CHAPTER VIII.The following morning, when he opened his eyes after a very restless night, the events of the previous evening seemed but a confused memory. The tragic deepening of the twilight on the silent country; the grave sound of the Angelus, which, prolonged in his ears by a hallucination of hearing, had seemed endless; the anguish which had come over him on approaching the house, at the sight of the lighted windows crossed at intervals by shadows; the feverish excitement which had seized him when, pressed with questions by his mother and sister, he had related the interview, exaggerating the violence of the invectives and the atrocity of the altercation; the almost delirious desire to keep on speaking, to add to the recital of the real facts the incoherence of his imagination; the ejaculations of contempt or of tenderness with which his mother had interrupted him, as he went on describing the brute's attitude and his own energy in reproaching him; then the sudden hoarseness, the rapid exasperation of the pain which hammered his temples, the spasmodic efforts at a bitter and non-coercible vomiting, the severe cold which had chilled him in bed, the horrible dreams which had caused him to start while in the first torpor of his enfeebled nerves—all this came back confusedly to his memory, augmented his painful physical stupor, from which, however, he would not have been willing to emerge but to enter into a state of complete extinction, into the insensibility of a corpse.The necessity of death was still suspended over him with the same imminence; but it was unendurable for him to think that, in order to put his design into execution, he would have to shake off his inertia, accomplish a series of fatiguing acts, conquer the physical repugnance which discouraged him from all effort. Where could he kill himself? How? At the house? That same day? With a firearm? With poison? His mind had not yet conceived the precise and definite idea. Even the torpor that paralyzed him, and the bitterness of his mouth, suggested to him the idea of a narcotic. And, vaguely, without stopping to seek a practical means by which he could procure an efficacious dose, he imagined its effect. Little by little the images multiplied, became particularized, became more distinct; and their association formed a visible scene. What he tried to imagine was, not so much the sensations of his slow death-agony, as the circumstances which would lead to his mother, sister, and brother learning of the catastrophe. He tried to imagine the manifestations of their sorrow, their attitudes, their words, their gestures. Still following the same idea, his curious attention extended to all the survivors, not only his immediate relatives but to the entire family, to his friends, to Hippolyte, the far-distant Hippolyte, so distant that she had almost become as a stranger to him."George!"It was the voice of his mother, who was knocking at the door."Is it you, mother? Come in."She entered, approached the bed with affectionate eagerness, leaned over him, placed a hand on his forehead, and asked:"How do you feel? Any better?""A little. I'm still dizzy—I have a bitter taste in my mouth. I should like a drink.""Camille is going to bring you up a cup of milk. Shall I open the windows more?""Just as you like, mother."His voice was changed. His mother's presence aroused in him that sentiment of pity for himself which had given birth to the imaginary picture of funereal regrets, the time for which he believed was close at hand. In his mind, the actuality of his mother opening the windows became identified with the imaginary action which would bring about the terrible discovery; and his eyes grew moist with commiseration for himself and for the poor woman whom he destined to receive such a cruel blow; and the tragic scene appeared before him with all the distinctness of a thing actually seen: his mother, a little frightened, turns round in the light, calls him again by name; trembling, she approaches the bed, touches him, shakes him, finds his body inert, cold, rigid; and then she falls, fainting, prostrate over his corpse. "Perhaps dead. Such a shock might kill her." And his anxiety increased; and the moment seemed solemn to him, like all that is final; and his mother's appearance, actions, and words assumed in his eyes such an unusual signification and value that he followed them with almost anxious attention. Drawn suddenly from his spiritual torpor, he had just recovered an extraordinarily active consciousness of life. There reappeared in him a well-known phenomenon, the singularity of which had often attracted his attention. It was an instantaneous passage from one state of consciousness to another; between the new state and the anterior state there was the same difference as exists between waking and slumber, and that recalled to his mind the sudden change produced in the theatre when the footlights are unexpectedly turned up and project their strongest light.So, as on the day of the funeral, the son gazed on his mother with eyes that were no longer the same, and saw her as he had seen her then, with strange lucidity. He felt that this woman's life was brought closer to, became connected with as if adherent to, his own life; he felt the mysterious relation of the blood, and the affliction of the fate which menaced them both. And when his mother came close to him again and sat down by his bedside, he raised himself a little on his pillow, took one of her hands, tried to dissimulate his agitation by a smile. Under the pretext of looking at the cameo of a ring, he examined the long and thin hand, to which each particularity imparted an extraordinary expression of life and whose contact caused him a sensation resembling no other. His soul still enveloped in the gloomy images recently evoked, he thought: "When I am dead, when she touches me, when she feels the icy—" And he shuddered as he remembered his own aversion to touching a corpse."What's the matter?" asked his mother."Nothing—a little nervous, that's all.""Oh! you are not well," she went on, shaking her head. "Where do you feel ill?""Nowhere, mother. I am naturally a little upset."But the unnatural and convulsive look in her son's face did not escape the maternal eye."How sorry I am that I sent you there! How wrong it was of me to send you.""No, mother. Why? It was necessary, sooner or later."And all at once, without the slightest confusion henceforth, he relived the frightful hour; he saw once more his father's gestures, heard once more his voice; he heard again his own voice, that voice so changed, which, contrary to all expectation, had uttered such grave words. It seemed to him he was a stranger to that action and these uttered words; and nevertheless, at the bottom of his soul, he felt a sort of obscure remorse; he felt something akin to an instinctive consciousness of having passed beyond bounds, of having committed an irreparable transgression, of having trampled under foot something human and sacred. Why had he departed with such violence from the great, calm resignation with which the funereal image of Demetrius had inspired him, when it had appeared to him in the midst of the silent country? Why had he not persisted in considering with the same painful and clairvoyant pity the baseness and ignominy of that man upon whom, as upon all other men, weighed an invincible destiny? And he himself, he who carried that blood in his veins, did he not also bear, perhaps, at the bottom of his substance, all the latent germs of those abominable vices? If he continued to live, did not he, too, risk falling into a similar abjection? And then, all the cholers, all the hates, all the violences, all the punishments, appeared to him to be unjust and useless. Life was a heavy fermentation of impure matters. He believed he felt that in his substance he had a thousand forces, occult, unrecognizable, and indestructible, whose progressive and fatal evolution had made up his existence up to then, and would make up his future existence, if it had not happened precisely that his will had to obey one of these forces that now imposed on him the supreme action. "In short, why regret what I did yesterday? Could I have prevented myself from doing it?""It wasnecessary," he repeated, with a new signification, as if speaking to himself.And he sat a spectator, lucid and attentive, at the unrolling of the little of the life that remained for him to live.CHAPTER IX.When his mother and sister had left him alone, he stayed in bed a few moments longer, through a physical repugnance to do anything whatever. It seemed to him that, to rise, he would have to make an enormous effort. It seemed to him too fatiguing to leave that horizontal position in which, in one hour perhaps, he was going to find eternal repose. And, once more, he thought of a narcotic. "Close the eyes and wait for sleep!" The virginal light of that May morning, the azure reflected in the window-panes, the beam of sunlight that streamed on the floor, the voices and murmurs that arose from the street, all those living signs that seemed to rise above the balcony and reach as far as him and reconquer him, all inspired him with a kind of fright mixed with rancor. And he saw again, in his mind, the image of his mother going through the gesture of opening the window. He saw Camille once more at the foot of the bed; he reheard the words of both, always relating to the same man. What he most clearly remembered was a cruel exclamation, uttered by his mother, with lips overflowing with bitterness; and with it he associated the vision of the paternal features, those features on which he believed he had discovered, over there, on the terrace, in the strong light reflected by the whiteness of the wall, the symptoms of a mortal malady. In front of Camille and himself, his mother had said passionately: "If that were only true! Heaven grant it is true!" So that, then, was the last impression left in his heart, on the eve of his departure from the world, by the creature who was formerly in his house the source of every tenderness!An energetic impulse suddenly came over him; he threw himself from his bed, definitely resolved to act. "It will be done before evening. Where shall I do it?" He thought of Demetrius's closed rooms. He had not yet a definite plan; but he felt morally certain that, during the hours that still remained to run, the means would be spontaneously offered, by a sudden suggestion which he would be forced to obey.While he proceeded to make his toilet, the preoccupation haunted him to prepare his body for the tomb. He, too, had that species of funereal vanity that has been remarked in certain criminals condemned to death, and in suicides. He rendered this sentiment more intense on observing it in himself. And a regret came over him at having to die in this little, obscure town, at the bottom of that wild province, far from his friends, who for a long time, perhaps, would be ignorant of his death. If, on the contrary, the act were done in Rome, in the great city where he was well known, his friends would have grieved for him; they would, doubtless, have given to the tragic mystery the adornment of poetry. And, once more, he tried to picture what would follow his death—his attitude on the bed, in the chamber of his amours; the profound emotion of the youthful souls, the fraternal souls, at the sight of the corpse reposing in austere peace; the dialogues at the funereal vigil, by the light of the candles; the coffin covered with wreaths, followed by a crowd of young and silent men; the words of farewell pronounced by a poet, Stefano Gondi: "He diedbecause he could not make his life correspond to his dreams." And then Hippolyte's sorrow, despair, and loss of reason.Hippolyte! Where was she? What were her thoughts? What was she doing?"No," he thought, "my presentiment does not deceive me." And he saw again, in imagination, his mistress's gesture as she lowered her black veil after the last kiss; and he went over in his mind the littlefinalpoints. Yet there was one thing he could not explain, and that was the almost absolute acquiescence of his soul at the necessary and definite renunciation which dispossessed him of this woman, only lately the object of so many dreams and of so much adoration. Why, after the fever and anguish of the first days, had hope abandoned him little by little? Why had he fallen into the melancholy certainty that all effort would be useless to resuscitate that dead and incredibly distant thing,their love? Why had all that past been so entirely separated from him that during these last days, beneath the shock of recent tortures, he had barely felt a few vibrations reverberate clearly in his conscience?Hippolyte! Where was she? What were her feelings? What was she doing? On what sights were her eyes resting? From what words, from what contacts, did she suffer uneasiness? What could have happened, that, for two weeks, she had not found the means to send him news less vague and brief than four or five telegrams sent from always different places?"Perhaps she is already giving way to desire for another man. That brother-in-law of whom she was continually speaking—" And the frightful thought aroused by the old habit of suspicion and accusation suddenly mastered him, overwhelmed him as in the gloomiest hours of his past life. A tumult of bitter recollections arose in him. Leaning on the same balcony where, the first evening, amidst the perfume of the bergamots, in the anguish of first regrets, he had invoked the name of the loved one, he relived in one second the miseries of two years. And it seemed to him that, in the splendor of this May morning, it was the recent happiness of the unknown rival that blossomed, and was diffused as far as where he stood.CHAPTER X.As if to initiate himself in the profound mystery into which he was about to enter, George desired to see once more the deserted apartment where Demetrius had passed the last days of his life.In willing all his fortune to his nephew, Demetrius had also willed him this apartment. George had kept the rooms intact, with pious care, as one guards a reliquary. The rooms were situated on the upper floor, and looked south over the garden.He took the key and went upstairs, treading cautiously, to avoid being questioned. But, as he traversed the corridor, he was necessarily obliged to pass by his Aunt Joconda's door. Hoping to pass unnoticed, he walked softly, on tip-toe, holding his breath. He heard the old woman cough; he made a few quicker strides, believing that the noise of the cough would cover the sounds of his footsteps."Who's there?" demanded a hoarse voice from within."It is I, Aunt Joconda.""Ah! It's you, George? Come in, come in——"She appeared upon the threshold, with her ugly, yellowish face, which, in the shadow, was almost cadaveric; and she glanced at her nephew's hands before looking at his face, as if to see first if his hands had brought something."I am going in the next apartment," said George, repelled by the ignoble bodily odor, which filled him with disgust. "I must air the rooms a little."And he resumed his steps in the corridor, until he came to the other door. But, as he turned the key, he heard behind him the limping of the old woman.George felt his heart sink, as he thought that perhaps he would not find a way to disembarrass himself of her, that perhaps he would be obliged to listen to her stammering voice amid the almost religious silence of these rooms, with their beloved yet terrible souvenirs. Without saying anything, without turning round, he opened the door and entered.The first room was dark, the air somewhat warm and suffocating, impregnated with that singular odor peculiar to old libraries. A streak of faint light showed where the window was. Before opening the shutters, George hesitated; he strained his ear to hear the gnawing of the wood-ticks. Aunt Joconda began to cough, invisible in the darkness. Then, feeling on the window to find the iron catch, he felt a slight thrill, a fugitive fear. He opened it, and turned round; he saw the vague shapes of the furniture in the greenish penumbra produced by the shutters; he saw the old woman in the middle of the room, one side distorted, swaying her flaccid body to and fro, chewing something. He pushed back the shutters, which creaked on their hinges. A flood of sunlight inundated the interior. The discolored curtains fluttered.At first he was undecided: the presence of the old woman prevented him from abandoning himself to his feelings. His irritation increased to such a degree that he did not speak a single word to her, fearing that his voice would only be cross and angry. He passed into the adjoining room and opened the window. The light spread everywhere, and the curtains fluttered. He passed into the third room and opened the window. The light spread everywhere, and the curtains fluttered. He went no farther. The next room, in the angle, was the bedroom. He wished to enter it alone. He heard, with nausea, the limping gait of the unfortunate old woman rejoining him. He took a chair and relapsed into an obstinate silence, waiting.The old woman crossed the threshold slowly. Seeing George seated, and not speaking, she was perplexed. She did not know what to say. The fresh air that blew in from the window unquestionably irritated her catarrh; and she began to cough again, standing in the middle of the room. At every spell her body seemed to swell and then to subside, like the bag of a bagpipe beneath an intermittent breath. She held her hands on her breast—fat hands, like tallow, with nails bordered with black. And in her mouth, between the toothless gums, her whitish tongue quivered.As soon as her fit of coughing was over, she drew from her pocket a dirty paper bag, and took out a pastille. Still standing, she chewed, staring at George in a stupid manner.Her gaze wandered from George towards the closed door of the fourth room. And the old woman made the sign of the cross, then went and sat down on the seat nearest to George. Her hands on her abdomen, and the eyelids lowered, she recited aRequiem."She is praying for her brother," thought George; "for the soul of thedamned." It seemed inconceivable to him that this woman should be the sister of Demetrius Aurispa! How could the proud and generous blood which had soaked the bed in the adjoining room, the blood sprung from a brain already corroded by the highest cares of the intelligence, have come from the same source as that which coursed, so impoverished, in the veins of this peevish and disgusting old woman? "With her, it is greediness—the greediness which regrets the liberality of the donor. How strange, this prayer of gratitude from an old, dilapidated stomach towards the most noble of suicides! How odd life is!"All at once, Aunt Joconda began to cough again."You had better go from here, aunt; it isn't good for you," said George, who no longer had the strength to master his impatience. "The air here is bad for your cough. You had better go, really. Come, I will see you back to your room."Aunt Joconda looked at him, surprised at his abrupt speech and unusual tone. She rose, and went limping through the rooms. When she reached the corridor, she again made the sign of the cross, as if muttering an exorcism. When she had gone, George closed the door, and gave the key a double turn. At last, he was alone and free, with an invisible companion.He remained motionless for a few moments, as if under magnetic influence. And he felt his whole being invaded by the supernatural fascination which that man, existing without life, exercised over him from the bottom of the tomb.And he reappeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full of a virile melancholy, and with a single white curl in the centre of his forehead, among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance."For me," thought George, "he exists. Since the day of his corporeal death I have felt his presence every minute. Never so much as since his death have I felt our consanguinity. Never so much as since his death have I had the perception of the intensity of his being. All that he consumed in contact with his fellow-creatures; every action, every gesture, every word that he has sown in the course of time; every diverse manifestation which determined the special character of his being in relation with other beings; every characteristic, fixed or variable, which distinguished his personality from other personalities and made of him a man apart in the human multitude; in short, all that which differentiated his own life from other lives—all now seems to me to be collected, concentrated, circumscribed in the unique and ideal tie that binds him to me. He does not exist for anyone but me alone; he is freed from all other contact, he is in communication with me alone. He exists, purer and more intense than ever."He took a few steps, slowly. The heavy silence was disturbed at moments by little, mysterious noises, scarcely perceptible. The fresh air, the warmth of the day, contracted the fibres of the benumbed furniture, accustomed to the obscurity of the closed windows. The breath of heaven penetrated the pores of the wood, shook the particles of dust, swelled the folds of the hangings. In a ray of sunlight, myriads of atoms whirled about. The odor of the books was overcome gradually by the perfume of the flowers.The things suggested to the survivor a crowd of recollections. From these things arose a light and murmuring chorus which enveloped him. From every side arose the emanations of the past. One would have said that the things emitted the odors of a spiritual substance which had impregnated them. "Do I exalt myself?" he asked himself, at the aspect of the images that succeeded one another in his mind with prodigious rapidity, clear as visions, not obscured by a funereal shadow, but living a superior life. And he remained perplexed, fascinated by the mystery, seized by a terrible anguish at the moment of venturing on the confines of that unknown world.The curtains, which a rhythmic breath seemed to swell, undulated softly, giving glimpses of a noble and calm landscape. The slight noises made by the wainscoting, the papers, and the partitions continued. In the third room, severe and simple, the recollections were musical, and came from mute instruments. On a long, violet-wood piano, whose varnished surface reflected things like a mirror, a violin reposed in its box. On a chair a page of music rose and fell at the pleasure of the breeze, and almost in time with the curtains.George picked it up. It was a page from a Mendelssohn motet: DOMENICA II POST PASCHA:Andante quasi allegretto. Surrexit pastor bonus— Farther on, on a table, there was a heap of parts for the violin and piano, Leipzig editions: Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Rode, Tartini, Viotti. George opened the case, examined the fragile instrument that slept on olive-colored velvet, with its four strings still intact. A curiosity seized him to awaken them. He touched the treble string, which gave a plaintive moan that vibrated through the entire body. It was a violin made by Andrea Guarneri, dated 1680.Demetrius reappeared, tall and slender, a little bent, his neck long and pale, his hair brushed back, and with the single white lock in the centre of his forehead. He held the violin. He passed one hand through his hair on the temple, near the ear, with his usual gesture. He tuned the instrument, rosined the bow, then attacked the sonata. His left hand, shrivelled and proud, ran up and down the neck; the tips of his thin fingers pressed the strings, and, beneath the skin, the play of his muscles was so visible as to be painful; his right hand, when drawing the bow, moved with a long, faultless motion. Sometimes he held the instrument tighter with his chin, his head inclined, his eyes half-closed, enjoying keenly his inner voluptuousness.Sometimes he drew himself erect, looked fixedly before him, his eyes strangely brilliant; smiled a fugitive smile; and from his brow beamed an extraordinary purity.Thus the violinist reappeared to the survivor. And George lived again the hours of life already lived; he lived them again, not in pictures only, but in actual and profound sensations. He lived again the long hours of close intimacy and forgetfulness, the time when Demetrius and himself, alone, in the warm room to which no noise could penetrate, executed the music of their favorite masters. How they used to forget their very existence! In what strange raptures this music, executed by their own hands, soon threw them! Often the fascination of a single melody held them prisoners an entire afternoon, without their being able to leave the magic circle in which they were enclosed. How often they had rehearsed thatSong without Wordsof Mendelssohn, which had revealed to them both, at the bottom of their hearts, a sort of inconsolable hopelessness! How often they had rehearsed a Beethoven sonata which seemed to grasp their souls, to carry them away with a vertiginous rapidity across the infinity of space, and hover with them, during the flight, over every abyss!The survivor went back in his recollections as far as the autumn of 188-, to that unforgetful autumn of melancholy and poetry, when Demetrius had scarcely emerged from convalescence. That was to be the last autumn! After a long period of enforced silence, Demetrius took up his violin again with strange disquietude, as if he feared having lost all his aptitude and all his mastery, all his knowledge of the instrument. Oh, what trembling of the enfeebled fingers on the strings and the incertitude of the bowing when he essayed the first tones! And those two tears that formed slowly in the cavity of his eyes, rolled down his cheeks, and were arrested in the threads of his beard, rather long and still untrimmed.The survivor again saw the violinist about to improvise, while he himself accompanied him on the piano with an almost insupportable anguish, attentive in following him, in anticipating him, always fearing to break the measure, strike a false note, make a discord, or miss a note.In his improvisations, Demetrius Aurispa was almost always inspired with poetry. George remembered the marvellous improvisation that, on a certain October day, the violinist had composed on a lyric poem by Alfred Tennyson, inThe Princess. George himself had translated the verse so that Demetrius could understand it, and he had proposed it to him as a theme. Where was that page?The curiosity of a sad sensation prompted George to search for it in an album placed among the pieces of music. He was sure he could find it; he remembered it very clearly. And, in fact, he found it.It was a single sheet, written in violet ink. The characters had paled and the sheet had become rumpled, yellowish, without consistency, soft as a spider's web. It bore the sadness of pages traced a long time ago by a dear hand, gone henceforth forever.George, who scarcely recognized the characters, said to himself: "It is I who wrote this page! This writing is mine!" It was a rather timid hand, unequal, almost feminine, recalling a schoolboy's writing, preserving the ambiguity of the recent adolescence, the hesitating delicacy of a soul that dares not yet know all. "What a change in that, too!" And he read again the poet's verse:Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,Tears from the depth of some divine despairRise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,And thinking of the days that are no more.Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,That brings our friends up from the underworld.Sad as the last which reddens over oneThat sinks with all we love below the verge;So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawnsThe earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birdsTo dying ears, when unto dying eyesThe casement slowly grows a glimmering square;So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.Dear as remember'd kisses after death,And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'dOn lips that are for others; deep as love,Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;O Death in Life, the days that are no more.Demetrius improvised standing, beside the piano, a trifle paler, a trifle more bent; but from time to time he drew himself erect beneath the breath of inspiration, as a bent reed straightens beneath the breath of the wind. He kept his eyes fixed in the direction of the window, where, as if in a frame, appeared an autumn landscape, reddish and misty. According to the vicissitudes of the heavens without, a changeable light flooded at intervals his person, flashed in the humidity of his eyes, gilded his extraordinarily pure brow. And the violin said: "Sad as the last which reddens over one that sinks with all we love below the verge; so sad, so fresh, the days that are no more." And the violin repeated, with sobs: "O Death in Life, the days that are no more."At the reminiscence, at the vision conjured up, a supreme anguish assailed the survivor. When the images had passed, the silence seemed to him still heavier. The delicate instrument through which Demetrius's soul had sung its loftiest songs had again sunk to sleep, with its four strings still intact, in the velvet-lined case.George lowered the lid, as on a corpse. Around him the silence was lugubrious. But he still retained, at the bottom of his heart, like a refrain indefinitely prolonged, this sigh: "O Death in Life, the days that are no more."He remained a few moments before the door which shut off the tragic chamber. He felt that henceforth he was no longer master of himself. His nerves dominated him, imposed on him the disorder and excess of their sensations. He felt about his head a band that contracted and enlarged according to the palpitations of his arteries, as if it were an elastic and cold substance. The same cold chill ran down his spinal column.With sudden energy, in a sort of rage, he turned the knob and entered. Without looking about him, walking in the ray of light which, projected through the open door, was shed across the floor, he went straight towards one of the balconies, opened the two shutters. He also opened the shutters of the other balcony. After this rapid action, accomplished under the impulse of a sort of horror, turned, agitated, gasping. He felt his flesh creep.What he saw before anything else was the bed stationed in front of him, with its green counterpane, all of walnut, but simple in form, without carving, without ornaments without curtains. For several moments he saw nothing but the bed, like on that terrible day when, crossing the threshold of the room, he had stopped petrified at the sight of the corpse.Evoked by the survivor's imagination, the corpse, with its head enveloped in a black veil and its arms stretched alongside the body, retook its place on the mortuary couch. The strong light which entered from the wide-open balconies did not succeed in dissipating the phantom. It was a vision, not continuous but intermittent, seen now and then, as if by a rapid closure of the eyelids, although the witness's eyelids remained immovable.In the silence of the room, and in the silence of his soul, George heard, very distinctly, the scratching of the wood-tick. And this trifling fact sufficed to dissipate momentarily in him the extreme violence of the nervous tension, as the prick of a needle suffices to empty a swollen blister.Every particular of the terrible day came back to his memory: the unexpected news brought to Torricelle di Sarsa, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, by a breathless messenger who stammered and wept; the exhausting journey on horseback, in the heat of the dog-days, across the scorched hills, and, during the journey, the sudden fainting spells which made him reel in his saddle; then the house filled with sobs, filled with noises of doors banged by the gale, filled with the buzzing he had in the arteries; and, finally, the impetuous entry into the room, the sight of the corpse, the curtains swelling and swishing, the tinkling of the holy-water basin suspended on the wall.The deed had been done on the morning of the fourth of August, without any suspicious preparations. The suicide had left no letter, not even for his nephew. The will by which he constituted George his sole legatee was already of old date. Demetrius had taken evident precautions to conceal the causes of his resolution, and even to avoid every pretext for hypotheses; he had taken care to destroy even the least traces of the acts which had preceded the supreme act. In the apartment, everything was found in order, in an order almost excessive; not a paper remained on the desk, not a book was missing from the shelves of the bookcase. On the little table, near the bed, was the pistol-case, open; nothing more.For the thousandth time, a question arose in the mind of the survivor: "Why did he kill himself? Had he a secret which gnawed at his heart? Or else, was it the cruel sagacity of his intelligence which rendered life insupportable? He bore his destiny within himself, as I bear mine in myself."He looked at the little silver emblem still suspended on the wall at the head of the bed, a symbol of religion, a maternal pious souvenir. It was a fine piece of workmanship by an old master goldsmith of Guardiagrele, Andrea Gallucci—a sort of hereditary jewel. "He loved religious emblems, sacred music, the odor of incense, crucifixes, the hymns of the Latin Church. He was a mystic, an ascetic, the most passionate contemplator of the inner life; but he did not believe in God."He looked at the pistol-case; and a thought, latent in the deepest recesses of his brain, was revealed to him as by a lightning flash. "I, too, will kill myself with one of these pistols—with the same, on the same bed." After a short appeasement, his exaltation took hold of him again; again he felt his flesh creep. Once more he felt the actual and profound sensation of the shudder already experienced on the tragic day, when he had wished to raise, with his own hands, the black veil spread over the dead man's face, and when, through the linen wrappings, he believed he could see the ravages of the wound, the horrible ravage made by the explosion of the firearm, by the impact of the ball against the bone of the skull, against that brow so delicate and so pure. In reality, he had seen only a portion of the nose, the mouth, and the chin. The rest was hidden by the bandages several times folded, perhaps because the eyes had started from their sockets. But the mouth, intact, permitted a view of the beard, silky and thin—the mouth, pale and withered, which, living, opened so softly for the unexpected smile—the mouth had received from the seal of death an expression of superhuman calmness, rendered more extraordinary by the bloody havoc hidden by the bandages.This image, fixed in an ineffaceable imprint, was graven in the soul of the inheritor, in the centre of his soul; and after five years it still preserved the same evidence, preserved by a fatal power.In thinking that he also would stretch himself on the same bed, and that he would kill himself with the same weapon, George did not feel that tumultuous and vibrant emotion which sudden resolutions impart; it was rather an indefinable feeling, as if it concerned a project formed a long time ago, and approved in a rather indefinite fashion, and that the time had come to decide about it and to accomplish it. He opened the case, examined the pistols.They were fine weapons, rifled duelling pistols, of old English make, with a stock perfectly fitted to the hand. They reposed on a light-green velvet, a little frayed at the edges of the compartments which contained everything necessary for loading them. As the barrels were of large calibre, the balls were large; those which, when they touch their object, always produce a decisive effect.George took one and weighed it in the palm of his hand. "In less than five minutes I could be dead. Demetrius has left on this bed the hollow where I shall lie." And by an imaginary transposition it was himself whom he saw stretched on the couch. But that wood-tick! That wood-tick! He had a perception of being gnawed by the insects, as distinctly and as frightfully as if the animals were in his brain. This implacable gnawing came from the bed, and he perceived it. Then he understood the sadness of the man who, before dying, hears beneath him the gnawing of the wood-tick. When he pictured himself in the act of pressing the trigger, he felt an agonized and repulsive contraction of all his nerves. When he came to the conclusion that nothing forced him to kill himself, and that he could wait, he felt at the deepest recesses of his substance the spontaneous expansion of intense relief. A thousand invisible ties still bound him to life. "Hippolyte!"He went towards the balcony, towards the light, with a sort of impetuosity. A background of an immense landscape, bluish and mysterious, melted in the languor of the day. The sun was slowly setting on the mountain, which it flooded with gold, like the couch of a mistress who awaited. The Majella, enormous and white, all bathed in this liquid gold, reared its huge mass in the sky.III.THE HERMITAGE.CHAPTER I.In her letter of May 10th, Hippolyte had said: "I can at last dispose of a free hour to write you a long letter. My brother-in-law has now been dragging his pain from hotel to hotel around the lake for the last ten days; and we both follow him like troubled souls. You could never imagine the melancholy of this pilgrimage. I myself am utterly exhausted; I await the first favorable opportunity to leave them. Have you already found the Hermitage?" She had said: "Your letters increase my torment inexpressibly. I know well your malady; and I divine that words fail you to express your suffering. I would give half of my blood to succeed in convincing you, once for all, that I am yours, absolutely yours, forever, until death. I think of you, of you only, uninterruptedly, every instant of my life. Away from you, I cannot enjoy one moment's calm and happiness. Everything disgusts and irritates me. Oh, when will it be given me to be with you entire days, to live your life! You will see; I shall no longer be the same woman. I shall be amiable, tender, gentle. I shall take care to be always the same, always discreet. I shall tell you all my thoughts, and you will tell me all yours. I shall be your mistress, your friend, your sister; and, if you believe me worthy, I will be also your counsellor. I have a lucid intuition of things, and a hundred times I have experienced this lucidity, which has never led me into error. My sole care will be to please you always, never to be a burden in your life. In me you should find only sweetness and repose.... I have many faults, my friend; but you will aid me to conquer them. You will make meperfect, for yourself. I await from you the first encouragement. Later, when I am sure of myself, I will say to you: Now I am worthy; now I have the consciousness of being what you desire. And you, too, will be proud to think that I owe you all, that I am your creature in everything; and then it will seem to you that I am more intimately yours, and you will love me always more, always more. It will be a life of love such as has never before been seen."In a postscript: "I send you a rhododendron gathered in the park of Isola Madre.... Yesterday, in the pocket of that gray dress which you know, I found the note from Albano which I had asked you for as a souvenir. It is datedApril 9th. It has been marked with severalbaskets of wood. Do you recall our great fires of love? Courage, courage! The renewal of happiness is approaching. In one week, in ten days at the most, I shall be wherever it pleases you. With you, no matter where."CHAPTER II.And George, who at heart hardly believed in success, but who was suddenly seized by an insensate ardor, attempted the supreme test.He left Guardiagrele for the littoral, in quest of the Hermitage. The country, the sea, the motion, the physical activity, the variety of the incidents strewn along the course of this exploration, the singularity of his own condition—all these new things stirred him, restored his equilibrium, gave him an illusory confidence. It seemed to him that he had just escaped by a miracle from the assault of a mortal malady in which he had been face to face with death. For the first few days, life had for him that sweetness and depth which it only has for convalescents. Hippolyte's romantic dream floated about his heart."If she should succeed in curing me! To cure me would require ahealthyandstrong love." He avoided looking into the very bottom of his conscience; he fought shy of the interior sarcasm that those two adjectives provoked. "On earth, there is but one durable intoxication:securityin the possession of another creature, absolute and unshakable security. This intoxication I am seeking. I would like to be able to say: My loved one, present or absent, lives entirely in me; my will is her only law; if I ceased to love her she would die; in dying, she will regret only my love." Instead of resigning himself to enjoy love in the form of suffering, he persisted in following it in the form of pleasure. He felt that his mind was corroded irreparably. Once more he felt he had degraded his manhood. He discovered the Hermitage at San Vito, in the land of the furze, on the borders of the Adriatic. It was the ideal Hermitage—a house built on a plateau, half-way up on the cliffs, in a grove of orange and olive trees, facing a little bay closed in by two promontories.Very primitive, the architecture of the house. An outer stairway led up to a loggia on which opened the four doors of four rooms. Each room had its door, and vis-à-vis, in the wall opposite, a window looking out on the olive-grove. To the upper loggia there was a corresponding lower loggia; but the rooms on the ground floor, with the exception of one, were uninhabitable.On one side, the house was contiguous to an old ruin inhabited by the peasants who owned it. Two enormous oaks, that the persevering breath of the northerly winds had bent towards the hill, shaded the court and protected the stone tables, useful for dining in summer time. This court was surrounded by a stone parapet, and, rising above the parapet, acacia-trees, loaded with odorous bloom, delineated against the background of the sea the delicate elegance of their foliage.This house was used only for lodging strangers who rented it for the bathing season, according to the industry practised by all the villagers of the coast in the region of San Vito. It was about two miles distant from the borough, on the border of a territory called Portelles, in quiet and mild solitude. Each of the two promontories was pierced by a tunnel, the two openings of which were visible from the house. The railroad ran from one to the other in a straight line, along the shore, a distance of from five to six hundred yards. At the extreme point of the right-hand promontory, on a bank of rocks the Trabocco stretched, a strange fishing machine, constructed entirely of beams and planks, like a colossal spider-web.The tenant, out of season, was greeted like an unhoped for and extraordinary piece of good fortune.The head of the family, an old man, said:"The house is yours."He refused to name a price, and said: "If you are satisfied with it, you will give me what you wish and when you please."While uttering these cordial words, he examined the stranger with an eye so scrutinizing that the latter was embarrassed and surprised by this too piercing look. The old man was blind with one eye, bald on the top of his head, with two little tufts of white hair on the temples; his chin was shaven, and he carried his entire body before him, sustained by two bow legs. His limbs were deformed by hard work: by the labor at the plough, which advances the right shoulder and twists the body; by the labor of mowing, which forces the knees apart; by the labor of thinning the vines, which bends the body in two; by all the slow and patient labors of agriculture."You'll give what you wish."He had already scented in this affable young man, with his somewhat distracted and almost wandering air, the generous milord, inexperienced, careless of money. He knew that the generosity of his guest would be much more profitable for him than if he made his own terms.George asked:"Is the place quiet, without visitors, without noise?"The old man pointed to the sea and smiled:"Look; you will hear nothing but that."He added:"Sometimes the sound of the loom, too. But now Candia hardly weaves at all."And he smiled, pointing to the threshold where stood his daughter-in-law, blushing.She wasenceinte, already very large at the waist, blond, a clear carnation, her face sown with freckles. She had big gray eyes, the iris veined like agates. She wore in her ears two heavy gold rings, and on her bosom the presenfoso, a large star of filigree work, with two hearts in the centre. On the threshold beside her was a little girl of ten, a blonde also, with a sweet expression."One could drink down that little madcap in a glass," said the old man. "That's all! There are only us and Albadora."He turned toward the olive-grove and began to call:"Albadora! Albadò!"Then, addressing his granddaughter:"Helen, go and call her," he said.Helen disappeared."Twenty-two children!" cried the old man. "Albadora gave me twenty-two children—six boys and sixteen girls. I have lost three boys and seven girls. The other nine girls are married. One of my boys went to America; another has made his home in Tocco, and works in the petroleum mines; the youngest, the one whom Candia married, is employed on the railway, and only visits us every two weeks. We are left all alone. Ah! signor, it is well said that one father supports a hundred children, and that a hundred children do not support one father."The septuagenarian Sibyl appeared, bearing in her apron a heap of large earth-snails, a slimy and flaccid heap, from which protruded long tentacles. She was a woman of tall stature, but bent, emaciated, broken by fatigue and by frequent pregnancies, weakened by childbirths, with a small head, wrinkled like a withered apple, on a neck full of hollows and tendons. In her apron the snails stuck together, twisted about one another, glued to one another, greenish, yellowish, whitish, frothy, with colorations of pale iridescent reflections. One of them had crawled up on her hand.The old man exclaimed:"This gentleman wishes to rent the house from to-day on.""God bless you!" she cried.And, with a rather silly yet kind air, she drew closer to George, leering at him with eyes sunk deep in their orbits, almost sightless.She added:"It's Jesus come back to earth. God bless you! May you live as long as there's bread and wine. May you become as great as the sun!"And, with a joyous step, she passed on into the house, through the same door which all her twenty-two children had passed through on their way to baptism.The old man said to George:"My name is Colas di Cinzio; but, as my father's surname was Sciampagne, everybody calls me Colas di Sciampagne. Come and see the garden."George followed the peasant."The crops are very promising this year."The old man, walking in front, praised the plantations, and, as is common with persons who have grown old in the midst of nature, he made prognostications. The garden was luxuriant, and seemed to enclose in its circle all the gifts of abundance. The orange-trees shed such waves of perfume that, at moments, the atmosphere acquired a sweet and powerful savor, like that of a generous wine. The other fruit-trees were no longer in flower, but their innumerable fruits hung from nourishing branches, rocked by the breath of heaven.George thought: "This, perhaps, is what the superior life would be: a limitless liberty; a noble and fruitful solitude which would envelop me with its warmest emanations; to journey on amidst the vegetal creation as one would amongst a multitude of intelligences; to wrest from it the occult thought and to divine the mute sentiment which reigns beneath the externals; to successively render my being comfortable with each of these beings, and to successively substitute for my weakened and oblique soul each of these simple and strong souls; to contemplate nature with such a continuity of attention that I should succeed in reproducing, in my own person, the harmonious palpitation of all creatures; finally, by a laborious and ideal metamorphosis, identify myself with the robust tree whose roots absorb the invisible subterranean ferments, and whose summit imitates, by its agitation, the voice of the sea. Would not that be truly a superior life?" At the sight of the spring-time exuberance that transfigured the surrounding places, he permitted himself to be dominated by a sort of drunken panic. But the fatal habit of contradiction cut short this transport, brought him back to his old ideas, opposed reality to dreams. "We have no contact whatever with nature. We have only the imperfect perception of exterior forms. It is impossible for man to enter into communion with things. Man has certainly the power to inject into things all his own substance; but he never receives anything in return. The sea will never speak to him in an intelligible language, the earth will never reveal to him its secret. Man may feel all his blood circulate in the fibres of the tree, but the tree will never give him one drop of its vital sap."Pointing out with his finger such or such a marvel of luxuriance, the one-eyed old peasant said:"A stableful of dung performs more miracles than a churchful of saints."Pointing with his finger to a field of flowering beans at the end of the garden, he said:"The bean is the spy of the year."The field undulated almost imperceptibly. The small leaves, of a grayish green, agitated their thin points beneath the white or azure flowering. Every flower resembled a half-closed mouth, and bore two spots, black as eyes. Among those that were not yet faded, the superior petals slightly covered the spots, like pale eyelids on pupils which regard sidewise. The quivering of all those lipped and eyed flowers had a strange animal expression, attractive and indescribable.George thought: "How happy Hippolyte will be here! She has a delicate and passionate taste for all the humble beauties of the earth. I remember her little cries of admiration and pleasure on discovering some plant of unknown form, a new flower, a leaf, a bay, a bizarre insect, a shadow, a reflection." He pictured her to himself, slim and agile, in graceful attitudes, among the verdure. And an anguish suddenly overwhelmed him: the anguish of taking her again, of reconquering her entirely, of making himself loved immensely by her; of giving her a new joy every second. "Her eyes will be always filled with me. All her senses will remain closed to all sensations but those that will come to her from me. My words will seem to her more delicious than any other sound." Suddenly the power of love appeared to him to be unlimited. His inner life acquired a vertiginous acceleration.When he mounted the stairway of the Hermitage, he believed that his heart would break under the pressure of his increasing anxiety. Arrived at the loggia, he took in the landscape with an intoxicated look. In his profound agitation, he believed he felt that at that minute the sun beamed truly on the bottom of his heart.The sea, stirred by an equal and continuous thrill, reflecting the happiness scattered in the sky, seemed to refract this happiness in myriads of inextinguishable smiles. Through the crystal air, all the distant vistas were clearly defined—the Vasto Point, Mount Gargano, the Tremiti Islands, on the right; Cape Moro, the Nicchiola, Cape Ortona, on the left. The white Ortona resembled a glittering Asiatic city on a hill in Palestine, standing boldly against the azure, all in parallel lines, without minarets. That chain of promontories and gulfs, in the shape of a half-moon, suggested the image of a row of offerings, because each handle bore a cereal treasure. The furze spread its mantle of gold over the entire coast. From every bush arose a dense cloud of effluvia, as from a censer. The air respired was just as delicious as a sip of elixir.
CHAPTER VIII.
The following morning, when he opened his eyes after a very restless night, the events of the previous evening seemed but a confused memory. The tragic deepening of the twilight on the silent country; the grave sound of the Angelus, which, prolonged in his ears by a hallucination of hearing, had seemed endless; the anguish which had come over him on approaching the house, at the sight of the lighted windows crossed at intervals by shadows; the feverish excitement which had seized him when, pressed with questions by his mother and sister, he had related the interview, exaggerating the violence of the invectives and the atrocity of the altercation; the almost delirious desire to keep on speaking, to add to the recital of the real facts the incoherence of his imagination; the ejaculations of contempt or of tenderness with which his mother had interrupted him, as he went on describing the brute's attitude and his own energy in reproaching him; then the sudden hoarseness, the rapid exasperation of the pain which hammered his temples, the spasmodic efforts at a bitter and non-coercible vomiting, the severe cold which had chilled him in bed, the horrible dreams which had caused him to start while in the first torpor of his enfeebled nerves—all this came back confusedly to his memory, augmented his painful physical stupor, from which, however, he would not have been willing to emerge but to enter into a state of complete extinction, into the insensibility of a corpse.
The necessity of death was still suspended over him with the same imminence; but it was unendurable for him to think that, in order to put his design into execution, he would have to shake off his inertia, accomplish a series of fatiguing acts, conquer the physical repugnance which discouraged him from all effort. Where could he kill himself? How? At the house? That same day? With a firearm? With poison? His mind had not yet conceived the precise and definite idea. Even the torpor that paralyzed him, and the bitterness of his mouth, suggested to him the idea of a narcotic. And, vaguely, without stopping to seek a practical means by which he could procure an efficacious dose, he imagined its effect. Little by little the images multiplied, became particularized, became more distinct; and their association formed a visible scene. What he tried to imagine was, not so much the sensations of his slow death-agony, as the circumstances which would lead to his mother, sister, and brother learning of the catastrophe. He tried to imagine the manifestations of their sorrow, their attitudes, their words, their gestures. Still following the same idea, his curious attention extended to all the survivors, not only his immediate relatives but to the entire family, to his friends, to Hippolyte, the far-distant Hippolyte, so distant that she had almost become as a stranger to him.
"George!"
It was the voice of his mother, who was knocking at the door.
"Is it you, mother? Come in."
She entered, approached the bed with affectionate eagerness, leaned over him, placed a hand on his forehead, and asked:
"How do you feel? Any better?"
"A little. I'm still dizzy—I have a bitter taste in my mouth. I should like a drink."
"Camille is going to bring you up a cup of milk. Shall I open the windows more?"
"Just as you like, mother."
His voice was changed. His mother's presence aroused in him that sentiment of pity for himself which had given birth to the imaginary picture of funereal regrets, the time for which he believed was close at hand. In his mind, the actuality of his mother opening the windows became identified with the imaginary action which would bring about the terrible discovery; and his eyes grew moist with commiseration for himself and for the poor woman whom he destined to receive such a cruel blow; and the tragic scene appeared before him with all the distinctness of a thing actually seen: his mother, a little frightened, turns round in the light, calls him again by name; trembling, she approaches the bed, touches him, shakes him, finds his body inert, cold, rigid; and then she falls, fainting, prostrate over his corpse. "Perhaps dead. Such a shock might kill her." And his anxiety increased; and the moment seemed solemn to him, like all that is final; and his mother's appearance, actions, and words assumed in his eyes such an unusual signification and value that he followed them with almost anxious attention. Drawn suddenly from his spiritual torpor, he had just recovered an extraordinarily active consciousness of life. There reappeared in him a well-known phenomenon, the singularity of which had often attracted his attention. It was an instantaneous passage from one state of consciousness to another; between the new state and the anterior state there was the same difference as exists between waking and slumber, and that recalled to his mind the sudden change produced in the theatre when the footlights are unexpectedly turned up and project their strongest light.
So, as on the day of the funeral, the son gazed on his mother with eyes that were no longer the same, and saw her as he had seen her then, with strange lucidity. He felt that this woman's life was brought closer to, became connected with as if adherent to, his own life; he felt the mysterious relation of the blood, and the affliction of the fate which menaced them both. And when his mother came close to him again and sat down by his bedside, he raised himself a little on his pillow, took one of her hands, tried to dissimulate his agitation by a smile. Under the pretext of looking at the cameo of a ring, he examined the long and thin hand, to which each particularity imparted an extraordinary expression of life and whose contact caused him a sensation resembling no other. His soul still enveloped in the gloomy images recently evoked, he thought: "When I am dead, when she touches me, when she feels the icy—" And he shuddered as he remembered his own aversion to touching a corpse.
"What's the matter?" asked his mother.
"Nothing—a little nervous, that's all."
"Oh! you are not well," she went on, shaking her head. "Where do you feel ill?"
"Nowhere, mother. I am naturally a little upset."
But the unnatural and convulsive look in her son's face did not escape the maternal eye.
"How sorry I am that I sent you there! How wrong it was of me to send you."
"No, mother. Why? It was necessary, sooner or later."
And all at once, without the slightest confusion henceforth, he relived the frightful hour; he saw once more his father's gestures, heard once more his voice; he heard again his own voice, that voice so changed, which, contrary to all expectation, had uttered such grave words. It seemed to him he was a stranger to that action and these uttered words; and nevertheless, at the bottom of his soul, he felt a sort of obscure remorse; he felt something akin to an instinctive consciousness of having passed beyond bounds, of having committed an irreparable transgression, of having trampled under foot something human and sacred. Why had he departed with such violence from the great, calm resignation with which the funereal image of Demetrius had inspired him, when it had appeared to him in the midst of the silent country? Why had he not persisted in considering with the same painful and clairvoyant pity the baseness and ignominy of that man upon whom, as upon all other men, weighed an invincible destiny? And he himself, he who carried that blood in his veins, did he not also bear, perhaps, at the bottom of his substance, all the latent germs of those abominable vices? If he continued to live, did not he, too, risk falling into a similar abjection? And then, all the cholers, all the hates, all the violences, all the punishments, appeared to him to be unjust and useless. Life was a heavy fermentation of impure matters. He believed he felt that in his substance he had a thousand forces, occult, unrecognizable, and indestructible, whose progressive and fatal evolution had made up his existence up to then, and would make up his future existence, if it had not happened precisely that his will had to obey one of these forces that now imposed on him the supreme action. "In short, why regret what I did yesterday? Could I have prevented myself from doing it?"
"It wasnecessary," he repeated, with a new signification, as if speaking to himself.
And he sat a spectator, lucid and attentive, at the unrolling of the little of the life that remained for him to live.
CHAPTER IX.
When his mother and sister had left him alone, he stayed in bed a few moments longer, through a physical repugnance to do anything whatever. It seemed to him that, to rise, he would have to make an enormous effort. It seemed to him too fatiguing to leave that horizontal position in which, in one hour perhaps, he was going to find eternal repose. And, once more, he thought of a narcotic. "Close the eyes and wait for sleep!" The virginal light of that May morning, the azure reflected in the window-panes, the beam of sunlight that streamed on the floor, the voices and murmurs that arose from the street, all those living signs that seemed to rise above the balcony and reach as far as him and reconquer him, all inspired him with a kind of fright mixed with rancor. And he saw again, in his mind, the image of his mother going through the gesture of opening the window. He saw Camille once more at the foot of the bed; he reheard the words of both, always relating to the same man. What he most clearly remembered was a cruel exclamation, uttered by his mother, with lips overflowing with bitterness; and with it he associated the vision of the paternal features, those features on which he believed he had discovered, over there, on the terrace, in the strong light reflected by the whiteness of the wall, the symptoms of a mortal malady. In front of Camille and himself, his mother had said passionately: "If that were only true! Heaven grant it is true!" So that, then, was the last impression left in his heart, on the eve of his departure from the world, by the creature who was formerly in his house the source of every tenderness!
An energetic impulse suddenly came over him; he threw himself from his bed, definitely resolved to act. "It will be done before evening. Where shall I do it?" He thought of Demetrius's closed rooms. He had not yet a definite plan; but he felt morally certain that, during the hours that still remained to run, the means would be spontaneously offered, by a sudden suggestion which he would be forced to obey.
While he proceeded to make his toilet, the preoccupation haunted him to prepare his body for the tomb. He, too, had that species of funereal vanity that has been remarked in certain criminals condemned to death, and in suicides. He rendered this sentiment more intense on observing it in himself. And a regret came over him at having to die in this little, obscure town, at the bottom of that wild province, far from his friends, who for a long time, perhaps, would be ignorant of his death. If, on the contrary, the act were done in Rome, in the great city where he was well known, his friends would have grieved for him; they would, doubtless, have given to the tragic mystery the adornment of poetry. And, once more, he tried to picture what would follow his death—his attitude on the bed, in the chamber of his amours; the profound emotion of the youthful souls, the fraternal souls, at the sight of the corpse reposing in austere peace; the dialogues at the funereal vigil, by the light of the candles; the coffin covered with wreaths, followed by a crowd of young and silent men; the words of farewell pronounced by a poet, Stefano Gondi: "He diedbecause he could not make his life correspond to his dreams." And then Hippolyte's sorrow, despair, and loss of reason.
Hippolyte! Where was she? What were her thoughts? What was she doing?
"No," he thought, "my presentiment does not deceive me." And he saw again, in imagination, his mistress's gesture as she lowered her black veil after the last kiss; and he went over in his mind the littlefinalpoints. Yet there was one thing he could not explain, and that was the almost absolute acquiescence of his soul at the necessary and definite renunciation which dispossessed him of this woman, only lately the object of so many dreams and of so much adoration. Why, after the fever and anguish of the first days, had hope abandoned him little by little? Why had he fallen into the melancholy certainty that all effort would be useless to resuscitate that dead and incredibly distant thing,their love? Why had all that past been so entirely separated from him that during these last days, beneath the shock of recent tortures, he had barely felt a few vibrations reverberate clearly in his conscience?
Hippolyte! Where was she? What were her feelings? What was she doing? On what sights were her eyes resting? From what words, from what contacts, did she suffer uneasiness? What could have happened, that, for two weeks, she had not found the means to send him news less vague and brief than four or five telegrams sent from always different places?
"Perhaps she is already giving way to desire for another man. That brother-in-law of whom she was continually speaking—" And the frightful thought aroused by the old habit of suspicion and accusation suddenly mastered him, overwhelmed him as in the gloomiest hours of his past life. A tumult of bitter recollections arose in him. Leaning on the same balcony where, the first evening, amidst the perfume of the bergamots, in the anguish of first regrets, he had invoked the name of the loved one, he relived in one second the miseries of two years. And it seemed to him that, in the splendor of this May morning, it was the recent happiness of the unknown rival that blossomed, and was diffused as far as where he stood.
CHAPTER X.
As if to initiate himself in the profound mystery into which he was about to enter, George desired to see once more the deserted apartment where Demetrius had passed the last days of his life.
In willing all his fortune to his nephew, Demetrius had also willed him this apartment. George had kept the rooms intact, with pious care, as one guards a reliquary. The rooms were situated on the upper floor, and looked south over the garden.
He took the key and went upstairs, treading cautiously, to avoid being questioned. But, as he traversed the corridor, he was necessarily obliged to pass by his Aunt Joconda's door. Hoping to pass unnoticed, he walked softly, on tip-toe, holding his breath. He heard the old woman cough; he made a few quicker strides, believing that the noise of the cough would cover the sounds of his footsteps.
"Who's there?" demanded a hoarse voice from within.
"It is I, Aunt Joconda."
"Ah! It's you, George? Come in, come in——"
She appeared upon the threshold, with her ugly, yellowish face, which, in the shadow, was almost cadaveric; and she glanced at her nephew's hands before looking at his face, as if to see first if his hands had brought something.
"I am going in the next apartment," said George, repelled by the ignoble bodily odor, which filled him with disgust. "I must air the rooms a little."
And he resumed his steps in the corridor, until he came to the other door. But, as he turned the key, he heard behind him the limping of the old woman.
George felt his heart sink, as he thought that perhaps he would not find a way to disembarrass himself of her, that perhaps he would be obliged to listen to her stammering voice amid the almost religious silence of these rooms, with their beloved yet terrible souvenirs. Without saying anything, without turning round, he opened the door and entered.
The first room was dark, the air somewhat warm and suffocating, impregnated with that singular odor peculiar to old libraries. A streak of faint light showed where the window was. Before opening the shutters, George hesitated; he strained his ear to hear the gnawing of the wood-ticks. Aunt Joconda began to cough, invisible in the darkness. Then, feeling on the window to find the iron catch, he felt a slight thrill, a fugitive fear. He opened it, and turned round; he saw the vague shapes of the furniture in the greenish penumbra produced by the shutters; he saw the old woman in the middle of the room, one side distorted, swaying her flaccid body to and fro, chewing something. He pushed back the shutters, which creaked on their hinges. A flood of sunlight inundated the interior. The discolored curtains fluttered.
At first he was undecided: the presence of the old woman prevented him from abandoning himself to his feelings. His irritation increased to such a degree that he did not speak a single word to her, fearing that his voice would only be cross and angry. He passed into the adjoining room and opened the window. The light spread everywhere, and the curtains fluttered. He passed into the third room and opened the window. The light spread everywhere, and the curtains fluttered. He went no farther. The next room, in the angle, was the bedroom. He wished to enter it alone. He heard, with nausea, the limping gait of the unfortunate old woman rejoining him. He took a chair and relapsed into an obstinate silence, waiting.
The old woman crossed the threshold slowly. Seeing George seated, and not speaking, she was perplexed. She did not know what to say. The fresh air that blew in from the window unquestionably irritated her catarrh; and she began to cough again, standing in the middle of the room. At every spell her body seemed to swell and then to subside, like the bag of a bagpipe beneath an intermittent breath. She held her hands on her breast—fat hands, like tallow, with nails bordered with black. And in her mouth, between the toothless gums, her whitish tongue quivered.
As soon as her fit of coughing was over, she drew from her pocket a dirty paper bag, and took out a pastille. Still standing, she chewed, staring at George in a stupid manner.
Her gaze wandered from George towards the closed door of the fourth room. And the old woman made the sign of the cross, then went and sat down on the seat nearest to George. Her hands on her abdomen, and the eyelids lowered, she recited aRequiem.
"She is praying for her brother," thought George; "for the soul of thedamned." It seemed inconceivable to him that this woman should be the sister of Demetrius Aurispa! How could the proud and generous blood which had soaked the bed in the adjoining room, the blood sprung from a brain already corroded by the highest cares of the intelligence, have come from the same source as that which coursed, so impoverished, in the veins of this peevish and disgusting old woman? "With her, it is greediness—the greediness which regrets the liberality of the donor. How strange, this prayer of gratitude from an old, dilapidated stomach towards the most noble of suicides! How odd life is!"
All at once, Aunt Joconda began to cough again.
"You had better go from here, aunt; it isn't good for you," said George, who no longer had the strength to master his impatience. "The air here is bad for your cough. You had better go, really. Come, I will see you back to your room."
Aunt Joconda looked at him, surprised at his abrupt speech and unusual tone. She rose, and went limping through the rooms. When she reached the corridor, she again made the sign of the cross, as if muttering an exorcism. When she had gone, George closed the door, and gave the key a double turn. At last, he was alone and free, with an invisible companion.
He remained motionless for a few moments, as if under magnetic influence. And he felt his whole being invaded by the supernatural fascination which that man, existing without life, exercised over him from the bottom of the tomb.
And he reappeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full of a virile melancholy, and with a single white curl in the centre of his forehead, among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.
"For me," thought George, "he exists. Since the day of his corporeal death I have felt his presence every minute. Never so much as since his death have I felt our consanguinity. Never so much as since his death have I had the perception of the intensity of his being. All that he consumed in contact with his fellow-creatures; every action, every gesture, every word that he has sown in the course of time; every diverse manifestation which determined the special character of his being in relation with other beings; every characteristic, fixed or variable, which distinguished his personality from other personalities and made of him a man apart in the human multitude; in short, all that which differentiated his own life from other lives—all now seems to me to be collected, concentrated, circumscribed in the unique and ideal tie that binds him to me. He does not exist for anyone but me alone; he is freed from all other contact, he is in communication with me alone. He exists, purer and more intense than ever."
He took a few steps, slowly. The heavy silence was disturbed at moments by little, mysterious noises, scarcely perceptible. The fresh air, the warmth of the day, contracted the fibres of the benumbed furniture, accustomed to the obscurity of the closed windows. The breath of heaven penetrated the pores of the wood, shook the particles of dust, swelled the folds of the hangings. In a ray of sunlight, myriads of atoms whirled about. The odor of the books was overcome gradually by the perfume of the flowers.
The things suggested to the survivor a crowd of recollections. From these things arose a light and murmuring chorus which enveloped him. From every side arose the emanations of the past. One would have said that the things emitted the odors of a spiritual substance which had impregnated them. "Do I exalt myself?" he asked himself, at the aspect of the images that succeeded one another in his mind with prodigious rapidity, clear as visions, not obscured by a funereal shadow, but living a superior life. And he remained perplexed, fascinated by the mystery, seized by a terrible anguish at the moment of venturing on the confines of that unknown world.
The curtains, which a rhythmic breath seemed to swell, undulated softly, giving glimpses of a noble and calm landscape. The slight noises made by the wainscoting, the papers, and the partitions continued. In the third room, severe and simple, the recollections were musical, and came from mute instruments. On a long, violet-wood piano, whose varnished surface reflected things like a mirror, a violin reposed in its box. On a chair a page of music rose and fell at the pleasure of the breeze, and almost in time with the curtains.
George picked it up. It was a page from a Mendelssohn motet: DOMENICA II POST PASCHA:Andante quasi allegretto. Surrexit pastor bonus— Farther on, on a table, there was a heap of parts for the violin and piano, Leipzig editions: Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Rode, Tartini, Viotti. George opened the case, examined the fragile instrument that slept on olive-colored velvet, with its four strings still intact. A curiosity seized him to awaken them. He touched the treble string, which gave a plaintive moan that vibrated through the entire body. It was a violin made by Andrea Guarneri, dated 1680.
Demetrius reappeared, tall and slender, a little bent, his neck long and pale, his hair brushed back, and with the single white lock in the centre of his forehead. He held the violin. He passed one hand through his hair on the temple, near the ear, with his usual gesture. He tuned the instrument, rosined the bow, then attacked the sonata. His left hand, shrivelled and proud, ran up and down the neck; the tips of his thin fingers pressed the strings, and, beneath the skin, the play of his muscles was so visible as to be painful; his right hand, when drawing the bow, moved with a long, faultless motion. Sometimes he held the instrument tighter with his chin, his head inclined, his eyes half-closed, enjoying keenly his inner voluptuousness.
Sometimes he drew himself erect, looked fixedly before him, his eyes strangely brilliant; smiled a fugitive smile; and from his brow beamed an extraordinary purity.
Thus the violinist reappeared to the survivor. And George lived again the hours of life already lived; he lived them again, not in pictures only, but in actual and profound sensations. He lived again the long hours of close intimacy and forgetfulness, the time when Demetrius and himself, alone, in the warm room to which no noise could penetrate, executed the music of their favorite masters. How they used to forget their very existence! In what strange raptures this music, executed by their own hands, soon threw them! Often the fascination of a single melody held them prisoners an entire afternoon, without their being able to leave the magic circle in which they were enclosed. How often they had rehearsed thatSong without Wordsof Mendelssohn, which had revealed to them both, at the bottom of their hearts, a sort of inconsolable hopelessness! How often they had rehearsed a Beethoven sonata which seemed to grasp their souls, to carry them away with a vertiginous rapidity across the infinity of space, and hover with them, during the flight, over every abyss!
The survivor went back in his recollections as far as the autumn of 188-, to that unforgetful autumn of melancholy and poetry, when Demetrius had scarcely emerged from convalescence. That was to be the last autumn! After a long period of enforced silence, Demetrius took up his violin again with strange disquietude, as if he feared having lost all his aptitude and all his mastery, all his knowledge of the instrument. Oh, what trembling of the enfeebled fingers on the strings and the incertitude of the bowing when he essayed the first tones! And those two tears that formed slowly in the cavity of his eyes, rolled down his cheeks, and were arrested in the threads of his beard, rather long and still untrimmed.
The survivor again saw the violinist about to improvise, while he himself accompanied him on the piano with an almost insupportable anguish, attentive in following him, in anticipating him, always fearing to break the measure, strike a false note, make a discord, or miss a note.
In his improvisations, Demetrius Aurispa was almost always inspired with poetry. George remembered the marvellous improvisation that, on a certain October day, the violinist had composed on a lyric poem by Alfred Tennyson, inThe Princess. George himself had translated the verse so that Demetrius could understand it, and he had proposed it to him as a theme. Where was that page?
The curiosity of a sad sensation prompted George to search for it in an album placed among the pieces of music. He was sure he could find it; he remembered it very clearly. And, in fact, he found it.
It was a single sheet, written in violet ink. The characters had paled and the sheet had become rumpled, yellowish, without consistency, soft as a spider's web. It bore the sadness of pages traced a long time ago by a dear hand, gone henceforth forever.
George, who scarcely recognized the characters, said to himself: "It is I who wrote this page! This writing is mine!" It was a rather timid hand, unequal, almost feminine, recalling a schoolboy's writing, preserving the ambiguity of the recent adolescence, the hesitating delicacy of a soul that dares not yet know all. "What a change in that, too!" And he read again the poet's verse:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,Tears from the depth of some divine despairRise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,And thinking of the days that are no more.Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,That brings our friends up from the underworld.Sad as the last which reddens over oneThat sinks with all we love below the verge;So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawnsThe earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birdsTo dying ears, when unto dying eyesThe casement slowly grows a glimmering square;So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.Dear as remember'd kisses after death,And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'dOn lips that are for others; deep as love,Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;O Death in Life, the days that are no more.
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,Tears from the depth of some divine despairRise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,And thinking of the days that are no more.
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,That brings our friends up from the underworld.Sad as the last which reddens over oneThat sinks with all we love below the verge;So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld.
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawnsThe earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birdsTo dying ears, when unto dying eyesThe casement slowly grows a glimmering square;So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remember'd kisses after death,And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'dOn lips that are for others; deep as love,Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;O Death in Life, the days that are no more.
Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.
Demetrius improvised standing, beside the piano, a trifle paler, a trifle more bent; but from time to time he drew himself erect beneath the breath of inspiration, as a bent reed straightens beneath the breath of the wind. He kept his eyes fixed in the direction of the window, where, as if in a frame, appeared an autumn landscape, reddish and misty. According to the vicissitudes of the heavens without, a changeable light flooded at intervals his person, flashed in the humidity of his eyes, gilded his extraordinarily pure brow. And the violin said: "Sad as the last which reddens over one that sinks with all we love below the verge; so sad, so fresh, the days that are no more." And the violin repeated, with sobs: "O Death in Life, the days that are no more."
At the reminiscence, at the vision conjured up, a supreme anguish assailed the survivor. When the images had passed, the silence seemed to him still heavier. The delicate instrument through which Demetrius's soul had sung its loftiest songs had again sunk to sleep, with its four strings still intact, in the velvet-lined case.
George lowered the lid, as on a corpse. Around him the silence was lugubrious. But he still retained, at the bottom of his heart, like a refrain indefinitely prolonged, this sigh: "O Death in Life, the days that are no more."
He remained a few moments before the door which shut off the tragic chamber. He felt that henceforth he was no longer master of himself. His nerves dominated him, imposed on him the disorder and excess of their sensations. He felt about his head a band that contracted and enlarged according to the palpitations of his arteries, as if it were an elastic and cold substance. The same cold chill ran down his spinal column.
With sudden energy, in a sort of rage, he turned the knob and entered. Without looking about him, walking in the ray of light which, projected through the open door, was shed across the floor, he went straight towards one of the balconies, opened the two shutters. He also opened the shutters of the other balcony. After this rapid action, accomplished under the impulse of a sort of horror, turned, agitated, gasping. He felt his flesh creep.
What he saw before anything else was the bed stationed in front of him, with its green counterpane, all of walnut, but simple in form, without carving, without ornaments without curtains. For several moments he saw nothing but the bed, like on that terrible day when, crossing the threshold of the room, he had stopped petrified at the sight of the corpse.
Evoked by the survivor's imagination, the corpse, with its head enveloped in a black veil and its arms stretched alongside the body, retook its place on the mortuary couch. The strong light which entered from the wide-open balconies did not succeed in dissipating the phantom. It was a vision, not continuous but intermittent, seen now and then, as if by a rapid closure of the eyelids, although the witness's eyelids remained immovable.
In the silence of the room, and in the silence of his soul, George heard, very distinctly, the scratching of the wood-tick. And this trifling fact sufficed to dissipate momentarily in him the extreme violence of the nervous tension, as the prick of a needle suffices to empty a swollen blister.
Every particular of the terrible day came back to his memory: the unexpected news brought to Torricelle di Sarsa, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, by a breathless messenger who stammered and wept; the exhausting journey on horseback, in the heat of the dog-days, across the scorched hills, and, during the journey, the sudden fainting spells which made him reel in his saddle; then the house filled with sobs, filled with noises of doors banged by the gale, filled with the buzzing he had in the arteries; and, finally, the impetuous entry into the room, the sight of the corpse, the curtains swelling and swishing, the tinkling of the holy-water basin suspended on the wall.
The deed had been done on the morning of the fourth of August, without any suspicious preparations. The suicide had left no letter, not even for his nephew. The will by which he constituted George his sole legatee was already of old date. Demetrius had taken evident precautions to conceal the causes of his resolution, and even to avoid every pretext for hypotheses; he had taken care to destroy even the least traces of the acts which had preceded the supreme act. In the apartment, everything was found in order, in an order almost excessive; not a paper remained on the desk, not a book was missing from the shelves of the bookcase. On the little table, near the bed, was the pistol-case, open; nothing more.
For the thousandth time, a question arose in the mind of the survivor: "Why did he kill himself? Had he a secret which gnawed at his heart? Or else, was it the cruel sagacity of his intelligence which rendered life insupportable? He bore his destiny within himself, as I bear mine in myself."
He looked at the little silver emblem still suspended on the wall at the head of the bed, a symbol of religion, a maternal pious souvenir. It was a fine piece of workmanship by an old master goldsmith of Guardiagrele, Andrea Gallucci—a sort of hereditary jewel. "He loved religious emblems, sacred music, the odor of incense, crucifixes, the hymns of the Latin Church. He was a mystic, an ascetic, the most passionate contemplator of the inner life; but he did not believe in God."
He looked at the pistol-case; and a thought, latent in the deepest recesses of his brain, was revealed to him as by a lightning flash. "I, too, will kill myself with one of these pistols—with the same, on the same bed." After a short appeasement, his exaltation took hold of him again; again he felt his flesh creep. Once more he felt the actual and profound sensation of the shudder already experienced on the tragic day, when he had wished to raise, with his own hands, the black veil spread over the dead man's face, and when, through the linen wrappings, he believed he could see the ravages of the wound, the horrible ravage made by the explosion of the firearm, by the impact of the ball against the bone of the skull, against that brow so delicate and so pure. In reality, he had seen only a portion of the nose, the mouth, and the chin. The rest was hidden by the bandages several times folded, perhaps because the eyes had started from their sockets. But the mouth, intact, permitted a view of the beard, silky and thin—the mouth, pale and withered, which, living, opened so softly for the unexpected smile—the mouth had received from the seal of death an expression of superhuman calmness, rendered more extraordinary by the bloody havoc hidden by the bandages.
This image, fixed in an ineffaceable imprint, was graven in the soul of the inheritor, in the centre of his soul; and after five years it still preserved the same evidence, preserved by a fatal power.
In thinking that he also would stretch himself on the same bed, and that he would kill himself with the same weapon, George did not feel that tumultuous and vibrant emotion which sudden resolutions impart; it was rather an indefinable feeling, as if it concerned a project formed a long time ago, and approved in a rather indefinite fashion, and that the time had come to decide about it and to accomplish it. He opened the case, examined the pistols.
They were fine weapons, rifled duelling pistols, of old English make, with a stock perfectly fitted to the hand. They reposed on a light-green velvet, a little frayed at the edges of the compartments which contained everything necessary for loading them. As the barrels were of large calibre, the balls were large; those which, when they touch their object, always produce a decisive effect.
George took one and weighed it in the palm of his hand. "In less than five minutes I could be dead. Demetrius has left on this bed the hollow where I shall lie." And by an imaginary transposition it was himself whom he saw stretched on the couch. But that wood-tick! That wood-tick! He had a perception of being gnawed by the insects, as distinctly and as frightfully as if the animals were in his brain. This implacable gnawing came from the bed, and he perceived it. Then he understood the sadness of the man who, before dying, hears beneath him the gnawing of the wood-tick. When he pictured himself in the act of pressing the trigger, he felt an agonized and repulsive contraction of all his nerves. When he came to the conclusion that nothing forced him to kill himself, and that he could wait, he felt at the deepest recesses of his substance the spontaneous expansion of intense relief. A thousand invisible ties still bound him to life. "Hippolyte!"
He went towards the balcony, towards the light, with a sort of impetuosity. A background of an immense landscape, bluish and mysterious, melted in the languor of the day. The sun was slowly setting on the mountain, which it flooded with gold, like the couch of a mistress who awaited. The Majella, enormous and white, all bathed in this liquid gold, reared its huge mass in the sky.
III.
THE HERMITAGE.
CHAPTER I.
In her letter of May 10th, Hippolyte had said: "I can at last dispose of a free hour to write you a long letter. My brother-in-law has now been dragging his pain from hotel to hotel around the lake for the last ten days; and we both follow him like troubled souls. You could never imagine the melancholy of this pilgrimage. I myself am utterly exhausted; I await the first favorable opportunity to leave them. Have you already found the Hermitage?" She had said: "Your letters increase my torment inexpressibly. I know well your malady; and I divine that words fail you to express your suffering. I would give half of my blood to succeed in convincing you, once for all, that I am yours, absolutely yours, forever, until death. I think of you, of you only, uninterruptedly, every instant of my life. Away from you, I cannot enjoy one moment's calm and happiness. Everything disgusts and irritates me. Oh, when will it be given me to be with you entire days, to live your life! You will see; I shall no longer be the same woman. I shall be amiable, tender, gentle. I shall take care to be always the same, always discreet. I shall tell you all my thoughts, and you will tell me all yours. I shall be your mistress, your friend, your sister; and, if you believe me worthy, I will be also your counsellor. I have a lucid intuition of things, and a hundred times I have experienced this lucidity, which has never led me into error. My sole care will be to please you always, never to be a burden in your life. In me you should find only sweetness and repose.... I have many faults, my friend; but you will aid me to conquer them. You will make meperfect, for yourself. I await from you the first encouragement. Later, when I am sure of myself, I will say to you: Now I am worthy; now I have the consciousness of being what you desire. And you, too, will be proud to think that I owe you all, that I am your creature in everything; and then it will seem to you that I am more intimately yours, and you will love me always more, always more. It will be a life of love such as has never before been seen."
In a postscript: "I send you a rhododendron gathered in the park of Isola Madre.... Yesterday, in the pocket of that gray dress which you know, I found the note from Albano which I had asked you for as a souvenir. It is datedApril 9th. It has been marked with severalbaskets of wood. Do you recall our great fires of love? Courage, courage! The renewal of happiness is approaching. In one week, in ten days at the most, I shall be wherever it pleases you. With you, no matter where."
CHAPTER II.
And George, who at heart hardly believed in success, but who was suddenly seized by an insensate ardor, attempted the supreme test.
He left Guardiagrele for the littoral, in quest of the Hermitage. The country, the sea, the motion, the physical activity, the variety of the incidents strewn along the course of this exploration, the singularity of his own condition—all these new things stirred him, restored his equilibrium, gave him an illusory confidence. It seemed to him that he had just escaped by a miracle from the assault of a mortal malady in which he had been face to face with death. For the first few days, life had for him that sweetness and depth which it only has for convalescents. Hippolyte's romantic dream floated about his heart.
"If she should succeed in curing me! To cure me would require ahealthyandstrong love." He avoided looking into the very bottom of his conscience; he fought shy of the interior sarcasm that those two adjectives provoked. "On earth, there is but one durable intoxication:securityin the possession of another creature, absolute and unshakable security. This intoxication I am seeking. I would like to be able to say: My loved one, present or absent, lives entirely in me; my will is her only law; if I ceased to love her she would die; in dying, she will regret only my love." Instead of resigning himself to enjoy love in the form of suffering, he persisted in following it in the form of pleasure. He felt that his mind was corroded irreparably. Once more he felt he had degraded his manhood. He discovered the Hermitage at San Vito, in the land of the furze, on the borders of the Adriatic. It was the ideal Hermitage—a house built on a plateau, half-way up on the cliffs, in a grove of orange and olive trees, facing a little bay closed in by two promontories.
Very primitive, the architecture of the house. An outer stairway led up to a loggia on which opened the four doors of four rooms. Each room had its door, and vis-à-vis, in the wall opposite, a window looking out on the olive-grove. To the upper loggia there was a corresponding lower loggia; but the rooms on the ground floor, with the exception of one, were uninhabitable.
On one side, the house was contiguous to an old ruin inhabited by the peasants who owned it. Two enormous oaks, that the persevering breath of the northerly winds had bent towards the hill, shaded the court and protected the stone tables, useful for dining in summer time. This court was surrounded by a stone parapet, and, rising above the parapet, acacia-trees, loaded with odorous bloom, delineated against the background of the sea the delicate elegance of their foliage.
This house was used only for lodging strangers who rented it for the bathing season, according to the industry practised by all the villagers of the coast in the region of San Vito. It was about two miles distant from the borough, on the border of a territory called Portelles, in quiet and mild solitude. Each of the two promontories was pierced by a tunnel, the two openings of which were visible from the house. The railroad ran from one to the other in a straight line, along the shore, a distance of from five to six hundred yards. At the extreme point of the right-hand promontory, on a bank of rocks the Trabocco stretched, a strange fishing machine, constructed entirely of beams and planks, like a colossal spider-web.
The tenant, out of season, was greeted like an unhoped for and extraordinary piece of good fortune.
The head of the family, an old man, said:
"The house is yours."
He refused to name a price, and said: "If you are satisfied with it, you will give me what you wish and when you please."
While uttering these cordial words, he examined the stranger with an eye so scrutinizing that the latter was embarrassed and surprised by this too piercing look. The old man was blind with one eye, bald on the top of his head, with two little tufts of white hair on the temples; his chin was shaven, and he carried his entire body before him, sustained by two bow legs. His limbs were deformed by hard work: by the labor at the plough, which advances the right shoulder and twists the body; by the labor of mowing, which forces the knees apart; by the labor of thinning the vines, which bends the body in two; by all the slow and patient labors of agriculture.
"You'll give what you wish."
He had already scented in this affable young man, with his somewhat distracted and almost wandering air, the generous milord, inexperienced, careless of money. He knew that the generosity of his guest would be much more profitable for him than if he made his own terms.
George asked:
"Is the place quiet, without visitors, without noise?"
The old man pointed to the sea and smiled:
"Look; you will hear nothing but that."
He added:
"Sometimes the sound of the loom, too. But now Candia hardly weaves at all."
And he smiled, pointing to the threshold where stood his daughter-in-law, blushing.
She wasenceinte, already very large at the waist, blond, a clear carnation, her face sown with freckles. She had big gray eyes, the iris veined like agates. She wore in her ears two heavy gold rings, and on her bosom the presenfoso, a large star of filigree work, with two hearts in the centre. On the threshold beside her was a little girl of ten, a blonde also, with a sweet expression.
"One could drink down that little madcap in a glass," said the old man. "That's all! There are only us and Albadora."
He turned toward the olive-grove and began to call:
"Albadora! Albadò!"
Then, addressing his granddaughter:
"Helen, go and call her," he said.
Helen disappeared.
"Twenty-two children!" cried the old man. "Albadora gave me twenty-two children—six boys and sixteen girls. I have lost three boys and seven girls. The other nine girls are married. One of my boys went to America; another has made his home in Tocco, and works in the petroleum mines; the youngest, the one whom Candia married, is employed on the railway, and only visits us every two weeks. We are left all alone. Ah! signor, it is well said that one father supports a hundred children, and that a hundred children do not support one father."
The septuagenarian Sibyl appeared, bearing in her apron a heap of large earth-snails, a slimy and flaccid heap, from which protruded long tentacles. She was a woman of tall stature, but bent, emaciated, broken by fatigue and by frequent pregnancies, weakened by childbirths, with a small head, wrinkled like a withered apple, on a neck full of hollows and tendons. In her apron the snails stuck together, twisted about one another, glued to one another, greenish, yellowish, whitish, frothy, with colorations of pale iridescent reflections. One of them had crawled up on her hand.
The old man exclaimed:
"This gentleman wishes to rent the house from to-day on."
"God bless you!" she cried.
And, with a rather silly yet kind air, she drew closer to George, leering at him with eyes sunk deep in their orbits, almost sightless.
She added:
"It's Jesus come back to earth. God bless you! May you live as long as there's bread and wine. May you become as great as the sun!"
And, with a joyous step, she passed on into the house, through the same door which all her twenty-two children had passed through on their way to baptism.
The old man said to George:
"My name is Colas di Cinzio; but, as my father's surname was Sciampagne, everybody calls me Colas di Sciampagne. Come and see the garden."
George followed the peasant.
"The crops are very promising this year."
The old man, walking in front, praised the plantations, and, as is common with persons who have grown old in the midst of nature, he made prognostications. The garden was luxuriant, and seemed to enclose in its circle all the gifts of abundance. The orange-trees shed such waves of perfume that, at moments, the atmosphere acquired a sweet and powerful savor, like that of a generous wine. The other fruit-trees were no longer in flower, but their innumerable fruits hung from nourishing branches, rocked by the breath of heaven.
George thought: "This, perhaps, is what the superior life would be: a limitless liberty; a noble and fruitful solitude which would envelop me with its warmest emanations; to journey on amidst the vegetal creation as one would amongst a multitude of intelligences; to wrest from it the occult thought and to divine the mute sentiment which reigns beneath the externals; to successively render my being comfortable with each of these beings, and to successively substitute for my weakened and oblique soul each of these simple and strong souls; to contemplate nature with such a continuity of attention that I should succeed in reproducing, in my own person, the harmonious palpitation of all creatures; finally, by a laborious and ideal metamorphosis, identify myself with the robust tree whose roots absorb the invisible subterranean ferments, and whose summit imitates, by its agitation, the voice of the sea. Would not that be truly a superior life?" At the sight of the spring-time exuberance that transfigured the surrounding places, he permitted himself to be dominated by a sort of drunken panic. But the fatal habit of contradiction cut short this transport, brought him back to his old ideas, opposed reality to dreams. "We have no contact whatever with nature. We have only the imperfect perception of exterior forms. It is impossible for man to enter into communion with things. Man has certainly the power to inject into things all his own substance; but he never receives anything in return. The sea will never speak to him in an intelligible language, the earth will never reveal to him its secret. Man may feel all his blood circulate in the fibres of the tree, but the tree will never give him one drop of its vital sap."
Pointing out with his finger such or such a marvel of luxuriance, the one-eyed old peasant said:
"A stableful of dung performs more miracles than a churchful of saints."
Pointing with his finger to a field of flowering beans at the end of the garden, he said:
"The bean is the spy of the year."
The field undulated almost imperceptibly. The small leaves, of a grayish green, agitated their thin points beneath the white or azure flowering. Every flower resembled a half-closed mouth, and bore two spots, black as eyes. Among those that were not yet faded, the superior petals slightly covered the spots, like pale eyelids on pupils which regard sidewise. The quivering of all those lipped and eyed flowers had a strange animal expression, attractive and indescribable.
George thought: "How happy Hippolyte will be here! She has a delicate and passionate taste for all the humble beauties of the earth. I remember her little cries of admiration and pleasure on discovering some plant of unknown form, a new flower, a leaf, a bay, a bizarre insect, a shadow, a reflection." He pictured her to himself, slim and agile, in graceful attitudes, among the verdure. And an anguish suddenly overwhelmed him: the anguish of taking her again, of reconquering her entirely, of making himself loved immensely by her; of giving her a new joy every second. "Her eyes will be always filled with me. All her senses will remain closed to all sensations but those that will come to her from me. My words will seem to her more delicious than any other sound." Suddenly the power of love appeared to him to be unlimited. His inner life acquired a vertiginous acceleration.
When he mounted the stairway of the Hermitage, he believed that his heart would break under the pressure of his increasing anxiety. Arrived at the loggia, he took in the landscape with an intoxicated look. In his profound agitation, he believed he felt that at that minute the sun beamed truly on the bottom of his heart.
The sea, stirred by an equal and continuous thrill, reflecting the happiness scattered in the sky, seemed to refract this happiness in myriads of inextinguishable smiles. Through the crystal air, all the distant vistas were clearly defined—the Vasto Point, Mount Gargano, the Tremiti Islands, on the right; Cape Moro, the Nicchiola, Cape Ortona, on the left. The white Ortona resembled a glittering Asiatic city on a hill in Palestine, standing boldly against the azure, all in parallel lines, without minarets. That chain of promontories and gulfs, in the shape of a half-moon, suggested the image of a row of offerings, because each handle bore a cereal treasure. The furze spread its mantle of gold over the entire coast. From every bush arose a dense cloud of effluvia, as from a censer. The air respired was just as delicious as a sip of elixir.