It might have been a long and difficult matter to establish Vittoria's
identity, if Maria Carolina had been really insane, as it had been
feared that she might be. She was beyond further suffering, perhaps,
when the third of her sons was dead, but her mind was clear enough under
the intense religious melancholy that had settled upon her in her grief.
The fact of her having been willing and anxious to leave Vittoria at
such a time now explained itself. The girl was not her daughter, and in
the intensity of her sorrow the bereaved mother felt that she was a
stranger, if not a burden. Yet she kept the secret, out of a sort of
fear that even after eighteen years the revelation of it might bring
about some unimaginably dreadful consequence to herself, and as though
the Duca di Fornasco could still accuse her of having helped to steal
his child, by receiving her from the brigands.
The fact was that the outlaws had terrified the Corleone at the time,
threatening them with total destruction if they refused to conceal the
infant. They were poor and lived in an isolated neighbourhood, more or
less in fear of their lives, at a time when brigandage was the rule, and
when the many bands that existed in the island were under the general
direction of the terrible Leone. They had yielded and had kept the
secret with Sicilian reticence. Tebaldo alone had been old enough to
partly understand the truth, but his father had told him the whole story
before dying, and had left him a clearly-written account of it, in case
of any future difficulty. But Maria Carolina was alive still, and sane,
and she told the truth clearly and connectedly to a lawyer, for she was
glad to sever her last tie with the world, and glad, perhaps, that the
stolen child should go back to her own people after all. Among her
possessions were the clothes and tiny ornaments the infant had worn.
Vittoria's first sensation when she knew the truth was that of a captive
led into the open air after years of confinement in a poisonous air.
She had been the daughter of a race of ill fame, fatherless, and all but
motherless. Her three brothers had come to evil ends, one by one. She
had been left alone in the world, the last representative of what so
many called 'the worst blood in Italy.' She had been divided from the
man she loved by a twofold bloodshed and by all the horror of her last
surviving brother's crimes. Many and many a time she had stared into her
mirror for an hour at night, not pleased by her own delicate loveliness,
but asking herself, with heart-broken wonder, how it was possible that
she could be the daughter of such a mother, the sister of such brothers,
the grandchild of traitors and betrayers to generations of wickedness,
back into the dim past. She had never been like them, nor felt like
them, nor acted as they did, yet it had seemed mad, if not wicked, to
doubt that she was one of them. And each morning, meeting them all again
and living with them, there had come the shock of opposition between her
inheritance of honour and their inborn disposition to treachery and
crime.
And now, it was not true. There was not one drop of their blood in her
veins. There was not in her one taint of all that line of wickedness. It
had all been a mistake and a dream and an illusion of fate, and she
awoke in the morning and was free--free to face the world, to face
Corona Saracinesca, to marry Orsino, without so much as a day of
mourning for those who had been called her brothers.
The fresh young blood came blushing back to the delicate cheeks, and the
radiance of life's spring played on the fair young head.
'How beautiful you are!' exclaimed Miss Lizzie, throwing her arms round
her.
And Vittoria blushed again, and her eyes glistened with sheer, unbounded
happiness.
'But I shall never know what to call you,' laughed Miss Lizzie.
'I am Vittoria still,' answered the other. 'But I am Vittoria
Spinelli--and I come of very respectable people!' She laughed happily.
'I am related to all kinds of respectable people! There is my father,
first. He is on his way to see me--and I have a brother--a real brother,
to be proud of. And I am the cousin of Taquisara of Guardia--but I am
Vittoria still!'
Rome went half mad over the story, for the Romans had all been inclined
to like Vittoria for her own sake while distrusting those who had
composed her family. The instinct of an old and conservative society is
very rarely wrong in such matters. The happy ending of the tragedy of
the Corleone was a sincere relief to every one; and many who had known
the Duca di Fornasco in the days when his infant daughter had been
carried off and had seen how his whole life had been saddened during
eighteen years by the cruel loss, rejoiced in the vast joy of his later
years. For he had many friends, and was a man honoured and loved by
those who knew him.
'I have always believed that I should find you, my dear child,' he said,
when his eyes had cleared and he could see Vittoria through the dazzling
happiness of the first meeting. 'But I have often feared to find you,
and I never dared to hope that I should find you what you are.'
It seemed to her that the very tone of his voice was like her own, as
his brown eyes were like hers.
And later, he took Orsino's hand and laid it in his daughter's and
pressed the two together.
'You loved more wisely than you knew,' he said. 'But I know how bravely
you loved, when you would not give her up, nor yield to anyone. Your
father will not refuse to take my daughter from my hands, I think.'
'He will be as proud to take her as I am,' said Orsino.
'Or as I am to give her to such a man as you.'
So Orsino was married at last, and this tale comes to its happy end. For
he was happy, and his people took his wife to themselves as one of them,
and loved her for her own sake as well as for his; and they loved her,
too, for the many troubles she had so bravely borne, under the disgrace
of a name not her own. But neither were her sorrows hers, any more.
'Such things can only happen in Italy,' said Mrs. Slayback, after the
wedding.
'I am glad that nothing worse happened,' answered her niece,
thoughtfully. 'To think that I might have married that man! To think
that I cared for him! But I always felt that Vittoria was not his
sister. If I ever marry, I shall marry an American.'
She laughed, though there was a little ache left in her heart. But she
knew that it would not last long, for she had not been very desperately
in earnest, after all.
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.