CHAPTER XXVI

I DISAPPOINT MY FRIENDS

My forebodings were more than fulfilled.  The next time, which was at a week’s interval, that I presented myself at the Villa San Giorgio, Donna Aurelia, in full reception, turned her back upon me and left the room in company of the Marchese Semifonte.  I suffered the indignity as best I might—­I did not quit the company; nobody, I flatter myself, knew what pangs of mortification I was feeling.  I saw no more of Aurelia that evening, and a conversation which I had with Donna Giulia made matters no better.  She spoke to me very plainly and with some warmth.

“Here you had, but a few days ago, your mistress in a most promising humour,” she said, “detesting her doctor, yet resolved to have him back in order to give you a countenance.  In Count Giraldi and myself you have, I take leave to say, two of the most complaisant friends in Europe; yet what are you doing?  You maintain, for reasons best known to yourself, a pretty girl in your lodgings, pranked out in silks and furbelows—­a runaway from a house of discipline—­and (if it is all true that they tell me) one who, if she belongs to anybody, dare not belong, certainly, to you.  Really, Don Francis, you are exorbitant.  Pray, do you propose to us to keep Aurelia here in order that she may listen to your poetry, and then to return from your intellectual feast to the arms of your little peasant?  And Aurelia is to know it and acquiesce?  Good heavens! do you know that she is young, fresh, and charming, and of Siena?  I ask your pardon, Don Francis—­but oh, my perverse young friend, why on earth don’t you take her?”

“Dearest lady!” I cried out, “what under Heaven am I to take?  I adore Aurelia; I ask nothing better than leave to serve her, to kneel at her feet.  If she is cruel to me, that is my pride.  If she is kind, that is my humiliation.  If she were to kill me, that would be my topmost reward.”

“Very true indeed,” she said.  “And what if she were to do, as I should certainly do, ignore you altogether?”

“I should not cease to love her.  I should have nothing to complain of,” I said.

She tossed her hands up in despair.  “If this is what conies of reading your Dante, I advise the ‘Song of Solomon,’” she said.  “I have never opened the ’Divine Comedy’—­still less the ‘Vita Nova’; but I consider the author a donkey, and am sure that was the opinion of his Donna Beatrice.”

Count Giraldi, for some reason which I could not then comprehend, did not care to talk of my affair.  He said nothing of Aurelia to me—­and, so far as I could see, avoided the lady herself as much as the discussion of her position.  He told me that he had been able to offer a judgeship of the Court of Cassation to Dr. Lanfranchi, and that he was in great hopes that he would take it.  In that case he would, of course, reside in Florence; and “The rest,” said he, “I shall leave to you.”