“Zabetta!”
“No, no. I cannot leave him. Oh, Dio mio!”
“But Zabetta————”
“No. It would be a sin. Oh, the worst of sins. He is old and ill. I cannot leave him. Don’t ask me. It would be dreadful.”
“But then? Then what? What shall we do?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I wish I were dead.”
The cab came to a standstill, and Zabetta said, “Here we are.” I helped her to descend. We were before a dark porte-cochêre, in some dark back-street, high up the hillside.
“Addio,” said Zabetta, holding out her hand.
“You won’t come with me?”
“I can’t. I can’t. Addio.”
“Oh, Zabetta! Do you———Oh, say, say that you forgive me.”
“Yes. Addio.”
“And, Zabetta, you—you have my address. It is on the card I gave you. If you ever need anything—if you are ever in trouble of any kind—remember you have my address—you will write to me.”
“Yes. Addio.”
“Addio.”
She stood for a second, looking up at me from great brimming eyes, and then she turned away and vanished in the darkness of the porte-cochère. I got into the cab, and was driven to my hotel.
And here, one might have supposed, was an end of the episode; but no.
I went to Paris, I went to New York, I returned to Paris, I came on to London; and in this journeying more than a year was lost. In the beginning I had suffered as much as you could wish me in the way of contrition, in the way of regret too. I blamed myself and pitied myself with almost equal fervour. I had trifled with a gentle human heart; I had been compelled to let a priceless human treasure slip from my possession. But—I was twenty. And there were other girls in the world. And a year is a long time, when we are twenty. Little by little the image of Zabetta faded, faded. By the year’s end, I am afraid it had become very pale indeed....
It was late June, and I was in London, when the post brought me a letter. The letter bore an Italian stamp, and had originally been directed to my old address in Paris. Thence (as the numerous redirections on the big square foreign envelope attested) it had been forwarded to New York; thence back again to Paris; and thence finally to London.
The letter was written in the neatest of tiny copperplates; and this is a translation of what it said:
“Dear Friend,—My poor father died last month in the German Hospital, after an illness of twenty-one days. Pray for his soul.
“I am now alone and free, and if you still wish it, can come to you. It was impossible for me to come when you asked me; but you have not ceased to be my constant thought. I keep your coral hand.—Your ever faithful Zabetta Collaluce.”
Enclosed in the letter there was a sprig of some dried, bitter-sweet-smelling herb; and, in pencil, below the signature—laboriously traced, as I could guess, from what I had written for her on my visiting-card,—the English phrase: “Rosemary—that’s for remembrance.”
The letter was dated early in May, which made it six weeks old.
What could I do? What answer could I send?
Of course, you know what I did do. I procrastinated and vacillated, and ended by sending no answer at all. I could not write and say “Yes, come to me.” But how could I write and say “No, do not come“? Besides, would she not have given up hoping for an answer, by this time? It was six weeks since she had written. I tried to think that the worst was over.
But my remorse took a new and a longer and a stronger lease of life. A vision of Zabetta, pale, with anxious eyes, standing at her window, waiting, waiting for a word that never came,—for months I could not chase it from my conscience; it was years before it altogether ceased its accusing visits.
And then, last night, after a perfectly usual London day and evening, I went to bed and dreamed of her vividly; and all day long to-day the fragrance of my dream has clung about me,—a bitter-sweet fragrance, like that of rosemary itself. Where is Zabetta now? What is her life? How have the years treated her?... In my dream she was still eighteen. In reality—it is melancholy to think how far from eighteen she has had leisure, since that April afternoon, to drift.
Youth faces forward, impatient of the present, panting to anticipate the future. But we who have crossed a certain sad meridian, we turn our gaze backwards, and tell the relentless gods what we would sacrifice to recover a little of the past, one of those shining days when to us also it was given to sojourn among the Fortunate Islands.Ah, si jeunesse savait!...