University of Virginia Library

2. II.

The Count Basil had been a month at Florence. In that time
he had contrived to place himself between the Duke's ear and all
the avenues of favor, and had approached as near, perhaps nearer,
to the hearts of the women of his court. A singular and instinctive
knowledge of the weaknesses of human nature, perfected and concealed
by conversance with the consummate refinement of life at
Paris, remarkable personal beauty, and a quality of scornful bitterness
for which no one could divine a reason in a character and
fate else so happily mingled, but which, at the same time, added to
his fascination, had given Count Basil a command over the varied
stops of society, equalled by few players on that difficult and
capricious instrument. His worldly ambition went swimmingly
on, and the same wind filled the sails of his lighter ventures as
well. The love of the Marchesa del Marmore, as he had very
well anticipated, grew with his influence and renown. A woman's
pride, he perfectly knew, is difficult to wake after she has once
believed herself adored; and, satisfied that the portrait taken on
the lagoon, and the introduction he had given her to the exclusive
penetralia of the Pitti, would hold her till his revenge was
complete, he left her love for him to find its own food in his successes,
and never approached her but to lay to her heart, more
mordently, the serpents of jealousy and despair.

For the Lady Geraldine the Count Basil had conceived a love,
the deepest of which his nature was capable. Long as he had
known her, it was a passion born in Italy, and, while it partook of
the qualities of the clime, it had for its basis the habitual and
well-founded respect of a virtuous and sincere friendship. At

their first acquaintance at Paris, the lovely Englishwoman,
newly arrived from the purer moral atmosphere of her own
country, was moving in the dissolute, but skilfully disguised
society of the Faubourg St. Germain, with the simple unconsciousness
of the pure in heart, innocent herself, and naturally
unsuspicious of others. The perfect frankness with which she
established an intimacy with the clever and accomplished attaché,
had soon satisfied that clear-sighted person that there was no
passion in her preference, and, giddy with the thousand pleasures
of that metropolis of delight, he had readily sunk his first startled
admiration of her beauty in an affectionate and confiding friendship.
He had thus shown her the better qualities of his character
only, and, charmed with his wit and penetration, and something
flattered, perhaps, with the devotion of so acknowledged an
autocrat of fashion and talent, she had formed an attachment for
him that had all the earnestness of love without its passion.
They met at Florence, but the “knowledge of good and evil”
had, by this time, driven the Lady Geraldine from her Eden of
unconsciousness. Still as irreproachable in conduct, and perhaps
as pure in heart as before, an acquaintance with the forms of vice
had introduced into her manners those ostensible cautions which,
while they protect, suggest also what is to be feared.

A change had taken place also in Count Basil. He had left
the vitreous and mercurial clime of France, with its volatile and
superficial occupations, for the voluptuous and indolent air of
Italy, and the study of its impassioned deifications of beauty.
That which had before been in him an instinct of gay pleasure—
a pursuit which palled in the first moment of success, and was
second to his ambition or his vanity—had become, in those two
years of a painter's life, a thirst both of the senses and the imagination,

which had usurped the very throne of his soul. Like
the Hindoo youth, who finds the gilded plaything of his childhood
elevated in his maturer years into a god, he bowed his heart to
what he held so lightly, and brought the costly sacrifice of time
and thought to its altars. He had fed his eyes upon the divine
glories of the pencil, and upon the breathing wonders of love in
marble, beneath the sky and in the dissolving air in which they
rose to the hand of inspiration; and, with his eye disciplined, and
his blood fused with taste and enthusiasm, that idolatry of beauty,
which had before seemed sensual or unreal, kindled its first fires
in his mind, and his senses were intoxicated with the incense.
There is a kind of compromise in the effects of the atmosphere
and arts of Italy. If the intellect takes a warmer hue in its study
of the fair models of antiquity, the senses in turn become more
refined and intellectual. In other latitudes and lands woman is
loved more coldly. After the brief reign of a passion of instinct,
she is happy if she can retain her empire by habit, or the qualities
of the heart. That divine form, meant to assimilate her to the
angels, has never been recognised by the dull eye that should
have seen in it a type of her soul. To the love of the painter or
the statuary, or to his who has made himself conversant with their
models, is added the imperishable enthusiasm of a captivating and
exalted study. The mistress of his heart is the mistress of his
mind. She is the breathing realization of that secret ideal which
exists in every mind, but which, in men ignorant of the fine arts,
takes another form, and becomes a woman's rival and usurper.
She is like nothing in ambition—she is like nothing in science or
business—nothing in out-of-door pleasures. If politics, or the
chase, or the acquisition of wealth, is the form of this ruling
passion, she is unassociated with that which is nearest his heart,
and he returns to her with an exhausted interest and a flagging
fancy. It is her strongest tie upon his affection, even, that she
is his refuge when unfit for that which occupies him most—in his
fatigue, his disappointment, his vacuity of head and heart. He
thinks of her only as she receives him in his most worthless
hours; and, as his refreshed intellects awake, she is forgotten
with the first thought of his favorite theme—for what has a
woman's loveliness to do with that?

Count Basil had not concluded his first interview with the Lady
Geraldine, without marvelling at the new feelings with which he
looked upon her. He had never before realized her singular and
adorable beauty. The exquisitely-turned head, the small and
pearly ears, the spiritual nostril, the softly-moulded chin, the
clear loftiness of expression yet inexpressible delicacy and brightness
in the lips, and a throat and bust—than which those of
Faustina in the delicious marble of the Gallery of Florence might
be less envied by the Queen of Love—his gaze wandered over
these, and followed her in the harmony of her motions, and the
native and unapproachable grace of every attitude; and the pictures
he had so passionately studied seemed to fade in his mind,
and the statues he had half worshipped seemed to descend from
their pedestals depreciated. The Lady Geraldine, for the first
time, felt his eye. For the first time in their acquaintance, she
was offended with its regard. Her embarrassment was read by
the quick diplomate, and at that moment sprang into being a
passion, which perhaps had died but for the conscious acknowledgment
of her rebuke.

Up to the evening in the Cascine, with which the 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

jealous are the damned,” and the daily and deadly agony of the
Marchesa del Marmore was a dark ground from which his love to
the Lady Geraldine rose to his own eye in heightened relief. His
dearest joy forwarded with equal step his dearest revenge; and
while he could watch the working of his slow torture in the
fascinated heart of his victim, he was content to suspend a blow
to which that of death would be a mercy. “The law,” said Count
Basil, as he watched her quivering and imploring lip, “takes
cognizance but of the murder of the body. It has no retribution
for the keener dagger of the soul.”