“From my childhood, I have known but one absorbing influence,” Buondlemonte said, “and that is my love for Camilla Donati. ’Tis a secret I have kept within my own breast till now; for I was educated to consider myself the husband of another, and, looking upon the marriage with Amedi’s sister as a thing that must be, I felt reconciled—while the period of our union was indefinite—to what I could not avoid.”
“Why not feel so still?” Guiseppo asked.
“I cannot,” was the reply; “the nearer the hour for our nuptials approaches, the more repugnant do I feel. There’s no sympathy between the house of Amedi and Buondelmonte—they are Ghibellines and I am a Guelph. I love not Francesca; I like not her unsmiling brothers; yet I must wed, and in fulfilling a compact made without my consent, doom myself to certain misery.”
Buondlemonte might have added that the missive which the page had delivered to him was from the mother of Camilla Donati, and that it had given strength to feelings which were before but too powerful; but he did not; the information might have compromised others, and he kept it to himself. What was further said would scarcely interest the reader, and we pass to details more immediately connected with the development of our story.
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CHAPTER III.
At the time of which we write—the latter end of the thirteenth century—there existed between the two principal families in Florence, (those of Amedi and Donati,) a spirit of bitter malignity and determined rivalry, which was carried quite to the extent of the quarrels described by Shakspeare, in “Romeo and Juliet,” between the houses of Capulet and Montague.
Ambition for supremacy was the origin of the dispute between these noble families, but political differences had widened the breach. The quarrels between the Emperor of Germany and the Pope, which followed the elevation of Gregory VII. to the papal throne—and which divided Germany, and even Italy into factions, calling themselves Guelphs and Ghibellines—had extended to Florence, mid the rival families of Donati and Amedi were not slow to take sides in the dispute; each hoping thereby to obtain an ascendency over the other. The Donati took part with the Pope, and called themselves Guelphs; the Amedi sided with the emperor, and were called Ghibellines; and for generations, the animosity between these two houses disturbed the peace of the beautiful city of Florence.
At the period of our narrative a female ranked as the head of the house of Donati. Left a widow, during the childhood of her only daughter, she had sustained with masculine energy the pretensions of her family, and at the same time she had reared with maternal fondness the offspring left to her sole charge.
The father of young Buondlemonte was a nobleman of the first influence in Italy. He resided in the upper vale of Arno, and though he supported the pretensions of the pontiff against those of the emperor, his feelings were so far from being rancorous, that he maintained an equal intimacy with the rival houses of Amedi and Donati; the circumstance of their having served together in the wars of the day alone induced him to prefer the alliance with the family of Amedi.