“Are you not my wife?” said Missirilli, “and a wife always adored? I shall know how to love you and protect you.”
Vanina had to go and pay visits. Scarcely had she left Missirilli when he began to think his conduct barbarous.
“What is our country, after all?” he said to himself. “It is not a being to whom we owe any gratitude for any benefit, and who might be unhappy and curse us if we failed to be grateful. Country and liberty are like my cloak, a thing that is useful to me, that I must buy, no doubt, if I have not inherited it from my father; but after all I love country and liberty because these two things are useful to me. If I can do nothing with them, if they are no more use to me than a cloak in August, what is the good of buying them, at an enormous price too? Vanina is so beautiful! She has such a remarkable mind! People will seek to please her; she will forget me. What woman ever had only one lover? Those Roman princes, whom I despise as citizens, have such an advantage over me! They must be very lovable! Ah, if I go away, she will forget me, and I shall lose her for ever!”
In the middle of the night Vanina came to see him; he told her of the indecision in which he had been plunged, and the examination to which, because he loved her, he had subjected the great word country. Vanina was very happy.
“If he had to choose definitely between his country and me,” she said to herself, “the choice would fall on me.”
The clock of the neighbouring church struck three; the moment of their last farewells arrived. Pietro tore himself from the arms of his beloved. He was already descending the little stair, when Vanina, restraining her tears, said to him with a smile:
“If you had been tended by some poor countrywoman, would you not do something out of gratitude? Would you not try to repay her? The future is uncertain; you are going to travel amidst enemies; give me three days out of gratitude, as if I were a poor woman, and in repayment of my trouble.”
Missirilli remained. At last he quitted Rome. Thanks to a passport bought from a foreign embassy, he reached his home. There was great rejoicing; they had given him up for dead. His friends wished to celebrate his safe return by killing one or two carabineers, as the police in the Papal states are called.
“Do not let us kill an Italian that knows the use of arms, unless we are forced to,” said Missirilli; “our country is not an island, like happy England: we need soldiers to resist the intervention of the kings of Europe.”
Shortly afterwards, Missirilli, hard pressed by the carabineers, killed two of them with the pistols that Vanina had given him. A price was set on his head.