It was with joy in her heart that the Contessa returned to the palazzo del Dongo.
"No one could possibly be more of a gentleman than that reformed rake," she told the Marchesa. "This evening at the Scala, at a quarter to eleven by the theatre clock, we are to send everyone away from our box, put out the candles, and shut our door, and at eleven the Canon himself will come and tell us what he has managed to do.
We decided that this would be the least compromising course for him."
This Canon was a man of spirit; he was careful to keep the appointment; he shewed when he came a complete good nature and an unreserved openness of heart such as are scarcely to be found except in countries where vanity does not predominate over every other sentiment.
His denunciation of the Contessa to her husband, General Pietranera, was one of the great sorrows of his life, and he had now found a means of getting rid of that remorse.
That morning, when the Contessa had left his room,
"So she's in love with her nephew, is she," he had said to himself bitterly, for he was by no means cured.
"With her pride, to have come to me! … After that poor Pietranera died, she repulsed with horror my offers of service, though they were most polite and admirably presented by Colonel Scotti, her old lover.
The beautiful Pietranera reduced to living on fifteen hundred francs!" the Canon went on, striding vigorously up and down the room.
"And then to go and live in the castle of Grianta, with an abominable seccatore like that Marchese del Dongo! … I can see it all now!
After all, that young Fabrizio is full of charm, tall, well built, always with a smile on his face … and, better still, a deliciously voluptuous expression in his eye … a Correggio face," the Canon added bitterly.
"The difference in age … not too great … Fabrizio born after the French came, about
'98, I fancy; the Contessa might be twenty-seven or twenty-eight: no one could be better looking, more adorable. In this country rich in beauties, she defeats them all, the Marini, the Gherardi, the Ruga, the Aresi, the Pietragrua, she is far and away above any of them. They were living happily together, hidden away by that beautiful Lake of Como, when the young man took it into his head to join Napoleon… . There are still souls in Italy! In spite of everything!
Dear country!
No," went on this heart inflamed by jealousy, "impossible to explain in any other way her resigning herself to vegetating in the country, with the disgusting spectacle, day after day, at every meal, of that horrible face of the Marchese del Dongo, as well as that unspeakable pasty physiognomy of the Marchesino Ascanio, who is going to be worse than his father! Well, I shall serve her faithfully.
At least I shall have the pleasure of seeing her otherwise than through an opera-glass."
Canon Borda explained the whole case very clearly to the ladies.
At heart, Binder was as well disposed as they could wish; he was delighted that Fabrizio should have taken the key of the street before any orders could arrive from Vienna; for Barone Binder had no power to make any decision, he awaited orders in this case as in every other. He sent every day to Vienna an exact copy of all the information that reached him; then he waited.
It was necessary that, in his exile at Romagnano, Fabrizio
(1) Should hear mass daily without fail, take as his confessor a man of spirit, devoted to the cause of the Monarchy, and should confess to him, at the tribunal of penitence, only the most irreproachable sentiments.
(2) Should consort with no one who bore any reputation for intelligence, and, were the need to arise, must speak of rebellion with horror as a thing that no circumstances could justify.
(3) Must never let himself be seen in the caffe, must never read any newspaper other than the official Gazette of Turin and Milan; in general he should shew a distaste for reading, and never open any book printed later than 1720, with the possible exception of the novels of Walter Scott. (4)
"Finally" (the Canon added with a touch of malice), "it is most important that he should pay court openly to one of the pretty women of the district, of the noble class, of course; this will shew that he has not the dark and dissatisfied mind of an embryo conspirator."
Before going to bed, the Contessa and the Marchesa each wrote Fabrizio an endless letter, in which they explained to him with a charming anxiety all the advice that had been given them by Borda.
' Fabrizio had no wish to be a conspirator: he loved Napoleon, and, in his capacity as a young noble, believed that he had been created to be happier than his neighbour, and thought the middle classes absurd.
Never had he opened a book since leaving school, where he had read only texts arranged by the Jesuits.
He established himself at some distance from Romagnano, in a magnificent palazzo, one of the masterpieces of the famous architect Sanmicheli; but for thirty years it had been uninhabited, so that the rain came into every room and not one of the windows would shut.
He took possession of the agent's horses, which he rode without ceremony at all hours of the day; he never spoke, and he thought about things.
The recommendation to take a mistress from an ultra family appealed to him, and he obeyed it to the letter.
He chose as his confessor a young priest given to intrigue who wished to become a bishop (like the confessor of the Spielberg but he went three leagues on foot and wrapped himself in a mystery which he imagined to be impenetrable, in order to read the Constitutionnel, which he thought sublime.
"It is as fine as Alfieri and Dante!" he used often to exclaim.
Fabrizio had this in common with the young men of France, that he was far more seriously taken up with his horse and his newspaper than with his politically sound mistress.
But there was no room as yet for imitation of others in this simple and sturdy nature, and he made no friends in the society of the large country town of Romagnano; his simplicity passed as arrogance: no one knew what to make of his character.
"He is a younger son who feels himself wronged because he is not the eldest," was the parroco's comment.
Chapter 6
Let us admit frankly that Canon Borda's jealousy was not altogether unfounded: on his return from France, Fabrizio appeared to the eyes of Contessa Pietranera like a handsome stranger whom she had known well in days gone by.
If he had spoken to her of love she would have loved him; had she not already conceived, for his conduct and his person, a passionate and, one might say, unbounded admiration?
But Fabrizio embraced her with such an effusion of innocent gratitude and good-fellowship that she would have been horrified with herself had she sought for any other sentiment in this almost filial friendship.
"After all," she said to herself, "some of my friends who knew me six years ago, at Prince Eugene's court, may still find me good-looking and even young, but for him I am a respectable woman—and, if the truth must be told without any regard for my vanity, a woman of a certain age."
The Contessa was under an illusion as to the period of life at which she had arrived, but it was not the illusion of common women.
"Besides, at his age," she went on, "boys are apt to exaggerate the ravages of time.
A man with more experience of life … " The Contessa, who was pacing the floor of her drawing-room, stopped before a mirror, then smiled.
It must be explained that, some months since, the heart of Signora Pietranera had been attacked in a serious fashion, and by a singular personage.
Shortly after Fabrizio's departure for France, the Contessa who, without altogether admitting it to herself, was already beginning to take a great interest in him, had fallen into a profound melancholy.
All her occupations seemed to her to lack pleasure, and, if one may use the word, savour; she told herself that Napoleon, wishing to secure the attachment of his Italian peoples, would take Fabrizio as his aide-de-camp.
"He is lost to me!" she exclaimed, weeping, "I shall never see him again; he will write to me, but what shall I be to him in ten years' time?"
It was in this frame of mind that she made an expedition to Milan; she hoped to find there some more immediate news of Napoleon, and, for all she knew, incidentally news of Fabrizio.
Without admitting it to herself, this active soul was beginning to be very weary of the monotonous life she was leading in the country.
"It is a postponement of death," she said to herself, "it is not life." Every day to see those powdered heads, her brother, her nephew Ascanio, their footmen!
What would her excursions on the lake be without Fabrizio?