“Gentlemen,” he said, “you are all cowards. That English lady is my friend, and you shall all answer to me for what you have said, or make a most humble apology in writing, confessing that your statements are false. I expect to hear from you at the Palazzo Balzano.”
Thus saying, he left the café and returned home. He was a crack shot, fenced beautifully, and was an adept at the sword exercise. It is, after this, useless to say that a full and ample apology was made in writing by all the offenders, and from that moment not a whisper was ever breathed against the fair fame of the English signora.
Too delicate to inform us of this circumstance himself, we heard of it by chance some days afterwards, through one who had been a spectator of the scene. Our grateful acknowledgments to our kind protector may be easily imagined; and from that time di Balzano became a constant visitor at our home.
We presented our credentials to our kind and respected minister, Sir W. Temple, who received us with true English hospitality. Once more we entered the glittering halls of pleasure—once more my heroine became apparently the gayest of the gay; but she had learned a lesson. No longer a coquette, she sought the society of ladies, rather than that of the opposite sex. Di Balzano had no reason for jealousy; poor fellow—I saw that his heart was irretrievably hers. He paid her the most respectful attention, and she appeared to feel for him sincere friendship and esteem—nothing more.
Yet such a marriage might have satisfied even one as fastidious as was Evelyn. Balzano was handsome, noble, good, independent in fortune, and deeply in love; he was manly, (a rare quality in an Italian,) honorable, brave, and unselfish almost to a fault.
But our heroine chose to imagine him uneducated, and not sufficiently spirituel. She observed that after dinner he felt inclined to take a siesta.—Her old failing of despising a devoted heart, came back in full force. Was she not beautiful?—had she not been adored by Melville and others? She might look higher—if not as to birth, at least as regards intellect. She was not content with plain common sense in a husband, united with the artistic taste innate in most of the children of beautiful Italy. She did not at that time appreciate the inestimable bliss of tranquil domestic life. She would shine, she would be somebody in the world—the wife of a Cabinet Minister, of a great general, an orator, a poet. She desired to queen it, in society; she was in truth a worldling at heart, a very slave to the pomps and vanities of life—not perhaps for their own intrinsic merit, but as a means of gratifying those ambitious desires, which as a vulture devoured every good feeling of her nature. But God, as a tender Father, who chastises but to bless, was leading her in His own way, and preparing for her unwilling feet, a path so steep and thorny, that could the future have been at that time disclosed to her, she would have shrunk back appalled from its dreariness, and have clung with the tenacious grasp of despair to this her last hope of happiness on earth.
CHAPTER XIV.
I PROMESSI SPOSI
“And so, bella mia, I may at last be permitted to congratulate you on your engagement to the Duc di Balzano. If I understand aright, he will very shortly place a coronet on the fair brow he so much admires—is it not so?”