Beati Paoli
by Luigi Natoli
part three, chapter 5
| Italiano | English |
Donna Gabriella was about to get into bed, when on the pillow of her wrought iron bed with very elegant leaves she saw a piece of paper. Presolo and performed it with a certain trepidation, he read these few words with amazement.
"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; the sins of the fathers will fall upon the children. Write this to your husband."
The sense of these words seemed incomprehensible to her, and she remained thoughtful and suspicious, when her maid rushed into the room, shouting frightened:
"Excellency! Your Excellency, what a misfortune!
Woman Gabriella, terrified by the sudden raid, the look and the cry, exclaimed trembling:
"What happened?... Oh, my God! What?..."
"They kidnapped the young lady!..."
"Violant?...
"Woman Violante!... Excellency, yes, they kidnapped her!..."
"Violante?!... How?... Who? Who said that?"
"The "mom" of the monastery came... Now... It's still there..."
"Let her come!... now!... I want to know!..."
She was convulsed and did not know what to think; that news filled her with dismay, upset her. The mason of the monastery of Montevergini, also sussopra, entered, and among the hiccups confirmed what the waitress had said, narrating with leaps, sentences interrupted what was said or supposed to be in the monastery. The maiden had been taken away by people penetrated from the garden: half of Palermo had flown: What a scare!
Donna Gabriella didn't know what to say, she would get up, she would sit, she would walk, she would murmur:
"My God! What to do?... What to do? Oh, my God! What a disgrace!... But who? Who?..."
Her eyes fell on the letter, and a mess made her hair on her head: That letter was the key to the mystery. The Beati Paoli made a very daring gesture in retaliation, and this made the condition of things more terrible. Where were they? How to hit them? How to liberate Violante?
"My carrier!" she ordered.
"Your Excellency, what will you do?" asked the waitress.
But the Duchess repeated more imperiously:
"The carrier!"
Twenty minutes later he arrived at the monastery when the crowd came out whistling and shouting and throwing frizzi to the "uncle nun escaped with the monk's uncle."
The abbess, the nuns, the teachers of the teachers welcomed her with tears in her eyes: No one knew why: The abbess seemed inconsolable; a monastery that enjoyed so much good reputation!... where nothing like this had ever happened! Yes, it was true, of escapes, of abductions, they happened; educators who took flight there were always, and even some professed nuns!... But in Montevergini!...
Ah! It was a misfortune for the monastery! This was the greatest pain. Donna Gabriella gathered the news that she could, realized that she had nothing to do, and left.
"To the royal palace!" he ordered the servants.
What did he want to do? Raise the Viceroy? Send the guards after the kidnappers? Calling the cavalry? He didn't know. He used the Viceroy as the head of state, as the one who could do anything. But the Viceroy was asleep at that time; the doors of the palace were closed, the sentry did not allow him to be beaten. And then, that was not the time of audiences; his Excellency Count Hannibal Mattei, vicarized Sicily in the name of his Majesty Victor Amedeo, had prescribed the days and hours of audience; and he did not derogate. It could ruin the world; if it wasn't provided for in the regulation, no one would have been uncomfortable. All the administrative discipline consisted mainly in this rigid and pedantic observance of the regulations, which was, and still is, the glorious panache of every administration and every administrator or chief of Piedmontese offices.
Donna Gabriella had to go home, with an agitated, bitter, convulsive soul, and spent all night without being able to sleep, tormented by a thousand turbid visions. The story mutilated and altered by her husband, about the origin of the persecution of the Beati Paoli and the accusations that were made, returned to her mind, raised her suspicions and doubts, put in her blood a kind of horror and terror. It was evident that the rat was a reprisal: Did Violant pay, perhaps, for that missing child, dead, perhaps murdered, just looking out for life? But who could have been interested in this late revenge? Or he paid, as she seemed most likely, for the family of the admired, whose grandson was moaning in the dungeons of Castellamare, and his wife had been tortured in that ignominious way?
It had to be like this. But why did the admirer become the avenger of that Duchess and that boy who had disappeared for 16 years? Mystery! Meanwhile, it was a relentless, terrible war to which, now that her husband was away, she was exposed and dragged.
So the first hours of the day passed, when the curate sent from Blasco arrived.
"I have important news to give to your Excellency, to you alone," he said.
The Duchess, who was in constant apprehension, immediately ordered that he be brought in.
"Well, good man, where are you from?"
"From Grace, Your Excellency..."
"And do you have any news to give me?"
"Excellency, yes..."
"Speak, then..."
"Your Excellency order a carriage to come and get the lady."
"Violante!" cried the Duchess leaping up and with unspeakable joy; "Violante!..."
"Excellency, yes..."
"But how! Do you say?..."
"I know nothing, Your Excellency, I have been told to come here and warn your Excellency that the young lady is healthy and saved by a miracle of God and the Beautiful Mother of Grace!..."
Donna Gabriella was pricked by a thousand questions that crossed, rushed, thickened, tormenting her in a thousand guise; she grabbed the bell and sounded furiously:
"The great litter, with the mules," he ordered, "and the escort men immediately!..."
In a convulsive haste he threw on his shoulders a cloak, put on his head one of those three-pointed hats, surmounted by white plumes, which the fashion had then introduced, and ordered:
"Let's go!"
A galloned servant stood on the threshold, bowing down, and put her arm with her protruding elbow. Donna Gabriella put her hand on that arm and went down the large marble staircase, at the foot of which was the litter loaded on two piled mules, and behind it two servants on horseback, armed with bows and guns.
Throughout the palace the news had spread that the Duchessina had been found and that the mistress went to get her back, and all the servants crowded full of interest, up the staircase, the railing of the court, accompanying the Duchess with vows and with desire.
The litter came out. The curate, who had come on horseback, went by the door, to answer the questions of woman Gabriella. The ringing of the rattles made the people turn, who recognizing the Duchess greeted her:
"Slave of your Excellency..."
Also on the street the news was spread that the Duchess went to get her stepdaughter and the people, greeting her, added:
"May the Beautiful Mother of the Light help you!"
The procession went out of the Gate of Ossuna, skirted the city walls and entered the country. Donna Gabriella found the mules a little slow, but in truth the poor beasts, urged by the litterers, went quickly. Of course they could not trot, because it would have been the same that tossing Gabriella woman between the walls of the litter.
It had already passed midday, when they came before the gate.
"It is here," said the curate, disassembling and pushing the gate.
Donna Gabriella wanted to disassemble and walk down the avenue; when she was at the house, she cried out:
"Violante!... Violant!..."
And a voice full of joy answered her: "Mrs. Mother!..."
Donna Gabriella saw her in the cloak, stopped at her hips by a leather strap, and with her arms lost in two large turquoise sleeves, but she did not notice this strange outfit, holding her stepdaughter at that point with a sincere emotion, which also took away the word.
After that moment in which it seemed that those two hearts, free from all fear, were confused, the Duchess sat on a stone seat and looked with astonishment at her stepdaughter:
"Oh, how funny are you!" he exclaimed, "Why did you get your hair like that?"
"If your lordship knew, madam!"
"But come on, tell me how it went, how you're here, why you're dressed like this."
Violently he sat side by side and put his hands on his face, as he recovered from the fear of danger.
"Ah, madam, what a terror! What a terror!... I'm dying to think about it!... it was a miracle, just a miracle!... For surely it was the good Lord who sent him."
"Send who?"
"My liberator... he..."
"Him?... But who?..."
"Oh, didn't I tell you? I'm a stunned woman, and I should have told him sooner, to thank him!.. Who freed me from my kidnappers, it was him, Mr. Blasco from Castiglione..."
"Blasco da Castiglione?!... He!..." exclaimed woman Gabriella leaping up, with an expression in which they merged and tumultuous a thousand opposite and stifling feelings: "Blasco da Castiglione... what about you?"
A crowd of thoughts and suspicions invaded her brain, clouded her feeling, troubled her soul: Why was the young man there to save Violante from danger? Wasn't that sudden, miraculous intervention something prepared? Where was he?...
"Speak therefore," he said with a trembling voice: "recounts!..."
Violant told her her first and scary adventure with that liveliness, that warmth proper of adolescence, exaggerating even, if possible, the danger course, his impressions, the beauty of the heroic gesture of the young savior. Donna Gabriella listened to her, but her soul did not follow so much the dangers, the anxieties, the tremors, the fear of her stepdaughter, as the words referring to Blasco. When the maiden finished her account, with her arrival in that house and her disguise, Gabriella asked her:
"And then?"
"And then... then I fell asleep."
"What about Mr. Blasco?"
"Ah! Mr. Blasco, poor thing, watched me all night. And maybe that's why I could sleep..."
"And then?"
"And then nothing... Your Excellency has come..."
"And Mr. Blasco didn't tell you anything? No word?"
"He gave me courage, of course."
"I'm not saying that... I'm saying if he told you any of those words that men want to say to women..."
"What words, madam?"
The Duchess bit her lips. The ingenuity of her stepdaughter disconcerted her: Was it a fiction? He was a little silent, tormented by an occult thought.
Violent smiled with malice, then, and said:
"Your Excellency told me that Mr. Blasco had been killed... but instead!"
Donna Gabriella didn't answer; perhaps she didn't even remember inventing that tale. Violent, with the same smile and with a tone that he wanted to express unbelief and at the same time reproach, he added:
"And he also told me that he was a bad man... while he is so good!"
Praise shook the Duchess who, almost following her thought, asked her abruptly:
"And... was he always with you tonight?"
"Always!" answered Violant with intensity.
"And he didn't do anything to you?"
"What?"
"Didn't he caress you?"
Violent blushed to the eye, and he replied: "No, madam."
Donna Gabriella looked at her unbelievingly, and perhaps interpreted that redness in her own way; pale, with a voice choked by jealousy, by anger, asked her:
"And now where is your savior? I must thank him."
"I think he's there... he has awe, I think... he doesn't want to be thanked, he already told me; but I'll call him... Yes, it's only right that you too, Madame Mother, tell him a few words... He deserves it!"
And rising up, which stood at the foot of the outer stairway, which stood up along the wall, he called:
Mr. Blasco... Mr. Blasco...
Blasco from Castiglione appeared on the top of the staircase. He was slightly pale and smiling. He bowed to the Duchess and went down the stairs with eagerness; Gabriella looked at him, dominating his emotion, but not so as to prevent his face from first becoming red, then pale, and his nostrils and mouth not to tremble. Straight, beautiful, in an attitude that wanted to express gratitude and instead expressed spite, anger, anger, jealousy... she forgot to lend her hand to Blasco, who had bowed to her again, and stuttered a word of thanks:
"I am grateful to you, sir, for what you have done, and I will write to the Duke my husband."
His words were so glacial, that Blasco was amazed; nevertheless he replied:
"Oh, Mrs. Duchess, if I have ever been able to render you any service, it is rather a replacement, which does not equal the benefit received... It is I who owe you much, and I thank God who gave me the opportunity to express my gratitude."
Both were silent, embarrassed; Gabriella woman for the torment of her fixed idea, Blasco for that reception so cold and almost astute of which she did not guess the reasons. He hoped to be welcomed with cordiality and to be able to establish with Gabriella a bond of sweet friendship, founded on a mute gratitude, and he felt brought there, now that he was in possession of those cards, for that instinctive impulse of his heart that impelled him to defend the weak and to take the sides of those who were threatened by a great danger. He felt that the Beati Paoli, having been unable or not dared to strike Don Raimondo, wanted to carry out their vengeance over those two innocent women of all guilt, alien to the murders of the duke, helpless; and he seemed to him to have a strong duty to protect and defend them. But the coldness of a woman Gabriella disconcerted him. Were you spiteful for abandoning her? Was it hate? No: It couldn't have been hate, because otherwise he would have let him die in prisons. What was it then? Blasco did not have a keen eye, and on the other hand he could not conceive that the Duchess felt jealousy of her stepdaughter; Violante was almost a child and if he felt a feeling of deep sympathy and tenderness for her, he could not yet say that he loved her, because that girl still seemed so sour, that he feared to profane her candor and unawareness, loving her with love. And so his feeling colored with a reverberation, a respect, a religiosity, which almost intoxicated him, and gave him a pure and profound joy. So he didn't suspect that Gabriella could be jealous.
But she felt herself biting her soul. He loved her. He always loved her with all the impetus of a passion, that pride, self-love, spite, the reaction of revenge rejected and wanted to disguise hate. He had almost armed the arm of the prince of Iraci, it was true, but precisely because the passion It was burning. The desire to take revenge was born of abandonment. The attempted assassination and the danger of death had almost wiped out from her heart all feelings of hatred and had left there an angry spite and a rabid desire: she felt, almost without wanting to, carried him to protect him from the pitfalls. And this feeling had become stronger. In Messina he had understood that if Matteo Lo Vecchio had tried to poison Blasco he had certainly been commissioned by Don Raimondo and this had caused him to keep silent that he had seen the young man and saved him from death. She felt almost happy to know even free: Perhaps some distant hope was born in her heart; perhaps some dream had dawned in the nights within her head; perhaps, when the repugnance of her complicity with her husband had tormented her soul, she had aimed at the young man as a deliverance... This is when a new thought came to awaken the flames of jealousy; his suspicious mind had plunged its gaze into the depths of the maiden's heart, and had seen the image of Blasco carved there. In her fantasy she now saw scenes and episodes that filled her with pain and swollen her eyes with burning tears. She suspected, indeed, that between Blasco and Violante there were many other relationships than those fraternal and innocent ones that appeared from the words of the maiden. The bitter desire to investigate, to know, pervaded her blood; she fixed her eyes on Blasco as if to discover on her face the traces of a night of love. And he saw nothing; but he did not reassure himself.
"Go up," he said to Violante, "and get some order in your outfit. You should get dressed... Of course you can't go back to town dressed like that."
He called the curate.
"There will be a few peasant houses around and there will be women. Here's some money. Get me some clean clothes."
The curate left. Donna Gabriella, alone with Blasco, crossed her arms and, looking at him with sparkling eyes, said:
"Lord, you will not think that I am so foolish as to believe the story of Violante."
"How, Mrs. Duchess?..."
"I say, sir, that your intervention so timely and miraculous gives all the rest to suppose, indeed to believe, that you are not entirely foreign to the Violant rat."
"Mrs. Duchess!" exclaimed Blasco with her face on fire; "I do not believe that there is an act in my life that gives you the power to think of such wickedness..."
Donna Gabriella didn't move her eyelids.
"And it's vain to warm up: Everything is against you. I know you haven't laid eyes on the Duke of Motta's daughter since today!..."
"Me?... Duchess, what do you say? But you really want to suppose..."
"I wish it were supposed!..." cried desperately Gabriella woman, leaving the gap to jealousy.
That cry was a revelation. Blasco felt his indignation warmed and said with a milder voice:
"Ma'am, on what do you want me to swear?... Behold." He drew a silver medal out of his chest, and with a moved voice, and added: "This silver medal is the only legacy that my mother left me, and it is for me the most sacred relic; well, I swear on this blessed medal that I did not know before the Duchessina, that I am completely alien to this unholy rapture, that only chance or luck have led me to prevent a crime!..."
Donna Gabriella didn't seem reassured; after all, she didn't care so much if Blasco had a part in the kidnapping or if he had relations with the Beati Paoli. What she cared about, that tormented her, was the conviction that Blasco loved Violante. The vision of the two young men who were close in an ensemble, united in a kiss, I had a joy that she had known and of which she still had the arsura, she was offered before her eyes.
"Negate," she said with an altered voice; "Negate that you had... that you had spent the night... that you abused your position!... Deny this too, if you can!..."
"Yes, I deny it! No sister has ever been so sure next to her brother, no daughter ever could.Sleep so confidently in the mother's arms, as a Violant woman, tonight, in this house, and beside me. Blasco from Castiglione, lady, has no family arms, as he has no surname, but he can write on his forehead, as the knight Bavard: "Without stain and fear."
Donna Gabriella did not give up, but continued with a gloomy voice of jealousy:
"Violante is so beautiful!..."
"Yes... she is beautiful!"
"She's so seductive..."
"Yes... she's seductive!"
"All her person is an enchantment..."
"Yes, it's true... She's lovely..."
"Confess, then, that you love her!..." cried Gabriella woman, pointing her finger at him with a convulsive tremor, and eagerly waiting for an answer. Blasco was a bit puzzled by that sudden and unexpected question, which woke him suddenly a thousand sensations sweet and tormenting and could not find an answer immediately; he stuttered then:
"Love her?... Me? Donna Violante?"
The Duchess tasted all the bitterness of her painful triumph.
"Yes, you love her!... Swear to me that it is not true; swear on that relic!"
"I don't swear," he murmured. Blasco; "I can't swear; I don't know: Maybe I do, I love her, or I would love her: but it is not a love that can feed on hopes, and I am honest enough to know and be able to close and stop in the depths of the heart a feeling, which would be, rather than a joy, a torture!..."
The Duchess seemed impressed by those words: the pain that swelled her chest overwhelms her; in her so mobile nature, in which the feelings had no more than the duration of the impulse and were rapidly rotating, anger, jealousy were unraveled to leave room for pain. He let himself fall into the seat, pale, with arid mouth, murmuring:
"He loves her! He loves her!..."
The voice of the curate who returned with a bundle picked it up; he recompensed, took up his countenance; he took his clothes from the hands of the curate and went up quickly, without saying anything.
Blasco remained there like a statue, sad, with a tight heart in a bite, preying to a dismay, as if from that brief dialogue, and more from the last words, a dark and distant threat arose, which hovered not only over his head, but still over that of Violante.
