Part 22 (2/2)
”Nor who recommended her to your wife?”
”No.”
”Probably Lady Jane Horton?”
”It may be so. Very likely.”
”I will follow up this track, slight as it is.”
”But if Mrs. Bertram received the communication, how comes it that it never reached--O, fool that I am, how should it! I, who guarded so carefully my incognito!”
”True. This your wife could not foresee; she would naturally imagine that your residence in England would be easily discovered. But many years must have pa.s.sed since your wife lost sight of this Mrs. Bertram, if their acquaintance was made so soon after your marriage; and now it is a long time to retrace--long before even your Violante was born.”
”Alas! yes. I lost two fair sons in the interval. Violante was born to me as the child of sorrow.”
”And to make sorrow lovely! how beautiful she is!”
The father smiled proudly.
”Where, in the loftiest house of Europe, find a husband worthy of such a prize?”
”You forget that I am still an exile--she still dowerless. You forget that I am pursued by Peschiera; that I would rather see her a beggar's wife--than--Pah, the very thought maddens me, it is so foul. _Corpo di Bacco!_ I have been glad to find her a husband already.”
”Already! Then that young man spoke truly?”
”What young man?”
”Randal Leslie. How! You know him?” Here a brief explanation followed.
Harley heard with attentive ear, and marked vexation, the particulars of Riccabocca's connection and implied engagement with Leslie.
”There is something very suspicious to me in all this,” said he. ”Why should this young man have so sounded me as to Violante's chance of losing fortune if she married an Englishman?”
”Did he? O, pooh! excuse him. It was but his natural wish to seem ignorant of all about me. He did not know enough of my intimacy with you to betray my secret.”
”But he knew enough of it--must have known enough to have made it right that he should tell you I was in England. He does not seem to have done so.”
”No--_that_ is strange; yet scarcely strange--for, when we last met, his head was full of other things--love and marriage. _Basta!_ youth will be youth.”
”He has no youth left in him!” exclaimed Harley, pa.s.sionately. ”I doubt if he ever had any. He is one of those men who come into the world with the pulse of a centenarian. You and I never shall be as old--as he was in long-clothes. Ah, you may laugh; but I am never wrong in my instincts. I disliked him at the first--his eye, his smile, his voice, his very footstep. It is madness in you to countenance such a marriage; it may destroy all chance of your restoration.”
”Better that than infringe my word once pa.s.sed.”
”No, no,” exclaimed Harley; ”your word is not pa.s.sed--it shall not be pa.s.sed. Nay, never look so piteously at me. At all events, pause till we know more of this young man. If he be worthy of her without a dower, why, then, let him lose you your heritage. I should have no more to say.”
”But why lose me my heritage?”
”Do you think the Austrian government would suffer your estates to pa.s.s to this English jackanapes, a clerk in a public office? O, sage in theory, why are you such a simpleton in action?”
Nothing moved by this taunt, Riccabocca rubbed his hands, and then stretched them comfortably over the fire.
<script>