 | People I have met, or, Pictures of society and people of mark, drawn under a thin veil of fiction |  |
THE REVENGE OF THE SIGNOR BASIL.
1. PART I.
“Un homme capable de faire des dominos avec les os de son pere.”
—Pere Goriot.
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 God-send 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. Mark, and the flying Mercury on the Dogana, paled to the setting
orb and kindled to the rising, with the same Talleyrandesque
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,
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 impoverishes 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
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 a 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 brim, 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 revery 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 lookeron;
“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, and 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 the large hats covering their faces from the
powerful rays of the moon.
“Miladi does justice to the beauty of the night,” said the
her feet 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 tonight?”
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 surprise 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, with a glance around,
which the accomplished courtier before her read better than she
dreamed, 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 eyes
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
toward her, and on his 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 toward 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
travellers, 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 during 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
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
husband, 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,
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 gayety, almost
any presentable person, resident at Florence, may procure the
entrée to the court balls, and start fair with noble dames and
gentlemen for grace in courtly favor. The fétes 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
royal cortége, the delighted crowd take their departure, having
seen no class more favored than themselves, and enchanted with
the gracious absence of pretension in the nobilta 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 travelling artists were on
their way from the grand gallery at Florence to their noonday
meal. Loitering with slow feet through the crowded and narrow
up with understanding eyes at the slender shaft of the Campanile
(than which a fairer figure 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
traveller 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 Fiesolé, 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 dithyrambie. 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 à 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 travellers 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
of the palace rang with his prancing hoofs.
He who was idle and bought flowers at the Café 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 attaché to the
Russian embassy at Paris (where he had first sunned his eyes in
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 résumer—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 congé for a couple of years, and I dived presently
under a broad-brimmed 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,
without 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 wayworn 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,” soliloquised 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-traveller
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-traveller
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.
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 radiant. 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 body-guard,
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 gayly-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 threadlike 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.
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 leaned 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
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 chance-won 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
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
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 highborn 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 in 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 carressing words of the Marchesa
fell on an unlistening 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
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 countrywomen, 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 noonday slumber, was alive with the
sound of wheels. The sun was sinking over the Apennine which
kneels at the gate of Florence; the streets were cool and shadowy;
the old women, with the bambina between their knees, braided
straw at the doors; the booted guardsman paced his black charger
slowly over the jeweller's bridge; the picture-dealer brought forward
his brightest “master” to the fading light; and while the
famous churches of that fairest city of the earth called to the
Ave-Maria with impatient bell, the gallantry and beauty of
Tuscany sped through the dampening air with their swift horses,
meeting and passing, with gay greetings, amid the green alleys of
the Cascine.
The twilight had become grey, when the carriages and
this loveliest of parks, turned by common consent toward the
spacious square in the centre, and, drawing up, in thickly-serried
ranks, the soirée on wheels, the réunion en plein air, which is one
of the most delightful of the peculiar customs of Florence, commenced
its healthful gayeties. The showy carriages of the
Grand-Duke and the ex-King of Wurtemberg (whose rank would
not permit them to share in the familiarities of the hour) disappeared
by the avenue skirting the bank of the Arno, and, with
much delicate and some desperate specimens of skill, the coachmen
of the more exclusive nobility threaded the embarrassed
press of vehicles, and laid their wheels together on the southern
edge of the piazza. The beaux in the saddle, disembarrassed of
ladies and axletrees, enjoyed their usual butterfly privilege of
roving, and, with light rein and ready spur, pushed their impatient
horses to the coronetted panels of the loveliest or most powerful;
the laugh of the giddy was heard here and there over the pawing
of restless hoofs; an occasional scream—half of apprehension,
half of admiration—rewarded the daring caracole of some young
and bold rider; and, while the first star sprang to its place, and
the dew of heaven dropped into the false flowers in the hat of the
belle, and into the thirsting lips of the violet in the field, (simplicity,
like virtue, is its own reward!), the low murmur of
calumny and compliment, of love and 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 caléche, with panels of dusky crimson, the hammer-cloth
of the same shade, edged with a broad fringe of white, the
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 caléche, 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 passing 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
newly arrived from the purer moral atmosphere of her own
country, was moving in the dissolute, but skilfully disguised
society of the Faubourg St. Germain, with the simple unconsciousness
of the pure in heart, innocent herself, and naturally
unsuspicious of others. The perfect frankness with which she
established an intimacy with the clever and accomplished attaché,
had soon satisfied that clear-sighted person that there was no
passion in her preference, and, giddy with the thousand pleasures
of that metropolis of delight, he had readily sunk his first startled
admiration of her beauty in an affectionate and confiding friendship.
He had thus shown her the better qualities of his character
only, and, charmed with his wit and penetration, and something
flattered, perhaps, with the devotion of so acknowledged an
autocrat of fashion and talent, she had formed an attachment for
him that had all the earnestness of love without its passion.
They met at Florence, but the “knowledge of good and evil”
had, by this time, driven the Lady Geraldine from her Eden of
unconsciousness. Still as irreproachable in conduct, and perhaps
as pure in heart as before, an acquaintance with the forms of vice
had introduced into her manners those ostensible cautions which,
while they protect, suggest also what is to be feared.
A change had taken place also in Count Basil. He had left
the vitreous and mercurial clime of France, with its volatile and
superficial occupations, for the voluptuous and indolent air of
Italy, and the study of its impassioned deifications of beauty.
That which had before been in him an instinct of gay pleasure—
a pursuit which palled in the first moment of success, and was
second to his ambition or his vanity—had become, in those two
years of a painter's life, a thirst both of the senses and the imagination,
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,
fancy. It is her strongest tie upon his affection, even, that she
is his refuge when unfit for that which occupies him most—in his
fatigue, his disappointment, his vacuity of head and heart. He
thinks of her only as she receives him in his most worthless
hours; and, as his refreshed intellects awake, she is forgotten
with the first thought of his favorite theme—for what has a
woman's loveliness to do with that?
Count Basil had not concluded his first interview with the Lady
Geraldine, without marvelling at the new feelings with which he
looked upon her. He had never before realized her singular and
adorable beauty. The exquisitely-turned head, the small and
pearly ears, the spiritual nostril, the softly-moulded chin, the
clear loftiness of expression yet inexpressible delicacy and brightness
in the lips, and a throat and bust—than which those of
Faustina in the delicious marble of the Gallery of Florence might
be less envied by the Queen of Love—his gaze wandered over
these, and followed her in the harmony of her motions, and the
native and unapproachable grace of every attitude; and the pictures
he had so passionately studied seemed to fade in his mind,
and the statues he had half worshipped seemed to descend from
their pedestals depreciated. The Lady Geraldine, for the first
time, felt his eye. For the first time in their acquaintance, she
was offended with its regard. Her embarrassment was read by
the quick diplomate, and at that moment sprang into being a
passion, which perhaps had died but for the conscious acknowledgment
of her rebuke.
Up to the evening in the Cascine, with which the second
chapter of this mainly true tale commences, but one of the two
leading threads, in the Count Basil's woof, had woven well. “The
Marchesa del Marmore was a dark ground from which his love to
the Lady Geraldine rose to his own eye in heightened relief. His
dearest joy forwarded with equal step his dearest revenge; and
while he could watch the working of his slow torture in the
fascinated heart of his victim, he was content to suspend a blow
to which that of death would be a mercy. “The law,” said Count
Basil, as he watched her quivering and imploring lip, “takes
cognizance but of the murder of the body. It has no retribution
for the keener dagger of the soul.”
3. III.
The conversation between the Russian Secretary and the
Prince Poniatowski ended at last in a graceful bow from the
former to his horse's neck; and the quicker rattling of the small
hoofs on the ground, as the fine creature felt the movement in the
saddle and prepared to bound away, drew all eyes once more
upon the handsomest and most idolized gallant of Florence. The
narrow lane of carriages, commencing with the showy calêche of
the Marchesa del Marmore, and closed up by the plain chariot of
the Lady Geraldine, was still open; and, with a glance at the
latter which snfficiently 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 laid the back and forward
wheels of the ealéche directly across his path. Met in full career
by this sudden obstacle, the horse of the Russian reared high in
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 neek of his
horse, and while the Marchesa del Marmore drove past with a
look of inexpressible anguish and hate, and the dispersing nobles
and dames took their way to the city gates, Count Basil leaned
close to the ear of that loveliest of breathing creatures, and forgot,
as she forgot in listening to the bewildering music of his voice,
that the stars had risen, or that the night was closing around
them.
The Cascine had long been silent when the chariot of the Lady
Geraldine took its way to the town, and, with the reins loose upon
his horse's neck, Count Basil followed at a slower pace, lost in
the revery of a tumultuous passion. The sparkling and unobstructed
stars broke through the leafy roof of the avenue whose
silence was disturbed by those fine and light-stepping hoofs, and
the challenge of the Duke's forester, going his rounds ere the
gates closed, had its own deep-throated echo for its answer.
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 walls on this side Florence, the traveller
will remember that the trees are more thickly serried, and the
stone seats, for the comfort and pleasure of those who would step
forth from the hot streets for an hour of fresh air and rest, are
mossy with the depth of the perpetual shade. In the midst of
this dark avenue, the unguided animal beneath the careless and
forgetful rider suddenly stood still, and the next moment starting
aside, a female sprang high against his neck, and Count Basil,
ere awake from his revery, felt the glance of a dagger-blade
across his bosom.
With the slender wrist that had given the blow firmly arrested
in his left hand, the Count Basil slowly dismounted, and, after a
steadfast look, by the dim light, into the face of the lovely assassin,
he pressed her fingers respectfully, and with well counterfeited
emotion, to his lips.
“Twice since the Ave-Maria!” he said, in a tone of reproachful
tenderness, “and against a life that is your own!”
He could see, even in that faint light, the stern compression of
those haughty lips, and the flash of the darkest eyes of the Val
d'Arno. But leading her gently to a seat, he sat beside her, and,
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 was 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
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
Café Colonna, where the artists were at this hour usually assembled,
he sought out his fellow-traveller, Giannino Speranza, who
had sketched the Marchesa upon the lagoon, and made an appointment
with him for the morrow.
4. IV.
While the Count Basil's revenge sped thus merrily, the just
Fates were preparing for him a retribution in his love. The
mortification of the Marchesa del Marmore, at the Cascine, had
been made the subject of conversation at the prima sera of the
Lady Geraldine; and, other details of the same secret drama
transpiring at the same time, the whole secret of Count Basil's
feelings toward that unfortunate woman flashed clearly and fully
upon her. His motives for pretending to have drawn the portrait
of the lagoon—for procuring her an admission to the exclusive
suppers of the Pitti—for a thousand things which had been unaccountable,
or referred to more amiable causes—were at once
revenge, the Lady Geraldine felt an indignant pity for the unconscious
victim, and a surprised disapproval of the character
ummasked 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 éclaircissement
which must follow the public scene in the Cascine, the Count
Basil had left the café for his own palazzo; and, in a letter, of
which the following is the passage most important to our story,
he revealed, to the lady he loved, a secret, which he hoped would
anticipate the common rumor:—
* * * * * “But these passionate words will have offended
your ear, dearest lady, and I must pass to a theme on which I
shall be less eloquent. You will hear to-night, perhaps, that
which, with all your imagination, will scarce prepare you for
what you will hear to-morrow. The Marchesa del Marmore is
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,
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
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 del Servi, and with a lash and jerk of violence, the
coachman of the Marchesa del Marmore, enraged at the loss of
his noonday repose, brought up her showy caléche 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
portrait, done by the incomparable artist who would receive her.
Disappointment and vexation overwhelmed the heart of the
Marchesa, and she burst into tears. She read the letter again,
and grew calmer; for it was laden with epithets of endearment,
and seemed to her written in the most sudden haste. Never
doubting for an instant the truth of his apology, she removed her
hat, and, with a look at the deeply-shaded mirror, while she
shook out from their confinement the masses of her luxuriant
hair, she approached the painter's easel, and, with a forced cheerfulness,
inquired in what attitude she should sit to him.
“If the Signora will amuse herself,” he replied, with a bow,
“it will be easy to compose the picture, and seize the expression
without annoying her with a pose.”
Relieved thus of any imperative occupation, the unhappy
Marchesa seated herself by a table of intaglios and prints, and,
while she apparently occupied herself in the examination of these
specimens of art, she was delivered, as her tormentor had well
anticipated, to the alternate tortures of impatience and remorse.
And while the hours wore on, and her face paled, and her eyes
grew bloodshot with doubt and fear, the skilful painter, forgetting
everything in the enthusiasm of his art, and forgotten utterly by
his unconscious subject, transferred too faithfully to the canvas
that picture of agonized expectation.
The afternoon, meantime, had worn away, and the gay world
of Florence, from the side toward Fiesole, rolled past the Via
dei Servi on their circuitous way to the Cascine, and saw, with
dumb astonishment, the carriage and liveries of the Marchesa del
Marmore at the door of Count Basil Spirifort. On they swept
by the Via Mercata Nova to the Lung' Arno, and there their
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 Venetion painter, an elève of Count Basil Spirifort. It
was called “The Lady expecting an Inconstant,” and had been
pronounced by a virtuoso, who had seen it on private view, to be
a masterpiece of expression and color. It was instantly and
indignantly recognised as the portrait of the unfortunate
Marchesa, whose late 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 worse passions of men, in
common life, are sometimes inserutably prospered. The revenge
of Count Basil, however, was betrayed by the last act which com
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]
| People I have met, or, Pictures of society and people of mark, drawn under a thin veil of fiction | |