 | II. Inklings of adventure |  |
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.”
| II. Inklings of adventure | |