Vittoria. Complete

Bitter laughter rang throughout Lombardy when, in spite of his efforts to save his daughter’s husband, Giacomo Piaveni suffered death. No harder blow had ever befallen the count: it was as good as a public proclamation that he possessed small influence. To have bent the knee was not afflicting to this nobleman’s conscience: but it was an anguish to think of having bent the knee for nothing.

Giacomo Piaveni was a noble Italian of the young blood, son of a General loved by Eugene. In him the loss of Italy was deplorable. He perished by treachery at the age of twenty-three years. So splendid was this youth in appearance, of so sweet a manner with women, and altogether so-gentle and gallant, that it was a widowhood for women to have known him: and at his death the hearts of two women who had loved him in rivalry became bound by a sacred tie of friendship. He, though not of distinguished birth, had the choice of an almost royal alliance in the first blush of his manhood. He refused his chance, pleading in excuse to Count Serabiglione, that he was in love with that nobleman’s daughter, Laura; which it flattered the count to hear, but he had ever after a contempt for the young man’s discretion, and was observed to shrug, with the smooth sorrowfulness of one who has been a prophet, on the day when Giacomo was shot. The larger estates of the Piaveni family, then in Giacomo’s hands, were in a famous cheese-making district, producing a delicious cheese:—‘white as lambkins!’ the count would ejaculate most dolefully; and in a rapture of admiration, ‘You would say, a marble quarry when you cut into it.’ The theme was afflicting, for all the estates of Giacomo were for the time forfeit, and the pleasant agitation produced among his senses by the mention of the cheese reminded him at the same instant that he had to support a widow with two children. The Signora Piaveni lived in Milan, and the count her father visited her twice during the summer months, and wrote to her from his fitful Winter residences in various capital cities, to report progress in the settled scheme for the recovery of Giacomo’s property, as well for his widow as for the heirs of his body. ‘It is a duty,’ Count Serabiglione said emphatically. ‘My daughter can entertain no proposal until her children are duly established; or would she, who is young and lovely and archly capricious, continue to decline the very best offers of the Milanese nobility, and live on one flat in an old quarter of the city, instead of in a bright and handsome street, musical with equipages, and full of the shows of life?’

In conjunction with certain friends of the signora, the count worked diligently for the immediate restitution of the estates. He was ably seconded by the young princess of Schyll-Weilingen,—by marriage countess of Fohrendorf, duchess of Graatli, in central Germany, by which title she passed,—an Austrian princess; she who had loved Giacomo, and would have given all for him, and who now loved his widow. The extreme and painful difficulty was that the Signora Piaveni made no concealment of her abhorrence of the House of Austria, and hatred of Austrian rule in Italy. The spirit of her dead husband had come to her from the grave, and warmed a frame previously indifferent to anything save his personal merits. It had been covertly communicated to her that if she performed due submission to the authorities, and lived for six months in good legal, that is to say, nonpatriotic odour, she might hope to have the estates. The duchess had obtained this mercy for her, and it was much; for Giacomo’s scheme of revolt had been conceived with a subtlety of genius, and contrived on a scale sufficient to incense any despotic lord of such a glorious milch-cow as Lombardy. Unhappily the signora was more inspired by the remembrance of her husband than by consideration for her children. She received disaffected persons: she subscribed her money ostentatiously for notoriously patriotic purposes; and she who, in her father’s Como villa, had been a shy speechless girl, nothing more than beautiful, had become celebrated for her public letters, and the ardour of declamation against the foreigner which characterized her style. In the face of such facts, the estates continued to be withheld from her governance. Austria could do that: she could wreak her spite against the woman, but she respected her own law even in a conquered land: the estates were not confiscated, and not absolutely sequestrated; and, indeed, money coming from them had been sent to her for the education of her children. It lay in unopened official envelopes, piled one upon another, quarterly remittances, horrible as blood of slaughter in her sight. Count Serabiglione made a point of counting the packets always within the first five minutes of a visit to his daughter. He said nothing, but was careful to see to the proper working of the lock of the cupboard where the precious deposits were kept, and sometimes in forgetfulness he carried off the key. When his daughter reclaimed it, she observed, ‘Pray believe me quite as anxious as yourself to preserve these documents.’ And the count answered, ‘They represent the estates, and are of legal value, though the amount is small. They represent your protest, and the admission of your claim. They are priceless.’

In some degree, also, they compensated him for the expense he was put to in providing for his daughter’s subsistence and that of her children. For there, at all events, visible before his eyes, was the value of the money, if not the money expended. He remonstrated with Laura for leaving it more than necessarily exposed. She replied,

‘My people know what that money means!’ implying, of course, that no one in her house would consequently touch it. Yet it was reserved for the count to find it gone.

The discovery was made by the astounded nobleman on the day preceding Vittoria’s appearance at La Scala. His daughter being absent, he had visited the cupboard merely to satisfy an habitual curiosity. The cupboard was open, and had evidently been ransacked. He rang up the domestics, and would have charged them all with having done violence to the key, but that on reflection he considered this to be a way of binding faggots together, and he resolved to take them one by one, like the threading Jesuit that he was, and so get a Judas. Laura’s return saved him from much exercise of his peculiar skill. She, with a cool ‘Ebbene!’ asked him how long he had expected the money to remain there. Upon which, enraged, he accused her of devoting the money to the accursed patriotic cause. And here they came to a curious open division.

‘Be content, my father,’ she said; ‘the money is my husband’s, and is expended on his behalf.’

‘You waste it among the people who were the cause of his ruin!’ her father retorted.

‘You presume me to have returned it to the Government, possibly?’

‘I charge you with tossing it to your so-called patriots.’

‘Sir, if I have done that, I have done well.’

‘Hear her!’ cried the count to the attentive ceiling; and addressing her with an ironical ‘madame,’ he begged permission to inquire of her whether haply she might be the person in the pay of Revolutionists who was about to appear at La Scala, under the name of the Signorina Vittoria. ‘For you are getting dramatic in your pose, my Laura,’ he added, familiarizing the colder tone of his irony. ‘You are beginning to stand easily in attitudes of defiance to your own father.’

‘That I may practise how to provoke a paternal Government, you mean,’ she rejoined, and was quite a match for him in dialectics.

The count chanced to allude further to the Signorina Vittoria.

‘Do you know much of that lady?’ she asked.

‘As much as is known,’ said he.

They looked at one another; the count thinking, ‘I gave to this girl an excess of brains, in my folly!’

Compelled to drop his eyes, and vexed by the tacit defeat, he pursued, ‘You expect great things from her?’

‘Great,’ said his daughter.

‘Well, well,’ he murmured acquiescingly, while sounding within himself for the part to play. ‘Well-yes! she may do what you expect.’

‘There is not the slightest doubt of her capacity,’ said his daughter, in a tone of such perfect conviction that the count was immediately and irresistibly tempted to play the part of sagacious, kindly, tolerant but foreseeing father; and in this becoming character he exposed the risks her party ran in trusting anything of weight to a woman. Not that he decried women. Out of their sphere he did not trust them, and he simply objected to them when out of their sphere: the last four words being uttered staccato.

‘But we trust her to do what she has undertaken to do,’ said Laura.

The count brightened prodigiously from his suspicion to a certainty; and as he was still smiling at the egregious trap his clever but unskilled daughter had fallen into, he found himself listening incredulously to her plain additional sentence:—‘She has easy command of three octaves.’

By which the allusion was transformed from politics to Art. Had Laura reserved this cunning turn a little further, yielding to the natural temptation to increase the shock of the antithetical battery, she would have betrayed herself: but it came at the right moment: the count gave up his arms. He told her that this Signorina Vittoria was suspected. ‘Whom will they not suspect!’ interjected Laura. He assured her that if a conspiracy had ripened it must fail. She was to believe that he abhorred the part of a spy or informer, but he was bound, since she was reckless, to watch over his daughter; and also bound, that he might be of service to her, to earn by service to others as much power as he could reasonably hope to obtain. Laura signified that he argued excellently well. In a fit of unjustified doubt of her sincerity, he complained, with a querulous snap:

‘You have your own ideas; you have your own ideas. You think me this and that. A man must be employed.’

‘And this is to account for your occupation?’ she remarked.

‘Employed, I say!’ the count reiterated fretfully. He was unmasking to no purpose, and felt himself as on a slope, having given his adversary vantage.

‘So that there is no choice for you, do you mean?’

The count set up a staggering affirmative, but knocked it over with its natural enemy as soon as his daughter had said, ‘Not being for Italy, you must necessarily be against her:—I admit that to be the position!’

‘No!’ he cried; ‘no: there is no question of “for” or “against,” as you are aware. “Italy, and not Revolution”: that is my motto.’

‘Or, in other words, “The impossible,”’ said Laura. ‘A perfect motto!’

Again the count looked at her, with the remorseful thought: ‘I certainly gave you too much brains.’

He smiled: ‘If you could only believe it not impossible!’

‘Do you really imagine that “Italy without Revolution” does not mean “Austria”?’ she inquired.

She had discovered how much he, and therefore his party, suspected, and now she had reasons for wishing him away. Not daring to show symptoms of restlessness, she offered him the chance of recovering himself on the crutches of an explanation. He accepted the assistance, praising his wits for their sprightly divination, and went through a long-winded statement of his views for the welfare of Italy, quoting his favourite Berni frequently, and forcing the occasion for that jolly poet. Laura gave quiet attention to all, and when he was exhausted at the close, said meditatively, ‘Yes. Well; you are older. It may seem to you that I shall think as you do when I have had a similar, or the same, length of experience.’

This provoking reply caused her father to jump up from his chair and spin round for his hat. She rose to speed him forth.

‘It may seem to me!’ he kept muttering. ‘It may seem to me that when a daughter gets married—addio! she is nothing but her husband.’

‘Ay! ay! if it might be so!’ the signora wailed out.

The count hated tears, considering them a clog to all useful machinery. He was departing, when through the open window a noise of scuffling in the street below arrested him.

‘Has it commenced?’ he said, starting.

‘What?’ asked the signora, coolly; and made him pause.

‘But-but-but!’ he answered, and had the grace to spare her ears. The thought in him was: ‘But that I had some faith in my wife, and don’t admire the devil sufficiently, I would accuse him point-blank, for, by Bacchus! you are as clever as he.’

It is a point in the education of parents that they should learn to apprehend humbly the compliment of being outwitted by their own offspring.

Count Serabiglione leaned out of the window and saw that his horses were safe and the coachman handy. There were two separate engagements going on between angry twisting couples.

‘Is there a habitable town in Italy?’ the count exclaimed frenziedly. First he called to his coachman to drive away, next to wait as if nailed to the spot. He cursed the revolutionary spirit as the mother of vices. While he was gazing at the fray, the door behind him opened, as he knew by the rush of cool air which struck his temples. He fancied that his daughter was hurrying off in obedience to a signal, and turned upon her just as Laura was motioning to a female figure in the doorway to retire.

‘Who is this?’ said the count.

A veil was over the strange lady’s head. She was excited, and breathed quickly. The count brought forward a chair to her, and put on his best court manner. Laura caressed her, whispering, ere she replied: ‘The Signorina Vittoria Romana!—Biancolla!—Benarriva!’ and numerous other names of inventive endearment. But the count was too sharp to be thrown off the scent. ‘Aha!’ he said, ‘do I see her one evening before the term appointed?’ and bowed profoundly. ‘The Signorina Vittoria!’

She threw up her veil.

‘Success is certain,’ he remarked and applauded, holding one hand as a snuff-box for the fingers of the other to tap on.

‘Signor Conte, you—must not praise me before you have heard me.’

‘To have seen you!’

‘The voice has a wider dominion, Signor Conte.’

‘The fame of the signorina’s beauty will soon be far wider. Was Venus a cantatrice?’

She blushed, being unable to continue this sort of Mayfly-shooting dialogue, but her first charming readiness had affected the proficient social gentleman very pleasantly, and with fascinated eyes he hummed and buzzed about her like a moth at a lamp. Suddenly his head dived: ‘Nothing, nothing, signorina,’ he said, brushing delicately at her dress; ‘I thought it might be paint.’ He smiled to reassure her, and then he dived again, murmuring: ‘It must be something sticking to the dress. Pardon me.’ With that he went to the bell. ‘I will ring up my daughter’s maid. Or Laura—where is Laura?’

The Signora Piaveni had walked to the window. This antiquated fussiness of the dilettante little nobleman was sickening to her.

‘Probably you expect to discover a revolutionary symbol in the lines of the signorina’s dress,’ she said.

‘A revolutionary symbol!—my dear! my dear!’ The count reproved his daughter. ‘Is not our signorina a pure artist, accomplishing easily three octaves? aha! Three!’ and he rubbed his hands. ‘But, three good octaves!’ he addressed Vittoria seriously and admonishingly. ‘It is a fortune-millions! It is precisely the very grandest heritage! It is an army!’

‘I trust that it may be!’ said Vittoria, with so deep and earnest a ring of her voice that the count himself, malicious as his ejaculations had been, was astonished. At that instant Laura cried from the window: ‘These horses will go mad.’

The exclamation had the desired effect.

‘Eh?—pardon me, signorina,’ said the count, moving half-way to the window, and then askant for his hat. The clatter of the horses’ hoofs sent him dashing through the doorway, at which place his daughter stood with his hat extended. He thanked and blessed her for the kindly attention, and in terror lest the signorina should think evil of him as ‘one of the generation of the hasty,’ he said, ‘Were it anything but horses! anything but horses! one’s horses!—ha!’ The audible hoofs called him off. He kissed the tips of his fingers, and tripped out.

The signora stepped rapidly to the window, and leaning there, cried a word to the coachman, who signalled perfect comprehension, and immediately the count’s horses were on their hind-legs, chafing and pulling to right and left, and the street was tumultuous with them. She flung down the window, seized Vittoria’s cheeks in her two hands, and pressed the head upon her bosom. ‘He will not disturb us again,’ she said, in quite a new tone, sliding her hands from the cheeks to the shoulders and along the arms to the fingers’-ends, which they clutched lovingly. ‘He is of the old school, friend of my heart! and besides, he has but two pairs of horses, and one he keeps in Vienna. We live in the hope that our masters will pay us better! Tell me! you are in good health? All is well with you? Will they have to put paint on her soft cheeks to-morrow? Little, if they hold the colour as full as now? My Sandra! amica! should I have been jealous if Giacomo had known you? On my soul, I cannot guess! But, you love what he loved. He seems to live for me when they are talking of Italy, and you send your eyes forward as if you saw the country free. God help me! how I have been containing myself for the last hour and a half!’

The signora dropped in a seat and laughed a languid laugh.

‘The little ones? I will ring for them. Assunta shall bring them down in their night-gowns if they are undressed; and we will muffle the windows, for my little man will be wanting his song; and did you not promise him the great one which is to raise Italy-his mother, from the dead? Do you remember our little fellow’s eyes as he tried to see the picture? I fear I force him too much, and there’s no need-not a bit.’

The time was exciting, and the signora spoke excitedly. Messing and Reggio were in arms. South Italy had given the open signal. It was near upon the hour of the unmasking of the great Lombard conspiracy, and Vittoria, standing there, was the beacon-light of it. Her presence filled Laura with transports of exultation; and shy of displaying it, and of the theme itself, she let her tongue run on, and satisfied herself by smoothing the hand of the brave girl on her chin, and plucking with little loving tugs at her skirts. In doing this she suddenly gave a cry, as if stung.

‘You carry pins,’ she said. And inspecting the skirts more closely, ‘You have a careless maid in that creature Giacinta; she lets paper stick to your dress. What is this?’

Vittoria turned her head, and gathered up her dress to see.

‘Pinned with the butterfly!’ Laura spoke under her breath.

Vittoria asked what it meant.

‘Nothing—nothing,’ said her friend, and rose, pulling her eagerly toward the lamp.

A small bronze butterfly secured a square piece of paper with clipped corners to her dress. Two words were written on it:—

‘SEI SOSPETTA.’