We had observed that for some weeks he looked more than ordinarily woe-begone, scarcely spoke, and his unbrushed hair stood erect with an air of distraction it was pitiable to witness. The usual inquiries about England, the lectures upon art, the pæans to Raphael, were all at an end, and our lessons were becoming very stupid, common-place affairs, when, one day, as he was cutting a crayon, he suddenly laid it down, and said, falteringly: “Signorine, will you excuse my temerity, if, knowing all your benevolent interest in me, I tell you what makes me so ill. I have fallen in love.”
“Indeed!” we exclaimed; “tell us all about it. Where is the lady?—how long has it been going on?—when will the sposalizio take place?”
“Alas!” he replied, “what can I say? I have never spoken to her; it is two months since I first saw her; it was one evening outside the gates: she was with her mother. I beheld that modest ingenuous face, and my fate was decided. Miserable was I born, miserable have I always been, but never so miserable as now.”
“Wherefore?” I inquired, with a perplexed expression.
“Because I have no means of maintaining her—not even a few hundred dollars of my own: therefore it is of no use attempting to make the acquaintance of her family, or presenting myself as a suitor. O signorine! I have suffered so long, my secret was wearing me to the grave.”
“But you have an avvenire—a future, at least,” said my cousin Lucy, who, under all her sedateness, was rather of an enthusiastic turn.
“Ah!” answered he, shaking his head, “that is easy to say for you English: we poor Italians have no future; we never can rise; we are but fools to dream of it.”
“Then do you not mean even to try to improve your fortunes, so as one day to be able to marry?”
“Heaven knows whether I do not try,” was the rueful response; “but the days for art in Italy are gone by. You are witness, ladies, to the patronage accorded to me here. What have I to look back upon since I established myself in Ancona? One or two commissions from convents for the apotheosis of some new saint—a few portraits—at such rare intervals, and on such hard terms, that I verily believe, if I were a house-painter, I should succeed better than with my aspirations to be an historical one.”
“Yet, why despair?” I persisted; “why not obtain an introduction to the family of the fair incognita, explain your views, and if they hold out any hopes of your ultimately being accepted, you will work away with redoubled energy. You might go and paint signs in California.” (That was all the rage just then.)