“You don’t mean to say,” I exclaimed, amazed, “that you have been held up like this in the Villa at half-past ten o’clock, within a stone’s throw of a thousand people!”

He nodded several times, staring at me with all his might.

“The clarionet,” he declared, solemnly, “was finishing his solo, and I assure you I could hear every note.  Then the band crashed fortissimo, and that creature rolled its eyes and gnashed its teeth hissing at me with the greatest ferocity, ‘Be silent!  No noise or—­’”

I could not get over my astonishment.

“What sort of knife was it?” I asked, stupidly.

“A long blade.  A stiletto—­perhaps a kitchen knife.  A long narrow blade.  It gleamed.  And his eyes gleamed.  His white teeth, too.  I could see them.  He was very ferocious.  I thought to myself:  ’If I hit him he will kill me.’  How could I fight with him?  He had the knife and I had nothing.  I am nearly seventy, you know, and that was a young man.  I seemed even to recognize him.  The moody young man of the cafe.  The young man I met in the crowd.  But I could not tell.  There are so many like him in this country.”

The distress of that moment was reflected in his face.  I should think that physically he must have been paralyzed by surprise.  His thoughts, however, remained extremely active.  They ranged over every alarming possibility.  The idea of setting up a vigorous shouting for help occurred to him, too.  But he did nothing of the kind, and the reason why he refrained gave me a good opinion of his mental self-possession.  He saw in a flash that nothing prevented the other from shouting, too.

“That young man might in an instant have thrown away his knife and pretended I was the aggressor.  Why not?  He might have said I attacked him.  Why not?  It was one incredible story against another!  He might have said anything—­bring some dishonouring charge against me—­what do I know?  By his dress he was no common robber.  He seemed to belong to the better classes.  What could I say?  He was an Italian—­I am a foreigner.  Of course, I have my passport, and there is our consul—­but to be arrested, dragged at night to the police office like a criminal!”

He shuddered.  It was in his character to shrink from scandal, much more than from mere death.  And certainly for many people this would have always remained—­considering certain peculiarities of Neapolitan manners—­a deucedly queer story.  The Count was no fool.  His belief in the respectable placidity of life having received this rude shock, he thought that now anything might happen.  But also a notion came into his head that this young man was perhaps merely an infuriated lunatic.

This was for me the first hint of his attitude towards this adventure.  In his exaggerated delicacy of sentiment he felt that nobody’s self-esteem need be affected by what a madman may choose to do to one.  It became apparent, however, that the Count was to be denied that consolation.  He enlarged upon the abominably savage way in which that young man rolled his glistening eyes and gnashed his white teeth.  The band was going now through a slow movement of solemn braying by all the trombones, with deliberately repeated bangs of the big drum.