"Not bad," she conceded, in French this time. "I speak all those, and six or seven others besides, including Russian, Walachian, Serbo-Croat, Chinese and Turanian."
"I congratulate you," Marianne retorted. Not for anything in the world would she have shown that she was impressed. "But now that that is settled, would you think me very stupid, Madame, if I asked you who you are and where I am?"
The old lady came closer so that Marianne could smell the scents of incense and ambergris and gave another of her sardonic chuckles.
"You are in my house," she said. "In my house in Phanar.[2] And I am Princess Morousi, widow of the late hospodar [3] of Walachia. I am happy to welcome you as my guest."
"Thank you. It is very kind of you to make me welcome, Princess, but I should like to know how I come to be here at all. Last night, I went with a Turkish lady, a friend of the Sultan Valideh, to—"
"I know," the princess interrupted her. "But I also know that there are places to which no woman has the right to go without her husband's permission. You are here, therefore, because he brought you here."
"My husband? But there must be some mistake! My husband is dead. I am a widow!"
The old princess gave a compassionate sigh and struck the ground with her stick to give emphasis to her words.
"I think, my dear, that the mistake is yours. Unless you are not the Princess Sant'Anna, wife of Prince Corrado?"
"That is who I am, but—"
"Then we are not at cross purposes and I tell you again that it was Corrado Sant'Anna himself brought you here, to this house, last night."
"But that's impossible!" Marianne cried out, on the verge of tears. "Unless—"
A dreadful thought had crossed her mind, but so fantastically improbable had been the whole course of her life since the burning down of Selton Hall that not even this could surprise her very much. If she had really come to this strange place in her dead husband's company, then it must be that she herself had died and both this unaccustomed room and this woman with her ability to speak every known language must exist in the next world. The Jewess, Rebecca, had simply poisoned her, and she had gone to sleep on earth never to wake again except in this rather luxurious kind of purgatory, watched over by a distinctly unconventional angel. But then how could anyone possibly know what the life after death was going to be like?
In her bewilderment she was half expecting the door to open and admit a patriarch or some other long-dead person, or perhaps even her own father or mother, when her companion went over to the icons and fetched a candle which she brought to Marianne.
"Feel the flame," she told her. "When it burns you, you will know that you are just as much alive as I am. Nor, unless I'm much mistaken, are you in the least ill. I trust that you slept well?"
"Yes, thank you," Marianne acknowledged, putting her finger unhesitatingly into the flame and withdrawing it at once. "Indeed, I feel better than I have for a long time. But I still can't understand what you mean by saying my husband is alive—and here, in this house. Does that mean that you know him—that you have seen him?"
"When he has never permitted you to do so?" the princess agreed tranquilly. "That is quite true." She drew a chair, a curious, X-shaped thing with a goatskin seat, up to the bed and continued: "My child—my age allows me to call you so, for you are not really very old, you know—it is natural for you to be full of questions regarding your peculiar situation. I think I may be able to answer some of them, but not all. I have known the Sant'Anna family for a long time, you see. Don Sebastiano, your husband's grandfather, was a frequent guest of my parents when I was a child. He was a great friend of ours and that friendship has been passed on to his descendants. After the tragedy that struck his family, young Corrado spent much time away from Italy, where he could not live a normal life, and naturally found his way back to us, sure of finding a welcome and understanding in his dreadful plight."
Curiosity, abruptly reawakened, drove out every other feeling in Marianne, including all the fears she had experienced since waking. Surely this woman held the key to the mystery surrounding her invisible husband, and at the least she wanted to possess that key herself. Unable to control herself any longer, Marianne broke in on her hostess.
"So you know?"
"What do I know?"
"The reason why my husband shuts himself away like a hermit in his ancestral home? The reason why I know him only as a voice in a mirror, a hand in a white glove parting a black curtain, a horseman in a white mask glimpsed from afar? The reason why he married me, a stranger, already pregnant by another man, because that other was the emperor, instead of getting an heir of his own body?"
Princess Morousi inclined her head gravely.
"All these I know. In each case, the reason is the same."
"Then, tell me! I want to know. I have a right to know."
"That is so. But it is not for me to tell you, for you have asked me the one question which my conscience will not allow me to answer. All I can tell you is that, in spite of what that devil Damiani told you, Corrado is not dead. I think that at the last moment something stronger than himself stayed the wretch's hand. He missed his stroke and Corrado was only wounded. Then he dared not strike again but chained him in a dungeon, deep under the old Soranzo Palace in Venice, expecting him to die there. But the prince did not die. He recovered from his wound and escaped—"
Suddenly Marianne saw again the wide hall of the Venetian palazzo in which she, too, had been imprisoned. She saw the black servants lying dead and Damiani's huge body sprawled across the marble staircase, still clad in its golden robe, with the blood oozing slowly from it and a pair of iron fetters and a length of chain upon its breast. She had pushed all these mysteries to the back of her mind because of the hideous memories with which they were bound up, but now they rushed out again in a new light.
"So it was he—" she said slowly, as though still trying to grasp what she was saying. "So it was he who killed Damiani and his slaves that terrible night in Venice?"
"It was he. But it was not done for revenge, but simply out of the most elementary justice. He held Damiani's life forfeit for all the crimes that he had planned and executed. It was both his right and his duty."
"I am not the one to deny it. But then, why did he run away? Why not come to me and tell me what happened? I, too, was a prisoner in that palace. He must have told you that?"
"He did," the princess agreed.
"Instead of which he opened my prison door and then vanished without waiting to wake me even! Yet he was in his own house and no one could touch him. We could have got rid of the bodies and waited for the officers together—oh, I don't know… He set me free and then by his very flight put me in danger. I could have been arrested."
"No, because you, too, were in your own house. As for him, he was obliged to remain in hiding since he could no more show his face in Venice than in Lucca. Had he done so, no one would have believed him. The military governor's men would have taken him for an impostor, and he would have been taken and put to death for sure. Believe me, he could not have stayed."
Here again was the same tiresome riddle that Marianne came up against every time. She wondered if she would ever meet anyone who would be prepared to treat her as a grown-up person, a woman in her own right, and reveal to her a secret which was already shared by a good many other people. True that most of those were dead…
Still trying instinctively to penetrate the heart of the mystery, Marianne said casually: "How is it, then, that he cannot appear in public as the Prince Sant'Anna in Italy and yet is able to do so here?"