University of Virginia Library

THE
REVENGE OF THE SIGNOR BASIL.

1. PART I.

It was in the golden month of August, not very long
ago, that the steamer which plies between St. Mark's
Stairs, at Venice, and the river into which Phaeton
turned a somerset with the horses of the Sun, started
on its course over the lagoon with an unusual Godsend
of passengers. The moon was rising from the
unchaste bed of the Adriatic, (wedded every year to
Venice, yet every day and night sending the sun and
moon from her lovely bosom to the sky,) and while the
gold of the west was still glowing on the landward side
of the Campanile, a silver gleam was brightening momently
on the other, and the Arabic domes of St.
Marc and the flying Mercury on the Dogana paled to
the setting orb and kindled to the rising with the same
Talleyrand-esque facility.

For the first hour the Mangia-foco sputtered on her
way with a silent company; the poetry of the scene,
or the regrets at leaving the delicious city lessening in
the distance, affecting all alike with a thoughtful incommunicativeness.

Gradually, however, the dolphin hues
over the Brenta faded away—the marble city sank into
the sea, with its turrets and bright spires—the still lagoon
became a sheet of polished glass—and the silent
groups leaning over the rails found tongues and feet,
and began to stir and murmur.

With the usual unconscious crystallization of society,
the passengers of the Mangia-foco had yielded
one side of the deck to a party of some rank, who had
left their carriages at Ferrara in coming from Florence
to Venice, and were now upon their return to the city
of Tasso, stomaching, with what grace they might, the
contact of a vulgar conveyance, which saved them the
hundred miles of posting between Ferrara and the
Brenta. In the centre of the aristocratic circle stood
a lady enveloped in a cashmere, but with her bonnet
hung by the string over her arm—one of those women
of Italy upon whom the divinest gifts of loveliness are
showered with a profusion which apparently improverishes
the sex of the whole nation. A beautiful woman
in that land is rarely met; but when she does appear,
she is what Venus would have been after the contest
for beauty on Ida, had the weapons of her antagonists,
as in the tournaments of chivalry, been added to the
palm of victory. The Marchesa del Marmore was apparently
twenty-three, and she might have been an incarnation
of the morning-star for pride and brightness.

On the other side of the deck stood a group of young
men, who, by their careless and rather shabby dress,
but pale and intellectual faces, were of that class met
in every public conveyance of Italy.—The portfolios
under their arms, ready for a sketch, would have removed
a doubt of their profession, had one existed;
and with that proud independence for which the class
is remarkable, they had separated themselves equally
from the noble and ignoble—disqualified by inward superiority
from association with the one, and by accidental

poverty from the claims cultivation might give
them upon the other. Their glances at the divine face
turned toward them from the party I have alluded to,
were less constant than those of the vulgar, who could
not offend; but they were evidently occupied more
with it than with the fishing-boats lying asleep on the
lagoon; and one of them, half-buried in the coil of
rope, and looking under the arm of another, had already
made a sketch of her that might some day make
the world wonder from what Seventh Heaven of fancy
such an angelic vision of a head had descended upon
the painter's dream.

In the rear of this group, with the air of one who
would conceal himself from view, stood a young man
who belonged to the party, but who, with less of the
pallor of intellectual habits in his face, was much better
dressed than his companions, and had, in spite of
the portfolio under his arm, and a hat of the Salvator
breadth of rim, the undisguisable air of a person accustomed
to the best society. While maintaining a
straggling conversation with his friends, with whom he
seemed a favorite, Signor Basil employed himself in
looking over the sketch of the lovely Marchesa going
on at his elbow, occasionally as if to compare it with
the original, stealing a long look from between his
hand and his slouched hat at the radiant creature sitting
so unconsciously for her picture, and in a low
voice correcting, as by the result of his gaze, the rapid
touches of the artist.

“Take a finer pencil for the nostril, caro mio!” said
he; “it is as thin as the edge of a violet, and its transparent
curve---—”

“Cospetto!” said the youth; “but you see by this
faint light better than I; if she would but turn to the
moon------”

The Signor Basil suddenly flung his handkerchief
into the lagoon, bringing its shadow between the Queen

of Night and the Marchesa del Marmore; and, attracted
from her reverie by the passing object, the lady
moved her head quickly to the light, and in that
moment the spirited lip and nostril were transferred to
the painter's sketch.

“Thanks, mio bravo!” enthusiastically exclaimed
the looker on; “Giorgione would not have beaten
thee with the crayon!” and with a rudeness which
surprised the artist, he seized the paper from beneath
his hand, walked away with it to the stern, and leaning
far over the rails, perused it fixedly by the mellow
lustre of the moon. The youth presently followed
him, and after a few words exchanged in an undertone,
Signor Basil slipped a piece of gold into his
hand, and carefully placed the sketch in his own portfolio.

2. II.

It was toward midnight when the Mangia-foco entered
the Adige, and keeping its steady way between
the low banks of the river, made for the grass-grown
and flowery canal which connects its waters with the
Po. Most of the passengers had yielded to the drowsy
influence of the night air, and, of the aristocratic party
on the larboard side, the young Marchesa, alone was
waking; her friends had made couches of their cloaks
and baggage, and were reclining at her feet, while the
artists, all except the Signor Basil, were stretched fairly
on the deck, their portfolios beneath their heads,
and their large hats covering their faces from the powerful
rays of the moon.

“Miladi does justice to the beauty of the night,”
said the waking artist, in a low and respectful tone,
as he rose from her with a cluster of tuberoses she
had let fall from her hand.

“It is indeed lovely, Signor pittore,” responded the
Marchesa, glancing at his portfolio, and receiving the

flowers with a gracious inclination; “have you touched
Venice from the lagoon to-night?”

The Signor Basil opened his portfolio, and replied
to the indirect request of the lady by showing her a
very indifferent sketch of Venice from the island of St.
Lazzaro. As if to escape from the necessity of praising
what had evidently disappointed her, she turned the
cartoon hastily, and exposed, on the sheet beneath, the
spirited and admirable outline of her own matchless
features.

A slight start alone betrayed the surmise of the high-born
lady, and raising the cartoon to examine it more
closely, she said with a smile, “You may easier tread
on Titian's heels than Canaletti's. Bezzuoli has painted
me, and not so well. I will awake the Marquis,
and he shall purchase it of you.”

“Not for the wealth of the Medici, Madam!” said
the young man, clasping his portfolio hastily, “pray do
not disturb Monsignore! The picture is dear to me!”

The Marchesa looking into his face, and with a
glance around, which the aceomplished courtier before
her read better than she dreamed, she drew her shawl
over her blanched shoulders, and settled herself to listen
to the conversation of her new acquaintance.

“You would be less gracious if you were observed,
proud beauty,” thought Basil: “but while you think
the poor painter may while away the tediousness of a
vigil, he may feed his eye on your beauty as well.”

The Mangia-foco turned into the canal, threaded
its lily-paved waters for a mile or two, and then, putting
forth upon the broad bosom of the Po, went on
her course against the stream, and, with retarded pace,
penetrated toward the sun-beloved heart of Italy. And
while the later hours performed their procession with
the stars, the Marchesa del Marmore leaned sleepless
and unfatigued against the railing, listening with mingled
curiosity and scorn to the passionate love-murmur

of the enamored painter. His hat was thrown aside,
his fair and curling locks were flowing in the night air,
his form was bent earnestly but respectfully towards
her, and on its lip, with all its submissive tenderness,
there sat a shadow of something she could not define,
but which rebuked ever and anon, as with the fierce
regard of a noble, the condescension she felt towards
him as an artist.

3. III.

Upon the lofty dome of the altar in the cathedral of
Bologna stands poised an angel in marble, not spoken
of in the books of travelers, but perhaps the loveliest
incarnation of a blessed cherub that ever lay in the
veined bosom of Pentelicus. Lost and unobserved on
the vast floor of the nave, the group of artists, who had
made a day's journey from Ferrara, sat in the wicker
chairs hired for a baioch the vesper, and drew silently
from this angel, while the devout people of Bologna
murmured their Ave Marias around. Signor Basil
alone was content to look over the work of his companions,
and the twilight had already begun to brighten
the undying lamps at the shrine, when he started from
the pillar against which he leaned, and crossed hastily
toward a group issuing from a private chapel in the
western aisle. A lady walked between two gentlemen
of noble mien, and behind her, attended by an equally
distinguished company, followed that lady's husband,
the Marchese del Marmore. They were strangers
passing through Bologna, and had been attended to
vespers by some noble friends.

The companions of the Signor Basil looked on with
some surprise as their enamored friend stepped confidently
before the two nobles in attendance upon the
lady, and arrested her steps with a salutation which,
though respectful as became a gentleman, was marked

with the easy politeness of one accustomed to a favorable
reception.

“May I congratulate Miladi,” he said, rising slowly
from his bow, and fixing his eyes with unembarrassed
admiration on her own liquid but now frowning orbs,
upon her safe journey over the Marches. “Bologna,”
he continued, glancing at the nobles with a courteous
smile, “welcomes her fittingly.”

The lady listened with a look of surprise, and the
Bolognese glanced from the dusty boots of the artist to
his portfolio.

“Has the painter the honor to know La Signora?”
asked the cavalier on her right.

“Signor, si!” said the painter, fiercely, as a curl
arched the lady's lip, and she prepared to answer.

The color mounted to the temples of the Marchesa,
and her hushand, who had loitered beneath the Madonna
of Domenichino, coming up at the instant, she
bowed coldly to the Signor Basil, and continued down
the aisle. The artist followed to her carriage, and
lifted his hat respectfully as the lumbering equipage took
its way by the famous statue of Neptune, and then with
a confident smile, which seemed to his companions
somewhat mistimed, he muttered between his teeth,
“Ciascuno son bel' giorno!” and strolled loitering on
with them to the trattoria.

4. IV.

The court of the Grand Duke of Florence is perhaps
the most cosmopolitan and the most easy of access
in all Europe. The Austrian-born Monarch himself,
adopting in some degree the frank and joyous
character of the people over whom he reigns, throws
open his parks and palaces, his gardens and galleries,
to the strangers passing through; and, in the season of
gaiety, almost any presentable person, resident at Florence,
may procure the entree to the court balls, and

start fair with noble dames and gentlemen for grace in
courtly favor. The fetes at the Palazzo Pitti, albeit not
always exempt from a leaven of vulgarity, are always
brilliant and amusing, and the exclusives of the court,
though they draw the line distinctly enough to their
own eye, mix with apparent abandonment in the motley
waltz and mazurka, and either from good-nature or a
haughty conviction of their superiority, never suffer the
offensive cordon to be felt, scarce to be suspected, by
the multitude who divert them. The Grand Duke, to
common eyes is a grave and rather timid person, with
more of the appearance of the scholar than of the
sovereign, courteous in public, and benevolent and
earnest in his personal attentions to his guests at the
palace. The royal quadrille may be shared without
permission of the grand chamberlain, and the royal eye,
after the first one or two dances of ceremony, searches
for partners by the lamp of beauty, heedless of the diamonds
on the brow, or the star of nobility on the shoulder.
The grand supper is scarce more exclusive, and
on the disappearance of the royal cortege, the delighted
crowd take their departure, having seen no class more
favored than themselves, and enchanted with the gracious
absence of pretension in the nobilita of Tuscany.

Built against the side of a steep hill, the Palazzo
Pitti encloses its rooms of state within massive and
sombre walls in front, while in the rear the higher stories
of the palace open forth on a level with the delicious
gardens of the Boboli, and contain suites of
smaller apartments, fitted up with a cost and luxury
which would beggar the dream of a Sybarite. Here
lives the monarch, in a seclusion rendered deeper and
more sacred by the propinquity of the admitted world
in the apartments below; and in this sanctuary of royalty
is enclosed a tide of life, as silent and unsuspected
by the common inhabitant of Florence, as the flow of
the ocean-veiled Arethusa by the mariner of the Ionian

main. Here the invention of the fiery genius of Italy
is exhausted in poetical luxury,—here the reserved and
silent sovereign throws off his maintien of royal condescension,
and enters with equal arms into the lists of
love and wit,—here burn (as if upon an altar fed with
spice-woods and precious gums) the fervent and uncalculating
passions of this glowing clime, in senses refined
by noble nurture, and hearts prompted by the
haughty pulses of noble blood,—and here—to the
threshold of this sanctuary of royal pleasure—press all
who know its secrets, and who imagine a claim to it in
their birth and attractions, while the lascia-passare is
accorded with a difficulty which alone preserves its
splendor.

Some two or three days after the repulse of the
Signor Basil in the cathedral of Bologna, the group of
traveling artists were on their way from the grand gallery
at Florence to their noon-day meal. Loitering
with slow feet through the crowded and narrow Via
Calzaiole, they emerged into the sunny Piazza, and
looking up with understanding eyes at the slender shaft
of the Campanile, (than which a fairer finger of religious
architecture points not to heaven,) they took
their way toward the church of Santa Trinita, proposing
to eat their early dinner at a house named, from its
excellence in a certain temperate beverage, La Birra.
The traveler should be advised also, that by paying an
extra paul in the bottle, he may have at this renowned
eating-house, an old wine sunned on the southern
shoulder of Fiesole, that hath in its flavor a certain redolence
of Boccaccio, scarce remarkable since it grew
in the scene of the Decameron, but of a virtue which,
to the Hundred Tales of Love, (read drinking,) is what
the Gradus ad Parnassum should be to the building of
a dithyrambic. The oil of two crazie upon the palm of
the fat waiter Giuseppe will assist in calling the vintage
to his memory.

A thundering rap upon the gate of the adjoining Palazzo
arrested the attention of the artists as they were
about to enter the Birra, and in the occupant of a dark
green cabriolet, drawn by a pampered horse of the
Duke's breed, they recognised, elegantly dressed and
posed on his seat a la D'Orsay, the Signor Basil. His
coat was of an undecided cut and color, and his gloves
were of primrose purity.

The recognition was immediate, and the cordiality
of the greeting mutual. They had parted from their
companion at the gate of Florence, as travelers part,
without question, and they met without reserve to part
as questionless again. The artists were surprised at
the Signor Basil's transformation, but no follower of
their refined art would have been so ill bred as to express
it. He wished them the bon appetito, as a tall
chasseur came out to say that her ladyship was at
home; and with a slacked rein the fiery horse sprang
through the gateway, and the marble court of the
palace rang with his prancing hoofs.

He who has idled and bought flowers at the Cafe of
the Colonna at Florence will have remarked, as he sat
in his chair upon the street in the sultry evening the
richly ornamented terrace and balustrade of the Palazzo
Corsi giving upon the Piazza Trinita. The dark old
Ghibelline palace of the Strozzi lets the eye down upon
it, as it might pass from a helmeted knight with closed
vizor to his unbonneted and laughing page. The crimson
curtains of the window opening upon the terrace,
at the time of our story, reminded every passing Florentine
of the lady who dwelt within—a descendant of
one of the haughtiest lines of English chivalry—resident
in Italy since many years for health, but bearing
in her delicate frame and exquisitely transparent features,
the loftiest type of patrician beauty that had ever
filled the eye that looked upon her. In the inner heaven
of royal exclusiveness at the Pitti—in its constellation

of rank and wit—the Lady Geraldine had long
been the worshipped and ascendant cynosure. Happy
in a husband without rank and but of moderate fortune,
she maintained the spotless character of an English
wife in this sphere of conventional corruption; and
though the idol of the Duke and his nobles, it would
have been like a whisper against the purity of the
brightest Pleiad, to have linked her name with love.

With her feet upon a sofa covered with a gossamer
cashmere, her lovely head pillowed on a cushion of
silk, and a slight stand within arm's length holding a
vase of flowers and the volume from which she had
been reading, the Lady Geraldine received the Count
Basil Spirifort, some time attache to the Russian embassy
at Paris, (where he had first sunned his eyes in
her beauty,) and at present the newly appointed secretary
to the minister of the same monarch near the
court of Tuscany.

Without a bow, but with the hasty step and gesture
of a long absent and favored friend, the Count Basil
ran to the proffered hand, and pressed its alabaster
fingers to his lips. Had the more common acquaintances
of the diplomate seen him at this moment, they
would have marvelled how the mask of manhood may
drop, and disclose the ingenuous features of the boy.
The secretary knew his species, and the Lady Geraldine
was one of those women for whom the soul is unwilling
to possess a secret.

After the first inquiries were over, the lady questioned
her recovered favorite of his history since they
had parted. “I left you,” she said, “swimming the
dangerous tide of life at Paris. How have you come
to shore?”

“Thanks, perhaps, to your friendship, which made
life worth the struggle! For the two extremes, however,
you know what I was at Paris—and yesterday I
was a wandering artist in velveteen and a sombrero!”

Lady Geraldine laughed.

“Ah! you look at my curls—but Macassar is at a
discount! It is the only grace I cherished in my incognito.
A resumer—I got terribly out of love by the
end of the year after we parted, and as terribly in
debt. My promotion in diplomacy did not arrive, and
the extreme hour for my credit did. Pozzo di Borgo
kindly procured me conge for a couple of years, and I
dived presently under a broad-rimmed hat, got into a
vetturino with portfolio and pencils, joined a troop of
wandering artists, and with my patrimony at nurse,
have been two years looking at life witout spectacles
at Venice.”

“And painting?”

“Painting!”

“Might one see a specimen?” asked the Lady Geraldine,
with an incredulous smile.

“I regret that my immortal efforts in oils are in the
possession of a certain Venetian, who lets the fifth floor
of a tenement washed by the narrowest canal in that
fair city. But if your ladyship cares to see a drawing
or two—”

He rang the bell, and his jocki Anglais presently
brought from the pocket of his cabriolet a way-worn
and thinly furnished portfolio. The Lady Geraldine
turned over a half-dozen indifferent views of Venice,
but the last cartoon in the portfolio made her start.

“La Marchesa del Marmore!” she exclaimed, looking
at Count Basil with an inquiring and half uneasy
eye.

“Is it well drawn?” he asked quietly.

“Well drawn? It is a sketch worthy of Raphael.
Do you really draw so well as this, or”—she added,
after a slight hesitation—“is it a miracle of love?”

“It is a divine head,” soliloquized the Russian, half
closing his eyes, and looking at the drawing from a

distance, as if to fill up the imperfect outline from his
memory.

The Lady Geraldine laid her hand on his arm. “My
dear Basil,” she said seriously, “I should be wretched
if I thought your happiness was in the power of this
woman. Do you love her?”

“The portrait was not drawn by me,” he answered,
“though I have a reason for wishing her to think so.
It was done by a fellow traveler of mine, whom I wish
to make a sketch of yourself, and I have brought it
here to interest you in him as an artist. Mais revenons
a nos moutons—La Marchesa was also a fellow traveler
of mine, and without loving her too violently, I owe
her a certain debt of courtesy contracted on the way.
Will you assist me to pay it?”

Relieved of her fears, and not at all suspecting the
good faith of the diplomatist in his acknowledgments of
gratitude, the Lady Geraldine inquired simply how she
could serve him.

“In the twenty-four hours since my arrival at Florence,”
he said, “I have put myself, as you will see,
au courant of the minor politics of the Pitti. Thanks
to my Parisian renown, the Duke has enrolled me already
under the back-stairs oligarchy, and to-morrow
night I shall sup with you in the Saloon of Hercules
after the ball is over. La Marchesa, as you well know,
has, with all her rank and beauty, never been able to
set foot within those guarded penetralia—soit her malicious
tongue, soit the interest against her of the men
she has played upon her hook too freely. The road
to her heart, if there be one, lies over that threshold,
and I would take the toll. Do you understand me,
most beautiful Lady Geraldine?”

The Count Basil imprinted another kiss upon the
fingers of the fair Englishwoman, as she promised to
put into his hand the following night the illuminated
ticket which was to repay, as she thought, too generously,

a debt of gratitude; and plucking a flower from
her vase for his bosom, he took his leave to return at
twilight to dinner. Dismissing his cabriolet at the gate,
he turned on foot toward the church of San Gaetano,
and with an expression of unusual elation in his step
and countenance, entered the trattoria, where dined at
that moment his companions of the pencil.

5. V.

The green lamps glittering by thousands amid the
foliage of the Boboli had attained their full brightness,
and the long-lived Italian day had died over the distant
mountains of Carrara, leaving its inheritance of light
apparently to the stars, who, on their fields of deepening
blue, sparkled, each one like the leader of an unseen
host in the depths of heaven, himself the foremost
and the most radaint. The night was balmy and voluptuous.
The music of the Ducal band swelled forth
from the perfumed apartments on the air. A single
nightingale, far back in the wilderness of the garden,
poured from his melodious heart a chant of the most
passionate melancholy. The sentinel of the bodyguard
stationed at the limit of the spray of the fountain
leaned on his halberd and felt his rude senses melt in
the united spells of luxury and nature. The ministers
of a monarch's pleasure had done their utmost to prepare
a scene of royal delight, and night and summer
had flung in their enchantments when ingenuity was
exhausted.

The dark architectural mass of the Pitti, pouring a
blaze of light scarce endurable from its deeply sunk
windows, looked like the side of an enchanted mountain
laid open for the revels of sorcery. The aigrette
and plume passed by; the tiara and the jewel upon
the breast; the gaily dressed courtiers and glittering
dames; and to that soldier at his dewy post, it seemed
like the realized raving of the improvisatore when he

is lost in some fable of Araby. Yet within walked
Malice and Hate, and the light and perfume that might
have fed an angel's heart with love, but deepened in
many a beating bosom the consuming fires of Envy.

With the gold key of office on his cape, the Grand
Chamberlain stood at the feet of the Dowager Grand
Duchess, and by a sign to the musicians, hidden in a
latticed gallery behind the Corinthian capital of the
hall, retarded or accelerated the soft measure of the
waltz. On a raised seat in the rear of the chairs of
state, sat the ladies of honor and the noble dames
nearest allied to royal blood; one solitary and privileged
intruder alone sharing the elevated place—the
Lady Geraldine. Dressed in white, her hair wound
about her head in the simplest form, yet developing
its divine shape with the clear outline of statuary, her
eyes lambent with purity and sweetness, heavily fringed
with lashes a shade darker than the light auburn
braided on her temples, and the tint of the summer's
most glowing rose turned out from the thread-like
parting of her lips; she was a vision of loveliness to
take into the memory, as the poet enshrines in his soul
the impossible shape of his ideal, and consumes youth
and age searching in vain for its like. Fair Lady Geraldine!
thou wilt read these passionate words from
one whose worship of thy intoxicating loveliness has
never before found utterance, but if this truly told tale
should betray the hand that has dared to describe thy
beauty, in thy next orisons to St. Mary of Pity, breathe
from those bright lips a prayer that he may forget
thee!

By the side of the Lady Geraldine, but behind the
chair of the Grand Duchess, who listened to his conversation
with singular delight, stood a slight young
man of uncommon personal beauty, a stranger apparently
to every other person present. His brilliant uniform
alone betrayed him to be in the Russian diplomacy,

and the marked distinction shown him both by the
reigning Queen of the court, and the more powerful
and inaccessible queen of beauty, marked him as an
object of keen and universal curiosity. By the time
the fifth mazurka had concluded its pendulous refrain,
the Grand Chamberlain had tolerably well circulated
the name and rank of Count Basil Spirifort, the renowned
wit and elegant of Paris, newly appointed to
the Court of His Royal Highness of Tuscany. Fair
eyes wandered amid his sunny curls, and beating bosoms
hushed their pulses as he passed.

Count Basil knew the weight of a first impression.
Count Basil knew also the uses of contempt. Upon
the first principle he kept his place between the Grand
Duchess and Lady Geraldine, exerting his deeply studied
art of pleasing to draw upon himself their exclusive
attention. Upon the second principle, he was perfectly
unconscious of the presence of another human
being, and neither the gliding step of the small-eared
Princess S— in the waltz, nor the stately advance
of the last female of the Medici in the mazurka, distracted
his large blue eyes a moment from their idleness.
With one hand on the eagle-hilt of his sword,
and his side leant against the high cushion of red velvet
honored by the pressure of the Lady Geraldine, he
gazed up into that beaming face, when not bending
respectfully to the Duchess, and drank steadfastly from
her beauty, as the lotus cup drinks light from the sun.

The new Secretary had calculated well. In the
deep recess of the window looking toward San Miniato,
stood a lady nearly hidden from view by the muslin
curtains just stirring with the vibration of the music,
who gazed on the immediate circle of the Grand Duchess
with an interest that was not attempted to be disguised.
On her first entrance into the hall, the Marchesa
del Marmore had recognised in the new minion
of favor her impassioned lover of the lagoon, her slighted

acquaintance of the cathedral. When the first shock
of surprise was over, she looked on the form which
she had found beautiful even in the disguise of poverty,
and, forgetting her insulting repulse when he would
have claimed in public the smile she had given him
when unobserved, she recalled with delight every syllable
he had murmured in her ear, and every look she
had called forth in the light of a Venetian moon. The
man who had burned upon the altar of her vanity the
most intoxicating incense—who had broken through
the iron rules of convention and ceremony, to throw
his homage at her feet—who had portrayed so incomparably
(she believed) with his love-inspired pencil
the features imprinted on his heart---this chancewon
worshipper, this daring but gifted plebeian, as she
had thought him, had suddenly shot into her sphere
and become a legitimate object of love; and, beautified
by the splendor of dress, and distinguished by the
preference and favor of those incomparably above her,
he seemed tenfold, to her eyes, the perfection of adorable
beauty. As she remembered his eloquent devotion
to herself, and saw the interest taken in him by a woman
whom she hated and had calumniated—a woman who
she believed stood between her and all the light of existence—she
anticipated the triumph of taking him from
her side—of exhibiting him to the world as a falcon seduced
from his first quarry—and never doubting that
so brilliant a favorite would control the talisman of the
paradise she had so long wished to enter, she panted
for the moment when she should catch his eye and
draw him from his lure, and already heard the Chamberlain's
voice in her ear commanding her presence
after the ball in the saloon of Hercules.

The Marchesa had been well observed from the first
by the wily diplomate. A thorough adept in the art
(so necessary to his profession) of seeing without appearing
to see, he had scarce lost a shade of the varying

expressions of her countenance; and while she
fancied him perfectly unconscious of her presence, he
read her tell-tale features as if they had given utterance
to her thoughts. He saw, with secret triumph,
the effect of his brilliant position upon her proud and
vain heart; watched her while she made use of her
throng of despised admirers to create a sensation near
him and attract his notice; and when the ball wore on,
and he was still in unwearied and exclusive attendance
upon the Lady Geraldine, he gazed after her with a
momentary curl of triumph on his lip, as she took up
her concealed position in the embayed window, and
abandoned herself to the bitter occupation of watching
the happiness of her rival. The Lady Geraldine had
never been so animated since her first appearance at
the Court of Tuscany.

It was past midnight when the Grand Duke, flushed
and tired with dancing, came to the side of the Lady
Geraldine. Count Basil gave place, and, remaining a
moment in nominal obedience to the Sovereign's polite
request which he was too politic to construe literally,
he looked down the dance with the air of one who has
turned his back on all that could interest him, and,
passing close to the concealed position of the Marchesa,
stepped out upon the balcony.

The air was cool, and the fountain played refreshingly
below. The Count Basil was one of those minds
which never have so much leisure for digression as
when they are most occupied. A love, as deep and
profound as the abysses of his soul, was weaving thread
for thread with a revenge worthy of a Mohican; yet,
after trying in vain to count eight in the Pleiades, he
raised himself upon the marble balustrade, and perfectly
anticipating the interruption to his solitude which
presently occurred, began to speculate aloud on the
dead and living at that hour beneath the roof of the
Pitti.

“A painter's mistress,” he said, “immortal in the
touch of her paramour's pencil, is worshipped for centuries
on these walls by the pilgrims of art; while the
warm perfection of all loveliness---the purest and divinest
of high-born women---will perish utterly with the
eyes that have seen her! The Bella of Titian, the
Fornarina of Raffaelle---peasant-girls of Italy---have,
at this moment, more value in this royal palace than
the breathing forms that inhabit it! The Lady Geraldine
herself, to whom the Sovereign offers at this moment
his most flattering homage, would be less a loss
to him than either! Yet they despise the gods of the
pencil who may thus make them immortal! The dull
blood in their noble veins, that never bred a thought
beyond the instincts of their kind, would look down,
forsooth, on the inventive and celestial ichor that inflames
the brain, and prompts the fiery hand of the
painter! How long will this very sovereign live in the
memories of men? The murderous Medici, the ambitious
cardinals, the abandoned women of an age gone
by, hang in imperishable colors on his walls; while of
him, the lord of this land of genius, there is not a bust
or a picture that would bring a sequin in the market-place!
They would buy genius in these days like
wine, and throw aside the flask in which it ripened.
Raffaelle and Buonarotti were companions for a pope
and his cardinals;---Titian was an honored guest for
the Doge. The stimulus to immortalize these noble
friends was in the love they bore them; and the secret
of their power to do it lay half in the knowledge of their
characters, gained by daily intimacy. Painters were
princes then, as they are beggars now; and the princely
art is beggared as well!”

The Marchesa del Marmore stepped out upon the
balcony, leaning on the arm of the Grand Chamberlain.
The soliloquizing Secretary had foretold to himself
both her coming and her companion.

“Monsieur le Comte,” said the Chamberlain, “La
Marchesa del Marmore wishes for the pleasure of your
acquaintance.”

Count Basil bowed low, and in that low and musical
tone of respectful devotion which, real or counterfeit,
made him irresistible to a woman who had a soul to be
thrilled, he repeated the usual nothings upon the beauty
of the night; and when the Chamberlain returned to
his duties, the Marchesa walked forth with her companion
to the cool and fragrant alleys of the garden,
and, under the silent and listening stars, implored forgiveness
for her pride; and, with the sudden abandonment
peculiar to the clime, poured into his ear the
passionate and weeping avowal of her sorrow and love.

“Those hours of penitence in the embayed window,”
thought Count Basil, “were healthy for your soul.”
And as she walked by his side, leaning heavily on his
arm, and half-dissolved in a confiding tenderness, his
thoughts reverted to another and a far sweeter voice;
and while the caressing words of the Marchesa fell on
an un-listening ear, his footsteps insensibly turned back
to the lighted hall.

6. VI.

As the daylight stole softly over Vallombrosa, the
luxurious chariot of the Marchesa del Marmore stopped
at the door of Count Basil. The Lady Geraldine's
suit had been successful; and the hitherto excluded
Florentine had received, from the hand of the man she
had once so ignorantly scorned, a privilege for which
she would have bartered her salvation;—she had supped
at his side in the saloon of Hercules. With many
faults of character, she was an Italian in feeling, and
had a capacity, like all her country-women, for a consuming
and headlong passion. She had better have
been born of marble.

“I have lifted you to heaven,” said Count Basil, as
her chariot wheels rolled from his door; “but it is as
the eagle soars into the clouds with the serpent. We
will see how you will relish the fall!”

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 noon-day
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 grey, 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 soiree on wheels,
the reunion en plein air, which is one of the most delightful

of the peculiar customs of Florence, commenced
its healthful gaities. 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 axle-trees, enjoyed their usual
butter-fly 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 light-heartedness,
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 caleche with pannels 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 piazza. 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 caleche, 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 carriages to the dark-green
chariot, and, excited by 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
attache, 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 statutes 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 second
chapter of this simply true tale commences, but
one of the two leading threads in the Count Basil's
woof had woven well. “The jealous are the damn'd,”
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

caleche 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 back the forward wheels of the caleche 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 reverie 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 diplomate 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
traveler 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 reverie, 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 esteem—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
close into his face, as if she would read in his dim features
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 good-night. 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 Cafe Colonna, where the artists were at this
hour usually assembled, he sought out his fellow-traveler,
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 cafe
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, with 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 good 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 canvas 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 dei Servi, and with a lash
and jerk of violence, the coachman of the Marchesa
del Marmore, enraged at the loss of his noon-day repose,
brought up her showy caleche at the door of
Count Basil Spirifort. The fair occupant of that luxurious
vehicle was pale, but the brightness of joy and
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 posse.”

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 every thing in the enthusiasm of his
art, and forgotten utterly by his unconscious subject,
transferred too faithfully to the canvas that picture of
agonized expectation.

The afternoon meantime had worn away, and the
gay world of Florence, from the side towards 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 participation 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
eleve 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 master-piece of expression and color. It was
instantly and indignantly recognised as the portrait of
the unfortunate Marchesa, whose late abandonment 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]