CHAPTER II

The Marchese Lamberto di Castelmare

Signor Leandro Lombardoni felt himself to be abundantly repaid for his hour of waiting in the cold street, and for the bajocchi expended on the glass of punch, by the position he occupied at the Circolo all that evening.  He was the centre of every group anxious to gain the earliest information respecting a matter of the highest interest to all the society of Ravenna.  And the matter belonged to a class of subjects respecting which the Conte Leandro was especially desirous of being thought to be thoroughly well-informed, and to have interest in the highest quarters.

The fact was, that Signor Ercole Stadione, the Ravenna impresario, had undertaken a journey to Milan, in the hope of accomplishing a negotiation in which the whole of the smaller provincial city had felt itself deeply interested.  He had gone thither for the purpose of engaging the celebrated prima donna, Bianca Lalli, to sing at Ravenna during the coming Carnival.  The pretension was a very ambitious one on the part of the impresario—­or, as it may be more properly said, on the part of the city—­for the step was by no means the result of his own independent and unaided enterprise.  Such matters were not done in that way in the good old times in the smaller cities of Italy.  The matter had been much debated among the leading patrons of the musical drama in the little town.  The chances of success had been canvassed.  The financial question had been considered.  Certain sacrifices had been determined on.  And it had been settled what terms the impresario should be empowered to offer.

It had been fully felt and recognised that the hope of engaging the famous Bianca Lalli to sing at remote little Ravenna, during a carnival, was a singularly ambitious one.  But there had been circumstances which had led those who had conceived the bold idea to hope that it would not prove to be so impossible as it might at first sight appear.  There had been whispers of certain difficulties--untoward circumstances at Milan.  Ill-natured things had been said of the “divina Lalli.”  Doubtless she had been more sinned against than sinning.  But to put the matter crudely—­which, of course, no Italian who had to speak of it, was ever so ill-bred as to do—­it would seem that the great singer had placed herself, or had been placed, in such relations with somebody or other bearing a great name in the Lombard capital, that the paternal Austrian government, at the instance of that somebody’s family, had seen good to hint, in some gentle, but unmistakable manner, that it might, on the whole, be better that the divine Lalli should bless some other city with her presence during the ensuing season.  And then came the consideration, that in all probability most of the great cities of the peninsula had, by that time, made their arrangements for the coming Carnival.  Not impossible, too, that the “diva” herself