Vendetta

“He whom I love.”

“How can he know you enough to love you?”

“Father,” said Ginevra, with a gesture of impatience, “whether he loves me or not, if I love him – ”

“You love him?” cried Piombo.

Ginevra bent her head softly.

“You love him more than you love us?”

“The two feelings cannot be compared,” she replied.

“Is one stronger than the other?”

“I think it is,” said Ginevra.

“You shall not marry him,” cried the Corsican, his voice shaking the window-panes.

“I shall marry him,” replied Ginevra, tranquilly.

“Oh, God!” cried the mother, “how will this quarrel end? Santa Virgina! place thyself between them!”

The baron, who had been striding up and down the room, now seated himself; an icy sternness darkened his face; he looked fixedly at his daughter, and said to her, in a gentle, weakened voice, —

“Ginevra, no! you will not marry him. Oh! say nothing more to-night – let me think the contrary. Do you wish to see your father on his knees, his white hairs prostrate before you? I supplicate you – ”

“Ginevra Piombo does not pass her word and break it,” she replied. “I am your daughter.”

“She is right,” said the baroness. “We are sent into the world to marry.”

“Do you encourage her in disobedience?” said the baron to his wife, who, terrified by the word, now changed to marble.

“Refusing to obey an unjust order is not disobedience,” said Ginevra.

“No order can be unjust from the lips of your father, my daughter. Why do you judge my action? The repugnance that I feel is counsel from on high, sent, it may be, to protect you from some great evil.”

“The only evil could be that he did not love me.”

“Always he!”

“Yes, always,” she answered. “He is my life, my good, my thought. Even if I obeyed you he would be ever in my soul. To forbid me to marry him is to make me hate you.”

“You love us not!” cried Piombo.

“Oh!” said Ginevra, shaking her head.

“Well, then, forget him; be faithful to us. After we are gone – you understand?”

“Father, do you wish me to long for your death?” cried Ginevra.

“I shall outlive you. Children who do not honor their parents die early,” said the father, driven to exasperation.

“All the more reason why I should marry and be happy,” she replied.

This coolness and power of argument increased Piombo’s trouble; the blood rushed violently to his head, and his face turned purple. Ginevra shuddered; she sprang like a bird on her father’s knee, threw her arms around his neck, and caressed his white hair, exclaiming, tenderly: —

“Oh, yes, yes, let me die first! I could never survive you, my father, my kind father!”

“Oh! my Ginevra, my own Ginevra!” replied Piombo, whose anger melted under this caress like snow beneath the rays of the sun.

“It was time you ceased,” said the baroness, in a trembling voice.

“Poor mother!”

“Ah! Ginevretta! mia bella Ginevra!”

And the father played with his daughter as though she were a child of six. He amused himself by releasing the waving volume of her hair, by dandling her on his knee; there was something of madness in these expressions of his love. Presently his daughter scolded while kissing him, and tried, by jesting, to obtain admission for Luigi; but her father, also jesting, refused. She sulked, then returned to coax once more, and sulked again, until, by the end of the evening, she was forced to be content with having impressed upon her father’s mind both her love for Luigi and the idea of an approaching marriage.

The next day she said no more about her love; she was more caressing to her father than she had ever been, and testified the utmost gratitude, as if to thank him for the consent he seemed to have given by his silence. That evening she sang and played to him for a long time, exclaiming now and then: “We want a man’s voice for this nocturne.” Ginevra was an Italian, and that says all.

At the end of a week her mother signed to her. She went; and Elisa Piombo whispered in her ear: —

“I have persuaded your father to receive him.”

“Oh! mother, how happy you have made me!”

That day Ginevra had the joy of coming home on the arm of her Luigi. The officer came out of his hiding-place for the second time only. The earnest appeals which Ginevra made to the Duc de Feltre, then minister of war, had been crowned with complete success. Luigi’s name was replaced upon the roll of officers awaiting orders. This was the first great step toward better things. Warned by Ginevra of the difficulties he would encounter with her father, the young man dared not express his fear of finding it impossible to please the old man. Courageous under adversity, brave on a battlefield, he trembled at the thought of entering Piombo’s salon. Ginevra felt him tremble, and this emotion, the source of which lay in her, was, to her eyes, another proof of love.

“How pale you are!” she said to him when they reached the door of the house.

“Oh! Ginevra, if it concerned my life only! – ”

Though Bartolomeo had been notified by his wife of the formal presentation Ginevra was to make of her lover, he would not advance to meet him, but remained seated in his usual arm-chair, and the sternness of his brow was awful.

“Father,” said Ginevra, “I bring you a person you will no doubt be pleased to see, – a soldier who fought beside the Emperor at Mont-Saint-Jean.”

The baron rose, cast a sidelong glance at Luigi, and said, in a sardonic tone: —

“Monsieur is not decorated.”

“I no longer wear the Legion of honor,” replied Luigi, timidly, still standing.

Ginevra, mortified by her father’s incivility, dragged forward a chair. The officer’s answer seemed to satisfy the old servant of Napoleon. Madame Piombo, observing that her husband’s eyebrows were resuming their natural position, said, by way of conversation:

“Monsieur’s resemblance to a person we knew in Corsica, Nina Porta, is really surprising.”

“Nothing could be more natural,” replied the young man, on whose face Piombo’s flaming eyes now rested. “Nina was my sister.”