“Fire is better than snow, torture is more exquisite than joy, disease is more poetic than health,” said Lucia in ringing tones, her head erect, her eyes flashing, dominating him. Andrea bowed his head; he was subjugated.
“Fire is better than snow, torture is more exquisite than joy, disease is more poetic than health,” said Lucia in ringing tones, her head erect, her eyes flashing, dominating him. Andrea bowed his head; he was subjugated.
At Santa Maria, on the way home, the two equipages stopped, the victoria had caught up the phaeton. They conversed from one carriage to another. Alberto said he was very comfortable, and that he had made the Signora Caterina explain to him how to make mulberry syrup. It was so good for bronchial complaints. He had described his journey to Paris to her. Caterina nodded acquiescingly; she was never bored. Then they started again, the trap on before, the carriage following. The sun was going down.
“Oh, dio!are we going back? We are going back,” moaned Lucia; “this lovely day is coming to an end. Who knows when we shall have another?”
“What dark thoughts! Do not torment yourself with dreams, Lucia. The reality is that I love you; ’tis a fair reality.”
“We are evil-doers.”
“Lucia, you are striving to poison this hour of happiness.”
“And what man are you, if you cannot bear sorrow? What cowardice is this! Is all your strength in your muscles? I have loved you because I believed in your strength.”
“I am weak in your hands. Your voice alone can either sadden or revive me. You can give me strength or deprive me of it. Do not abuse your power.”
They were on the verge of a sentimental wrangle, whither she had been leading him since the beginning of the drive.
“Love is no merry prank, Andrea; remember, love is a tragedy.”
“Do not look at me like that, Lucia. Smile on me as you did before; we were so happy, just now.”
“We cannot always be happy. Happiness is sin, happiness is dearly bought....” sententiously.
He turned his face away, profoundly saddened. He no longer goaded his horse, and Tetillo had subsided into a slow trot. Turning, Lucia beheld the victoria approaching. “On, on, Andrea,” she said; “faster, faster!” The little trap flew like an arrow. She passed one arm through the arm of the driver, and with head erect, and hair blown about by the breeze, she gave herself up to the pleasure of the race.
“This is thesteppe, thesteppe,” she murmured, with a sigh.
“Love, love, love!” repeated Andrea, in the excitement of their speed. The phaeton sped on; they no longer looked behind them, nor saw the double row of trees that flew past them, nor the people who met them, nor the cloud of dust from the road. The little carriage flew, assuming a fantastic aspect, like that of a winged car.
“Give me a kiss,” said Andrea.
“No, they are behind us; they can see us.”
“Give me a kiss.”
Then she opened her white linen sunshade, lined with blue, and put it behind her; that dome screened them both and hid their two heads. Before them, no one, no one in the fields; and while the carriage sped along in the broad light of day, they kissed each other lingeringly on the lips.
The audacity of their love increased day by day. Trusting in the quiescence of the other two, they dared all that lovers’ imagination is capable of inventing. They chose seats beside each other, Andrea played with Lucia’s fan or handkerchief, he counted her bangles: if they were apart they talked of their love in a special vocabulary that recalled every incident of the past—an open parasol, a lake, a green shade, a lace scarf, a phrase pronounced by one or the other,then. If Lucia saw Andrea preoccupied, she immediately led the conversation to the subject of the Exhibition, and placidly remarked that the day of the horticultural show had been one of the most delightful in her whole life; and Andrea would find means to drag the wordsorceressinto his discourse. They understood each other’s every gesture and intonation, even to the movement of an eyelid or a finger. One day, Lucia called across the room to Andrea: “Listen, Andrea, I have something to tell you in your ear; no one else may hear it.”
“Not even I?” said Alberto, in comic wrath.
“Neither you, nor Caterina, who is smiling over there. Come here, Andrea.” He crossed the room and approached her: she laid her hand on his shoulder to draw him towards her, and whispered:
“Andreamio, I love you.”
He appeared to collect his thoughts for a moment, and then breathed in her ear:
“Love, my love, my witch—I love you!”
Then he returned to his place. But Alberto wanted to know absolutely; if he didn’t, he should die of curiosity. Lucia, pretending to yield, confessed that she had said; “Alberto is as curious as a woman; let us tease him, poor fellow.” This incident amused the lovers immensely, but they did not repeat the experiment. They had other devices: there was the proffer of the arm—indoors, on the terrace, on thestairs, and fugitive clasping and light touches in the corridor. Sometimes, for an instant, the two heads were so close that they might have kissed. When Caterina was not there and Alberto happened to turn his back to them, they exchanged glances as intense as if there had been pain in them. When they spent the evening in the drawing-room, Lucia chose her position with infinite art. She sat in the shade behind Alberto, so that she might gaze her fill on Andrea, without attracting any observation.
Sometimes she opened her fan before her eyes, looking through its sticks. Now and then, when Alberto was away and Caterina bent over her sewing, Lucia’s great eyes flashed in Andrea’s face: the lids dropped immediately. All the evening Lucia maintained her air of melancholy, her tired voice and weary intonation. If for a moment she found herself alone with Andrea, she would rise, quivering with life, and cry, close to his face:
“I love you.”
She fell back exhausted, while he was like one dazed. Now they found a hundred ways of passing letters to each other, running the risk of discovery every time, but succeeding with amazing dexterity; hiding notes in balls of wool, handkerchiefs or books, in packs of cards, at the bottom of the box of dominoes, in a copy of music, under the drawing-room clock; in fact, wherever a scrap of paper could be hidden. Lucia’s eye indicated the place; Andrea watched his opportunity, took a turn round the room; then, when he reached the spot, abstracted the letter with a masterly ease, acquired by habit, and substituted his own for it. Under an assumed hilarity and noisy joking manner, he concealed the most ardent anxiety and a continual uneasiness. Without looking at Lucia, he studied her every movement; he, great lion though he was, acquired the feline habit of certain tiger-like gestures; he, who was frankness personified, became accustomed to profound dissimulation; he grew sagacious, cunning and wily, oblique of glance and of crouching gait. During the night he meditatedthe plan for the morrow, so that on the morrow he might give Lucia a letter, or grasp her hand. He prepared all the mock questions and departures, all the improvised returns, the business pretexts and fictitious appointments. During the night he rehearsed the lies that were to deceive Alberto and Caterina on the morrow. Continual prevarication gradually degraded his character and drowned the cries of his conscience, to which perfidy and veiled evil were naturally repugnant. He lent a new spirit to the letter of his doctrine, one steeped in mental restrictions and Jesuitical excuses.
But this same spiritual corruption that tainted every characteristic of his frank, loyal nature, these hypocritical concessions, this sentimental cowardice, bound him the more firmly to Lucia. The more he gave himself up to her the more he became penetrated by her influence, the more acutely did he feel the delight of his slavery and the exquisite bitterness of his subjugation. The sacrifice of his honesty, the greatness of all his renunciations, strengthened the fetters that bound him to her who inspired it. Although he was prepared for anything, and ever on the look-out for any new, infernal, love-inspired invention, that Lucia’s brain might devise, she always succeeded in amazing him. One morning they met under aportière, on the threshold of the drawing-room; she dropped the curtain, threw her arms round his neck, and flew past him into the room. He thought he must be dreaming, and could hardly restrain himself from running after her. One evening, while Alberto was half asleep and Caterina playing one of her eternalrêveries, she called him out to her on the balcony, under the pretext of showing him a star, and there in the corner had for a second fallen into his arms. Then she said, imperiously:
“Go away.”
In one of those moments he had murmured, with every feature quivering:
“Take care: I shall strangle you.”
Indeed, he often felt that he could have strangled thewoman who maddened him by her presence and her vagaries, and who always eluded him. Even her letters were so incoherent, so mad, so prone to pass from despair to joy, that they added to his perturbation. To-day she would write a sentimental divagation on pure love—she wished him to love her like a sister, like an ideal, impersonal being, for that was the highest, sublimest love; and Andrea, moved, lulled by these abstractions, by the tenderness with which they were expressed, replied that thus did he love her, as she would be loved, as an angel of Paradise. Next day her letter would be full of mysticism; she spoke of God and the Madonna, of a vision that had come to her in the night; she entreated him to have faith, she prayed him to pray—oh! to be saved together, what happiness, what ecstasy to meet in Paradise! And Andrea, who was indifferent in matters of religion, who lived in the utmost apathy, replied—yes, for her sake, he would believe and pray: he preferred to lie than to contradict her; her will was his, he had no other. But in another mood, Lucia would indulge in the most ardent phrases, filling a page with kisses, words of fire and yet more kisses, with languors and savage longing and kisses, kisses, kisses; ending with: “Do you not feel my lips dying on yours?” And Andrea did feel them, and those words, written in minute characters, were to him as kisses, and when his lips touched them a shiver ran through his burning veins: his reply was almost brutal in its violence. Then Lucia, in her alarm, would write that their love was infamy; that their treason would meet with the direst punishment; that she already felt miserable, unhappy, and stricken. Andrea, tortured by the inconstancy of her moods, by her continual blowing hot and cold, by the constant struggle, knowing not how to follow her, despairing of finding arguments that would convince her—replied, entreating her to cease from torturing him, to have pity on him. To which Lucia answered by return: “Thou dost not love me!” He suffered more acutely than ever, despite the daring, the letters, the stolen kisses and the embraces in doorways. Day by day Lucia grewmore strange; one morning her face was pale and her voice hoarse and acrid. She neither gave her hand nor said good-day: her elbows looked angular and her shoulders as if they would pierce her gown; she even stooped as if suddenly stricken with age, answering every one—her husband, Caterina, and Andrea—disagreeably, especially Andrea. He held his peace, wondering what he could have done to her. When he could snatch an opportunity of speaking to her, he asked:
“What is the matter with thee?”
“Nothing.”
“What have I done?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you love me?”
“No.”
“Then I had better go away.”
“Go.”
In a moment like that, Andrea felt he could have beaten her, so wicked did she seem to him. He went away to Caserta to write her a furious letter from the post-office. When he returned she was worse, absorbed in silence, no longer deigning to answer any one. Those about her were so much influenced by her bad temper that they did not speak either. Every now and then, Alberto would ask:
“Luciamia, is there anything you want?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“To die.”
The newspaper shook in Andrea’s hand; he was pretending to read, while not a word was lost upon him.
“Lucia, shall we go to the wood to-morrow?” ventured Caterina, timidly, to give her something to talk about.
“No, I hate the wood, and the green, and the country....”
“Yesterday you said that you loved them.”
“To-day I hate what I loved yesterday,” said Lucia, in her sententious tone.
At last, one day, when she was shaking hands with Andrea,who was going out, she fell down in the frightful convulsions to which she had been subject from her childhood. Her arms beat the air, and her head rebounded on the floor. Neither Alberto nor Caterina could do much for her; Andrea grasped her wrists, and felt them stiffen like iron in his hands; her teeth chattered as if from ague, and the pupils of her eyes disappeared under her lids. She stammered unintelligible words, and Andrea, in dismay, almost thought he heard her break into sentences that revealed their secret. Then the convulsions appeared to abate, her muscles relaxed, and her bosom heaved long sighs. She opened her eyes, gazed at the persons round her, but closing them again, in a kind of horror, uttered a piercing cry, and fell into fresh convulsions; struggling, and insensible to the vinegar, the water, and the perfumes with which they drenched her face. Caterina called her, Alberto called her; no answer. When Andrea called her, her face became more livid, and the convulsions redoubled in intensity. With her lace tie torn away from her throat, her dress torn at the bosom, with dishevelled hair, and livid marks on her wrists, she inspired love and terror. When she came to herself, she cried as if her heart would break, as if some one had died. They comforted her, but she kept repeating, “No, no, no,” and continued her lamentations. Then, tired, worn out, with aching bones and joints, incapable of moving away, she fell asleep on the sofa, wrapped up in a shawl. Alberto stayed there until, at midnight, Caterina persuaded him to go to bed, and the two men retired. She sat up near a little table to watch, starting up at the slightest sound. Towards two o’clock Andrea stole in quietly; he was dressed, he had not gone to bed, he had been smoking.
“How is she?” he whispered to his wife.
“Better, I think; she never woke up, she has only sighed two or three times, as if she were oppressed.”
“What horrible convulsions!”
“She used to have them at school, but not so badly.” “Why do you not go to bed?”
“I cannot, Andrea; I cannot leave the poor thing alone.”
“I will sit up.”
“That wouldn’t do,sai.”
“You are right, but they haven’t made my orangeade.”
“The oranges and the sugar must be in the bedroom ... but I had better go and see.... Stay here a moment, I will soon return.”
Then he knelt down by the sofa, laying his hand on Lucia’s. She woke up gently and did not seem surprised, but hung on to his neck and kissed him.
“Take me away,” she said.
“Come, love,” he said, attempting to raise her.
“I cannot; I am dying, Andrea.” She again closed her eyes.
“To-morrow,” he said vaguely, for fear the convulsions should come on again.
“Yes, to-morrow, you will take me away, far, far....”
“Far, far away, my heart....”
They were silent; she must have heard an imperceptible sound, for she said:
“Here is Caterina.”
Caterina entered on tiptoe, and found her husband sitting in his place.
“She hasn’t moved?”
“No.”
“I have made you your orangeade.”
“Have you made up your mind to sit up?”
“Yes, I shall stay here; you don’t mind?”
And as they were in the dark, but for the faint light of the lamp, she stood on tiptoe for him to kiss her. He went away as slowly as possible, and Caterina watched until dawn.
Henceforward, all the letters ended with, “Take me away;” all of them were despairing.
Lucia wrote with such tragic concision, that he feared to open her letters. There was nothing in them but crime,malediction, suicide, death, eternal damnation, hellish remorse, teeth chattering, fever, burning fire. She was afraid of God, of man, of her husband, of Caterina, of Andrea himself; she felt degraded, lost, precipitated into a bottomless pit. “To die, only to die!” she exclaimed, in her letters. And she appeared so truly miserable, so really lost, that he accused himself of having ruined a woman’s existence, and craved her forgiveness, as if she had been a victim and a martyr. “I am your assassin; I am your executioner; I am your torment,” wrote Andrea, who had adopted the formulas of her emphatic style, with all its fantastic lyricism.
October was drawing to an end. One Sunday, at table, Lucia calmly announced that they would be leaving on the following Tuesday, despite the popular dictum.[2]
“I thought,” said Caterina gently, “that you would have stayed till Martinmas.”
“The fact is that Alberto’s cough is a little more troublesome, owing to the damp of this rainy October. Our house in Via Bisignano is very dry, and it is quite ready for us.”
“For the matter of that, I am better,” volunteered Alberto; “I am sure that I have gained flesh. I have been obliged to lengthen my braces. I owe my recovery to this country air.”
“I am sorry that Lucia has not been so well,” said Caterina.
“What does it matter?” said the other with supreme indifference. “I am a sickly, unfortunate creature. Yet the time I have spent here at Centurano, Caterinamia, has been the brightest, most harmonious epoch of my life, the highest point in my parabola; after it, there can only come a rapid descent towards eternal silence, eternal darkness, eternal solitude.”
Andrea did not open his lips, but in the evening he wrote, entreating her to stay a few days longer. He could not bear the thought of her departure. At Naples, she would no longer care for him. He would not let her go. She was his Lucia;why did she leave him? If she refused to stay, she must know that he would follow her at once.
It was of no avail. Lucia insisted on leaving. He clashed against an iron will, against a will with a steady aim. In one or two curt notes, Lucia replied so harshly as to fill him with dismay. She wished to leave, why should he detain her, why not let her go in peace? She wished to go, because her sufferings were intolerable, because she was so miserable. She wished to go, to weep elsewhere, to despair elsewhere. She wished to go, and he had no right to detain her, since he had made her so unhappy. She wished to go, so that she might not die at Centurano.
And she did leave; the farewell was heartrending. Lucia, whose departure had been fixed for midday, wept since early morning. Of everything that she looked upon, she said, “I look upon it for the last time.” Of everything that she did she said, “I do this for the last time.” Caterina was pale and with difficulty restrained her tears; Alberto was so much moved by Lucia’s emotion, that he mumbled inaudible nothings. Andrea rambled about the house like a phantom, touching himself as if to make sure of his own existence. Lucia avoided him, and abstained from addressing him; she did but raise her tearful eyes to his. They lunched in silence; no one ate a mouthful. Afterwards Lucia drew Caterina into her room; there she threw her arms round her, and sobbed her thanks for all her goodness.
“Oh! angel, angel! Caterinamia! For what you have done to me, may happiness be yours! May God’s hand be over your house! May love and joy abide within it! May Andrea ever love you more and more; may he adore thee as the Madonna is adored....”
Caterina signed to her to be silent, for the strain was getting too much for her; they kissed each other over and over again. When they entered the drawing-room, Lucia’s eyes were swollen.
“Addio, Andrea,” she said.
“Let me take you to the station,” he murmured.
“No, no, it would be worse.Addio; thank you. May the Lord bless....”
She turned away sobbing, and was gone. The greetings from the balcony and waving of handkerchiefs lasted until the carriage had turned the corner to Caserta. Husband and wife were alone together. Suddenly the house seemed deserted, and the rooms immense. A chill fell upon it. Caterina stooped to pick up a white handkerchief; it was Lucia’s, and Caterina wept over it, like a child who has lost its mother. Andrea sat down by her on the sofa, drew her head towards him, until it rested against his shoulder, and wept with her. Only two tears—burning, scalding, sacrilegious.