After the Pardon

+===================================+ | Spring Publications | | | | OF | | | | The Stuyvesant Press | | | | A Woman of Uncertain Age | | | | By MARY ANNE BERRY | | | | After The Pardon | | | | By MATILDE SERAO | | | | The Woman Herself | | | | Anonymous | | | | The Isle of Temptation | | | | By ARTHUR STANLEY COLLETON | | | | The Woman, The Man and The Monster| | | | By CARLETON DAWE | | | | The Diary of a Lost One | | | | Ed. by MARGARETE BÖHME | | | | _All the above, cloth, 12mo_ | | _$1.50 each_ | +===================================+

After The Pardon

By Matilde Serao

[Illustration: colophon]

New York The Stuyvesant Press 1909

Copyright, 1909, By The Stuyvesant Press, New York.

Foreward

In this romance, the author has vividly pictured the ravishing fierceness of the love which sways the Latins and bends them to its desires. Graphically she has shown how their passions force them beyond all laws and duties, beyond all vows. In them the emotional nature and the finer intelligence are ever at variance. They confuse that rude instinct which is jealousy, physical and base, with the higher and more ardent love--the virile affirmation of possession with the fresher, more vigorous desire of love’s happiness--but this does not make their passions more trivial nor less consuming.

The author’s gifts are of rare quality. She delves alike into the souls of her characters and into their more animal humanity, and contrasts their weaknesses with their strength in a striking manner.

The story is of the intensest interest.

F. F.

Contents

Part I Page

Solis Occasu 7

Part II

The Pardon 81

Part III

Usque Ad Mortem 245

_To that glorious soul ELEONORA DUSE_

After The Pardon

Part I

Solis Occasu

I

Donna Maria Guasco Simonetti, gracefully stretched on the sofa and immersed in the many soft cushions of all kinds of fabrics and colours, was reading alone. A steady light, opalised by the clear transparent silk of a large shade, was diffused from the tall pedestal at her side, on which was placed a quaint lamp of chased silver, so that the reader’s head, with her thick mass of chestnut hair, attired almost in harmony with its natural lines in broad waves and rich braids, received exactly the clearness of the light.

The pale face, slightly rosy beneath the fineness of its complexion, the large eyes bent over the reading, the little composed mouth, without smile but without bitterness, were delicately illuminated. The soft, opaque silk, of a sheenless silver, of her dress of exquisite style, blended itself with the colour of the cushions, while the soft fleecy lace which adorned the dress seemed a sort of superfluity of the large sofa. Amidst stuff and lace the feet peeped out in shoes of gold cloth, slightly peculiar and bright, the caprice of a lady in her own home.

She was reading alone, and the slow rustling of the pages, which she turned with a gentle movement, alone broke the silence of the room.

The tiny clock on a small table at her side tinkled clearly, striking half-past nine. Donna Maria started slightly, gave a rapid glance at the clock, and, from a long habit of solitude, said to herself almost aloud--

“Always later, always a little later.”

Suppressing a sigh of impatience, and shrugging her beautiful shoulders, she resumed her reading. Her fine sense of hearing told her that outside in the hall the lock of the front door was rattling, and a slight blush rose to her cheeks and forehead.

A servant knocked at the door, entered without waiting for a reply, and silently offered the evening papers on a tray. She took them and placed them on the small table, scarcely bestowing a glance on him as he withdrew discreetly. Then, all of a sudden, a kind of spasm of grief, of anger and of annoyance, contracted her pure countenance, and with a half-angry, and yet suppressed cry, she exclaimed--

“How annoying! How annoying!”

The book fell down. Donna Maria arose, exposing her tall, lithe figure, full of noble grace. The harmony of a body not slender but comfortably covered, added to the pleasing maturity of thirty years, undulated in the silk dress with a slight rustling as she went to the balcony, and lifting the heavy lace curtains looked through the clear glass into the street.

The majestic piazza of Santa Maria Maggiore stretched before her eyes as far as the steps of the great basilica with its lofty closed doors, while the vastness of the piazza and the architectural grandeur of the temple were bathed on that June night by the soft brightness of the moon. The passers-by were few and scattered, little black shadows cast on the roads and footpaths of the square. Then an electric tram, coming from the via Cavour, crossed the square, desecrating for a moment the Roman scene, where faith and the Church had placed one of their most enduring and ancient manifestations, and suddenly disappeared into the other artery of the via Cavour.

The woman gazed at that almost deserted space, at the immense solitary church, rendered cold by the light of the moon, and the solitude of her desolate spirit and desolate heart became more profound and intense.

“Maria,” said a voice at her shoulder.

She turned suddenly. The young man who had called her took her two hands and kissed them one after the other with tender gallantry, and while she bent her head with a smile he kissed her eyes with a soft caress.

“It is a little late,” he said, excusing himself.

“It wants a quarter of an hour to ten,” replied Maria precisely. He looked at his watch and added--

“Perhaps your watch is fast?”

“Perhaps,” she replied, as if to break off the discussion.

She sat down, and the young man, taking a low chair, his usual seat, placed himself beside her. Taking her hand loosely he began to play a little with her fingers, toying distractedly with the rings with which they were loaded.

“ ..._m’aimes_?” said Maria, in an almost childish French fashion, but in a voice without tone or colour.

“ ..._t’aime_,” he replied childishly, and rather perfunctorily. Having, as it were, accomplished a small preliminary duty of conversation they were silent.

She looked at him, and noticed that he was in evening dress, and in his buttonhole were some carnations which she had given him in the morning. Marco Fiore’s slightly delicate appearance was aided by these garments of society. His person gained freedom from a certain thinness more apparent than real. His face was a little too pallid, with deep-black hair and moustaches; the lips were fresh and strong. The eyes, which were extremely soft, with a fascinating softness, had every now and then something feminine in them. But there was nothing feminine in the gleams of passion which kept crossing them in waves, nor was there anything feminine in the generality of the lines, where firmness and even obstinacy were prominent. Two or three times, to break the silence, he kissed her slender fingers.

“Are you going out, Marco?” she asked in that decided voice of hers, which required a precise and direct reply.

“Yes, for a moment or two.... I am obliged to,” Marco insinuated.

“Where?”

“To the English Embassy, Maria.”

“Is there a reception?”

“Yes, the last of the season,” he explained, as if to clear up his obligation for going.

Again there was a silence. Maria sat with her two jewelled hands clasped over her knees among the silken folds of opaque silver, as if in a dream.

“Once upon a time I was a great friend of Lady Clairville.”

“And now?” Marco asked absent-mindedly.

Suddenly he repented of the remark. Maria’s large eyes, proud and ardent, were veiled in tears.

“Now no longer,” she said, still as if in a dream.

“It is you who avoid her,” he said, trying to repair the mischief.

“It is I, yes,” she said, awakening suddenly, in a clear voice. “I did not wish her to cut me. The English are faithful, I know. But still she is an ambassadress and sees lots of people, even bad people.”

He shook his head melancholily, as if he thought, “What is to be done? These are fatal matters to discuss.”

“And you, Marco, why are you going?” Maria questioned, with an increase of hardness.

“My mother is going there, so----”

“But she has your sister-in-law for company?”

“Yes, Beatrice is accompanying her; but both have no escort.”

“Is your brother Giulio away?”

“Yes, he is at Spello.”

They remained silent for a while.

“I am sure,” resumed Maria, “you will meet some one at the English Embassy.”

“Whoever, Maria?”

“Vittoria Casalta, your former _fiancée_, the sister of your sister-in-law,” and an accent more ironical than disdainful pointed the sentence.

“No, Maria,” he said, at once becoming serious.

“What is this ‘_No_,’ Marco?” and she smiled more sarcastically; “what are you denying?”

“That Vittoria Casalta is going to the English Embassy, Maria.”

“Ah, you know that she is not going there!” and she laughed bitterly.

“Don’t torment yourself, don’t torment me, dear soul!” he said softly, tenderly drawing her to himself with his conquering sweetness and gentle grace.

Donna Maria let herself be drawn to him, no longer smiling, as if expecting some word or action. But neither action nor word came. After the tender admonition, as usual, a certain dryness rendered them dumb and motionless.

She, as usual, was the first to interrupt this state of mind.

“And then, Marco, how do you know that the fair Vittoria is not going to Lady Clairville’s?”

“Because she no longer goes into society, Maria.”

“Has she taken the veil?” she exclaimed, with a sarcastic smile.

“Almost. For that matter she never has loved the world.”

“Perhaps she flies from you, Marco?”

“Yes, I believe she flies from me.”

“I tell you Vittoria Casalta still loves you,” Maria murmured slowly as if she were speaking to herself, as if she were repeating to herself a thing said many times.

“No,” said Marco vivaciously.

“She still loves you,” the woman repeated authoritatively, almost imperiously.

“There is only one woman who loves me, and she is you, Maria--you,” he replied, as if to finish the discussion.

She listened attentively from the very first words of the sentence, attentively as if to find in them a trace or a recollection of past things, but she did not hear there quite what she wished. The words were the same, but the voice was no longer the same which pronounced them, and no longer the same, perhaps, was the man who said them. A sense of delusion for an instant, only for an instant, was depicted on her face; an expression, however, which he did not notice.

“I have never understood, Marco,” she resumed in a grave voice, “if you loved this Vittoria Casalta seriously.”

“What does it matter now?” he exclaimed, a little vexed.

“No, it doesn’t matter, it is true. Still, I should have liked to have heard it from you.”

“How many times have you asked this, Maria?” he said, between reproof and increasing vexation.

“Also you have asked me pretty often, Marco, if I ever loved my husband,” she retorted disdainfully.

At such a reminder the countenance of Marco Fiore became convulsed. Every slightly feminine trace disappeared from his rather pale and delicate face, and the firm and obstinate lines of his profile and chin became more accentuated, manly and rough. His lips trembled as he spoke.

“Why do you name your husband? Why do you name him, Maria?”

“Because he is not dead, Marco; because he exists, because he lives,” she proclaimed imperiously, her large eyes flashing.

“I hate him. Don’t speak to me of him!” he exclaimed with agitation, rising and kicking the chair aside to walk about.

“But why do you hate him? Why? Tell me, tell me.”

“Because he is the only man of whom I can be, of whom I ought to be, jealous, Maria,” he exclaimed, beside himself with exasperation. Then Maria smiled joyfully, a smile which he did not observe.

“I renounced him, his name and his fortune for you,” she replied simply.

“Do you regret it?” he asked, still hot with anger, but somewhat distractedly.

“I do not regret it,” she replied, after an imperceptible moment of hesitation.

“But, Maria, I am sure he regrets you very much.”

“No.”

“I am as certain as if he had told me, and I am certain he will get you back, Maria.”

“No.”

“Yes, he will get you back.”

“Covering himself with shame?”

“Yes, because he loves you.”

“Covering himself with ridicule.”

“He loves you, he loves you.”

“Knowing that I do not love him.”

“What does that matter? He will take you back to try to make you love him.”

“This is madness.”

“All those who love are mad,” murmured Marco Fiore very sadly.

Stupefied and suffering, she looked at him. Each looked at the other as if to recognise themselves. They were the same who, strangely, every day and every evening, scarcely found themselves together without, after a few minutes, involuntarily irritating with curious and cruel fingers the old wounds which seemed to be healing, which their restless and disturbed minds caused to bleed again.

Here she was, Donna Maria Guasco Simonetti, graceful and exquisite, she who had been the object of a thousand desires, repulsed by her serene austerity and boundless pride, who had suddenly loved Marco Fiore madly and faithfully for three years. Here she was in that house where she had come to live alone, after abandoning the conjugal abode for three years, to live apart in a strange, constant and ardent love, forgetful of every other thing. Here she was, ever more graceful in the plenitude of her womanly grace, in the atmosphere of exclusive luxury with which she was surrounded, and in garments which reflected her fascination.

And the man, Marco Fiore, young, trembling with life, who had come there that evening, an impassioned lover who had not tolerated sharing the woman of his love with the husband, _he_ had not fallen at her feet, infatuated as usual by his mortal infatuation; _he_ had not taken her to his arms to press her to himself, to kiss her as his own.

Instead they had given themselves, as for some time, to a sad duel of words, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes angry, evoking the absent figures of the two betrayed, of Vittoria Casalta, Marco’s betrothed, of Emilio Guasco, the husband of Donna Maria.

Both tried to subdue themselves. She crossed the quiet room, and adjusted some knick-knacks on the pianoforte, which was covered with a peculiar flowered fabric, her profile was bent slightly in a pleasing way beneath the dense shadow of her magnificent hair.

Marco opened a cigarette case, and asked, with a voice already become expressionless--

“May I smoke?”

“Do smoke.”

“Would you like a cigarette?”

“No, Marco.”

She returned to the sofa, throwing herself down gently, and drawing under her head a cushion to support her mass of hair. So they remained for a while, he smoking his cigarette slowly, and she looking at a distant part of the room, her hands stretched along her body.

“Have you found some place for us, Marco, for August?”

“I am very uncertain,” he murmured. “In whatever holiday place one goes, however far away, one meets people.”

“Far too many,” she added.

“You don’t wish to meet any one?”

“That is so; I should like not to.”

“It is impossible, Maria.”

“People always make me suffer so.”

“Why, dear?”

“I don’t know.”

After an instant he resumed quietly--

“Let us remain in Rome.”

She trembled, and raised her eyebrows slightly.

“In Rome? In Rome in August?”

“If we can’t go anywhere else,” he added, without noticing Maria’s surprise.

“You renounce the holiday and travelling which we have had every year, Marco! Do you renounce them willingly?”

“Willingly,” he replied, with complete resignation.

Why did he not look her in the face? He would have seen the lines discompose under the wave of bitterness which invaded them, and then suddenly with heroic force recompose themselves. Instead, he only heard a proud, cold voice which accepted the renunciation.

“Let us remain in Rome.”

The hard, sharp compact which annulled one of their best dreams, and destroyed one of their intensest joys, was subscribed without any further observation.

He resumed with a little difficulty.

“Later on, in September, mamma wants me.”

“Where, then?”

“At Spello, you know, at our place, where she passes the autumn.”

“I know. You have gone there every year for some days; last year for ten days.”

“This year I ought to stay some days longer.”

“How many days longer?”

“Two weeks, perhaps two or three.”

As usual, on words which he feared would displease her Marco placed a courteous hesitation. He was never precise. He sought always to render the conversation more vague with a sweet smile.

Maria did not fall into the deception, and replied clearly--

“But three weeks are not the same as two, Marco.”

“They are not the same, it is true. I will try to shorten them.”

“Why remain so long?”

“My mother requires assistance this year; my brother Giulio is unable to give her any. I don’t like to say it, but my mother is getting older. The business of the house is heavy: there are so many things to regulate and decide. In fact, I neglect my mother a little.”

“Stop three weeks then,” she said, lowering her eyelids to hide the flash of her proud eyes.

“And you? What will you do in September in Rome alone?”

“I shall do what I can,” she said, throwing her head back among the cushions.

“Poor Maria,” he said slowly.

There was so much lack of comfort in those two words, so much empty sorrow; in fact, a pity so sterile, that she broke in--

“Don’t pity me, Marco; I don’t like you to pity me.”

“Does everything offend you, then, Maria?” he exclaimed, surprised.

“Pity above everything offends me--every one’s pity; but your pity offers me an atrocious offence.”

“You are very proud, Maria.”

“Very, Marco.”

“Will nothing ever conquer this fatal pride of yours?”

“Nothing, no one. No one except myself, and not even I myself.”

“Pride causes weeping, Maria.”

“It is true; but very seldom have human eyes seen my tears,” she said conclusively.

He felt that evening, as on so many others, that never more would they find, if not the flame of passion, even the penetrating sweetness of loving companionship. The beautiful and beloved woman was near him. They were together, alone and free, alone and masters of every movement of the mind and action of the body; but some mysterious obstacle had been interposed between them, whence all beauty, love, liberty and consent were in vain.

Maria had before her the man she loved, with all his attractive appearance, with all the charms of youth and health, with all his seductiveness of mind, and this man was there in the name of an invincible transport, and ought to be and could be hers in every hour of her life. Yet nothing came of it, just as if a wanton, and deliberately wanton, hand were destroying this flower and fruit of love.

Of the two, Marco Fiore seemed to be yielding feebly to this obstacle which was intruding itself between them: he was passive, a little morbid, and easily resigned. Maria Guasco, however, proud and combative, was fighting and endeavouring to conquer the infamous hand which was plucking in the dark all the roses of their passion. She, on the other hand, allowed herself to be conquered only at the last.

“Why don’t you go now?” she said anxiously.

“Do you believe I ought to?”

“Yes, it is nearly eleven. If you want to return here afterwards,” she added, “you will make me wait up rather too long.”

He raised his eyebrows as if he experienced some difficulty in breathing or speaking.

“Well ... afterwards I should like to return home with Beatrice and mamma.”

“Ah!” she exclaimed at this blow, without further observation.

They became silent. He bent his head with that aspect of accustoming himself to a thing which had to occur, which had been usual with him for some time. She, instead, raised hers with that ever renascent pride which scorched her soul, and at last succeeded in smiling.

“But what will you do afterwards at home, Marco?”

“I shall go to bed. I am a little tired.”

“Tired of what?”

“Why, I don’t know. I have a curious physical weariness.”

“You should let a doctor examine you.”

“Do you think so? Rest heals everything.”

“It is true. Do you remember the time when you were unable to go to sleep without having written me a letter?”

“Yes, I remember,” he said surprised; “but when was that?”

“It was before--before we lived together,” she replied, with a slight trembling of the lips.

“Some time ago,” he said simply, without meaning it.

He got up to go. He took her two hands in his and pressed them with an infantile caress over his face, minutely kissing their soft and fragrant palms, and, as she lowered her head, instead of kissing her eyes as when he came in, his kisses were immersed in the dark and odorous waves of her hair.

“To-morrow, then, Marco,” she whispered, raising her head.

“To-morrow certainly, Maria,” he replied.

She accompanied him for two or three steps, almost to the door. Then she stopped for still a look or a word.

“_Toujours?_” she asked.

“_Toujours_,” he replied.

Their voices were monotonous and colourless, and their faces inexpressive as they pronounced the usual words of farewell, now three years old.

II

All was quiet in Rome when Marco Fiore returned home to the ancient Palazzo Fiore in the via Bocca di Leone. His mother and sister-in-law had returned from the reception at the English Embassy before him. Donna Arduina Fiore and Donna Beatrice Fiore had, in fact, left without looking for him, supposing that he had returned to the lonely lady in the silent little villa at Santa Maria Maggiore. Instead, he had allowed himself to wander here and there among the well-dressed crowd in the smaller reception-rooms to converse haphazardly with friends, married women and girls, conversations which, with a smile and a laugh, nearly always bore an allusion to his condition as a man chained firmly and for ever, as a man exiled voluntarily from society, and deprived of all intercourse with light loves and flirtations.

At a direct allusion to Maria Guasco, the woman who had behaved with such marvellous audacity in a hypocritical society, he lowered his eyes with a slight smile and did not reply. If the allusion was too unkind to the absent one, to her who had thrown everything on the pyre to be able to love him in liberty and beauty, his face became serious. Anyhow, the conversation languished after such an insinuation or was broken off, and suddenly he felt himself estranged and far away from that society, which nevertheless was his own, from the people who belonged to his set and perhaps to his race. To have lived three years apart from them was sufficient to break the tie.

But that evening amidst such profound elegance, among the most beautiful Roman and foreign women and the most celebrated men, it seemed to him as if like had found like, and that the other Marco Fiore, he of three years ago, was living again. When two or three times his friends had smiled intentionally at his secret marriage, as they called it, a feeling of annoyance and oppression had tormented him. A moral and perhaps physical agitation kept showing him the silent room at Santa Maria Maggiore where the solitary woman was waiting for him, and he no longer saw Maria Guasco in her proud and passionate beauty, refulgent with a powerful and charming love, but in her imperious aspect and indomitable pride, as a soul which had given up everything for ever and which wished for everything. The weight of his amorous chain crushed his heart, as he left the imposing rooms of the English Embassy.

However, when he found himself in his own room, in Palazzo Fiore, one of those old rooms with lofty ceilings and furniture exclusively old; when among the shadows and bizarre half-shadows he looked distractedly at the four or five portraits of Maria Guasco, which were mixed among the beautiful and costly ornaments adorning the table and bookshelves; when he had noticed one of her by his pillow, dressed simply in a travelling costume with a little hat on the abundance of flowing hair, a portrait in which she seemed to walk absorbed and ecstatic towards an ideal aim--in truth that aim had been love, and the portrait had been taken on their first journey, in fact during their flight--Marco Fiore trembled as if under a severe shock, and his heart melted towards her.

Her image, not from scattered portraits, but from the depth of his soul where it was impressed, rose to his eyes with all the allurements of love, and it seemed to him confused in a mortal, incurable sadness. Tears were rising in the eyes of the ardent, sorrowing image, consumed by its secret flame, tears which he had so seldom seen in reality. The fascination of a vision more subjugating than any form of tangible life! Marco Fiore’s heart began to melt, seeing Maria weeping in his dream, and an immense regret and remorse overpowered him, because by every movement and deed of his he had caused her sadness that evening, because he had not spoken a single word of love to her, because he had not yielded to her timid and impassioned invitation to return to her after midnight, as he had always done in the past; because she was there in her room alone with the sorrow of her abandonment and desertion. For a short time Marco had no peace thinking of his involuntary coldness and cruelty, and he experienced an irresistible desire to go out, to go to Maria, to throw himself at her feet.

“I will go,” he said to himself, starting up.

But he did not pass the threshold of his room. The flow of bitterness and repentance ceased and composed itself slowly at the bottom of his heart, which became all at once mysteriously calm. He meditated on his sudden appearance at Maria’s house when she was no longer expecting him, when perhaps she was asleep. Perhaps Maria on that evening had not even wept as his vision had showed him, or perhaps her tears had been dried by her pride. How cold and sharp she had been with him! With what delight she had tortured him, and afterwards had aroused, cleverly and cruelly, his jealousy! With what calmness and iciness she had accepted all he had scarcely dared to tell her for fear of crucifying her: the August without travelling or holiday-making, and the September separated and far away! How in her pride she had spurned his tender pity!

Marco Fiore did not leave his room. His good impulse had fallen, his remorse had dissolved, and his dream of amorous consolation and human compassion had vanished. A great aridness spread itself over him. He was without desires, without hope or plans. Maria’s portraits around him spoke no more to him, and before closing his eyes in sleep he looked at them as strange and unknown figures, as figures indifferent to him.

* * * * *

A long absorption of thoughts held the woman who was left alone stretched among the cushions.

Twice her little clock struck the hour, but she did not heed it. The book had fallen on the ground and had not been picked up, the little chair where Marco had sat had not been moved from beside her, and in the air the subtle smell of cigarettes remained, while on the ash-tray on the little table there were some ashes. Amidst so much testimony of a vanished hour, which had spoken its word of truth, she immersed herself in the hidden passion of her tumultuous and ecstatic soul. Only the light step of her maid roused her, a pale and sleepy young woman, who was trying to keep her eyes open and conceal her weariness.

“Am I to wait for the master?” she asked in a subdued voice, as if fearing to wake her mistress.

“No, go to bed,” replied Donna Maria precisely.

“If Your Excellency is going to wait, I will wait too.”

“No, the master will not return.”

“Ah,” said the other, lowering her eyes, and after saying good-night she left.

At last Donna Maria arose and rapidly passed into the salotto, another room where she had placed her books, pictures, and writing-table, and where she used to pass the morning when she did not go out, and quickly entered the bedroom. A night-light was burning there subduedly, and a fresh fragrance impregnated the air. Everything was there in the familiar and caressing half-light. Like a shadow Donna Maria walked up and down her room, without stopping or touching anything, as if she were looking for something and really did not care to look for it.

She trembled, and sometimes stopped as if at the noise of steps.

With its counterpane of old flowered brocade, fringed with gold lace and turned down, the bed was made and glistened whitely with its sheets and lace.

All at once she discovered what she wanted. Her expert hands opened the drawer of a little inlaid cabinet near the bed, and fumbled there till she found and drew out a small object. It was a little diary, but she was unable to read the small pages as she turned them over. She came nearer the night-light and, finding the page, read thereon. Of a sudden a great cry escaped her breast, and, kneeling by the bed, she embraced the pillows convulsively.

“It is ten days ago--ten days!”

A hundred times with a hundred sighs, in a torrent of tears like one demented, she repeated the words in tones of anger, fear, and lament. She said the words with a desolation and sadness, and an immense melancholy. Then she murmured them more softly, and even stammered them. At last she was silent; her tears ceased. Then she fell, wearied out, into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

III

As she entered the courtyard of the Baths of Diocletian, where modern Rome has placed a museum for whatever the Tiber has restored, or whatever has been excavated in recent years, Maria Guasco closed her white lace parasol and looked around. The place seemed like the white and silent cloister of a Christian monastery. Four roomy covered _portici_ surrounded a garden planted simply with rose-bushes, box hedges, and some small trees. In the middle rose a stone sundial, and on the right a well with an ancient pully from whose rope was hanging an old-fashioned bucket. The _portici_ were quite white, and along their walls were hanging fragments of marble and pieces of Roman bas-reliefs. There was an occasional bust on its pedestal, and some wooden benches. But at the beginning of the summer, at ten in the morning, the place was without visitors. Donna Maria stopped undecidedly.

She was dressed in a white soft stuff which waved noiselessly about her, a large white and very fine veil surrounded her hat, her abundant hair, and oval face. Youth, primal and fresh, proceeded from all the whiteness in which she walked, like one of those dense, soft, white clouds which give a sense of spiritual voluptuousness to the eyes. Her beauty was illuminated by it, and beneath the transparency of her complexion her blood coursed more lively, rendering more rosy her delicate and expressive countenance. Only her eyes contained a tinge of disturbance in their colour, undecided between grey and blue. Something proud and sad concealed them, sometimes even extinguishing their glance. Donna Maria’s mouth, too, had not a shadow of a smile. While she stood there she was so wrapped in her thoughts and sensations, as almost to forget the reason for which she had come at that unusual hour to the Baths of Diocletian.

“Good-morning, Donna Maria,” said a gentleman, coming towards her, taking off his hat with an extremely correct bow.

“Good-morning, Provana,” she said, frowning slightly and biting her lip; “since when have you been a frequenter of museums and a lover of the ancient statues of Faustina and Britannicus?”

“Oh, I don’t care for them, cara Signora,” he hastened to say with an ironical smile, “I don’t understand them, and, therefore, I detest them.”

“Why, then?”

“To be able to speak to you alone in a place which is completely deserted at this hour and season.”

“Why don’t you come to my house?” she replied, growing more austere; “I am alone sometimes.”

“Yes; but Marco Fiore can come there any minute, neither can you deny him entrance,” he replied coldly.

“Do you hate Marco Fiore so much, Provana?”

“I don’t hate him, I envy him,” he added, again becoming the gallant.

“So you hasten to give me a meeting where he must not interfere, to tell me things he must not hear?” she replied with a sardonic laugh.

“But you have come to listen,” he observed craftily.

She bit her lip hard, and extracted from her gold chain-purse a note, folded in four, which she gave to him.

“Take back your letter, Provana, and goodbye.”

“Don’t go, Donna Maria, don’t go. Listen to me since you have come. It is a serious matter.”

“Good-bye, Provana,” she replied, almost reaching the main entrance.

“In Heaven’s name, don’t leave! The matter is really so important;” and his voice trembled with anxiety.

Donna Maria looked at him intently. Gianni Provana, whose correct and gentlemanly face, with its more than forty years, for the most part pleasing and inexpressive in lines and colouring, seemed genuinely moved. His monocle had fallen from its orbit, and he was a little pale. He twisted his moustaches nervously, and his mouth, still fresh in spite of its maturity, seemed to restrain a flow of words with difficulty.

Donna Maria had never seen him thus; Gianni, the man of moderation in every gesture and word, so often sceptical, so often cold, but never agitated, the common type, in fact, of the elegant gentleman who assumes a correct pose from infancy, who cloaks himself with a studied disdain for everything, and most especially for the things he is not aiming at, and the persons he does not understand.

“Really I can’t think of anything important to listen to from you,” she murmured, turning back for a step or two.

“However, it is so, Donna Maria. It is a question of your good which is immensely dear to me.”

“Why is it dear to you? How do I concern you?”

“Why, I esteem you deeply; I love you.”

“Still I don’t love you, neither do I esteem you,” she replied icily.

“Why don’t you esteem me?”

“Because you are a dissembler, Provana.”

“Dissembling is often necessary and most useful in life. It is often an act of prudence and benevolence.”

“That is the invention of liars.”

They walked together, side by side, along one of the _portici_, drawing further away towards the back of the edifice. Gianni Provana watched her half curiously and half anxiously; she was distracted, gazing intently on an unknown point, trailing her parasol.

“How far has loyalty served you, Donna Maria? You have lost reputation, position, and family.”

“I have gained liberty and love,” she replied, raising her head proudly.

“But not happiness.”

“Liberty is love,” she answered, with a cry of revolt.

“You are the prisoner of your horrible condition, Donna Maria, and you are not sure that Marco Fiore loves you,” he insisted, determined to say all.

“It is I who ought to love him.”

“You don’t love him, Donna Maria. I swear that you don’t love him.”

“Who makes you say this? Who has told you this?”

“I say it because I know it. I say it because it is necessary to open your eyes to yourself and upon Marco Fiore!”

“Why do you do this? For what obscure motive? For what perfidious interest?”

“In your own interest entirely, Donna Maria.”

“That can’t be. You are a calculator. You have a plan; reveal it at once. I prefer it. What is the motive of this meeting?”

“To persuade you that you do not love Marco Fiore, and that he does not love you.”

“Is it he, is it Marco Fiore who sends you?” she exclaimed with a spasm in her voice.

Gianni Provana hesitated an instant.

“No, it is not he. It is I who have guessed all, who know all.”

She bent her head in thought. In spite of the horror which this colloquy with a man she had always despised caused her, although she was listening to words which offended her mortally, she continued to listen to him as if subjugated. They had now reached a corner of the _portici_ near a large pillar. Not a shadow of a visitor appeared.

“Donna Maria, you who are truth herself, how can you endure this life of lies?”

“Of lies?”

“Exactly. You are deceiving Marco Fiore when you tell him that you love him, and you are deceiving yourself. He is deceiving you. This love is dead, in fact it has been lived much too long.”

“According to you, who suppose that you know something about love, how long does passion last? By the way, perhaps you have got the figures with you to explain them?”

“Yes; passion lasts from six months to a year, love from a year to two years. You have been living a lie for more than a year. O Donna Maria, break this chain.”

“Are we meant to slay this love?” she exclaimed mockingly, with a shrill bitterness in her voice.

“You ought to slay it!”

“And am I afterwards to burn myself on the pyre like the widows of Malabar?” she continued, even more mockingly and bitterly.

“You ought to live and be happy.”

“With you, eh? With Gianni Provana?”

“With another,” he said in a low voice, looking at her.

“With whom?”

“With Emilio Guasco,” he ventured to say.

“Don’t repeat the infamy!” she cried, clenching her teeth.

A terrible silence came upon them. The sun had already invaded half of the simple garden among the thick box hedges and winter roses. The soft singing of a little bird issued here and there from the trees.

“Does he send you, Provana?” she continued, in a voice almost hoarse with annoyance, so great was the disdain which she was controlling within her.

“No, he doesn’t send me, but I am come all the same. Donna Maria, does it please you to continue to live outside the laws, outside morality, outside society, when the great cause of it is at an end? Does it please you still to sacrifice your decorum, your dignity, your name, not to love but to your fancy? Where are there any more the supreme compensations for all that you have lost? Where are there any more the rich sentimental and sensual rewards for that which you have thrown away and abandoned? How does your abnegation profit you any more? You have given all and are giving all, and meanwhile your life is empty, your soul is empty.”

Why did she listen so intently, without interrupting, without rebelling? Why was no shock given to her pride? And why did she cry out no more in protest? Gianni Provana so cold, so sceptical in his manner, was reaching at that time and in that singular place almost to eloquence. She who suspected him, despised and considered him a liar and a hypocrite, was listening to him, while her face contracted with suffering and disdain.

“Donna Maria, you had the courage to offend and abandon your husband who had done nothing to you, because you did not care to live in deceit and treachery: have another courage, worthy of you, that of flying from Marco Fiore, since you love him no more and he does not love you. Leave the house where you live in heavy and gloomy silence; re-enter the world, re-enter society. Be an honoured and respected lady, as you deserve to be for your beauty and your great soul.”

“To become what you tell me, Provana,” she replied precisely, in a hard voice, “I ought to return to my husband.”

“You ought to return.”

“And he would take me back?”

“He would take you back.”

“Forgetting all?”

“Forgiving you everything.”

“After three years of public scandal, of life together with Marco Fiore in the same city, under his eyes--my husband would do this?”

“He would do it because he believes in the law of pardon.”

“Knowing that I do not love him?”

“Knowing it quite well.”

“That I shall never love him?”

“Who can tell that?”

“I!” she proclaimed. “I shall never love him, and he knows it.”

“In spite of that, he desires to pardon you, and to give you back all that you have lost by your passion.”

“Why does he do this?”

“Because he is good.”

“A great many good people would never do it!”

“Because he has suffered much and learned much.”

“What have his sufferings to do with me?”

“He has pity for your sorrows.”

“Pity is not enough to do this, Provana.”

“Because he loves you,” Gianni Provana declared at last.

“What a poltroon!” she sneered with infinite contempt.

“Am I to tell Emilio Guasco this?”

“Tell him what you please.”

“His love does not move you?”

“No.”

“His pity does not soften you?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t his pardon seem a sublime act to you? Is he not a hero?”

“I am a miserable creature made of clay, and I do not understand sublimity.”

They were silent. The weather became warmer and slightly heavier, and the singing of the little birds in the trees grew weaker. Some of the roses had scattered their leaves on the ground.

“And with all this what are we going to do with Marco Fiore?” she broke in with irony.

“With Marco?”

“Yes, with him. What will he do when, according to you, I have returned to my husband? What will become of Marco?”

“He will be content to marry Vittoria Casalta. The girl has been waiting for him for three years.”

“Ah!” she exclaimed, in a voice scarcely recognisable.

Without greeting or looking at him she turned her back, and went quickly round the corner of the portico.

Nor did Gianni Provana dare to follow her.

IV

Maria had searched for Marco Fiore for an hour in all the places she supposed he might be; at the great door of Palazzo Fiore, in the via Bocca di Leone, leaving him word scribbled in pencil on a small piece of paper; at the Hunt Club, which he sometimes looked into towards noon; at the fencing rooms in the via Muratte, where two or three times a week he used to undergo a long sword exercise.

Porters, butlers, servants had seen the beautiful and elegant lady, dressed in white, hidden behind a white veil, ask with insistence for the noble Marco Fiore and go away slowly, as if not convinced that he was not in one of those places. Towards noon, agitated and silent, consumed by her emotion, she entered the little villa at Santa Maria Maggiore, and there, at the threshold, was Marco, who had just arrived, with a slightly languid smile on his lips and the habitual softness in his eyes.

“Ah, Marco, Marco, I have looked for you everywhere,” she stammered in confusion, taking him by the hand.

“What is the matter?” he asked, a little surprised, scrutinising her face.

“Come, Marco; come.”

Still leading him by the hand she made him cross the ante-room, the drawing-room, the little drawing-room, and the study, and did not stop till she was with him in the bedroom with its closed green shutters, whence entered the perfumes from a very tiny conservatory. Once within, she closed the door with a tired gesture. They were alone. She fixed him with her eyes right into his, placing her two hands on his shoulders, dominating him with her height. And to him never had her face seemed so beautiful and so ardent.

“Do you love me, Marco?”

“I love you,” he said with tender sweetness.

“You mustn’t say it so. Better, better. Do you love me?”

“I love you,” he replied, disturbed.

“As once upon a time, you must say, _as once upon a time_.”

“I love you, Maria,” he replied, still more disturbed.

“Do you love me as at first? Reply without hesitating, without thinking--as at first?”

Regarding him, scorching him with her glance, with the pressure of her white and firm hands on his shoulders, she subjugated him.

Already the youthful blood of Marco Fiore coursed in his veins, and the giddiness of passion, which for some time had not overcome his soul, mastered him.

“As at first,” he murmured, in a subdued voice.

“It is true you don’t want to lose me. Say it! Say it!”

“I would prefer to lose my soul.”

“You have never thought of leaving me?”

“Never.”

“Am I always your lady?”

“My lady, you, and you only.”

“Oh, Marco!” she sighed, letting her face fall on his breast, yielding to an emotion which was too violent.

He had become very pale. His eyebrows were knotted in sad thought. He took her face, covered with tears, and wiped it with his handkerchief, and asked her with a voice, where already suspicion was pressing, and where jealousy was hissing insidiously--

“What is this, Maria? Tell me all.”

“Oh, I can’t, I can’t,” she said desperately.

“Tell me all at once,” he rejoined in angry impatience.

“No, no, Marco, it is nothing. I am mad this morning.”

“That is impossible. You were calm and serene yesterday evening. There is something. There is _somebody_. Whom have you seen this morning?”

The question was so precise and abrupt that the woman of truth hesitated, and dared no longer be silent.

“I have seen Gianni Provana.”

“Ah!” he exclaimed, twisting his moustaches; “did you see him here?”

“No, elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere? In the street?”

“Almost.”

“You met him by accident?”

“Not by accident.”

“Maria, Maria!” he cried; “why have you done this?”

“I have erred; pardon me, Marco.”

She humbled herself, taking his hands to kiss them in an act of profound contrition.

But releasing himself, he made two or three turns of the room, then returned to her.

“And what has _that_ reptile said to you? Repeat to me what that horrid man said to you.”

“Oh, he is so horrid as to make one shudder.”

“Repeat it; repeat it at once, Maria.”

“How am I to tell them? They are infamous things.”

“Against me?”

“Against us.”

“But speak, at least speak! Do you wish to make me die of anger and impatience?”

“No, Marco. I will tell you all. Come, sit beside me, be tranquil. I don’t like to see you so. You must be calm, my love, so that I may tell you all; you must be sweet and loving, and not so disturbed and wicked.”

“Maria, I am waiting,” he said, almost without listening to her, folding his arms.

“Listen; it is true I ought not to have gone to the meeting with Gianni Provana. I have erred greatly, but a secret terror has been too much for me; I wished to know what he had to tell me. Could it not be perhaps a secret threat for me, for you?”

“I fear nothing, Maria.”

“I, too, nothing; but I went to know. That man is so perverse, and he is always seeing my husband.”

“Then he came for Emilio Guasco?” he exclaimed, rising.

“Yes,” she said with candour.

“To tell you what in the name of Emilio Guasco?”

“To tell me that you no longer love me.”

“It is false, I swear!” exclaimed Marco Fiore, with vehemence.

“To suggest to me that I no longer love you.”

“Swear that it is false.”

“I swear it,” she replied, with a grave voice.

“And then? and then?”

“And then, as our love had been killed, it was necessary and right to re-enter the lawful, to re-enter the moral, to resume my place in society, to return esteemed, respected, honoured.”

“That is to say?”

“To return to my husband.”

“He said this atrocious thing to you?”

“This atrocious thing.”

“Of his own initiative?”

“No, Marco.”

“So,” he exclaimed in the height of anger, “this husband of yours, this friend of his, beyond me, above me, and against me, laughing at me, propose that you should leave me and return to Casa Guasco?”

“Yes.”

“After all that has happened?”

“Yes.”

“After three years of a life of love, our only and unique life of love, you should return to Casa Guasco?”

“It is so.”

The physiognomy of Marco Fiore became transfigured. A convulsion of bitterness, of suffering, of fury shook it continuously; that slightly morbid insouciance, which composed its poetry together with its youth, had quite vanished, showing only a face of energy, crossed by sentiments more unrestrainedly virile.

“And your husband, whom they say is a man of honour, would he forget the dishonour?”

“He is ready to forget it.”

“Would a gentleman forget an offence so open and so cruel?”

“He has been ready, he says, for a long time to pardon.”

“But why? Is he a rascal perhaps? Is he a saint perhaps? Has he blood in his impoverished veins? Has he a heart in that money-grubbing breast of his?”

“He says that he has suffered; that he is suffering.”

“But why does he suffer?--through _amour propre_? through pride? through envy? through punctiliousness?”

She was silent. He, as one mad, continued--

“What has made him suffer?--the injury? the insult? the public shame? ridicule? Why, after having suffered, does he pardon?”

Still she was silent.

“And why does he want you? To shame me? To have his revenge? So that the world may mock me as it has mocked him? Why does he want you? To adorn his salons? To expose the jewels he has given you? To decorate his box at the theatre? Why does he want you?”

With head bowed and hands joined together on her knees, she remained silent and pale. He went towards her and forced her to rise and look at him.

“You know, Maria, why he forgets, why he pardons you, why he wants you. You know and you won’t tell me.”

She shook her head in denial.

“You know, you know; they have told you; repeat it to me! If you don’t tell me, I am going away and I am never going to return again.”

Maria trembled.

“I know,” she stammered, “I know, but I did not wish to tell. Provana says ... that my husband loves me, he forgets because he loves me; he pardons because he loves me; he wants me because he loves me. That is all.”

Violently, brutally, he took her in his arms, and pressed her to himself.

“I love you, Maria, I only love you.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, with emotion; “as once upon a time, as once upon a time?”

Pressed to him, closed as in a vice in his arms, he kissed her on the hair, the eyes, the mouth, murmuring--

“I love you, Maria, as at first, as always, for ever, I love you.”

Radiant with joy, crying with joy, she threw back her head as if inebriated.

“You are mine, Maria, it is true?”

“Yours, yours, yours.”

“No one else’s ever?”

“No one else’s.”

“I shall never let you be taken by any one, Maria.”

“No one can take me.”

“I would kill him first, Maria, then myself.”

“Marco, Marco, I adore you!”

For a moment his encircling arms loosened, as he thought for an instant. A powerful exaltation, proceeding from a powerful instinct, was compelling him. And she was intoxicated with joy of him.

“Maria, will you do as I wish?”

“Yes, like a slave.”

“Good; let us go away together.”

“Let us go.”

“To-morrow?”

“No, this evening.”

“This evening? Where?”

“I don’t know. Far away. Together. Somewhere where there are not these infamous persons and horrible annoyances, Maria. Far away, where your soul and your person may be only mine, without remorse, without reproach, without remembrances. Together, away from here, far off.”

“Let us go, Marco.”

“You follow me with desire, with enthusiasm?”

“With desire, with enthusiasm.”

“As if you were leaving for ever, never more to return?”

“As if I were going to love and to death, Marco.”

“This evening, Maria?”

“This evening.”

“But I am not going to leave you to-day. I can’t leave you. I am frightened that you may not come. I am frightened that I may lose you, Maria.”

“Just as we fled the first time, then,” she murmured, in a mysterious, dreamy ecstasy.

“As the first time, darling.”

And the old times reappeared to them, just as the voices reappeared, just as the words reappeared; time was annulled, and everything was as at first. They asked nothing of their souls, of their hearts, since the looks, the voices, and the gestures were _as at first_; in the unrestrained tumult of resumed passion their souls and their hearts kept silence, in their profound, singular, and obscure silence.

V

Venice, who has consecrated and exalted in her soft and persuasive arms a thousand powerful loveknots, placed the wonderful peace of her mortal beauty round the grand flame of Maria Guasco and Marco Fiore; the silent caress of her glimmering lights, and the tenderness of her melancholy. The amorous fluid that thousands of lovers gathered wherever they lived, wherever they moved in Venice--that amorous fluid that emanates from her quiet waters, from the balconies of her palaces, from the veiled voices of those who sing in flowering gardens on quiet side canals, that emanates from the gloomy colour of her gondolas, from the whiteness of the marble which the water has left intact or obscured, which emanates from every lineament of the place and from every tint of the sky, enveloped Marco Fiore and Maria Guasco, and multiplied their flame into a precipitous tumult of their lives.

Their love had something mysterious, powerful, and troublous in that ardent renewal, which engulfed them as in a whirlwind. They seemed blind and deaf to every other aspect and every other sound of life which was not their amorous delirium. If no idyllic sweetness, if no sentimental tenderness brightened the passing of the days, the fever which caused them to palpitate, which singularly always gave them fresh fire, had aspects unknown to many, unknown even to themselves. A veil was over their eyes when they turned them away from the adored person; and the vision of Venice, where their days were slipping away, was like a dream around them, was like a scene unknown, appearing and vanishing just as in a dream. Never had Maria Guasco, whose beauty consisted above all in a lively, tender, and proud expression of countenance, never had she carried so clearly and openly those signs of amorous happiness which cause envy and regret to those who have never been in love, or who no longer love. Never, too, had Marco Fiore experienced a greater passion, or a larger sense of subjugation to a creature beloved.

Sometimes, however, passion in its violence seemed odious to him, and he would gaze at Maria with eyes sad and stern but still passionate, and he would speak to her shortly and commandingly, while his strong hands would press her soft hands so roughly as almost to cause her pain.

Then she would become silent, biting her lips to prevent a cry, and bowing her head as if conquered and crushed.

Long indeed were the silences of the lovers, and gladly were their lips dumb, as if words were useless to their understanding and thoughts weighed heavily on their hearts, or as if they felt it was profoundly dangerous to give life to their thoughts with a word. They remained side by side in their room in the Grand Hotel on the Grand Canal, silent and absorbed. Sometimes they stood together on the small marble balcony watching the canal winding among the magnificent palaces towards the _Salute_, with joined hands and fingers interlaced, and watched for a long time the bizarre reflections of the water changing colour beneath the light of the sky, always silent and oppressed. On the occasions when the gondola carried them in long excursions, left to the choice of the gondolier, to the more solitary canals and islands, Marco became more imperious in his lover’s exactions. If Maria drew aside from him even for a minute, he called her back with a sudden and almost angry gesture; if she had a bunch of flowers in her belt he snatched them one by one, kissed them, and threw them into the water, and he would continually take her handkerchief and gloves and press them to his face and lips.

They spoke seldom and subduedly, just their names, or a monosyllable uttered questioningly and repeated with an acquiescent nod and dropping of the eyes. Their passion, even in its greatest flame, was collected and gloomy, and just as they were not exuberant in words they were not exuberant in smiles. No puerile happiness or youthful gaiety enlivened its intensity. Their passion seemed greater than they could endure, heavy and crushing in its force and vigour, and their souls and heart were too little to contain it; or its secret violence and immeasurable power seemed to surprise and dispirit them every instant, as if they were ignorant of its origin and end. Every now and then Maria, as if she could no longer endure his intense glances, placed her hands over Marco’s eyes, as against the light of the sun which vivifies and yet blinds, and sometimes he returned the gesture, placing his hand on her ruby mouth, to stop her rare words and continuous kisses, as if his fibres were relaxing beneath the ideal and sensual caress which was consuming him. Their memories, too, were wrapped in a veil, or they would have remembered their first journey; their flight in which in a thousand forms of joy their cry of liberty had broken out, in which a thousand smiles carelessly adorned their day, in which the song of the simplest and purest jollity overflowed their mornings, and the laugh which closed their day and sent them deliciously to sleep.

They remembered none of that. This other love, silent, without jests, without songs, without smiles; this turbid and gloomy love resembled a spell-bound spiritual imprisonment, a magical slavery of the senses, and a tyrannous voluptuousness which filled them with madness and deadly intoxication.

Their reason for leaving Rome was never mentioned by them. Perhaps once or twice the woman wished to allude to it, but immediately, pale with anger and jealousy, the man had cried out--“No!”

And he closed her again to his breast, where his heart beat as tumultuously as on the day in which he had nearly seen the hand of Emilio Guasco, her husband, take her hand in the shade and lead her away. Very often such pallor and such fury passed over Marco’s face as to give a greater clearness and heat to the flame of love. Often, too, when she seemed thoughtful and absorbed, and her soul was slipping away from the place and altar of passion he would lean over her, and, seized again by the madness of that day, would embrace her fiercely, and his breath on her forehead seemed as if it wished to devour the thought which was going towards Rome.

She understood at once, and exclaimed passionately--

“No, Marco, no!”

Then Marco would stammer a question brokenly in a monosyllable.

“Mine? Mine?”

“Thine! thine!” she answered, looking at him.

Nothing more. Nothing more than these two words, so monotonous, intense and inexorable. Not another demand, not another reply; not a promise, not an oath. The words of possession: thine and mine. The length of this delirium and the passing of time left no impression on their minds. Others counted their days by their troubles or pleasures, not so Marco and Maria.

Four weeks had fled on a day at the end of July when, one morning, Maria rising from the old-fashioned chair, approached a table, and, taking a pen, dipped it in the ink as if to write. Then she trembled at her act, which drew her back to the fiery circle of her love, and she looked at Marco. He had seen all without showing surprise. Then she heard his voice, that voice of other times, a little tired, a little veiled, letting fall a question almost of politeness, but without any interest in a reply--

“Are you going to write, Maria?”

A fit of trembling caused her to hesitate. He did not notice her disturbance as his eyes were lowered. She sat down to write. But the tumult within her was so strong that her hand traced mechanically meaningless signs. Maria had no one to write to, and did not know what to write. Her hand fell upon the paper, and she bent her head. Still he noticed nothing.

“Marco?” she asked, in the cold clear voice of former times, “Marco, what is the matter?”

And truth was evoked from the depth of the man’s soul. Truth said simply and cruelly: “I am tired.”

So it was all that memorable day. Maria saw in Marco Fiore’s face nothing but an unspeakable weariness. On the marble balcony above the silver-grey water which he was looking at, his weariness lent a leaden colour to his lips and eyes, and a dense pallor to his face. A sad wrinkle of exhaustion was at each corner of his mouth. Again she asked, “Are you tired?”

Again he replied, cruelly and monotonously, “I am tired.”

She saw him stretch himself on the soft black cushions of the gondola, as if he wished to stay there for ever. He did not look to see if she was beside him and shut his eyes as if asleep, but without sleeping, nor did he issue from that silence and stupor till they landed from the gondola at the Palazzo Ferro. When at night he retired, after touching her hair with the lightest of kisses, when later in her soft night-garments she went to see him asleep, she stopped near the bed. Horrible sight! Marco was sleeping heavily, with his head buried in the pillows just as if it was his last sleep, and all his face was decomposed in its fatigue and pallor, even the lips were white beneath the moustaches, and his forehead had a crease of weariness and bitterness. Too long, indeed, did she gaze at that sight, and drink in its poison with her soul and eyes. She felt her heart like a stone within her breast, and her soul wound her person like a sharp rock with a tremendous spasm. She felt, too, the floods of bitterness like a poison diffuse themselves through her being. Falling on the bed in her white garments she lapsed into the same lead-like lethargy as her lover.

Of their exhausted forces of desire, of their weary and somnolent bodies, their spent phantasies and arid souls, of this cessation of spiritual life, on the following day, they understood the tremendous truth. They understood how, as in common people, that rude and fierce instinct, which is jealousy, had plotted against them; a jealousy physical and base, taking the appearance of a higher and more ardent love, of a passion larger and more consuming; and how like inexperienced and weak creatures they had been victims of a trivial deception of the senses, abandoning themselves to it, as to a renewing flame of love more youthful and more devouring. The man felt the shame mount to his face for having mistaken the impulse of a vulgar, fatuous, and virile affirmation of possession for a fresher and more vigorous desire of love’s happiness, and he experienced a great repentance for having surrendered to it their hope in a new future for their love. But more supreme was the woman’s shame for having fallen into the net of the senses, she so proud, so modest, and so chaste even in passion. Her sorrow was the more supreme for having ever believed that love can be reborn from its ashes.

For a day they hated and despised themselves as never before. For a day they hated themselves fiercely. Then that shadow, that coldness, and that boredom ruled over them, whose signs they had piously hidden in Rome, but which at last in Venice they no longer dared conceal.

VI

“Spello, October....

“Dearest Maria,

“Since you as ever appear to me what you are, a creature of truth, and since you tell me briefly and honestly--and in reading I almost seem to hear your voice--‘Marco, our dream is over,’ I ought to elevate my spirit to your moral height where a lie is impossible, and repeat loyally, ‘Maria, our dream is over.’ It was beautiful. No meanness disturbed its violent grandeur, no weakness spoiled its power, no hypocrisy disturbed its purity, and we indeed preferred to break the social knot rather than loosen it miserably. Moreover, we preferred to give a single sorrow to others rather than inflict ridicule and humiliation on them every day, and we preferred to exile and isolate ourselves than drag deception and fraud from drawing-room to drawing-room, from home to home. We lived so impetuously and ardently in a fulness and richness of life, which, darling Maria, neither of us will ever find again, which ought not to be found again because certain destinies have but one existence. Ours is past and the dream is ended. Nothing remains for us except the enduring memory of its beauty and intensity.

“We believed this dream to be eternal; we believed that it would have led us hand in hand together, full of desire and hope, even to the hour of death. Such is the measured small eternity of man! Not even was this true, not even was this modest cycle of years, modest compared with Time, just the life of a man and a woman, given to our dream. The hours, days, and years were limited, not by us, not by our enthusiasm, not by our anxiety, but by the laws of passion themselves, those immutable laws, alas! which each believes he can change, which each hopes to elude, and by which we are all dominated.

“Adored Maria, you have had from me all the love which a young man, impassioned and sincere, can give to an adorable woman such as you are; but love is a brief matter, with a brevity which frightens all desolate and tender souls, all faithful hearts and feeling fibres. He who says that he desires only one woman for all his life, either deceives or is deceived. We wished to be constant, faithful, and tenacious of our love, but it escaped us fatally, every day increasingly, till our devastated and cold hearts felt that that love had vanished, because thus it must be, since it is the law; since this brevity is the essential condition of its force and beauty, and this brevity is the reason of its perfidious fascination. We have loved each other, dearest Maria, for three years. A cynic would tell you that they are many, that they are too many--three years. But remember that a cynic always conceals a soul desolated by the reality of things. I shall tell you that the time has been just what it had to be, and, in telling you this, how my heart overflows with an intense bitterness against love’s fall, against the misery of this sentiment and its fugacity. Otherwise I had hoped, lady mine, otherwise we had hoped together. We believed, too, and feared that unhappiness and sorrow would have come to us from outside, from those whom we had abandoned, from laws which we had violated, from society which we had offended. Instead, all the inconsolable sadness of this moment comes from ourselves, from our dead souls, from our dead hearts and senses, where our love has lived, but from whence it has disappeared, leaving colourless ashes which the wind will carry away. Maria, how I should like to rise against myself, against my mortal weariness and indifference. I should like to galvanise my spirit, resuscitate this corpse, and I torture myself in vain, while tears of useless anger course my cheeks. Maria, I am dying through not loving you, but I cannot live to love you.

“O dear Maria, I hope you love me no longer. So it should be. Do you remember our first meeting, in a box at the theatre, one evening when the music of love and torture was filling the house--_Les Huguenots_? Do you remember the first long devouring glance in that box, and the first expressive pressure of the hands, as if they could not disentangle themselves? We loved each other at the same instant. We both abandoned ourselves to the vortex which was engulfing us, and neither hesitated. Neither dragged the other into the delirious circle of passion. Together we gave ourselves, blind, mute, conquered and infatuated. Both, without the one suggesting it to the other, decided to live alone, free, obscure, ignored and forgotten, and neither, in flying from everything, trembled at the mad plan or hesitated. So, Maria, I not only hope but believe that you do not love me.

“In your house of love, lady mine, in that house where the magnificent flower of our passion sprouted and sent forth its celestial perfumes, in that house, which alone of the dream will remain uncancellable in our minds as the house of the most beautiful dream of our lives, I know you are weeping in despair because you no longer love me. I see you weeping about your barren heart, about your exhausted soul, your spent desire, about everything where love is dead. I see sighs swell your throat, and your head fall convulsively on your pillow.

“It is the same with me, Maria; just the same. Never was love born with such consent, never did love live in such equality, and never did love so disappear from two conquered and fettered beings.

“Oh, if I had to think differently, Maria, I should kill myself! If I had to believe that this death of love had only struck me, and that while I no longer had the spark to give light and heat you were still burning; if I had to see you still in love with a man who no longer loved you, if this moral inferiority had to strike me, if I alone had to appear deserted by love, inept to love, inept to feel through my personal weakness of mind--Maria, Maria, I should kill myself. How could I live longer, near to you, far from you, loving you no more while you still loved me, inflicting on the dearest, best, most beautiful of women, upon her who alone for three years has seemed a woman to me, my indifference?

“Maria, write to me, swear to me that you love me no more. I can’t bear the thought that you may still be burning with love for me; I can’t bear the thought of grieving you with the dumbness of my mind. Maria, I owe to you three years of perfect happiness. You have beautified my existence with every grace and charm of yours. You have lavished all the treasures of your heart with a generosity and magnificence which has no equal. You have given me all yourself, and I have known what exaltation a man can enjoy without dying of too much joy. And for this, my lady, gentle and proud, for all this that I owe you I cannot give you a sorrow which has not its equal, that of loving still when one is not loved. Swear that your desolation is only for the dream which has vanished in you as in me; that your tears are of an infinite bitterness for love and not for me; that I am as a brother in sorrow and not a fickle and forgetful lover; that you can think of me without a shock, but with sadness for things which are extinct; that nothing glows in you; that your blood is without fever, and your phantasy is without visions--_that you are like me_.

“And now, Maria, you have my life and your own in your hands, and not only these two lives: because in the step which you boldly and nobly took in abandoning the conjugal roof and your husband, in renouncing your splendid social position, and above all your intact virtue, you lost much more, and to many you lost all; because although in this union of passion we have both been happier than any others in such a union have ever been, you appear as my victim, and such perhaps you will be according to the judgment of the world. You, Maria, brave and good, have to decide what is to become of me, of you, of the others.

“I am at your feet to obey you blindly, and do you take me by the hand and show me the road we ought to traverse, either separated or together. Whatever may be the moral sacrifice you ask of me to save you, I am ready to make it with enthusiasm. You have to order me to live or to perish, and I shall live as you wish; I shall perish by the death you choose.

“So much I ought to do for you, darling Maria, who threw away everything to love and follow me, who looked not behind and sacrificed yourself to passion. Show me the way, lead it wherever it may; it is your task, and always was your task.

“You know, you only know what is necessary. I have lived so madly in our dream that I have forgotten everything, and am now in life like an ignoramus, like a confused and disquieted child unable to avoid hesitation and to have a will. Be my will, you who are stronger than I. You have always been the stronger because you possess a virtue that is lacking in me, which is pride, that lofty and shining guide, which can be cruel yet is always lofty. You, Maria, know what is necessary, and you ought to impose it on me, after having imposed it on yourself. I shall be like matter in your hands and all will be well, since it will have been willed by you, and done by you, creature of strength, of goodness and beauty, sustained by your shining beacon, your pride.

“Tell me all and show me the way. In following your commandments, the bitter tears which I shed for our dream will become slower and rarer, that mortal sadness which falls on those who have lost somebody or something dear to them will little by little be conquered. The immense bitterness will grow less because I shall have done my duty towards you who have been my happiness, and towards the love which has been the reason of my being. Restore to me, Maria, the consciousness of being a man worth something. Show me my duty, and cause even this last gratitude towards you to be born in my spirit. Cause it that I owe you all my good, even this last of which I am ignorant, though it will be something just and worthy of you, since it comes from you, Maria, blessed to-day, and how I shall bless you for ever, even till my death.

“Marco Fiore.”

This is the reply which reached Marco Fiore at Spello immediately.

“Rome, October....

“Marco, I swear that I no longer love you. Come at once, and I will tell you all that is necessary.

“Maria Guasco.”

VII

A strong, cold, almost wintry wind was blowing through the streets of Rome on an afternoon of late October, and a low sky with a mass of whitish-grey clouds was hanging over the semi-circle of the Esedra di Termini. Little whirlwinds of dust rolled from the Esquiline and the Viminal towards ancient Rome, while dead leaves issuing from the gardens of the suburban villas, gyrating, and small squares, still rolled along.

Marco, who had just arrived, trembled with cold, as he crossed on foot the little distance which separated the Stazione di Termini from Santa Maria Maggiore. In spite of his courage, which he knew had been inspired by the soul of Maria Guasco, a dumb fear agitated him, a fear of the present, a fear of the future. He was experiencing the agonising terror of life, when in certain supreme moments a man seems conquered by all the hostile forces within and without him. However, he did not hesitate a moment to enter the villa. He went towards his destiny with a soul in trepidation but with a firm step. The profound faith which he had in Maria’s heart, a faith experienced apart from passion and love, alone sustained him, and once again he sought from her the source of his strength in the hour of sorrow and torment.

But when she appeared, and he understood that he was seeing her for the last time, dressed as she was in black, so exquisite, so noble in her mourning, so disdainfully proud as she looked at him with a glance of intense sorrow, his heart was tormented with an immense desolation, and holding and caressing her hands like a child, he wept bigger tears than he had ever wept. Holding his hands in hers and sitting beside him Maria wept without sobs, and her tears coursed silently down her face while she bowed her head in silence, as if unable to pronounce a single word.

“Everything is finished, Maria, everything,” sighed Marco.

She was silent. Her tears ceased the first, but her face was composed in a febrile pallor. He kept lamenting brokenly, “Finished, all is finished,” like the burden of a death agony. Slowly their embrace relaxed. For some moments they found nothing to say. But again her pale worn face agonised his heart.

“Maria, I have loved you deeply!” he exclaimed.

“I know it,” she replied gravely. “Your love has given sun to my life, and its reflection and warmth will remain with me till death.”

“I shall never love a woman again like you, Maria, who have been all mine,” he said desolately.

“None, Marco,” continued Maria, lowering her eyelids to hide the expression of her eyes, “and so it ought to be.”

“I shall never forget you, you who have been all my ardour and sweetness,” he added, still desolately.

“You ought not to forget me, dear love of mine, you ought not to.”

“Well then, Maria, why is everything ended?”

“For this reason,” she replied enigmatically.

“I want to love you all my life passionately.”

“It isn’t possible, it isn’t possible. Love doesn’t last for life. Life is so long, love is so short.”

“Oh, what sadness, Maria! what sadness! I shall never console myself.”

“I too shall never console myself, Marco, never.”

Again they were silent, desperate and bowed down beneath their fate, as if separated by an iron wall and divided in soul, incapable of passing over or breaking down that wall. They felt as well the weight of time which was falling on their heads, and the mortal tedium which was enveloping them in that so far profitless conversation.

He felt the uselessness of tears and words, and with a renewal of life said--

“What shall we do, Maria?”

“Our duty,” she replied severely.

“To whom have we a duty to fulfil, Maria? To what?”

“We have a duty first of all to ourselves, Marco. And that is to live in truth and liberty of soul. Since our love is ended and our dream of happiness is _over_, let us not lie an instant longer, and separate.”

“For ever, Maria?”

“For ever, Marco.”

“Shall I never see you again, my friend?”

“I shall not see you, and you will not seek me. We will fly as far as we can and ought from each other.”

“That is very cruel, Maria.”

“Yes, it is very cruel, but it has to be done.”

“I shall suffer very much, because, apart from passion and love, you are very dear to me.”

“You are very dear to me, my friend,” she added, with a fresh veil of sorrow in her voice, “but it is necessary.”

“But what will become of me, Maria? Tell me. What will become of me? What shall I do? Where shall I go to lie me down? How will my life go on? Where shall I tie it that the knot does not come undone?”

She did not reply at once. Her eyes were closed as if to concentrate her thoughts, and her mouth was firm as if to close her words; her hands, loaded with jewels, were crossed over her knees in a familiar gesture.

“Maria, Maria, I have come purposely to ask you this, because you ought to tell me, because I do not know and you do. What will become of me without you? What shall I do with my soul? What shall I do with my days? Maria, think of me. Succour me, my friend, my sister, source of all my comfort. Tell me, tell me.”

A shadow of a smile, a bitter shadow of a smile, traced itself on Maria Guasco’s lips at the uneasiness of the man’s convulsed conscience.

“Well,” she said, softly and slowly, “after doing our duty towards ourselves in separating, we have to accomplish it towards others, Marco.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked him squarely in the eyes, and said--

“You will marry Vittoria Casalta, Marco.”

“No.”

“You will marry her; she loves you.”

“I don’t love her.”

“What does it matter? Thousands of marriages are made so. She has loved you for years, and you were betrothed. You have betrayed her. She has waited, and she is a patient creature. She has waited, and, see, she was right to wait.”

“I can’t marry her with a heart devastated by passion, with an unconsolable regret.”

“Marco, hearts are healed. Yours will heal. Regrets go to sleep at the bottom of the soul, and one day you will wake up consoled. You ought to marry Vittoria Casalta.”

“Ought I to?”

“You ought to. She has suffered for you. She doesn’t deserve to suffer. She is good, they say; I don’t know. Anyhow, she has suffered. Since your heart is empty, and your spirit has no goal, since your soul has no pasture, fill your heart with charity towards a sufferer, give an affectionate scope to your existence, create a pleasing duty of reparation, and heal the wounds you have made by marrying Vittoria Casalta.”

Maria spoke in a low voice, slowly, but suggestively and persuasively. Marco’s face grew paler and his lips were white. He recognised that an immense effort was uplifting her courage to say all that she was saying, and he regarded her with profound admiration as he touched her hand lightly to kiss it, which he did almost timorously. A cry escaped his breast.

“Maria, I can’t be happy with Vittoria Casalta.”

“You can’t be; that is true. You have been happy, too happy perhaps. You can’t be happy again. And what does it matter? Content yourself in giving happiness to her who has suffered so much for you. That is a great deal.”

“That will not suffice for me, Maria.”

“You want too much from life, Marco,” she said, shaking her head; “you must give something instead. Vittoria Casalta has suffered secret torture for three years. You ought to marry her to sweeten her existence and render her happiness.”

He became silent and thoughtful, and she, who was used to reading almost the ideas of his mind on his forehead, saw the doubt there.

“Vittoria desires nothing else but to pardon you and open her arms to you, Marco.”

He looked at her, but did not reply. An almost definite silence fell between them. This part of their conversation was concluded. It seemed as if there was nothing else to be said; that they understood each other. Marco was the first to express this feeling.

“And you, Maria?”

“I, Marco?”

“Yes, you. What will you do?”

She shrugged her shoulders in an act of complete indifference, and did not reply.

“Will you return to your husband?”

“I shall return,” she said coldly.

“Will you return willingly, Maria?” he exclaimed sorrowfully, but without a trace of anger in his voice.

“Not willingly. I am going to return because I ought to.”

“Won’t you suffer in returning? Tell me, Maria.”

“I shall suffer, that is true,” she declared precisely, “but I ought to suffer, it seems. I have been intoxicated with happiness and liberty, my friend. One pays for such things. Here I am ready to pay.”

“How will you live with him?”

“As I can. I shall do my best, and shall try to do my duty. Emilio, too, has suffered through my betrayal. In returning to him I must do what I can to make him forget his suffering.”

“But you don’t love him.”

“I don’t love him, and I can’t love him again. I am exhausted. My heart has lived as much as it can, and it can do no more. But I can, however, have great pity for him, great sweetness, and great friendship to make him forget the torture I have inflicted on him.”

Again, before the force of energy which was exalting her and with which she was struggling, Marco felt a great emotion invade him, a melancholy enthusiasm for the moral martyrdom which she was enduring, and forgot his own immense pain. And anew a lament escaped his lips.

“Poor Maria!”

“Ah, pity me, pity me; you are right!” she cried, twisting her hands in agitation, “I am an unfortunate.”

“We are two unfortunates!” he exclaimed, taking her to his arms and kissing her on her hair and eyes.

She repelled him, and drying her tears composed herself.

But he, as he felt the moments of their last meeting flying, and the unsupportable pain of a farewell which was rending his soul, resisted the more.

“Maria, Maria, let us remain together, I implore you.”

“No, Marco, no.”

“I can’t live without you, my love.”

“You deceive yourself.”

“I see myself dying if I leave you, Maria.”

“You deceive yourself.”

“I still want you. I want you always.”

“You deceive yourself.”

“I love you, Maria. I swear it; I love you.”

“You lie!” she cried, with a voice vibrant with anger and with a heightened complexion.

“I love you, I love you,” he cried more weakly.

“You lie! You lie!”

“I love you,” he murmured, with lowered eyes.

“Have you understood that you are lying?” she said. “Be silent.”

So all was ended. Even this last rebellion of Marco’s soul evaporated, leaving him cold and dumb. His very torment, given its supreme grief, seemed to quieten into torpor. The large emotions which he had just experienced left him exhausted with a disgust of himself and life. White and done up he lay upon the sofa scarcely noticing the woman at his side. She herself, spent by the long spiritual struggle maintained with herself and him, lay with closed mouth, her beautiful chestnut hair with its deep shining waves had fallen about her neck, and her head had fallen forward listlessly. Each was far away, full of thought and sorrow for the new life so uncertain and doubtful which was presenting itself to their gaze, and each was trying to read the unknown words of their new fate.

Both felt themselves in the great obscurity to be without energy, to have spent everything, to have lost all in the high crisis of detachment.

How long this sad absorption lasted they did not know.

It was already dusk when Maria started, and desired that everything should be ended fittingly between them. Silently she rose and giving him her hand led him into the bedroom, to the room which had been theirs. Near the bed, upon a background of dark-blue velvet, an old crucifix of yellowish ivory was hanging, and the face of the Martyr was full of profound and yet serene sorrow.

She looked at the Christ who had died for love and duty, for the desire of the salvation of every suffering soul.

“Do you remember, Marco, we did not dare to invoke the blessing of Maria, the most pure, on our love, but before Him who understood all and pardoned all, who was God, but was also man, who sees all, and who raised all to heaven, we asked Jesus to consecrate our knot?”

“Yes, Maria,” he murmured, regarding the anguished but tranquil face of the Son of man.

“Before Him we united ourselves for life and death. I obtained your promise of love and fidelity, Marco.”

“I have kept it, Maria.”

“It is not our fault if the knot is undone, if our eternity has only lasted three years. That is outside us, Marco. But we were faithful, and if love has deserted us it means that life is fleeting, and that human forces are weak. We were as faithful as we could be. I have loved you, Marco, above everything and everybody.”

“And so have I loved you, Maria.”

“Well, let us release ourselves to-day before Him, suffering profoundly, but knowing that we have done what is possible to be worthy of our passion, having never lied, having never deceived. Let us release ourselves, suffering like Him, but with the knowledge that this suffering is not useless, dedicating it as we do to the consolation of others, to the happiness of others.”

“Let it be so, Maria,” he said piously.

They stood a little in silence before the crucifix, as if praying mentally. A sigh escaped Maria Guasco’s tired bosom.

“I shall keep all I have of yours, Maria,” he murmured in a weak and tremulous voice, “I could never separate myself from them.”

“Nor I, Marco.”

In truth their anguish had become unbearable, they had cruelly prolonged their martyrdom.

“Good-bye, Marco!” she exclaimed almost inaudibly, bending her head on his shoulder.

“Good-bye, Maria,” he said, with a short but almost frenzied embrace.

“_Toujours_, _toujours_, Marco,” she said once again brokenly.

“_Toujours_, Maria, _toujours_,” he replied desperately.

Then he left.

She heard nothing. She knew about herself, about the whole world revolving in its immense concentration around her, but every sense of persons, of space, and of time was ignored by her for several hours in that deserted room. When she awoke from this long absence from life, she found nothing within her but bitterness, such a great bitterness that it seemed as if her body and soul had been poisoned for ever. Since all that had seemed lasting to her and alone worthy to be lasting was dispersed and finished with, since the only lofty outstanding reason of life--love--was ended, she felt a nauseating disgust of that mediocre thing, existence, with its false and fugitive sensations.

Marco went as one mad through the streets of Rome, already gloomy with falling night, and swept by chilly winds beneath the low nocturnal clouds. For some time he wandered aimlessly, like a dead leaf detached from a tree, and felt himself dispersed in the shadowy cold and solitude. He felt it useless to call for aid, since the only thing which could succour him--love--was dead. He felt that he too was dead, and that he could never rise again.

Part II

The Pardon

I

Whisperings, now slow now more frequent, filled the top of the church dedicated to Santa Maria del Popolo, where the guests invited to the wedding were gathered before the high altar, while the rest of the large central nave preserved the usual solitude and silence of Roman temples. Around the high altar were placed large clumps of palms, and white azaleas with such a wealth of bloom that they seemed as white as snow, without the shadow of a leaf between flower and flower. Some soft dark carpets descended from the altar as far as the first row of seats. The rest of the church, the greater part of it, which it would have been vain to decorate, kept its cold, marbled, and imposing aspect.

Now and then the guests, politely restraining their impatience, turned towards the great door, which was open to the limpid spring sky, to watch if the couple, already late, had arrived. Compared with the vastness of the church, and in spite of their large numbers, they seemed a very small group near the high altar in an oasis of plants and flowers.

All the relations of Casa Fiore were there, together with the Casalta, who are not Romans but Neapolitans, of remote Neapolitan origin but living in Rome for two or three generations. Many had come from the outskirts of Rome, from Umbria and Campania, to be present at the marriage of Marco Fiore and Vittoria Casalta, a marriage so resisted by fate that for a time it had seemed quite broken off, but which had at last become a reality. There was much whispering over the strange story, the lateness of the couple, and the great size of the church.

“How has the bridegroom behaved during this second betrothal?”

“Perfectly.”

“Is he very much in love?”

“Full of affection.”

“Enamoured?”

“With ideal delicacy.”

“How large this church is!”

“But beautiful.”

“The church of Lucretia Borgia, is it not?”

“Certainly. You know that Gregorovius has rehabilitated Lucretia?”

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Very cold; I would gladly go out.”

“Oh, they’ll come, they’ll come.”

“They are thirty-five minutes late.”

“Do you think that a lot? At the marriage of Giovanella Farnese we had to wait nearly an hour.”

“What bad form; don’t you think so?”

“Is it true that the bride is very happy?”

“Diamine! Hasn’t she waited four years for the faithless one!”

“Only patient women are right in this world.”

“Does she show her happiness? I want to see her face as she comes into church.”

“You will gather nothing from it; you know that Vittoria is most reserved.”

“Too reserved; she is icy, like this church.”

“But why not have the marriage in Santa Maria della Vittoria? It is a small church and beautiful.”

“It belongs to Casa Colonna, and the Colonna reserve it for their own marriages.”

“Hush! Hush! Here they come!”

Suddenly the whispering ceased; the notes of the organ sounded, heavy and sonorous, waking all the echoes of the church. It was an organ placed up above, on the epistle side of the altar, and the organist was invisible from below. He ought to have been signaled to, for from his invisible hands on the stops escaped the profound and solemn melody of Beethoven’s wedding march, so that every one rose to their feet to honour the bridal pair, who surely had reached the church door at that moment, to be accompanied on their procession to the high altar by Beethoven’s music, which is a noble greeting and invitation, the expression of fine desire, and the satisfaction of a strong and calm affection.

The well-known notes rolled along among the arches of Santa Maria del Popolo. The guests stood silent and attentive behind their seats, but still no one entered. The march continued in its beauty and gravity; the tones grew less and were extinguished. Silence reigned again. With a noise somewhat louder and whisperings a little stronger, the guests--the Ottoboni, Savelli, Farnese, Aldrobrandini, Caracciolo del Sole, Carafa--reseated themselves. The top of the church took more than ever the familiar appearance of a drawing-room. Groups were formed and seats were turned round; there was even a little laughter. In the midst of the general distraction the couple and their escort quite suddenly passed up the church and reached the high altar, greeted by none and unaccompanied by the music.

“That’s an entry missed!” exclaimed Gianni Provana, with a slight and amiable grin.

* * * * *

In the white cloud of her satin dress and in the fleecy white cloud of her veil, the bride knelt at a _prie-dieu_ of brown carved wood on which had been placed a cushion of dark-red velvet. On this cushion she placed her bouquet of orange-blossoms with its long white satin ribbon, and while the religious rite proceeded read from her Prayer-book, a little book bound in white and silver brocade; and her blonde head was slightly bent as she read. The bridegroom was kneeling beside her at another _prie-dieu_, also with bent head, thoughtful and collected. The Fiore have a long reputation for religious piety in the family, and perhaps conquered by the moment he was praying like a Christian to his God.

After the function had begun he glanced two or three times at Vittoria almost questioningly, for according to Italian tradition he had not led her to the altar. As she had no father alive she had been brought by her eldest brother, and at the house he had only exchanged a rapid greeting in the presence of everybody. Marco looked at his bride to read her thoughts and measure her emotions, but Vittoria’s face, in its indefinably white and virginal purity, had the virtue of never, or scarcely ever, revealing the secret which was weighing on the mind. She kept her eyes bent over the pages of her Prayer-book, and, as she repeated the words of the prayers, her delicate and sinuous lips, accustomed to silence and mystery, scarcely seemed to move.

The special moment arrived. Interrupting the Mass, after the first Gospel, before the Elevation, the celebrant turned to the couple and summoned them to him. They rose from their knees, and mounted the two steps of the sanctuary, where they prostrated themselves. Fabrizio Ottobone, the master of the ceremonies, placed himself beside them, a tall, thin old man, with flowing whiskers, and in spite of his age a very good figure. The usual form of marriage rite proceeded very slowly. Vittoria’s right hand was still gloved, and at a word whispered in her ear by Fabrizio Ottobone, she tried to take the glove off quickly. Not succeeding she tore at it and stripped it off her fingers, and at last the little right hand was stretched on that of Marco Fiore’s. The priest pronounced the sacred words which demand the assent of the man and the woman, and when obtained he declared them united in the name of God. The little hand was closed in Marco’s; he felt it tremble like a leaf. He pressed it in vain, as if to give it the strength of a promise and the support of an oath, and yet the little hand trembled incessantly.

Marco looked at his wife intently. On her pure face, in every beautiful line, in the fold of the fine taciturn mouth, and in the limpid and clear eyes he read in a flash such anguish mixed with hope; he read there anxiety, uncertainty, and fear, so that all his man’s heart filled with pity for her loving, suffering, and fearing. An immense pity welled in his heart, and not being able at that moment to speak a single word to her, he bent his head and prayed with all his might to have the power to console the woman who loved him.

Meanwhile, after completing the nuptial union, the priest stepped back to the altar to continue the Mass, and the couple, now bound for life, returned to their places. The organ again played music well known to all feeling souls. After the first chords from the invisible organist had sounded a cantor took his place, also invisible, but whose sonorous voice diffused itself throughout the church, and was listened to with a sigh of satisfaction by those who recognised the sympathetic timbre of a well-known tenor. He sang the _aria di chiesa_ of Alessandro Stradella. It is a prayer offered to a God of clemency and mercy, but it is one of those musical prayers more vibrant in its mortal sadness than the human voice in its emotional notes can pour forth. With the complacency of an artiste, and perhaps with sincerity, the famous singer lent to the lament of Stradella an emphasis more sorrowful and harrowing than ever. The listeners were taken and subdued by it. Some turned anxiously to the organ; several women in particular became pale with emotion, and their eyes were clouded by tears.

Behind her soft veil Vittoria Casalta let her tears fall silently one by one down her cheeks, nor did she make the slightest attempt to dry them, and only Marco could see that silent weeping. He leant towards her a little.

“Vittoria, don’t cry.”

She made no reply, only a slight movement of the hand to ask his silence, to ask him not to bother about her crying. He became silent. But up above the unseen, but not unknown, singer kept on singing passionately the prayer, so singular for a wedding-day, with its peculiar and painful words: “_Pietà, Signore, di me dolente._” Again all hearts were touched and all souls secretly struck, for there were in that society, rich and almost scintillating with exterior happiness, and among those exquisitely dressed women covered with jewels, many who had suffered, and all such felt the power of the melody, where the soul cries to her God in waves of agony.

The bride continued to weep silently.

“Vittoria, you must not cry!” murmured Marco Fiore softly, but with virile energy in his low voice. She made a slight nod of obedience; gradually her tears dried, and her face became composed. Stradella’s air was finished, the song gave forth its last sobs, and silence reigned again. But in the silence there was a sigh of bitterness from some breast still oppressed; among the rest almost a feeling of relief and a subdued whispering.

“What a singer, that Varisco!”

“Divine.”

“He makes such an impression on me.”

“That air of Stradella’s is so beautiful.”

“But what an idea to sing such an air at a marriage!”

“It is sung everywhere.”

“But it is too, too sad.”

“Do you think matrimony such a gay matter?”

“Does this seem to you the moment to say such a thing?”

“Well, why did you cry?”

“Crying does one good every now and then.”

“In my time we laughed at weddings.”

“Now we manage better.”

“Be quiet, be quiet, it is the Elevation.”

At a hint which reached him the celebrant hurried the end of the Mass. It was late; the young couple had delayed so much, and the day had been completely disorganised thereby. A baritone sang in haste the _O Salutaris Hostia_, and was scarcely listened to; the special marriage prayers before the second Gospel were said with much rapidity. Every one had the air of wanting to get up and leave even before it was time to do so, since they had been in church nearly two hours. There was a sound of chairs being moved, and even some footsteps resounded on the marble pavement before the end. The procession was again formed at the high altar. This time the bridegroom gave his arm to the bride, and, after having kissed their nearest relations, they descended the steps of the altar together. Marco Fiore’s slightly fragile good looks had for some time assumed a more virile appearance, his physiognomy, which formerly was gracious and sweet with something feminine in it, was composed and settled in an expression of thought and peace. The bride beside him, tall, but not too tall, fairly slender with a white face beneath a shining wave of golden hair, with clear and lively eyes, over which now and then a cloud seemed to pass, with her little mouth like a closed flower, seemed made to be supported and protected by the man. As they proceeded slowly through the church to gather the congratulations and greetings, the organ sounded again for the last time to accompany them out.

It was another march, the one with which the knights and ladies of Thuringia accompanied Elsa of Brabant and Lohengrin, the son of Parsifal, to the nuptial chamber. Involuntarily the procession regulated its step to the rhythm of Wagner’s music, while after it had passed the whispering began again.

“Marco Fiore is always sympathetic.”

“He doesn’t seem exuberantly happy to me.”

“Do you want him to start dancing?”

“How charming the bride is!”

“Poor thing!”

“Why do you pity her?”

“I always pity girls who get married.”

“Yes, she is very pretty, it is true, but I prefer _the other_.”

“The other? Which other?”

“Oh, you know quite well! Maria Guasco.”

“Sst! You might be overheard.”

“No, no; I liked the other very much. She was a woman.”

“Don’t raise your voice.”

“This one is a figure for a picture; I should place her in a frame and leave her there.”

“You are very naughty.”

“Is everything over, then, between Marco and Maria?”

“Everything, for six or seven months.”

“Do you believe in this ending?”

“I? What does it matter what I believe?”

“Poor girl!”

“There! You see I was right to pity her.”

The music, spreading through the large central nave, still followed the bridal couple and the long procession of guests with its sonorous and precise notes. No word passed between them, and they contented themselves with a handshake to the good wishes which accompanied their passage; only at a certain point it seemed to Vittoria as if Marco’s face was troubled by a secret idea crossing his spirit. Suddenly her little white-gloved hand imperceptibly held his arm on which she was leaning, as she asked him with a tremor in her voice--

“Marco, what is the matter?”

“Nothing,” he replied, seized by his secret and obscure thought.

Wagner’s music seemed to exhale a powerful and settled joy which rocked the deep love of Elsa and Lohengrin, and spoke to them of a future of soft and constant passion, even until death. But Marco’s face became more clouded, as if his secret imaginings had mastered him.

“What is the matter, Marco?” Vittoria asked again a little anxiously, holding him back almost at the threshold of the church, as if she was unwilling to proceed further without an explanation.

“It is the music!” he exclaimed, sadly turning his head the other way.

“Ah!” she exclaimed without further comment, becoming exceedingly pale.

Vittoria had to suppose, with her cruel and devouring internal suspicion, that the music brought recollections of a former time to her husband, of other things, of another person. Her fine and tender mouth closed as if sealed hermetically, and she assumed her aspect of a flower dead and closed.

Meanwhile outside the view spread itself beneath the caressing April sun. The bright, fresh, blue vault of the sky arched itself from the Via Flaminia to the grandiose Piazza del Popolo, and far away the cypresses of Monte Mario, from amidst the green of the Farnesina, bathed by the twisting Tiber, hurled themselves against the almost quivering firmament, while on the left rose the Pincio, with its groves already in leaf. The large fountain in the middle of the Piazza del Popolo raised its monumental marbles which time had obscured nobly, while its waters fell back into the basin in soft spray. In the background the three roads which lead to Rome spread out like a fan; the Corso in the middle, the via di Ripetta on the right, and on the left the via del Babuino.

The morning joy was so complete that the Piazza del Popolo and adjoining streets, often so austerely solitary, now showed a great animation with the movement of passers-by and carriages.

Even the newly-married couple, once outside the large and glacial temple and in the fresh air beneath the enchanting vault of the sky, felt a flutter of exaltation raise their hearts, on which life had already left its traces. That atmosphere of gaiety, so like their flourishing youth, encompassed them, and the usual magnificent allurement of the spring drew them and merged them in its gentle and fervid train. Every recollection vanished, all the wounds seemed healed, and together they began to believe again in life. Blushing Vittoria heard the people’s exclamation of admiration as she got into the carriage: her veil thrown back disclosed the white forehead, and a soft smile appeared on her lips.

To the tender pity which Marco Fiore felt for the comely girl he had married a quarter of an hour ago, by the rite which no human hand can dissolve till death, there was united a kind of feeling of masculine pride, a feeling as it were of a great mission to be accomplished worthy of an upright and affectionate heart. Their two hands joined and their glances spoke of a common hope, of a common faith.

The carriage entered the Corso and the ample and exultant view vanished, and only a little narrow strip of cloud appeared between the big austere palaces. They drove towards the Palazzo Casalta in via della Botteghe Oscure. They were silent now. The two hands little by little disentangled themselves naturally from their pressure, nor did they rejoin. Both looked out of the window. As if she were speaking in a dream, Vittoria asked--

“That last wedding music displeased you, Marco?”

He trembled, and replied suddenly, “Yes.”

“Will you tell me why, Marco?”

“Why do you ask so many things, little Vittoria?” he said sweetly; “it doesn’t do to ask so much.”

“Tell me, tell me, Marco,” she insisted anxiously.

“You are like Elsa,” he murmured, shaking his head.

“What did Elsa do, Marco? She loved Lohengrin passionately.”

“Yes, little Vittoria, passionately. But she was not content with loving him without asking anything more. _She wanted to know._”

“Ah!” she exclaimed, growing pale.

“Instead of loving she wanted to know who her spouse was.”

“Wasn’t she right, perhaps?” said Vittoria, trembling a little.

“She was wrong,” replied Marco gravely; “she had to love--that was all--blindly and humbly. Wherefore Elsa’s imperfect and incomplete love led her to deception, to betrayal, and to abandonment.”

Vittoria bit her little lip silently, as if to restrain a secret sigh.

“Haven’t you ever heard Lohengrin, little Vittoria?” murmured Marco, as if speaking to an imaginary being; “at a certain point, in the nuptial chamber, near his loving and faithful wife, the valiant knight discovers the ambuscade of which Elsa is herself an accomplice. Have you never heard, Vittoria, Lohengrin’s lament, deceived and betrayed an hour after the marriage? His dumb cry of delusion and bitterness? The dream of love was over and had vanished. Vittoria, I never could hear that cry without feeling my heart break.”

“That is why, Marco, you suffered when that music accompanied us from the church?”

“That is why, Vittoria.”

“But why was that wedding march played? It is a funeral march, Marco. Why did they play it?” she asked convulsively, bending over him.

“I don’t know,” he replied desolately.

II

After descending from the carriage in the noisy station among the crowd which the train from Florence was pouring forth, Donna Maria hesitated a moment, and behind her soft black veil her eyes seemed to be looking for some one. Her maid, carrying shawls and parcels, stood a few steps away from her. Discovering no one she made a resolute movement and opened a way for herself through the crowd, when a gentleman approached and greeted her, taking her hand to kiss it.

“Welcome, Donna Maria.”

“Good-evening, Provana,” she replied with cold courtesy, “what are you doing here?”

“I have come to meet you,” he said, surprised at the question.

“Very kind of you,” she replied, thanking him with a bow.

She approached the exit with him, followed at two or three steps’ distance by her maid. A servant of Casa Guasco was there; he touched his hat, and inquired after the luggage. Maria drily directed the man to her maid.

“The carriage is here too,” said Gianni fussily.

“You are very kind,” she said.

The great electric lights illuminated the arrival place, and Gianni looked at her intently. The morbid and slightly proud grace of Maria’s face seemed unchanged with its faintly rosy complexion, the large eyes were closed purposely as if absorbed in their interior life. Her undulating figure, even in its simple travelling costume, preserved its fascination. Perhaps her glance was less vivid, and the lines of her face were less decided, nor was the expression of the proud mouth quite so firm, little changes due to fatigue, which in fact gave her an air of languor, new and strangely attractive in her.

She did not speak to Gianni as he accompanied her to the coupé, a new and elegant carriage. Before entering she hesitated slightly, and turned to take leave of him. He bowed politely, and asked--

“Will you allow me to accompany you home?”

“Do you think it necessary?”

“To accomplish my duty,” he affirmed, with veiled insistence.

“If it is a duty, yes,” she consented coldly.

The door was closed on them. By the brightness of the electric light Maria discovered a bunch of flowers in the pocket in front of her.

“Are they yours?” she asked.

“No, I wouldn’t allow myself,” he murmured, with a smile. “They are Emilio’s; he has thought of everything. For several days he has busied himself with nothing but your return.”

“You busy yourselves together, it seems to me,” she said, with a fleeting tinge of irony.

“If you like. Emilio considers me, perhaps unworthily, one of the authors of your return. Is he wrong?”

“He is wrong,” she replied precisely.

A silence fell between them. In spite of his wit and scepticism Gianni Provana always felt the distance at which the woman held him, and the confused repugnance, a repugnance sometimes cruelly apparent, with which he inspired her.

“Because of this false idea of his, then,” resumed Provana, “Emilio wished to organise your return with me.”

“And he sent you to the station?”

“He sent me to the station.”

“It was useless.”

“Ought you to have found no one?”

“I ought to have found Emilio,” she said in a low voice, as if to herself. There was a heavy moment of silence.

“Such a meeting, Donna Maria, in public after what has happened! You understand?” he murmured.

“I understand; be silent,” she rejoined, with a decisive gesture.

For some time the carriage proceeded on its way without either speaking. Perhaps, in spite of his tenacity, hidden under an appearance of graciousness and indifference, the man repented of having been involved in that _histoire intime_, and perhaps the perverse conception he had of life counselled him to be quiet, to be patient, and to wait. It was Maria who resumed the conversation, as the carriage was drawing near its destination.

“Is Emilio in Rome?”

“Yes.”

“Is he at home?”

“He is waiting for you.”

“You will leave me at the house door, Provana,” she added coldly.

“Of course, there is no necessity to order me to do it. I will come to-morrow to greet you.”

“No, Provana.”

“Within a few days, then.”

“The latest possible, and better never.”

“Never is a big word, Donna Maria. Why don’t you want to see me any more?”

“Do you believe that I am what I am, and what I shall always be, a creature of truth? Do you believe that I have come this evening to Emilio Guasco’s home, to my husband’s home, to accomplish a solemn act? Why, then, do you wish me to become a creature of lies? Why, then, do you wish to make grotesque, doubly grotesque, my act of humility, and my husband’s act of pardon.”

“But why ever do you suppose that, Donna Maria?” he asked, a little confused.

“I suppose what is, Provana; that it may please you hugely to be the lover of your best friend’s wife, that it may please you to preserve a friendship with the husband and love the wife; that you have a horror of scandal, of noise, of open and undeniable betrayal; that the miserable and nauseating betrayal of every day pleases you with all its lies and transactions; that for a long time you have known that you wished to do this to Emilio and to me; that no one upset your plan more than he whom you know--and in fact that you have begun to hope again in its success.”

“Every one is allowed to hope for what he ardently desires,” replied Gianni ambiguously.

“I shall only have had one love in my life,” she said, in a clear low voice, “and only one lover. Good-bye, Provana.”

The carriage had driven round the circle of the courtyard of the Guasco Palazzo, in via de’Prefetti, and stopped before the peristyle. Bowing deeply Gianni Provana took his leave, while Maria, preceded by the servants, mounted the stairs very slowly. An inexorable agitation pressed deeply on the soul of the woman who, after the intense love rhapsody in which she had thrown all that was good and bad in her existence as upon a pyre, was retracing her steps and invoking the pardon of him whom she had fatally and unjustly injured. Ah, she would never have returned to the honest, faithful man unless she had seen the magnificent pyre of her passion extinguished, and her life rendered mute and deserted by love!

She had preferred to take time to calm her sorrow, to mature in her conscience the act of remission and humility she had come to accomplish. She had passed five months away from Rome in a villa near Florence, without asking or giving news, and her heart and soul were immersed in a great contrition. They had felt all the weight of the evil done to others, of suffering inflicted undeservedly on the innocent. The sublime idea of reparation had become in Maria so lofty and irrevocable that, at the end of her exile, she was asking to touch the limit of every personal sacrifice, if only to console, heal, and make Emilio Guasco happy again.

In the solitude which she had imposed on herself, in which she had prepared herself for the great work--the greatest and most beautiful work the human soul can accomplish--of giving comfort and happiness, the figure of Emilio Guasco, by his sufferings and the dignity with which he had borne them, and the magnanimity with which he had recalled her to himself, stretching his arms to her in pardon, seemed greater than it had ever been. From the distance Emilio’s love for her seemed immeasurable, since it had resisted betrayal, abandonment, and dishonour. It seemed a different love to her--superior, immovable, eternal, a love which she had never experienced, and, in fact, she felt herself unworthy of having inspired. Contrition was breaking, pulverising, volatilising Maria Guasco’s pride, that secret strength, sin, and virtue of her life.

Slowly she reached the head of the stairs, her heart beating more quickly, as she noticed again the well-known place where she had lived, where again she had to see the well-known face and hear again the familiar voice. She realised that she was holding in her convulsed hand two existences.

Maria had no other feeling as she placed her feet on the threshold of what had been her home, and was to become so again, except that of the humility of the repentant sinner. All her being was humility. She was begging pardon for the sin committed, and for the pardon was offering in exchange the dedication of a soul, the dedication of a life.

In the large ante-room, with its dark-carved panels, the two servants left their mistress, and retired to the other side of the living rooms. Once alone her trembling increased, and she seemed to be falling. Where, then, was Emilio, her husband and judge, her husband and her victim, who had not had the strength to meet her at the station, whom at any rate she had expected to find at the threshold? With an effort of will she kept her step firm, and crossed the drawing-room and the little drawing-room. Both rooms were deserted, and so was her bright boudoir. Where was Emilio? A singular thought crossed her brain, which she rejected as soon as she had accepted it, as she perceived him through the open door of his study, standing by his large writing-table holding in his hand, but not reading, a newspaper. The room was less illuminated than the others, and the lamps were shaded in green, but if it had been inundated with the light of the sun Maria would have noticed nothing, so veiled were her eyes and scattered her senses. However, she advanced towards him, where he was waiting silently for the proper word from her. In spite of her horrible trembling, she turned to him contritely with the sincerest repentance; bending her head and stretching out her hands to him. With a very white face, she exclaimed in unspeakable humility--

“Emilio, I ask your pardon.”

If her knees were not bent nor the body prostrated, the soul was prostrated, waiting for the complete pardon, for the word that absolves, the act that cancels, the gesture that redeems. The woman listened humbly without looking at him.

“I pardon you, Maria,” said the man.

Maria raised her eyes and fixed them on Emilio Guasco, and waited; but he did not look at her, neither did he move. An immense silence, an enormous distance seemed to have come between the man and the woman.

III

After having helped her into a soft white silk robe and laced her shoes, Chiara, the faithful maid, looked at Donna Maria, expecting orders. It was late, past eleven, and as they had been travelling weariness was overwhelming both. After thinking for an instant, Maria said to Chiara--

“Braid my hair.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Chiara, with the slightest movement of surprise. Chiara had forgotten the old custom. Formerly, when she had entered the service of Donna Maria Guasco Simonetti about six months after her marriage, every evening, whether her young mistress went out or not, sometimes even after a theatre or a ball, Chiara had to undo the great thick mass of chestnut hair, taking out the combs and pins, and having combed the magnificent tresses with an almost caressing movement of the brush and comb, she had to gather them into a long plait, tieing it at the end with a white silk ribbon, while a similar ribbon went round the head in a bow on top. This gave Maria an exceedingly young, almost girlish appearance. When Maria had fled from Casa Guasco with Marco Fiore, and had cloistered her life in the little villa at Santa Maria Maggiore, where Chiara followed her in blind devotion and obedience, the tresses were no longer unloosed by the girl’s expert hands and bound in a plait. Such a fashion perhaps no longer pleased Donna Maria, as she remembered the house she had left, or more likely it did not please her lover, whose delight it was to plunge his fingers and face in the soft and odorous waves of her hair.

“Make me a plait like you used to, Chiara,” Maria murmured, with her eyes closed.

With a slight tinkle the small combs and pins fell on the crystal-covered toilette table, and that well-known sound seemed to strike the two women as if the old life had begun again. When she had finished, Chiara searched for a moment among the silver-topped vials and ivory boxes.

“Here is the ribbon,” she said softly.

The white ribbon was there, as if Chiara had left it the evening before and four years had not passed, or as if a mysterious hand had placed the things there as in former times, so that the singular resurrection should seem like a continuation of life. In every particular Maria found this secret care that every line and tint should produce the quiet and persuasive impression of an existence which had had no interruptions, which was pursuing its development without a break, so that to-day was like yesterday, like a year ago or seven years ago, and to-morrow and the day after like yesterday and to-day. Not only had none of the old furniture been moved, not only had the carpets, portières and curtains preserved their usual aspect, but they had not even grown old. Not only did the hundred well-known and familiar objects attract the glance with the sympathetic fidelity of inanimate objects, but they gave more than ever the sense of unelapsed time, of objects viewed no later than yesterday, and to-day found again sympathetically in their place. Maria found again a little antique clock on a small table near her bed, with the hours marked in blue figures, which she had left on her departure and missed. It was ticking lightly and pointed to half-past eleven, as if it had never ceased to go in all the time that had passed. In some vases there were large bunches of grass, and green leaves without a flower, such as she always liked to have in her bedroom, seeking out the grasses most peculiar and delicate in form, and the leaves the most varied in colour and marking. Formerly she did not care for the perfume of flowers in her bedroom, fearing its insidious poison; but the green of gardens and meadows, of fields and mountains, the healthy green of leaves and grasses pleased her simple open spirit, her sane and beautiful youth. The ink was fresh in the pen on the writing-table, just as if her last letter had been written an instant ago, and near by was a book in a dark-green binding, a book unfinished with the marker in its place--_Salammbo_, of Gustave Flaubert.

Thus Donna Maria had the feeling of the abolition of time.

“Does Your Excellency want anything else?” asked Chiara, mechanically uttering the words of formerly which had returned to her memory.

“Nothing, Chiara; good-night.”

In greeting her maid Maria’s voice trembled with tenderness. For seven years she had given all her services to Maria, and little by little had become a friendly and devoted shadow, almost as if she no longer existed for her own personality. In every peculiar contingency of these seven years, without speaking, without murmuring, even without judging or thinking, Chiara had continued to serve and obey--the shadow of Donna Maria.

On this day, profound with diverse and contrary sentiments, she returned with her mistress silently and humbly, like her with a contrite heart, to the house from which they had fled together, from which they had been absent so long, and just as Donna Maria strangely began her life again where it had been interrupted, and time and her deeds had seemed abolished, so the poor little shadow of a Chiara returned to that which had been formerly, naturally and tacitly like a faithful shadow.

IV

When Chiara had disappeared and Donna Maria’s eyes had followed her with a little thrill of affection and gratitude for so much altruism in a service requiring such tact, she settled herself in an arm-chair as of yore. She resumed the novel on Carthage where she had left off, removed the marker methodically from the open page, and fixed her eyes on the printed letters, waiting for Emilio, her husband, to come as he used to.

“He will come now,” thought Maria, as her eyes read about the curious refinements of the attiring of Salammbo, as she sets off for the field of the rebels to seize from Matho the veil of Tanith, which he had stolen.

However, her reading was but short. There arose in her soul a dull agitation, which became stronger there where for a moment it had been lulled, as it seemed to her that nothing had happened, and that her life had had no break in its continuity; so much so that she awoke from the calm and peaceful surroundings, speaking of an uninterrupted serenity from which she had obtained a lingering caress of contentment, as in a dream, only to be confronted with a reality. How could she read? _Salammbo_ slid from her knees to the carpet. She rose to her feet, crossed the large room, approached the closed door and listened if Emilio were coming towards her, as formerly, even if differently to formerly so long as he came to that room which had been theirs for years; that she may confront his eyes, that their glances may unite and melt together, that she may seize his hand and clasp it with hers, that she may remember the gentle way he used to open his arms and close her tenderly to his bosom.

“I will weep on his bosom,” she said to herself, “he will weep with me; nothing is better than weeping when we have to pardon and forget, when we have been pardoned and are invoking forgetfulness.”

However, the silence in Casa Guasco was supreme, and Donna Maria heard no step approaching. The boudoir, which preceded her room, was in half-darkness, lit by a single lamp. On the other side was her husband’s study, where they had met an hour ago, and where he had remained silent without following her. The study door was closed. No noise reached from there.

“He is working, perhaps,” she thought. Then suddenly a contradiction arose. “Working? At what? At this hour?”

Like a spectre Maria re-entered her room, praying for calm against the heavy disturbance which was again oppressing her. She sat at her desk, and pressing her burning forehead in her cool hands, endeavoured to subdue herself, to conquer herself.

Again the sentiment of humility, with which she had mortified her proud heart in the months of solitude and repentance which she had passed at Florence, inundated her soul with pity, with affection, and with loving charity. She thought of the state of Emilio’s heart, on that day on which he had accomplished such a noble and tender deed, pardoning a long and atrocious offence, in which he had given a beautiful proof of magnanimity, receiving again into his home the traitress, the truant, who had broken her sacred promises and vows. She thought of how he must have suffered for four eternal years in the same land, in the same society, having no comfort of any kind, having no children and in a deserted house, and of how he must have cursed his destiny and her name.

She thought of what the pardon he had offered her must have cost him in intense moral pain, and in powerful moral sacrifice, which she had only accepted when it was convenient for her to accept it.

Again, the figure of her husband opposed to her egoism, opposed to her love folly, opposed to the delirium of her own passion, seemed to grow large with goodness, and she felt herself mean and unworthy before him. She felt the need of seeing him, of telling him of her gratitude and her admiration, since he alone possessed every virtue and energy of well-doing, while she was a fragile and fallen creature. Thus in the silence, in her solitude, she evoked the presence of her husband. She invoked that presence, in order that she might tell him how a whole life of devotion would compensate for his heroic pardon.

With fixed eyes Maria stood at the door, all ardour, to see it open after the invocation. Her contracted face spoke of a heavy anguish, her sinuous body in its flowing white gown was alert and rigid with waiting. From not seeing her husband appear, as she had thought, hoped, and desired, she suffered the more from the profound silence of the house, from the desert which the house seemed to have become, from that mortal solitude, but especially from her mortal delusion. She suffered acutely. And it was intolerance of such torturing waiting, in all its moments of repression, that exasperated her; she wished through her imperious will to force the destiny of that long night to change.

“I will go and seek him,” she said to herself. Once having decided she crossed the boudoir, reached the door of the study, where she supposed her husband was closeted, and stooped to knock, even to open it violently. But her raised hand did not obey the movement suggested by her will. Quite apart, her feverish and convulsed brain had inspired her with a shock, with an immense fear.

“Suppose he were to think.... Suppose he were to think....” she murmured to herself almost deliriously.

With scarcely perceptible motion, taking every care not to make the slightest noise, holding her breath, she turned back, palpitating and trembling, yet striving to restrain the palpitation and the trembling. At last she reached her room.

Throwing herself on the bed she hid her face in the pillow, even stopping her mouth with it, so that her sobs of bitterness, of fear, and terror may not be heard. Hers was all the shame of a woman, who suddenly was fated to tell herself the hard and cruel truth that she was still a young and beautiful woman, that the man she had sought was still young and her husband as well, that, although the night was late, he who loved her surely, since only he who loves pardons, had not come to look for her dressed as she was as if for a love tryst; but that she had been on the point of knocking at his door, as if not to beg merely a colloquy of sadness, of repentance, of tears--not a colloquy of two bruised souls which sought spiritual healing for their wounds--but a colloquy of love.

“No, no, no,” she kept on saying, scarcely breathing, with her mouth against the fine linen of the pillow, fighting against the unjust accusation of her conscience.

Unjust! She felt herself perfectly pure from such a transgression, one of those miserable and mean transgressions of the inner feminine life which lower and corrupt a woman even to despising herself. Maria had only had, as she said, one love and one lover only, Marco Fiore, had only lived with a complete and intense passion for the three years of separation from Casa Guasco, and at once, but for ever, her heart and her senses had become a heap of ashes. As she had never wished to divide her soul and her person between Emilio Guasco and Marco Fiore at the time of the height of her amorous delirium, as she had forgotten everything, thrown everything aside to belong to one only, and had burnt in a single flame all that life had conceded her of love for Marco Fiore, so she, on returning home, to live again with her husband, had not for a moment thought that her person ought to be offered and given again as a sensible and tangible pledge, as a holocaust to the new conjugal existence. The idea that her husband hearing her knock at that door, hearing the handle creak, and seeing her appear in her soft garment, with her look of former times, late at night when he had not sought her; the idea that he might have believed it a sensual offering, had aroused in her a tempestuous crisis of shuddering, of shame, and of fear. Ah, how the lover was finished, was dead in Maria Guasco, dead with a love which is measured and short, as short as human existence, far, far shorter than all short affairs of which life is composed and in which man, alas, desires to place his eternity! Love was over, the lover was dead, and Maria Guasco felt every glory of the senses extinguished within her. If her soul and fibres at Venice and Rome had proved the immeasurable and inconsolable sorrow of her own sentimental and sensual impotence for her delightful lover, never more could she have love and a lover--not even her husband, Emilio Guasco.

“God has nullified and calmed me,” she thought, soothing the anguish of her spirit little by little. “I can be faithful to the past since I have been touched by death, and I have entered into an extreme quiet.”

But the man who was breathing, moving, living his unknown but powerful life in a room not far from Maria’s, the man who was the first to clasp her, his legitimate spouse, who had kept for her, even during the betrayal, even during the abandonment, all his rights as a husband; the man of whom Maria knew only this absolute and irrefutable right, was he, too, finished with love and dead to the senses?

Had the years which were passed withdrawn him from the inebriating flatteries of passion? Had they withdrawn him from all the burning impulses of life in its fulness? Was he dead? And if he was not, if he was alive, of what was he thinking, what was he desiring, what was he wishing, what could he wish of Maria at the present moment, now so late?

“He used to love me--he did love me,” she said to herself, lifting herself from her pillow, absorbed in the intensity of her thoughts.

And even now Emilio ought to love her. A feminine instinct told the thoughtful woman this; a precise and clear presentiment repeated it to her, and every act in daily reality had confirmed it for her, and his very magnanimity bore testimony to it.

“Only he loves who pardons,” she thought, in a secret torture which kept penetrating her spirit. The singular torture, that is, of all those who do not love, who are unable to love, who could break their hearts, but who could not place love there, and who, instead, are loved with tenderness and enthusiasm; the torture, that is, which life inflicts on thousands and thousands of miserable men and women, inept to love, who must endure the love of another, endure it coldly, and measure all its greatness without participating in it, and, in fact, feel all its weight, all its annoyance, and all its execration!--an ineffable torture indeed, which up to a certain point sent a rush of fear through Maria’s excited and sensible fibres. Rising to her feet and gazing with scared eyes at the door, she feared lest Emilio should appear there, should come to her enamoured as of yore, even more enamoured, and burning with precipitous desire. Maria in all that spiritual fever which flowed through her acutest feelings, her sharpest sensations, retired to the door of her room and wrung her hands in desperation, not knowing where to fly from such a danger. And just as she had evoked and invoked that presence of a good and honourable man which she had rendered so unhappy, that presence from which she had desired to hear the voice repeat to her the words of pardon, to let herself pronounce afresh those words of humility and contrition, so that presence--not one of a brother, not one of a friend, not of a suffering soul to be consoled and healed--that presence of a man, of a husband, strong in his love, strong in his instincts, strong in his right, seemed to her an abyss of abjection, of perdition, into which she would have fallen with all her pride and all her womanly dignity.

“What shall I do; whatever shall I do?” she exclaimed, as if invoking succour.

But the silence of Casa Guasco was so profound and absolute! Conquering her terror, Maria recrossed the room and mechanically, with the rigid movements of one who obeys her will rather than dispute with it, she left the boudoir and turned the knob of the electric light. The shadow increased in the brightly lit room, and all fell into obscurity. Entering her own room she closed the door without making any noise, but dared not turn the key. Clothed as she was, leaving the lamp lit, she threw herself on the bed, commanding all her exhausted forces to arouse her, all her tired fibres not to abandon her, so much did she fear to fall asleep since some one could enter her room, since she had not had the courage to shut herself in.

Two or three times, in the torpor by which her mind and limbs were conquered, she tossed about and then sat up in bed, only to fall again without having heard or seen anything. Then a deep sleep fell upon her.

V

On entering the room at the usual hour, Chiara found her mistress asleep and dressed on the bed with the electric light on, while outside the sun was high. She turned out the light quietly, half opened the shutters, and re-arranged the scattered things, knowing that her mistress would be awakened. Turning round Chiara saw that Maria’s eyes were open and that she was very pale; she wished her good-morning, and received a feeble reply. Maria closed her eyes again and buried her head in the pillow, as if she had need of escaping the spectacle of the living things around her. A torpor held her on the rumpled bed, a desire to know, to hear, to see nothing. The young maid entered and left two or three times with her rhythmical and noiseless step, till at last Maria raised her head, and asked--

“Is it late?”

“Almost nine. Shall I prepare the bath?”

“Later on,” she replied in a weak voice.

Chiara looked at her with such tender pity in her eyes that Maria gave her a reassuring nod.

“It is nothing. I am all right.” And at the same time she made a questioning movement which the loving soul understood--

“The master has gone out.”

“Gone out; where?”

“On business to Velletri. He returns this evening.”

“When did he go?”

“This morning at seven. Gaspare, the valet, called him very early.”

“But where did he sleep?” asked Maria, after a little hesitation.

“In his new room, Excellency.”

“His new room?”

“Over there, behind the billiard-room.”

There was a silence between the two women.

“How long has your master occupied this room?”

“For some time,” said the girl, lowering her eyes.

“Tell me how long, Chiara,” insisted Maria.

“Since Your Excellency left.”

“Ah!” replied Donna Maria without further observation, letting her head fall on the pillow. Chiara stood waiting for orders.

“Are there any letters for me?” resumed Maria in a feeble voice.

“No, Excellency.”

“Has your master left a note for me?”

“Nothing, Excellency. It seems, though, that he has been awake all the night.”

“Who told you that?”

“Gaspare.”

“Ah!”

Not another word passed between the two women.

Beginning her first day after the pardon, Maria read in her mind these clear and indelible words: “He has pardoned me, but he avoids me; he has pardoned me, but he hates me; he has pardoned me, but he despises me.” And all sense of life was lost within her.

VI

Vittoria Fiore was alone in her room at the Hôtel de la Paix, dressed ready to go out. She went to and fro from the balcony to the door, waiting for her husband who was nearly an hour late, and every time she withdrew from the balcony overlooking the white Lungarno and the river, and went towards the door to peep into the corridor, to see if Marco were coming, a sorrowful impatience contracted her youthful figure. Passing before a large mirror, two or three times she threw a rapid glance at herself, then shook her head sadly. On the face of the newly made bride there was not shining that smile of gentle delight, of mutual love which trusts in a long future of serene joy. She was thoughtful, agitated, and sometimes completely tormented, as if her inmost soul could find no peace.

But Marco did not return. Where was he then? For an instant the spasm of impatience was so strong that her pale face became livid, and she placed her hand to her heart, as if she felt it stopping. A step sounded in the corridor. In an instant the lines of her face composed themselves, a light wave of blood mounted to her cheeks. The expression of her face became so tranquil and serene that it would have deceived the most expert eye. To complete the deception she pretended to be buttoning her glove.

Marco entered with a great bunch of white lilies and red velvety roses, which shed their delicate fragrance in the room.

“I had to wait a little, Vittoria,” he said; “but in compensation I have brought you these flowers.”

“I have waited a little, but I didn’t notice it,” she replied untruthfully.

“I had something to do,” he added vaguely, without offering further information; “don’t you like the flowers?”

“Yes, I like them,” she replied quickly, without any enthusiasm. “Thank you, Marco, they are beautiful flowers.” And she immersed her face in them.

He had thrown himself into a chair as if tired from a long walk or fastidiousness, as if he had forgotten that he had come to take her out. Vittoria herself, who had remained standing near the table, where she had placed the flowers, now sat down and placed her purse, and parasol there.

“What magnificent flowers Florence has,” added Marco, with an abstracted smile, “every time I return here I am seized with a madness to have such a lot of them, in fact, all if it were possible in my arms and my room.”

“You have been several times to Florence?” she asked coldly, almost imperiously.

“Yes,” he replied, without heeding either the question or its tone; “not all understand this country, and so not all can love it. It is a country of love and poesy,” he ended in saying, almost to himself, with a far-away expression of recollection.

Silent and serene Vittoria seemed to have heard nothing, and, as Marco was not getting up from his seat, nor expressing a wish to go out, she drew off her gloves slowly, stretched them one after the other, and placed them on the table beside the purse and the parasol.

“You have never seen it in the evening and at night, Vittoria, but I assure you it is a dreamland. Shall we go this evening, would you like to?”

“We will go,” she replied tranquilly, slightly distractedly, while she raised her long white hands to draw the two large pearl-headed pins from her hat.

“We must go if the evening is beautiful,” he continued, absorbed in his plan. “Is there a moon, Vittoria?”

“Yes, I think so,” she replied, lifting the flowers of her hat with her white fingers, and not appearing to give much attention to her husband’s discourse.

“Very well, if there is a moon, and it rises late, we must go to the Loggia di Orcagna. Do you remember you saw the Loggia di Orcagna yesterday?”

“Yes, I saw it yesterday,” she replied, folding her white veil accurately.

“At that hour there are no people in the streets of Florence, and it is a city recollected and a little melancholy. Then we must sit on the steps of the Loggia di Orcagna, beneath the statue of Judith, holding in her hand the head of Holofernes, and look around the Piazza della Signoria, and all the visions come to him who knows how to dream.”

“What visions? What dreams?” she demanded coldly, playing with the charms on her gold chain.

Marco looked at her, marvelling a little.

“Do you never dream, little Vittoria?” he asked, with some irony.

“Never,” she replied drily.

“Not even of me when I am not there?” and the tone became still more ironical.

“When you are not there I wait for you; that is all,” she murmured, without further observation.

“That is not a great deal; but still it doesn’t matter!” and he broke into a laugh.

She lowered her eyelids, as she always did to hide the trouble of her eyes, and closed her lips to repress her words; but these actions were so imperceptible that the man hardly ever noticed them.

“Aren’t you going to put your flowers in water? don’t you like them?”

“I am just going to,” she replied.

Then very slowly she took the flowers and untied them, almost without looking at them, separating them on the table with a mechanical working of the hands.

“It is eleven,” he said, looking at his watch. “I should like to lie down a little; I am so tired. It is the spring perhaps.”

“Go and sleep; you have an hour and a half before lunch,” Vittoria replied, without turning.

“Aren’t you tired?”

“No, I haven’t been out.”

“That is true. Doesn’t the spring tire you?”

“No.”

“I feel exhausted,” he added vaguely, “I am going to sleep. What are you going to do?”

“I am going to write home.”

“Brava! Write for me too; tell them everything, little Vittoria.”

“You haven’t written to any one, Marco,” she observed.

“I am a poor letter-writer, little Vittoria.”

“Have you always been?” and the question seemed conventional and polite.

“Not always,” he replied, falling into the trap; “au revoir, Vittoria; occupy yourself with the flowers, and this evening we will go under the Loggia di Orcagna.”

He disappeared into the other room. For several minutes she continued to gather together the branches of odorous lilies and fragrant roses. Then she went on tip-toe to the bedroom door, looked in, and listened. Marco was asleep, and his face was wasted with weariness. Then she returned to the table, threw herself into a chair, and buried her face in her hands, completely unstrung.

“O my God! my God!” she cried, through her clenched teeth, so as not to be heard. But the fresh flowers, the lilies and rich red roses, which were beneath her face and hands, repelled her as something horrid, fell to the ground, and lay there while she sobbed and invoked Heaven desperately in a stifled voice.

VII

“Decide, little Vittoria,” said Marco, spreading a small map on the marble table, “you must decide. Here we are in Milan; we have seen the Cathedral, the Brera Gallery, and the Sforza Castle. There is nothing else to see; decide.”

“I decide to leave because you don’t wish to remain,” Vittoria replied, with her usual reserve.

“But by which route shall we go to Paris? Right through from here by the Gothard? Or shall we step off at Turin and go by Mont Cenis? Look at the map carefully and decide.”

Ever since they had started on their travels, he had kept up this amiable and slightly teasing tone, that of a travelling companion, a little bored, who has seen everything, but is good-natured enough to lend himself as the cicerone of a tyro. All his concern and care was protecting. He had the expression of a person who spends for the diversion and happiness of another without participating himself in the diversion or the happiness. It was impossible to conceal this expression, and Vittoria, with her common-sense, had understood his peculiar behaviour. Of Florence, Pisa, Siena, Bologna, nothing mattered to Marco Fiore, nor did it concern him to be in one hotel more than another, nor did it matter to him whether he left by this or that _train-de-luxe_--but that his little Vittoria should see and appreciate everything, should pass a happy day without being too tired, that all the Palace Hotels should give her hospitality, and that all the _wagon-lits_ should make the journey less heavy and tiresome for her, was his care and occupation. Certainly he was indifferent to all the sights and changes, to the arrivals and departures, like one who has seen everything and could see nothing more.

“Decide, then, Vittoria, for the Gothard or the Cenis?”

Was he not treating her like a child, of whom he was the affectionate tutor? Vittoria looked at the map without the least understanding it, and, raising her eyes, said to him--

“You, Marco, by which route would you go?”

“Oh, I?” he exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders, “I have been so often one way or the other.”

“Ah,” she said, “then it is quite indifferent to you.”

“To me, yes; though the Gothard route is the more beautiful.”

“Let us take the other then,” she added.

“Would you always be a spirit of contradiction, Vittorietta? Why do you prefer the less beautiful?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

He frowned. Sometimes her cold replies surprised him, freezing all the gentle concern he had in seeing her content and happy. When that pleasant face grew fixed and the lips closed, she seemed like a little unopened flower which no ray of the sun could open, and he experienced a sense of delusion and melancholy. The control he exerted over himself was very great. To be so abundantly affectionate he required so much moral and sentimental effort, and she understood nothing of it. With a word or a gesture she cut off all his tender good-will.

But to accomplish his sentimental existence of a mission, of a duty which should fill the immense empty place of his dead love, was not Marco bound to Vittoria’s good and happiness? Was it not his concern, little by little, by daily sympathy and affection, by loving tenderness, to heal the heart wounded by a long and cruel abandonment and betrayal? Should he not make her forget all she had suffered for him? And if that jealous and offended soul was not completely reassured, if that disdainful soul martyred by waiting did not expand and tremble with joy, she was right perhaps. He must be patient and sweet with her, as with an invalid who has scarcely reached convalescence, and has still the horror of the disease in the mind.

“Now, little Vittoria, melt all the ice which surrounds your soul, have a desire and a will, my lady,” he resumed, in the half-mocking, half-affectionate tone he liked to take with her. The poor cold soul who only felt the affection of courteous words and the brilliant glance of the clear eyes, asked--

“What do you wish, then, Marco?”

“That you express an idea, expound a plan for the continuance of our journey. Don’t you know; can’t you decide? I will help you, little Vittoria. Do you wish to go to Paris?”

“Yes.”

“At once?”

“This very evening.”

“Very good; this evening, then, by the Cenis. You won’t see the best pa