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The Duke was present at the cabinet meetings but took no part in the direction of affairs. His mind was lost in a maze of metaphysical speculations; and even these served him merely as some cunningly-contrived toy with which to trick his leisure. His revocation of the charter had necessarily separated him from Gamba and the advanced liberals.
Odo reported this to Gamba, who heard with a two-edged smile. "Yes," was his comment, "he fears me enough to want to see me safe in his fold." Odo flushed at the implication. "And why not?" said he. "Could you not serve the cause better by attaching yourself openly to the liberals than by lurking in the ditch to throw mud at both parties?" "The liberals!" sneered Gamba. "Where are they?
"Adjutant," said one of the soldiers in a low voice, "let us have no quarrels with Mateo." Gamba appeared evidently embarrassed. He spoke in an undertone with the soldiers who had already visited the house.
The Duke's gift of Boscofolto to the Countess Belverde had stirred up a swarm of epigrams, and the most malignant among them, Crescenti averred, were openly ascribed to Gamba. "A few more imprudences," he added, "must cost him his post; and if your excellency has any influence with him I would urge its being used to restrain him from such excesses."
Trescorre then obtained his appointment as assistant to the Duke's librarian, a good old priest engrossed in compiling the early history of Pianura from the ducal archives; and this post Gamba had now filled for two years. "It must," said Odo, "be one singularly congenial to you, if, as I have heard, you are of a studious habit.
While he spoke of the relative fineness of the ancient and modern ear, maintaining that the reason ancient singers could sing without an accompaniment was that they were trained to sing from the monochord, Owen considered the figure of this tall, fair girl, and wondered if she would elect to remain with her father, playing the viola da gamba in Dulwich, or bolt with a manager that was what generally happened.
In the Signorina V.'s society I found the most advanced reformers of the duchy: among others Signor Gamba, the famous pamphleteer, author of a remarkable treatise on taxation, which had nearly cost him his liberty under the late Duke's reign. He is a man of extreme views and sarcastic tongue, with an irritability of manner that is perhaps the result of bodily infirmities.
Byron arrived in Pisa with the Countess Guiccioli and her brother Pietro Gamba, on November the 1st, at the Lanfranchi Palace, and the Shelleys had apartments at the top of I Tre Palazzi di Chiesa, opposite. Claire, who had been staying with them, and accompanied them on a trip to Spezzia, had now returned to Professor Bojti's at Florence.
The ferment of expectancy that prevailed in Romagna is reflected in the Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, whom young Count Pietro Gamba made a Carbonaro, and who looked forward to seeing the Italians send the barbarians of all nations back to their own dens, as to the most interesting spectacle and moment in existence.
Now, as a patriotic Englishman he loved Huns to be slain, but as the survivor of James Marmaduke Trevor, dilettante expert on the theorbo and the viol da gamba and owner of the peacock and ivory room in Denby Hall, to say nothing of the collector of little china dogs, he could not honestly declare that he enjoyed the various processes of slaying them. "I can't explain," he replied, after a while.
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