We lay back against the cushions. We acted like conspirators—it was difficult to tell why. The surprise of meeting her thus suddenly had deprived me of words. It must have been the same with her; we clasped hands in silence.
“I had to see you—had to speak to you.”
She was panting—almost crying.
“Of course. Why not? It was foolish to go on the way we were going.”
“Yes, foolish and heartbreaking. It wasn’t as though we were wanting to do anything wicked—only to meet one another, as we used to.”
Her voice trailed off into a little shivering sob; she flickered her eye-lids to prevent the tears from gathering.
“Ruthie, you mustn’t carry on so.” Then, “What has he done to you?” I asked fiercely. “You’re afraid.”
“He’s guessed.”
“Guessed what?”
“What you never knew.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I can’t tell you. If you’d guessed, it might have made all the difference.”
I did not dare to speak—her whisper was so ashamed. Her hand was hot in mine. She withdrew it. When I leant over her she shuddered, just as the trees had done when they knew the rain was coming, as though I were a thing to her both sweet and dreadful. She took my face between her hands, and yet shrank back from me. She delighted in and feared the thing she was doing.
The rain volleyed against the carriage, shutting us in as with a tightly drawn curtain; yet, did I look up, through the gray mist the tepid gold of the sun was shining.
“Ruthie, it seems almost too good to be true that we’re alone at last together—to have you all to myself.”
“Did you ever want me, Dannie?”
“Did I ever want you!”
“But as much as you wanted her?”
“Differently, yes.”
“You poor boy. And you didn’t get either of us.”
“Couldn’t be helped, Ruthie. That’s life—to be always wanting and never getting. But I have you now and, perhaps, one day——”
“But how can you? She’s married.”
“One can’t tell. Things come unexpectedly. I didn’t expect half-an-hour ago that I’d be with you.”
She fell to asking me little stabbing questions. When I only answered her vaguely, “Don’t let’s start with secrets,” she implored me.
“But it’s five years—there’s so much to explain.”
“Yes—on both sides.”
“You seemed—seemed to dislike him,” I said. “I never understood——”
She took me up quickly. “Nor did I. Don’t let’s talk about it—not yet, Dante.”
So I told her about my doings, the book I was writing and the little daily round at Woadley; and then I told her of why I had quarreled with my father.
“But he let me marry Halloway, and you’ve never——”
I laughed. “Ah, but no matter what Halloway did as a bachelor, he was discreet when it came to marriage.”
She drew me forward to the light; doubt was in her eyes. “But you—you’re unhappy too.”
“I’ve gained everything I played for; I played to lose.”
“Everything?”
“I didn’t deserve Vi. And I didn’t deserve you; if I had, I shouldn’t have lost you.”
Not until I had replied did she realize how much she had told me. She was not happy! I wanted to ask her questions, so many questions—questions which I had no right to ask, nor she to answer.
“And you—you have no children?”
She hesitated. “No.”
I rubbed the damp from the panes. We were in Stoke Newington. The storm was over; streets and roof-tops shone as with liquid fire. Children going home from school, were laughing and playing. They might have been myself and Ruthie of years ago.
“They won’t see me,” I warned her.
“Who?”
“Folks at Pope Lane.”
“They’re not there. Only Hetty’s left to take care of the house. They’ve gone away for a few days.”
“Then I can see it all again. We can walk in the garden together and pretend that things are exactly as they were.”
“Oh, Dannie!” she cried. “Icancall you Dannie, can’t I?”
Time slipped away. She was my little sister now—no longer Lady Halloway. At the posts before the passage we alighted—that was the first news the coachman had of whom he had been driving. We went slowly up the lane, where the shadows of the limes groped like tentacles fingering the sunshine. When I felt beneath the creepers and the bell jangled faintly, Ruthita clutched my arm, attempting to appear bold.
Hetty stared at us. “Well, I’ll be blowed!”
We pushed by her smiling, assuring her that we had no objection. Not until we had rounded the house, did I hear the rattle of the door closing.
Nothing ever changed in that walled-in garden. Flowers grew in the same places—crocuses, daffodils, and hyacinths. Peaches on the wall would soon ripen. Presently sunflowers, like sentinels in gold helmets, would stand in stately line. Pigeons strutted on the slates of houses opposite or wheeled against the sky. There was the window of Ruthita’s bedroom, up to which I had so often called.
The hole, which had been bricked up between the Favarts’ garden, was still discernible. Everything retained its record; only we had changed.
Truants again, stealing an hour together, I listened expectant to hear Hetty call, “Dant-ee. Dant-ee. Bedtime.” The old excitement clutched my heart. Her starched skirt would rustle down the path, and we would run into the gooseberry bushes to hide. I glanced at the study-window. Surely I should see my father seated there, leaning across the desk with his head propped by his arm. Surely that hand of Ruthita’s in my own was growing smaller. I should turn to find a child in a short print-frock, with clusters of ringlets on her shoulders. A shutter in my mind had opened; the past had become present. Ah, but I was no longer anxious to escape. The walled-in garden was all I wanted. I was tired of liberty. I was ready to be commanded. I was willing that others should order my life.
That the illusion might not slip from me, I half shut my eyes. Drip, drip, drip, from eaves and branches! The earth was stirring in the gentle quiet. Through drenched bushes and on the vivid stretch of lawn blackbirds were hopping, delving with their yellow bills. Perhaps I was dwindling into a small boy, just as I had once hoped in the forest that I might suddenly shoot up into manhood. How absurd to believe that I was thirty, and had seen so much of disillusionment! That was all a dream out of which I was waking—I had been here all the time in the narrow confines of the walled-in garden. The old enchantment of familiar sensations stole upon me—I was Dannie Cardover of the Red House; playing tricks with his imagination.
How did it happen? Was it I or was it Ruthie? Her lips were pressing mine. A step came down the path behind us. We sprang apart, laughing softly with reckless joy at our impropriety. Which of us would have thought ten years ago that there would be anything improper in being caught kissing?
Hetty pretended not to have seen us, but her flustered face told its story.
“D’you remember, Hetty, how I once found you doing that to John?”
She writhed her hands under her apron, trying to appear shocked and not to smile. “I remember, Sir Dante; ’t’aint likely I’d forget.” Then, disregarding me for Ruthita, “I was about to h’arsk your ladyship, whether I should get tea ready.”
Ruthita took her by the hand. “You didn’t talk to me that way once, Hetty. I’m just Ruthie to you always, and Sir Dante is plain Dannie.”
She looked up and met the laughing reproach in our eyes. Her apron went to her face and her bodice commenced to quiver. “Little did I think when I washed and dressed yer little bodies that I should ever see this day,” she sobbed. “It’s breakin’ me ’eart, that’s what it is, all this quarrelin’. Why shouldn’t I speak to ’im if I wants ter? Why shouldn’t ’e kiss ’is own sister if he likes? Wot’s it matter if all the neighbors was lookin’? There’s too little lovin’ and too little kissin’; that’s wot I say. ’Tain’t right ter be ashamed o’ bein’ nateral. If it ’adn’t ’a’ been for bein’ afraid and ashamed, I might ’a’ married John. The nus-girl next door got ’im. There’s allaws been someone a-lookin’ when I was courtin’—there’s been too little kissin’ in my life, and it’s yer Pa’s fault, if I do say it, wi’ ’is everlastin’ look of ‘Don’t yer do it.’”
“If it’s as bad as all that, Hetty, I’m sure you won’t mind if I——” She made an emotional armful, but between struggling and giggling she allowed me.
We had tea together in the formal dining-room, with its heavy furniture and snug red walls. We made Hetty sit beside us; she protested and was scandalized, but we wouldn’t let her wait. As we talked, the old freedom of happiness came back to Ruthita’s laughter. The mask of enforced prejudices lifted from Hetty’s face. All our conversation was of the past—our adventures, childish mutinies, and punishments. We told Hetty what a tyrant she had been to us. We asked her whether her nightgowns were still of gray flannel. I accused her of being the start of all my naughtiness in the explanation she had given me of how marriages were concocted. It was like putting a wilted flower into water to see the way she picked up and freshened. When she had nothing else to reply, she wagged her head at us, exclaiming, “Oh, my h’eye—what goin’s on! It’s a good thing walls ain’t got ears. What would your poor Pa say?”
We left her and wandered through the rooms together. We only opened the study-door; we did not enter. It had always, even when we had been invited, seemed to have been closed against us. Books lay on the desk, dust-covered. It was allowed to be tidied only in my father’s presence. We both felt that he must know of our trespassing, even though we could not see him. I had the uncanny feeling that he was still there at the table writing; any moment he might glance up, having completed his sentence, and I should hear his voice. Not until we had climbed the stairs did we rid ourselves of the shadow of his disapproval. In the old days when we were romping, we had been accustomed to hear his dreaded door open and his stern voice calling, “Children! Children! What d’you think you’re doing? Not so much noise.” It was something of this kind we were now expecting and with the same sensations of trembling.
The house was memory-haunted. Following our footsteps, yet so discreetly that we never caught them, were a witch-faced girl and a sturdy boy. Where pools of sunlight lay upon the floor we lost them; when we turned into dark passages, again they followed. On entering rooms, we half expected to find them occupied with their playing; when the budding creeper stirred against the walls, it was as though they whispered. They were always somewhere where we were not—either in the room we had just left, or the room to which we were going.
We entered what had been my bedroom. The sun was westering, playing hide-and-seek behind crooked chimneypots. Below us the garden lay in shadow, cool and cloistered.
Kneeling beside the window, with our elbows on the sill, not watching one another’s eyes, we whispered by fits and starts, leaving our sentences unended. Most of what we said commenced with “Do you remember?” and drifted off into silence as the picture formed. It was like flinging pebbles into a pond and watching the circles spreading. One after another memories came and departed—all that we had done together and been to one another in that conspiracy of childhood. There was the pink muffler she had made me, the guinea-pig about which I had lied to her, the tragic departures and wild homecomings of schooldays, and the week when the Bantam had declared his love for her. And there were memories which preceded her knowledge—my quest for the magic carpet. How I wished I might yet find it; I would fly by night to her window and carry her off, re-visiting old happinesses while Lord Halloway lay snoring.
I don’t know how we came to it—I suppose we must have been speaking about Vi. Presently Ruthita said, “You could only love golden hair, could you, Dannie?”
I didn’t know what she was driving at; her voice shook and her face was flushing.
“Dark-haired girls never had any chance with you, did they? You told me that long ago, after Fiesole. I remembered because—because——”
“I was a boy then, and was clumsy.”
“But you spoke the truth, though you did say that for sisters black hair was the prettiest in the world. It hurt because at that time I fancied—you can guess what.”
“You never showed it.”
“You never looked for it—never asked for it.”
I knew to what she referred. It was on the night of my sudden return from the Red House because the Spuffler had lost our money. I was sitting at this window as I was now sitting. A tap at the door had startled me; then a timid voice had said, “It’s only Ruthita.” She had crept in noiselessly as a shadow. Her dear arms went about my neck, drawing down my face. “Oh, Dannie, I’m so sorry,” she had whispered; “I’ve never missed welcoming you home ever since you went to school.” She had nestled against me in the dark, her face looking frailer and purer than ever. She had slipped on a long blue dressing-gown, I remember, and her black hair hung about her shoulders like a cloud. Just below the edge of the gown her pale feet twinkled. I noticed that a physical change had come over her. Then I had realized for the first time that she was different as I was different—we were no longer children. I had fallen to wondering whether the same wistful imaginings, exquisite and alluring, had come to her. With an overwhelming reverence, I had become aware of the strange fascination of her appealing beauty. In the confessing that followed I had told her of my jilting by Fiesole, and had spoken those stupid words about loving only golden hair. How wounding I had been in my boyish egotism! And that was not the last time I had wounded her in my blindness.
Scene after scene came back to me—into each I read a new meaning in the light of what she had told me: the Snow Lady’s hints before I sailed for America; Ruthita’s appeal for my protection against Halloway, and her sudden acceptance of him directly she heard that I was with Vi at Sheba.
“Ruthie, all this was very long ago; so many things have happened since then, there can be no harm in talking about it. You wanted me right up to the last—and I was too selfish to know it.”
“Right up to the last,” she whispered, and I knew she meant right up to now.
“And this—and this is what your husband has guessed?”
She took my hands in both her own, speaking with quiet dignity. “I had to tell you. Perhaps I too have been selfish, but I couldn’t let you misunderstand me any longer. I’ve seen you watching for me, and I’ve had to go by you without looking. We never had any secrets, you and I; you must have wondered why I let my husband make me cut you—I’ve been wicked—I couldn’t trust myself. When I heard that you’d gone to Sheba, I didn’t care what happened. I’d always hoped and hoped that you might come to love me. But it seemed I wasn’t wanted, so I just took—— He’s been good to me, but it isn’t like living with the person you love best, is it? You mustn’t hate him any more; to love a woman who can’t love you back again makes even success empty—and he’s been used to take love without asking.”
We sat very still. We saw Hetty come out into the garden and walk down the path as though she were looking for us. We waited to hear her call, but she re-entered the house, leaving the silence unruffled.
“I’ve made a pretty fair mess of things, haven’t I? There was Vi first, and now there’s you. I’m a pretty fair blighter.”
She pressed herself against me to stop me. “Oh, you mustn’t say that. It hurts. You mustn’t say it.”
“But I am. Even your husband knows it.”
“Some day you’ll marry and everything’ll come right.”
“For Vi, if we have the luck to come together. But what about you? What about even Halloway?”
She avoided answering my self-accusations by attracting attention to herself. “From the first he didn’t want me to know you; he gave excuses, and I understood. Because I couldn’t give him love, I gave him everything else that he wanted. But now—now that I’m going to be a mother, I had to tell you. I want it to be a boy, Dannie. Waiting for him, I’ve thought so much of old days. I felt that if you didn’t know, somehow, things wouldn’t go right—because when he comes I want him to be like you.”
She had risen, letting go my hand.
“I had always thought of you as my sister,” I faltered.
“I know—and you were a dear brother. It was just my foolishness to want you to be something else.”
For a moment she clung to me, hiding her face against my shoulder. Then we passed down the stairs, afraid to be alone any longer.
“Goin’?” Hetty inquired. “You won’t tell the master, will yer?” She glanced toward the study-door as though he were behind it and might have overheard.
At the end of the lane the carriage was standing. In the presence of the coachman Ruthita’s tones were conventional. “You’re going westwards? Where can I drop you?”
In the carriage I asked her whether her husband would know of what we had done.
“I shall tell him.”
“Don’t you think he might be willing to let us be friends?”
“I’ll ask him,” she said, “but——”
At Hyde Park Corner the carriage pulled up and I alighted. I watched her eager face looking back at me, growing smaller and smaller.
Wandering aimlessly through the parks, I sat for a time by the Serpentine. The nerves of all that had happened in the past five years were cut. If I had married Ruthita, would she have been happy? The thought of marrying her was just as impossible to me now as it had been when Grandmother Cardover had mentioned it at Ransby. And yet, at a time when I had been most sensitive of injustice, I had been unjust to her—— And now she was going to be a mother—little Ruthita, who seemed to me herself so much a child!
When I came into Whitehall, the pale twilight of spring still hovered above house-tops; from streets the flare of London steamed up. The opal of the sky reflected the marigold-yellow of illumined windows; arc-lights, like ox-eye daisies, stared above the grass of the dusk.
I made my way to my club and sank into a chair, aimlessly skimming the papers, reading scarcely a line. Few people were about; the room was empty save for one other loiterer. Spring in the streets was calling.
The man strolled up to me, holding an illustrated weekly in his hand. I knew him slightly and nodded.
“Writing a book on the Renaissance, ar’n’t you? Here’s something a bit in your line. Funny how Paris’ll go mad over a thing like that!” He smacked the page. “Girl comes from nowhere. Her lover writes a play—that’s the story. There’s a mystery. The play’s difficult to understand, so it must be brainy. Now I like a thing that don’t need no explanation: Marie Lloyd, the Empire, musical comedy—that’s my cut.”
He tossed me the weekly and turned on his heel to walk out. Annoyed at being disturbed, I glanced down irritably.
From a full-page illustration the face of Fiesole smiled up.
It was ridiculous this curiosity, but I knew how to explain it—it grew out of my life’s great emptiness since I had listened to Ruthita’s confession. She had made me realize as never before how I had muddled my chances of happiness. I had heard nothing from Vi in all these years and now I had learnt that, without knowing it, I might have had Ruthita. My interests had lost their charm; I wanted an excuse to leave my work. This matter of Fiesole had cropped up, so here I was on my way to Paris, more for the sake of something to do than anything else.
I had not the remotest intention of renewing her acquaintance. Unseen by her, I would watch her from some corner of the theatre, and then slip back to London. There would be piquancy in the thought that I had gone to see her for old time’s sake, and that she would never know about it. As for speaking to her, that would be an insult after what had happened at Venice. Probably she hated me. She ought to, if she did not.
Though I smiled at myself, truth to tell, I was rather pleased to find I could still be so impulsive; romance in me was not dead after all these years of uneventful waiting. This journey was the folly of a sentimental boy—not the cynical act of a man of the world.
La Fiesole! La Fiesole!Since she had stared out at me from the printed page I was continually coming across her. Everyone was discussing her; she had sprung out of nowhere into notoriety. Greater than Bernhardt, men said of her: a spontaneous emotional actress of the first rank—the sensation of the moment.
France took her seriously; England quoted French eulogies in italics. Fantastic legends were woven about her name, made plausible by an occasional touch of accuracy.
Antoine Georges had written the play—it was based on theamoursof Lucrezia Borgia. It was said that he was La Fiesole’s lover, that she had given him the plot—that she had even helped him write it; some went so far as to say that it was founded on an incident in her own past life, transposed into a fifteenth century setting. Antoine Georges denied that he was her lover; but the world smiled skeptically—it liked to believe he was. One story asserted that she had been afille de joiewhen he came across her; another, with that French instinct for the theatric, that he had reclaimed her from a low café in Cherbourg in which she danced. Nothing was too incredible in the face of her incredible success. One fact alone was undisputed—that she was the daughter of the famous Italian actor, many years dead, Signore Cortona.
This confirmed what I already knew about her. I remembered how she had told me in Oxford of her early stage career, which she had abandoned to go traveling. I recalled how she had said, “I’m an amateur at living—always chopping and changing. I’ll find what I want some day.”—— So she had found it!
In the English press she was made a peg on which to hang a whole wardrobe of side-issue and prejudice. The decency of the French stage was discussed. The question was introduced as to whether such a play would be allowed to be performed in London. The superiority of English morals was the topic of some articles; of others, the brutal prudery by which British art was stifled. A fine opportunity was afforded and welcomed for slinging mud at the censor. The discussion was given academic sanction when Andrew Lang patted it on the head in an ingeniously discursive monologue on the anachronisms of playwrights, in which he made clear that Monsieur Georges’s tragedy was riddled with historic falsity.
It was nearing five when we steamed into the Gare du Nord. My first journey to Paris had been prompted by Fiesole. Then I was escaping from her; now I was going to her. For old time’s sake I made my headquarters at the hotel at which I had then stayed in the Rue St. Honoré. AfterdinerI set out through thronged streets to book a seat at the theatre. Upon making my request at the office, the man shrugged his shoulders and turned away with the inimitable insolence of French manners. It was as though he had said, “You must be mad, or extremely bourgeois.” I had affronted him personally, the theatre-management, La Fiesole and last, but not least, the infallible intelligence of Paris. Did Monsieur not know that La Fiesole was the rage, the fashion? Every seat was taken—taken weeks ahead.
My second request was apologetic and explanatory: I honored La Fiesole so much that I had journeyed from London on purpose to see her. What was the earliest date at which he could make it possible? He directed me to an agency which had bought up all the best seats in the house; here I secured a box at an extortionate price for five nights later.
In the intervening days I was frequently tempted to abandon my project and return. It seemed the height of foolishness to squander five days in order that I might court disappointment. She must have altered—might have deteriorated. It was just possible there was a grain of truth in the wild stories that circulated about her. And yet—— There were memories that came to me full of nobility and gentleness: windswept days at Oxford; a night at Ferrara; days and nights on the lapping lagoons of Venice. I wanted to see her again—and I did not. I blew hot and cold. And while I hesitated, spring raced through the streets of Paris with tossing arms and reckless laughter.
When I entered the theatre it was already packed. The audience seemed conscious that it had assembled for a great occasion; it had dressed for its share in the undertaking. Gowns of marvelous cut and audacity were in evidence. The atmosphere was heavy with the perfume of exotic femininity and flowers.
My box was on the right-hand side, just above and next to the stage. Below me was a nodding sea of plumed head-dresses, naked shoulders, and gleaming bosoms; rising tier on tier to the gold-domed roof, was a wall of eyes and fluttering white faces. Everything was provocative of expectancy. Gods and goddesses, carved on the columns and painted on the curtain, alone were immobile.
A quick succession of taps sounded, followed by three long raps. The theatre was plunged in shadow. As though a crowd drew away into the distance, the last murmur spent itself. The curtain quivered, then rose reluctantly on the illusion which had brought the unrelated lives of so vast an audience together.
We saw an Italian garden, basking in sunlight and languorous with summer. Beneath the black shade of cypress-trees stretched marble terraces, mounting up a hillside, up and up, till they hung gleaming like white birds halfhidden in the velvet foliage. In the foreground a fountain splashed. A little way distant the Pope Alexander lolled, toying with his mistress, Giulia. Up and down pathways lined with statues, groups of courtiers wandered: youths in parti-colored hose and slashed doublets; girls, vividly attired, exquisitely young, engaged in the game of love. Guitars tinkled and masses of bloom flared stridently in the sun. Sitting by the fountain was the Madonna Lucrezia and the young Lord of Pesaro. Her face was turned from us; we could only see her vase-like figure and the way she shook her head in answer to all he offered.
The envoy from Naples enters and with him the Duke of Biseglia; he urges the Pope for a last time to make an alliance with his country by betrothing the Madonna Lucrezia to the Duke. But the Pope does not want the alliance; he is joining with Ludovico of Milan against Naples and war will result. While the Pope is refusing, for the first time Lucrezia looks up and her face is turned towards us—the face I had known in my boyhood, innocently girlish, fresh as a flower, so ardent and beautiful with longing that the theatre caught its breath at sight of it and a muffled “Ah!” swept through the audience.
As though attracted by a power which is outside herself, she rises, hesitating between shyness and daring, and steals to where the young Duke is sullenly standing. She takes his hand and presses it against her breast. He snatches it from her. She commences to speak, at first haltingly, but with gathering passion. Her voice is hoarse and sultry, like that of a Jewess; it is a voice shaken with emotion, which now caresses and now tears at the heart. The drone of merriment in the garden and the tinkling of the guitars is hushed. Listless lovers come out from the shadows and gather about her, amused by her earnestness. She pleads with the Pope, her father, to give her the Duke—not to send him away from her. Biseglia interrupts haughtily, asserting that he only desired her for State reasons and that since the Pope refuses Naples’ friendship, he would not marry the Madonna Lucrezia though her father were to allow it.
Alexander laughs boisterously at this quarrel of children and like a huge Silenus wanders off into the garden, leaning on his mistress, Giulia, followed by his train of minstrels and dilettantes. Their singing grows more faint as they mount the terraces towards the palace.
Lucrezia watches them depart with a face frozen with despair. As Biseglia turns to go, she darts after him and drags him back, fawning on him, abasing herself, offering herself to him, telling him that whatever comes of it she cannot live without him. He regards her in silence; then falls to smiling and flings her from him, reminding her that she is the Pope’s bastard. At that the boy Lord of Pesaro, who has watched everything from the fountain, runs with drawn sword to her defense. But she springs between them, saying that when the time comes to kill Biseglia, she will take revenge in her own way like a Borgia. The great Pope, looking back, has seen her awakened savagery and laughs uproariously. The scene ends with the garden empty and Lucrezia stretched out on the ground, kissing the spot which Biseglia’s feet have touched and weeping in a frenzy of abandon, while the Lord of Pesaro looks on impotent and broken-hearted.
Between the first act and the second the French have invaded Italy, so the Pope and the King of Naples have found a common enemy and a common need for alliance. The Duke of Biseglia has again been sent to Rome to sue for the hand of Lucrezia. But in the meanwhile she has been betrothed to the Lord of Pesaro, and, to prevent him from joining with the French when Lucrezia is taken from him, his removal has been planned.
The curtain goes up on a night of bacchanalian riot in the Papal gardens. Beneath trees a costly table has been spread, at which sit men and women attired in every kind of extravagance, as animals, pagan deities, and mythological monstrosities. In the branches overhead are set sconces and blazing torches. Distantly over white terraces and pathways the moon is rising. In the foreground are mummers and tumblers. The servitors who pass up and down the company are humpbacks, dwarfs, Ethiopians, and dancing-girls.
In the center of the table sits the Pope, and next to him Lucrezia, and next to her Biseglia. Opposite to Biseglia is seated the Lord of Pesaro, and next to him a woman in a mask. With the heat of the wine and the lateness of the hour the women lie back in their lovers’ arms—all except the masked woman and the Madonna Lucrezia. Lucrezia sits erect like a frightened child, the one pure thing in the freedom that surrounds her. Biseglia pays her no attention, and from across the table the Lord of Pesaro watches.
The Pope twits Biseglia on his coldness, saying, “Think you that my daughter hath a deformity?” And Biseglia gives the irritable answer, “Can a man love a woman while that young spit-fire glowers green envy at him opposite?”
Pesaro leaps to his feet, but the Pope, as though to pacify him, pledges him and hands the goblet to the masked woman to offer to him. Still standing uncertain, Pesaro receives it from her. Raising it slowly, his lips touch the brim; he clutches at his throat, upsetting the cup so that the red stain flows towards Lucrezia. He leans out, gazes in her eyes, and crashes across the table, twisting as he falls, still looking up at her.
The silence that follows is broken by a low rippling laugh. The company gaze in astonishment; it is Lucrezia who is laughing. The child in her face is dead; her expression is inscrutable, wicked and sirenish. She sways towards Biseglia, bending back her head and twining her arms about him. “Hath the Pope’s daughter a deformity that thou canst not love her? Behold, thou shalt judge. She will dance and dance, till she dances thee into rapture and thy soul is poured out upon her.”
From the hand of a servitor she snatches a torch and steps into the open. She commences to dance and, as she dances, unbuckles her girdle so that her gown slips from her. As the beat of the music grows more furious she unbinds her hair, so that it writhes like snakes about her firm white arms and bust. Dwarfs clamber into trees and slide out along their branches, raining rose-leaves on her as she passes. The strangely attired company forget their jaded decadence and sprawl across the table, digging their elbows into its scattered magnificence, following the gleam of her young, white body as it twists and turns beneath the whirling torch.
But her gaze is bent always on Biseglia; her eyes are aslant and beckoning. Her bosom rises and falls more fiercely with the wrenching in-take of the breath. Will he never go to her?
She flings back her hair from her shoulders; her body flashes like an unsheathed sword. Nearer and nearer to him she dances. His eyes rest on her moodily, half-closed. Does he make a movement, quickly she withdraws.
She has flung away her torch and is spinning madly with her hands clasped behind her head. The grass is hidden with rose-leaves; she floats—her feet scarcely stir them. Suddenly she stops; stands erect for an ecstatic moment; sways dizzily; her strength is gone. Her hands, small and pitiful, fly up to cover her eyes. She shakes her hair free to hide her. Her body crumples. She is broken with her shame and futility. Biseglia leaps the table and has her in his arms as she falls, pressing his hot lips against hers. With clenched fists she smites him from her, slips from his embrace, and runs shimmering like a white doe through the forest of blackness.
With a shout the revelers shatter the banquet and pour in pursuit of her. Biseglia leads them, darting ahead into the shadows. Dancing and singing, the disheveled bacchanalians stagger across the dark, trouping along dusky terraces with twining arms, following the fleeing dryad.
Torches are burnt out and smolder in their sockets. Night is tattered by the dawn. Amid the havoc of trampled chalices and glass sprawls the wine-stained figure of the dead Lord of Pesaro—the man who, could she have loved him, would have given her all.
La Fiesole! La Fiesole!We rose as one man as the curtain dropped. We did not care to think whether this was wrong—it was lovely. She had danced our souls out of their prejudices, out of their walls of restraint into chaos. The rapture of her beauty ran through our veins like wine. Our imaginations pursued her along pale terraces. The fragrance of crushed rose-leaves was in our nostrils and the coolness of night. Our breath came short, as though we had been running. Our senses were reeling and our eyes dazzled. We stood up in our places clutching at the air, calling and calling, hungry for the sight of her.
For myself, I was smitten with blindness. My eyes saw the striving throng through a mist and probed into the beyond, where she ran on and on palely, forever from me. I shouted to her, but she grew more distant; never once did she look back or stay her footsteps.
I was aware of a deep stillness—a hoarse peal of laughter: thousands of eyes glared up at me and down on me, and mouths gaped mockery. The mist cleared; Fiesole was standing before the curtain. The audience had grown hushed at sight of her while I had continued calling. From the stage, twenty feet away, she was smiling at me, insolent and charming, her body still shuddering with exertion beneath the velvet cloak which lay across her shoulders. What did I care, though to-morrow the whole of Paris should laugh? She had danced my soul into ecstasy. I placed my hands on the edge of the box and leant out drunkenly, shouting her name, “Fiesole! Fiesole!”
She kissed her hand at me derisively, bowed to the audience, and was gone.
I sank in my place, a sickening nostalgia for her upon me. I did not reason; I only knew I wanted her—wanted her as she had once wanted me, with her hands and eyes and body. In a dim way I felt angry with myself for having lost her. She had made me disgusted with my coldness at Venice as I had watched my counterpart, the Duke of Biseglia. From the theatric torture in her face I had learnt something of how brutal a man may be when he fancies that he is righteously moral. She, whom I saw now so remotely, might have been mine; through these chilly years La Fiesole might have been my companion, had I had the faith to take what was offered. I had sought the things that were impossible. I had made a god of my scruples. I had sinned weakly, following Vi who did not belong to me. I had sat down to wait for her, and all the while Life was tapping at the door. I tasted Life to-night—— And who knows? Perhaps I had broken this woman’s heart. I would no longer be niggardly. I would go to her; accuse myself to her; beat down her hatred of me; carry her off.
While these thoughts trooped across my mind, the crooked sphinx-like smile of Paris wandered over me, examined me, hinted at tragedy with laughter, and widened its painted lips at my absurdity.
The curtain rustled. The warning raps sounded. Lights sank, and heads bent forward.
In a dim-lit room, chilly to the point of austerity, sat Lucrezia. Tall candles shone upon her face—a face purged of emotion, nunlike and wooden with an expression of distant contemplation. Behind her head was an open window through which floated in the sound of music. She heeded it not at all. In the far corner stood a bed with the curtains drawn back. At an altar a lamp burnt before a shining crucifix. Her women were unrobing her for the bridal night. They spoke to her, but she did not answer. They blamed her for her indifference to Biseglia: she had never kissed him, never caressed him since the night when she had won him. Did she not know that he hungered for her kindness?
She gave them no answer. They lifted her this way and that as though she were a doll; she seemed to have forgotten her body. She might have been in a trance, leading a life separate, dreaming of things innocent and holy.
One by one the candles were extinguished; only the lamp burnt before the altar. When her women were gone; she slipped from the bed and knelt with her head bowed before the cross.
The music dies; silence falls. Along the passage comes a creeping footstep. The door opens; Biseglia enters, blinking his eyes at the room’s dimness. He whispers her name. At last she hears him and rises, standing before the altar. He crosses the room reverently. He halts, gazing at her. He rushes forward, masters her, crushes her to him, and cries that she torments him—starves him.
When she makes no response, but lies pulseless in his arms, he carries her to the bed, incoherently claiming as his right the fondness she does not give him. Then he grows gentle and kneels before her, kissing her feet and calling her his god.
She speaks. Her voice is small. “Biseglia, thou didst love me only when I had made myself worthless that I might win thy fondness.”
He yearns up to her with his arms, disowning his former coldness, protesting that he adores her. She leans over him sadly; he raises his lips to hers. As she kisses him, her expression kindles to triumph. She withdraws her hand from her breast; the Borgian dagger sinks into his heart.
She gazes stonily on the man who had once refused her. The lamp before the altar flickers and goes out. The room is plunged in darkness.