"That sort of lady does not much like walking so far as from the Pineta here, I fancy. Besides, I should have overtaken her on the road."

"In any case what is there to be uneasy about. No harm can have happened to her. No such luck, per Bacco!"

"Harm! No; no harm can have happened to her, beyond losing herself in the forest. What I am afraid of is that she has strayed and not been able to find her way. And G.o.d knows how far she may wander. When I tell you that in wandering away from the place where I left her, for not above a quarter of an hour, I lost my way, and that when I found, as I supposed, the place where we had been, I could not be sure whether it was the same spot or not; you may suppose how easy it is to lose oneself. And I don't suppose the poor girl would be able to walk very far. If she has not returned, I must get help and go back to the forest and search till I find her."

"It's far more likely that you will find that she has returned home. I wish, for my part, that she had never set foot within a dozen miles of Ravenna. Just think what it would be! But I trust--I trust we may yet be able to induce your uncle to listen to reason."

"I'll tell you what, Signor Fortini. I should not be surprised if it should be found more possible to make the other party hear reason."

"What, the lady!"

"Yes, the lady--if we set about the matter in the right way."

"Well, Signor Ludovico, it may be that you may understand such matters and such people better than I can pretend to do. It is not improbable.

But my conceptions of the power of persuasion have never risen yet to a belief in the possibility of persuading a dog who has got a lump of b.u.t.ter in his mouth to relinquish it."

"Umph! you are not particularly gallant, Signor Giovacchino. We shall see. But all that must be matter for future conversation. Here we are at her door. Let us see if anything has been heard of her." Ludovico, leaving his companion for an instant in the street, sprang up the stairs to make inquiry; and in the next minute returned looking very much vexed and annoyed, with the information that nothing had been seen or heard of the Diva since she left the house in his company at an early hour that morning.

CHAPTER IX

"Pa.s.sa la Bella Donna e par che dorma"--Ta.s.so

"What's to be done now? I absolutely must find her," said Ludovico, looking, as he felt, exceedingly puzzled and annoyed.

"Well, yes. Considering the nature of the information she gave you this morning, and bearing in mind that her existence in the flesh promises to be the means of leaving you without the price of a crust of bread in the world, and the further fact she was last seen starting on a tete-a-tete expedition with you at six o'clock in the morning, I admit that it is desirable that you should find her," said the lawyer, with somewhat grim pleasantry.

"For heaven's sake, Signor Giovacchino, don't talk in that sort of way, even in jest," replied the young man, looking round at the lawyer with an uneasy eye. "After all, nothing can have happened to her, you know, worse than losing herself in the Pineta."

"Pooh! happen to her. What should happen to her? Either you did not go back to the place where you left her; or, likely enough, after strolling a little away from it, and not finding you, she sat down, and two to one, fell asleep again. I would wager that she is, at this moment, fast asleep under the shadow of a pine-tree, making up for last night."

"But what had I better do? If she is still either sleeping or waking in the forest, I must find her."

"Let us just step as far as the gate, and make some inquiry there. If she returned to the city she must have come to the Porta Nuova. And she could hardly have entered the town without drawing the attention of the men at the gate. Just let us make inquiry there in the first place."

So they went together to the Porta Nuova, and nothing more was said between them during the short walk. But it seemed as if the manifest uneasiness of Ludovico had infected his companion. Yet it was evident that thoughts of a different nature were busy in their minds. The Marchese Ludovico pressed on faster than the old lawyer could keep up with him, and was very unmistakably anxious about the object of his quest, and the tidings which he should be able to hear at the gate.

Signor Fortini had apparently got some other and newly-conceived thought in his mind. He looked two or three times shrewdly and furtively into the face of the young Marchese; and closely compressed his thin lips together, and drew into a knot the s.h.a.ggy eye-brows over his clear and thoughtful eyes. Some notion had been suggested to his mind which very plainly he did not like.

At the gate nothing had been seen of the object of their search. The octroi officers perfectly well remembered seeing the Marchese Ludovico, who was well known to them by sight, drive through the gate very early that morning in a bagarino with a lady. One man had recognised the lady as the prima donna at the opera. And they were very sure that she had not returned to the city since, at least by that gate.

But one of the officers volunteered the information that another young lady had that morning pa.s.sed out of the city on foot a little before the time at which the bagarino had pa.s.sed with the Marchese and the prima donna. And the men, after some consultation together, were sure that neither had that young lady returned by the gate they guarded.

Ludovico looked at the lawyer, and the lawyer looked at Ludovico; but neither of them could suggest anything in explanation of so strange a circ.u.mstance.

"I saw nothing of any such person either in the Pineta or on the road,"

said Ludovico. "Who could it have been?"

The old lawyer only shrugged his shoulders in reply

"There is a young lady," resumed Ludovico, after some minutes of thought, "a friend of mine--a young artist engaged in making copies from the mosaics in our churches. I know that it was her purpose shortly to begin some work of this kind at St. Apollinare in Cla.s.se. It may be that she had selected this morning for the purpose of going out to look at her task,--though I almost think that I should have been informed of her intention."

"The plot seems to thicken with a vengeance," said the lawyer, with an impatient shrug, and a slight sneer of ill-humour, provoked by the multiplicity of his young client's lady friends. "I daresay," he added, "the young ladies are not playing hide-and-seek in the Pineta all by themselves."

"But what had I better do?" said the young Marchese, looking with increased anxiety into the lawyer's face; "the fact is--you see, Signor Giovacchino, this new idea, this possibility that Paolina--that is the young artist's name--may be--may have been in the forest--in short, I feel more uneasy than before till I can learn what has become of both of them."

"Do you mean," said the lawyer, with a sneer in his voice, but at the same time looking into his companion's face with a shrewd expression of investigation in his eye,--"do you mean that the two ladies may possibly have fallen in with each other, and may in such case not improbably have fallen out with each other? You know best, Signor Marchese, the likelihood of any trouble arising out of such a meeting."

"For G.o.d's sake don't speak in such a tone, Signor Giovacchino. I tell you I am seriously uneasy. Should they have met under such circ.u.mstances--G.o.d only knows--What would you advise me to do, Signor Giovacchino?" said the Marchese, looking into the lawyer's face with increasing and now evidently painful anxiety.

"It is ill giving advice without knowing all the circ.u.mstances of a case, Signor Marchese," returned Fortini, somewhat drily, looking hard at the young man as he spoke, and putting a meaning emphasis on the word "all."

"You do know all the circ.u.mstances as far as I know them myself. The thing happened exactly as I told you," replied Ludovico.

"You left her sleeping on a bank in the forest, and have never seen her since?" said the lawyer, thoughtfully.

"Exactly so! I returned to the spot where I had left her--at least as far as I could tell it was the same spot--and she was no longer there,"

replied Ludovico.

"But you were not sure that you did return to the same spot? You could not recognise it again with certainty?"

"So it seemed to me when I was there. I think it must have been the same place. But when I did not find her, I could not feel sure of it. Every spot in the Pineta is so like all other spots. One pine-tree is just like another; and the gra.s.sy openings, and the little thickets of underwood, are all the same over and over again. I felt that I could not be sure that the place was the same."

"Was there no fallen tree, no track of road, no specialty of weed or flower, that the spot might be identified by?"

"None I think--none that I am aware of or can remember. There was a little rising of the ground,--a sort of bank, and the gra.s.s was sprinkled all over with wild flowers. There were violets close at hand, I know, because I remember the scent of them! But when I came to try, it seem'd to me that I found all these things in a dozen other places."

"Nevertheless, you know at what point you entered the Pineta; it cannot be very difficult to have the whole wood, within such a distance as it is at all likely that she should have strayed to, thoroughly searched.

But the best men for the purpose would be some of the foresters in the employ of the farmers of the forest. I dare say that we might find--what is that coming along the road yonder?" said the lawyer interrupting himself.

The two gentlemen had been standing during the above short conversation just on the outside of the gate, and looking down the stretch of long straight road towards St. Apollinare and the pine forest.

"It is a knot of men coming along the road. They are likely enough some of the very fellows we want. In that case we might get them to go back with us without loss of time."

"With us?" said the lawyer, who had not bargained when he left his home, for any such expedition. "Well, I don't mind helping you, Signor Marchese, in your search," he added, after a moment's consideration; "but I am not going to walk to the Pineta this afternoon; and I should think you must have had enough of it for to-day. But I will tell you what I can do. We will send one of these fellows to my house to order my servant to come here with my calessino as quick as he can; and if these men are the people we want--What are they doing? They are carrying something! Why surely--Signor Marchese!" said the old lawyer, looking into his companion's face, while a strange expression of understanding, mixed with a blank look of dismay and alarm, stole over his own features.

"What is it?--What have they got?--Why, heavens and earth! it is--Signor Fortini, is it not a dead body they are carrying? My G.o.d!"

The young man griped his companion's arm hard, as he spoke, and the action enabled the lawyer to remark that he was shaking all over.

In another minute the men whom they had seen coming along the road were close to the gate. They were six in number; and they were bearing--somewhat, between them. They advanced beneath the covered gateway, and there, as it is necessary to do in the case of everything brought into the town, they set their burthen down on the flag-stones, at the feet of the officers of the gate, and of the Marchese and the lawyer.

Their burthen was a door lifted from its hinges, and supported by three slender stakes drawn green from a hedgerow. And on the door there lay, covered with a sheet, what was evidently a dead body.

Ludovico, with his eyes starting from his head, and horror in every feature of his face, still clutching one hand of the old lawyer in his, stretched forward with one advanced stride towards the extemporized bier, and with his other hand lifted the sheet.