She
at least knew that the Marchese Lamberto had already conceived the
most torturing jealousy of his nephew. Ludovico, on his part, was of
course utterly unconscious that he was giving his uncle the remotest
cause for umbrage by his attentions to the successful Diva.
Then came the little tete-a-tete supper--tete-a-tete by accident
rather than by design, as the reader may remember; and the officious
and spiteful eavesdropping and tell-tale denunciation by the angry
poet.
Nevertheless, and despite of all these circumstances and of the
temper of mind in which he quitted the ball-room that night, it is
certain that the Marchese did, on the morning of the following Ash
Wednesday, send for his lawyer and announce to him formally his
intention to make the Signorina Bianca Lalli his wife.
We have seen all the agonies of irresolution and indecision--all the
alternating swayings of his mind, as passion or prudence
predominated at the moment. He seemed utterly unable to bring
himself, save fitfully, to the final adoption of either line of
conduct. And yet, at the moment when his jealousy most furiously
boiled over, he decided on taking the first overt step towards the
accomplishment of the deed.
Was it possibly that he was urged irresistibly forwards by the fear
that if he did not at once make the prize he so eagerly coveted
irrevocably his own, the power to make it so might pass away from
him? that, after all, his nephew might have found the goddess as
irresistible as he had found her himself; and that she might prefer
the younger to the older Marchese di Castelmare?
Whatever the reflections might have been that at last drove him to
take the definitive step of applying to his lawyer, we know that
they were not of a pleasant kind--that the state of the Marchese's
mind was anything but a happy or peaceful one during the hours that
preceded his sending the message to Signor Fortini.
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