"Concetta will know what to do," returned Sor Beppe.
"Good. But there must be no failure—no risk of the packet falling into other hands, or its delivery being suspected."
"There will be none."
Don Agostino held out his hand. "You will not regret what you have undertaken," he said, "and you may be sure that the principessina will not forget it, either. We must save her from a great unhappiness, my friend, and perhaps from, worse than that. Now, I must be inhospitable and ask you to go; for it is late, and you have to arrange matters with Concetta, who by this time is probably asleep. Who knows what led you to visit me this evening? I had been turning over in my mind every means I could imagine to insure that packet reaching Donna Bianca safely. It is certainly very strange."
Sor Beppe buttoned up the little parcel securely in the corner pocket of his coat. "To-morrow I will come again," he said, "and who knows that I shall not bring with me an acknowledgment from the principessina that she has received the packet safely? Then you can write to her lover and tell him so. All the same, if I were that young man, I would come to Montefiano and take Donna Bianca away with me—even if I had to slit the throats of the baron and the Abbé Roux in the doing of it." And muttering a string of expletives under his breath, Sor Beppe passed out into the garden. Don Agostino let him out through the door, opening to the piazza in front of the church; and then, after standing for a few moments to watch his tall figure striding away down the white road towards the castle, he went slowly back into his house, bidding Ernana, whose curiosity as to Sor Beppe's visit had brought her out to the threshold, lock up the door and go to bed.
XXIV
Monsieur d'Antin's visit to Rome was not of long duration. He returned to Montefiano two days after the evening when he had dined at the Castello di Costantino, in close proximity to Professor Rossano and his little party. That evening had certainly been an entertaining one to him, for many reasons. He had, of course, instantly recognized Silvio and Giacinta Rossano, while his host and companion, Peretti, had as quickly identified the professor. Except for the brief glimpse Monsieur d'Antin had caught of Silvio on the staircase of Palazzo Acorari, he had never had an opportunity of watching him with any attention; yet the boy's form and features were well impressed on his memory, and he would in any case have known he must be Giacinta Rossano's brother by the strong likeness existing between the two.
It had been his ill-disguised interest in him, and the marked manner in which he stared, that had nearly provoked Silvio into openly resenting this liberty on the part of a stranger; and probably Monsieur d'Antin had very little idea that he had narrowly escaped bringing about a scene which he might afterwards have had cause to regret. His glance and attitude had been so insolent, indeed, that for a moment or two Silvio had wondered whether he did not intend to provoke a public quarrel, which could have had but one result—a meeting with pistols or swords in some secluded villa garden, where the police were not likely to interfere. Had Giacinta, confident from her brother's face that a storm was brewing, and knowing that though storms were rare with Silvio they were apt to be violent if they burst, not taken Monsieur Lelli's advice and hurried him and her father away from the terrace, there was no saying what complication might not have arisen still further to increase the difficulties of the general situation.
As a matter of fact, Monsieur d'Antin's vanity had received a violent shock. He had known that Silvio Rossano was extremely good-looking, for he had gathered as much when he had seen him ascending the staircase at Palazzo Acorari. But he had not realized it as fully as he did that evening at the Castello di Costantino. The discovery annoyed him exceedingly, for obvious reasons. He had, up to that moment, felt no particular personal antipathy towards a presumptuous young man of the bourgeois class, who had ventured to consider himself a fitting husband for Bianca Acorari. On the contrary, Monsieur d'Antin had felt most grateful to him for having, by his presumption and want of knowledge of the ways of good society, placed Bianca in an equivocal position, and at the mercy of anybody who might choose to set a scandal abroad concerning her.
But that night, as he looked across the restaurant at the table where Silvio was sitting, he hated him for his youth, for his tall, well-knit form, for his good-looking face; and perhaps, more than all, for a certain indefinable air of high-breeding and easy grace, which Monsieur d'Antin angrily told himself a person of the middle class had no right to possess. Nothing escaped him. He watched Silvio's manner, his mode of eating and drinking, his dress, everything, in short, which could betray the cloven hoof he was longing to discover. He could overhear, too, snatches of the conversation from Professor Rossano's table, and he was disagreeably surprised by what he heard. There was none of the loud, vulgar intonation of the voices usually the accompaniment of any gathering together of Romans of the middle and lower orders, and none of the two eternal topics of conversation—food and money—from which the Roman of the middle classes can with difficulty be persuaded to tear himself away.