"I remember you perfectly, sir," Giannella said at last, "but I do not understand to what you allude. There is a mistake. You must be thinking of some other person."
Neither of them had noticed Mariuccia, who, through the colloquy, had been staring at the lawyer with an ominous frown. She remembered him, she recognized him, the visitor to whom she had wished twenty thousand apoplexies in the last three months.
Pushing Giannella aside she came before him, her eyes like fiery gimlets boring for the truth—a rough-tongued, hard-handed Nemesis prepared to chastise the disturber of household peace. "Ah, it is you!" she began in a scornful growl, "Now perhaps you will tell me what wickedness it was that you put into my poor padrone's head when you came to see him? Till that day he was an angel, good, pacific, regulated, thinking only of his studies, his blessed archæology and his bits of stones, asking only that his house should be quiet and his meals punctual and cheap. Never did he require more of us two poor creatures than that—and as for matrimony—he would have run away if anybody had had the temerity to speak to him of such folly. What should he want with a wife at fifty-five, when he never wanted one at the proper time? You come, Master Lawyer, and a thousand caprices come with you and make an earthquake in his poor head! This child and I have had no rest! He wants to marry the poor little thing, marry her, with the clothes she stands up in, a girl without a penny, who already works for him without wages, as if she were my daughter and not a lady born. Did you tell him, O assassin, that she is big enough and strong enough to do the work of two? Does he want to send me away after twenty years' service, to save my miserable wages—all that she and I have in the world—and make her his wife so that she will have to work for him, gratis, forever? Ah, that was it, was it? You said to him, 'Sor Professore mio, why feed two females and pay one when you need only feed one and pay her nothing? That old strega, Mariuccia, will soon be aged and of little use. Giannella knows how to do everything now. Marry her, so that she can live alone with you, and get rid of the other at once.' Yes, that is what you advised, infidel, imprudent," thundered the enraged seeress, "and you have committed a damnable sin, for which the devil who taught it to you shall kick your soul and the souls of all your ugly little dead about in hell for a thousand years! Madonna mia, how could such wickedness enter a man's heart?"
During this long impassioned address De Sanctis had stood quite still, never taking his eyes from his adversary's face till she stopped, gasping for breath, with clenched hands that seemed twitching to get at his throat. Giannella was clinging to her arm and had been keeping up a stream of remonstrances and entreaties that she would cease to insult the gentleman, would refrain from making such a scandalous uproar in the Cardinal's house. But all to no purpose. Mariuccia shook her off as a wolfhound would shake off a spaniel, and only paused, as it seemed, to find breath and inspiration for another tirade.
De Sanctis had allowed her to say her say, for every word she uttered only made the Professor's perfidy more plain; now his legal integrity was sitting in judgment on the offender, while his personal grudge against the man fed joyfully on the proofs of his double dealing. Having learned all that he wished to know, he spoke to Mariuccia, angrily enough. "You are a silly, ignorant woman, and you have been saying things for which you will beg my pardon on your knees! You think you know what I came to say to your master, do you? Well, listen, and never again, so long as you live, dare to insult an honorable and innocent person with vile suspicions. Yes, I thought the Professor was like myself, an upright man, a man to be trusted. I thought he had been the lifelong friend and helper of this young lady. And, as she was still under age, I placed in his hands the wonderful fortune which, largely through my disinterested efforts in discovering her, had come to her from her father's brother in Denmark. Ah, you tremble, you turn pale. Yes, that was what I came to tell Signor Bianchi—and the brigand has never informed her of it—that Giannella Brockmann had become a rich girl with an income of two thousand scudi, left her by her uncle, two thousand big silver scudi every year, all for herself; that she is no longer obliged to live on charity, but is now a young lady with a dowry that will ensure her a good husband and a comfortable establishment whenever she chooses. I came as the bearer of this beautiful news—and you insult me as if I were an executioner!"
The last part of this speech was lost on his audience. Mariuccia had sunk back on a chair, her face gray with emotion, and Giannella was kneeling beside her, covering her gnarled hands with kisses and crying through a rain of happy tears, "Mariuccia, do you understand? I am rich, rich, and now I can repay you for all your goodness to me. You shall have clothes, shoes, meat, old wine—a new bed for your poor tired body, with soft blankets—two thousand scudi—every year, for always? Oh, you shall have a gold chain as thick as my finger and earrings with pearls as big as figs. Oh, what have I done that such happiness should come to me, Madonna mia Santissima—I shall die of joy."
Not a thought for herself, nor even for Rinaldo; not a glimmer of resentment against Bianchi; only the passion of gratitude nearly breaking her heart because it could be satisfied at last.
Mariuccia bent down and kissed the golden head. Then she took the girl's face in her two hands and looked into it long and silently, a light on her own that had never shone there before. She tried to speak, but could not; only, two slow tears trickled down her cheeks. Giannella put up her soft fingers and brushed them away.
"The very last you shall ever shed, Mariuccia mia," she murmured; "we know, we two, what it has been. Domine Dio, it is all over!"