'And from her lips, as from a hyacinth fullOf honey-dew, a liquid murmur drops,Killing the sense with passion, sweet as stopsOf planetary music heard in trance.'
'And from her lips, as from a hyacinth fullOf honey-dew, a liquid murmur drops,Killing the sense with passion, sweet as stopsOf planetary music heard in trance.'
Andrea thought of Shelley's lines. He repeated them to Maria, feeling the contagion of her emotion, penetrated by the charm of the hour and the scene.
'Never, in my hours of loftiest spiritual flights, have I attained to such heights. You lift yourself above my sublimest dream, shine resplendent above my most radiant thoughts; you illumine me with a ray that is almost brighter than I can bear.'
She stood up straight and slender against the balustrade, her hands clasping the stone, her head high, her face more pallid than on the memorable morning when they walked beneath the flowering trees. Tears filled her half-closed eyes and glittered upon her lashes, and as she gazed before her, she saw the sky all rosy-red through the mist of her tears.
The sky seemed to rain roses as on that evening in October when the sun, sinking behind the hill at Rovigliano, lit up the deep pools in the pine-wood. The Villa Medici, eternally green and flowerless, received upon the tops of its rigid arboreal walls this gentle rain of innumerable petals showered down from the celestial gardens.
She turned to go down. Andrea followed her. They walked in silence towards the stairway; they looked at the wood that stretched between the terrace and the Belvedere. The light seemed to stop short at the entrance to it, where stood the two guardian statues, unable to pierce the further gloom; and the trees looked as if they spread their branches in a different atmosphere, or rather in some dark waters at the bottom of the sea, like giant marine plants.
She was seized with sudden terror. Hastening towards the steps, she ran down five or six and then stopped, dazed and panting. Through the silence, she heard the beating of her heart like the roll of distant thunder. The Villa Medici was no longer in sight; the stairway was enclosed between two walls, damp and gray and with grass growing in the cracks, gloomy as a subterranean dungeon. She saw Andrea lean down swiftly to kiss her on the lips.
'No, no, Andrea—no!'
He stretched out his hands to draw her to him, to hold her fast.
'No!'
Wildly she seized one of his hands and carried it to her lips; she kissed it twice—thrice, with frenzied passion. Then she fled down the steps to the gate like a mad creature.
'Maria! Maria! Stop!'
They stood together before the closed gate, pale, panting, shaken, trembling from head to foot, gazing at one another with wide distraught eyes, their ears filled with the throb of their mad pulses, a sense of choking in their throats. Then suddenly, with one impulse, they were in each other's arms, heart to heart, lips to lips.
'Enough—you are killing me,' she murmured, leaning, half fainting, against the gateway, with a gesture of supreme entreaty.
For a moment, they stood facing one another without touching. All the silence of the Villa seemed to weigh upon them in this narrow spot enclosed in its high walls like anopen tomb. High above them sounded the hoarse cawing of the rooks gathering on the roofs of the palaces or crossing the sky. Once more, a strange fear possessed Maria's heart. She cast a terror-stricken glance up at the top of the walls. Then, with a visible effort she said quickly:
'We can go now; will you open the gate!'
And, in her uncontrollable haste to get away, her hand met Andrea's on the latch of the gate.
As she passed between the two granite columns and under the jasmin, Andrea said—'Look, the jasmin is just going to blossom!'
She did not turn but she smiled—a smile that was infinitely sad because of the shadow cast upon her heart by the sudden recollection of the name she had read in the Belvedere. And while she walked through the mysterious gloom of the avenue, and she felt his kiss flame in her blood, a ruthless torture graved deep into her heart, that name—oh, that name!
Lord Heathfield opened the great book-case containing his private collection, and turning to Sperelli—
'You should design the clasps for this volume,' he said; 'it is in quarto and dated from Lampsacus, 1734. The engravings seem to me extremely fine. What do you think?'
He handed Andrea the rare volume, which was illustrated with erotic vignettes.
'Here is a very notable figure,' he continued, pointing to one of the vignettes—'something that was quite new to me. None of my erotic authors mention it.'
He talked incessantly, discussing each detail and following the lines of the drawing with a flabby white finger, covered with hairs on the first joint and ending in a polished, pointed nail, a little livid like the nail of an ape. His voice grated hideously on Sperelli's ear.
'This Dutch edition of Petronius is magnificent. And here is theErotopœgnionprinted in Paris, 1798. Do you know the poem attributed to John Wilkes,An Essay on Women? This is an edition of 1763.'
The collection was very complete. It comprised all the most infamous, the most refinedly sensual works that the human mind has produced in the course of centuries to serve as a commentary to the ancient hymn in honour of the god of Lampsacus,Salve! Sancte pater.
The collector took the books down from their shelves and showed them in turn to his 'young friend,' never pausing in his discourse. His hands grew caressing as he touched each volume bound in priceless leather or material. A subtlesmile played continually round his lips, and a gleam as of madness flashed from time to time into his eyes.
'I also possess a first edition of the Epigrams of Martial—the Venice one, printed by Windelin of Speyer, in folio. This is it. The clasps are by a master hand.'
Sperelli listened and looked in a sort of stupor that changed by degrees into horror and distress. His eyes were continually drawn to a portrait of Elena hanging on the wall against the red damask background.
'That is Elena's portrait by Frederick Leighton. But now, look at this! The frontispiece, the headings, the initial letters, the marginal ornaments combine all that is most perfect in the matter of erotic iconography. Look at the clasps!'
The binding was exquisite. Shark-skin, wrinkled and rough as that which surrounds the hilts of Japanese sabres covered the sides and back; the clasps and bosses, of richly silvered bronze, were chased with consummate elegance, and were worthy to rank with the best work of the sixteenth century.
'The artist, Francis Redgrave, died in a lunatic asylum. He was a young genius of great promise. I have all his studies. I will show them to you.'
The collector warmed to his subject. He went away to fetch the portfolio from the next room. His gait was somewhat jerky and uncertain, like that of a man who already carries in his system the germ of paralysis, the first touch of spinal disease; his body remained rigid without following the movement of his limbs, like the body of an automaton.
Andrea Sperelli followed him with his eyes till he crossed the threshold of the room. The moment he was alone, unspeakable anguish rent his soul. This room, hung with dark-red damask, exactly like the one in which Elena had received him two years ago, seemed to him tragic and sinister. These were, perhaps, the very same hangings that had heard Elena say to him that day, 'I love you.' The book-case was open, and he could see the rows of obscene books, the bizarrebindings stamped with symbolic decorations. On the wall hung the portrait of Lady Heathfield side by side with a copy of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Nelly O'Brien. And the two women looked out of the canvas with the same, self-same piercing intensity, the same glow of passion, the same flame of sensual desire, the same marvellous eloquence; each had a mouth that was ambiguous, enigmatical, sibylline, the mouth of the insatiable absorber of souls; and each had a brow of marble whiteness, immaculately, radiantly pure.
'Poor Redgrave!' said Lord Heathfield, returning with the portfolio of drawings. 'There was a genius for you. There never was an erotic imagination to equal his. Look! look! What style! What profound knowledge of the potentialities of the human figure for expression.'
He left Andrea's side for a moment in order to close the door. Then he returned to the table in the window and began turning over the collection under Sperelli's eyes, talking without a pause, pointing out with that ape-like finger the peculiar characteristics of each figure.
He spoke in his own language, beginning each sentence with an interrogative intonation and ending with a monotonous irritating drop of the voice. Certain words lacerated Andrea's ear like the sound of filing iron or the shriek of a steel knife over a pane of glass.
And the drawings passed in review before him, appalling pictures which revealed the terrible fever that had taken hold upon the artist's hand, and the terrible madness that possessed his brain.
'Now here,' said Lord Heathfield, 'is the work which inspired these masterpieces. A priceless book—rarest of the rare! You are not acquainted with Daniel Maclisius?'
He handed Andrea the treatise:De verberatione amatoria. He had warmed more and more to his subject. His bald temples were flushed, and the veins stood out on his great forehead; every minute his mouth twitched a little convulsively and his hands, those detestable hands, were perpetually on the move, while his arms retailed their paralytic immobility. The unclean beast in him appeared in all its brazen ugliness and ferocity.
'Mumps! Mumps! are you alone?'
It was Elena's voice. She knocked softly at one of the doors.
'Mumps!'
Andrea started violently; the blood rushed to his head and drew a veil of mist before his eyes, and there was a roar in his ears as if he were going to be seized with vertigo. In the midst of the fever of excitement into which he had been thrown by these books, these pictures, the maddening discourses of his host, a furious instinct rose out of the blind depths of his being, the same brutal impetus which he had already experienced on the race-course after his victory over Rutolo amid the acrid exhalations of his steaming horse. The phantasm of a crime of love tempted and beckoned to him: to kill this man, take the woman by force, wreak his brutal will upon her, and then kill himself. But it passed rapidly as it had come.
'No, I am not alone,' answered the husband, without opening the door. 'In a few minutes I shall have the pleasure of bringing Count Sperelli to you—he is here with me.'
He replaced the book in the book-case, closed the portfolio and carried it back into the next room.
Andrea would have given all he possessed not to have to undergo the ordeal that awaited him, and yet it attracted him strangely. Once more, he raised his eyes to the crimson wall and the dark frame out of which Elena's pallid face looked forth, that face with the haunting eyes and the sibylline mouth. A penetrating and continuous fascination emanated from that imperious image. That strange pallor dominated tragically the whole crimson gloom of the apartment. And once again he felt that his miserable passion was incurable.
'Will you come into the drawing-room?' asked the husband, reappearing in the doorway perfectly calm and composed. 'Then, you will design those clasps for me?'
'I will try,' answered Andrea.
He was quite unable to control his inward agitation. Elena looked at him with a provocative smile.
'What were you doing in there?' she asked him, still smiling in the same manner.
'Your husband was showing me some unique curiosities.'
'Ah!'
There was a sardonic sneer upon her lips, a manifest mocking scorn in her voice. She settled herself on a wide divan covered with a Bokhara carpet of faded amaranthine hues on which languished great cushions embroidered with spreading palms of dull gold. Here she leaned back in an easy, graceful attitude, and gazed at Andrea from under her drooping eyelids, while she spoke of trivial society matters in a voice that insinuated its tones into the young man's heart, and crept through his blood like an invisible fire.
Two or three times, he surprised a look which Lord Heathfield fixed upon his wife—a look that seemed surcharged with all the infamies he had stirred up just now. Again that criminal thought sped through his mind. He trembled in every fibre of his being. He started to his feet, livid and convulsed.
'Going already?' exclaimed Lord Heathfield. 'Why, what is the matter?' and he smiled a singular smile at his 'young friend.' He knew well the effect of his books.
Sperelli bowed. Elena gave him her hand without rising. Her husband accompanied him to the door, where he repeated in a low voice—'You won't forget those clasps?'
As Andrea stood in the portico, he saw a carriage coming up the drive. A man with a great golden beard nodded to him from the window. It was Galeazzo Secinaro.
In a flash, the recollection of the May Bazaar came back to him, and the episode of Galeazzo offering Elena a sum of money if she would dry her beautiful hands, all wet with champagne, on his beard. He hurried through the garden and out into the street. He had a dull confused sense as of some deafening noise going on inside his head.
It was an afternoon at the end of April, warm and moist.
The sun appeared and disappeared again among the fleecy slow-sailing clouds. The languor of the sirocco lay over Rome.
On the pavement in front of him in the Via Sistina, he perceived a lady walking slowly in the direction of the Trinità. He recognised her as Donna Maria Ferrès. He looked at his watch; it was on the stroke of five; only a minute or two before the accustomed hour of meeting. Maria was assuredly on her way to the Palazzo Zuccari.
He hastened forward to join her. When he reached her side, he called her by name.
She started violently. 'What? You here? I was just going up to you. It is five o'clock.'
'It wants a minute or two yet to the hour. I was hurrying on to receive you. Forgive me.'
'But you seem quite upset and very pale. Where were you coming from?'
She frowned slightly, regarding him fixedly through her veil.
'From my stables,' Andrea replied, meeting her look unblushingly as though he had not a drop of blood left to send to his face. 'A horse that I thought a great deal of has been hurt in the knee—the fault of the jockey—and now it will not be able to run in the Derby on Sunday. It has annoyed and upset me very much. Please forgive me, I over-stayed the time without noticing it. But it is still a few minutes to five.'
'It does not matter. Good-bye. I am going back.'
They had reached the Piazza del Trinità. She stopped and held out her hand. A furrow still lingered between her brows. With all her great sweetness of temper, she occasionally had moments of angry impatience and petulancy that seemed to transform her into another creature.
'No, Maria—come, be kind! I am going up now to wait for you. Go on as far as the gates of the Pincio and then come back. Will you?'
The clock of the Trinità de' Monti begun to strike.
'You hear that?' he added.
She hesitated for a moment.
'Very well, I will come.'
'Thank you so much! I love you.'
'And I love you.'
They parted.
Donna Maria went on across the piazza and into the avenue. Over her head, the languid breath of the sirocco sent a broken murmur through the green trees. Subtle waves of perfume rose and fell upon the warm, damp breeze. The clouds seemed lower; the swallows skimmed close to the ground; and in the languorous heaviness of the air there was something that melted the passionate heart of the Siennese.
Ever since she had yielded to Andrea's persuasions, her heart had been filled with a happiness that was deeply fraught with fear. All her Christian blood was on fire with the hitherto undreamed-of raptures of her passion, and froze with terror at her sin. Her passion was all-conquering, supreme, immense, so despotic that for hours sometimes it obliterated all thought of her child. She went so far as to forget, to neglect Delfina! And afterwards, she would have a sudden access of remorse, of repentance, of tenderness, in which she covered the astonished little girl's face with tears and kisses, sobbing in horrible despair as over a corpse.
Her whole being quickened at this flame, grew keener, more acute, acquired a marvellous sensibility, a sort of clairvoyance, a faculty of divination which caused her endless torture. Hardly a deception of Andrea's but seemed to send a shadow across her spirit; she felt an indefinite sense of disquietude which sometimes condensed itself into a suspicion. And this suspicion would gnaw at her heart, embittering kisses and caresses, till it was dissipated by the transports and ardent passion of her incomprehensible lover.
She was jealous. Jealousy was her implacable tormentor; not jealousy of the present but of the past. With the crueltythat jealous people exercise against themselves, she would have wished to read the secrets of Andrea's memory, to find the traces left there by former mistresses, to know—to know—. The question that most often rose to her lips if Andrea seemed moody and silent was, 'What are you thinking about?' And yet, at the very moment of asking the question, a shadow would cross her eyes and her spirit, an inevitable rush of sadness would rise out of her heart.
To-day again, when he turned up so unexpectedly in the street, had she not had an instinctive movement of suspicion? With a flash of lucidity, the idea had leapt into her mind that Andrea was coming from the Palazzo Barberini, from Lady Heathfield.
She knew that Andrea had been this woman's lover; she knew that her name was Elena; she knew also that she was the Elena of the inscription—'Ich lebe!' Goethe's distich rang painfully in her heart. That lyric cry gave her the measure of Andrea's love for this most beautiful woman. He must have loved her boundlessly!
Walking slowly under the trees, she recalled Elena's appearance in the concert-hall and the ill-disguised uneasiness of the old lover. She remembered her own terrible agitation one evening at the Austrian Embassy when the Countess Starnina said to her, seeing Elena pass by—'What do you think of Lady Heathfield? She was, and is still, I fancy, a great flame of our friend Sperelli's.'
'Is still, I fancy.' What tortures in a single sentence! She followed her rival persistently with her eyes through the throng, and more than once her gaze met that of the other, sending a nameless shiver through her. Later on in the evening, when they were introduced to one another by the Baroness Bockhorst, in the middle of the crowd, they merely exchanged an inclination of the head. And that perfunctory salutation had been repeated on the rare occasions on which Maria Ferrès had joined in any social function.
Why should these doubts and suspicions, beaten down andstifled under the flood of her passion, rise up again now with so much vehemence? Why had she not the strength to repress them or put them away from her altogether? The least touch brought them up to the surface as lively as ever.
Her distress and unhappiness increased with every moment. Her heart was not satisfied; the dream that had risen up within her on that mystical morning under the flowering trees in sight of the sea, had not come true. All that was purest and fairest in that love had remained down there in the sequestered glades in the symbolical forest that bloomed and bore fruit perpetually in contemplation of the Infinite.
She stood and leaned against the parapet that looks towards San Sebastianello. The ancient oaks, their foliage so dark as almost to seem black, spread a sombre artificial roof over the fountain. There were great rents in their trunks filled up with bricks and mortar like the breaches in a wall. Oh, the young arbutus-trees all radiant and breathing in the light! The fountain, dripping from the higher into the lower basin, moaned at intervals, like a heart that fills with anguish and then overflows in a torrent of tears; oh, the melody of the Hundred Fountains in the laurel avenue! The city lay as dead, as if buried under the ashes of an invisible volcano, silent and funereal as a city ravaged by the plague, enormous, shapeless, dominated by the cupola that rose out of its bosom like a cloud. Oh, the sea, the tranquil sea!
Her uneasiness increased. An obscure menace emanated from these things. She was seized with the feeling of terror she had already experienced on so many occasions. Across her pious spirit there flashed once more the thought of punishment.
Nevertheless, the recollection that her lover awaited her, thrilled her to the heart's core; at the thought of his kisses, his caresses, his mad endearments, her blood was on fire and her soul grew faint. The thrill of passion triumphed over the fear of God. She turned her steps towards her lover's house with all the palpitating emotion of her first rendezvous.
'At last!' cried Andrea, gathering her into his arms, and drinking the breath from her panting lips.
He took one of her hands and held it against his breast.
'Feel my heart. If you had stayed away a minute longer, it would have broken.'
But instead of her hand, she laid her cheek upon it. He kissed the white nape of her neck.
'Do you hear it beat?'
'Yes, and it speaks to me.'
'What does it tell you?'
'That you do not love me.'
'What does it tell you?' repeated the young man, biting her neck softly and preventing her from raising her head.
She laughed.
'That you love me.'
She removed her cloak, her hat and her gloves, and then went to smell the bouquets of white lilac that filled the high Florentine vases like those of thetondoin the Borghese Gallery. Her step on the carpet was extraordinarily light, and nothing could exceed her grace of attitude as she buried her face in the delicate tassels of bloom.
She bit off the end of a spray, and holding it between her lips—
'Take it,' she said.
They exchanged a long, long kiss in among the perfume.
He drew her closer and said with a tremor in his voice, 'Come.'
'No, Andrea—no; let us stay here. I will make the tea for you.'
She took her lover's hand and twined her fingers into his. 'I don't know what is the matter with me. My heart is so full of love that I could almost cry.'
The words trembled on her lips; her eyes were full of tears.
'Oh, if only I need not leave you, if I could stay here always!'
Her heart was so full that it lent an indefinable sadness to her words.
'When I think that you can never know the whole extent of my love! That I can never know yours! Do you love me? Tell me, say it a hundred, a thousand times—always—you love me?'
'As if you did not know!'
'No, I do not know.'
She uttered the words in so low a tone that Andrea hardly caught them.
'Maria!'
She silently laid her head on Andrea's breast, waiting for him to speak, as if listening to his heart.
He regarded that hapless head, weighed down by the burden of a sad foreboding; he felt the light pressure of that noble, mournful brow upon his breast, which was hardened by falsehood, encased in duplicity as in a cuirass of steel. He was stirred by genuine emotion; a sense of human pity for this most human suffering gripped him by the throat. And yet this agitation of soul resolved itself into lying words and lent a quiver of seeming sincerity to his voice.
'You do not know!—Your voice was so low that it died away upon your lips; at the bottom of your heart something protested against your words; all, all the memories of our love rose up and protested against them. Oh!you do not knowthat I love you!—'
She remained leaning against him, listening, trembling, recognising or fancying that she recognised in his moving voice the accents of true passion, the accents that intoxicated her and that she supposed were inimitable. And he went on speaking, almost in her ear, in the silence of the room, with his hot breath on her cheek and with pauses that were almost sweeter than words. '—To have one sole thought, continually, every hour, every moment—not to be able to conceive of any happiness but the transcendent one that beams upon me from your mere presence—to live throughout the day in the anticipation—impatient, restless, fierce—of themoment when I shall see you again, and, after you have gone to caress and cherish your image in my heart,——to believe in you alone, to swear by you alone, in you alone to put my faith, my strength, my pride, my whole world, all that I dream and all that I hope——'
She lifted her face all bathed in tears. He ceased to speak, and with his lips arrested the course of the warm drops that flowed over her cheeks. She wept and smiled, caressing his hair with trembling hands, shaken with irrepressible sobs.
'My heart, my dearest heart!'
He made her sit down and knelt before her without ceasing to kiss her lids. Suddenly he started. He had felt her long lashes tremble on his lips like the flutter of an airy wing. Time was, when Elena had laughingly given him that caress twenty times in succession. Maria had learned it from him, and at that caress he had often managed to conjure up the image ofthe other.
His start made Maria smile; and as a tear still lingered on her lashes—'This one too,' she said.
He kissed it away, and she laughed softly without a thought of suspicion.
Her tears had ceased, and, reassured, she turned almost gay and full of charming graces.
'I am going to make the tea now,' she said.
'No, stay where you are.' The image of Elena had suddenly interposed between them.
'No, let me get up,' begged Maria, disengaging herself from his constraining arms. 'I want you to taste my tea. The aroma will penetrate to your very soul.'
She was alluding to some costly tea she had received from Calcutta which she had given to Andrea the day before.
She rose and went over to the arm-chair with the dragons in which the melting shades of therosa di gruogoof the ancient dalmatic continued to languish exquisitely. The little cups of fine Castel-Durante Majolica still glittered on the tea-table.
While preparing the tea, she said a thousand charming things, she let all the goodness and tenderness of her fond heart bloom out with entire freedom; she took an ingenuous delight in this dear and secret intimacy, the hushed calm of the room with all its accessories of refined luxury. Behind her, as behind the Virgin in Botticelli'stondo, rose the tall vases crowned with sprays of white lilac, and her archangelic hands moved about among the little mythological pictures of Luzio Dolci and the hexameters of Ovid beneath them.
'What are you thinking about?' she asked Andrea, who was sitting on the floor beside her, leaning his head against the arm of her chair.
'I am listening to you. Go on!'
'I have nothing more to say.'
'Yes, you have. Tell me a thousand, thousand things——'
'What sort of things?'
'The things that you alone know how to say.'
He wanted Maria's voice to lull the anguish caused him bythe other; to animate for him the image ofthe other.
'Do you smell that?' she exclaimed, as she poured the boiling water on to the aromatic leaves.
A delicious fragrance diffused itself through the air with the steam.
'How I love that!' she cried.
Andrea shivered. Were not those the very words—and spoken in her very tone—that Elena had used on the evening she offered him her love? He fixed his eyes on Maria's mouth.
'Say that again.'
'What?'
'What you just said.'
'Why?'
'The words sound so sweet when you pronounce them—you cannot understand it, of course. Say them again.'
She smiled, divining nothing, and a little troubled, even a little shy, under her lover's strange gaze.
'Well then—I love that!'
'And me?'
'What?'
'And me?——you——'
She looked down puzzled at her lover writhing at her feet, his face haggard and drawn, waiting for the words he was trying to draw out of her.
'And me?——'
'Ah! you——I love you——'
'That is it! That is it!—Say it again—again——'
She did so, quite unsuspecting. He felt a spasm of inexpressible pleasure.
'Why do you shut your eyes?' she asked, not because of any suspicion in her mind, but to lead him on to explain his emotion.
'So that I may die.'
He laid his head on her knee and remained for some minutes in that attitude, silent and abstracted. She gently stroked his hair, his brow—that brow behind which his infamous imagination was working. Shadows began to fill the room, and the fragrance of the flowers and the aromatic beverage mingled in the air; the outlines of the surrounding objects melted into one vague form, harmonious, dim, unsubstantial.
Presently she said: 'Get up, dearest, I must go. It is getting late.'
'Stay a little longer with me,' he entreated.
He drew her over to the divan where the gold on the cushions still gleamed through the shadows. There he suddenly clasped her head between his hands and covered her face with fierce hot kisses. He let himself imagine it was the other face he held, and he thought of it as sullied by the lips of her husband; and instead of disgust, was filled with still more savage desire of it. All the turbid sensations he had experienced in the presence of this man now rose to the surface of his consciousness, and with his kisses these vile things swept over the cheeks, the brow, the hair, the throat, the lips of Maria.
'Let me go—let me go,' she cried, struggling out of his arms.
She ran across to the tea-table to light the candles.
'You must be good,' she said, panting a little still, and with an air of fond reproof.
He did not move from the divan, but looked at her in silence.
She went over to the side of the mantelpiece, where, on the wall, hung the little old mirror. She put on her hat and veil before its dim surface, that looked so like a pool of dull and stagnant water.
'I am so loath to leave you this evening!' she murmured, oppressed by the melancholy of the twilight hour. 'This evening more than ever before.'
The violet gleam of the sunset struggled with the light of the candles. The lilac in the crystal vases looked waxen white. The cushion in the arm-chair retained the impress of the form that had leaned against it.
The clock of the Trinità began to strike.
'Heavens! how late! Help me to put on my cloak,' exclaimed the poor creature, turning to Andrea.
He only clasped her once more in his arms, kissing her furiously, blindly, madly, with a devouring passion, stifling on her lips his own insane desire to cry aloud the name of Elena.
At last she managed to gasp in an expiring voice—
'You are drawing my life out of me.' But his passionate vehemence seemed to make her happy.
'My love, my soul, all, all mine!' she said.
And again, blissfully—'I can feel your heart beating—so fast, so fast.'
At last, with a sigh, 'I must go now.'
Andrea was as lividly pale and convulsed as if he had just committed a murder.
'What ails you?' she asked with tender solicitude.
He tried to smile. 'I never felt so profound an emotion,' he answered.
'I thought I should have died.'
He took the bouquet of flowers from one of the vases and handed it to her and went with her towards the door, almost hurrying her departure, for this woman's every look and gesture and word was a fresh sword-thrust in his heart.
'Good-bye, dear heart!' said the hapless creature to him with unspeakable tenderness. 'Think of me.'
On the morning of the 20th of May, as Andrea Sperelli was walking along the Corso in the radiant sunshine, he heard his name called from the doorway of the Club.
On the pavement in front of it was a group of gentlemen amusing themselves by watching the ladies pass and talking scandal. They were Giulio Musellaro, Ludovico Barbarisi, the Duke of Grimiti, Galeazzo Secinaro, Gino Bomminaco, and two or three others.
'Have you heard what happened last night?' Barbarisi asked him.
'No, what?'
'Don Manuel Ferrès, the Minister for Guatemala——'
'Well?'
'Was caught red-handed cheating at cards.'
Sperelli retained his self-command, although some of the men were looking at him with a certain malicious curiosity.
'How was that?'
'Galeazzo was there and was playing at the same table.'
Secinaro proceeded to give him the details.
Andrea did not affect indifference, he listened with a grave and attentive air. At the end of the story, he said, 'I am extremely sorry to hear it.'
After remaining a minute or two longer with the group, he bowed and passed on.
'Which way are you going?' asked Secinaro.
'I am going home.'
'I will go with you part of the way.'
They went off together in the direction of the Via de' Condotti. The Corso was one glittering stream of sunshinefrom the Piazzo di Venezia to the Piazzo del Popolo. Ladies in light spring dress passed along by the brilliant shop-windows—the Princess of Ferentino with Barbarella Viti under one big lace parasol; Bianca Dolcebuono; Leonetto Lanza's young wife.
'Do you know this man—this Ferrès?' asked Galeazzo of Andrea, who had not spoken as yet.
'Yes, I met him last year at Schifanoja, at my cousin Ateleta's. The wife is a great friend of Francesca's. That is why the affair annoys me so much. We must see that it is hushed up as much as possible. You will be doing me the greatest favour if you will help me about it.'
Galeazzo promised his assistance with the most cordial alacrity.
'I think,' said he, 'that the worst of the scandal might be avoided if the Minister sends in his resignation to his Government without a moment's delay. That is what the President of the Club advised, but Ferrès refused last night. He blustered and did the insulted. And yet the proofs were there, as clear as daylight. He will have to be persuaded.'
They continued on the subject as they walked along. Sperelli was grateful to Secinaro for his assistance, and the intimate tone of the conversation predisposed Secinaro to friendly confidences.
At the corner of the Via de' Condotti, they caught sight of Lady Heathfield strolling along the left side of the street past the Japanese shop-windows, with her undulating, rhythmic, captivating walk.
'Ah—Donna Elena,' said Galeazzo.
Both the men watched her, and both felt the glamour of that rhythmic gait.
When they came up to her, they both bowed but passed on. They no longer saw her, but she saw them; and for Andrea it was a form of torture to have to walk beside a rival under the gaze of the woman he desired, and feel that those piercing eyes were perhaps taking a delight in weighing the merits of both men. He compared himself with Secinaro.
Galeazzo was of the bovine type, a Lucius Verus with golden hair and blue eyes; while amid the magnificent abundance of his golden beard shone a full red mouth, handsome, but without the slightest expression. He was tall, square-shouldered and strong, with an air of elegance that was not exactly refined, but easy and unaffected.
'Well?' Sperelli asked, goaded on by a sort of madness. 'Are matters going on favourably?'
He knew he might adopt this tone with a man of this sort.
Galeazzo turned and looked at him half surprised, half suspicious. He certainly did not expect such a question from him, and still less the airy and perfectly calm tone in which the question was uttered.
'Ah, the time that siege of mine has lasted!' groaned the bearded prince. 'Ages simply—I have tried every kind of manœuvre but always without success. I always came too late, some other fellow had always been before me in storming the citadel. But I never lost heart. I was convinced that sooner or later my turn would come.Attendre pour atteindre.And sure enough——'
'Well?'
'Lady Heathfield is kinder to me than the Duchess of Scerni. I shall have, I hope, the very enviable honour of being set down after you on the list.'
He burst into a rather coarse laugh, showing his splendid teeth.
'I fancy that my doughty deeds in India, which Giulio Musellaro spread abroad, have added to my beard several heroic strands of irresistible virtue.'
'Ah, just in these days that beard of yours should fairly quiver with memories.'
'What memories?'
'Memories of a Bacchic nature.'
'I don't understand.'
'What, have you forgotten the famous May Bazaar of 1884?'
'Well, upon my word, now that you remind me of it, the third anniversary does fall on one of these next days. But you were not there—who told you?
'You want to know more than is good for you, my dear boy.'
'Do tell me!'
'Bend your mind rather to making the most skilful use of this anniversary and give me news as soon as you have any.'
'When shall I see you again?'
'Whenever you like.'
'Then dine with me to-night at the Club—about eight o'clock. That will give us an opportunity of seeing after the other affair too.'
'All right. Good-bye, Goldbeard. Run!'
They parted in the Piazza di Spagna, at the foot of the steps, and as Elena came across the square in the direction of the Via due Macelli to go up to the Quattro Fontane, Secinaro joined her and walked on with her.
The strain of dissimulation once over, Andrea's heart sank within him like a leaden weight. He did not know how he was to drag himself up the steps. He was quite assured that, after this, Secinaro would tell him everything, and somehow this seemed to him a point to his advantage. By a sort of intoxication, a species of madness, resulting from the severity of his sufferings, he rushed blindly into new and ever more cruel and senseless torments; aggravating and complicating his miserable state in a thousand ways; passing from perversion to perversion, from aberration to aberration, without being able to hold back or to stop for one moment in his giddy descent. He seemed to be devoured by an inextinguishable fever, the heat of which made all the germs of human lust lying dormant in the hidden depths of his being flourish and grow big. His every thought, his every emotion showed the same stain.
And yet, it was the very deception itself that bound him so strongly to the woman he deceived. His mind had adapted itself so thoroughly to the monstrous comedy that hewas no longer capable of conceiving any other way of satisfying his passion. This incarnation of one woman in another was no longer a result of exasperated desire, but a deliberate habit of vice, and now finally an imperious necessity. From thenceforth, the unconscious instrument of his vicious imagination had become as necessary to him as the vice itself. By a process of sensual depravity, he had almost come to think that the real possession of Elena would not afford him such exquisite and violent delight as the imaginary. He was hardly able to separate the two women in his thoughts. And just as he felt that his pleasure would be diminished by the actual possession of the one, so his nerves received a shock if by some lassitude of the imagination he found himself in the presence of the other without the interposing image of her rival.
Thus he felt crushed to the earth at the thought that Don Manuel's ruin meant for him the loss of Maria.
When she came to him that evening, he saw at once that the poor thing was ignorant as yet of her misfortune. But the next day, she arrived, panting, convulsed, pale as death. She threw herself into his arms, and hid her face on his breast.
'You know?' she gasped between her sobs.
The news had spread. Disgrace and ruin were inevitable, irremediable. There followed days of hideous torture, during which Maria, left alone after the precipitate flight of the gamester, abandoned by the few friends she possessed, persecuted by the innumerable creditors of her husband, bewildered by the legal formalities of the seizure of their effects, by bailiffs, money-lenders and rogues of all sorts, gave evidences of a courage that was nothing less than heroic, but failed to avert the utter ruin that overwhelmed the family.
From her lover she would receive no assistance of any kind; she told him nothing of the martyrdom she was enduring even when he reproached her for the brevity of her visits. She never complained; for him she always managedto call up a less mournful smile; still obeyed the dictates of her lover's capricious passion, and lavished upon her ruthless destroyer all the treasures of her fond heart.
Her presentiments had not deceived her. Everything was falling in ruins around her. Punishment had overtaken her without a moment's warning.
But she never regretted having yielded to her lover; never repented having given herself so utterly to him, never bewailed her lost purity. Her one sorrow—stronger than remorse, or fear, or any other trouble of mind—was the thought that she must go away, must be separated from this man who was the life of her life.
'My darling, I shall die. I am going away to die far from you—alone—all alone—and you will not be there to close my eyes——'
She smiled as she spoke with certainty and resignation. But Andrea endeavoured to kindle an illusive hope in her breast, to sow in her heart the seeds of a dream that could only lead to future suffering.
'I will not let you die! You will be mine again and for a long time to come. We have many happy days of love before us yet!'
He spoke of the immediate future.—He would go and establish himself in Florence; from there he could go over as often as he liked to Sienna under the pretext of study—could pass whole months there copying some Old Master or making researches in ancient chronicles. Their love should have its hidden nest in some deserted street, or beyond the city, in the country, in some villa decorated with rural ornaments and surrounded by a meadow. She would be able to spare an hour now and then for their love. Sometimes she would come and spend a whole week in Florence, a week of unbroken happiness. They would air their idyll on the hillside of Fiesole in a September as mild as April, and the cypresses of Montughi would not be less kind to them than the cypresses of Schifanoja.
'Would it were true! Would it were true!' sighed Maria.
'You don't believe me?'
'Oh yes, I believe you; but my heart tells me that all these sweet things will remain a dream.'
She made Andrea take her in his arms and hold her there for a long time; and she leaned upon his breast, silently crouching into his embrace as if to hide herself, with the shiver of a sick person or of one who seeks protection from some threatening danger. She asked of Andrea only the delicate caresses that in the language of affection she called 'kisses of the soul' and that melted her to tears sweeter than any more carnal delights. She could not understand how in these moments of supreme spirituality, in these last sad hours of passion and farewell her lover was not content to kiss her hands.
'No—no, dear love,' she besought him, half repelled by Andrea's crude display of passion, 'I feel that you are nearer to me, closer to my heart, more entirely one with me, when you are sitting at my side, and take my hand in yours and look into my eyes and say the things to me that you alone know how to say. Those other caresses seem to put us far away from each other, to set some shadow between you and me——I don't know how to express my thought properly——And afterwards it leaves me so sad, so sad—I don't know what it is——I feel then so tired—but a tiredness that has something evil about it——!'
She entreated him, humbly, submissively, fearing to make him angry. Then she fell to recalling memories of things recent and passed, down to the smallest details, the most trivial words, the most insignificant facts, which all had a vast amount of significance for her. But it was towards the first days of her stay at Schifanoja that her heart returned most fondly.
'You remember? You remember?'
And suddenly the tears filled her downcast eyes.
One evening Andrea, thinking of her husband, asked her—'Since I knew you, have you always beenwhollymine?'
'Always.'
'I am not speaking of the soul——'
'Hush!—--yes, always wholly yours.'
And he, who had never before believed one of his mistresses on this point, believed Maria without a shadow of doubt as to the truth of her assertion.
He believed her even while he deceived and profaned her without remorse; he knew himself to be boundlessly loved by a lofty and noble spirit, that he was face to face with a grand and all-absorbing passion, and recognised fully both the grandeur of that passion and his own vileness. And yet under the lash of his base imaginings he would go so far as to hurt the mouth of the fond and patient creature, to prevent himself from crying aloud upon her lips the name that rose invincibly to his; and that loving and pathetic mouth would murmur, all unconscious, smiling though it bled—
'Even thus you do not hurt me.'
It wanted but a few days now to their parting. Miss Dorothy had taken Delfina to Sienna, and then returned to help her mistress in the last and most trying arrangements and to accompany her on the journey. In the mother's house in Sienna the truth of the story was not known, and Delfina of course knew nothing. Maria had merely written that Don Manuel had been suddenly recalled by his government. And she made ready to go—to leave these rooms, so full of cherished things, to the hands of the public auctioneers who had already drawn up the inventory and fixed the date of the sale for the 20th of June, at ten in the morning.
On the evening of the 9th, as she was leaving Andrea, she missed a glove. While looking for it she came upon a volume of Shelley, the one which Andrea had lent her in Schifanoja, the dear and affecting book in which, before the excursion to Vicomile, she had underlined the words