"It is all true," cried Giannella, "I burn with fever—but it is a good fever. I feel happy—I want to sing."
"Better so," growled the other; "since it seems you must marry him, I am glad you are pleased. It is another thing for me. I cannot say that I am. What has made you change your mind so suddenly? Are you thinking of the silk dress and the confetti?"
All the color left Giannella's face and she gave a little cry. "Madonna mia buona, I had forgotten! Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?" And she covered her eyes with her hands and rocked herself in her chair. She had forgotten—for a few happy moments—all that had gone before—the Princess's manifesto, her own conviction while listening to it that there could be no right action in opposition to so much sense and piety—her remorse for her own selfishness and willfulness, the perception of the duty which stood unbendingly before her.
She rose and paced the narrow room, all her senses at war. Who could help her? Who would tell her which was right and to be obeyed—her own intense repulsion for Bianchi, strengthened a thousandfold by the upspringing of the new love, the first love, all unbaptized as yet, but drawing her with every chord of the spirit, every fiber of the flesh, to her natural mate? or the fiat of those whom God had placed in authority over her, the Princess, the Professor? She thought of taking her case to her confessor, Padre Anselmo, over there at San Severino; but how could she lay it honestly before the dim-eyed old saint, who seemed already to be hovering so far above earth that he could only see things from above, as the angels see them? How could she bare her heart to him, confess that it had become a shrine of glory where a thousand love lamps burned round one worshiped picture, the picture of a man she had known but a few weeks and who had spoken no word to her or to her natural guardians to show that he meant to ask her in marriage?
She felt that she should die of shame if she had to tell that, for who would ever understand? In days gone by, before she had seen love's face, she had listened, first hopefully and then despondingly, to Mariuccia's prophecies about the good young husband who would come to seek for her. Then, marriage had presented itself as a mere change of state, very slightly connected with the shadowy wooer. She had never read a novel, never spoken with a person in love; the relations of husband and wife had been wrapped for her in the impenetrable veil so strongly insisted on in the Castelli, where girls at that time grew up to womanhood believing what their mothers told them—that the mere breath of man, a kiss or even a sigh, was all that was needed to make a maid a mother. Trusting to this complete impersonality of the married relation, it might have been possible for the Giannella of three months earlier to bow her pretty head to fate and accept even Carlo Bianchi as a husband, had authority voiced its mandate then; but now, now the new music, new yet tenderly familiar, was sounding in her ears; life lay before her like an unblown rose that every hour of sunshine was kissing into bloom; a new Giannella had been born, and her every heart-beat cried aloud, "I will live, I will live."
FOOTNOTE:
[1] The mutilated statue which served as a gazette of public opinion. All lampoons, caricatures, etc. were pasted on the pedestal in the night, and there was generally a little crowd gathered round it in the morning. The questions were affixed to another torso called Marforio, near by, and "Pasquino" displayed the answers.