The duchess is neutral ground.  Come here to-night.  And don’t talk of me, but say that a friend asks how she is, and hopes—­the best things you can say for me.  I must go up to their confounded chatter again.  Tell her there’s no fear, none whatever.  You all hate us, naturally; but you know that Austrian officers are gentlemen.  Don’t speak my name to her just yet.  Unless, of course, she should happen to allude to me, which is unlikely.  I had a dismal idea that her husband was at Novara.”

The tender-hearted duchess sent a message to Vittoria, bidding her not to forget that she had promised her at Meran to ‘love her always.’

“And tell her,” she said to Merthyr, “that I do not think I shall have my rooms open for the concert to-morrow night.  I prefer to let Antonio-Pericles go mad.  She will not surely consider that she is bound by her promise to him?  He drags poor Irma from place to place to make sure the miserable child is not plotting to destroy his concert, as that man Sarpo did.  Irma is half dead, and hasn’t the courage to offend him.  She declares she depends upon him for her English reputation.  She has already caught a violent cold, and her sneezing is frightful.  I have never seen so abject a creature.  I have no compassion at the sight of her.”

That night Merthyr heard from Wilfrid that a plot against Carlo Ammiani did exist.  He repeated things he had heard pass between Countess d’Isorella and Irma in the chamber of Pericles before the late battle.  Modestly confessing that he was ‘for some reasons’ in high favour with Countess Lena, he added that after a long struggle he had brought her to confess that her sister had sworn to have Countess Alessandra Ammiani begging at her feet.

By mutual consent they went to consult the duchess.  She repelled the notion of Austrian women conspiring.  “An Austrian noble lady—­do you think it possible that she would act secretly to serve a private hatred?  Surely I may ask you, for my sake, to think better of us?”

Merthyr showed her an opening to his ground by suggesting that Anna’s antipathy to Victoria might spring more from a patriotic than a private source.

“Oh!  I will certainly make inquiries, if only to save Anna’s reputation with her enemies,” the duchess answered rather proudly.

It would have been a Novara to Pericles if Vittoria had refused to sing.  He held the pecuniarily-embarrassed duchess sufficiently in his power to command a concert at her house; his argument to those who pressed him to spare Vittoria in a season of grief running seriously, with visible contempt of their intellects, thus:  “A great voice is an ocean.  You cannot drain it with forty dozen opera-hats.  It is something found—­an addition to the wealth of this life.  Shall we not enjoy what we find?  You do not wear out a picture by looking at it; likewise you do not wear out a voice by listening to it.  A bird has wings;—­here is a voice.