III.I carried this branch to Juliana, and many others besides. I never returned to the Badiola without a load of flowered gifts.One morning, as I was carrying a bunch of hawthorns, I met my mother in the vestibule; I was somewhat out of breath, heated, disturbed by a slight intoxication."Where is Juliana?" I asked."Upstairs, in her room," she answered, laughing.I ran up the staircase, crossed the corridor, entered the room, crying:"Juliana, Juliana, where are you?"Maria and Natalia ran to meet me, giving me a boisterous welcome, delighted at the sight of the flowers, dancing about as if possessed."Come in! Come in!" they cried. "Mamma is here, in the bedroom. Come in!"On crossing the threshold my heart beat faster. Juliana was there, smiling and embarrassed. I threw the bunch at her feet."Look!""Oh! how beautiful!" she exclaimed, bending over the fragrant treasure.She was dressed in one of her favorite gowns, hanging in ample and graceful folds, and of a green hue resembling the green of an aloes-leaf. Her hair, not yet dressed, covered the nape of her neck, hiding her ears beneath its thick masses. The emanations from the hawthorns, that odor of thyme mixed with bitter almonds, enveloped, inundated the room, penetrating everything."Take care not to prick yourself," I said to her. "See my hands."I showed her the still bleeding lacerations, as if to enhance the value of my offering. "Oh! if now she would take my hands!" I thought. And in my mind passed confusedly the recollection of a day, far distant, when she had kissed my hands, lacerated by the thorns, when she had wanted to suck the drops of blood that appeared one after the other. "If now she would take my hands, and if, by this single action, she would accord me full pardon, and yield herself up to me entirely!"At that time I was in constant expectation of some such movement. I could not, of course, have said what gave me such confidence; but I was sure that Juliana would give herself to me again in this manner sooner or later, by some simple and silent action by which she would "accord me full pardon and yield herself up to me entirely."She smiled. A shade of suffering passed over her pale face and in her sunken eyes."Don't you feel a little better since you are here?" I asked, approaching her."Yes, I'm better," she answered.Then, after a pause:"And you?""Oh, I! I am cured. Don't you see?""Yes, it is true."At that time, when she spoke to me, her words had a curious hesitation that seemed to me full of grace, but which now it is impossible for me to define. One would have said that she was continually preoccupied in restraining the word that rose to her lips, to pronounce another word. Moreover, her voice was, so to speak, morefeminine; it had lost its former firmness, and some of its sonorousness; it was veiled, like an instrument played in secret.But, since it had only tender accents for me now, what obstacle prevented us from being all in all to each other again? What obstacle maintained the separation between us?During that period, which in the history of my soul will ever remain mysterious, my natural perspicacity seemed to have deserted me. All my terrible analytical faculties, even those that had made me suffer so much, seemed exhausted; the power of these restless faculties appeared to be annihilated. Innumerable sensations, innumerable feelings relative to that epoch, are now incomprehensible, inexplicable, because I have no indication to aid me in retracing their origin, in determining their character. There was a break in the continuity, or lack of solder between that period of my psychic existence and the other periods.Formerly, I had narrated a fabulous tale in which a young prince, after the adventures of a long pilgrimage, finally succeeds in rejoining the lady whom he had pursued with his ardent love. The young man trembled with hope, and the lady smiled on him, close by. But a veil seemed to render this smiling lady intangible, a veil of unknown substance, so subtle that it was confounded with the air; and, nevertheless, this veil was a barrier that prohibited the young man from clasping the woman he loved to his heart.This fable helps me a little to form an idea of the singular state in which I found myself at that timevis-à-visJuliana. I felt that between her and me an unknown something constantly maintained an abyss. But, at the same time, I was confident that, sooner or later, the "simple and silent gesture" would annihilate the obstacle and bring back my happiness.Meanwhile, how Juliana's room pleased me! It was furnished with light-colored hangings, with faded pink flowers and it had a deep alcove. What a perfume the hawthorns shed!"This odor is penetrating," she said, very pale. "It gives one a headache. Don't you feel it?"She went and opened a window.Then she added:"Maria, call Miss Edith."The governess came in."Edith, please take these flowers to the music-room; put them into vases. Take care not to prick yourself."Maria and Natalia wanted to carry a part of the bunch. We remained alone. She went once more to the window, and leaned against it, her back turned toward the light."Have you anything to do? Do you wish me to go?" I asked."No, no; stay, be seated. Tell me about your walk this morning. How far did you go?"She spoke with some precipitation. As the window support was at about the height of her waist, she had placed her elbows on it, and her bust was inclined backward, framed by the rectangle of the window. Her face, turned directly toward me, was entirely shaded, particularly about the orbits of the eyes; but her hair, on the summit of which fell the light, formed a slight aureole; the light also touched the tops of her shoulders. One of her feet—the one that supported the weight of her body—was raised, drawing up the dress, partly disclosing the ash-colored stocking and the patent-leather slipper. In that attitude, in that light, her entire person possessed extraordinarily seductive power. A section of bluish and voluptuous landscape, pinked out between the two window-posts, formed a distant background behind her head.And then, instantaneously, as if by a crushing revelation, I saw once more in her the desirable woman; and all my blood fired up at the memory of, and the desire of, her caresses.I spoke to her, my eyes fixed on her. And the more I gazed on her, the more disturbed I became. She also, no doubt, must have read my look, since her uneasiness became visible. I thought, with poignant internal anxiety: "If I only dared? If I went closer to her? If I took her in my arms?" The apparent assurance that I sought to put in my frivolous remarks rapidly abandoned me. My disturbance grew. My embarrassment became insupportable. From the adjoining rooms came the sound of the voices of Maria, Natalia, and Edith, indistinctly.I arose, approached the window, and stood beside Juliana. I was on the point of bending toward her to speak at last the words that I had so many times repeated to myself in imaginary conversations. But the fear of a probable interruption stopped me. I thought that perhaps the moment was badly chosen, that perhaps I should not have the time to say all to her, to open all my heart to her, to relate my intimate life during the last few weeks, the mysterious convalescence of my soul, the awakening of my most tender fibres, the arousing of my most delicate dreams, the depth of my new sensation, the tenacity of my hope. I thought that I should not have the time to recount in detail the recent episodes, to make those little, innocent confessions to her, so delicious to the ear of the woman who loves, fresh with sincerity, more persuasive than any eloquence. In fact, I must succeed in convincing her of a great truth, perhaps incredible to her after so many disillusions; succeed in convincing her that now my return was no longer deceptive, but sincere, definite, necessitated by a vital desire of my entire being. Of course, she was still distrustful; of course, her distrust was the cause of her reserve. Between us the shadow of an atrocious recollection ever interposed itself. It was for me to banish this shadow, to draw my soul and hers so closely together that nothing more could interpose between them. But, for that, a favorable occasion was required in some secret and silent place, inhabited only by memories. That place was the Lilacs.We remained in the embrasure of the window, by each other's side, both silent. From the adjoining rooms came the sound of the voices of Maria, Natalia, and Edith, indistinctly. The perfume of the hawthorn was dissipated. The curtains that hung from the arch of the alcove permitted a view of the bed in its depth, and my eyes wandered ceaselessly toward it, searching the shadows, almost concupiscent.Juliana had lowered her head, perhaps because she also felt the delicious and agonizing weight of the silence. The light breeze toyed with a loose curl on her temple. The restless agitation of that dark curl, in which were light scattered threads of gold, on that temple white as a wafer, made me languorous. And, as I gazed at her, I saw again on her neck the little brown mole which, in former days, had so often curiously attracted me.Then, incapable of containing myself, with a mixture of apprehension and hardihood, I raised my hand to arrange the curl; and my fingers trembled on her hair, and they brushed against the ear, the neck, but lightly, very lightly, with the most furtive of caresses."What are you doing?" said Juliana, shaken by a start, turning on me a bewildered look, trembling perhaps more than I.She left the window. Then, feeling that I was following her, she made several steps as if to flee, dismayed."Ah! Juliana, why, why?" I cried, stopping short.Then immediately I added:"It is true. I am still unworthy. Pardon!"At that moment the two bells of the chapel began to chime. And Maria and Natalia rushed into the room, ran up to their mother with cries of joy, and hung around her neck, one after the other, covering her face with kisses; then, leaving their mother, they came to me, and I raised them in my arms, one after the other.The two bells chimed furiously; the whole of the Badiola seemed to be invaded by the thrill of the bronze. It was Holy Saturday, the hour of the Resurrection.IV.In the afternoon of that same Saturday, I had a strange attack of melancholy.The post had arrived at the Badiola, and I happened to be in the billiard-room with my brother, glancing through the newspapers. My eyes fell by chance on the name of Filippo Arborio, mentioned in an article. A sudden agitation seized me. Thus it is that a slight jar will stir up the dregs of a quiescent liquid.I remember. It was a foggy afternoon, illuminated by the fatigued reverberation of a whitish light. Outside, before the window looking on the lawn, Juliana passed with my mother, arm in arm, chatting. Juliana carried a book, and walked as if fatigued.With the incoherence of the images that unrolled before me in thought, there arose in my mind certain remnants of my past life: Juliana before the mirror, on that November day; the bouquet of white chrysanthemums; my anxiety on hearing the air from Orpheus; the words written on the fly-leaf ofThe Secret; the color of Juliana's dress; my soliloquy at the window; Filippo Arborio's face, dripping with perspiration; the scene in the dressing-room of the salle d'armes. I thought with a shudder of fear, like a man who suddenly finds himself leaning over the edge of a precipice: "Can it be possible that I am lost?"Overcome by anguish, feeling a desire to be alone in order to commune with myself, to meet my fear face to face, I took leave of my brother, left the hall, and returned to my room.My agitation was mingled with impatience and anger. I was like a man who, in the midst of the comfort of an illusory cure, in the full assurance of having regained his health, would feel all at once the sting of his old malady, would perceive that in his flesh the ineradicable disease still remained, and would be constrained to watch himself, to note his symptoms, in order to convince himself of the horrible truth. "Can it be possible that I am lost? And why?"In the strange forgetfulness in which the entire past was buried, in that sort of obscurity which seemed to have entirely invaded one layer of my conscience, the doubt against Juliana, that odious doubt, had also vanished, was dissolved. My soul had so great a desire to lull itself with illusions, to believe and to hope! My mother's saintly hand, in caressing Juliana's hair, had rekindled for me the aureole around that head. By one of those sentimental errors frequent during the period of weakness, when I had seen the two women leading the same existence in such sweet concord, I had involved them in the same irradiation of purity.But now, a slight accidental fact, a mere name read by chance in a journal, the awakening of a recollection had sufficed to upset me, to frighten me, to open an abyss beneath my feet; and I did not dare sound the depths of a resolute scrutiny, because my dream of happiness withheld me, drew me back, clung to me obstinately. I wavered at first in an obscure and indefinable anguish, traversed at moments by dreadful glimpses. "It may be that she is not pure, and then? Filippo Arborio, or another ... who knows? Were I certain of the sin, could I pardon it? What sin? What pardon? You have not the right to judge her; you have not the right to raise your voice. She has kept silent too often. Now, it is your duty to keep silent. And your happiness? The happiness that you dream of, is it your own or does it belong to both of you? To both of you, of course; for the shadow ofhersorrow would suffice to obscure all your joys. You suppose that, if you are happy, she will be happy also—you with your past of constant misconduct, she with her past of constant martyrdom? The happiness that you dream of has for its only foundation the abolition of the past. Why, then, if she had truly ceased to be pure, would it be impossible to throw a veil over it or condone her sin as you would your own? Why, if she forgets, should you not forget, yourself? Why, if you claim to be a man without prejudice and completely freed from social convention, should you not consider her also as a woman in the same state of being? Such an inequality would be perhaps the worst of your injustices. But the Ideal? But the Ideal? My own felicity would not be possible except on the condition of recognizing in Juliana a creature absolutely superior, impeccable, worthy of every adoration; and it is precisely also in the innate feeling of this superiority, in the consciousness of her personal moral greatness, that she would find the most precious elements of her own felicity. I should not succeed in forgetting my own past or hers, because the existence of this special happiness presupposes both the profligacy of my former life and her unconquered and almost superhuman heroism, the image of which has always constrained my mind to bow before it. But do you take into account the amount of egotism and high ideality that enters into your dream? Do you believe you merit that supreme prize, happiness? By what privilege? So your long misconduct has entitled you, not to expiation, but to a reward?"I rose hastily to my feet to cut short this debate. "In brief, it concerns only an old suspicion, very vague, and awakened by chance. This unreasonable agitation will go away. I have made a substance of a shadow. In two or three days, after Easter, we will go to the Lilacs, and then I shall know, I shall unquestionablyfeelthe truth. But is not that profound and immutable melancholy which is in her eyes also suspicious? That bewildered air, that species of continual preoccupation which is marked so heavily on her brow, that great fatigue which is revealed by certain attitudes, that anguish which she cannot succeed in dissimulating at your approach—is not all thatsuspicious?" The ambiguity of such symptoms bore also a favorable interpretation. Then, submerged by a flood of the most violent pain, I went up to the window, with the instinctive desire of plunging into the spectacle of the outer world to discover there something that would correspond to the state of my soul—a revelation or an appeasement.The sky was quite white, like a scaffolding of superimposed veils between which the air circulated, producing large mobile folds. One of these veils seemed at times to detach itself and approach the earth, graze the tops of the trees, break up, be reduced to falling fragments, undulate on the ground, fade away. On the horizon, the lines of the heights were confusedly unrolled, disappearing to reappear in the fantastic landscapes, like a vista perceived in a dream, without reality. A lead-colored shadow covered the valley, and the Assoro, whose shores were invisible, animated it with its reflections. This tortuous river, glistening in that sombre gulf, beneath that slow and continued disaggregation of the sky, attracted the attention, and had for the mind the fascination of symbolical things, seemed to bear in itself the occult sense of that indefinable spectacle.My pain gradually lost its acuteness, became appeased and calm. "Why do you aspire with such avidity to a happiness of which you are not worthy? Why do you base the whole edifice of your future life on an illusion? Why believe with such blind faith in a privilege that does not exist? All men perhaps, in the course of their lives, encounter a decisive period in which the most perspicacious are able to understand whattheir life should be. That period you have already met. Remember the moment when the white and faithful hand which offered you love, indulgence, peace, dreams, forgetfulness, everything that is good and beautiful, trembled in the air, was extended toward youas if for the supreme offering..."Bitterness swelled my heart with tears. I leaned my elbows on the balustrade, my hands to my face, and, my eyes fixed on the windings of the river at the bottom of the leaden valley, while the scaffolding of the sky ceaselessly disaggregated, I remained for several minutes under the menace of an imminent punishment, I felt that an unknown disaster was suspended above me.But, suddenly, from the room below arose the sound of the piano; and instantaneously, that heavy oppression disappeared, and I was seized by a confused anxiety in which all the dreams, every desire, each hope, every regret, remorse, and terror were mingled anew with inconceivable and suffocating rapidity.I recognized the music. It was aRomance without Wordsof which Juliana was very fond, and which Miss Edith often played; it was one of those veiled yet profound melodies in which the Soul appeared to ask Life, with ever-changing accents, this single question, "Why have you disappointed my expectation?"Yielding to a kind of instinctive impulse, I went out, agitated, traversed the corridor, descended the staircase, and stopped before the door from which issued the sounds. The door was ajar; I slipped in without making any noise, and looked through the portières. Was it Juliana? At first my eyes, blinded by the light, were incapable of distinguishing anything, before adapting themselves to the darkness; but I was struck by the penetrating perfume of the hawthorns, that odor of mingled thyme and bitter-almond, fresh as country milk. I looked in. The room was poorly lighted by a greenish light that struggled in from between the slats of the Venetian blinds. Miss Edith was alone at the piano, and she continued to play without noticing my presence. The polished case of the instrument glistened in the dark; the branches of hawthorns made a white spot. In the quiet of this retreat, in this perfume emanating from the branches that recalled the happy matinal intoxication, and Juliana's smile and my own fear, the romance seemed more desolate than ever.Where was Juliana? Gone upstairs? Still out of doors? I withdrew; I went down the other stairs; I traversed the vestibule without meeting anyone. I had an unconquerable desire to seek her, to see her; I thought that, perhaps, it would suffice me to be near her in order to recover my calmness, to regain confidence. On going out on the lawn, I perceived her beneath the elms, sitting with Federico.Both smiled at me. When I came up to them my brother said smilingly:"We were speaking of you. Juliana thinks you will soon be tired of the Badiola.... If so, what will become of our projects?""No, Julianadoes not know," I replied, making an effort to recover my habitual ease. "But you will see. On the contrary, it is of Rome that I am tired ...and of everything else."I looked at Juliana. A marvellous change was taking place in my soul. The sad things that, up to then, had oppressed me, now faded away, disappeared, gave place to a salutary feeling that the mere sight of her and of my brother sufficed to awaken in me. She was seated in a careless and nonchalant attitude, holding on her knees a book that I recognized, the book that I had given her some days before, Tolstoï'sPeace and War. Truly, all about her, her attitude, her look, breathed sweetness and goodness. And in me an emotion was born similar to that which I should doubtless have felt if, in the same place, beneath the familiar elms, that shed their dead flowers, I had seen Constance, the poor sister, side by side with Federico.The elms rained thousands of flowers at every breath of the wind. There was, in the white light, a continual and very slow rain of diaphanous, almost impalpable pellicles, that loitered in the air, hesitating, trembling like the wings of dragon-flies, of an indefinable color between green and blond, and whose incessant fall imparted a sensation of vertigo. They fell on Juliana's knees, on her shoulders; from time to time she made a movement to remove one that had ensconced itself in her hair."Ah! If Tullio stays at the Badiola," said Federico, addressing her, "we will do great things. We will promulgate the new agrarian laws; we will establish the foundations of the new agricultural constitution... You smile? You also will have your share in our work; we will confide to you the execution of two or three precepts of our Decalogue. You will work like the others. Apropos, Tullio, when shall we commence this novitiate? Your hands are too white. Eh! It is not enough to simply prick them with thorns...."He spoke gayly, in his clear and strong voice, that immediately inspired every listener with a feeling of security and confidence. He spoke of his old and new projects relative to the interpretation of the primitive Christian law on alimentary labor with a gravity of thought and emotion that tempered that sportive gayety with which he protected himself as with a veil of modesty against the admiration and eulogy of his auditors. In him all appeared simple, easy, spontaneous. This young man, by the sole power of a mind that illumined his inborn virtue, had had, for several years already, the intuition of the social theory that the Moujik Bondareff inspired in Leo Tolstoï. At that time, he had not the least knowledge ofPeace and War, the great book that had just appeared in the East."Here is a book for you," I said to him, taking the volume from Juliana's knees."Thanks; lend it to me. I will read it.""Do you like it?" I asked Juliana."Yes; very much. It is sad and consoling at the same time. I already love Marie Bolkonsky, and Pierre Besoukhow too."I sat down near her, on a bench. It seemed to me that I was thinking of nothing, that I had not one precise thought; but my soul kept vigil and meditated. There was a manifest contrast between the feeling that sprang from the circumstance, from the neighboring objects, and that which corresponded with Federico's words, with that book, with the names of the characters whom Juliana loved.The time passed slowly and gently, almost lazily, in this diffused and whitish mist in which the elms gradually shed their flowers. The sound of the piano reached us, muffled, unintelligible, rendering the light more melancholy, cradling, so to speak, the drowsy atmosphere.Absorbed, listening no longer, I opened the book, I turned the leaves at several places, and ran through the beginning of several pages. I noticed that there were several pages turned down at the corners, as if to mark them; on others, there were finger-nail marks, the habit of the reader. Then I wished to read in turn, curious, almost anxious. In the scene between Pierre Besoukhow and the unknown old man at the Torjok post-house, many passages were marked."Let your spiritual look fall back on your inner being. Ask yourself if you are satisfied with yourself. At what result have you arrived, having but your intelligence for a guide? You are young, you are rich, you are intelligent. What have you done with all these gifts? Are you satisfied with yourself and with your life?""No, I have a horror of it!""If you have a horror of it, change it, purify yourself. And, in measure as you transform yourself, you will learn to recognize wisdom. How have you passed your existence? In orgies, in debauches, in depravities, receiving everything from society without giving it anything. What use have you made of the benefits of fortune? What have you done for your fellow-man? Have you thought of your tens of thousands of serfs? Have you assisted them morally or materially? No, you have not. You have profited by their labor in order to live a life of corruption. Have you sought to employ yourself in the service of your fellow-man? No. You have lived in indolence. And then you married; you accepted the responsibility of serving as a guide to a young woman. And then? Instead of helping her to find the path of truth, you have plunged her into the abyss of deceit and of misery...."Again the unbearable load weighed me down, crushed me; and it was a more atrocious torture than that I had already suffered, because Juliana's presence exasperated the crisis. On the leaf, the passage transcribed was marked by a single pencil stroke. Without any doubt, Juliana had marked it, thinking of me, of my misconduct. But the last line? To whom did that refer? To me? To us?Had I thrown her, had she fallen "into the abyss of deceit and misery"?I feared that she and Federico would hear the beating of my heart.There was another page turned down, with a very pronounced mark—that on the death of the Princess Lisa."The eyes of the dead woman were closed; but her small face had not changed, and she seemed constantly saying: 'What have you done to me?' Prince André did not weep; but he felt his heart break as he thought that he was guilty of wrongs henceforth irreparable and unforgettable. The old prince came also, and kissed one of the frail waxen hands that lay crossed over one another. And one would have thought that the poor, small face was again repeating to him: 'What have you done to me?'"That gentle yet terrible question pierced me like a dagger. "What have you done to me?" I kept my eyes fixed on the page, not daring to make a movement, to look at Juliana, yet agonized by a desire to do so; and I feared that both she and Federico might hear my heart-beats, that they might turn toward me to look at me and that they would discover my agitation. My agitation was so great that it seemed to me that my face was distorted, that I was incapable of rising, incapable of uttering a single syllable. I threw a single rapid, stealthy glance at Juliana, and her profile impressed itself on me so strongly that I seemed to continue to see her before me on the page, beside the "poor, small face" of the dead princess. It was a pensive profile, rendered graver by attention, shaded by long lashes; and the lips, tightly closed, somewhat depressed at the corners, appeared as if involuntarily confessing a feeling of fatigue and great sadness. She was listening to my brother. And my brother's voice resounded confusedly in my ears, seemed to me far off, although he was quite close. And all these flowers shed by the elms, that rained, rained ceaselessly, all these dead flowers, almost unreal, almost bereft of being, induced in me an inexpressible sensation, as if that psychic vision were transformed in me into strange internal phenomena, as if I had been present at the continuous passage of these thousands of impalpable shadows in an inner sky, at the bottom of my soul. "What have you done to me?" repeated the voice of the dead and the living, both the one and the other without moving their lips. "What have you done to me?""What are you reading, Tullio?" asked Juliana, turning and taking from my hands the book, which she closed and replaced on her knees with a sort of nervous impatience.And immediately, without pause, as if to remove all significance from her action, she added:"Why do we not rejoin Miss Edith and have a little music? Do you hear her? She is playing, I think, the Funeral March for the Death of a Hero, which you are so fond of, Federico...."She listened. We all three listened. We heard several chords in the silence. She was not mistaken. Rising, she added:"Well, come. Will you?"I rose last, so to have her before me. She did not take the trouble to shake from her dress the elm flowers that had formed a soft carpet on the ground all around.She stood still a minute, her head bent, regarding the layer of flowers which she hollowed out and piled up with the slender tip of her shoe, while on her, other flowers, and still other flowers, continued to rain, to rain ceaselessly. I could see nothing of her face. Was she really so attentive to that trifling action? Or was she not rather absorbed in perplexity?V.The following morning, among those who brought Easter offerings to the Badiola, came Calisto, old Calisto, the keeper at the Lilacs, with an enormous bouquet of fresh and odorous lilacs. He wanted to offer them to Juliana with his own hands, recalling to her the happy time of our stay there, and begging for another visit, a short visit. "Signora had seemed so gay, so happy over there. Why did she not return? The house had remained intact; nothing had been changed. The garden was now more filled. The lilac-trees, a veritable forest, were in full bloom. Did not their perfume reach as far as the Badiola, toward evening? Really, the garden and the house expected a visit. Beneath the roof all the old nests were full of swallows. In deference to Signora's wish, these nests had been respected as if sacred. But, assuredly, there were too many now. Every week they were obliged to clean up the balconies and window-sills with a shovel. And what a warbling, from morning till night! When will Signora decide to come? Soon?""Shall we go there on Tuesday?" I asked Juliana.After a slight hesitation, sustaining with the greatest difficulty the heavy care that bowed her head, she answered:"We'll go on Tuesday, if you wish.""Very well. Tuesday, then, Calisto," I said to the old man, in such a happy tone that I was surprised at it myself so sudden and spontaneous had been the rapture of my soul. "Expect us Tuesday morning. We will bring our lunch. Make no preparations. Do you understand? Let the house remain closed. I wish to open the door myself, and to open the windows myself, one after the other. Do you understand?"A strange happiness, without a single cloud, agitated me, urged me on to puerile actions and puerile and almost foolish remarks, that I could hardly restrain. I should have liked to embrace Calisto, to stroke his fine, white beard, take him in my arms, speak to him of the Lilacs, of the past, of the "good old time," in a prolixity of words, under the grand Easter sun."Once more I see before me a simple, sincere man, a faithful heart," I thought, regarding him. And once more I felt security, as if the affection of this old man were for me a second talisman against the blows of fate.Once more, since the close of the preceding evening, my soul expanded, stimulated by the abundance of joy that impregnated the atmosphere, that emanated from every being. That morning, one would have thought that the Badiola was the shrine of a pilgrimage. Not one peasant failed to bring his offering and well-wishes. My mother received upon her blessed hands a thousand kisses of men, women, and children. At the mass that was celebrated in the chapel a dense crowd was present. It overflowed the porch and spread over the lawn, full of religious zeal beneath the azure vault. The silver bells rang merrily in the still air with joyous, almost melodic harmony. On the tower, the inscription on the sundial said:Hora est benefaciendi. And on this glorious morning, on which one felt, so to speak, all the gratitude due to long kindness mounting toward the sweet maternal house, these three words seemed like a chant.How then could I retain my perfidious doubt, suspicions, troubled recollections? What could I have to fear after having seen my mother press her lips on Juliana's smiling brow, after having seen my brother press in his noble and loyal hand the delicate and pale hand of her who was for him a second incarnation of Constance.VI.The thought of the excursion to the Lilacs occupied me all that day and again the day following, without interruption. Never, I think, had the longing for the hour agreed upon for a first rendezvous filled me with such ardent impatience.The disturbance of the senses contributed also to enshroud and dull my conscience. I wanted to reconquer Juliana body and soul. The name of the Lilacs reawakened in me memories, recollections, not only of a sweet idyll, but also of ardent passion. Without being aware of it, I had perhaps sharpened my longing by the inevitable images that suspicion engenders; it was a latent poison that I bore in me. Up to then, in fact, it had seemed to me that my dominant emotion was entirely spiritual, and, in the expectation of the great day, I had taken delight in imagining the conversation that I would hold with the woman whose pardon I wished to obtain. Now, on the contrary, what I saw, was less the pathetic scene that would take place between us than the scene that must be the immediate consequence. Gradually, by a rapid and irresistible elimination, a single image excluded all the others, invaded me, mastered me, became fixed, clear, precise in the smallest particulars. "It is after lunch. A small glass of Chablis has sufficed to disturb Juliana, who does not drink wine, so to speak. The afternoon becomes warmer and warmer; the odor of the roses, of the corn-flag, of the lilacs, become violent; the swallows pass and repass with a deafening twittering. We are alone, both invaded by an unbearable internal tremor. And, suddenly, I say to her: 'Shall we go and look at our old room?' It is the old nuptial chamber, that intentionally I had omitted to open during our first walk through the villa. We enter. There is a low humming noticeable, the same humming that one thinks one hears in the deep folds of certain shells; but it is only the murmur of my arteries. She also, no doubt, hears this humming; but it is only the murmur of her arteries. All around is silent; one would think that the swallows have ceased warbling. I want to speak, and, at my first word, that sticks in my throat, she falls into my arms, almost fainting."This imaginary picture became ceaselessly more and more embellished, grew complicated, simulated the reality, attained an incredible actuality. I could not succeed in preventing its absolute empire over my mind. One would have said that there was reborn in me the old-time libertine, so keen was my pleasure in contemplating and caressing the vision. The kind of life I had led for several weeks, in this warm springtime, produced its effect on my regenerated organism. Simple physiological phenomena completely modified the state of my conscience, gave an entirely different turn to my thoughts, made of me another man.Maria and Natalia had expressed a desire to accompany us on this excursion. Juliana wanted them to come, but I objected, and I used all my skill, every persuasion, to accomplish my purpose.Federico had made this proposition: "I must go to Casal Caldore on Tuesday. I will accompany you in the carriage as far as the Lilacs, where you will stop, and I will continue on my way. Then, in the evening, I will call for you again with the carriage, and we will return together to the Badiola." Juliana consented, in my presence.I reflected that Federico's company, at least in going, would not inconvenience us; on the contrary, it would even spare me a certain embarrassment. In fact, what could we have spoken about, Juliana and I, had we been alone during the two or three hours the ride lasted? What attitude could I have taken toward her? Who knows even if I should not have spoiled the situation, compromised its success, or, at least, removed the freshness from our emotion? Was it not my dream to find myself again suddenly with her at the Lilacs, as if by magic, and there to speak to her my first word of tenderness and submission? The presence of Federico furnished the advantage of avoiding uncertain preliminaries, long and painful silences, sentences spoken in low tones on account of the coachman's ears; in a word, all the little irritations and tortures. We would get down at the Lilacs, and then, then only, we should find ourselves by each other's side at the gate of the lost paradise.VII.This is what took place. I cannot find words to describe the sensation I felt when I heard the sound of the bells and the noise of the carriage which bore Federico away in the direction of Casal Caldore. I said to Calisto, as I took the keys from his hands with manifest impatience:"Now, you may go. I will call you later."And I myself closed the gate behind the old man, who seemed rather surprised and dissatisfied at so unceremonious a dismissal."At last, we're here!" I cried, directly I was alone with Juliana. And the entire wave of happiness that had invaded me passed into my voice.I was happy, happy, unspeakably happy; I was as if fascinated by an immense hallucination of unexpected, unhoped for happiness, that transfigured all my being, reawoke and multiplied all that there was still good and youthful in me, isolated me from the world, instantly concentrated my life within the circuit of the walls enclosed by that garden. Words sprang to my lips without connection, inexpressible; my reason wandered in a blazing flash of thoughts.How was it that Juliana had not guessed what was passing in me? How was it she had not understood me? How was it that her heart had not received the counter-shock of my impetuous joy?We looked at each other. I can still see the anxious expression of her face, over which hovered an indefinable smile. She spoke in that muffled, feeble voice, always hesitating with the singular hesitation that I had already remarked in other circumstances and that made her appear to be ceaselessly preoccupied in restraining the words that mounted to her lips in order to substitute for them other words. She said:"Let us take a walk round the garden before opening the house. How long it is since I have seen it in such flower. The last time we were here was three years ago, do you remember? It was also in April, during Easter week."Without doubt she wished to overcome her agitation, but she could not succeed; without doubt she wished to repress the effusion of her tenderness, but she could not. In this place, the first words issued from her own mouth had begun to evoke memories. After a few steps she stopped, and we looked at each other. An indefinable change, as if she were forcing herself to stifle something, passed through her dark eyes."Juliana!" I cried, incapable of controlling myself, feeling an afflux of passionate and tender words spring from the bottom of my heart, seized by a mad frenzy to kneel before her on the sand, to embrace her knees, to kiss her dress, her hands, her wrists, furiously, ceaselessly.With a supplicating gesture, she made a motion for me to be quiet. And she continued to advance along the path, hastening her steps.She wore a light-gray dress trimmed with darker shades, a gray felt hat, and carried a gray-silk parasol embroidered with white trefoils. I still see her walking between the tufted masses of lilacs that bent toward her their thousands of bluish-violet bunches.It was hardly eleven o'clock. The morning was warm, a precocious warmth; in the azure floated a number of flocculent vapors. The charming bushes that had given their name to this country-house blossomed on every side, were masters of the garden, formed a wood, interspersed here and there by tea-rose bushes and by the tufts of the corn-flag. Here and there the roses climbed up stalks, insinuated themselves between the branches, fell back again in chains, in garlands, festoons, bouquets; at the foot of the stalks, Florentine orris sprang from between their leaves, like long, greenish swords, flowers of large and noble design. The three perfumes harmonized in a deep accord that Irecognized, because, since the now distant epoch, these had remained in my memory as clearly as the accord of three musical notes. In the silence only the warbling of the swallows could be heard. The house could scarcely be seen between the cones of the cypresses, and the swallows were as numerous there as bees around a hive.Very soon Juliana slowed down her pace. I walked at her side, so near that at times our elbows touched. She glanced attentively around her, as if she feared something might escape her. Two or three times I detected on her lips a movement as if she were about to speak: it was like the first outline of a word that remained unpronounced.I said to her, in a low voice and timidly:"Of what are you thinking?""I am thinking that we should never have left here.""You are right, Juliana."At times the swallows almost brushed against us, with a cry, rapid and glistening like winged arrows."How much I have longed for this day, Juliana! Ah! you will never know how much I have longed for it!" I cried, prey to an emotion so strong that my voice became almost unrecognizable. "Never, do you understand, never have I felt an anxiety equal to that which devours me since the day before yesterday, since the moment you consented to come here. Do you remember the day when, for the first time, we saw each other in secret, on the terrace of the Villa Oggeri, where we kissed each other? I was mad with love for you, do you remember? Well, the expectation of the last night was nothing in comparison. You do not believe me, and you are right in misbelieving me, in doubting me. But I want to tell you all, to recount my sufferings, my fears, my hope. Oh! I know, my sufferings are doubtless little in comparison with those that I have made you suffer. I know, I know; all my pains are not equal to your pains, not worth your tears. I have not expiated my fault, and I am not worthy of pardon. But tell me, tell me that I may hope that you will pardon me. You do not believe me; but I wish to tell you all. It is you, you only whom I have truly loved; it is you alone whom I love. I know, I know; men will say these things in order to obtain pardon, and you are right not to believe me. Yet see; if you think of our love of long ago, if you think of our first three years of never-failing tenderness, if you remember, if you recollect, you will see it is impossible to refuse to believe me. Even in my lowest abasements, you were to be for me unforgettable; and my soul ever longed to turn toward you, to seek you, to regret you, always, do you understand? Always. Did you not perceive it yourself? When you were as a sister to me, did you not sometimes perceive that I was dying of sorrow? I swear to you that, far away from you, I never felt sincere joy. I have never had one hour of complete forgetfulness. Never, never; I swear it. You were my constant, profound, secret adoration. The better part of myself has always been yours, and there has been in me a hope that has never been extinguished—that of being able to free myself from my malady and to find intact my first, my only love... Ah! Juliana, tell me that I have not hoped in vain!"She walked with extreme slowness, no longer looking before her, her head bent, excessively pale. A slight, painful contraction appeared at times at the corner of her mouth. And, because she remained silent, I began to feel a vague uneasiness arise within me. An oppressive feeling began to be caused by the sun, the flowers, the cries of the swallows, by all the joyfulness displayed by triumphant springtime."You do not answer me?" I continued, taking the hand that she let hang by her side. "You do not believe me; you have lost all confidence in me; you still fear that I deceive you; you do not dare to give yourself up again because you are always thinking ofthe last time.... Yes, it is true, that was the most brutal of all my infamies. I repent it as I would a crime, and, even if you should pardon me, I shall never be able to forgive myself. But did you not notice that I was ailing, that I was losing my reason? A curse pursued me, and, since that day, I have not had one minute's respite, I have not had a single lucid interval. Do you not remember? Do you not remember? Surely you knew I was beside myself, in a state of madness; for you looked at me as one does upon a madman. How often have I surprised in your glances sad compassion, curiosity, fear! Do you not remember what I had become? I was unrecognizable. Well, I am cured; I saved myself for your sake. I have succeeded in opening my eyes, I have succeeded in seeing the light. At last it is light. It is you, you only whom I have truly loved all my life, it is you only whom I love. Do you hear?"I pronounced the last words in a firmer voice, and more slowly, as if to impress them one by one upon this woman's soul, and I pressed firmly her hand, which I already held in my own. She stopped with the manner of one about to collapse, gasping. Later, only later, during the hours that followed, I understood the excess of mortal anguish exhaled by this panting. But, at that moment, I understood only this: "The recollection of my horrible treason, evoked by me, revives her suffering. I have touched wounds that are still open. Ah! if I could persuade her to believe me! If I could conquer her distrust! Does not my voice convince her that I am speaking the truth?"We had come to the intersection of two paths. There was a bench there. She murmured:"Let us sit down a little."We sat down. I do not know if she recognized the spot. Even I did not recognize it at first, bewildered like a man who has had both his eyes bandaged for some time. We both looked about us, then we looked at one another, and in our eyes we had the same thought. A crowd of tender recollections were connected with this old stone bench. My heart swelled, not with regret, but with a restless covetousness, with a sort of frenzy of living that, in a flash, gave me a chimerical, dazzling vision of the future. "Ah! she is ignorant of what new tenderness I am capable! In my soul there is a paradise for her." And the flaming up of that ideal of love was so strong that I became exalted."Are you sad? But what creature in all the world was ever loved as I love you? To what woman has it been given to obtain a proof of love equal to that I give you? You said just now: 'We should never have left here.' Without doubt, we should have been happy: you would not have suffered a martyrdom, you would not have shed so many tears, you would not have lost so many years of your life; but you would not have known my love, all my love."Her head was bent on her bosom, her eyes half-closed, and she listened, motionless. Her eyelashes threw on the upper part of her cheeks a shadow that disturbed me more than a look would have done."And I myself would have had no knowledge of my love. Did I not believe the first time I left you that all was at an end? I sought another passion, another fever, another intoxication; I wished to embrace life in one single clasp. You did not suffice me. And during all those years I weakened myself by an atrocious life, oh! so atrocious that I have a horror of it, as a convict has a horror of the prison in which he has lived,dying a little every day. And I had to wander from darkness into darkness, before light fell on my soul, before this great truth appeared to me. I have loved only one woman, and you are she. You alone, in all the world, are good and gentle; and you are the best and most gentle creature I have ever dreamed of; you are the Unique. And you were in my house, while I sought you afar off. Do you understand, now? Do you understand?You were in my house, while I sought you afar off. Ah, tell me, is not this confession worth all your tears? Do you not wish you had shed more, much more, in order to purchase this certitude?""Yes, still more," she said, so low that I scarcely heard her.The words passed like a breath from her pallid lips. And the tears gushed from between her eyelashes, rolled down her cheeks, wetted the convulsed mouth, fell on that palpitating bosom."Juliana, my love! Oh, my love!" I cried, with a thrill of supreme felicity, throwing myself on my knees before her.And I threw my arms around her, I laid my head on her bosom, I felt again in all my being that frenetic tension in which ends useless effort to express by an action, by a gesture, by a caress, the inexpressible internal passion. Her tears fell on my cheek. If the material effect of these warm life-drops had equalled the sensations that I received from them, I should carry an indelible mark on my skin."Oh! let me drink," I begged.Raising myself, I placed my lips to her eyelids and I bathed them with her tears, while my hands lavished on her distracted caresses. My limbs had acquired an extraordinary flexibility, a sort of illusory fluidity that prevented me from noticing the obstacle presented by the clothes. It seemed to me that I had the power to enclose and envelop the entire person of the loved one."Did you dream," I said, with the saline savor in my mouth that impregnated me to the heart (later, during the hours that followed, I was astonished at not having found an intolerable bitterness in these tears), "did you dream you would be loved so much? Did you dream of such happiness? It is I, look, it is I who speak to you like this; look well: it is I. If you knew how strange that seems to me! If I could tell you! I know that I do not know you from to-day, I know I do not love you from to-day, I know that you are what you have always been. And yet it seems to me that I only just found you a moment ago, when you said: 'Yes, still more.' You said it, did you not? Only three words—a breath. And I am reborn, and you are reborn, and we will be happy, happy forever."I told her these things in a voice that seemed to come from a distance, broken, indefinable; in one of those tones whose intonations seem to rise to our lips, not from our material organs, but from the deepest depths of our soul. And she, who up to then had shed silent tears, burst into sobs.Violent, too violent were her sobs; not as when one succumbs to a limitless joy, but when one gives vent to inconsolable despair. She sobbed so violently that, for several seconds, I was seized by the stupor caused by excessive manifestations, supreme paroxysms of human emotions. Unconsciously I drew back a little; but, immediately, I noticed the distance that now separated us; I at once noticed not only that there was no longer a physical contact, but also that the sensation of moral communion had become dissipated in the twinkling of an eye. We were still two beings, distinct, separate, external to one another. The very difference of our attitudes even accentuated this disunion. Sitting back at her end of the bench and covering her face with her two hands, she sobbed; and every one of her sobs shook her entire being, put in evidence her fragility, so to speak. Without touching her, I was again on my knees before her; and I looked at her, stupefied, and yet strangely lucid, attentive to all that was passing within me, and yet with every sense open to the perception of surrounding objects. I heard both her sobs and the twittering of the swallows; I had an exact notion of time and place. And those flowers, and those perfumes, and the surrounding glory of the joyous springtime inspired me with a fright that grew and grew, becoming a sort of panicky terror, an instinctive and blind terror against which reason was powerless. And, like a thunderbolt that lights up a bank of clouds, one thought flashed out from the midst of this tumultuous fear, illuminated me, struck me to the heart: "She is impure!"Ah! why did I not fall then, struck dead by the blow? Why did not one of my vital organs collapse? Why did I not expire at the feet of the woman who, in a few short moments, had raised me to the height of happiness, only to precipitate me into an abyss of misery?"Answer!"I seized her wrists, I uncovered her face, I spoke close to her; and my voice was so low that I scarcely heard it myself in the tumult of my brain."Answer! What do these tears signify?"She ceased to sob, and looked at me; and her eyes, reddened by the tears, became dilated with an expression of supreme anguish, as if they had seen me dying. In fact, my face must have seemed lifeless."It is too late, perhaps? Is it too late?" I added, revealing my terrible thought by this obscure question."No, no, Tullio! No—it is—nothing. What could you have thought? No, no. I am so weak, you see. I am no longer what I was formerly. I have no strength. I am ill, you know; I am so ill! I have not had the force to resist your words. You understand. This crisis has come to me so unexpectedly. It is my nervousness—a sort of convulsion. When one has a spasm like this, one cannot distinguish whether it is from joy or sorrow. Oh! my God! See, it is passing. Rise, Tullio; come here, by my side."She spoke to me in a voice still choked by tears, still broken with sobs; she looked at me with an expression that was well known to me, the expression that she had already often had at the sight of my suffering. At one time, she could not bear to see me suffer. Her sensibility to this was so exaggerated that I could obtain anything from her by showing her that I was sad. She would have done anything to free me from pain, even the slightest. Often at that time I feigned pain, in jest, to make her uneasy, so as to be consoled like a child, to obtain certain caresses that pleased me, to call forth certain graceful gestures that I adored. Was it not the same tender yet alarmed expression that reappeared now in her eyes?"Come here, by my side; sit down. Or would you prefer to continue our walk in the garden? We have seen nothing yet. Let us go toward the fountain. I would like to bathe my eyes. Why do you look at me so? Of what are you thinking? Are we not happy? See, I begin to feel well again, very well. But I must bathe my eyes, my face. What time is it? Noon, perhaps? Federico will be back at about six o'clock. We have plenty of time. Will you come?"She spoke in a broken and still somewhat convulsive voice, and with a manifest effort, as if trying to collect herself, to regain command of her nervousness, to dissipate in me the shadow of an apprehension, to appear to me confiding and happy. The smile that trembled in her still humid and somewhat reddened eyes had a troubled gentleness that awakened my sympathy. I felt in her words, in her attitude, in all her person that gentleness that softened me, that made me languish with a half-sensual languor, is impossible for me to define the delicate seduction that, emanating from this creature, insinuated itself in my senses and in my mind, favored by the indefinable and confused state of my soul. She seemed to be silently saying to me: "It is impossible for me to be more adorable. Take me, then, since you love me; take me in your arms, but carefully, without hurting me, without clasping me too hard. Oh! I burn with desire to receive your caresses! But I believe they would kill me." This thought aided me a little to counteract the effect her smile produced upon me.I looked at her mouth at the moment she asked me: "Why do you look at me like that?" and at the moment when she asked: "Are we not happy?" I felt the blind desire of an awakened sensation in which died away the uneasy feeling which my recent passion had left in me. When she arose, I seized her impetuously in my arms, and fastened my lips to hers.It was a lover's kiss that I gave her, a kiss long and deep, that stirred all the essence of our two beings. She sank back on the bench, exhausted."Oh! no, no, Tullio; I beg of you! Enough, enough! Let me regain a little strength," she begged, stretching her hands out to push me away. "Otherwise, I shall be unable to keep on my feet. See, I am half dead."But there had sprung up in me extraordinary phenomena. That sensation had had the same effect on my mind as an impetuous wave that sweeps away all obstacles, effaces every imprint, and leaves the sand smooth. Everything was instantly levelled; and, suddenly, I found myself in anew state determined by the immediate influence of circumstances, by the pressure of the blood which began to tingle. I no longer knew but one thing. I had there before me the woman whom I desired, trembling, overwhelmed by my kiss—in short, mine entirely; around us blossomed a garden, filled with memories, filled with secrets; a deserted house awaits us behind the flowering bushes guarded by the familiar swallows."Do you think I am not strong enough to carry you?" I said to her, seizing her hands, interlacing my fingers in hers. "You used to be as light as a feather. Now you must be still lighter. Let us try!"A dark shadow passed in her eyes. For a second, she seemed absorbed in thought, as when one deliberates and takes a rapid resolution. Then she shook her head, and throwing herself back, hanging to me by her outstretched arms, laughing with a laugh that revealed a little of her bloodless gum:"Very well! Lift me," she said.Scarcely had she risen than she fell against my breast; and then it was she who kissed me first, with a sort of convulsive furor, as if a prey to a sudden frenzy, as if she wished at one stroke to appease an atrociously painful thirst."Ah! It is killing me!" she repeated, when our lips had parted.And that humid mouth, somewhat projecting, half-open, that had become redder, animated by languor, in that face so pale and frail, really gave me the indefinable impression that, of all that body similar to a corpse, the lips only were alive.She murmured, dreamily, raising her closed eyes, the long lashes of which trembled as if a slight smile had filtered out from beneath the lids:"Are you happy?"I pressed her to my heart."Very well, let us go. Carry me where you will. Support me a little, Tullio; I feel as if my knees would give way.""To the house, Juliana?""Where you wish."I supported her by placing my arm around her waist, and I drew her along. She walked like a somnambulist. At first we were silent; and, each moment, we both turned together toward one another, to look at each other. She seemed to me to be really anew woman; my attention was arrested by the details, was preoccupied by them; a slight mark scarcely visible on the skin, a little dimple on the lower lip, the curvature of the lashes, a vein at the temple, the shadow that encircled the eyes, the infinitely delicate lobe of the ear. The brown mark on the neck was hardly hidden by the edging of lace; at each movement of the head that Juliana made, one saw it appear or disappear; and that little particularity irritated my impatience. I was intoxicated, and yet, I was very lucid. I heard the cries of the swallows, more numerous, the splashing of the jets of water in the fountain close by. I had the sensation that life was fleeting, that time was flying. And that sun, and those flowers, and those perfumes, and those sounds, and all the joyousness of the springtime, aroused in me for the third time an inexplicable emotion of anxiety."My willow!" cried Juliana, as we arrived at the fountain; and she ceased leaning on me, walked more rapidly. "Look, look how tall it is! Do you remember? It was only a branch."After being pensive for a moment, she added in a different tone and in a low voice:"I saw it before—you do not perhaps know? I came here, to the Lilacs,the other time."She could not restrain a sigh. But immediately, as if to dissipate the shadow that these words had put between us, as if to remove the bitterness from her mouth, she bent toward one of the two faucets, drank a few mouthfuls, then turning towards me made a gesture as if asking a kiss. Her chin was still wet, and her lips cool. We both felt that what was to be must be, and we longed for the supreme reconciliation that every fibre of our beings demanded. When we disengaged ourselves, our eyes repeated the same intoxicating promise. And how extraordinary was the sentiment expressed by Juliana's physiognomy. But, then, I did not understand it! Later on, only during the hours that followed, did it become intelligible—only later I knew that a vision of death and a vision of voluptuousness had at the same time intoxicated the poor creature, and that in abandoning herself to the languors of her flesh she had made a funeral vow. I see as if I had her before my eyes, I shall always see that face full of mystery, under the shadow of that willow which rained on us its great vegetal chevelure. Beneath the sun, between the long branches of diaphanous foliage, silvery reflections from the water imparted a hallucinating vibration to the shade. The echoes combined, in a low and continuous monotone, the sonorous sound of the jets of water. All these appearances exalted my mind out of the world about me.We went toward the house without speaking. My joy was so great at our reconciliation, our reawakened love, that my soul was transported in a whirlwind of joy so high, the pulsations of my arteries were so violent, that I thought: "Is this delirium? I felt nothing of this on my first marriage night, when I crossed the threshold of the nuptial chamber." Twice or three times I was seized by a savage transport, as if by a sudden attack of madness, and it is wonderful that I could contain myself: so great was my physical desire to take possession again of this woman. In her also the crisis must have become insupportable; because she stopped, and sighed: "Oh! my God, my God! This is too much!"Suffocating, oppressed, she took my hand and placed it over her heart."Feel," said she.I felt less the throbbing of her heart than the elasticity of her breast, through the cloth. I saw the iris in Juliana's eyes become hidden under the closing eyelids. For fear that she would faint, I supported her; then I bore her away, I carried her almost as far as the cypress, as far as a bench where we both sat down, both exhausted.The house rose before us, as if in a dream.Leaning her head on my shoulder, she said:"Ah! Tullio, how terrible! Do you not think, too, that we could die from it?"She added, gravely, in a voice that seemed to come from I know not what depths of her soul:"Shall we both die?"I felt a strange shudder, which convinced me that these words expressed an extraordinary state of mind, perhaps the same sentiment that had transformed her face beneath the willow, after the embrace, after the silent resolution. But this time, again, I could not understand. I understood only that we were both possessed by a species of delirium and that we were both breathing the atmosphere of a dream.The house rose before us as in a vision. On the rustic façade, on every cornice, on every projection, along the gutters, on the architraves, beneath the window ledges, beneath the stones of the balconies, between the brackets, between the eminences, everywhere, the swallows had built their nests. The clay nests, by thousands, old and new, cemented together like the cells of a hive, had but few spaces between them. In these spaces, and on the slats of the Venetian shutters, and on the iron-work of the balustrades, the excrements made white patches like thinned chalk. Closed and without inhabitants, this house nevertheless was full of life—a bustling life, joyous and tender. The faithful swallows whirled around in their flight, with their cries, their scintillations, with all their tendernesses, ceaselessly. While, in the air, flocks pursued one another, strong, swift strokes, as rapid as arrows, with great alternating clamors, flying away, coming closer in the twinkling of an eye, brushing close to the trees, then rising up again in reflecting flashes in the sunlight, indefatigable. In and about the nests there was an activity of another sort, but not the less ardent. Some of the swallows remained for several moments fixed before the orifices; others sustained themselves on their wings while in flight; others, half-way in, showed on the outside only their little forked tails, quivering and agile, black and white on the grayish mud; others, half-way out, showed a small portion of their shining breasts and fawn-colored throats; others, up to then invisible, flew out with a piercing cry, and flew off. All this lively and joyous movement around the closed house, all that animation around the nests of our nest of the old days, formed a spectacle so delightful, a miracle of gentleness so exquisite, that for several minutes, as if during a respite from our fever, we forgot ourselves in its contemplation.
III.
I carried this branch to Juliana, and many others besides. I never returned to the Badiola without a load of flowered gifts.
One morning, as I was carrying a bunch of hawthorns, I met my mother in the vestibule; I was somewhat out of breath, heated, disturbed by a slight intoxication.
"Where is Juliana?" I asked.
"Upstairs, in her room," she answered, laughing.
I ran up the staircase, crossed the corridor, entered the room, crying:
"Juliana, Juliana, where are you?"
Maria and Natalia ran to meet me, giving me a boisterous welcome, delighted at the sight of the flowers, dancing about as if possessed.
"Come in! Come in!" they cried. "Mamma is here, in the bedroom. Come in!"
On crossing the threshold my heart beat faster. Juliana was there, smiling and embarrassed. I threw the bunch at her feet.
"Look!"
"Oh! how beautiful!" she exclaimed, bending over the fragrant treasure.
She was dressed in one of her favorite gowns, hanging in ample and graceful folds, and of a green hue resembling the green of an aloes-leaf. Her hair, not yet dressed, covered the nape of her neck, hiding her ears beneath its thick masses. The emanations from the hawthorns, that odor of thyme mixed with bitter almonds, enveloped, inundated the room, penetrating everything.
"Take care not to prick yourself," I said to her. "See my hands."
I showed her the still bleeding lacerations, as if to enhance the value of my offering. "Oh! if now she would take my hands!" I thought. And in my mind passed confusedly the recollection of a day, far distant, when she had kissed my hands, lacerated by the thorns, when she had wanted to suck the drops of blood that appeared one after the other. "If now she would take my hands, and if, by this single action, she would accord me full pardon, and yield herself up to me entirely!"
At that time I was in constant expectation of some such movement. I could not, of course, have said what gave me such confidence; but I was sure that Juliana would give herself to me again in this manner sooner or later, by some simple and silent action by which she would "accord me full pardon and yield herself up to me entirely."
She smiled. A shade of suffering passed over her pale face and in her sunken eyes.
"Don't you feel a little better since you are here?" I asked, approaching her.
"Yes, I'm better," she answered.
Then, after a pause:
"And you?"
"Oh, I! I am cured. Don't you see?"
"Yes, it is true."
At that time, when she spoke to me, her words had a curious hesitation that seemed to me full of grace, but which now it is impossible for me to define. One would have said that she was continually preoccupied in restraining the word that rose to her lips, to pronounce another word. Moreover, her voice was, so to speak, morefeminine; it had lost its former firmness, and some of its sonorousness; it was veiled, like an instrument played in secret.
But, since it had only tender accents for me now, what obstacle prevented us from being all in all to each other again? What obstacle maintained the separation between us?
During that period, which in the history of my soul will ever remain mysterious, my natural perspicacity seemed to have deserted me. All my terrible analytical faculties, even those that had made me suffer so much, seemed exhausted; the power of these restless faculties appeared to be annihilated. Innumerable sensations, innumerable feelings relative to that epoch, are now incomprehensible, inexplicable, because I have no indication to aid me in retracing their origin, in determining their character. There was a break in the continuity, or lack of solder between that period of my psychic existence and the other periods.
Formerly, I had narrated a fabulous tale in which a young prince, after the adventures of a long pilgrimage, finally succeeds in rejoining the lady whom he had pursued with his ardent love. The young man trembled with hope, and the lady smiled on him, close by. But a veil seemed to render this smiling lady intangible, a veil of unknown substance, so subtle that it was confounded with the air; and, nevertheless, this veil was a barrier that prohibited the young man from clasping the woman he loved to his heart.
This fable helps me a little to form an idea of the singular state in which I found myself at that timevis-à-visJuliana. I felt that between her and me an unknown something constantly maintained an abyss. But, at the same time, I was confident that, sooner or later, the "simple and silent gesture" would annihilate the obstacle and bring back my happiness.
Meanwhile, how Juliana's room pleased me! It was furnished with light-colored hangings, with faded pink flowers and it had a deep alcove. What a perfume the hawthorns shed!
"This odor is penetrating," she said, very pale. "It gives one a headache. Don't you feel it?"
She went and opened a window.
Then she added:
"Maria, call Miss Edith."
The governess came in.
"Edith, please take these flowers to the music-room; put them into vases. Take care not to prick yourself."
Maria and Natalia wanted to carry a part of the bunch. We remained alone. She went once more to the window, and leaned against it, her back turned toward the light.
"Have you anything to do? Do you wish me to go?" I asked.
"No, no; stay, be seated. Tell me about your walk this morning. How far did you go?"
She spoke with some precipitation. As the window support was at about the height of her waist, she had placed her elbows on it, and her bust was inclined backward, framed by the rectangle of the window. Her face, turned directly toward me, was entirely shaded, particularly about the orbits of the eyes; but her hair, on the summit of which fell the light, formed a slight aureole; the light also touched the tops of her shoulders. One of her feet—the one that supported the weight of her body—was raised, drawing up the dress, partly disclosing the ash-colored stocking and the patent-leather slipper. In that attitude, in that light, her entire person possessed extraordinarily seductive power. A section of bluish and voluptuous landscape, pinked out between the two window-posts, formed a distant background behind her head.
And then, instantaneously, as if by a crushing revelation, I saw once more in her the desirable woman; and all my blood fired up at the memory of, and the desire of, her caresses.
I spoke to her, my eyes fixed on her. And the more I gazed on her, the more disturbed I became. She also, no doubt, must have read my look, since her uneasiness became visible. I thought, with poignant internal anxiety: "If I only dared? If I went closer to her? If I took her in my arms?" The apparent assurance that I sought to put in my frivolous remarks rapidly abandoned me. My disturbance grew. My embarrassment became insupportable. From the adjoining rooms came the sound of the voices of Maria, Natalia, and Edith, indistinctly.
I arose, approached the window, and stood beside Juliana. I was on the point of bending toward her to speak at last the words that I had so many times repeated to myself in imaginary conversations. But the fear of a probable interruption stopped me. I thought that perhaps the moment was badly chosen, that perhaps I should not have the time to say all to her, to open all my heart to her, to relate my intimate life during the last few weeks, the mysterious convalescence of my soul, the awakening of my most tender fibres, the arousing of my most delicate dreams, the depth of my new sensation, the tenacity of my hope. I thought that I should not have the time to recount in detail the recent episodes, to make those little, innocent confessions to her, so delicious to the ear of the woman who loves, fresh with sincerity, more persuasive than any eloquence. In fact, I must succeed in convincing her of a great truth, perhaps incredible to her after so many disillusions; succeed in convincing her that now my return was no longer deceptive, but sincere, definite, necessitated by a vital desire of my entire being. Of course, she was still distrustful; of course, her distrust was the cause of her reserve. Between us the shadow of an atrocious recollection ever interposed itself. It was for me to banish this shadow, to draw my soul and hers so closely together that nothing more could interpose between them. But, for that, a favorable occasion was required in some secret and silent place, inhabited only by memories. That place was the Lilacs.
We remained in the embrasure of the window, by each other's side, both silent. From the adjoining rooms came the sound of the voices of Maria, Natalia, and Edith, indistinctly. The perfume of the hawthorn was dissipated. The curtains that hung from the arch of the alcove permitted a view of the bed in its depth, and my eyes wandered ceaselessly toward it, searching the shadows, almost concupiscent.
Juliana had lowered her head, perhaps because she also felt the delicious and agonizing weight of the silence. The light breeze toyed with a loose curl on her temple. The restless agitation of that dark curl, in which were light scattered threads of gold, on that temple white as a wafer, made me languorous. And, as I gazed at her, I saw again on her neck the little brown mole which, in former days, had so often curiously attracted me.
Then, incapable of containing myself, with a mixture of apprehension and hardihood, I raised my hand to arrange the curl; and my fingers trembled on her hair, and they brushed against the ear, the neck, but lightly, very lightly, with the most furtive of caresses.
"What are you doing?" said Juliana, shaken by a start, turning on me a bewildered look, trembling perhaps more than I.
She left the window. Then, feeling that I was following her, she made several steps as if to flee, dismayed.
"Ah! Juliana, why, why?" I cried, stopping short.
Then immediately I added:
"It is true. I am still unworthy. Pardon!"
At that moment the two bells of the chapel began to chime. And Maria and Natalia rushed into the room, ran up to their mother with cries of joy, and hung around her neck, one after the other, covering her face with kisses; then, leaving their mother, they came to me, and I raised them in my arms, one after the other.
The two bells chimed furiously; the whole of the Badiola seemed to be invaded by the thrill of the bronze. It was Holy Saturday, the hour of the Resurrection.
IV.
In the afternoon of that same Saturday, I had a strange attack of melancholy.
The post had arrived at the Badiola, and I happened to be in the billiard-room with my brother, glancing through the newspapers. My eyes fell by chance on the name of Filippo Arborio, mentioned in an article. A sudden agitation seized me. Thus it is that a slight jar will stir up the dregs of a quiescent liquid.
I remember. It was a foggy afternoon, illuminated by the fatigued reverberation of a whitish light. Outside, before the window looking on the lawn, Juliana passed with my mother, arm in arm, chatting. Juliana carried a book, and walked as if fatigued.
With the incoherence of the images that unrolled before me in thought, there arose in my mind certain remnants of my past life: Juliana before the mirror, on that November day; the bouquet of white chrysanthemums; my anxiety on hearing the air from Orpheus; the words written on the fly-leaf ofThe Secret; the color of Juliana's dress; my soliloquy at the window; Filippo Arborio's face, dripping with perspiration; the scene in the dressing-room of the salle d'armes. I thought with a shudder of fear, like a man who suddenly finds himself leaning over the edge of a precipice: "Can it be possible that I am lost?"
Overcome by anguish, feeling a desire to be alone in order to commune with myself, to meet my fear face to face, I took leave of my brother, left the hall, and returned to my room.
My agitation was mingled with impatience and anger. I was like a man who, in the midst of the comfort of an illusory cure, in the full assurance of having regained his health, would feel all at once the sting of his old malady, would perceive that in his flesh the ineradicable disease still remained, and would be constrained to watch himself, to note his symptoms, in order to convince himself of the horrible truth. "Can it be possible that I am lost? And why?"
In the strange forgetfulness in which the entire past was buried, in that sort of obscurity which seemed to have entirely invaded one layer of my conscience, the doubt against Juliana, that odious doubt, had also vanished, was dissolved. My soul had so great a desire to lull itself with illusions, to believe and to hope! My mother's saintly hand, in caressing Juliana's hair, had rekindled for me the aureole around that head. By one of those sentimental errors frequent during the period of weakness, when I had seen the two women leading the same existence in such sweet concord, I had involved them in the same irradiation of purity.
But now, a slight accidental fact, a mere name read by chance in a journal, the awakening of a recollection had sufficed to upset me, to frighten me, to open an abyss beneath my feet; and I did not dare sound the depths of a resolute scrutiny, because my dream of happiness withheld me, drew me back, clung to me obstinately. I wavered at first in an obscure and indefinable anguish, traversed at moments by dreadful glimpses. "It may be that she is not pure, and then? Filippo Arborio, or another ... who knows? Were I certain of the sin, could I pardon it? What sin? What pardon? You have not the right to judge her; you have not the right to raise your voice. She has kept silent too often. Now, it is your duty to keep silent. And your happiness? The happiness that you dream of, is it your own or does it belong to both of you? To both of you, of course; for the shadow ofhersorrow would suffice to obscure all your joys. You suppose that, if you are happy, she will be happy also—you with your past of constant misconduct, she with her past of constant martyrdom? The happiness that you dream of has for its only foundation the abolition of the past. Why, then, if she had truly ceased to be pure, would it be impossible to throw a veil over it or condone her sin as you would your own? Why, if she forgets, should you not forget, yourself? Why, if you claim to be a man without prejudice and completely freed from social convention, should you not consider her also as a woman in the same state of being? Such an inequality would be perhaps the worst of your injustices. But the Ideal? But the Ideal? My own felicity would not be possible except on the condition of recognizing in Juliana a creature absolutely superior, impeccable, worthy of every adoration; and it is precisely also in the innate feeling of this superiority, in the consciousness of her personal moral greatness, that she would find the most precious elements of her own felicity. I should not succeed in forgetting my own past or hers, because the existence of this special happiness presupposes both the profligacy of my former life and her unconquered and almost superhuman heroism, the image of which has always constrained my mind to bow before it. But do you take into account the amount of egotism and high ideality that enters into your dream? Do you believe you merit that supreme prize, happiness? By what privilege? So your long misconduct has entitled you, not to expiation, but to a reward?"
I rose hastily to my feet to cut short this debate. "In brief, it concerns only an old suspicion, very vague, and awakened by chance. This unreasonable agitation will go away. I have made a substance of a shadow. In two or three days, after Easter, we will go to the Lilacs, and then I shall know, I shall unquestionablyfeelthe truth. But is not that profound and immutable melancholy which is in her eyes also suspicious? That bewildered air, that species of continual preoccupation which is marked so heavily on her brow, that great fatigue which is revealed by certain attitudes, that anguish which she cannot succeed in dissimulating at your approach—is not all thatsuspicious?" The ambiguity of such symptoms bore also a favorable interpretation. Then, submerged by a flood of the most violent pain, I went up to the window, with the instinctive desire of plunging into the spectacle of the outer world to discover there something that would correspond to the state of my soul—a revelation or an appeasement.
The sky was quite white, like a scaffolding of superimposed veils between which the air circulated, producing large mobile folds. One of these veils seemed at times to detach itself and approach the earth, graze the tops of the trees, break up, be reduced to falling fragments, undulate on the ground, fade away. On the horizon, the lines of the heights were confusedly unrolled, disappearing to reappear in the fantastic landscapes, like a vista perceived in a dream, without reality. A lead-colored shadow covered the valley, and the Assoro, whose shores were invisible, animated it with its reflections. This tortuous river, glistening in that sombre gulf, beneath that slow and continued disaggregation of the sky, attracted the attention, and had for the mind the fascination of symbolical things, seemed to bear in itself the occult sense of that indefinable spectacle.
My pain gradually lost its acuteness, became appeased and calm. "Why do you aspire with such avidity to a happiness of which you are not worthy? Why do you base the whole edifice of your future life on an illusion? Why believe with such blind faith in a privilege that does not exist? All men perhaps, in the course of their lives, encounter a decisive period in which the most perspicacious are able to understand whattheir life should be. That period you have already met. Remember the moment when the white and faithful hand which offered you love, indulgence, peace, dreams, forgetfulness, everything that is good and beautiful, trembled in the air, was extended toward youas if for the supreme offering..."
Bitterness swelled my heart with tears. I leaned my elbows on the balustrade, my hands to my face, and, my eyes fixed on the windings of the river at the bottom of the leaden valley, while the scaffolding of the sky ceaselessly disaggregated, I remained for several minutes under the menace of an imminent punishment, I felt that an unknown disaster was suspended above me.
But, suddenly, from the room below arose the sound of the piano; and instantaneously, that heavy oppression disappeared, and I was seized by a confused anxiety in which all the dreams, every desire, each hope, every regret, remorse, and terror were mingled anew with inconceivable and suffocating rapidity.
I recognized the music. It was aRomance without Wordsof which Juliana was very fond, and which Miss Edith often played; it was one of those veiled yet profound melodies in which the Soul appeared to ask Life, with ever-changing accents, this single question, "Why have you disappointed my expectation?"
Yielding to a kind of instinctive impulse, I went out, agitated, traversed the corridor, descended the staircase, and stopped before the door from which issued the sounds. The door was ajar; I slipped in without making any noise, and looked through the portières. Was it Juliana? At first my eyes, blinded by the light, were incapable of distinguishing anything, before adapting themselves to the darkness; but I was struck by the penetrating perfume of the hawthorns, that odor of mingled thyme and bitter-almond, fresh as country milk. I looked in. The room was poorly lighted by a greenish light that struggled in from between the slats of the Venetian blinds. Miss Edith was alone at the piano, and she continued to play without noticing my presence. The polished case of the instrument glistened in the dark; the branches of hawthorns made a white spot. In the quiet of this retreat, in this perfume emanating from the branches that recalled the happy matinal intoxication, and Juliana's smile and my own fear, the romance seemed more desolate than ever.
Where was Juliana? Gone upstairs? Still out of doors? I withdrew; I went down the other stairs; I traversed the vestibule without meeting anyone. I had an unconquerable desire to seek her, to see her; I thought that, perhaps, it would suffice me to be near her in order to recover my calmness, to regain confidence. On going out on the lawn, I perceived her beneath the elms, sitting with Federico.
Both smiled at me. When I came up to them my brother said smilingly:
"We were speaking of you. Juliana thinks you will soon be tired of the Badiola.... If so, what will become of our projects?"
"No, Julianadoes not know," I replied, making an effort to recover my habitual ease. "But you will see. On the contrary, it is of Rome that I am tired ...and of everything else."
I looked at Juliana. A marvellous change was taking place in my soul. The sad things that, up to then, had oppressed me, now faded away, disappeared, gave place to a salutary feeling that the mere sight of her and of my brother sufficed to awaken in me. She was seated in a careless and nonchalant attitude, holding on her knees a book that I recognized, the book that I had given her some days before, Tolstoï'sPeace and War. Truly, all about her, her attitude, her look, breathed sweetness and goodness. And in me an emotion was born similar to that which I should doubtless have felt if, in the same place, beneath the familiar elms, that shed their dead flowers, I had seen Constance, the poor sister, side by side with Federico.
The elms rained thousands of flowers at every breath of the wind. There was, in the white light, a continual and very slow rain of diaphanous, almost impalpable pellicles, that loitered in the air, hesitating, trembling like the wings of dragon-flies, of an indefinable color between green and blond, and whose incessant fall imparted a sensation of vertigo. They fell on Juliana's knees, on her shoulders; from time to time she made a movement to remove one that had ensconced itself in her hair.
"Ah! If Tullio stays at the Badiola," said Federico, addressing her, "we will do great things. We will promulgate the new agrarian laws; we will establish the foundations of the new agricultural constitution... You smile? You also will have your share in our work; we will confide to you the execution of two or three precepts of our Decalogue. You will work like the others. Apropos, Tullio, when shall we commence this novitiate? Your hands are too white. Eh! It is not enough to simply prick them with thorns...."
He spoke gayly, in his clear and strong voice, that immediately inspired every listener with a feeling of security and confidence. He spoke of his old and new projects relative to the interpretation of the primitive Christian law on alimentary labor with a gravity of thought and emotion that tempered that sportive gayety with which he protected himself as with a veil of modesty against the admiration and eulogy of his auditors. In him all appeared simple, easy, spontaneous. This young man, by the sole power of a mind that illumined his inborn virtue, had had, for several years already, the intuition of the social theory that the Moujik Bondareff inspired in Leo Tolstoï. At that time, he had not the least knowledge ofPeace and War, the great book that had just appeared in the East.
"Here is a book for you," I said to him, taking the volume from Juliana's knees.
"Thanks; lend it to me. I will read it."
"Do you like it?" I asked Juliana.
"Yes; very much. It is sad and consoling at the same time. I already love Marie Bolkonsky, and Pierre Besoukhow too."
I sat down near her, on a bench. It seemed to me that I was thinking of nothing, that I had not one precise thought; but my soul kept vigil and meditated. There was a manifest contrast between the feeling that sprang from the circumstance, from the neighboring objects, and that which corresponded with Federico's words, with that book, with the names of the characters whom Juliana loved.
The time passed slowly and gently, almost lazily, in this diffused and whitish mist in which the elms gradually shed their flowers. The sound of the piano reached us, muffled, unintelligible, rendering the light more melancholy, cradling, so to speak, the drowsy atmosphere.
Absorbed, listening no longer, I opened the book, I turned the leaves at several places, and ran through the beginning of several pages. I noticed that there were several pages turned down at the corners, as if to mark them; on others, there were finger-nail marks, the habit of the reader. Then I wished to read in turn, curious, almost anxious. In the scene between Pierre Besoukhow and the unknown old man at the Torjok post-house, many passages were marked.
"Let your spiritual look fall back on your inner being. Ask yourself if you are satisfied with yourself. At what result have you arrived, having but your intelligence for a guide? You are young, you are rich, you are intelligent. What have you done with all these gifts? Are you satisfied with yourself and with your life?"
"No, I have a horror of it!"
"If you have a horror of it, change it, purify yourself. And, in measure as you transform yourself, you will learn to recognize wisdom. How have you passed your existence? In orgies, in debauches, in depravities, receiving everything from society without giving it anything. What use have you made of the benefits of fortune? What have you done for your fellow-man? Have you thought of your tens of thousands of serfs? Have you assisted them morally or materially? No, you have not. You have profited by their labor in order to live a life of corruption. Have you sought to employ yourself in the service of your fellow-man? No. You have lived in indolence. And then you married; you accepted the responsibility of serving as a guide to a young woman. And then? Instead of helping her to find the path of truth, you have plunged her into the abyss of deceit and of misery...."
Again the unbearable load weighed me down, crushed me; and it was a more atrocious torture than that I had already suffered, because Juliana's presence exasperated the crisis. On the leaf, the passage transcribed was marked by a single pencil stroke. Without any doubt, Juliana had marked it, thinking of me, of my misconduct. But the last line? To whom did that refer? To me? To us?
Had I thrown her, had she fallen "into the abyss of deceit and misery"?
I feared that she and Federico would hear the beating of my heart.
There was another page turned down, with a very pronounced mark—that on the death of the Princess Lisa.
"The eyes of the dead woman were closed; but her small face had not changed, and she seemed constantly saying: 'What have you done to me?' Prince André did not weep; but he felt his heart break as he thought that he was guilty of wrongs henceforth irreparable and unforgettable. The old prince came also, and kissed one of the frail waxen hands that lay crossed over one another. And one would have thought that the poor, small face was again repeating to him: 'What have you done to me?'"
That gentle yet terrible question pierced me like a dagger. "What have you done to me?" I kept my eyes fixed on the page, not daring to make a movement, to look at Juliana, yet agonized by a desire to do so; and I feared that both she and Federico might hear my heart-beats, that they might turn toward me to look at me and that they would discover my agitation. My agitation was so great that it seemed to me that my face was distorted, that I was incapable of rising, incapable of uttering a single syllable. I threw a single rapid, stealthy glance at Juliana, and her profile impressed itself on me so strongly that I seemed to continue to see her before me on the page, beside the "poor, small face" of the dead princess. It was a pensive profile, rendered graver by attention, shaded by long lashes; and the lips, tightly closed, somewhat depressed at the corners, appeared as if involuntarily confessing a feeling of fatigue and great sadness. She was listening to my brother. And my brother's voice resounded confusedly in my ears, seemed to me far off, although he was quite close. And all these flowers shed by the elms, that rained, rained ceaselessly, all these dead flowers, almost unreal, almost bereft of being, induced in me an inexpressible sensation, as if that psychic vision were transformed in me into strange internal phenomena, as if I had been present at the continuous passage of these thousands of impalpable shadows in an inner sky, at the bottom of my soul. "What have you done to me?" repeated the voice of the dead and the living, both the one and the other without moving their lips. "What have you done to me?"
"What are you reading, Tullio?" asked Juliana, turning and taking from my hands the book, which she closed and replaced on her knees with a sort of nervous impatience.
And immediately, without pause, as if to remove all significance from her action, she added:
"Why do we not rejoin Miss Edith and have a little music? Do you hear her? She is playing, I think, the Funeral March for the Death of a Hero, which you are so fond of, Federico...."
She listened. We all three listened. We heard several chords in the silence. She was not mistaken. Rising, she added:
"Well, come. Will you?"
I rose last, so to have her before me. She did not take the trouble to shake from her dress the elm flowers that had formed a soft carpet on the ground all around.
She stood still a minute, her head bent, regarding the layer of flowers which she hollowed out and piled up with the slender tip of her shoe, while on her, other flowers, and still other flowers, continued to rain, to rain ceaselessly. I could see nothing of her face. Was she really so attentive to that trifling action? Or was she not rather absorbed in perplexity?
V.
The following morning, among those who brought Easter offerings to the Badiola, came Calisto, old Calisto, the keeper at the Lilacs, with an enormous bouquet of fresh and odorous lilacs. He wanted to offer them to Juliana with his own hands, recalling to her the happy time of our stay there, and begging for another visit, a short visit. "Signora had seemed so gay, so happy over there. Why did she not return? The house had remained intact; nothing had been changed. The garden was now more filled. The lilac-trees, a veritable forest, were in full bloom. Did not their perfume reach as far as the Badiola, toward evening? Really, the garden and the house expected a visit. Beneath the roof all the old nests were full of swallows. In deference to Signora's wish, these nests had been respected as if sacred. But, assuredly, there were too many now. Every week they were obliged to clean up the balconies and window-sills with a shovel. And what a warbling, from morning till night! When will Signora decide to come? Soon?"
"Shall we go there on Tuesday?" I asked Juliana.
After a slight hesitation, sustaining with the greatest difficulty the heavy care that bowed her head, she answered:
"We'll go on Tuesday, if you wish."
"Very well. Tuesday, then, Calisto," I said to the old man, in such a happy tone that I was surprised at it myself so sudden and spontaneous had been the rapture of my soul. "Expect us Tuesday morning. We will bring our lunch. Make no preparations. Do you understand? Let the house remain closed. I wish to open the door myself, and to open the windows myself, one after the other. Do you understand?"
A strange happiness, without a single cloud, agitated me, urged me on to puerile actions and puerile and almost foolish remarks, that I could hardly restrain. I should have liked to embrace Calisto, to stroke his fine, white beard, take him in my arms, speak to him of the Lilacs, of the past, of the "good old time," in a prolixity of words, under the grand Easter sun.
"Once more I see before me a simple, sincere man, a faithful heart," I thought, regarding him. And once more I felt security, as if the affection of this old man were for me a second talisman against the blows of fate.
Once more, since the close of the preceding evening, my soul expanded, stimulated by the abundance of joy that impregnated the atmosphere, that emanated from every being. That morning, one would have thought that the Badiola was the shrine of a pilgrimage. Not one peasant failed to bring his offering and well-wishes. My mother received upon her blessed hands a thousand kisses of men, women, and children. At the mass that was celebrated in the chapel a dense crowd was present. It overflowed the porch and spread over the lawn, full of religious zeal beneath the azure vault. The silver bells rang merrily in the still air with joyous, almost melodic harmony. On the tower, the inscription on the sundial said:Hora est benefaciendi. And on this glorious morning, on which one felt, so to speak, all the gratitude due to long kindness mounting toward the sweet maternal house, these three words seemed like a chant.
How then could I retain my perfidious doubt, suspicions, troubled recollections? What could I have to fear after having seen my mother press her lips on Juliana's smiling brow, after having seen my brother press in his noble and loyal hand the delicate and pale hand of her who was for him a second incarnation of Constance.
VI.
The thought of the excursion to the Lilacs occupied me all that day and again the day following, without interruption. Never, I think, had the longing for the hour agreed upon for a first rendezvous filled me with such ardent impatience.
The disturbance of the senses contributed also to enshroud and dull my conscience. I wanted to reconquer Juliana body and soul. The name of the Lilacs reawakened in me memories, recollections, not only of a sweet idyll, but also of ardent passion. Without being aware of it, I had perhaps sharpened my longing by the inevitable images that suspicion engenders; it was a latent poison that I bore in me. Up to then, in fact, it had seemed to me that my dominant emotion was entirely spiritual, and, in the expectation of the great day, I had taken delight in imagining the conversation that I would hold with the woman whose pardon I wished to obtain. Now, on the contrary, what I saw, was less the pathetic scene that would take place between us than the scene that must be the immediate consequence. Gradually, by a rapid and irresistible elimination, a single image excluded all the others, invaded me, mastered me, became fixed, clear, precise in the smallest particulars. "It is after lunch. A small glass of Chablis has sufficed to disturb Juliana, who does not drink wine, so to speak. The afternoon becomes warmer and warmer; the odor of the roses, of the corn-flag, of the lilacs, become violent; the swallows pass and repass with a deafening twittering. We are alone, both invaded by an unbearable internal tremor. And, suddenly, I say to her: 'Shall we go and look at our old room?' It is the old nuptial chamber, that intentionally I had omitted to open during our first walk through the villa. We enter. There is a low humming noticeable, the same humming that one thinks one hears in the deep folds of certain shells; but it is only the murmur of my arteries. She also, no doubt, hears this humming; but it is only the murmur of her arteries. All around is silent; one would think that the swallows have ceased warbling. I want to speak, and, at my first word, that sticks in my throat, she falls into my arms, almost fainting."
This imaginary picture became ceaselessly more and more embellished, grew complicated, simulated the reality, attained an incredible actuality. I could not succeed in preventing its absolute empire over my mind. One would have said that there was reborn in me the old-time libertine, so keen was my pleasure in contemplating and caressing the vision. The kind of life I had led for several weeks, in this warm springtime, produced its effect on my regenerated organism. Simple physiological phenomena completely modified the state of my conscience, gave an entirely different turn to my thoughts, made of me another man.
Maria and Natalia had expressed a desire to accompany us on this excursion. Juliana wanted them to come, but I objected, and I used all my skill, every persuasion, to accomplish my purpose.
Federico had made this proposition: "I must go to Casal Caldore on Tuesday. I will accompany you in the carriage as far as the Lilacs, where you will stop, and I will continue on my way. Then, in the evening, I will call for you again with the carriage, and we will return together to the Badiola." Juliana consented, in my presence.
I reflected that Federico's company, at least in going, would not inconvenience us; on the contrary, it would even spare me a certain embarrassment. In fact, what could we have spoken about, Juliana and I, had we been alone during the two or three hours the ride lasted? What attitude could I have taken toward her? Who knows even if I should not have spoiled the situation, compromised its success, or, at least, removed the freshness from our emotion? Was it not my dream to find myself again suddenly with her at the Lilacs, as if by magic, and there to speak to her my first word of tenderness and submission? The presence of Federico furnished the advantage of avoiding uncertain preliminaries, long and painful silences, sentences spoken in low tones on account of the coachman's ears; in a word, all the little irritations and tortures. We would get down at the Lilacs, and then, then only, we should find ourselves by each other's side at the gate of the lost paradise.
VII.
This is what took place. I cannot find words to describe the sensation I felt when I heard the sound of the bells and the noise of the carriage which bore Federico away in the direction of Casal Caldore. I said to Calisto, as I took the keys from his hands with manifest impatience:
"Now, you may go. I will call you later."
And I myself closed the gate behind the old man, who seemed rather surprised and dissatisfied at so unceremonious a dismissal.
"At last, we're here!" I cried, directly I was alone with Juliana. And the entire wave of happiness that had invaded me passed into my voice.
I was happy, happy, unspeakably happy; I was as if fascinated by an immense hallucination of unexpected, unhoped for happiness, that transfigured all my being, reawoke and multiplied all that there was still good and youthful in me, isolated me from the world, instantly concentrated my life within the circuit of the walls enclosed by that garden. Words sprang to my lips without connection, inexpressible; my reason wandered in a blazing flash of thoughts.
How was it that Juliana had not guessed what was passing in me? How was it she had not understood me? How was it that her heart had not received the counter-shock of my impetuous joy?
We looked at each other. I can still see the anxious expression of her face, over which hovered an indefinable smile. She spoke in that muffled, feeble voice, always hesitating with the singular hesitation that I had already remarked in other circumstances and that made her appear to be ceaselessly preoccupied in restraining the words that mounted to her lips in order to substitute for them other words. She said:
"Let us take a walk round the garden before opening the house. How long it is since I have seen it in such flower. The last time we were here was three years ago, do you remember? It was also in April, during Easter week."
Without doubt she wished to overcome her agitation, but she could not succeed; without doubt she wished to repress the effusion of her tenderness, but she could not. In this place, the first words issued from her own mouth had begun to evoke memories. After a few steps she stopped, and we looked at each other. An indefinable change, as if she were forcing herself to stifle something, passed through her dark eyes.
"Juliana!" I cried, incapable of controlling myself, feeling an afflux of passionate and tender words spring from the bottom of my heart, seized by a mad frenzy to kneel before her on the sand, to embrace her knees, to kiss her dress, her hands, her wrists, furiously, ceaselessly.
With a supplicating gesture, she made a motion for me to be quiet. And she continued to advance along the path, hastening her steps.
She wore a light-gray dress trimmed with darker shades, a gray felt hat, and carried a gray-silk parasol embroidered with white trefoils. I still see her walking between the tufted masses of lilacs that bent toward her their thousands of bluish-violet bunches.
It was hardly eleven o'clock. The morning was warm, a precocious warmth; in the azure floated a number of flocculent vapors. The charming bushes that had given their name to this country-house blossomed on every side, were masters of the garden, formed a wood, interspersed here and there by tea-rose bushes and by the tufts of the corn-flag. Here and there the roses climbed up stalks, insinuated themselves between the branches, fell back again in chains, in garlands, festoons, bouquets; at the foot of the stalks, Florentine orris sprang from between their leaves, like long, greenish swords, flowers of large and noble design. The three perfumes harmonized in a deep accord that Irecognized, because, since the now distant epoch, these had remained in my memory as clearly as the accord of three musical notes. In the silence only the warbling of the swallows could be heard. The house could scarcely be seen between the cones of the cypresses, and the swallows were as numerous there as bees around a hive.
Very soon Juliana slowed down her pace. I walked at her side, so near that at times our elbows touched. She glanced attentively around her, as if she feared something might escape her. Two or three times I detected on her lips a movement as if she were about to speak: it was like the first outline of a word that remained unpronounced.
I said to her, in a low voice and timidly:
"Of what are you thinking?"
"I am thinking that we should never have left here."
"You are right, Juliana."
At times the swallows almost brushed against us, with a cry, rapid and glistening like winged arrows.
"How much I have longed for this day, Juliana! Ah! you will never know how much I have longed for it!" I cried, prey to an emotion so strong that my voice became almost unrecognizable. "Never, do you understand, never have I felt an anxiety equal to that which devours me since the day before yesterday, since the moment you consented to come here. Do you remember the day when, for the first time, we saw each other in secret, on the terrace of the Villa Oggeri, where we kissed each other? I was mad with love for you, do you remember? Well, the expectation of the last night was nothing in comparison. You do not believe me, and you are right in misbelieving me, in doubting me. But I want to tell you all, to recount my sufferings, my fears, my hope. Oh! I know, my sufferings are doubtless little in comparison with those that I have made you suffer. I know, I know; all my pains are not equal to your pains, not worth your tears. I have not expiated my fault, and I am not worthy of pardon. But tell me, tell me that I may hope that you will pardon me. You do not believe me; but I wish to tell you all. It is you, you only whom I have truly loved; it is you alone whom I love. I know, I know; men will say these things in order to obtain pardon, and you are right not to believe me. Yet see; if you think of our love of long ago, if you think of our first three years of never-failing tenderness, if you remember, if you recollect, you will see it is impossible to refuse to believe me. Even in my lowest abasements, you were to be for me unforgettable; and my soul ever longed to turn toward you, to seek you, to regret you, always, do you understand? Always. Did you not perceive it yourself? When you were as a sister to me, did you not sometimes perceive that I was dying of sorrow? I swear to you that, far away from you, I never felt sincere joy. I have never had one hour of complete forgetfulness. Never, never; I swear it. You were my constant, profound, secret adoration. The better part of myself has always been yours, and there has been in me a hope that has never been extinguished—that of being able to free myself from my malady and to find intact my first, my only love... Ah! Juliana, tell me that I have not hoped in vain!"
She walked with extreme slowness, no longer looking before her, her head bent, excessively pale. A slight, painful contraction appeared at times at the corner of her mouth. And, because she remained silent, I began to feel a vague uneasiness arise within me. An oppressive feeling began to be caused by the sun, the flowers, the cries of the swallows, by all the joyfulness displayed by triumphant springtime.
"You do not answer me?" I continued, taking the hand that she let hang by her side. "You do not believe me; you have lost all confidence in me; you still fear that I deceive you; you do not dare to give yourself up again because you are always thinking ofthe last time.... Yes, it is true, that was the most brutal of all my infamies. I repent it as I would a crime, and, even if you should pardon me, I shall never be able to forgive myself. But did you not notice that I was ailing, that I was losing my reason? A curse pursued me, and, since that day, I have not had one minute's respite, I have not had a single lucid interval. Do you not remember? Do you not remember? Surely you knew I was beside myself, in a state of madness; for you looked at me as one does upon a madman. How often have I surprised in your glances sad compassion, curiosity, fear! Do you not remember what I had become? I was unrecognizable. Well, I am cured; I saved myself for your sake. I have succeeded in opening my eyes, I have succeeded in seeing the light. At last it is light. It is you, you only whom I have truly loved all my life, it is you only whom I love. Do you hear?"
I pronounced the last words in a firmer voice, and more slowly, as if to impress them one by one upon this woman's soul, and I pressed firmly her hand, which I already held in my own. She stopped with the manner of one about to collapse, gasping. Later, only later, during the hours that followed, I understood the excess of mortal anguish exhaled by this panting. But, at that moment, I understood only this: "The recollection of my horrible treason, evoked by me, revives her suffering. I have touched wounds that are still open. Ah! if I could persuade her to believe me! If I could conquer her distrust! Does not my voice convince her that I am speaking the truth?"
We had come to the intersection of two paths. There was a bench there. She murmured:
"Let us sit down a little."
We sat down. I do not know if she recognized the spot. Even I did not recognize it at first, bewildered like a man who has had both his eyes bandaged for some time. We both looked about us, then we looked at one another, and in our eyes we had the same thought. A crowd of tender recollections were connected with this old stone bench. My heart swelled, not with regret, but with a restless covetousness, with a sort of frenzy of living that, in a flash, gave me a chimerical, dazzling vision of the future. "Ah! she is ignorant of what new tenderness I am capable! In my soul there is a paradise for her." And the flaming up of that ideal of love was so strong that I became exalted.
"Are you sad? But what creature in all the world was ever loved as I love you? To what woman has it been given to obtain a proof of love equal to that I give you? You said just now: 'We should never have left here.' Without doubt, we should have been happy: you would not have suffered a martyrdom, you would not have shed so many tears, you would not have lost so many years of your life; but you would not have known my love, all my love."
Her head was bent on her bosom, her eyes half-closed, and she listened, motionless. Her eyelashes threw on the upper part of her cheeks a shadow that disturbed me more than a look would have done.
"And I myself would have had no knowledge of my love. Did I not believe the first time I left you that all was at an end? I sought another passion, another fever, another intoxication; I wished to embrace life in one single clasp. You did not suffice me. And during all those years I weakened myself by an atrocious life, oh! so atrocious that I have a horror of it, as a convict has a horror of the prison in which he has lived,dying a little every day. And I had to wander from darkness into darkness, before light fell on my soul, before this great truth appeared to me. I have loved only one woman, and you are she. You alone, in all the world, are good and gentle; and you are the best and most gentle creature I have ever dreamed of; you are the Unique. And you were in my house, while I sought you afar off. Do you understand, now? Do you understand?You were in my house, while I sought you afar off. Ah, tell me, is not this confession worth all your tears? Do you not wish you had shed more, much more, in order to purchase this certitude?"
"Yes, still more," she said, so low that I scarcely heard her.
The words passed like a breath from her pallid lips. And the tears gushed from between her eyelashes, rolled down her cheeks, wetted the convulsed mouth, fell on that palpitating bosom.
"Juliana, my love! Oh, my love!" I cried, with a thrill of supreme felicity, throwing myself on my knees before her.
And I threw my arms around her, I laid my head on her bosom, I felt again in all my being that frenetic tension in which ends useless effort to express by an action, by a gesture, by a caress, the inexpressible internal passion. Her tears fell on my cheek. If the material effect of these warm life-drops had equalled the sensations that I received from them, I should carry an indelible mark on my skin.
"Oh! let me drink," I begged.
Raising myself, I placed my lips to her eyelids and I bathed them with her tears, while my hands lavished on her distracted caresses. My limbs had acquired an extraordinary flexibility, a sort of illusory fluidity that prevented me from noticing the obstacle presented by the clothes. It seemed to me that I had the power to enclose and envelop the entire person of the loved one.
"Did you dream," I said, with the saline savor in my mouth that impregnated me to the heart (later, during the hours that followed, I was astonished at not having found an intolerable bitterness in these tears), "did you dream you would be loved so much? Did you dream of such happiness? It is I, look, it is I who speak to you like this; look well: it is I. If you knew how strange that seems to me! If I could tell you! I know that I do not know you from to-day, I know I do not love you from to-day, I know that you are what you have always been. And yet it seems to me that I only just found you a moment ago, when you said: 'Yes, still more.' You said it, did you not? Only three words—a breath. And I am reborn, and you are reborn, and we will be happy, happy forever."
I told her these things in a voice that seemed to come from a distance, broken, indefinable; in one of those tones whose intonations seem to rise to our lips, not from our material organs, but from the deepest depths of our soul. And she, who up to then had shed silent tears, burst into sobs.
Violent, too violent were her sobs; not as when one succumbs to a limitless joy, but when one gives vent to inconsolable despair. She sobbed so violently that, for several seconds, I was seized by the stupor caused by excessive manifestations, supreme paroxysms of human emotions. Unconsciously I drew back a little; but, immediately, I noticed the distance that now separated us; I at once noticed not only that there was no longer a physical contact, but also that the sensation of moral communion had become dissipated in the twinkling of an eye. We were still two beings, distinct, separate, external to one another. The very difference of our attitudes even accentuated this disunion. Sitting back at her end of the bench and covering her face with her two hands, she sobbed; and every one of her sobs shook her entire being, put in evidence her fragility, so to speak. Without touching her, I was again on my knees before her; and I looked at her, stupefied, and yet strangely lucid, attentive to all that was passing within me, and yet with every sense open to the perception of surrounding objects. I heard both her sobs and the twittering of the swallows; I had an exact notion of time and place. And those flowers, and those perfumes, and the surrounding glory of the joyous springtime inspired me with a fright that grew and grew, becoming a sort of panicky terror, an instinctive and blind terror against which reason was powerless. And, like a thunderbolt that lights up a bank of clouds, one thought flashed out from the midst of this tumultuous fear, illuminated me, struck me to the heart: "She is impure!"
Ah! why did I not fall then, struck dead by the blow? Why did not one of my vital organs collapse? Why did I not expire at the feet of the woman who, in a few short moments, had raised me to the height of happiness, only to precipitate me into an abyss of misery?
"Answer!"
I seized her wrists, I uncovered her face, I spoke close to her; and my voice was so low that I scarcely heard it myself in the tumult of my brain.
"Answer! What do these tears signify?"
She ceased to sob, and looked at me; and her eyes, reddened by the tears, became dilated with an expression of supreme anguish, as if they had seen me dying. In fact, my face must have seemed lifeless.
"It is too late, perhaps? Is it too late?" I added, revealing my terrible thought by this obscure question.
"No, no, Tullio! No—it is—nothing. What could you have thought? No, no. I am so weak, you see. I am no longer what I was formerly. I have no strength. I am ill, you know; I am so ill! I have not had the force to resist your words. You understand. This crisis has come to me so unexpectedly. It is my nervousness—a sort of convulsion. When one has a spasm like this, one cannot distinguish whether it is from joy or sorrow. Oh! my God! See, it is passing. Rise, Tullio; come here, by my side."
She spoke to me in a voice still choked by tears, still broken with sobs; she looked at me with an expression that was well known to me, the expression that she had already often had at the sight of my suffering. At one time, she could not bear to see me suffer. Her sensibility to this was so exaggerated that I could obtain anything from her by showing her that I was sad. She would have done anything to free me from pain, even the slightest. Often at that time I feigned pain, in jest, to make her uneasy, so as to be consoled like a child, to obtain certain caresses that pleased me, to call forth certain graceful gestures that I adored. Was it not the same tender yet alarmed expression that reappeared now in her eyes?
"Come here, by my side; sit down. Or would you prefer to continue our walk in the garden? We have seen nothing yet. Let us go toward the fountain. I would like to bathe my eyes. Why do you look at me so? Of what are you thinking? Are we not happy? See, I begin to feel well again, very well. But I must bathe my eyes, my face. What time is it? Noon, perhaps? Federico will be back at about six o'clock. We have plenty of time. Will you come?"
She spoke in a broken and still somewhat convulsive voice, and with a manifest effort, as if trying to collect herself, to regain command of her nervousness, to dissipate in me the shadow of an apprehension, to appear to me confiding and happy. The smile that trembled in her still humid and somewhat reddened eyes had a troubled gentleness that awakened my sympathy. I felt in her words, in her attitude, in all her person that gentleness that softened me, that made me languish with a half-sensual languor, is impossible for me to define the delicate seduction that, emanating from this creature, insinuated itself in my senses and in my mind, favored by the indefinable and confused state of my soul. She seemed to be silently saying to me: "It is impossible for me to be more adorable. Take me, then, since you love me; take me in your arms, but carefully, without hurting me, without clasping me too hard. Oh! I burn with desire to receive your caresses! But I believe they would kill me." This thought aided me a little to counteract the effect her smile produced upon me.
I looked at her mouth at the moment she asked me: "Why do you look at me like that?" and at the moment when she asked: "Are we not happy?" I felt the blind desire of an awakened sensation in which died away the uneasy feeling which my recent passion had left in me. When she arose, I seized her impetuously in my arms, and fastened my lips to hers.
It was a lover's kiss that I gave her, a kiss long and deep, that stirred all the essence of our two beings. She sank back on the bench, exhausted.
"Oh! no, no, Tullio; I beg of you! Enough, enough! Let me regain a little strength," she begged, stretching her hands out to push me away. "Otherwise, I shall be unable to keep on my feet. See, I am half dead."
But there had sprung up in me extraordinary phenomena. That sensation had had the same effect on my mind as an impetuous wave that sweeps away all obstacles, effaces every imprint, and leaves the sand smooth. Everything was instantly levelled; and, suddenly, I found myself in anew state determined by the immediate influence of circumstances, by the pressure of the blood which began to tingle. I no longer knew but one thing. I had there before me the woman whom I desired, trembling, overwhelmed by my kiss—in short, mine entirely; around us blossomed a garden, filled with memories, filled with secrets; a deserted house awaits us behind the flowering bushes guarded by the familiar swallows.
"Do you think I am not strong enough to carry you?" I said to her, seizing her hands, interlacing my fingers in hers. "You used to be as light as a feather. Now you must be still lighter. Let us try!"
A dark shadow passed in her eyes. For a second, she seemed absorbed in thought, as when one deliberates and takes a rapid resolution. Then she shook her head, and throwing herself back, hanging to me by her outstretched arms, laughing with a laugh that revealed a little of her bloodless gum:
"Very well! Lift me," she said.
Scarcely had she risen than she fell against my breast; and then it was she who kissed me first, with a sort of convulsive furor, as if a prey to a sudden frenzy, as if she wished at one stroke to appease an atrociously painful thirst.
"Ah! It is killing me!" she repeated, when our lips had parted.
And that humid mouth, somewhat projecting, half-open, that had become redder, animated by languor, in that face so pale and frail, really gave me the indefinable impression that, of all that body similar to a corpse, the lips only were alive.
She murmured, dreamily, raising her closed eyes, the long lashes of which trembled as if a slight smile had filtered out from beneath the lids:
"Are you happy?"
I pressed her to my heart.
"Very well, let us go. Carry me where you will. Support me a little, Tullio; I feel as if my knees would give way."
"To the house, Juliana?"
"Where you wish."
I supported her by placing my arm around her waist, and I drew her along. She walked like a somnambulist. At first we were silent; and, each moment, we both turned together toward one another, to look at each other. She seemed to me to be really anew woman; my attention was arrested by the details, was preoccupied by them; a slight mark scarcely visible on the skin, a little dimple on the lower lip, the curvature of the lashes, a vein at the temple, the shadow that encircled the eyes, the infinitely delicate lobe of the ear. The brown mark on the neck was hardly hidden by the edging of lace; at each movement of the head that Juliana made, one saw it appear or disappear; and that little particularity irritated my impatience. I was intoxicated, and yet, I was very lucid. I heard the cries of the swallows, more numerous, the splashing of the jets of water in the fountain close by. I had the sensation that life was fleeting, that time was flying. And that sun, and those flowers, and those perfumes, and those sounds, and all the joyousness of the springtime, aroused in me for the third time an inexplicable emotion of anxiety.
"My willow!" cried Juliana, as we arrived at the fountain; and she ceased leaning on me, walked more rapidly. "Look, look how tall it is! Do you remember? It was only a branch."
After being pensive for a moment, she added in a different tone and in a low voice:
"I saw it before—you do not perhaps know? I came here, to the Lilacs,the other time."
She could not restrain a sigh. But immediately, as if to dissipate the shadow that these words had put between us, as if to remove the bitterness from her mouth, she bent toward one of the two faucets, drank a few mouthfuls, then turning towards me made a gesture as if asking a kiss. Her chin was still wet, and her lips cool. We both felt that what was to be must be, and we longed for the supreme reconciliation that every fibre of our beings demanded. When we disengaged ourselves, our eyes repeated the same intoxicating promise. And how extraordinary was the sentiment expressed by Juliana's physiognomy. But, then, I did not understand it! Later on, only during the hours that followed, did it become intelligible—only later I knew that a vision of death and a vision of voluptuousness had at the same time intoxicated the poor creature, and that in abandoning herself to the languors of her flesh she had made a funeral vow. I see as if I had her before my eyes, I shall always see that face full of mystery, under the shadow of that willow which rained on us its great vegetal chevelure. Beneath the sun, between the long branches of diaphanous foliage, silvery reflections from the water imparted a hallucinating vibration to the shade. The echoes combined, in a low and continuous monotone, the sonorous sound of the jets of water. All these appearances exalted my mind out of the world about me.
We went toward the house without speaking. My joy was so great at our reconciliation, our reawakened love, that my soul was transported in a whirlwind of joy so high, the pulsations of my arteries were so violent, that I thought: "Is this delirium? I felt nothing of this on my first marriage night, when I crossed the threshold of the nuptial chamber." Twice or three times I was seized by a savage transport, as if by a sudden attack of madness, and it is wonderful that I could contain myself: so great was my physical desire to take possession again of this woman. In her also the crisis must have become insupportable; because she stopped, and sighed: "Oh! my God, my God! This is too much!"
Suffocating, oppressed, she took my hand and placed it over her heart.
"Feel," said she.
I felt less the throbbing of her heart than the elasticity of her breast, through the cloth. I saw the iris in Juliana's eyes become hidden under the closing eyelids. For fear that she would faint, I supported her; then I bore her away, I carried her almost as far as the cypress, as far as a bench where we both sat down, both exhausted.
The house rose before us, as if in a dream.
Leaning her head on my shoulder, she said:
"Ah! Tullio, how terrible! Do you not think, too, that we could die from it?"
She added, gravely, in a voice that seemed to come from I know not what depths of her soul:
"Shall we both die?"
I felt a strange shudder, which convinced me that these words expressed an extraordinary state of mind, perhaps the same sentiment that had transformed her face beneath the willow, after the embrace, after the silent resolution. But this time, again, I could not understand. I understood only that we were both possessed by a species of delirium and that we were both breathing the atmosphere of a dream.
The house rose before us as in a vision. On the rustic façade, on every cornice, on every projection, along the gutters, on the architraves, beneath the window ledges, beneath the stones of the balconies, between the brackets, between the eminences, everywhere, the swallows had built their nests. The clay nests, by thousands, old and new, cemented together like the cells of a hive, had but few spaces between them. In these spaces, and on the slats of the Venetian shutters, and on the iron-work of the balustrades, the excrements made white patches like thinned chalk. Closed and without inhabitants, this house nevertheless was full of life—a bustling life, joyous and tender. The faithful swallows whirled around in their flight, with their cries, their scintillations, with all their tendernesses, ceaselessly. While, in the air, flocks pursued one another, strong, swift strokes, as rapid as arrows, with great alternating clamors, flying away, coming closer in the twinkling of an eye, brushing close to the trees, then rising up again in reflecting flashes in the sunlight, indefatigable. In and about the nests there was an activity of another sort, but not the less ardent. Some of the swallows remained for several moments fixed before the orifices; others sustained themselves on their wings while in flight; others, half-way in, showed on the outside only their little forked tails, quivering and agile, black and white on the grayish mud; others, half-way out, showed a small portion of their shining breasts and fawn-colored throats; others, up to then invisible, flew out with a piercing cry, and flew off. All this lively and joyous movement around the closed house, all that animation around the nests of our nest of the old days, formed a spectacle so delightful, a miracle of gentleness so exquisite, that for several minutes, as if during a respite from our fever, we forgot ourselves in its contemplation.