whose coming and whose going would always be a thing of mystery and wonder to them all; and felt, then, as now, all around him the numb nocturnal stillness of the town, the impending prescience of wild joy, the heartbeats of ten thousand sleeping men.
And this feeling of unutterable loss and familiarity, of strangeness and reality, remained with him later when he left the closing café and walked home towards his hotel through a silent, cobbled street, between rows of old, still houses, the shuttered secrecy of the shops.
And later, the feeling was more strong and strange than ever, as he lay in his sumptuous bed in the hotel, reading the clippings in the Countess’s books—those incredible explosions of Yankee journalese that this old woman had inspired in a thousand little towns across America—brought back here, read here now, in the midnight stillness of this ancient town as the great cathedral bells thronged through the air—the miraculous weavings of dark chance and destiny, all near as his heart and farther off than heaven, familiar as his life, and stranger than a dream.
XCIII
In the weeks that followed, the boy discovered in the totally absurd, yet curiously persuasive illogic of the woman’s mind a revealing illustration of the psychology of fraud, the self-hypnosis of the impostor. When he would protest to her at the effrontery of her representations, the staggering fiction she had now woven about him, his family, his wealth, his power, his influence, and his profession, which made an open, barefaced use of great names and institutions of which he had no knowledge and to which he could make no claim, the old woman would answer him at once with a series of arguments so ingeniously persuasive that for a moment he would find himself almost conquered by their hypnotic power, absurdly false though he knew them to be.
“Look here,” he would say resentfully. “What do you mean by telling all these people that I represent The New York Times? What if The New York Times should hear about it and have me thrown in jail for fraud—for using their name when I had no right to do it?—You’d be safe—you would,” he said bitterly. “I’d be the one to suffer—you could always get out of it by saying that you acted in good faith, that you really thought I did work for The Times.”
“But you do, don’t you?” She looked at him with a surprised and puzzled face.
