"Not once, upon my word," replied Austin, with a solemn air, laying his hand upon his left breast. "Lord bless you, since he knew the signora, he has become as discreet as a bell-wether. Why, he sent me out of Genoa for six weeks, just for pinching the cheek of Ninette Bar, the daughter of the innkeeper, and putting my lips too near those of Rosalie, the smith's niece. It is true that I had to break the head of Jerome, and whack Rosalie's lover in self-defence; for it came to crabstick. But as for my lord, he passed all his time at the house of an old gentleman called Beza, where fewer women got in than get into a monkery--though he used to have as gay a heart as the gayest once on a time."
"Then why did he go away, and stay away so long, if he is so fond of her?" asked the old lady, who had her own share of curiosity as well as Austin Jute.
"Nay! gads my life! you must ask that of the earl himself," replied the man, "for I am not his father confessor. Perhaps the lady was cold, for you women will have your whimsies. Dear creatures, you would not be half so charming without."
The compliment oblique is almost always sure to go deeper than the direct; and good Tita, though she had long lost any external claims to the title of a charming creature, included herself comfortably in the general category, and felt her heart open towards her companion. "No, no," she answered, "she is not cold--to him, at least; and how should she be, when she scarcely ever saw a young man before? He is not so bad looking either, and a kind heart too; and as for whimsies, dear child, she has none, and never had. She lay in my arms when she was two years old, and that is sixteen years since."
"Upon my life, the old gentleman must have taken to matrimony late in life, to have a daughter of eighteen, when he is eighty," said Austin Jute, laughing.
The shot took effect.
"His daughter, you foolish knave!" cried the old lady, "she is not his daughter!--His daughter's daughter, if you will."
"Well, there would be no great harm in it, if she were his daughter," answered Jute; "so you need not look so angry, my dear; many a man marries at sixty for the consolation of life, or at least of the little bit of life that remains. Better late than never, men say. I would rather come in at the end of the dinner than see no dinner at all. It is never too dark to see one's way, if one has but a lantern; and if we have gone on wrong from the beginning, why should we not try to get right at the end?--And so the young lady's name is not Manucci, after all?"
"Her mother's was," answered Tita. "Poor thing, I remember her well. When she gave the child into my hands," she said, "Take care of her, Tita, for she will soon have no mother to do so, and no father has she ever known."
"Oh, ho!" said Austin Jute, with a peculiar expression of countenance; but the old woman's black eyes flashed fire. "Out, knave!" she said, without allowing him to finish the sentence; "would you slander a saint in heaven?"