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Alfieri almost screeched the words. He was in a frenzy of passion. This woman had ever the power to drive him beyond bounds. He hated her now with an intensity born of derided love. The Governor would have stormed at him, but Mrs. Haxton accepted the challenge too promptly. "I admit nothing," she cried with a sudden shrillness.
He, who had seen Alfieri at the very last, might be admitted when the door was closed to all others; he could help to sort the dead man's papers; he could, in his artistic capacity, discuss the plans for Alfieri's monument, write to Canova, correspond with the dignitaries of Santa Croce, and so forth; come in contact with the Countess in those manifold pieces of business, in those long conversations, which seem, for a time, to keep the dead one still in the company of the living.
After the first great grief was over a sense of relief may have arisen, a sense that after all "'tis an ill wind that blows no good"; that if she had lost Alfieri she had gained a degree of liberty, of independence, that she had acquired a possibility of being herself with all her tastes, the very existence of which she had forgotten while living under the shadow of that strange and disagreeable great man.
O God! how it degrades one's soul!" "On the 17th August 1784, at eight in the morning, at the inn of the Two Keys, Colmar, I met her, and remained speechless from excess of joy." So runs an annotation of Alfieri on the margin of one of his lyrics.
Alfieri leaped to his feet. His voice rose to a cracked falsetto. "You hear, you hear!" was his cry. "She robbed me of the papyrus, yet boasts of it. She is a thief, self-confessed." Mrs. Haxton also sprang up. Her physical dread of the man had yielded to the triumph of having cornered him. "Truly I hope his Excellency hears," she said.
"I do not know, sir," said he, "whether you have found leisure to study these enigmas of that mysterious Sphinx, the earth; for though Count Alfieri has spoken to me of your unusual acquirements, I understand your tastes have hitherto lain rather in the direction of philosophy and letters;" and on Odo's prompt admission of ignorance, he courteously continued: "The physical sciences seem, indeed, less likely to appeal to the imaginative and poetical faculty in man, and, on the other hand, religion has appeared to prohibit their too close investigation; yet I question if any thoughtful mind can enter on the study of these curious phenomena without feeling, as it were, an affinity between such investigations and the most abstract forms of thought.
But of the meanness, the narrowness of nature, the want of resonance of fibre, the insufficiency of moral vitality in so many things; of Alfieri's vanity, intolerance, injustice, indifference, hardness; of all these peculiarities which make the real man repulsive, the ideal man unattractive, to us, I have said more than enough, and when we have said all this, Alfieri still remains, for all his vanity, selfishness, meanness, narrow-mindedness, a man of grander proportions, of finer materials, nay, even of nobler moral shape, than the vast majority of men superior to him in all these points.
If Alfieri kept his tryst, they were to give him a letter, written by Irene, which asked him to follow and join the expedition. Otherwise, they were to ride after the caravan at top speed, and report his non- arrival.
And thus, with her books and her salon and her cavalier, she spent the rest of her chequered life until the end came one day in 1824; and her last resting-place was, as she wished it to be, by the side of her beloved Alfieri.
The Bell villa took, from a distance, an air of sentimental fantasy. She felt herself that she was too closely observed at Resole. Madame Marmet annoyed her. Prince Albertinelli disquieted her. The meetings in the pavilion of the Via Alfieri had become difficult and dangerous.
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