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I am sorry to have to speak so plainly to you, but it is not for you, any more than for me, to reproach Gioiachino with being an honest man." She was silent for a few minutes, then knelt down and kissed my hand. When I raised her up and embraced her, I found tears on her cheeks.
She accepted, but hardly returned, my salute, was very silent throughout the preparation and eating of our supper; now and then, glancing at her, I caught her gaze fixed upon me, and fancied that there was a hard light in her eyes. Our companions, Gioiachino and his wife Teresa, rallied us on what they thought to be one of those domestic differences common to the most affectionate couples.
"Good, my lord," she said; "and may your handmaid know the name of the friend whom you propose to send with your cartel to the Cavaliere Aquamorta?" I said that I should ask Gioiachino, our fellow-lodger, to oblige me. "Excellent," said Virginia with irony, "excellent indeed!
At a quarter before seven, Gioiachino with me, armed with a stout cart-whip, I left the Porta del Vescovo and walked briskly over one or two water-meadows towards a retired grove of trees not far from the Pisa road. I flattered myself that we were first in the field; but there I was mistaken.
It was not until Gioiachino and his Teresa were asleep that I could hope to discover what had affected Virginia. She then told me that, as she had been at work that afternoon, kneeling on the boards by the river with the other women, the Cavaliere Aquamorta with a party of gentlemen had come by the meadows and stopped to jest and bandy familiarities with the laundresses.
The cavaliere received the poor fellow with perfect affability, and after a short colloquy with some of his companions, introduced a certain Prince Gandolfo Dolfini, with whom Gioiachino was to arrange a meeting in the fields for seven o'clock on the Wednesday morning. The cavaliere having the choice of weapons, his friend the prince decided for WHIPS.
Gioiachino, a cat's-meat man, waits upon the Cavaliere Aquamorta on behalf of his friend Francesco, a journeyman carpenter!" This made me more angry than I had any business to be, for she was perfectly right from the cavaliere's view of the thing. I said, "Virginia, my condition in this world has never been hidden from you.
I told him of my concern for Virginia, of the deadly perils that beset her, and concluded by assuring him that the one service of any moment which he could do me was to devise me some means of communicating with Gioiachino, the vendor of cat's-meat in Lucca. Belviso had put his head between his knees, and so remained for some time after I had done speaking, in earnest meditation.
Apart from my birthright, which is an advantage not of my own making, I hope I have never been to you other than an honourable man. Gioiachino, who has been a good friend to you and me, certainly deserves no less credit.
My answer to that was that such conduct to the bearer of a gentleman's cartel was unheard of. I added that if the cavaliere prided himself, against all evidence, upon being a gentleman, he was not at all likely to convict himself of being a ruffian. Very ruefully, in the end, the good-natured Gioiachino went out to oblige me. It happens that I was right, or had good grounds for thinking so.
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