‘And your sister, my dear Powys?’ he asked, as one returning to the consideration of shadows.

‘My sister accompanies me, but not to the opera.’

‘For another campaign—­hein?’

‘To winter in Italy, at all events.’

Carlo Ammiani entered and embraced Merthyr Powys warmly.  The Englishman was at home among Italians:  Pericles, feeling that he was not so, and regarding them all as a community of fever-patients without hospital, retired.  To his mind it was the vilest treason, the grossest selfishness, to conspire or to wink at the sacrifice of a voice like Vittoria’s to such a temporal matter as this, which they called patriotism.  He looked on it as one might look on the Hindoo drama of a Suttee.  He saw in it just that stupid action of a whole body of fanatics combined to precipitate the devotion of a precious thing to extinction.  And worse; for life was common, and women and Hindoo widows were common; but a Vittorian voice was but one in a generation—­in a cycle of years.  The religious belief of the connoisseur extended to the devout conception that her voice was a spiritual endowment, the casting of which priceless jewel into the bloody ditch of patriots was far more tragic and lamentable than any disastrous concourse of dedicated lives.  He shook the lobby with his tread, thinking of the great night this might have been but for Vittoria’s madness.  The overture was coming to an end.  By tightening his arms across his chest he gained some outward composure, and fixed his eyes upon the stage.

While sitting with Laura Piaveni and Merthyr Powys, Ammiani saw the apparition of Captain Weisspriess in his mother’s box.  He forgot her injunction, and hurried to her side, leaving the doors open.  His passion of anger spurned her admonishing grasp of his arm, and with his glove he smote the Austrian officer on the face.  Weisspriess plucked his sword out; the house rose; there was a moment like that of a wild beast’s show of teeth.  It passed:  Captain Weisspriess withdrew in obedience to General Pierson’s command.  The latter wrote on a slip of paper that two pieces of artillery should be placed in position, and a squad of men about the doors:  he handed it out to Weisspriess.

‘I hope,’ the General said to Carlo, ’we shall be able to arrange things for you without the interposition of the authorities.’

Carlo rejoined, ’General, he has the blood of our family on his hands.  I am ready.’

The General bowed.  He glanced at the countess for a sign of maternal weakness, saw none, and understood that a duel was down in the morrow’s bill of entertainments, as well as a riot possibly before dawn.  The house had revealed its temper in that short outburst, as a quivering of quick lightning-flame betrays the forehead of the storm.

Countess Ammiani bade her son make fast the outer door.  Her sedate energies could barely control her agitation.  In helping Angelo Guidascarpi to evade the law, she had imperilled her son and herself.  Many of the Bolognese sbirri were in pursuit of Angelo.  Some knew his person; some did not; but if those two before whom she had identified Angelo as being her son Carlo chanced now to be in the house, and to have seen him, and heard his name, the risks were great and various.