Confidence
by
Henry James
Library of America edition, 1983
It was in the early days of April; Bernard Longueville had been
spending the winter in Rome. He had travelled northward with the
consciousness of several social duties that appealed to him from the
further side of the Alps, but he was under the charm of the Italian
spring, and he made a pretext for lingering. He had spent five days at
Siena, where he had intended to spend but two, and still it was
impossible to continue his journey. He was a young man of a
contemplative and speculative turn, and this was his first visit to
Italy, so that if he dallied by the way he should not be harshly
judged. He had a fancy for sketching, and it was on his conscience to
take a few pictorial notes. There were two old inns at Siena, both of
them very shabby and very dirty. The one at which Longueville had
taken up his abode was entered by a dark, pestiferous arch-way,
surmounted by a sign which at a distance might have been read by the
travellers as the Dantean injunction to renounce all hope. The other
was not far off, and the day after his arrival, as he passed it, he
saw two ladies going in who evidently belonged to the large fraternity
of Anglo-Saxon tourists, and one of whom was young and carried herself
very well. Longueville had his shareor more than his
shareof gallantry, and this incident awakened a regret. If he
had gone to the other inn he might have had charming company: at his
own establishment there was no one but an ; aesthetic German who
smoked bad tobacco in the dining-room. He remarked to himself that
this was always his luck, and the remark was characteristic of the
man; it was charged with the feeling of the moment, but it was not
absolutely just; it was the result of an acute impression made by the
particular occasion; but it failed in appreciation of a providence
which had sprinkled Longueville's career with happy
accidentsaccidents, especially, in which his characteristic
gallantry was not allowed to rust for want of exercise. He lounged,
however, contentedly enough through these bright, still days of a
Tuscan April, drawing much entertainment from the high picturesqueness
of the things about him. Siena, a few years since, was a flawless gift
of the Middle Ages to the modern imagination. No other Italian city
could have been more interesting to an observer fond of reconstructing
obsolete manners. This was a taste of Bernard Longueville's, who had a
relish for serious literature, and at one time had made several lively
excursions into mediæval history. His friends thought him very
clever, and at the same time had an easy feeling about him which was a
tribute to his freedom from pedantry. He was clever indeed, and an
excellent companion; but the real measure of his brilliancy was in the
success with which he entertained himself. He was much addicted to
conversing with his own wit, and he greatly enjoyed his own society.
Clever as he often was in talking with his friends, I am not sure that
his best things, as the phrase is, were not for his own ears. And this
was not on account of any cynical contempt for the understanding of
his fellow-creatures: it was simply because what I have called his own
society was more of a stimulus than that of most other people. And yet
he was not for this reason fond of solitude; he was, on the contrary,
a very sociable animal. It must be admitted at the outset that he had
a nature which seemed at several points to contradict itself, as will
probably be perceived in the course of this narration.
He entertained himself greatly with his reflections and meditations
upon Sienese architecture and early Tuscan art, upon Italian
street-life and the geological idiosyncrasies of the Apennines. If he
had only gone to the other inn, that nice-looking girl whom he had
seen passing under the dusky portal with her face turned away from him
might have broken bread with him at this intellectual banquet. Then
came a day, however, when it seemed for a moment that if she were
disposed she might gather up the crumbs of the feast. Longueville,
every morning after breakfast, took a turn in the great square of
Sienathe vast piazza, shaped like a horse-shoe, where the
market is held beneath the windows of that crenellated palace from
whose overhanging cornice a tall, straight tower springs up with a
movement as light as that of a single plume in the bonnet of a
captain. Here he strolled about, watching a brown contadino
disembarrass his donkey, noting the progress of half an hour's chaffer
over a bundle of carrots, wishing a young girl with eyes like animated
agates would let him sketch her, and gazing up at intervals at the
beautiful, slim tower, as it played at contrasts with the large blue
air. After he had spent the greater part of a week in these grave
considerations, he made up his mind to leave Siena. But he was not
content with what he had done for his portfolio. Siena was eminently
sketchable, but he had not been industrious. On the last morning of
his visit, as he stood staring about him in the crowded piazza, and
feeling that, in spite of its picturesqueness, this was an awkward
place for setting up an easel, he bethought himself, by contrast, of a
quiet corner in another part of the town, which he had chanced upon in
one of his first walksan angle of a lonely terrace that abutted
upon the city-wall, where three or four superannuated objects seemed
to slumber in the sunshinethe open door of an empty church,
with a faded fresco exposed to the air in the arch above it, and an
ancient beggar-woman sitting beside it on a three-legged stool. The
little terrace had an old polished parapet, about as high as a man's
breast, above which was a view of strange, sad-colored hills.
Outside, to the left, the wall of the town made an outward bend, and
exposed its rugged and rusty complexion. There was a smooth stone
bench set into the wall of the church, on which Longueville had rested
for an hour, observing the composition of the little picture of which
I have indicated the elements, and of which the parapet of the terrace
would form the foreground. The thing was what painters call a subject,
and he had promised himself to come back with his utensils. This
morning he returned to the inn and took possession of them, and then
he made his way through a labyrinth of empty streets, lying on the
edge of the town, within the wall, like the superfluous folds of a
garment whose wearer has shrunken with old age. He reached his little
grass-grown terrace, and found it as sunny and as private as before.
The old mendicant was mumbling petitions, sacred and profane, at the
church door; but save for this the stillness was unbroken. The yellow
sunshine warmed the brown surface of the city-wall, and lighted the
hollows of the Etruscan hills. Longueville settled himself on the
empty bench, and, arranging his little portable apparatus, began to
ply his brushes. He worked for some time smoothly and rapidly, with
an agreeable sense of the absence of obstacles. It seemed almost an
interruption when, in the silent air, he heard a distant bell in the
town strike noon. Shortly after this, there was another interruption.
The sound of a soft footstep caused him to look up; whereupon he saw a
young woman standing there and bending her eyes upon the graceful
artist. A second glance assured him that she was that nice girl whom
he had seen going into the other inn with her mother, and suggested
that she had just emerged from the little church. He suspected,
howeverI hardly know whythat she had been looking at him
for some moments before he perceived her. It would perhaps be
impertinent to inquire what she thought of him; but Longueville, in
the space of an instant, made two or three reflections upon the young
lady. One of them was to the effect that she was a handsome creature,
but that she looked rather bold; the burden of the other was
thatyes, decidedlyshe was a compatriot. She turned away
almost as soon as she met his eyes; he had hardly time to raise his
hat, as, after a moment's hesitation, he proceeded to do. She herself
appeared to feel a certain hesitation; she glanced back at the church
door, as if under the impulse to retrace her steps. She stood there a
moment longerlong enough to let him see that she was a person
of easy attitudesand then she walked ...
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