“Salvatori.”
“What! the same who married an English girl at Naples?”
“And sold her to the Marquis Brandini for ten thousand sequini. The very man. But here comes the messenger to say his Excellency will receive us.”
My friend quitted Paris the moment his interview ended, and I heard no more.
Last night I saw her in the Cursaal—beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than ever! At least there was a lofty elegance and a splendour about her that I never remember in her girlish days; nor was it till she smiled that I could now believe that the queen-like beauty before me was the timid, delicate girl I first saw tripping along the narrow path of a Welsh mountain.
Even from the gossip of Baden I could learn no more about her than that she was a Sicilian Countess of great wealth, and a widow; that she was intimately received into the very highest circles—even of royalty—and constantly was seen driving in the carriage of the Archduchess. It was, then, possible that I might be mistaken, after all! Great people are not accessible so easily.
I tried in various quarters to get presented to her—for she shewed not the slightest sign of having ever met me—but failed every where: they who knew her did not do so intimately enough to introduce me.
The reminiscences I have just jotted down have made me miserably feverish and ill; for although I now begin to doubt that I ever saw this Countess before, the sad story of Caroline Graham is ever present to my mind—a terrible type of the fortune of many a fair English girl left to the merciless caprice of a foreign husband!
I am not bigot enough to fancy that happy, eminently happy, marriages do not exist abroad as well as with us; but I am fully minded to say that the individuals should be of the same nation, reared in the midst of the same traditions, imbued with feelings that a common country, language, and religion bestow.
I know of nothing that presents so pitiable a picture of unhappy destiny, as a fair and delicately minded English girl the wife of a foreigner! How I wish to resolve my doubts in this case! for although I began this memorandum fully persuaded it was Caroline Graham that I had seen, every line I write increases my uncertainty.