University of Virginia Library

5. CHAPTER V.

The reader will long since have been reminded, by
the trouble we have to whip in and flog up the lagging
and straggling members of our story, of a flock of
sheep driven unwillingly to market. Indeed, to stop
at the confessional (as you will see many a shepherd
of the Campagna, on his way to Rome), this tale of
many tails should have been a novel. You have, in
brief, what should have been well elaborated, embarrassed
with difficulties, relieved by digressions, tipped
with a moral, and bound in two volumes, with a portrait
of the author. We are sacrificed to the spirit of the
age. The eighteenth century will be known in
hieroglyphics by a pair of shears. But, “to return to
our muttons.”

The masquerade went merrily on, or, if there were
more than one heavy heart among those light heels,
it was not known, as the newspapers say, “to our reporter.”
One, there certainly was—heavy as Etna on
the breast of Enceladus. Biondo Amieri sat in a corner
of the gallery, with his swathed hand laid before
him, pale as a new statue, and with a melancholy in
his soft dark eyes, which would have touched the executioners
of St. Agatha. Beside him sat Lenzoni,
who was content to forego the waltz for a while, and
keep company for pity with a friend who was too busy
with his own thoughts to give him word or look, but
still keeping sharp watch on the scene below, and
betraying by unconscious ejaculations how great a
penance he had put on himself for love and charity.

“Ah, la bella musica, Biondo!” he exclaimed
drumming on the banquette, while his friend held
up his wounded hand to escape the jar, “listen to that
waltz, that might set fire to the heels of St. Peter.
Corpo di Bacco! look at the dragon!—a dragon
making love to a nun, Amieri! Ah! San Pietro!
what a foot! Wait till I come, sweet goblin! That
a goblin's tail should follow such ankles, Biondo!
Eh! bellissimo! the knight! Look at the red-cross
knight, Amieri! and—what?—il gobbo, by St. Anthony!
and the red-cross takes him for a woman!
It is Giulio, for there never were two hunchbacks so
wondrous like! Ecco, Biondo!”

But there was little need to cry “look” to Amieri,
now. A hunchback, closely masked, and leaning on
a palmer's arm, made his way slowly through the
crowd, and a red-cross knight, a figure gallant enough
to have made a monarch jealous, whispered with courteous
and courtly deference in his ear.

“Cielo! it is she!” said Biondo, with mournful
earnestness, not heeding his companion, and laying
his hand upon his wounded wrist, as if the sight he
looked on gave it a fresher pang.

“She?” answered Lenzoni, with a laugh. “If it
is not he—not gobbo Giulio—I'll eat that cross-hilted
rapier! What `she' should it be, caro Biondo!”

“I tell thee,” said Amieri, “Giulio is asleep at the
foot of his marred statue! I left him but now, he is
too ill with his late vigils to be here—but his clothes,
I may tell thee, are borrowed by one who wears them
as you see. Look at the foot, Lenzoni!”

“A woman, true enough, if the shoe were all!
But I'll have a close look! Stay for me, dear Amieri!
I will return ere you have looked twice at them!”

And happy, with all his kind sympathy, to find a
fair apology to be free, Lenzoni leaped over the
benches and mingled in the crowd below.

Left alone, Biondo devoured with his eyes, every
movement of the group in which he was so deeply
interested, and the wound in his hand seemed burning
with a throb of fire, while he tried in vain to defect,
in the manner of the hunchback, that coyness
which might show, even through a mask, dislike or
indifference. There was even, he thought (and he
delivered his soul over to Apollyon in the usual phrase
for thinking such ill of such an angel); there was
even in her manner a levity and freedom of gesture
for which the mask she wore should be no apology.
He was about to curse Malaspina for having spared
his life at the fountain, when some one jumped lightly
over the seat, and took a place beside him. It was
a female in a black domino, closely masked, and
through the pasteboard mouth protruded the bit of

ivory, commonly held in the teeth by maskers, to disguise
the voice.

“Good evening to you, fair signor!”

“Good even to you, lady!”

“I am come to share your melancholy, signor!”

“I have none to give away unless you will take all;
and just now, my fair one, it is rather anger than sadness.
If it please you, leave me!”

“What if I am more pleased to stay!”

“Briefly, I would be alone. I am not of the festa.
I but look on, here!” And Biondo turned his shoulder
to the mask, and fixed his eyes again on the hunchback,
who having taken the knight's arm, was talking
and promenading most gayly between him and the
palmer.

“You have a wounded hand, signor!” resumed his
importunate neighbor.

“A useless one, lady. Would it were well!”

“Signor Melancholy, repine not against providence.
I that am no witch, tell thee that thou wilt yet bless
Heaven that this hand is disabled.”

Biondo turned and looked at the bold prophetess,
but her disguise was impenetrable.

“You are a masker, lady, and talk at random!”

“No! I will tell you the thought uppermost in your
bosom!”

“What is it?”

“A longing for a pluck at the red-cross, yonder!”

“True, by St. Mary!” said Biondo, starting energetically:
“but you read it in my eyes!”

“I have told you your first thought, signor, and I will
give you a hint of the second Is there a likeness
between a nymph on canvass, and a gobbo in a mask!”

“Giulio!” exclaimed Amieri, turning suddenly
round; but the straight back of the domino met his
eye, and totally bewildered, he resumed his seat, and
slowly perused the stranger from head to foot.

“Talk to me as if my mask were the mirror of your
soul, Amieri,” said the soft but disguised voice.
“You need sympathy in this mood, and I am your
good angel. Is your wrist painful to-night?”

“I can not talk to you,” he said, turning to resume
his observation on the scene below. “If you know
the face beneath the gobbo's mask, you know the
heaven from which I am shut out. But I must gaze
on it still.”

“Is it a woman?”

“No! an angel.”

“And encourages the devil in the shape of Malaspina?
You miscall her, Amieri!”

The answer was interrupted by Lenzoni, who ran
into the gallery, but seeing his friend beset by a mask,
he gave him joy of his good luck, and refusing to interrupt
the tête-à-tête, disappeared with a laugh.

“Brave, kind Lenzoni!” said the stranger.

“Are you his good angel, too?” asked Amieri,
surprised again at the knowledge so mysteriously displayed.

“No! Little as you know of me you would not be
willing to share me with another! Say, Amieri! love
you the gobbo on the knight's arm?”

“You have read me riddles less clear, my fair incognita!
I would die at morn but to say farewell to
her at midnight!”

“Do you despair of her love?”

“Do I despair of excelling Raphael with these
unstrung fingers? I never hoped—but in my dreams,
lady!”

“Then hope, waking! For as there is truth in
heaven, Violanta Cesarini loves you, Biondo!”

Laying his left hand sternly on the arm of the
stranger, Biondo raised his helpless wrist and pointed
toward the hunchback, who, seated by the red-cross
knight, played with the diamond cross of his sword-hilt,
while the palmer turned his back, as if to give
two lovers an opportunity.

With a heart overwhelmed with bitterness, he then
turned to the mocking incognito. Violanta sat beside
him!

Holding her mask between her and the crowd below,
the maiden blush mounted to her temples, and
the long sweeping lashes dropped over her eyes their
veiling and silken fringes. And while the red-cross
knight still made eloquent love to Giulio in the saloon
of the masquerade, Amieri and Violanta, in their unobserved
retreat, exchanged vows, faint and choked
with emotion on his part, but all hope, encouragement,
and assurance, on hers