and the San Martino girls made friends with the French girls, and the Neapolitan and his gentlemen friends flitted among them all.

The Countess Brenda at first behaved somewhat stiff with Mme. Dawson and her daughters, but later she little by little submitted and permitted them to be her friends.

She introduced the French ladies to the other ladies in the hotel; but doubtless her aristocratic ideas would not allow her to consider Mlle.

Cadet a person worthy to be introduced, for whenever she got to her she acted as if she didn't know her.

The governess, noticing this repeated contempt, would blush at it, and once she murmured, addressing Caesar with tears ready to escape from her eyes:

"That's a nice thing to do! Just because I am poor, I don't think they ought to despise me."