“Yes, I am very much occupied at the studio,” replied Ginevra, rather slowly.
“What is the matter, Ginevra? You are turning pale!” cried her mother.
“No!” exclaimed the young girl in a tone of resolution, — ”no! it shall never be said that Ginevra Piombo acted a lie.”
Hearing this singular exclamation, Piombo and his wife looked at their daughter in astonishment.
“I love a young man,” she added, in a voice of emotion.
Then, not venturing to look at her parents, she lowered her large eyelids as if to veil the fire of her eyes.
“Is he a prince?” asked her father, ironically, in a tone of voice which made the mother quail.
“No, father,” she said, gently, “he is a young man without fortune.”
“Is he very handsome?”
“He is very unfortunate.”
“What is he?”
“Labedoyere’s comrade; he was proscribed, without a refuge; Servin concealed him, and — ”
“Servin is a good fellow, who has done well,” cried Piombo; “but you, my daughter, you do wrong to love any man, except your father.”
“It does not depend on me to love, or not to love,” replied Ginevra, still gently.
“I flattered myself,” continued her father, “that my Ginevra would be faithful to me until I died; and that my love and that of her mother would suffice her till then; I did not expect that our tenderness would find a rival in her soul, and — ”
“Did I ever reproach you for your fanaticism for Napoleon?” said Ginevra. “Have you never loved any one but me? Did you not leave me for months together when you went on missions. I bore your absence courageously. Life has necessities to which we must all submit.”
“Ginevra!”
“No, you don’t love me for myself; your reproaches betray your intolerable egotism.”
“You dare to blame your father’s love!” exclaimed Piombo, his eyes flashing.
“Father, I don’t blame you,” replied Ginevra, with more gentleness than her trembling mother expected. “You have grounds for your egotism, as I have for my love. Heaven is my witness that no girl has ever fulfilled her duty to her parents better than I have done to you. I have never felt anything but love and happiness where others often see obligation. It is now fifteen years that I have never left your protecting wing, and it has been a most dear pleasure to me to charm your life. But am I ungrateful for all this in giving myself up to the joy of loving; is it ingratitude to desire a husband who will protect me hereafter?”
“What! do you reckon benefits with your father, Ginevra?” said Piombo, in a dangerous tone.
A dreadful pause then followed, during which no one dared to speak. Bartolomeo at last broke the silence by crying out in a heart-rending tone: —
“Oh! stay with us! stay with your father, your old father! I cannot have you love another man. Ginevra, you will not have long to await your liberty.”
“But, father, remember that I need not leave you; we shall be two to love you; you will learn to know the man to whose care you bequeath me. You will be doubly cherished by me and by him, — by him who is my other self, by me who am all his.”
“Oh! Ginevra, Ginevra!” cried the Corsican, clenching his fists; “why did you not marry when Napoleon brought me to accept the idea? Why did you not take the counts and dukes he presented to you?”
“They loved me to order,” said the girl. “Besides, they would have made me live with them, and I did not wish to leave you alone.”
“You don’t wish to leave me alone,” said Piombo, “and yet you marry! — that is leaving me alone. I know you, my daughter; in that case, you would cease to love us. Elisa,” he added, looking at his wife, who remained motionless, and as if stupefied, “we have no longer a daughter; she wishes to marry.”
The old man sat down, after raising his hands to heaven with a gesture of invoking the Divine power; then he bowed himself over as if weighed down with sorrow.
Ginevra saw his agitation, and the restraint which he put upon his anger touched her to the heart; she expected some violent crisis, some ungovernable fury; she had not armed her soul against paternal gentleness.
“Father,” she said, in a tender voice, “no, you shall never be abandoned by your Ginevra. But love her a little for her own sake. If you know how he loves me! Ah! He would never make me unhappy!”
“Comparisons already!” cried Piombo, in a terrible voice. “No, I can never endure the idea of your marriage. If he loved you as you deserve to be loved he would kill me; if he did not love you, I should put a dagger through him.”
The hands of the old man trembled, his lips trembled, his body trembled, but his eyes flashed lightnings. Ginevra alone was able to endure his glance, for her eyes flamed also, and the daughter was worthy of the sire.
“Oh! to love you! What man is worthy of such a life?” continued Piombo. “To love you as a father is paradise on earth; who is there worthy to be your husband?”
“He,” said Ginevra; “he of whom I am not worthy.”
“He?” repeated Piombo, mechanically; “who is he?”
“He whom I love.”
“How can he know you enough to love you?”
“Father,” said Ginevra, with a gesture of impatience, “whether he loves me or not, if I love him — ”
“You love him?” cried Piombo.
Ginevra bent her head softly.
“You love him more than you love us?”
“The two feelings cannot be compared,” she replied.
“Is one stronger than the other?”
“I think it is,” said Ginevra.
“You shall not marry him,” cried the Corsican, his voice shaking the window-panes.
“I shall marry him,” replied Ginevra, tranquilly.
“Oh, God!” cried the mother, “how will this quarrel end? Santa Virgina! place thyself between them!”
The baron, who had been striding up and down the room, now seated himself; an icy sternness darkened his face; he looked fixedly at his daughter, and said to her, in a gentle, weakened voice, —
“Ginevra, no! you will not marry him. Oh! say nothing more to-night — let me think the contrary. Do you wish to see your father on his knees, his white hairs prostrate before you? I supplicate you — ”
“Ginevra Piombo does not pass her word and break it,” she replied. “I am your daughter.”
“She is right,” said the baroness. “We are sent into the world to marry.”
“Do you encourage her in disobedience?” said the baron to his wife, who, terrified by the word, now changed to marble.
“Refusing to obey an unjust order is not disobedience,” said Ginevra.
“No order can be unjust from the lips of your father, my daughter. Why do you judge my action? The repugnance that I feel is counsel from on high, sent, it may be, to protect you from some great evil.”
“The only evil could be that he did not love me.”
“Always he!”
“Yes, always,” she answered. “He is my life, my good, my thought. Even if I obeyed you he would be ever in my soul. To forbid me to marry him is to make me hate you.”
“You love us not!” cried Piombo.
“Oh!” said Ginevra, shaking her head.
“Well, then, forget him; be faithful to us. After we are gone — you understand?”
“Father, do you wish me to long for your death?” cried Ginevra.
“I shall outlive you. Children who do not honor their parents die early,” said the father, driven to exasperation.
“All the more reason why I should marry and be happy,” she replied.
This coolness and power of argument increased Piombo’s trouble; the blood rushed violently to his head, and his face turned purple. Ginevra shuddered; she sprang like a bird on her father’s knee, threw her arms around his neck, and caressed his white hair, exclaiming, tenderly: —
“Oh, yes, yes, let me die first! I
could never survive you, my father, my kind father!”
“Oh! my Ginevra, my own Ginevra!” replied Piombo, whose anger melted under this caress like snow beneath the rays of the sun.
“It was time you ceased,” said the baroness, in a trembling voice.
“Poor mother!”
“Ah! Ginevretta! mia bella Ginevra!”
And the father played with his daughter as though she were a child of six. He amused himself by releasing the waving volume of her hair, by dandling her on his knee; there was something of madness in these expressions of his love. Presently his daughter scolded while kissing him, and tried, by jesting, to obtain admission for Luigi; but her father, also jesting, refused. She sulked, then returned to coax once more, and sulked again, until, by the end of the evening, she was forced to be content with having impressed upon her father’s mind both her love for Luigi and the idea of an approaching marriage.
The next day she said no more about her love; she was more caressing to her father than she had ever been, and testified the utmost gratitude, as if to thank him for the consent he seemed to have given by his silence. That evening she sang and played to him for a long time, exclaiming now and then: “We want a man’s voice for this nocturne.” Ginevra was an Italian, and that says all.
At the end of a week her mother signed to her. She went; and Elisa Piombo whispered in her ear: —
“I have persuaded your father to receive him.”
“Oh! mother, how happy you have made me!”
That day Ginevra had the joy of coming home on the arm of her Luigi. The officer came out of his hiding-place for the second time only. The earnest appeals which Ginevra made to the Duc de Feltre, then minister of war, had been crowned with complete success. Luigi’s name was replaced upon the roll of officers awaiting orders. This was the first great step toward better things. Warned by Ginevra of the difficulties he would encounter with her father, the young man dared not express his fear of finding it impossible to please the old man. Courageous under adversity, brave on a battlefield, he trembled at the thought of entering Piombo’s salon. Ginevra felt him tremble, and this emotion, the source of which lay in her, was, to her eyes, another proof of love.
“How pale you are!” she said to him when they reached the door of the house.
“Oh! Ginevra, if it concerned my life only! — ”
Though Bartolomeo had been notified by his wife of the formal presentation Ginevra was to make of her lover, he would not advance to meet him, but remained seated in his usual arm-chair, and the sternness of his brow was awful.
“Father,” said Ginevra, “I bring you a person you will no doubt be pleased to see, — a soldier who fought beside the Emperor at Mont-Saint-Jean.”
The baron rose, cast a sidelong glance at Luigi, and said, in a sardonic tone: —
“Monsieur is not decorated.”
“I no longer wear the Legion of honor,” replied Luigi, timidly, still standing.
Ginevra, mortified by her father’s incivility, dragged forward a chair. The officer’s answer seemed to satisfy the old servant of Napoleon. Madame Piombo, observing that her husband’s eyebrows were resuming their natural position, said, by way of conversation:
“Monsieur’s resemblance to a person we knew in Corsica, Nina Porta, is really surprising.”
“Nothing could be more natural,” replied the young man, on whose face Piombo’s flaming eyes now rested. “Nina was my sister.”
“Are you Luigi Porta?” asked the old man.
“Yes.”
Bartolomeo rose, tottered, was forced to lean against a chair and beckon to his wife. Elisa Piombo came to him. Then the two old people, silently, each supporting the other, left the room, abandoning their daughter with a sort of horror.
Luigi Porta, bewildered, looked at Ginevra, who had turned as white as a marble statue, and stood gazing at the door through which her father and mother had disappeared. This departure and this silence seemed to her so solemn that, for the first time, in her whole life, a feeling of fear entered her soul. She struck her hands together with great force, and said, in a voice so shaken that none but a lover could have heard the words: —
“What misery in a word!”
“In the name of our love, what have I said?” asked Luigi Porta.
“My father,” she replied, “never spoke to me of our deplorable history, and I was too young when we left Corsica to know anything about it.”
“Are we in vendetta?” asked Luigi, trembling.
“Yes. I have heard my mother say that the Portas killed my brother and burned our house. My father then massacred the whole family. How is it that you survived? — for you were tied to the posts of the bed before they set fire to the house.”
“I do not know,” replied Luigi. “I was taken to Genoa when six years old, and given in charge of an old man named Colonna. No detail about my family was told to me. I knew only that I was an orphan, and without property. Old Colonna was a father to me; and I bore his name until I entered the army. In order to do that, I had to show my certificate of birth in order to prove my identity. Colonna then told me, still a mere child, that I had enemies. And he advised me to take Luigi as my surname, and so evade them.”
“Go, go, Luigi!” cried Ginevra. “No, stay; I must go with you. So long as you are in my father’s house you have nothing to fear; but the moment you leave it, take care! you will go from danger to danger. My father has two Corsicans in his service, and if he does not lie in wait to kill you, they will.”
“Ginevra,” he said, “this feud, does it exist between you and me?”
The girl smiled sadly and bowed her head. Presently she raised it, and said, with a sort of pride: —
“Oh, Luigi, our love must be pure and sincere, indeed, to give me strength to tread the path I am about to enter. But it involves a happiness that will last throughout our lives, will it not?”
Luigi answered by a smile, and pressed her hand.
Ginevra comprehended that true love could despise all vulgar protestations at such a moment. This calm and restrained expression of his feelings foreshadowed, in some sense, their strength and their duration.
The destiny of the pair was then and there decided. Ginevra foresaw a cruel struggle, but the idea of abandoning Luigi — an idea which may have floated in her soul — vanished completely. His forever, she dragged him suddenly, with a desperate sort of energy, from her father’s house, and did not leave him till she saw him reach the house where Servin had engaged a modest lodging.
By the time she reached home, Ginevra had attained to that serenity which is caused by a firm resolution; no sign in her manner betrayed uneasiness. She turned on her father and mother, whom she found in the act of sitting down to dinner, a glance of exceeding gentleness devoid of hardihood. She saw that her mother had been weeping; the redness of those withered eyelids shook her heart, but she hid her emotion. No one touched the dinner which was served to them. A horror of food is one of the chief symptoms which reveal a great crisis in life. All three rose from table without having addressed a single word to one another.
When Ginevra had placed herself between her father and mother in the great and gloomy salon, Piombo tried to speak, but his voice failed him; he tried to walk, but he had no strength in his legs. He returned to his seat and rang the bell.
“Pietro,” he said, at last, to the footman, “light the fire; I am cold.”
Ginevra trembled, and looked at her father anxiously. The struggle within him must have been horrible, for his face was distorted. Ginevra knew the extent of the peril before her, but she did not flinch. Bartolomeo, meanwhile, cast furtive glances at his daughter, as if he feared a character whose violence was the work of his own hands.
Between such natures all things must be extreme. The certainty of some impending change in the feelings of father and daughter gave to the worn and weary face of the baroness an expression of terror.
“Ginevra, you love the enemy of your family,
” said Piombo, at last, not daring to look at his daughter.
“That is true,” she replied.
“You must choose between us. Our vendetta is a part of our being. Whoso does not share my vengeance is not a member of my family.”
“My choice is made,” replied Ginevra, calmly.
His daughter’s tranquillity misled Bartolomeo.
“Oh! my dear child!” he cried, letting her see his eyes moistened with tears, the first and only tears he ever shed in life.
“I shall be his wife,” said Ginevra, abruptly.
Bartolomeo seemed dazed for a moment, but he recovered his coolness instantly, and replied: —
“The marriage will not take place in my lifetime; I will never consent to it.”
Ginevra kept silence.
“Ginevra,” continued the baron, “have you reflected that Luigi is the son of the man who killed your brother?”
“He was six years old when that crime was committed; he was, therefore, not guilty of it,” she replied.
“He is a Porta!” cried Bartolomeo.
“I have never shared that hatred,” said Ginevra, eagerly. “You did not bring me up to think a Porta must be a monster. How could I know that one of those whom you thought you had killed survived? Is it not natural that you should now yield your vendetta to my feelings?”
“A Porta!” repeated Piombo. “If his father had found you in your bed you would not be living now; he would have taken your life a hundred times.”
“It may be so,” she answered; “but his son has given me life, and more than life. To see Luigi is a happiness without which I cannot live. Luigi has revealed to me the world of sentiments. I may, perhaps, have seen faces more beautiful than his, but none has ever charmed me thus; I may have heard voices — no, no, never any so melodious! Luigi loves me; he will be my husband.”
“Never,” said Piombo. “I would rather see you in your coffin, Ginevra.”
The old Corsican rose and began to stride up and down the salon, dropping the following sentences, one by one, after pauses which betrayed his agitation.
“You think you can bend my will. Undeceive yourself. A Porta shall never be my son; that is my decree. Let there be no further question of this between us. I am Bartolomeo di Piombo; do you hear me, Ginevra?”
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 108
