"You take far too merciful and charitable a view," answered Laura, with some scorn.

"No, on the contrary, if she were quite what she used to be, she would be more dangerous--she would not make mistakes. Two or three years ago she would not have gratuitously thrown herself into danger as she has now. She would not have made such a failure as this."

"And what a failure it is! Do you know? It was very puzzling at first.

To know positively that you never could have received those letters, and yet to see that they are still in existence, addressed to you, and opened in your peculiar way. I felt as though I were in a dream."

"I wonder you did not feel inclined to believe me guilty. The evidence was almost as strong as it could be. In your position I should have hesitated."

"Would you have believed such a thing of me, if it had been just as it is, only if the letters had gone to you instead of to me?" asked Laura.

"Certainly not!" exclaimed Ghisleri, with strong emphasis. "That would be quite another matter."

"I do not see that it would. You would have been exactly in my position, as you hinted a moment ago."

"I was not thinking of you. The day I do not believe in you I shall not believe in G.o.d. You are the last thing I have left to believe in--and the best, my dear friend."

He was very much in earnest, as Laura knew from the tone of his voice.

But she would not look at him just then, because she felt that he was looking at her, and she preferred that their eyes should not meet.

"Will you do anything about this?" she asked, after a pause, and not referring to what he had last said. "Will you destroy those vile things?"

"Since they are addressed to me, I suppose I have a right to do so,"

answered Ghisleri, and he began slowly to tear up the sheets of the first letter.

"There can be no doubt about their being genuine?" asked Laura, with sudden emotion.

"Not at all, I should say. But you are the best judge of that. You should know her handwriting better than I. If you like," he added, with a short laugh, "I will go and show them to her and ask her if she wrote them. Shall I?"

"Oh, no! Do not do that!" exclaimed Laura, who knew that he was quite capable of following such a course as he suggested.

There was apparently nothing to be done. Laura believed that any attempt to make use of the two remaining letters would be as abortive as the first, and there could certainly be no use in keeping those which had been sent. On the contrary, it was possible that if they were preserved, chance might throw them into hands in which they might become far more dangerous than they were.

"Shall I write to Maria B., whoever she is?" asked Laura.

"You might send her another five francs," answered Ghisleri, grimly. "It would show her how much you value the doc.u.ments she has for sale."

"I will," said Laura, with a laugh. "How furious she will be! Of course it is Adele who gets these things."

"Of course. Five francs is quite enough."

And Laura, little knowing or guessing how it would be used against her, sent a five-franc note with her card in an envelope and addressed it. On the card she had written in pencil, "For Maria B., with best thanks."

"There is one other thing I would like to do," she said. "But I do not know whether you would approve. It would give me such satisfaction--you know I am only a woman, after all."

"What is that?" asked Ghisleri, "and why should you need my approval?"

"Only this. To-morrow, and perhaps the next day, when she is quite sure I must have received those letters, I would like to drive with you in an open carriage where we should be sure to meet Adele. I would give anything to see her face."

Ghisleri laughed. The womanly side of Laura's nature was becoming more apparent of late, and its manifestations pleased and surprised him. He thought Laura would hardly have seemed human if she had not wished to let Adele see how completely the attempt had failed which she had so ingeniously planned and carried out.

"If anything would make the town talk, that would," he answered. "The only way to manage it would be to get the Princess to go with you and then take me as--" He stopped short, rather awkwardly.

"I should rather go without her," said Laura, turning her face away to hide her amus.e.m.e.nt at the slip of the tongue of which he had been guilty.

In Rome, for Ghisleri to be seen driving with the Princess of Gerano and her daughter would have been almost equivalent to announcing his engagement to Laura.

CHAPTER XXIV.

Adele had not antic.i.p.ated such complete failure in the first instance.

The five-franc note with Laura Arden's card told her plainly enough what her step-sister thought of the matter, but she had no means of finding out whether Ghisleri had been informed of what she had done or not, and her efforts to extract information from him when she met him were not successful. His tone and his manner towards her were precisely the same as formerly, and he was as ready as ever to enter into desultory conversation with her; but if she ventured to lead the talk in such a direction as to find out what she wanted to know, he instantly met her with a counter-allusion to her doings which frightened her and silenced her effectually. So the months pa.s.sed in a sort of petty skirmishing which led to no positive result, and she secretly planned some further step which should complete those she had already taken, reverse Laura's judgment, and completely ruin Pietro Ghisleri with her and before the world. The uneasy workings of her unsettled brain grew more and more tortuous every day, until at last she felt unable to reason the question out without the help of some experienced person. She felt quite sure that there must be some way out of all her difficulties, by a short cut to victory, and that a clever man, a good lawyer, for instance, if he could be deceived into believing the story she had concocted, would know how to make use of it against her enemies. The difficulty was two-fold.

In the first place she must put together such a body of evidence as no experienced advocate could refuse as ground for an action at law, and, secondly, she must find the said advocate and explain the whole matter to him from her own point of view. The action would be brought in self-defence against Pietro Ghisleri, who would be accused of having systematically attempted to levy blackmail. That was the crude form in which the idea suggested itself to Adele when she set to work.

Her conviction now was that Pietro was only partially aware of the substance of the lost confession, and that the letter containing it was still at Gerano. This being the case, she could freely speak of it to her lawyer and describe the contents in any way she pleased, so as to turn the existence of the doc.u.ment to her own advantage. In the letters she had sent Laura and in the other two which she kept by her for future use, she had been careful never to say anything conclusive. Maria B. had indeed spoken of the transaction as being ended, but that could be interpreted as the unfounded supposition of a person not fully acquainted with the facts, and desirous of making money out of them as far as possible. The hardest thing would probably be to produce the woman who was supposed to have written to Laura, in case she should be needed. Money well bestowed, however, would do much towards stimulating the memory of some indigent and unscrupulous person, and the part to be played would, after all, be a small and insignificant one. On the other hand, the weak point in the case would be that Adele, while able to produce an unlimited number of her own letters to Ghisleri, would not have a single line of his writing to show. She could, indeed, fall back upon her own natural sense of caution, and declare that she had destroyed all he had written, in the mistaken belief that it would be safer to do so, and her lawyer could taunt his opponent with his folly in not doing likewise; but that would, after all, be rather a poor expedient. Or it might be pretended that Pietro had invariably written to her in a feigned handwriting signing himself, perhaps, with a single initial, as a precaution in case his letters should fall into the wrong hands. In that case she could produce whatever she chose. The best possible plan would be to extract one or two short notes from him upon which an ambiguous construction might be put by the lawyers. All this, Adele reflected, would need considerable time, and several months must elapse before she could expect to be ready. Her mind, too, worked spasmodically, and she was subject to long fits of apathy and extreme depression in the intervals between her short hours of abnormal activity. She knew that this was the result of the morphia she took in such quant.i.ties, and she resolved to make a great effort to cure herself of the fatal habit, if it were not already too late.

As has been said more than once, Adele Savelli had possessed a very determined will, and it had not yet been altogether destroyed. Having once made up her mind to free herself if she could, she made the attempt bravely and systematically. The result was that, in the course of several months, she had reduced the amount of her daily doses very considerably. The suffering was great, but the object to be gained was great also, and she steeled herself to endure all that a woman could.

She was encouraged, also, by the fact that her mind began to act more regularly and seemed more reliable. Physically, she was growing very weak and was becoming almost emaciated. Francesco Savelli watched her narrowly, and it was his opinion that she could not last long. The Prince of Gerano was very anxious about her all through the spring which followed the events last described, and his wife, though she was far less fond of Adele than in former times, could not but feel a sorrowful regret as she saw the young life that had begun so brightly wearing itself away before her eyes. But the Princess had consolations in another direction. Laura Arden seemed to grow daily more lovely in her mature beauty, and Herbert was growing out of his babyhood into a st.u.r.dy little boy of phenomenal strength and of imperturbably good temper.

Laura was headstrong where Ghisleri was concerned, but in all other respects she was herself still.

The first consequence of Adele's attempt to break the strong friendship which united Laura and Pietro, was to draw them still more closely together, and to make Laura, at least, more defiant of the world's opinion than ever. As for Ghisleri, he almost forgot to ask himself questions. The time to separate for the summer was drawing near, and he knew, when he thought of it, what a different parting this one would be from the one which had preceded it a year earlier. But he tried to think of the present and not of the weary months of solitude he looked forward to between June and November or December. He remembered, in spite of himself, how he had more than once enjoyed the lonely life, even refusing invitations to pleasant places rather than lose a single week of an existence so full of charm. But another interest had been growing, slowly, deep-sown, spreading its roots in silence, and fastening itself about his heart while he had not even suspected that it was there at all. Little by little, without visible manifestation, the strong thing had drawn more strength from his own life, mysteriously absorbing into itself the springs of thought and the sources of emotion, unifying them and a.s.similating them all into something which was a part, and was soon to be the chief part, of his being. And now, above the harrowed surface of that inner ground on which such fierce battles had been fought throughout his years of storm, a soft shoot raised its delicate head, not timidly, but quietly and un.o.btrusively, to meet the warm sunshine of the happier days to come. He saw it, and knew it, and held his peace, dreading it and yet loving it, for it was love itself; but not knowing truly what the little blade would come to, whether it was to bloom all at once into a bright and poisonous flower of evil, bringing to him the death of all possible love for ever; or whether it would grow up slowly, calm and fair, from leaf to shrub, from shrub to sapling, from sapling at last to tree, straight, tall, and strong, able to face tempest and storm without bending its lofty head, rich to bear for him in the end the stately blossom and the heavenly fruit of pa.s.sionate true love.

For before the day of parting came Pietro Ghisleri knew that he loved Laura Arden. Ever since that moment when she had quietly given him Adele's letter and had told him that she would believe no evil of him, he had begun to suspect that she was no longer what she had been to him once and what she had remained so long, a friend, kind, almost affectionate, for whom he would give all he had, but only a friend after all. It was different now. The thought of bidding Laura good-bye, even for a few months, sent a thrill of pain through his heart which he had not expected to feel--the small, sharp pain which tells a man the truth about a woman and himself as nothing else can. The prospect of the lonely summer was dreary.

Ghisleri was surprised, and almost startled. During nearly two years and a half he had honestly believed that he could never love again, and if a sincere wish, formulated in the shape he unconsciously chose, could be called a prayer, he earnestly prayed that so long as he lived he might not feel what he had felt very strongly twice, at least, since he had been a boy. But such a man could hardly expect that such a wish, or prayer, could be granted or heard, so long as he was spending many hours of each succeeding week in the company of Laura Arden. In the full strength of manhood, pa.s.sionate, sensitive beneath a cold exterior, always attracted by women, and almost always repelled by men, Pietro Ghisleri could hardly expect that in one moment the capacity for loving should be wholly rooted out and destroyed by something like an act of will, and as the consequence of his being disappointed and disgusted by his own fickleness. The new pa.s.sion might turn out to be greater or less than the two which had hitherto disturbed his existence, but it could hardly be greater than the first. It would necessarily be different from either, in that it would be hopeless from the beginning, as he thought.

For where he was very sincere, he was rarely very confident in himself, if the stake was woman's love, a fact more common with men who are at once sensitive and strong than is generally known.

But his first impulse was not to go away and escape from the temptation, as it would have been some time earlier. There was no reason for doing that, as he had reflected before, when he had considered the advisability of breaking off all intercourse with Laura for the sake of silencing the world's idle chatter. He was perfectly free to love her, and to tell her so, if he chose. No one could blame him for wishing to marry her; at most he might be thought foolish for desiring anything so very improbable as that she should accept him. But he was quite indifferent to what any one might think of him excepting Laura herself.

One resolution only he made and did his best to keep, and it was a good one. He made up his mind that he would not make love to her, as he understood the meaning of the term. Possibly, as he told himself with a little scorn, this was no resolution at all, but only a way of expressing his conviction that he was quite unable to do what he so magnanimously refused to attempt. For his instinct told him that his love for Laura had already taken a shape which differed wholly from all former pa.s.sions, one unfamiliar to him, one which would need a new expression if it continued to be sincere. But that he doubted. He was quite ready to admit that when Laura came back in the autumn, this early beginning of love would have disappeared again, and that the old strong friendship would be found in its place, solid, firmly based, and unchanged, a permanent happiness and a constant satisfaction. He was no longer a boy, to imagine that the first breath of love was the forerunner of an all-destroying storm in which he must perish, or of a clear, fair wind before which the ship of his life was to run her straight course to the haven of death's peace. He had seen too much fickleness in himself and in others to believe in any such thing; but if he had antic.i.p.ated either it would have been the tempest. On the whole, he did the wisest thing he could. He changed nothing in his manner towards Laura and he waited as calmly as he was able, to see what the end would be. Once only before Laura went away the conversation turned upon love, and oddly enough it was Laura who brought up the subject.

She had been talking about little Herbert, as she often did, planning out his future according to her own wishes and making it happy in her own way, even to sketching the wife he was to win some five and twenty years hence.

"I should like her to be very fair," she said. "Herbert will be dark, as I am, and they say that contrasts attract each other most permanently.

But of course, though she must be beautiful, she must have ever so many other good points besides. In the first place, she must be capable of loving him with all her heart and soul. I suppose that is really the hardest thing of all to find."

"The 'one-great-pa.s.sion' sort of person, you mean, I fancy," observed Ghisleri, with a smile. "A rare bird--I agree with you."

"I doubt whether the individual exists," said Laura. "Except by accident, or when the course of true love runs so very smoothly that it would need superhuman ingenuity to fall off it."

"You are a constant revelation to me!" Ghisleri laughed, and looked at her.

"What is there surprising about what I said? You are not a believer in the universal stability of the human heart, are you?"

"Hardly that! But women very often are--at first. And then, when they see that change is possible, they are apt to say that there is no such thing as true love at all, whereas we know that there is."

"In other words, you think that I take the sensible view. After all, what is the use of expecting humanity to be superhuman?"