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Corleone had suddenly taken it into his head to come home for a few weeks. Then Bianca's brother, Gianforte Campodonico, had appeared and had taken a violent dislike to Pietro Ghisleri, so that Bianca feared a quarrel between them. Before anything had happened, she had induced Ghisleri to go to Switzerland, and she herself had gone to Sicily, whither her brother had accompanied her.
But he neither knew that she had meant him to say it, nor did he judge of the vast gulf her mind must have instantaneously bridged, from the outpouring of her fancied injuries and of her hatred for Francesca Campodonico, to the unconcealable satisfaction his words gave her. "I have heard him say that, too," she answered a moment later. "But he did not mean it.
Dalrymple's judgment was generally keen enough about people, and he had understood that such a woman as Donna Francesca Campodonico would certainly not make a personal friend of a painter, and allow him to occupy rooms in her palace, unless his character were altogether above suspicion.
It was the companionship of Bosio that she missed most keenly and constantly, through the long, empty hours. No one who called was received during those first days. It chanced that Cardinal Campodonico had gone to Rome to attend one of the consistories for the creation of new cardinals, which are often held shortly before Christmas. Had he been in Naples, he would of course have been admitted.
He thought that Reanda looked better, less harassed and less thin, than for a long time. He had at once returned to his old peaceful life and enjoyed it, and had evidently not the smallest intention of ever demanding satisfaction of his former friend. Francesca Campodonico had listened in nervous silence to Reanda's story. "She has done me a kindness," he concluded. "It is the first.
And he and his paid it in full, and more also, after years had passed, even to generations then unborn. This is the first act, as it were, of all the story, and between this one and the beginning of the next a few years must pass quickly, if not altogether in silence. IN the year 1861 Donna Francesca Campodonico was already a widow.
He felt strangely drawn to Francesca Campodonico. There was something in her face that very faintly reminded him of his dead wife, her kinswoman, and of his dead daughter, another of her race. His gloomy northern nature felt the fatality of it all. He never could repent of what he had done. The golden light of his one short happiness shone through the shrouding veil of fatal time.
He had such a friend, indeed, in Francesca Campodonico, but he was too proud to turn to her, and too deeply conscious that she had done all she could to give Gloria the social position the latter coveted. Francesca, on her side, was not slow to notice that something was radically wrong. Reanda's manner had changed by degrees since his marriage.
Whatever she found worth keeping she had caused to be restored just so far as to be useful, and she had known how to supply the deficiencies with modern material in such a way as not to destroy the harmony of the whole. It should be sufficiently clear from these facts that Donna Francesca Campodonico was a woman of taste and culture, in the modern sense.
"Take all rights into your own hands and tell her everything, just as you have told me. You know her well. If she is kind-hearted, as I think she is, she will pay your brother's debts, take over the estates herself, since it is time, and manage that Cardinal Campodonico shall never suspect that there has been anything wrong with the administration.
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