LAURA PIAVENI
After dark on the same day antecedent to the outbreak, Vittoria, with
her faithful Beppo at her heels, left her mother to run and pass one
comforting hour in the society of the Signora Laura Piaveni and her
children.
There were two daughters of a parasitical Italian nobleman, of whom
one had married the patriot Giacomo Piaveni, and one an Austrian
diplomatist, the Commendatore Graf von Lenkenstein. Count Serabiglione
was traditionally parasitical. His ancestors all had moved in Courts.
The children of the House had illustrious sponsors. The House itself was
a symbolical sunflower constantly turning toward Royalty. Great excuses
are to be made for this, the last male descendant, whose father in
his youth had been an Imperial page, and who had been nursed in the
conception that Italy (or at least Lombardy) was a natural fief of
Austria, allied by instinct and by interest to the holders of the Alps.
Count Serabiglione mixed little with his countrymen,--the statement
might be inversed,--but when, perchance, he was among them, he talked
willingly of the Tedeschi, and voluntarily declared them to be gross,
obstinate, offensive-bears, in short. At such times he would intimate in
any cordial ear that the serpent was probably a match for the bear in
a game of skill, and that the wisdom of the serpent was shown in
his selection of the bear as his master, since, by the ordination of
circumstances, master he must have. The count would speak pityingly of
the poor depraved intellects which admitted the possibility of a coming
Kingdom of Italy united: the lunatics who preached of it he considered a
sort of self-elected targets for appointed files of Tyrolese jagers.
But he was vindictive against him whom he called the professional
doctrinaire, and he had vile names for the man. Acknowledging that
Italy mourned her present woes, he charged this man with the crime
of originating them:--and why? what was his object? He was, the count
declared in answer, a born intriguer, a lover of blood, mad for the
smell of it!--an Old Man of the Mountain; a sheaf of assassins; and
more--the curse of Italy! There should be extradition treaties all over
the world to bring this arch-conspirator to justice. The door of his
conscience had been knocked at by a thousand bleeding ghosts, and
nothing had opened to them. What was Italy in his eyes? A chess-board;
and Italians were the chessmen to this cold player with live flesh.
England nourished the wretch, that she might undermine the peace of the
Continent.
Count Serabiglione would work himself up in the climax of denunciation,
and then look abroad frankly as one whose spirit had been relieved.
He hated bad men; and it was besides necessary for him to denounce
somebody, and get relief of some kind. Italians edged away from him. He
was beginning to feel that he had no country. The detested title 'Young
Italy' hurried him into fits of wrath. 'I am,' he said, 'one of the Old
Italians, if a distinction is to be made.' He assured his listeners
that he was for his commune, his district, and aired his old-Italian
prejudices delightedly; clapping his hands to the quarrels of Milan and
Brescia; Florence and Siena--haply the feuds of villages--and the common
North-Italian jealousy of the chief city. He had numerous capital tales
to tell of village feuds, their date and origin, the stupid effort
to heal them, and the wider consequent split; saying, 'We have, all
Italians, the tenacity, the unforgiveness, the fervent blood of pure
Hebrews; and a little more gaiety, perhaps; together with a love of fair
things. We can outlive ten races of conquerors.'
In this fashion he philosophized, or forced a kind of philosophy. But he
had married his daughter to an Austrian, which was what his countrymen
could not overlook, and they made him feel it. Little by little, half
acquiescing, half protesting, and gradually denationalized, the count
was edged out of Italian society, save of the parasitical class, which
he very much despised. He was not a happy man. Success at the Imperial
Court might have comforted him; but a remorseless sensitiveness of his
nature tripped his steps.
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.'