It was
really due to the afternoon's incident with Artois, succeeded by this
unexpected festival, in which the lively homage of the Marchesino was
mingled with the long procession of celebrated names introduced by the
Padrone. Vere was secretly strung up, had been strung up even before
she stepped into the launch. She felt very happy, but in her happiness
there was something feverish, which was not customary to any mood of
hers. She never drank wine, and had taken none to-night, yet as the
evening wore on she was conscious of an effervescence, as if her brain
were full of winking bubbles such as rise to the surface of champagne.
Her imagination was almost furiously alive, and as the Padrone talked,
waving his hands and striking postures like those of a military
dictator, she saw the dead Empress, with her fan before her face,
nodding her head to the jig of "Funiculi, funicula," while she watched
the red cloud from Vesuvius rising into the starry sky; she saw Sarah
Bernhardt taking the Greek cat upon her knee; the newly made Czar
reading the telegram with his glass of punch beside him; Tosti tracing
lines of music; Gladstone watching the sea; and finally the gaunt
figure and the long beard of Tolstoy bending over the book in which he
wrote clearly so many years ago, "Vedi Napoli e poi mori.
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