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Orsino had not been rebuked for his curiosity and would have asked another question if he had known how to frame it. An awkward silence followed. Maria Consuelo raised her eyes slowly and looked thoughtfully into Orsino's face. "I see," she said at last. "You are curious. I do not know whether you have any right to be have you?" "I wish I had!" exclaimed Orsino thoughtlessly.
She appeared to be singularly calm. After hesitating another moment Orsino rose to his feet. He had made up his mind what to say, for it was little enough, but his voice trembled a little. "Good-bye, Madame." Maria Consuelo started slightly and looked up, as though to see whether he really meant to go at that moment.
If Maria Consuelo returned suddenly to her original point of view maintaining that the promise given to her dying husband was still binding, Orsino determined that he would go to Spicca in a last resort.
"Keep your temper, Orsino," said Spicca quietly. "Quarrelling is always ridiculous unless somebody is killed, and then it is inconvenient. If you understood the nature of my acquaintance with Maria Consuelo with Madame d'Aranjuez, you would see that while not meaning to spy upon you in the least, I could not be ignorant of your movements."
"Do not talk of dying " "No. It is not necessary. I realise it enough, and you need not realise it at all. I have not much to tell you, but a little truth will sometimes destroy many falsehoods. You remember the story about Lucrezia Ferris? Maria Consuelo wrote it to you." "Remember it! Could I forget it?" "You may as well. There is not a word of truth in it. Lucrezia Ferris is not her mother."
Consuelo gravely refused the jewels and ornaments he offered her, and the count was strangely annoyed. He was thrilled with unknown emotions by Consuelo's singing, and his patrician soul could not realise that this poor little pupil of Porpora's was not to be won by the ordinary methods, which he had hitherto employed successfully in the conquest of opera singers.
He was now called to account for every farthing with the most malignant accuracy, and a sum of money, lost by ill-management, not being satisfactorily accounted for, his new tormentor threatened him with prison and trial. As he muttered to his late pupil that he would not survive this disgrace, she stepped forward and shielded him after the fashion of Consuelo.
Maria Consuelo had sold herself to free him from his difficulties, to save him from the terrible alternatives of either wasting his life as Del Ferice's slave or of ruining his family. With a smothered exclamation, between an oath and a groan of pain, Orsino threw himself upon the divan and buried his face in his hands. It is kinder to leave him there for a time, alone.
"Only we must be in Berlin in a week's time." The carriage and horses were already in the courtyard, and in a few minutes the baron and Consuelo were on their journey to the castle of the Rudolstadts. At the doorway of the castle they were met by the aged canoness, who, seizing Consuelo by the arm, said: "We have not a moment to lose. Albert begins to grow impatient.
Strangers who have a large common ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the grapple of genuine converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon, Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they can leave generalities and begin at once to speak by figures. Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and that embrace the widest range of facts.
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