 | Inklings of adventure |  |
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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,
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,
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,
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
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
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]
| Inklings of adventure | |