CHAPTER V. THE FIRST ACT OF THE LADY
VERONICA'S " LITTLE COMEDY."

CATERINA had slunk back to her home, as soon
as her accuser had vanished, overpowered with
shame and terror. She was well aware that
Salviati had taken careful precautions to secure
the secresy of his visits to the Via dei Pilastri,
and that he attached much importance to the
concealment of their intimacy from the world.
And of course it was not difficult to divine
that the duchess was of all persons the last,
whose ears he would have wished the guarded
secret to reach. What power of working woe
to her, or perhaps even to Jacopo himself,
this great and lofty lady might possess,—
what shape the vengeance of an outraged wife,
of such high place and rank, might take,—was all
misty and uncertain to Caterina, and more terrible
from its undefined vagueness. She felt keenly
enough the greatness of her unpardonable offence
against the duchess; and could not help wondering
at the moderation which was content to warn
before it struck. But, that the dreadful discovery
of her relations with the duke must have the
effect of putting an end to them, she could not
doubt. And she contemplated with an agony
almost equal to that felt by the duchess herself,
the certainty that her next interview with her
lover would be the last,—with an agony almost
equal, but not quite, for some of the elements
which intensified the bitterness of the cup to the
duchess, were absent from that of Cateriua.

The Lady Veronica had wronged her humbly-
born rival in one phrase of the passionate
denunciation she had hurled against her in the
church. Her love for Jacopo was not
"mercenary." It may have been that those first
profoundly corrupt corruptors of her early
innocence had, as one of them cynically avowed,
brought Salviati to the Casa dei Canacci from
purely mercenary motives. But the love which
had grown up between her and Jacopo Salviati
was not a mercenary, but—though an unhallowed
—a true love on either side. When the Duca di
San Giuliano married the Lady Veronica Cybo,
and when Caterina Bassi accepted the hand of
old Signor Canacci, both had been guilty of
mercenary love,—in such sense as mercenary motives
can ever be predicated of that much-misused
word; they had both, from mercenary motives,
pretended to love. If no princely marriages,
and no "assured bed and board," no "great
matches," in short, had come in the way, the
love of Jacopo and Caterina might have been
a heaven-blessed union. But there was the fatal
error in the top line of the sum, and the whole
column of figures was necessarily, therefore,
irremediably wrong to the end!

That next visit of the duke to Casa Canacci
followed very shortly upon the terrible one from
the duchess; and, as may be easily imagined,
was not the last. Caterina was astonished at the
smallness of the effect which the terrible tidings
she had looked forward with such dread to telling,
produced upon her lover. Jacopo appeared
to be more angry than alarmed. He muttered
something about his precautions of secresy having
been more for the duchess's own sake, than for
his own. As for Cateriua's share in the matter,
it did not seem to strike him that any harm
either in fame or fortune could come to her from
its being known that she was the favoured and
exclusive mistress of so great a Sultan as the
Duca di San Giuliano. And as things ordinarily
went in the world in which they were both living,
he was probably not far wrong in so deeming of
her position. The Lady Veronica Cybo was, it
must be admitted, a phenomenon much out of
place in that world, and one calculated to throw
its usual reckonings and ways not a little out of
their ordinary track. The extent, however, to
which it was capable of doing so, the Florentine
world and Salviati himself had yet to learn. And
he had little difficulty in soothing Caterina's
alarm, and teaching her to look on the threats
of the duchess as the impotent ill-temper of an
unreasonable woman.

So the duke's visits to the Casa Canacci were
as frequent as ever; and the sole result of the
extraordinary step taken by the duchess
appeared to be that they were less carefully guarded
from the suspicions of the world. To Salviati
himself, his wife had said no word alluding to
Caterina, to her discoveries respecting her, or to
her own visit to the church of San Pietro Maggiore.
She was only more than ordinarily gloomy
and silent; and the fits of violent passion,
upbraiding, and entreaty, which had from time to
time made his home intolerable to the light-
hearted libertine, altogether ceased. There was
a dead lull in Casa Salviati, which led him to
think, that, per Bacco! it would have been better
never to have attempted any concealment from
his wife at all.

            *             *             *             *             *

One morning, about the middle of December,
still in that same year 1638, the Duchess Veronica
said to her tire-woman, Francesca, as the
latter was about to leave the room after having
completed her mistress's toilette:

"Is thy brother Beppo the fringe-maker still
in the same house he occupied last year,
Francesca?"

"He is, so please you, signora, and his
business thrives well there."

"That is well. I am pleased to hear it. Now
listen to me. To-day thou wilt go down into the
city to pay a visit to thy brother; say to him
that I have need of a private chamber in which
to receive the visit of a person whom it does not
suit me to see here, or at the palazzo in town.
I know that I can trust both him and thee.
Thou mayst fancy, if thou wilt," she added, with
a dreary attempt at a smile, "that I, too, have a
love affair a-foot, and need a trysting-place to meet
my cavalier; but that is no business of thine or
of thy brother. I need the accommodation but
for an hour, say, at the Ave Maria to-morrow
evening, and I am sure he will manage to provide
me with it."