From time to time, for several years, I heard vaguely of Mrs.Light as a wandering beauty at French and German watering-places.
Once came a rumor that she was going to make a grand marriage in England; then we heard that the gentleman had thought better of it and left her to keep afloat as she could.
She was a terribly scatter-brained creature.She pretends to be a great lady, but I consider that old Filomena, my washer-woman, is in essentials a greater one.
But certainly, after all, she has been fortunate.
She embarked at last on a lawsuit about some property, with her husband's family, and went to America to attend to it.
She came back triumphant, with a long purse.She reappeared in Italy, and established herself for a while in Venice.
Then she came to Florence, where she spent a couple of years and where I saw her.Last year she passed down to Naples, which I should have said was just the place for her, and this winter she has laid siege to Rome.She seems very prosperous.
She has taken a floor in the Palazzo F----, she keeps her carriage, and Christina and she, between them, must have a pretty milliner's bill.Giacosa has turned up again, looking as if he had been kept on ice at Ancona, for her return.""What sort of education," Rowland asked, "do you imagine the mother's adventures to have been for the daughter?""A strange school! But Mrs.Light told me, in Florence, that she had given her child the education of a princess.In other words, I suppose, she speaks three or four languages, and has read several hundred French novels.Christina, I suspect, is very clever.
When I saw her, I was amazed at her beauty, and, certainly, if there is any truth in faces, she ought to have the soul of an angel.
Perhaps she has.I don't judge her; she 's an extraordinary young person.
She has been told twenty times a day by her mother, since she was five years old, that she is a beauty of beauties, that her face is her fortune, and that, if she plays her cards, she may marry a duke.
If she has not been fatally corrupted, she is a very superior girl.
My own impression is that she is a mixture of good and bad, of ambition and indifference.Mrs.Light, having failed to make her own fortune in matrimony, has transferred her hopes to her daughter, and nursed them till they have become a kind of monomania.She has a hobby, which she rides in secret; but some day she will let you see it.
I 'm sure that if you go in some evening unannounced, you will find her scanning the tea-leaves in her cup, or telling her daughter's fortune with a greasy pack of cards, preserved for the purpose.
She promises her a prince--a reigning prince.But if Mrs.Light is silly, she is shrewd, too, and, lest considerations of state should deny her prince the luxury of a love-match, she keeps on hand a few common mortals.At the worst she would take a duke, an English lord, or even a young American with a proper number of millions.The poor woman must be rather uncomfortable.
She is always building castles and knocking them down again--always casting her nets and pulling them in.If her daughter were less of a beauty, her transparent ambition would be very ridiculous;but there is something in the girl, as one looks at her, that seems to make it very possible she is marked out for one of those wonderful romantic fortunes that history now and then relates.'Who, after all, was the Empress of the French?' Mrs.Light is forever saying.
'And beside Christina the Empress is a dowdy!' ""And what does Christina say?"
"She makes no scruple, as you know, of saying that her mother is a fool.What she thinks, heaven knows.
I suspect that, practically, she does not commit herself.
She is excessively proud, and thinks herself good enough to occupy the highest station in the world; but she knows that her mother talks nonsense, and that even a beautiful girl may look awkward in making unsuccessful advances.
So she remains superbly indifferent, and lets her mother take the risks.If the prince is secured, so much the better;if he is not, she need never confess to herself that even a prince has slighted her.""Your report is as solid," Rowland said to Madame Grandoni, thanking her, "as if it had been prepared for the Academy of Sciences;" and he congratulated himself on having listened to it when, a couple of days later, Mrs.Light and her daughter, attended by the Cavaliere and the poodle, came to his rooms to look at Roderick's statues.
It was more comfortable to know just with whom he was dealing.
Mrs.Light was prodigiously gracious, and showered down compliments not only on the statues, but on all his possessions."Upon my word," she said, "you men know how to make yourselves comfortable.If one of us poor women had half as many easy-chairs and knick-knacks, we should be famously abused.
It 's really selfish to be living all alone in such a place as this.
Cavaliere, how should you like this suite of rooms and a fortune to fill them with pictures and statues? Christina, love, look at that mosaic table.
Mr.Mallet, I could almost beg it from you.Yes, that Eve is certainly very fine.We need n't be ashamed of such a great-grandmother as that.
