"You despise cowards bitterly, don't you, signora?" I asked, wondering what her opinion of me would be some day if I should give way at that moment to her romantic passion. Once more I fell into a melancholy reverie.
"What is the matter, in heaven's name?" said Alezia.
Her voice recalled me to myself. I looked at her with streaming eyes. She was weeping too, but on account of my hesitation. I understood it at once, and I said, taking her hands with a paternal gesture:
"O my child! do not accuse me! Do not doubt my poor heart! If you only knew how I am suffering!"
And I walked rapidly away, as if by leaving her I could escape my unhappiness. On reaching home I became calmer. I went over in my mind the whole extraordinary succession of events; I worked out all their details, and thus banished from my own mind the flavor of mystery which had paralyzed me at first with superstitious terror. It was all strange, but natural, even to the Christian name, that name Alezia, which I had always longed to know and had never dared to ask.
I do not know whether another man in my place could have continued to love the young Signora Aldini. Strictly speaking, I might have done it without criminality; for you will remember that I had not ceased to be a chaste and obedient lover of her mother. But my conscience rebelled at the thought of that incest of the mind. I loved La Grimani with her unknown baptismal name, I loved her with all my heart and all my senses; but in truth I did not love in that way little Alezia, Signorina Aldini, Bianca's daughter, for it seemed to me that I was her father. The memory of Bianca's charms and fascinating qualities had remained pure and undimmed throughout my life; it had followed me everywhere like a providence. It had made me generous to women and brave against myself. Although I had since fallen in with many false and selfish beauties, I always had the certainty that there are those who are sincere and generous. Bianca had made no sacrifice to me, because I had refused to accept any; but if I had accepted it, if I had yielded to her enthusiasm, she would have sacrificed everything to me, friends, family, fortune, honor, religion, and perhaps her daughter too! What a sacred debt I owed to her! Had I paid it in full by my refusal, by my departure? No; for she was a woman, that is to say, weak and submissive, exposed to the implacable decrees and the bitter insults of irony. And she would have braved it all, she who was so timid, so gentle, so like a child in a thousand ways. She would have done a sublime thing; and I, had I accepted, should have done a dastardly thing. So that I had done nothing more than fulfil a duty to myself, whereas she had exposed herself to the risk of martyrdom for my sake. Poor Bianca, my first, perhaps my only love! how lovely she had always remained in my memory! "Why, in heaven's name," I said to myself, "am I afraid that she has grown old and withered? Ought I not to be indifferent to that? Should I still love her? no, probably not; but, whether ugly or lovely, could I see her to-day without danger?" And at that thought my heart beat so violently that I realized how impossible it was for me to be her daughter's husband or lover.
And then too, to take advantage of the past—if it were only by a silent assent to Alezia's wishes,—in order to obtain the hand of Bianca's daughter, would have been a dishonorable act. Weak as I knew Bianca to be, I knew that she would consider herself bound to give us her consent; but I knew also that her old husband, her family, and, above all, her confessor, would overwhelm her with their reproaches. She had been able to make up her mind to marry a second time, a marriage of convenience. Therefore, she was at heart a woman of the world, a slave of social prejudices, and her love for me was simply a sublime episode, the memory of which was to her a cause of shame and despair, whereas it was my glory and my joy. "No, poor Bianca!" I thought, "no, I have not paid my debt to you. You must have suffered terribly, perhaps trembled with apprehension, at the idea that a servant might be peddling the secret of your weakness from house to house. It is time that you should sleep in peace, that you should cease to blush for the only happy days of your youth, and that you should be able to say, poor woman, on learning of Nello's everlasting silence, everlasting devotion, everlasting love, that there was a time in your fettered, disappointed life, when you knew love and inspired it."
I paced my room excitedly; day was beginning to break. In the lives of men who sleep but little, that is the decisive hour which puts an end to the hesitations conceived and nourished in the darkness, and which changes plans into resolutions. I felt a thrill of enthusiastic joy and legitimate pride at the thought that Lelio the actor had not fallen below Nello the gondolier. Sometimes, in my romantic democratic ideas, I had flushed with shame because I had left the thatched roof where I might have perpetuated a hardy, laborious, and frugal race; I had reproached myself, as for a crime, for having disdained the humble trade of my fathers to seek the bitter joys of luxurious living, the vain incense of glory, the false advantages and trivial labors of art. But by performing, in the tinsel of the actor, the same acts of unselfishness and true pride that I had performed in the rough jacket of the gondolier, I ennobled my life twice over, and raised myself above all false social grandeurs. My conscience, my dignity, seemed to me the conscience and dignity of the common people; by debasing myself I should have debased the common people. "Carbonari! carbonari!" I exclaimed, "I will be worthy to be one of you." The cult of deliverance is a new cult; liberalism is a religion which should ennoble its followers, and, like Christianity in its early days, make the slave a free man, the free man a saint or a martyr.
I wrote the following letter to Princess Grimani:
"SIGNORA:
"The signorina has been exposed to great danger. Why did you, a loving and fearless mother, consent to send her away from you? Is she not at an age when any accident may decide a woman's future—a glance or a breath? Is not this the time when you should watch over her every instant, night and day alike, fathom her troubles, however slight, and count the pulsations of her heart? For you, signora, who are so gentle and so condescending in small things, but in great crises can always find in your heart so much vigor and resolution, the moment has come when you should display the courage of the lioness, who will not allow her little ones to be taken from her. Come, signora, come; take your daughter back, and do not let her quit you again. Why do you leave her in strange hands, subjected to injudicious guidance, which irritates her and would drive her into serious errors, if she were not your daughter—if it were possible for the seeds of virtue and of dignity planted in her breast by you to become the plaything of the first breeze that blows! Open your eyes; see how your child's legitimate and sacred inclinations are being thwarted, until you are in danger of seeing her resist wise counsels, and contract a habit of independence which it will be impossible to overcome. Do not permit a husband whom she detests to be forced upon her, and look to it that her aversion for him does not spur her on to make a rash and even more deplorable choice. Assure her liberty. Let her only chains be her anxiety concerning your enlightened love, lest, distrusting your energy in her behalf, she seek dangerous succor in her imagination. In heaven's name, come!
"And if you wish to know, signora, by what right I address this appeal to you, I will tell you that I have seen your daughter without knowing her name; that I have been on the verge of falling in love with her; that I have followed her, watched her, sought her acquaintance; and that she is not so well guarded that I could not have spoken to her and exerted—in vain, I doubt not—all the wiles by which an ordinary woman is seduced. Thank God! your daughter has not even been exposed to my rash advances. I learned in time that she was the daughter of the woman whom I venerate and respect above all the world, and from that moment her place of abode became a sacred spot to me. If I do not leave the neighborhood instantly, it is that I may be ready to reply to your most searching questions, if, distrusting my honor, you bid me appear before you and render an account of my conduct.
"Accept, signora, the humble respects of your devoted slave,
"NELLO."