“Thanks, uncle!  Good-by, I wish you well through your meeting.”

“We shall see each other at dinner?”

“Yes.  A rivederla!”

CHAPTER X

The Contessa Violante

The Contessa Violante Marliani lived, as has been said, with her great-aunt, a sister of the Cardinal.  They occupied a small house nearly contiguous to the palace, which was almost more their home than their own dwelling.  The Marchesa Lanfredi, the Cardinal’s sister, though a great-aunt, was not yet sixty years old.  She had been left a childless widow, very scantily provided for, early in life, and had retired from Bologna, her husband’s native place, to live first at Foligno, of which city her brother had been bishop, and afterwards at Ravenna, to which he had been subsequently promoted.  The Cardinal was six or seven years her senior.  His elder brother, the grandfather of the Lady Violante, had inherited the family estates in the neighbourhood of Pesaro, and had died, leaving them to his only son, Violante’s father, when the latter was a very young man.

This Conte Alberto Marliani had married for love, as it is called.  That is to say, that he had not married for any of the reasons for which marriages among people of his rank and his country are usually made; but had been attracted by a pretty gentle face seen in a Roman ball-room.  The pretty gentle face had remained always gentle; but had soon ceased to be pretty.

The Contessa Marliani was inclined to devotion.  The Conte was very much disinclined to anything of the sort.  He soon got tired of his wife, repented of his marriage, and commenced an active system of breaking her heart.  It was not a very difficult task, for she was as gentle in spirit as in face.  He completed it when his only child Violante was about nine years old.  But he had also completed, much about the same time, the entire dissipation of the never very large Marliani property.  And it so happened that, very shortly afterwards, his own career was brought to a conclusion, which his relatives felt to have overtaken him a few years too late!  He was travelling from Rome down to Pesaro to complete the sale of the last portion of the estates, the proceeds of which had been anticipated, when he was very opportunely drowned in attempting to cross the Tiber swollen by flood.

The little Violante, thus left an almost destitute orphan, was nevertheless a personage of some importance.  She was the only remaining scion of the family; and the position of her great-uncle seemed to promise a renewed period of prosperity and fortune to the old name.  Violante was the Cardinal Legate’s natural and sole heir.  The Cardinal was a very rich man; and in amassing wealth and attaining honours, he had, like a true Italian, never thought the less of the additions to, and provisions for, the fortunes and splendour of the family name, which he was winning, because he was himself a priest, and would leave no heirs of his name.  The peculiarities in the position of a sacerdotal aristocracy have engrafted the passion of nepotism in the hearts, as well as the practice of it in the manners, of the members of Rome’s hierarchy.