She stopped our walk, and faced me with agitation. "Dio mio, my lord, what are you saying?" I repeated my words, and she became dry, as she always did when she disapproved.
"Good, my lord," she said; "and may your handmaid know the name of the friend whom you propose to send with your cartel to the Cavaliere Aquamorta?"
I said that I should ask Gioiachino, our fellow-lodger, to oblige me.
"Excellent," said Virginia with irony, "excellent indeed! Gioiachino, a cat's-meat man, waits upon the Cavaliere Aquamorta on behalf of his friend Francesco, a journeyman carpenter!"
This made me more angry than I had any business to be, for she was perfectly right from the cavaliere's view of the thing. I said, "Virginia, my condition in this world has never been hidden from you. Apart from my birthright, which is an advantage not of my own making, I hope I have never been to you other than an honourable man. Gioiachino, who has been a good friend to you and me, certainly deserves no less credit. If a gentleman, as I claim to be, is condescending enough to send a person perfectly honest to a vulgar, libidinous, lying bully and cheat, who happens to have robbed to better purpose than I have worked— then, I say, you should agree with me that I am paying more honour to a thief than he can hope to deserve. I am sorry to have to speak so plainly to you, but it is not for you, any more than for me, to reproach Gioiachino with being an honest man."
She was silent for a few minutes, then knelt down and kissed my hand. When I raised her up and embraced her, I found tears on her cheeks. We walked home in the dark without another word said, and I prevailed upon Gioiachino to convey my challenge, though he did what he could to dissuade me. "This," he said, "is madness. Do you not know that the less your man is assured of his gentility the more exacting he will be in the profession of it? Do you know what will occur? He will call for some lacquey or another to kick me downstairs."
My answer to that was that such conduct to the bearer of a gentleman's cartel was unheard of. I added that if the cavaliere prided himself, against all evidence, upon being a gentleman, he was not at all likely to convict himself of being a ruffian. Very ruefully, in the end, the good-natured Gioiachino went out to oblige me.
It happens that I was right, or had good grounds for thinking so. The cavaliere received the poor fellow with perfect affability, and after a short colloquy with some of his companions, introduced a certain Prince Gandolfo Dolfini, with whom Gioiachino was to arrange a meeting in the fields for seven o'clock on the Wednesday morning. The cavaliere having the choice of weapons, his friend the prince decided for WHIPS.
If this was to make me feel ridiculous it failed. I was much too angry.
"Whips he shall have," said I, and went to bed.
On the morning appointed I rose at my usual hour and went to the workshop, intending to go on with my duties until the time appointed. I left Virginia in tears, and Teresa, no less wretched, clinging to her in her bed. At a quarter before seven, Gioiachino with me, armed with a stout cart-whip, I left the Porta del Vescovo and walked briskly over one or two water-meadows towards a retired grove of trees not far from the Pisa road. I flattered myself that we were first in the field; but there I was mistaken. I found a numerous company assembled—tall persons in cocked hats, coats and badges, a posse of police, and the villainous cavaliere smirking in the midst. So soon as we entered the grove he pointed to me with his cane and said in a loud voice: "There, Signor Sindaco, there is the fugitive assassin, the betrayer of an innocent girl. Speed him back to Tuscany with the added wages he has richly earned in Lucca." The police advanced, seized me, bound my wrists. An old gentleman without teeth read a long legal instrument without stops, at the end of which I was stripped to the shirt, horsed upon Gioiachino's back and vigorously whipped. I was then haled by my harsh executioners some league or more over the marshes to the confines of the Republic of Lucca and told to take myself out of sight unless I wished for more taste of the whip. Without prayers, without words, without a coat, without money, rich in nothing but innocence and despair, I reached the hillside and flung myself face downwards upon the sward. There I lay far into the night.