“The signorina is laughing at me, I see; but it would not be right according to our ideas. She had better know nothing of me; her peace of mind might be disturbed. Those friends whom I have consulted, tell me I ought even to avoid passing her when she is out walking, or going to look at her at mass. Her character is evidently so full of sensibility that it would be easy to destroy her happiness.”
“How can you be so sure of all this, if you have never spoken to her?”
“I see it all perfectly in her face,” he answered, with a determined belief in his own powers of observation, which no ridicule or reasoning could shake. His romantic passion amused us all excessively, and as he evidently liked to talk of it, the disclosure having been once made, we were in future kept fully informed of all his tortures, fears, and despondency; but fancied that an attachment, hopeless and baseless as this, could not be of long duration. Contrary, however, to what we anticipated, he became more and more in love; he looked every day thinner, his hair more wiry, his eyes unnaturally brilliant and deeper sunk.
One morning—a real wintry morning, one of the few we ever saw—he came in, livid and trembling, with a wildness in his appearance that was startling. He did not leave his hat in the hall, as was his custom, but entered with it in his hand, and making a few steps forward, paused abruptly, and said in a hoarse voice:
“The signorine will excuse me if I pray them to dispense me from my attendance for a few days. I am going into the country—yes, into the country!”
When an Italian goes into the country at such a season of the year, he must be in a desperate plight, and we anxiously demanded the reason of this rash step.
“Signorine, I am mad—I am jealous! Yesterday I was looking up furtively at her window; another man was standing in the street near me; I fancied I had seen him there before: still a suspicion never crossed my brain when the window opened, and she looked out. Never had she deigned to do this for me. As I live, her eyes rested upon him! All the furies seized me; I rushed to the house of my friend, my best friend, the Avvocato D——. I raved, I tore my hair, I imprecated curses upon her. He took me by the arm. 'To-morrow, you must go into the country,' he said; 'I will accompany you.' Yes, signorine, with twelve inches of snow upon the ground, I go into the country!”
And into the country he went, and from the country he returned in two or three weeks' time, unrecovered; although convinced that his jealousy was groundless, the national specific had failed in this case. Then I fear we did him harm, for on the “nothing venture, nothing have” principle we counselled him to embody his hopes, prospects, and honest determinations in a letter to be submitted to the young lady's family, belonging, like his own, to the middle classes, though more affluent in their circumstances.
Taking an injudicious mezzo termine, he humbly presented this epistle to the fair Dulcinea herself, as she was coming one day out of church under the care of some aunt or elderly female relation.
Haughtily flinging it on the ground, the damsel indignantly said, “I do not know how to read letters of this description,” and passed on. Her virtue and discretion increased his admiration, while the repulse almost broke his heart. He never made any further attempt to press his suit, but moped and pined away perceptibly; in fact, he was dying of mortification and grief—so common an occurrence in this part of Italy, that they have a distinct name for the affection, and call it passione.