CHAPTER XII

Corbario was not pleased with the account given by Settimia in the letter she wrote him after reaching Pontresina with Regina and Marcello, who had chosen the Engadine as the coolest place he could think of in which to spend the hot months, and had preferred Pontresina to Saint Moritz as being quieter and less fashionable.  Settimia wrote that the dear patient had looked better the very day after arriving; that the admirable companion was making him drink milk and go to bed at ten o’clock; that the two spent most of the day in the pine-woods, and that Marcello already talked of an excursion up the glacier and of climbing some of the smaller peaks.  If the improvement continued, Settimia wrote, it was extremely likely that the dear patient would soon be better than he had ever been in his life.

Folco destroyed the letter, lit a cigarette, and thought the matter over.  He had deemed it wise to pretend assent when the Contessa had urged him to join Marcello at once, but he had not had the least intention of doing so, and had come back to Paris as soon as he was sure that the Contessa was gone.  But he had made a mistake in his calculations.  He had counted on Regina for the love of excitement, display, and inane dissipation which women in her position very often develop when they find that a man will give them anything they like; and he had counted very little on her love for Marcello.  Folco was still young enough to fall into one of the most common errors of youth, which is to believe most people worse than they are.  Villains, as they grow older, learn that unselfish devotion is more common than they had thought, and that many persons habitually speak the truth, for conscience’ sake; finding this out, villains have been known to turn into good men in their riper years, and have sometimes been almost saints in their old age.  Corbario smoked his cigarette and mentally registered his mistake, and it is to be feared that the humiliation he felt at having made it was much more painful than the recollection of having dropped one deadly tablet into a little bottle that contained many harmless ones.  He compared it in his mind to the keen disappointment he had felt when he had gone down to hide Marcello’s body, and had discovered that he had failed to kill him.  It is true that what he had felt then had been accompanied by the most awful terror he could imagine, but he distinguished clearly between the one sensation and the other.  There was nothing to fear now; he had simply lost time, but that was bad enough, since it was due to his own stupidity.

He thought over the situation carefully and considered how much it would be wise to risk.  Another year of the life Marcello had been leading in Paris would have killed him to a certainty; perhaps six months would have done it.  But a summer spent at Pontresina, living as it was clear that Regina meant him to live, would give the boy strength enough to last much longer, and might perhaps bring him out of all danger.