“Spare me, spare me, Giulia! Don’t say words which make me feel towards my father as I would not feel. He is old; and when men get old they think more of money. But I would be patient; I would never contradict him, if I only knew that you loved me.”
“But it is not only your father, Beppo. What would all the family say? What would the world say! Would they not say that the orphan who was taken in for charity had schemed to entrap the heir? Oh! I could not bear it. You could not bear it for me if you loved me, Beppo.”
“If I loved you! If I loved you! Giulia, Giulia, it makes me mad to hear you. And to talk of what the people may say, when it is to me a question of life and death. Say; why they would say that Beppo Vanni’s good luck was greater than he deserved,—that there was not a man in all Romagna who might not envy him. Only give me the right to do it, only give me a hope that you may be brought to look on me, and trust me to thrust the malignant sneers of any who dare sneer down their accursed throats. If you fear the world, Giulia, only let me stand between you and the world.”
“It cannot be, Beppo,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “It can never be. Let me go home.”
“And leave me thus. Oh, Giulia, you cannot be so cruel. Think of my wretchedness when you are gone.”
“And I am going to such happiness,” said Giulia; and the tears began to flow from her eyes and betray themselves in her voice.
“Why should you not be happy? You will find plenty to love you, and some one among them you can love,” said Beppo, bitterly.
“Their love would be loathsome to me. I’ll have no love,” said Giulia, now sobbing beyond her power to conceal it. “No love—no love—” he said amid her sobs, while a little nervous movement of her foot on the grass and the convulsive wreathing together of her fingers as she held them in front of her bosom, showed the extremity of her agitation; “no love—” she repeated,—“save yours,” was upon her tongue. She had all but said it. She felt as if she would have given worlds to say it; but she choked it down, and said instead, “Oh, Beppo, how can you make me so miserable?”
“I! I make you miserable!” said poor Beppo, in utter amazement.
“Yes; you do. You do make me—miserable—by—by—by talking about other—other men making love to me. I hate them, all—all, I do!”
Oh, poor, honest, dull, simple-minded Beppo, he did not see the truth.
“I thought it was talking about loving you myself that made you angry,” said he, in the extremity of perplexity.
“I hate that too,” pouted Giulia, as she shot at him a glance from the corner of her eye that had almost the gleam of a smile in it, struggling out half-drowned in tears.
“But you said you did not hate me, Giulia,” remonstrated he.
“No; I don’t hate you, Beppo. But now I must go home directly.
“And you do hate all other men,” said Beppo, pondering deeply, and more to himself than to Giulia.
“Do stand out of the way, Beppo, and let me go home. I must go directly, now this minute. Beppo! do you hear me!” she added, for Beppo appeared to be perfectly absorbed in the attempt to draw a conclusion from the different premises which had been afforded him.
“If you hate all other men, and don’t hate me, I am the only man you don’t hate,” said Beppo, proceeding cautiously to the construction of his syllogism, but with a strictly vigorous induction which would have done honour to an Aristotelian.
“I didn’t say that,” retorted Giulia, with her sex’s instinctive rebellion against a logical necessity. “Come, let me pass. I won’t stay talking with you here any longer.”
“It’s a great thing to know that you don’t hate me,” said Beppo, still meditatively, but looking into Giulia’s face with wistful eyes.
“Well, be content with it, then, and let me go home at once. The priest will tell la Si’ora Sunta what time I left the village, and then she will know that I must have stopped somewhere on my way. Let me go.”
“Don’t you think we ought to shake hands at parting, Giulia?” said Beppo, hanging his head, and timidly stretching out his hand a little towards her.
“Perhaps we ought—at parting,” said Giulia; and her hand stole out from her side to meet his, while she turned her face away as coyly as if the threatened kiss of palm on palm had been the sacredest of love’s mysteries.
Nor was the mountain nymph’s instinct so far wrong. For as those two hands touched, an electric thrill shot through both frames, that made their breath come short, making Giulia feel as though she should faint.
“It could not be wrong, cousin Giulia,” continued Beppo, very gently drawing her hand towards him; “it could not be wrong, since we are cousins, and since—you don’t hate me, just at parting to give each other a cousinly kiss.” He advanced his face a little, a very little, towards hers as he spoke.
She remained perfectly still, leaving her face in the most wholly open and defenceless position. But she said very decisively:
“No man shall ever kiss me, Beppo, except one that I love with all my heart and all my soul.”
She seemed to speak determinedly enough; but yet, Beppo observed she did not take any steps whatever for withdrawing her face from the very dangerous and exposed position in which it was. Her eyes were fixed on the ground, her head was bent a little on one side, so that the rich brown and pink cheek was held up to the full incidence of the moonbeam; one hand was hanging listlessly by her side, the other was still imprisoned within his.
“But if I am the only man you don’t hate, Giulia!” pleaded Beppo.
She made no answer, but the play of the moon-