Cupid, who really can only be led or driven by parents and guardians on the same principle on which Paddy is said to have succeeded in driving his pig from Cork to Dublin,—“by making the cratur think it’s from Dublin to Cork, that I’m wanting him to go!”
If cousin Giulia had been out of the question, really Beppo might have done worse than make up to Lisa Bartoldi, the rich Fano attorney’s only daughter; as his father, and Don Evandro, and Lisa’s father, old Sandro Bartoldi, wished him to do.
“Ay, if cousin Giulia were out of the question! as she would have been if Paolo Vanni had never taken her to live at Bella Luce.”
“See what comes of doing a charitable action, and sacrificing one’s own interest to one’s goodness of heart! It’s always the way!” said old Paolo Vanni one day, in talking the grievance over with his guide, philosopher, and friend, Don Evandro.
The priest did not answer him save by a steady and meaning look right into the old man’s eyes; the full translation and meaning of which I take to have been, that that able divine and confessor wished to intimate that his view of the circumstances in question placed that bringing home of the orphan cousin on the debtor, and not at all on the creditor, side of that double-entry account between his parishioner and the Recording Angel, which it was his duty to keep properly posted up.
And, after all, it was not so clear that all would have gone upon wheels—as the Italian phrase has it—even if cousin Giulia had never come to Bella Luce. Beppo might possibly have looked kindly on Lisa. But the attorney’s daughter was not a bit more disposed to accept Beppo Vanni for a husband than he was to take her to wife. And that, at all events, was not cousin Giulia’s fault! And though old Sandro Bartoldi was very desirous that his daughter should marry all Paolo Vanni’s hoarded scudi, he was far too doting a father to his motherless girl to have attempted compulsion.
And really Lisa Bartoldi was a very nice girl,—pretty, delicate-featured, golden-haired, blue-eyed, very fragile-looking, and slender. Worse wrong could not have been done her than to place her side by side with Giulia Vanni. It was to make her appear a poor, washed-out, faded, half-alive, wisp of a creature by contrast with that richly-developed and magnificent organisation! Her hair was really golden when the sun lent a little real golden light to tinge it. Her complexion was really charmingly delicate, with the faintest possible tint of the blush-rose in the cheek. But by the side of Giulia she seemed to fade into a general whity-brown atony of colour, like wood-ashes that still glow feebly in the gloom but fade into lightless grey when the sun’s beam touches them. “Che vuole!”[1] as the gossips said. Poor Lisa had been born and had grown up in a very dull house, in a very dull street, in the very dull town of Fano, while Giulia had been drinking from morning to night the free, fresh air of the breezy Apennine. What chance had Lisa in sleepy, stuffy Fano, from which even the sea-breeze is shut out by its walls, and by a range of sand-hills still higher than they, with a creep to mass in a neighbouring church for her whole dissipation, and a crawl on the passeggiata[2] under the lime-trees on festa days for her sole exercise?
Lisa knew, however, a great many things that Giulia did not;—necessarily so. Not that, to the best of my judgment, she was in any degree the cleverer girl, or had the more powerful intellect of the two. In the first place, I have a great notion of the truth of the mens sana in corpore sano; and, in the next place, there was always a sort of feeble, sickly sentimentalism—a great deal more common on the northern than on the southern side of the Alps—about Lisa, which did not give me the idea of a strongly-constituted mind. But, of course, she was by far the more cultivated, had far more pretension to lady-like manners—(though it must be understood that there is infinitely less difference in this respect between one woman and another in Italy than among ourselves, the manners of the lower classes being better, and those of the upper strata of society worse, or at least less refined, less educated, and less conventional, than those of the corresponding classes at home)—and to refinement. Though, as to lady-like feeling, my own impression is, that Giulia’s sentiments, if one could have got at her heart and seen them there in situ, instead of coming at them through the medium of her own exposition of them, would be found to be such as might have done honour to any crusader-descended duchess, and set a very useful example to not a few such.
And Lisa Bartoldi was a good girl in her way, too. But dull, herculean Beppo, with the frank, deep blue, steadfast eyes, and the honest, sunburnt, open face, would have nothing to say to her, preferring his nature-created duchess. Not that it ever had entered into his head to compare the two. Compare our Giulia to Lisa Bartoldi! or, indeed, to any other of mortal mould!!
No; he could have nothing to say to Lisa—nothing to say to her, that is, in the way of love, for they were very good friends, perfectly understood one another, and sympathised upon the subject, and would speak very freely upon it when they met, as was often the case, on occasion of the young farmer of Bella Luce coming into Fano on market-days.
And indeed they found much to say to each other upon such occasions. For Lisa had a secret of her own—a secret the joint property of herself and a certain captain of Bersaglieri,[3] one Giacopo Brilli—which she had no objection to trust to great, honest Beppo, in return for his bewailments of his hapless passion. The exchange was hardly a fair one; for Lisa was happy in her love, and, with a little perseverance, had not much to fear from the rigour of a doting father, who, however, for the present, declared that it was altogether impossible to bestow his heiress daughter on a man who proposed “no consideration, positively none!” in return. It would be a one-sided and altogether unformal contract. Besides, it was no