The next night, at the time of assembling specified in the invitations to the masked ball, Fabio was still lingering in his palace, and still allowing the black domino to lie untouched and unheeded on his dressing-table. This delay was not produced by any change in his resolution to go to the Melani Palace. His determination to be present at the ball remained unshaken; and yet, at the last moment, he lingered and lingered on, without knowing why. Some strange influence seemed to be keeping him within the walls of his lonely home. It was as if the great, empty, silent palace had almost recovered on that night the charm which it had lost when its mistress died.
He left his own apartment and went to the bedroom where his infant child lay asleep in her little crib. He sat watching her, and thinking quietly and tenderly of many past events in his life for a long time, then returned to his room. A sudden sense of loneliness came upon him after his visit to the child’s bedside; but he did not attempt to raise his spirits even then by going to the ball. He descended instead to his study, lighted his reading-lamp, and then, opening a bureau, took from one of the drawers in it the letter which Nanina had written to him. This was not the first time that a sudden sense of his solitude had connected itself inexplicably with the remembrance of the work-girl’s letter.
He read it through slowly, and when he had done, kept it open in his hand. “I have youth, titles, wealth,” he thought to himself, sadly; “everything that is sought after in this world. And yet if I try to think of any human being who really and truly loves me, I can remember but one—the poor, faithful girl who wrote these lines!”
Old recollections of the first day when he met with Nanina, of the first sitting she had given him in Luca Lomi’s studio, of the first visit to the neat little room in the by-street, began to rise more and more vividly in his mind. Entirely absorbed by them, he sat absently drawing with pen and ink, on some sheets of letter-paper lying under his hand, lines and circles, and fragments of decorations, and vague remembrances of old ideas for statues, until the sudden sinking of the flame of his lamp awoke his attention abruptly to present things.
He looked at his watch. It was close on midnight.
This discovery at last aroused him to the necessity of immediate departure. In a few minutes he had put on his domino and mask, and was on his way to the ball.
Before he reached the Melani Palace the first part of the entertainment had come to an end. The “Toy Symphony” had been played, the grotesque dance performed, amid universal laughter; and now the guests were, for the most part, fortifying themselves in the Arcadian bowers for new dances, in which all persons present were expected to take part. The Marquis Melani had, with characteristic oddity, divided his two classical refreshment-rooms into what he termed the Light and Heavy Departments. Fruit, pastry, sweetmeats, salads, and harmless drinks were included under the first head, and all the stimulating liquors and solid eatables under the last. The thirty shepherdesses had been, according to the marquis’s order, equally divided at the outset of the evening between the two rooms. But as the company began to crowd more and more resolutely in the direction of the Heavy Department, ten of the shepherdesses attached to the Light Department were told off to assist in attending on the hungry and thirsty majority of guests who were not to be appeased by pastry and lemonade. Among the five girls who were left behind in the room for the light refreshments was Nanina. The steward soon discovered that the novelty of her situation made her really nervous, and he wisely concluded that if he trusted her where the crowd was greatest and the noise loudest, she would not only be utterly useless, but also very much in the way of her more confident and experienced companions.
When Fabio arrived at the palace, the jovial uproar in the Heavy Department was at its height, and several gentlemen, fired by the classical costumes of the shepherdesses, were beginning to speak Latin to them with a thick utterance, and a valorous contempt for all restrictions of gender, number, and case. As soon as he could escape from the congratulations on his return to his friends, which poured on him from all sides, Fabio withdrew to seek some quieter room. The heat, noise, and confusion had so bewildered him, after the tranquil life he had been leading for many months past, that it was quite a relief to stroll through the half deserted dancing-rooms, to the opposite extremity of the great suite of apartments, and there to find himself in a second Arcadian bower, which seemed peaceful enough to deserve its name.
A few guests were in this room when he first entered it, but the distant sound of some first notes of dance music drew them all away. After a careless look at the quaint decorations about him, he sat down alone on a divan near the door, and beginning already to feel the heat and discomfort of his mask, took it off. He had not removed it more than a moment before he heard a faint cry in the direction of a long refreshment-table, behind which the five waiting-girls were standing. He started up directly, and could hardly believe his senses, when he found himself standing face to face with Nanina.
Her cheeks had turned perfectly colorless. Her astonishment at seeing the young nobleman appeared to have some sensation of terror mingled with it. The waiting-woman who happened to stand by her side instinctively stretched out an arm to support her, observing that she caught at the edge of the table as Fabio hurried round to get behind it and speak to her. When he drew near, her head drooped on her breast, and she said, faintly: “I never knew you were at Pisa; I never thought you would be here. Oh, I am true to what I said in my letter, though I seem so false to it!”
“I want to speak to you about the letter—to tell you how carefully I have kept it, how often I have read it,” said Fabio.
She turned away her head, and tried hard to repress the tears that would force their way into her eyes “We should never have met,” she said; “never, never have met again!”
Before Fabio could reply, the waiting-woman by Nanina’s side interposed.
“For Heaven’s sake, don’t stop speaking to her here!” she exclaimed, impatiently. “If the steward or one of the upper servants was to come in, you would get her into dreadful trouble. Wait till to-morrow, and find some fitter place than this.”
Fabio felt the justice of the reproof immediately. He tore a leaf out of his pocketbook, and wrote on it, “I must tell you how I honor and thank you for that letter. To-morrow—ten o’clock—the wicket-gate at the back of the Ascoli gardens. Believe in my truth and honor, Nanina, for I believe implicitly in yours.” Having written these lines, he took from among his bunch of watch-seals a little key, wrapped it up in the note, and pressed it into her hand. In spite of himself his fingers lingered round hers, and he was on the point of speaking to her again, when he saw the waiting-woman’s hand, which was just raised to motion him away, suddenly drop. Her color changed at the same moment, and she looked fixedly across the table.
He turned round immediately, and saw a masked woman standing alone in the room, dressed entirely in yellow from head to foot. She had a yellow hood, a yellow half-mask with deep fringe hanging down over her mouth, and a yellow domino, cut at the sleeves and edges into long flame-shaped points, which waved backward and forward tremulously in the light air wafted through the doorway. The woman’s black eyes seemed to gleam with an evil brightness through the sight-holes of the mask, and the tawny fringe hanging before her mouth fluttered slowly with every breath she drew. Without a word or a gesture she stood before the table, and her gleaming black eyes fixed steadily on Fabio the instant he confronted her. A sudden chill struck through him, as he observed that the yellow of the stranger’s domino and mask was of precisely the same shade as the yellow of the hangings and furniture which his wife had chosen after their marriage for the decoration of her favorite sitting-room.
“The Yellow Mask!” whispered the waiting-girls nervously, crowding together behind the table. “The Yellow Mask again!”
“Make her speak!”
“Ask her to have something!”
“This gentleman will ask her. Speak to her, sir. Do speak to her! She glides about in that fearful yellow dress like a ghost.”
Fabio looked around mechanically at the girl who was whispering to him. He saw at the same time that Nanina still kept her head turned away, and that she had her handkerchief at her eyes. She was evidently struggling yet with the agitation produced by their unexpected meeting, and was, most probably for that reason, the only person in the room not conscious of the presence of the Yellow Mask.
“Speak to her, sir. Do speak to her!” whispered two of the waiting-girls together.
Fabio turned again toward the table. The black eyes were still gleaming at him from behind the tawny yellow of the mask. He nodded to the girls who had just spoken, cast one farewell look at Nanina, and moved down the room to get round to the side of the table at which the Yellow Mask was standing. Step by step as he moved the bright eyes followed him. Steadily and more steadily their evil light seemed to shine through and through him, as he turned the corner of the table and approached the still, spectral figure.
He came close up to the woman, but she never moved; her eyes never wavered for an instant. He stopped and tried to speak; but the chill struck through him again. An overpowering dread, an unutterable loathing seized on him; all sense of outer things—the whispering of the waiting-girls behind the table, the gentle cadence of the dance music, the distant hum of joyous talk—suddenly left him. He turned away shuddering, and quitted the room.
Following the sound of the music, and desiring before all things now to join the crowd wherever it was largest, he was stopped in one of the smaller apartments by a gentleman who had just risen from the card table, and who held out his hand with the cordiality of an old friend.
“Welcome back to the world, Count Fabio!” he began, gayly, then suddenly checked himself. “Why, you look pale, and your hand feels cold. Not ill, I hope?”
“No, no. I have been rather startled—I can’t say why—by a very strangely dressed woman, who fairly stared me out of countenance.”
“You don’t mean the Yellow Mask?”
“Yes I do. Have you seen her?”
“Everybody has seen her; but nobody can make her unmask, or get her to speak. Our host has not the slightest notion who she is; and our hostess is horribly frightened at her. For my part, I think she has given us quite enough of her mystery and her grim dress; and if my name, instead of being nothing but plain Andrea D’Arbino, was Marquis Melani, I would say to her: ‘Madam, we are here to laugh and amuse ourselves; suppose you open your lips, and charm us by appearing in a prettier dress!’”
During this conversation they had sat down together, with their backs toward the door, by the side of one of the card-tables. While D’Arbino was speaking, Fabio suddenly felt himself shuddering again, and became conscious of a sound of low breathing behind him.
He turned round instantly, and there, standing between them, and peering down at them, was the Yellow Mask!
Fabio started up, and his friend followed his example. Again the gleaming black eyes rested steadily on the young nobleman’s face, and again their look chilled him to the heart.
“Yellow Lady, do you know my friend?” exclaimed D’Arbino, with mock solemnity.
There was no answer. The fatal eyes never moved from Fabio’s face.
“Yellow Lady,” continued the other, “listen to the music. Will you dance with me?”
The eyes looked away, and the figure glided slowly from the room.
“My dear count,” said D’Arbino, “that woman seems to have quite an effect on you. I declare she has left you paler than ever. Come into the supper-room with me, and have some wine; you really look as if you wanted it.”
They went at once to the large refreshment-room. Nearly all the guests had by this time begun to dance again. They had the whole apartment, therefore, almost entirely to themselves.
Among the decorations of the room, which were not strictly in accordance with genuine Arcadian simplicity, was a large looking-glass, placed over a well-furnished sideboard. D’Arbino led Fabio in this direction, exchanging greetings as he advanced with a gentleman who stood near the glass looking into it, and carelessly fanning himself with his mask.
“My dear friend!” cried D’Arbino, “you are the very man to lead us straight to the best bottle of wine in the palace. Count Fabio, let me present to you my intimate and good friend, the Cavaliere Finello, with whose family I know you are well acquainted. Finello, the count is a little out of spirits, and I have prescribed a good dose of wine. I see a whole row of bottles at your side, and I leave it to you to apply the remedy. Glasses there! three glasses, my lovely shepherdess with the black eyes—the three largest you have got.”
The glasses were brought; the Cavaliere Finello chose a particular bottle, and filled them. All three gentlemen turned round to the sideboard to use it as a table, and thus necessarily faced the looking-glass.
“Now let us drink the toast of toasts,” said D’Arbino. “Finello, Count Fabio—the ladies of Pisa!”
Fabio raised the wine to his lips, and was on the point of drinking it, when he saw reflected in the glass the figure of the Yellow Mask. The glittering eyes were again fixed on him, and the yellow-hooded head bowed slowly, as if in acknowledgment of the toast he was about to drink. For the third time the strange chill seized him, and he set down his glass of wine untasted.
“What is the matter?” asked D’Arbino.
“Have you any dislike, count, to that particular wine?” inquired the cavaliere.
“The Yellow Mask!” whispered Fabio. “The Yellow Mask again!”
They all three turned round directly toward the door. But it was too late—the figure had disappeared.
“Does any one know who this Yellow Mask is?” asked Finello. “One may guess by the walk that the figure is a woman’s. Perhaps it may be the strange color she has chosen for her dress, or perhaps her stealthy way of moving from room to room; but there is certainly something mysterious and startling about her.”
“Startling enough, as the count would tell you,” said D’Arbino. “The Yellow Mask has been responsible for his loss of spirits and change of complexion, and now she has prevented him even from drinking his wine.”
“I can’t account for it,” said Fabio, looking round him uneasily; “but this is the third room into which she has followed me—the third time she has seemed to fix her eyes on me alone. I suppose my nerves are hardly in a fit state yet for masked balls and adventures; the sight of her seems to chill me. Who can she be?”
“If she followed me a fourth time,” said Finello, “I should insist on her unmasking.”
“And suppose she refused?” asked his friend
“Then I should take her mask off for her.”
“It is impossible to do that with a woman,” said Fabio. “I prefer trying to lose her in the crowd. Excuse me, gentlemen, if I leave you to finish the wine, and then to meet me, if you like, in the great ballroom.”
He retired as he spoke, put on his mask, and joined the dancers immediately, taking care to keep always in the most crowded corner of the apartment. For some time this plan of action proved successful, and he saw no more of the mysterious yellow domino. Ere long, however, some new dances were arranged, in which the great majority of the persons in the ballroom took part; the figures resembling the old English country dances in this respect, that the ladies and gentlemen were placed in long rows opposite to each other. The sets consisted of about twenty couples each, placed sometimes across, and sometimes along the apartment; and the spectators were all required to move away on either side, and range themselves close to the walls. As Fabio among others complied with this necessity, he looked down a row of dancers waiting during the performance of the orchestral prelude; and there, watching him again, from the opposite end of the lane formed by the gentlemen on one side and the ladies on the other, he saw the Yellow Mask.
He moved abruptly back, toward another row of dancers, placed at right angles to the first row; and there again; at the opposite end of the gay lane of brightly-dressed figures, was the Yellow Mask. He slipped into the middle of the room, but it was only to find her occupying his former position near the wall, and still, in spite of his disguise, watching him through row after row of dancers. The persecution began to grow intolerable; he felt a kind of angry curiosity mingling now with the vague dread that had hitherto oppressed him. Finello’s advice recurred to his memory; and he determined to make the woman unmask at all hazards. With this intention he returned to the supper-room in which he had left his friends.
They were gone, probably to the ballroom, to look for him. Plenty of wine was still left on the sideboard, and he poured himself out a glass. Finding that his hand trembled as he did so, he drank several more glasses in quick succession, to nerve himself for the approaching encounter with the Yellow Mask. While he was drinking he expected every moment to see her in the looking-glass again; but she never appeared—and yet he felt almost certain that he had detected her gliding out after him when he left the ballroom.
He thought it possible that she might be waiting for him in one of the smaller apartments, and, taking off his mask, walked through several of them without meeting her, until he came to the door of the refreshment-room in which Nanina and he had recognized each other. The waiting-woman behind the table, who had first spoken to him, caught sight of him now, and ran round to the door.
“Don’t come in and speak to Nanina again,” she said, mistaking the purpose which had brought him to the door. “What with frightening her first, and making her cry afterward, you have rendered her quite unfit for her work. The steward is in there at this moment, very good-natured, but not very sober. He says she is pale and red-eyed, and not fit to be a shepherdess any longer, and that, as she will not be missed now, she may go home if she likes. We have got her an old cloak, and she is going to try and slip through the rooms unobserved, to get downstairs and change her dress. Don’t speak to her, pray, or you will only make her cry again; and what is worse, make the steward fancy—”
She stopped at that last word, and pointed suddenly over Fabio’s shoulder.
“The Yellow Mask!” she exclaimed. “Oh, sir, draw her away into the ballroom, and give Nanina a chance of getting out!”
Fabio turned directly, and approached the Mask, who, as they looked at each other, slowly retreated before him. The waiting-woman, seeing the yellow figure retire, hastened back to Nanina in the refreshment-room.
Slowly the masked woman retreated from one apartment to another till she entered a corridor brilliantly lighted up and beautifully ornamented with flowers. On the right hand this corridor led to the ballroom; on the left to an ante-chamber at the head of the palace staircase. The Yellow Mask went on a few paces toward the left, then stopped. The bright eyes fixed themselves as before on Fabio’s face, but only for a moment. He heard a light step behind him, and then he saw the eyes move. Following the direction they took, he turned round, and discovered Nanina, wrapped up in the old cloak which was to enable her to get downstairs unobserved.
“Oh, how can I get out? how can I get out?” cried the girl, shrinking back affrightedly as she saw the Yellow Mask.
“That way,” said Fabio, pointing in the direction of the ballroom. “Nobody will notice you in the cloak; it will only be thought some new disguise.” He took her arm as he spoke, to reassure her, and continued in a whisper, “Don’t forget to-morrow.”
At the same moment he felt a hand laid on him. It was the hand of the masked woman, and it put him back from Nanina.
In spite of himself, he trembled at her touch, but still retained presence of mind enough to sign to the girl to make her escape. With a look of eager inquiry in the direction of the mask, and a half suppressed exclamation of terror, she obeyed him, and hastened away toward the ballroom.
“We are alone,” said Fabio, confronting the gleaming black eyes, and reaching out his hand resolutely toward the Yellow Mask. “Tell me who you are, and why you follow me, or I will uncover your face, and solve the mystery for myself.”
The woman pushed his hand aside, and drew back a few paces, but never spoke a word. He followed her. There was not an instant to be lost, for just then the sound of footsteps hastily approaching the corridor became audible.
“Now or never,” he whispered to himself, and snatched at the mask.
His arm was again thrust aside; but this time the woman raised her disengaged hand at the same moment, and removed the yellow mask.
The lamps shed their soft light full on her face.
It was the face of his dead wife.
Signor Andrea D’Arbino, searching vainly through the various rooms in the palace for Count Fabio d’Ascoli, and trying as a last resource, the corridor leading to the ballroom and grand staircase, discovered his friend lying on the floor in a swoon, without any living creature near him. Determining to avoid alarming the guests, if possible, D’Arbino first sought help in the antechamber. He found there the marquis’s valet, assisting the Cavaliere Finello (who was just taking his departure) to put on his cloak.
While Finello and his friend carried Fabio to an open window in the antechamber, the valet procured some iced water. This simple remedy, and the change of atmosphere, proved enough to restore the fainting man to his senses, but hardly—as it seemed to his friends—to his former self. They noticed a change to blankness and stillness in his face, and when he spoke, an indescribable alteration in the tone of his voice.
“I found you in a room in the corridor,” said D’Arbino. “What made you faint? Don’t you remember? Was it the heat?”
Fabio waited for a moment, painfully collecting his ideas. He looked at the valet, and Finello signed to the man to withdraw.
“Was it the heat?” repeated D’Arbino.
“No,” answered Fabio, in strangely hushed, steady tones. “I have seen the face that was behind the yellow mask.”
“Well?”
“It was the face of my dead wife.”
“Your dead wife!”
“When the mask was removed I saw her face. Not as I remember it in the pride of her youth and beauty—not even as I remember her on her sick-bed—but as I remember her in her coffin.”
“Count! for God’s sake, rouse yourself! Collect your thoughts—remember where you are—and free your mind of its horrible delusion.”
“Spare me all remonstrances; I am not fit to bear them. My life has only one object now—the pursuing of this mystery to the end. Will you help me? I am scarcely fit to act for myself.”
He still spoke in the same unnaturally hushed, deliberate tones. D’Arbino and Finello exchanged glances behind him as he rose from the sofa on which he had hitherto been lying.
“We will help you in everything,” said D’Arbino, soothingly. “Trust in us to the end. What do you wish to do first?”
“The figure must have gone through this room. Let us descend the staircase and ask the servants if they have seen it pass.”
(Both D’Arbino and Finello remarked that he did not sayher.)
They inquired down to the very courtyard. Not one of the servants had seen the Yellow Mask.
The last resource was the porter at the outer gate. They applied to him; and in answer to their questions he asserted that he had most certainly seen a lady in a yellow domino and mask drive away, about half an hour before, in a hired coach.
“Should you remember the coachman again?” asked D’Arbino.
“Perfectly; he is an old friend of mine.”
“And you know where he lives?”
“Yes; as well as I know where I do.”
“Any reward you like, if you can get somebody to mind your lodge, and can take us to that house.”
In a few minutes they were following the porter through the dark, silent streets. “We had better try the stables first,” said the man. “My friend, the coachman, will hardly have had time to do more than set the lady down. We shall most likely catch him just putting up his horses.”
The porter turned out to be right. On entering the stable-yard, they found that the empty coach had just driven into it.
“You have been taking home a lady in a yellow domino from the masquerade?” said D’Arbino, putting some money into the coachman’s hand.
“Yes, sir; I was engaged by that lady for the evening—engaged to drive her to the ball as well as to drive her home.”
“Where did you take her from?”
“From a very extraordinary place—from the gate of the Campo Santo burial-ground.”
During this colloquy, Finello and D’Arbino had been standing with Fabio between them, each giving him an arm. The instant the last answer was given, he reeled back with a cry of horror.
“Where have you taken her to now?” asked D’Arbino. He looked about him nervously as he put the question, and spoke for the first time in a whisper.
“To the Campo Santo again,” said the coachman.
Fabio suddenly drew his arms out of the arms of his friends, and sank to his knees on the ground, hiding his face. From some broken ejaculations which escaped him, it seemed as if he dreaded that his senses were leaving him, and that he was praying to be preserved in his right mind.
“Why is he so violently agitated?” said Finello, eagerly, to his friend.
“Hush!” returned the other. “You heard him say that when he saw the face behind the yellow mask, it was the face of his dead wife?”
“Yes. But what then?”
“His wife was buried in the Campo Santo.”
Of all the persons who had been present, in any capacity, at the Marquis Melani’s ball, the earliest riser on the morning after it was Nanina. The agitation produced by the strange events in which she had been concerned destroyed the very idea of sleep. Through the hours of darkness she could not even close her eyes; and, as soon as the new day broke, she rose to breathe the early morning air at her window, and to think in perfect tranquillity over all that had passed since she entered the Melani Palace to wait on the guests at the masquerade.
On reaching home the previous night, all her other sensations had been absorbed in a vague feeling of mingled dread and curiosity, produced by the sight of the weird figure in the yellow mask, which she had left standing alone with Fabio in the palace corridor. The morning light, however, suggested new thoughts. She now opened the note which the young nobleman had pressed into her hand, and read over and over again the hurried pencil lines scrawled on the paper. Could there be any harm, any forgetfulness of her own duty, in using the key inclosed in the note, and keeping her appointment in the Ascoli gardens at ten o’clock? Surely not—surely the last sentence he had written, “Believe in my truth and honor, Nanina, for I believe implicitly in yours,” was enough to satisfy her this time that she could not be doing wrong in listening for once to the pleading of her own heart. And besides, there in her lap lay the key of the wicket-gate. It was absolutely necessary to use that, if only for the purpose of giving it back safely into the hand of its owner.
As this last thought was passing through her mind, and plausibly overcoming any faint doubts and difficulties which she might still have left, she was startled by a sudden knocking at the street door; and, looking out of the window immediately, saw a man in livery standing in the street, anxiously peering up at the house to see if his knocking had aroused anybody.
“Does Marta Angrisani, the sick-nurse, live here?” inquired the man, as soon as Nanina showed herself at the window.
“Yes,” she answered. “Must I call her up? Is there some person ill?”
“Call her up directly,” said the servant; “she is wanted at the Ascoli Palace. My master, Count Fabio—”
Nanina waited to hear no more. She flew to the room in which the sick-nurse slept, and awoke her, almost roughly, in an instant.
“He is ill!” she cried, breathlessly. “Oh, make haste, make haste! He is ill, and he has sent for you!”
Marta inquired who had sent for her, and on being informed, promised to lose no time. Nanina ran downstairs to tell the servant that the sick-nurse was getting on her clothes. The man’s serious expression, when she came close to him, terrified her. All her usual self-distrust vanished; and she entreated him, without attempting to conceal her anxiety, to tell her particularly what his master’s illness was, and how it had affected him so suddenly after the ball.
“I know nothing about it,” answered the man, noticing Nanina’s manner as she put her question, with some surprise, “except that my master was brought home by two gentlemen, friends of his, about a couple of hours ago, in a very sad state; half out of his mind, as it seemed to me. I gathered from what was said that he had got a dreadful shock from seeing some woman take off her mask, and show her face to him at the ball. How that could be I don’t in the least understand; but I know that when the doctor was sent for, he looked very serious, and talked about fearing brain-fever.”
Here the servant stopped; for, to his astonishment, he saw Nanina suddenly turn away from him, and then heard her crying bitterly as she went back into the house.
Marta Angrisani had huddled on her clothes and was looking at herself in the glass to see that she was sufficiently presentable to appear at the palace, when she felt two arms flung round her neck; and, before she could say a word, found Nanina sobbing on her bosom.
“He is ill—he is in danger!” cried the girl. “I must go with you to help him. You have always been kind to me, Marta—be kinder than ever now. Take me with you—take me with you to the palace!”
“You, child!” exclaimed the nurse, gently unclasping her arms.
“Yes—yes! if it is only for an hour,” pleaded Nanina; “if it is only for one little hour every day. You have only to say that I am your helper, and they would let me in. Marta! I shall break my heart if I can’t see him, and help him to get well again.”
The nurse still hesitated. Nanina clasped her round the neck once more, and laid her cheek—burning hot now, though the tears had been streaming down it but an instant before—close to the good woman’s face.
“I love him, Marta; great as he is, I love him with all my heart and soul and strength,” she went on, in quick, eager, whispering tones; “and he loves me. He would have married me if I had not gone away to save him from it. I could keep my love for him a secret while he was well; I could stifle it, and crush it down, and wither it up by absence. But now he is ill, it gets beyond me; I can’t master it. Oh, Marta! don’t break my heart by denying me! I have suffered so much for his sake, that I have earned the right to nurse him!”
Marta was not proof against this last appeal. She had one great and rare merit for a middle-aged woman—she had not forgotten her own youth.
“Come, child,” said she, soothingly; “I won’t attempt to deny you. Dry your eyes, put on your mantilla; and, when we get face to face with the doctor, try to look as old and ugly as you can, if you want to be let into the sick-room along with me.”
The ordeal of medical scrutiny was passed more easily than Marta Angrisani had anticipated. It was of great importance, in the doctor’s opinion, that the sick man should see familiar faces at his bedside. Nanina had only, therefore, to state that he knew her well, and that she had sat to him as a model in the days when he was learning the art of sculpture, to be immediately accepted as Marta’s privileged assistant in the sick-room.
The worst apprehensions felt by the doctor for the patient were soon realized. The fever flew to his brain. For nearly six weeks he lay prostrate, at the mercy of death; now raging with the wild strength of delirium, and now sunk in the speechless, motionless, sleepless exhaustion which was his only repose. At last; the blessed day came when he enjoyed his first sleep, and when the doctor began, for the first time, to talk of the future with hope. Even then, however, the same terrible peculiarity marked his light dreams which had previously shown itself in his fierce delirium. From the faintly uttered, broken phrases which dropped from him when he slept, as from the wild words which burst from him when his senses were deranged, the one sad discovery inevitably resulted—that his mind was still haunted, day and night, hour after hour, by the figure in the yellow mask.
As his bodily health improved, the doctor in attendance on him grew more and more anxious as to the state of his mind. There was no appearance of any positive derangement of intellect, but there was a mental depression—an unaltering, invincible prostration, produced by his absolute belief in the reality of the dreadful vision that he had seen at the masked ball—which suggested to the physician the gravest doubts about the case. He saw with dismay that the patient showed no anxiety, as he got stronger, except on one subject. He was eagerly desirous of seeing Nanina every day by his bedside; but, as soon as he was assured that his wish should be faithfully complied with, he seemed to care for nothing more. Even when they proposed, in the hope of rousing him to an exhibition of something like pleasure, that the girl should read to him for an hour every day out of one of his favorite books, he only showed a languid satisfaction. Weeks passed away, and still, do what they would, they could not make him so much as smile.
One day Nanina had begun to read to him as usual, but had not proceeded far before Marta Angrisani informed her that he had fallen into a doze. She ceased with a sigh, and sat looking at him sadly, as he lay near her, faint and pale and mournful in his sleep—miserably altered from what he was when she first knew him. It had been a hard trial to watch by his bedside in the terrible time of his delirium; but it was a harder trial still to look at him now, and to feel less and less hopeful with each succeeding day.
While her eyes and thoughts were still compassionately fixed on him, the door of the bedroom opened, and the doctor came in, followed by Andrea D’Arbino, whose share in the strange adventure with the Yellow Mask caused him to feel a special interest in Fabio’s progress toward recovery.
“Asleep, I see; and sighing in his sleep,” said the doctor, going to the bedside. “The grand difficulty with him,” he continued, turning to D’Arbino, “remains precisely what it was. I have hardly left a single means untried of rousing him from that fatal depression; yet, for the last fortnight, he has not advanced a single step. It is impossible to shake his conviction of the reality of that face which he saw (or rather which he thinks he saw) when the yellow mask was removed; and, as long as he persists in his own shocking view of the case, so long he will lie there, getting better, no doubt, as to his body, but worse as to his mind.”
“I suppose, poor fellow, he is not in a fit state to be reasoned with?”
“On the contrary, like all men with a fixed delusion, he has plenty of intelligence to appeal to on every point, except the one point on which he is wrong. I have argued with him vainly by the hour together. He possesses, unfortunately, an acute nervous sensibility and a vivid imagination; and besides, he has, as I suspect, been superstitiously brought up as a child. It would be probably useless to argue rationally with him on certain spiritual subjects, even if his mind was in perfect health. He has a good deal of the mystic and the dreamer in his composition; and science and logic are but broken reeds to depend upon with men of that kind.”
“Does he merely listen to you when you reason with him, or does he attempt to answer?”
“He has only one form of answer, and that is, unfortunately, the most difficult of all to dispose of. Whenever I try to convince him of his delusion, he invariably retorts by asking me for a rational explanation of what happened to him at the masked ball. Now, neither you nor I, though we believe firmly that he has been the dupe of some infamous conspiracy, have been able as yet to penetrate thoroughly into this mystery of the Yellow Mask. Our common sense tells us that he must be wrong in taking his view of it, and that we must be right in taking ours; but if we cannot give him actual, tangible proof of that—if we can only theorize, when he asks us for an explanation—it is but too plain, in his present condition, that every time we remonstrate with him on the subject we only fix him in his delusion more and more firmly.”
“It is not for want of perseverance on my part,” said D’Arbino, after a moment of silence, “that we are still left in the dark. Ever since the extraordinary statement of the coachman who drove the woman home, I have been inquiring and investigating. I have offered the reward of two hundred scudi for the discovery of her; I have myself examined the servants at the palace, the night-watchman at the Campo Santo, the police-books, the lists of keepers of hotels and lodging-houses, to hit on some trace of this woman; and I have failed in all directions. If my poor friend’s perfect recovery does indeed depend on his delusion being combated by actual proof, I fear we have but little chance of restoring him. So far as I am concerned, I confess myself at the end of my resources.”
“I hope we are not quite conquered yet,” returned the doctor. “The proofs we want may turn up when we least expect them. It is certainly a miserable case,” he continued, mechanically laying his fingers on the sleeping man’s pulse. “There he lies, wanting nothing now but to recover the natural elasticity of his mind; and here we stand at his bedside, unable to relieve him of the weight that is pressing his faculties down. I repeat it, Signor Andrea, nothing will rouse him from his delusion that he is the victim of a supernatural interposition but the production of some startling, practical proof of his error. At present he is in the position of a man who has been imprisoned from his birth in a dark room, and who denies the existence of daylight. If we cannot open the shutters and show him the sky outside, we shall never convert him to a knowledge of the truth.”
Saying these words, the doctor turned to lead the way out of the room, and observed Nanina, who had moved from the bedside on his entrance, standing near the door. He stopped to look at her, shook his head good-humoredly, and called to Marta, who happened to be occupied in an adjoining room.
“Signora Marta,” said the doctor, “I think you told me some time ago that your pretty and careful little assistant lives in your house. Pray, does she take much walking exercise?”
“Very little, Signor Dottore. She goes home to her sister when she leaves the palace. Very little walking exercise, indeed.”
“I thought so! Her pale cheeks and heavy eyes told me as much. Now, my dear,” said the doctor, addressing Nanina, “you are a very good girl, and I am sure you will attend to what I tell you. Go out every morning before you come here, and take a walk in the fresh air. You are too young not to suffer by being shut up in close rooms every day, unless you get some regular exercise. Take a good long walk in the morning, or you will fall into my hands as a patient, and be quite unfit to continue your attendance here. Now, Signor Andrea, I am ready for you. Mind, my child, a walk every day in the open air outside the town, or you will fall ill, take my word for it!”
Nanina promised compliance; but she spoke rather absently, and seemed scarcely conscious of the kind familiarity which marked the doctor’s manner. The truth was, that all her thoughts were occupied with what he had been saying by Fabio’s bedside. She had not lost one word of the conversation while the doctor was talking of his patient, and of the conditions on which his recovery depended. “Oh, if that proof which would cure him could only be found!” she thought to herself, as she stole back anxiously to the bedside when the room was empty.
On getting home that day she found a letter waiting for her, and was greatly surprised to see that it was written by no less a person than the master-sculptor, Luca Lomi. It was very short; simply informing her that he had just returned to Pisa, and that he was anxious to know when she could sit to him for a new bust—a commission from a rich foreigner at Naples.
Nanina debated with herself for a moment whether she should answer the letter in the hardest way, to her, by writing, or, in the easiest way, in person; and decided on going to the studio and telling the master-sculptor that it would be impossible for her to serve him as a model, at least for some time to come. It would have taken her a long hour to say this with due propriety on paper; it would only take her a few minutes to say it with her own lips. So she put on her mantilla again and departed for the studio.
On, arriving at the gate and ringing the bell, a thought suddenly occurred to her, which she wondered had not struck her before. Was it not possible that she might meet Father Rocco in his brother’s work-room? It was too late to retreat now, but not too late to ask, before she entered, if the priest was in the studio. Accordingly, when one of the workmen opened the door to her, she inquired first, very confusedly and anxiously, for Father Rocco. Hearing that he was not with his brother then, she went tranquilly enough to make her apologies to the master-sculptor.
She did not think it necessary to tell him more than that she was now occupied every day by nursing duties in a sick-room, and that it was consequently out of her power to attend at the studio. Luca Lomi expressed, and evidently felt, great disappointment at her failing him as a model, and tried hard to persuade her that she might find time enough, if she chose, to sit to him, as well as to nurse the sick person. The more she resisted his arguments and entreaties, the more obstinately he reiterated them. He was dusting his favorite busts and statues, after his long absence, with a feather-brush when she came in; and he continued this occupation all the while he was talking—urging a fresh plea to induce Nanina to reconsider her refusal to sit at every fresh piece of sculpture he came to, and always receiving the same resolute apology from her as she slowly followed him down the studio toward the door.
Arriving thus at the lower end of the room, Luca stopped with a fresh argument on his lips before his statue of Minerva. He had dusted it already, but he lovingly returned to dust it again. It was his favorite work—the only good likeness (although it did assume to represent a classical subject) of his dead daughter that he possessed. He had refused to part with it for Maddalena’s sake; and, as he now approached it with his brush for the second time, he absently ceased speaking, and mounted on a stool to look at the face near and blow some specks of dust off the forehead. Nanina thought this a good opportunity of escaping from further importunities. She was on the point of slipping away to the door with a word of farewell, when a sudden exclamation from Luca Lomi arrested her.
“Plaster!” cried the master-sculptor, looking intently at that part of the hair of the statue which lay lowest on the forehead. “Plaster here!” He took out his penknife as he spoke, and removed a tiny morsel of some white substance from an interstice between two folds of the hair where it touched the face. “Itisplaster!” he exclaimed, excitedly. “Somebody has been taking a cast from the face of my statue!”
He jumped off the stool, and looked all round the studio with an expression of suspicious inquiry. “I must have this cleared up,” he said. “My statues were left under Rocco’s care, and he is answerable if there has been any stealing of casts from any one of them. I must question him directly.”
Nanina, seeing that he took no notice of her, felt that she might now easily effect her retreat. She opened the studio door, and repeated, for the twentieth time at least, that she was sorry she could not sit to him.
“I am sorry too, child,” he said, irritably looking about for his hat. He found it apparently just as Nanina was going out; for she heard him call to one of the workmen in the inner studio, and order the man to say, if anybody wanted him, that he had gone to Father Rocco’s lodgings.