At that Mansana stopped.
"Do you know what it is that makes me furious, Cornelius? It is the thought that I ever paid attention to those people in the street! I must needs hold my tongue, suffer, and be trampled on! This is what makes me furious."
He drew a step nearer Sardi.
"And now," he said, "I mean to proclaim it aloud to all the world; I love her!"
He actually shouted the words as he walked on with proud step. Sardi followed, and, taking him by the arm, guided him quietly into a less frequented street. But Mansana paid no heed, and with loud voice and vigorous gesticulations, gave his secretly wounded egotism vent.
"After all, what should I gain," he cried, "by becoming the husband of the Princess Leaney, the steward of her ladyship's estates, the slave of her ladyship's caprices? Now, for the first time, I can acknowledge to myself the truth; such a life would have been unworthy of Giuseppe Mansana."
Sardi came to the conclusion that if Mansana could so belie the usual taciturnity and reserve of his nature as to bawl and shout in this outrageous manner, almost any mad feat might be possible; so, with an ingenuity and perseverance that did him credit, he sought to induce him to take a little journey, just to give time for the confused condition of his mind and his affairs to settle themselves. But he might as well have expected a hurricane to heed his words.
CHAPTER XI
That same evening, Amanda's curiosity was stirred by receiving a letter conveyed to her with every appearance of precaution. She struck a light, and found that it came from Luigi—the first he had ever sent to her—and thus it ran:
"My Amanda,—There is a madman in pursuit of me, and he threatens my life. An hour ago he got me to swear solemnly, and to put my hand to the oath, that I would renounce all pretensions to you, and never even speak to you again. I was a poltroon to submit to it. I know that well enough, and you cannot despise me more than I despise myself. But there is this to be said: until I consented to that declaration I never knew that I loved you. Perhaps, indeed, I had not done so. At any rate, now I know that I do love you—love you beyond measure, beyond bounds; and in all the wide world there is no wretch more miserable than I am at this moment. But I cannot bring myself to believe that all is over between us, or that this monstrous agreement can be binding.