Honoré de Balzac: Premium Collection. Honore de Balzac
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