The foregoing narrative changed the intentions of the Italian captain;no longer did he think of making a Marchesa di Montefiore of Juana di Mancini.He recognized the blood of the Maran as in the glance the girl had given from behind the blinds,in the trick she had just played to satisfy her curiosity,and also in the parting look she had cast upon him.The libertine wanted a virtuous woman for a wife.
The adventure was full of danger,but danger of a kind that never daunts the least courageous man,for love and pleasure followed it.
The apprentice sleeping in the shop,the cook bivouacking in the kitchen,Perez and his wife sleeping,no doubt,the wakeful sleep of the aged,the echoing sonority of the old mansion,the close surveillance of the girl in the day-time,--all these things were obstacles,and made success a thing well-nigh impossible.But Montefiore had in his favor against all impossibilities the blood of the Maran as which gushed in the heart of that inquisitive girl,Italian by birth,Spanish in principles,virgin indeed,but impatient to love.Passion,the girl,and Montefiore were ready and able to defy the whole universe.
Montefiore,impelled as much by the instinct of a man of gallantry as by those vague hopes which cannot be explained,and to which we give the name of presentiments (a word of astonishing verbal accuracy),Montefiore spent the first hours of the night at his window,endeavoring to look below him to the secret apartment where,undoubtedly,the merchant and his wife had hidden the love and joyfulness of their old age.The ware-room of the "entresol"separated him from the rooms on the ground-floor.The captain therefore could not have recourse to noises significantly made from one floor to the other,an artificial language which all lovers know well how to create.But chance,or it may have been the young girl herself,came to his assistance.At the moment when he stationed himself at his window,he saw,on the black wall of the courtyard,a circle of light,in the center of which the silhouette of Juana was clearly defined;the consecutive movement of the arms,and the attitude,gave evidence that she was arranging her hair for the night.
"Is she alone?"Montefiore asked himself;"could I,without danger,lower a letter filled with coin and strike it against that circular window in her hiding-place?"At once he wrote a note,the note of a man exiled by his family to Elba,the note of a degraded marquis now a mere captain of equipment.
Then he made a cord of whatever he could find that was capable of being turned into string,filled the note with a few silver crowns,and lowered it in the deepest silence to the center of that spherical gleam.
"The shadows will show if her mother or the servant is with her,"thought Montefiore."If she is not alone,I can pull up the string at once."But,after succeeding with infinite trouble in striking the glass,a single form,the little figure of Juana,appeared upon the wall.The young girl opened her window cautiously,saw the note,took it,and stood before the window while she read it.In it,Montefiore had given his name and asked for an interview,offering,after the style of the old romances,his heart and hand to the Signorina Juana di Mancini--a common trick,the success of which is nearly always certain.At Juana's age,nobility of soul increases the dangers which surround youth.A poet of our day has said:"Woman succumbs only to her own nobility.The lover pretends to doubt the love he inspires at the moment when he is most beloved;the young girl,confident and proud,longs to make sacrifices to prove her love,and knows the world and men too little to continue calm in the midst of her rising emotions and repel with contempt the man who accepts a life offered in expiation of a false reproach."Ever since the constitution of societies the young girl finds herself torn by a struggle between the caution of prudent virtue and the evils of wrong-doing.Often she loses a love,delightful in prospect,and the first,if she resists;on the other hand,she loses a marriage if she is imprudent.Casting a glance over the vicissitudes of social life in Paris,it is impossible to doubt the necessity of religion;and yet Paris is situated in the forty-eighth degree of latitude,while Tarragona is in the forty-first.The old question of climates is still useful to narrators to explain the sudden denouements,the imprudence,or the resistances of love.
Montefiore kept his eyes fixed on the exquisite black profile projected by the gleam upon the wall.Neither he nor Juana could see each other;a troublesome cornice,vexatiously placed,deprived them of the mute correspondence which may be established between a pair of lovers as they bend to each other from their windows.Thus the mind and the attention of the captain were concentrated on that luminous circle where,without perhaps knowing it herself,the young girl would,he thought,innocently reveal her thoughts by a series of gestures.But no!The singular motions she proceeded to make gave not a particle of hope to the expectant lover.Juana was amusing herself by cutting up his missive.But virtue and innocence sometimes imitate the clever proceedings inspired by jealousy to the Bartholos of comedy.Juana,without pens,ink,or paper,was replying by snip of scissors.Presently she refastened the note to the string;the officer drew it up,opened it,and read by the light of his lamp one word,carefully cut out of the paper:COME.
