I was trembling under her touch--trembling, my every nerve a-quiver and my breath shortened--and suddenly there flashed through my mind a line of Dante's in the story of Paolo and Francesca:
Giuliana's words: “Let us read no more to-day”--had seemed an echo of that line, and the echo made me of a sudden conscious of an unsuspected parallel. All at once our position seemed to me strangely similar to that of the ill-starred lovers of Rimini.
But the next moment I was sane again. She had withdrawn her hand, and had taken the volume to restore it to its shelf.
Ah, no! At Rimini there had been two fools. Here there was but one. Let me make an end of him by persuading him of his folly.
Yet Giuliana did nothing to assist me in that task. She returned from the book-shelf, and in passing lightly swept her fingers over my hair.
“Come, Agostino; let us walk in the garden,” said she.
We went, my mood now overpast. I was as sober and self-contained as was my habit. And soon thereafter came my Lord Gambara--a rare thing to happen in the afternoon.
Awhile the three of us were together in the garden, talking of trivial matters. Then she fell to wrangling with him concerning something that Caro had written and of which she had the manuscript. In the end she begged me would I go seek the writing in her chamber. I went, and hunted where she had bidden me and elsewhere, and spent a good ten minutes vainly in the task. Chagrined that I could not discover the thing, I went into the library, thinking that it might be there.
Doctor Fifanti was writing busily at the table when I intruded. He looked up, thrusting his horn-rimmed spectacles high upon his peaked forehead.
“What the devil!” quoth he very testily. “I thought you were in the garden with Madonna Giuliana.”
He crimsoned and banged the table with his bony hand. “Do I not know that?” he roared, though I could see no reason for all this heat. “And why are you not with them?”
You are not to suppose that I was still the meek, sheepish lad who had come to Piacenza three months ago. I had not been learning my world and discovering Man to no purpose all this while.
“It has yet to be explained to me,” said I, “under what obligation I am to be anywhere but where I please. That firstly. Secondly--but of infinitely lesser moment--Monna Giuliana has sent me for the manuscript of Messer Caro's Gigli d'Oro.”