She had loved Arsenio once; she had cleaved unto him with a fidelity to which—in these days—her own word “primitive” must be allowed to be the most obviously applicable; remorse had smitten her over her cruelty to him. All the same, in a measure she erred about him, judging his love solely by the standard of his conduct, his romance in the light of his frivolity and shamelessness, his sensibility by his failure adequately to understand a subtle and specialized sensibility in herself. That, at least, was the attitude to which her years of association with him—now intimate, now distant and aloof—had brought her. It was not, of course, to be attributed in anything like its entirety to the girl whom he had kissed at Cragsfoot, or whom he had loved at Venice, or carried off from Waldo. Her final judgment of him was the result of what is called, in quite another connection, a progressive revelation.
Thus it happened that his tragic death was—to put it moderately—no more tragic to her than it was to me his friend rather by circumstances than choice or taste, by interest and amusement more than by affection. She took him at his word, so to say, and accepted the note of ironical comedy which he himself was responsible for importing into the occurrence. Keen-eyed for that aspect, and in a bitter way keenly appreciative of it, she was blind to any other, and indeed reluctant to try to see it—almost afraid that, even dead, he might befool her again, still irremediably suspicious that he was deceiving her by lies and posturings. As a result, she was really and truly—in the depths of her soul—unmoved by the catastrophe, and not unamused by the trappings with which Arsenio had be-draped it—or, rather, his previously rehearsed but never actually presented, version of it.
For the outside observer—comparatively outside, anyhow—and for the amateur of comedy and its material—human foibles, prejudices, ambitions—there was amusement to be had. As soon as Lucinda’s decision to renounce the inheritance—except the _palazzo_ which, as she observed to me, had been honestly come by, and honestly preserved by being let out in lodgings—Arsenio’s last will and testament became an animated topic of the day—and a rather controversial one. The clericals and their journals—Signor Panizzi’s black reactionaries and pro-Austrians—paid lip-service to the ten thousand lire for masses, but could not refrain from some surprise at the choice of trustees which the lamented Don Arsenio—a good Catholic and of old noble stock—had made (the trustees were all pestilent, as I had suspected); while the other side—the patriots, the enlightened, the radicals, the pestilents, while most gratefully acknowledging his munificence, and belauding the eminent gentlemen to whom he had confided his trust, pointed out with satisfaction how the spirit of progress and enlightenment had proved too strong in the end even for a man of Don Arsenio’s clerical antecedents and proclivities. As for Signor Panizzi, both sides agreed that his finger had been in the pie; his position as first and dominating trustee was for the one a formidable menace to, and for the other a sufficient guarantee of, a wise, beneficial, and honest administration of the fund.