She had been the daughter of a race of ill fame, fatherless, and all but motherless. Her three brothers had come to evil ends, one by one. She had been left alone in the world, the last representative of what so many called 'the worst blood in Italy.' She had been divided from the man she loved by a twofold bloodshed and by all the horror of her last surviving brother's crimes. Many and many a time she had stared into her mirror for an hour at night, not pleased by her own delicate loveliness, but asking herself, with heart-broken wonder, how it was possible that she could be the daughter of such a mother, the sister of such brothers, the grandchild of traitors and betrayers to generations of wickedness, back into the dim past. She had never been like them, nor felt like them, nor acted as they did, yet it had seemed mad, if not wicked, to doubt that she was one of them. And each morning, meeting them all again and living with them, there had come the shock of opposition between her inheritance of honour and their inborn disposition to treachery and crime.
And now, it was not true. There was not one drop of their blood in her veins. There was not in her one taint of all that line of wickedness. It had all been a mistake and a dream and an illusion of fate, and she awoke in the morning and was free—free to face the world, to face Corona Saracinesca, to marry Orsino, without so much as a day of mourning for those who had been called her brothers.
The fresh young blood came blushing back to the delicate cheeks, and the radiance of life's spring played on the fair young head.
'How beautiful you are!' exclaimed Miss Lizzie, throwing her arms round her.
And Vittoria blushed again, and her eyes glistened with sheer, unbounded happiness.
'But I shall never know what to call you,' laughed Miss Lizzie.
'I am Vittoria still,' answered the other. 'But I am Vittoria Spinelli—and I come of very respectable people!' She laughed happily. 'I am related to all kinds of respectable people! There is my father, first. He is on his way to see me—and I have a brother—a real brother, to be proud of. And I am the cousin of Taquisara of Guardia—but I am Vittoria still!'
Rome went half mad over the story, for the Romans had all been inclined to like Vittoria for her own sake while distrusting those who had composed her family. The instinct of an old and conservative society is very rarely wrong in such matters. The happy ending of the tragedy of the Corleone was a sincere relief to every one; and many who had known the Duca di Fornasco in the days when his infant daughter had been carried off and had seen how his whole life had been saddened during eighteen years by the cruel loss, rejoiced in the vast joy of his later years. For he had many friends, and was a man honoured and loved by those who knew him.
'I have always believed that I should find you, my dear child,' he said, when his eyes had cleared and he could see Vittoria through the dazzling happiness of the first meeting. 'But I have often feared to find you, and I never dared to hope that I should find you what you are.'