CHAPTER XI

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.'