Having said these words, she took to flight.
CHAPTER XIII
The unexpected appearance of this charming young person drove every serious thought away. Fabrizio lived on at Bologna with a sense of the deepest delight and security. His artless propensity to find happiness in anything which filled his life, betrayed itself in his letters to the duchess, and to such a point as to annoy her.
Fabrizio hardly noticed it; only he noted in abbreviated signs on the dial plate of his watch, “When I write to the duchess I must never say ‘when I was a prelate, when I was a churchman’—it vexes her.” He had bought a pair of ponies, with which he was very much pleased, and harnessed them to a hired chaise whenever little Marietta had a fancy to go and see one of the delightful spots in the neighbourhood of Bologna. Almost every evening he drove her to the Reno Cascade. On the way back he would stop at the house of the good-natured Crescentini, who rather believed himself to be Marietta’s father.
“Faith,” said Fabrizio to himself, “if this be the café life which struck me as being so absurd for any serious man to lead, I did wrong to turn up my nose at it.” He forgot that he never went near a café except to read the Constitutionnel, and that as he was utterly unknown to any one in Bologna, the pleasures of vanity had nothing to do with his present state of felicity. When he was not with little Marietta, he was to be seen at the observatory, where he was attending a course of astronomy. The professor had taken a great fancy to him, and Fabrizio would lend him his horses on a Sunday, so that he and his wife might go and ruffle it in the Corso of the Montagnola.
He had a horror of making any one unhappy, however unworthy the person might be. Marietta would not hear of his seeing the mamaccia, but one day, when she was in church, he went up to the old woman’s room. She flushed with anger when she saw him enter. “I must play the Del Dongo here,” said Fabrizio to himself. “How much does Marietta earn a month when she has an engagement?” he called out, with very much the same air as that with which a self-respecting young Parisian takes his seat in the balcon at the Opéra Bouffe.
“Fifty crowns.”
“You lie, as usual. Tell me the truth, or, by God, you’ll not get a centime.”