ilcare
jumping against hers, his cheek, his lips, his soft syllabling, her own
breathless replies--then at last Amilcare, quite enraptured, finding
everything about her wonder and delight, made shift to catch up some
waft of her very tongue, closer savour of her very home, and called her
on high his adorable, his unending, his altogether soul-devastating,
destroying mistress, "Madonna Mollavella." Good Master Lovel the
wharfinger neither knew his daughter nor his father's name in this
long-drawn compound of liquids; he was troubled, very doubtful, anxious
for Gregory Drax; but all Lombardy and the Emilian March came to know it
in time. Amilcare rode down opposition. Eloquence! Were ever such cries
to great Heaven, such invitations to Olympus, slappings of the
forehead, punchings of ribs, in Wapping before? Molly in tears on her
mother's breast, Amilcare on his knees, the neighbours at the door:
Master Lovel, good man, abominated such scenes. Father Pounce married
them at St. Saviour's in Southwark; money abounded, the dowry passed
from hand to hand. On a gusty November morning there sailed out of the
London river the barque _Santa Fina_ of Leghorn, having on board
Amilcare Passavente and Donna Maria his wife, bound (as all believed)
for that port, and thence by long roads to their country of
adoption--not Pisa, nor Lucca, nor any place Tuscan; but Nona in the
March of Emilia. No; Erasmus was not the only traveller whirled about by
English kisses, nor Molly Lovel the only simple witch in turn bewitched.

II

AMILCARE: COMMERCE AND THE AFFECTIONS

Molly was a handsome fool: let there be no doubt about that. There was
no romance in her, though sentiment enough. She lacked the historic
sense; and if she thought of Rome at all, supposed it a collocation of
warehouses, jetties, and a church or two--an unfamiliar Wapping upon a
river with a long name. Her sensations on the voyage were those of
sea-sickness, on the golden-hazy Campagna those of home-sickness
unaffected. Affectation of any sort was far from her. If she was happy
she showed her white teeth, if wretched she either pouted or cried; if
she liked you there were kisses, if she distrusted you she grew red. But
she distrusted no one. Why should she? Since every act of hers was, in
seeming, a caress of personal intention, every one loved her. As for her
husband, when he was not sacramentally engaged, he mutely raved to the
stars, protesting by his dimmed eyes,