"I know what you would say, Signore, except a woman. Well, maybe men are all bad. I've been married, Signore--I know, I know."
"Well, I don't think I'm particularly bad, Petronella."
"Eh! then you're not a true man, Signore," retorted Petronella, closing the argument and the door at the same time.
[CHAPTER VI.]
A HAUNTED PALACE
I need hardly say that I was very much excited over the strange discovery I had made, as there now appeared to be a reasonable chance of clearing up the mystery of the Palazzo Morone. I had discovered the name of the unhappy young man, which gave me a most important clue to the reading of the enigma; but I had yet to find out the name of the lady who had behaved in such an extraordinary manner and committed so daring a crime. After hearing Peppino's story I fancied that she might perchance be the Contessa Morone, but had later on dismissed this idea as idle, seeing that she had been absent from Verona for many months; but now that Bianca had told me that Pallanza had come straight from Rome, I began to suspect that I had been right in my surmise. According to Peppino the Contessa had taken up her residence at the Italian capital, so what was more likely than that she had fallen in love with Guiseppe while he was singing at the Teatro Apollo, and, following him to Verona, had killed him by means of poison, in revenge for his determination to leave her?
So far everything was feasible enough, but two points of the affair perplexed me very much, one being the choosing of the deserted palace as a place of meeting, the other the visit to the burial ground by the woman. We do not live in the times of the Borgias, when noble ladies can thus rid themselves of their lovers with impunity, else I might have believed that this phantom of Donna Lucrezia had gone to the old Veronese cemetery to select a grave for the unfortunate young man she intended to murder. To think thus, however, was foolish, and although I guessed that she had used the old palace of her family as a safe place for a lovers' meeting, seeing its gruesome reputation secured it from public curiosity, yet I was quite unable to explain the cemetery mystery. One thing, however, appeared to me to be certain, that Guiseppe Pallanza had been carrying on an intrigue with the Contessa--presuming the ghoul to be her--and that he had gone to the Palazzo Morone on the night in question at her request. As to the sick friend----
Now I greatly mistrusted that sick-friend story. So many fast young Englishmen whom I knew had adopted the same lie to cover their little peccadilloes that I was quite sure Pallanza had employed the same fiction to prevent the scandal of his intrigue with this unknown woman from reaching the ears of his fiancée. Bianca was a very proud girl, and I felt certain, from what little I had seen of her character, that if she discovered Guiseppe was playing her false, she would at once break off the engagement at any cost. Like all Italian women, when she loved she loved with her whole soul, and expected the same single-hearted return to her passion; so that the discovery of her lover's infidelity could only be punished sufficiently, according to her ideas, by an everlasting parting between them. Pallanza knew this, and therefore tried to hide his guilt by the plausible story of his dying friend, which appeared to me to be such a remarkably weak fabrication that, before going to the Palazzo Morone, I determined to find out if this mythical invalid existed.
Curiously enough, although I was studying for the musical profession and was devoted to operatic performances, I had not been to the Teatro Ezzelino since my arrival at Verona, preferring to wander about the streets of the romantic old city in the moonlight to sitting night after night in a stifling atmosphere of heat, glare, and noise. I made up my mind, however, to go on this special night, in the hope that I might hear some talk about Pallanza's disappearance, and be guided thereby in any future movements; but meantime I went to the theatre in the afternoon, and, introducing myself to the impresario as a friend of Guiseppe's, asked him if he had heard any news of the missing tenor.
The impresario, a dingy old man of doubtful cleanliness, was in despair, and raged against the absent Pallanza like a Garrick of the gutter. He had heard nothing of this birbánte--this ladrone who had thus disappeared, and left an honest impresario in the lurch. "Faust" was the success of the season; without Pallanza there could be no "Faust," and the season would be a failure. What was he to do? Cospetto! it was the luck of the devil. Why had this scellerato run away? A sick friend? Bah! there was no sick friend. It was a woman who had enticed away this pazzo. A dying friend from Rome was not a very likely story, but a lie--a large and magnificent lie. Here was the basso of his company, who had been singing with Pallanza at the Apollo; ask him, truth is on his lips, Behold this good man!