 | The complete works of N.P. Willis |  |
2. PART II.
The grand-duke's carriages, with their six horses
and outriders, had turned down the Borg'ognisanti,
and the “City of the Red Lily,” waking from her
noonday slumber, was alive with the sound of wheels.
The sun was sinking over the Apennine which kneels
at the gate of Florence; the streets were cool and
shadowy; the old women, with the bambina between
their knees, braided straw at the doors; the booted
guardsman paced his black charger slowly over the
jeweller's bridge; the picture-dealer brought forward
his brightest “master” to the fading light; and while
the famous churches of that fairest city of the earth
called to the Ave-Maria with impatient bell, the gallantry
and beauty of Tuscany sped through the dampening
air with their swift horses, meeting and passing
with gay greetings amid the green alleys of the Cascine.
The twilight had become gray, when the carriages
and horsemen, scattered in hundreds through the interlaced
roads of this loveliest of parks, turned by common
consent toward the spacious square in the centre,
and drawing up in thickly-serried ranks, the soirèe on
wheels, the reunion en plein air, which is one of the
most delightful of the peculiar customs of Florence,
commenced its healthful gayeties. The showy carriages
of the grand-duke and the ex-king of Wurtemberg
(whose rank would not permit them to share in
the familiarities of the hour) disappeared by the avenue
skirting the bank of the Arno, and with much delicate
and some desperate specimens of skill, the coachmen
of the more exclusive nobility threaded the embarrassed
press of vehicles, and laid their wheels together
on the southern edge of the piazza. The beaux in the
saddle, disembarrassed of ladies and axletrees, enjoyed
their usual butterfly privilege of roving, and with light
rein and ready spur pushed their impatient horses to
the coronetted panels of the loveliest or most powerful;
the laugh of the giddy was heard here and there
over the pawing of restless hoofs; an occasional scream
— half of apprehension, half of admiration — rewarded
the daring caracole of some young and bold rider:
and while the first star sprang to its place, and the dew
of heaven dropped into the false flowers in the hat of
the belle, and into the thirsting lips of the violet in the
field (simplicity, like virtue, is its own reward!), the
low murmur of calumny and compliment, of love and
lightheartedness, of politeness, politics, puns, and poetry,
arose over that assembly upon wheels: and if it
was not a scene and an hour of happiness, it was the
fault neither of the fragrant eve nor of the provisions
of nature and fortune. The material for happiness
was there.
A showy calêche with panels of dusky crimson, the
hammer-cloth of the same shade, edged with a broad
fringe of white, the wheels slightly picked out with the
same colors, and the coachman and footman in corresponding
liveries, was drawn up near the southern edge
of the Piazzi. A narrow alley had been left for horsemen
between this equipage and the adjoining ones,
closed up at the extremity, however, by a dark-green
and very plain chariot, placed with a bold violation of
etiquette directly across the line, and surrounded just
now by two or three persons of the highest rank leaning
from their saddles in earnest conversation with the
occupant. Not far from the calêche, mounted upon
an English blood-horse of great beauty, a young man
had just drawn rein as if interrupted only for a moment
on some pressing errand, and with his hat slightly
raised, was paying his compliments to the venerable
Prince Poniatowski, at that time the Amphytrion of
Florence. From moment to moment, as the pauses
occurred in the exchange of courteous phrases, the
rider, whose spurred heel was close at his saddle-girths,
stole an impatient glance up the avenue of
the lifted rein and the proximity of the spur, the graceful
horse fretted on his minion feet, and the bending
figures from a hundred vehicles, and the focus of
bright eyes radiating from all sides to the spot, would
have betrayed, even to a stranger, that the horseman
was of no common mark. Around his uncovered temples
floated fair and well-cherished locks of the sunniest
auburn; and if there was beauty in the finely-drawn
lines of his lips, there was an inexpressibly fierce spirit
as well.
2. II.
The count Basil had been a month at Florence. In
that time he had contrived to place himself between
the duke's ear and all the avenues of favor, and had
approached as near, perhaps nearer, to the hearts of
the women of his court. A singular and instinctive
knowledge of the weaknesses of human nature, perfected
and concealed by conversance with the consummate
refinement of life at Paris, remarkable personal
beauty, and a quality of scornful bitterness for which
no one could divine a reason in a character and fate
else so happily mingled, but which at the same time
added to his fascination, had given Count Basil a command
over the varied stops of society, equalled by few
players on that difficult and capricious instrument.
His worldly ambition went swimmingly on, and the
same wind filled the sails of his lighter ventures as
well. The love of the marchesa del Marmore, as he
had very well anticipated, grew with his influence and
renown. A woman's pride, he perfectly knew, is difficult
to wake after she has once believed herself adored;
and, satisfied that the portrait taken on the lagoon, and
the introduction he had given her to the exclusive penetralia
of the Pitti, would hold her till his revenge was
complete, he left her love for him to find its own food
in his successes, and never approached her but to lay
to her heart more mordently the serpents of jealousy
and despair.
For the lady Geraldine the count Basil had conceived
a love, the deepest of which his nature was capable.
Long as he had known her, it was a passion
born in Italy, and while it partook of the qualities of
the clime, it had for its basis the habitual and well-founded
respect of a virtuous and sincere friendship.
At their first acquaintance at Paris, the lovely Englishwoman,
newly arrived from the purer moral atmosphere
of her own country, was moving in the dissolute,
but skilfully disguised society of the Faubourg
St. Germain, with the simple unconsciousness of the
pure in heart, innocent herself, and naturally unsuspicious
of others. The perfect frankness with which
she established an intimacy with the clever and accomplished
attaché, had soon satisfied that clear-sighted
person that there was no passion in her preference,
and, giddy with the thousand pleasures of that metropolis
of delight, he had readily sunk his first startled
admiration of her beauty in an affectionate and confiding
friendship. He had thus shown her the better
qualities of his character only, and, charmed with his
wit and penetration, and something flattered, perhaps,
with the devotion of so acknowledged an autocrat of
fashion and talent, she had formed an attachment for
him that had all the earnestness of love without its
passion. They met at Florence, but the “knowledge
of good and evil” had by this time driven the lady
Geraldine from her Eden of unconsciousness. Still
as irreproachable in conduct, and perhaps as pure in
heart as before, an acquaintance with the forms of vice
had introduced into her manners those ostensible cautions
which, while they protect, suggest also what is
to be feared.
A change had taken place also in Count Basil. He
had left the vitreous and mercurial clime of France,
with its volatile and superficial occupations, for the
voluptuous and indolent air of Italy, and the study of
its impassioned deifications of beauty. That which
had before been in him an instinct of gay pleasure — a
pursuit which palled in the first moment of success,
and was second to his ambition or his vanity — had become,
in those two years of a painter's life, a thirst
both of the senses and the imagination, which had
usurped the very throne of his soul. Like the Hindoo
youth, who finds the gilded plaything of his childhood
elevated in his maturer years into a god, he bowed his
heart to what he held so lightly, and brought the
costly sacrifice of time and thought to its altars. He
had fed his eyes upon the divine glories of the pencil,
and upon the breathing wonders of love in marble, beneath
the sky and in the dissolving air in which they
rose to the hand of inspiration; and with his eye disciplined,
and his blood fused with taste and enthusiasm,
that idolatry of beauty, which had before seemed
sensual or unreal, kindled its first fires in his mind,
and his senses were intoxicated with the incense.
There is a kind of compromise in the effects of the
atmosphere and arts of Italy. If the intellect takes
a warmer hue in its study of the fair models of antiquity,
the senses in turn become more refined and
intellectual. In other latitudes and lands woman is
loved more coldly. After the brief reign of a passion
of instinct, she is happy if she can retain her empire
by habit, or the qualities of the heart. That divine
form, meant to assimilate her to the angels, has never
been recognised by the dull eye that should have
seen in it a type of her soul. To the love of the painter
or the statuary, or to his who has made himself conversant
with their models, is added the imperishable
enthusiasm of a captivating and exalted study. The
mistress of his heart is the mistress of his mind. She
is the breathing realization of that secret ideal which
exists in every mind, but which, in men ignorant of the
fine arts, takes another form, and becomes a woman's
rival and usurper. She is like nothing in ambition —
she is like nothing in science or business — nothing in
out-of-door pleasures. If politics, or the chase, or the
acquisition of wealth, is the form of this ruling passion,
she is unassociated with that which is nearest his heart,
and he returns to her with an exhausted interest and a
flagging fancy. It is her strongest tie upon his affection,
even, that she is his refuge when unfit for that
which occupies him most — in his fatigue, his disappointment,
his vacuity of head and heart. He thinks
of her only as she receives him in his most worthless
hours; and, as his refreshed intellects awake, she is
forgotten with the first thought of his favorite theme —
for what has a woman's loveliness to do with that?
Count Basil had not concluded his first interview
with the lady Geraldine, without marvelling at the new
feelings with which he looked upon her. He had
never before realized her singular and adorable beauty.
The exquisitely turned head, the small and pearly
ears, the spiritual nostril, the softly moulded chin, the
clear loftiness of expression yet inexpressible delicacy
and brightness in the lips, and a throat and bust than
which those of Faustina in the delicious marble of the
Gallery of Florence might be less envied by the queen
of love — his gaze wandered over these, and followed
her in the harmony of her motions, and the native and
unapproachable grace of every attitude; and the pictures
he had so passionately studied seemed to fade in
his mind, and the statues he had half worshipped
seemed to descend from their pedestals depreciated.
The lady Geraldine, for the first time, felt his eye.
For the first time in their acquaintance, she was offended
with its regard. Her embarrassment was read
by the quick diplomate, and at that moment sprang
into being a passion, which perhaps had died but for
the conscious acknowledgment of her rebuke.
Up to the evening in the Cascine, with which the
but one of the two leading threads in the count Basil's
woof had woven well. “The jealous are the damned,”
and the daily and deadly agony of the marchesa del
Marmore was a dark ground from which his love to
the lady Geraldine rose to his own eye in heightened
relief. His dearest joy forwarded with equal step his
dearest revenge; and while he could watch the working
of his slow torture in the fascinated heart of his
victim, he was content to suspend a blow to which
that of death would be a mercy. “The law,” said
Count Basil, as he watched her quivering and imploring
lip, “takes cognizance but of the murder of
the body. It has no retribution for the keener dagger
of the soul.”
3. III.
The conversation between the Russian secretary
and the prince Poniatowski ended at last in a graceful
bow from the former to his horse's neck; and the
quicker rattling of the small hoofs on the ground, as
the fine creature felt the movement in the saddle and
prepared to bound away, drew all eyes once more
upon the handsomest and most idolized gallant of
Florence. The narrow lane of carriages, commencing
with the showy calêche of the marchesa del Marmore,
and closed up by the plain chariot of the lady Geraldine,
was still open, and with a glance at the latter
which sufficiently indicated his destination, Count
Basil raised his spurred heel, and with a smile of delight
and the quickness of a barb in the desert, galloped
toward the opening. In the same instant the
marchesa del Marmore gave a convulsive spring forward,
and, in obedience to an imperative order, her
coachman violently drew rein and shot the back and
forward wheels of the calêche directly across his path.
Met in full career by this sudden obstacle, the horse
of the Russian reared high in air; but ere the screams
of apprehension had arisen from the adjacent carriages,
the silken bridle was slacked, and with a low bow to
the foiled and beautiful marchesa as he shot past, he
brushed the hammer-cloths of the two scarce separated
carriages, and at the same instant stood at the
chariot window of the lady Geraldine, as calm and
respectful as if he had never known danger or emotion.
A hundred eyes had seen the expression of his face
as he leaped past the unhappy woman, and the drama
of which that look was the key was understood in Florence.
The lady Geraldine alone, seated far back in
her chariot, was unconscious of the risk run for the
smile with which she greeted its hero; and unconscious,
as well, of the poignant jealousy and open mortification
she had innocently assisted to inflict, she
stretched her fair and transparent hand from the carriage,
and stroked the glossy neck of his horse, and
while the marchesa del Marmore drove past with a
look of inexpressible anguish and hate, and the dispersing
nobles and dames took their way to the city
gates, Count Basil leaned close to the ear of that loveliest
of breathing creatures, and forgot, as she forgot
in listening to the bewildering music of his voice, that
the stars had risen, or that the night was closing
around them.
The Cascine had long been silent when the chariot
of the lady Geraldine took its way to the town, and,
with the reins loose upon his horse's neck, Count
Basil followed at a slower pace, lost in the revery of a
tumultuous passion. The sparkling and unobstructed
stars broke through the leafy roof of the avenue whose
silence was disturbed by those fine and light-stepping
hoofs, and the challenge of the duke's forester, going
his rounds ere the gates closed, had its own deep-throated
echo for its answer. The Arno rippled
among the rushes on its banks, the occasional roll of
wheels passing the paved arch of the Ponte Seraglio,
came faintly down the river upon the moist wind, the
pointed cypresses of the convent of Bello Sguardo
laid their slender fingers against the lowest stars in the
southern horizon, and with his feet pressed, carelessly,
far through his stirrups, and his head dropped on his
bosom, the softened diplomats turned instinctively to
the left in the last diverging point of the green alleys,
and his horse's ears were already pricked at
the tread, before the gate, of the watchful and idle
doganieri.
Close under the city wall on this side Florence,
the traveller will remember that the trees are more
thickly serried, and the stone seats, for the comfort
and pleasure of those who would step forth from the
hot streets for an hour of fresh air and rest, are mossy
with the depth of the perpetual shade. In the midst
of this dark avenue, the unguided animal beneath the
careless and forgetful rider suddenly stood still, and
the next moment starting aside, a female sprang high
against his neck, and Count Basil, ere awake from his
revery, felt the glance of a dagger-blade across his bosom.
With the slender wrist that had given the blow
firmly arrested in his left hand, the count Basil slowly
dismounted, and after a steadfast look, by the dim
light, into the face of the lovely assassin, he pressed
her fingers respectfully, and with well counterfeited
emotion, to his lips.
“Twice since the Ave-Maria!” he said in a tone of
reproachful tenderness, “and against a life that is your
own!”
He could see, even in that faint light, the stern compression
of those haughty lips, and the flash of the
darkest eyes of the Val d'Arno. But leading her gently
to a seat, he sat beside her, and with scarce ten
brief moments of low-toned and consummate eloquence,
he once more deluded her soul!
“We meet to-morrow,” she said, as, after a burst
of irrepressible tears, she disengaged herself from his
neck, and looked toward the end of the avenue, where
Count Basil had already heard the pawing of her impatient
horses.
“To-morrow!” he answered; “but, mia carissima!”
he continued, opening his breast to stanch the blood of
his wound, “you owe me a concession after this rude
evidence of your love.”
She looked into his face as if answer were superfluous.
“Drive to my palazzo at noon, and remain with me
till the Ave-Maria.”
For but half a moment the impassioned Italian hesitated.
Though the step he demanded of her was apparently
without motive or reason — though it was one
that sacrificed to a whim her station, her fortune, and
her friends — she hesitated but to question her reason
if the wretched price of this sacrifice would be paid —
if the love, to which she fled from this world and heaven,
was her own. In other countries, the crime of infidelity
is punished: in Italy it is the appearance only
that is criminal. In proportion as the sin is overlooked,
the violation of the outward proprieties of life is
severely visited; and while a lover is stipulated for in
the marriage-contract, an open visit to that lover's
house is an offence which brands the perpetrator with
irremediable shame. The marchesa del Marmore
well knew that in going forth from the ancestral palace
of her husband on a visit to Count Basil, she took
leave of it for ever. The equipage that would bear
her to him would never return for her; the protection,
the fortune, the noble relations, the troops of friends,
would all drop from her. In the pride of her youth
and beauty — from the highest pinnacle of rank — from
the shelter of fortune and estcem — she would descend,
by a single step, to be a beggar for life and love from
the mercy of the heart she fled to!
“I will come,” she said, in a firm voice, looking
the prophetic answer of his soul.
The count Basil strained her to his bosom, and starting
back as if with the pain of his wound, he pleaded
the necessity of a surgeon, and bade her a hasty goodnight.
And while she gained her own carriage in secrecy,
he rode round to the other gate, which opens
upon the Borg'ognisanti, and dismounting at the
Café Colonna, where the artists were at this hour usually
assembled, he sought out his fellow-traveller,
Giannino Speranza, who had sketched the marchesa
upon the lagoon, and made an appointment with him
for the morrow.
4. IV.
While the count Basil's revenge sped thus merrily,
the just Fates were preparing for him a retribution in
his love. The mortification of the marchesa del Marmore,
at the Cascine, had been made the subject of
conversation at the prima sera of the lady Geraldine;
and other details of the same secret drama transpiring
at the same time, the whole secret of Count Basil's
feelings toward that unfortunate woman flashed clearly
and fully upon her. His motives for pretending to
have drawn the portrait of the lagoon — for procuring
her an admission to the exclusive suppers of the Pitti
— for a thousand things which had been unaccountable,
or referred to more amiable causes — were at once
unveiled. Even yet, with no suspicion of the extent
of his revenge, the lady Geraldine felt an indignant pity
for the unconscious victim, and a surprised disapproval
of the character thus unmasked to her eye. Upon
further reflection, her brow flushed to remember that
she herself had been made the most effective tool of
his revenge; and as she recalled circumstance after
circumstance in the last month's history, the attention
and preference he had shown her, and which had gratified
her, perhaps, more than she admitted to herself,
seemed to her sensitive and resentful mind to have
been only the cold instruments of jealousy. Incapable
as she was of an unlawful passion, the unequalled fascinations
of Count Basil had silently found their way
to her heart, and if her indignation was kindled by a
sense of justice and womanly pity, it was fed and
fanned unaware by mortified pride. She rang, and
sent an order to the gate that she was to be denied for
the future to Count Basil Spirifort.
The servant had appeared with his silver tray in his
hand, and before leaving her presence to communicate
the order, he presented her with a letter. Well
foreseeing the eclaircissement which must follow the
public scene in the Cascine, the count Basil had left
the café for his own palazzo; and, in a letter, of which
the following is the passage most important to our
story, he revealed to the lady he loved a secret, which
he hoped would anticipate the common rumor: —
* * * * * “But these passionate words will have
offended your ear, dearest lady, and I must pass to a
theme on which I shall be less eloquent. You will
hear to-night, perhaps, that which, will all your imagination,
will scarce prepare you for what you will
hear to-morrow. The marchesa del Marmore is the
victim of a revenge which has only been second in my
heart to the love I have for the first time breathed to
you. I can never hope that you will either understand
or forgive the bitterness in which it springs; yet
it is a demon to which I am delivered, soul and body,
and no spirit but my own can know its power. When
I have called it by its name, and told you of its exasperation,
if you do not pardon, you will pity me.
“You know that I am a Russian, and you know the
station my talents have won me; but you do not know
that I was born a serf and a slave! If you could rend
open my heart and see the pool of blackness and bitterness
that lies in its bottom — fallen, drop by drop,
from this accursed remembrance — there would be little
need to explain to you how this woman has offended
me. Had I been honorably born, like yourself, I
feel that I could have been, like you, an angel of light:
as it is, the contumely of a look has stirred me to a
revenge which has in it, I do not need to be told, the
darkest elements of murder.
“My early history is of no importance, yet I may
tell you it was such as to expose to every wind this
lacerated nerve. In a foreign land, and holding an
official rank, it was seldom breathed upon. I wore,
mostly, a gay heart at Paris. In my late exile at Venice
I had time to brood upon my dark remembrance,
and it was revived and fed by the melancholy of my
solitude. The obscurity in which I lived, and the occasional
comparison between myself and some passing
noble in the Piazza, served to remind me, could I have
forgotten it. I never dreamed of love in this humble
disguise, and so never felt the contempt that had most
power to wound me. On receiving the letters of my
new appointment, however, this cautious humility did
not wait to be put off with my sombrero. I started
for Florence, clad in the habiliments of poverty, but
with the gay mood of a courtier beneath. The first
burst of my newly-released feelings was admiration for
a woman of singular beauty, who stood near me on
one of the most love-awakening and delicious eves
that I ever remember. My heart was overflowing, and
she permitted me to breathe my passionate adoration
in her ear. The marchesa del Marmore, but for the
scorn of the succeeding day, would, I think, have been
the mistress of my soul. Strangely enough, I had
seen you without loving you.
“I have told you, as a bagatelle that might amuse
you, my rencontre with del Marmore and his dame in
the cathedral of Bologna. The look she gave me
there sealed her doom. It was witnessed by the companions
of my poverty, and the concentrated resentment
of years sprang up at the insult. Had it been a
man, I must have struck him dead where he stood:
she was a woman, and I swore the downfall of her
pride.” * * *
Thus briefly dismissing the chief topic of his letter,
Count Basil returned to the pleading of his love. It
was dwelt on more eloquently than his revenge; but
as the lady Geraldine scarce read it to the end, it need
not retard the procession of events in our story. The
fair Englishwoman sat down beneath the Etruscan
lamp, whose soft light illumined a brow cleared, as if
by a sweep from the wing of her god angel, of the
troubled dream which had overhung it, and in brief
and decided, but kind and warning words, replied to
the letter of Count Basil.
5. V.
It was noon on the following day, and the Contadini
from the hills were settling to their siesta on the steps
of the churches, and against the columns of the Piazza
del Gran' Duca. The artists alone, in the cool gallery,
and in the tempered halls of the Pitti, shook off
the drowsiness of the hour, and strained sight and
thought upon the immortal canvass from which they
drew; while the sculptor, in his brightening studio,
weary of the mallet, yet excited by the bolder light,
leaned on the rough block behind him, and with listless
body but wakeful and fervent eye, studied the last
touches upon his marble.
Prancing hoofs, and the sharp quick roll peculiar to
the wheels of carriages of pleasure, awakened the aristocratic
sleepers of the Via del Servi, and with a lash
and jerk of violence, the coachman of the marchesa
del Marmore, enraged at the loss of his noonday repose,
brought up her showy calêche at the door of
Count Basil Spirifort. The fair occupant of that luxu
hope burned almost fiercely in her eye.
The doors flew open as the marchesa descended,
and following a servant in the count's livery, of whom
she asked no question, she found herself in a small saloon,
furnished with the peculiar luxury which marks
the apartment of a bachelor, and darkened like a painter's
room. The light came in from a single tall window,
curtained below, and under it stood an easel, at
which, on her first entrance, a young man stood
sketching the outline of a female head. As she advanced,
looking eagerly around for another face, the
artist laid down his palette, and with a low reverence
presented her with a note from Count Basil. It informed
her that political news of the highest importance
had called him suddenly to the cabinet of his
chef, but that he hoped to be with her soon; and,
meantime, he begged of her, as a first favor in his
newly-prospered love to bless him with the possession
of her portrait, done by the incomparable artist who
would receive her.
Disappointment and vexation overwhelmed the heart
of the marchesa, and she burst into tears. She read
the letter again, and grew calmer; for it was laden with
epithets of endearment, and seemed to her written in
the most sudden haste. Never doubting for an instant
the truth of his apology, she removed her hat, and
with a look at the deeply-shaded mirror, while she
shook out from their confinement the masses of her
luxuriant hair, she approached the painter's easel, and
with a forced cheerfulness inquired in what attitude
she should sit to him.
“If the signora will amuse herself,” he replied,
with a bow, “it will be easy to compose the picture,
and seize the expression without annoying her with a
pose.”
Relieved thus of any imperative occupation, the unhappy
marchesa seated herself by a table of intaglios
and prints, and while she apparently occupied herself
in the examination of these specimens of art, she was
delivered, as her tormentor had well anticipated, to the
alternate tortures of impatience and remorse. And
while the hours wore on, and her face paled, and her
eyes grew bloodshot with doubt and fear, the skilful
painter, forgetting everything in the enthusiasm of his
art, and forgotten utterly by his unconscious subject,
transferred too faithfully to the canvass that picture of
agonized expectation.
The afternoon, meantime, had worn away, and the
gay world of Florence, from the side toward Fiesole,
rolled past the Via dei Servi on their circuitous way
to the Cascine, and saw, with dumb astonishment, the
carriage and liveries of the marchesa del Marmore at
the door of Count Basil Spirifort. On they swept by
the Via Mercata Nova to the Lung' Arno, and there
their astonishment redoubled: for in the window of
the Casino dei Nobili, playing with a billiard-cue, and
laughing with a group of lounging exquisites, stood
Count Basil himself, the most unoccupied and listless
of sunset idlers. There was but one deduction to be
drawn from this sequence of events; and when they
remembered the demonstration of passionate jealousy
on the previous evening in the Cascine, Count Basil,
evidently innocent of partieipation in her passion, was
deemed a persecuted man, and the marchesa del Marmore
was lost to herself and the world!
Three days after this well-remembered circumstance
in the history of Florence, an order was received from
the grand-duke to admit into the exhibition of modern
artists a picture by a young Venetian painter, an
elève of Count Basil Spirifort. It was called “The
Lady expecting an Inconstant,” and had been pronounced
by a virtuoso, who had seen it on private
view, to be a masterpiece of expression and color. It
was instantly and indignantly recognised as the portrait
of the unfortunate marchesa, whose late aban
donment of her husband was fresh on the lips of common
rumor; but ere it could be officially removed,
the circumstance had been noised abroad, and the
picture had been seen by all the curious in Florence.
The order for its removal was given; but the purpose
of Count Basil had been effected, and the name of the
unhappy marchesa had become a jest on the vulgar
tongue.
This tale had not been told, had there not been
more than a common justice in its sequel. The worst
passions of men, in common life, are sometimes inscrutably
prospered. The revenge of Count Basil,
however, was betrayed by the last which completed
it; and while the victim of his fiendish resentment
finds a peaceful asylum in England under the roof of
the compassionate Lady Geraldine, the once gay and
admired Russian wanders from city to city, followed
by an evil reputation, and stamped unaccountably as a
jattatore.[1]
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