“Modane! Modane!” was cried from all sides as the train-de-luxe, arriving from Paris, rumbled heavily into the station.
“At last we re-enter our fatherland,” cried Marco Fiore, with a sigh of relief; and, without waiting for a reply from Vittoria, he placed his grey travelling cap on his head and left the compartment.
“Ought I to come too?” Vittoria asked, as she rejoined him in the corridor.
“If you want a stroll, yes. If not, it isn’t necessary. The station is very grey and gloomy.”
“Very gloomy,” repeated the woman in a low voice.
“But our country is so beautiful. Aren’t you content to return home?”
“I am glad,” she replied, without further observation. He looked at her as he did now and then with a scrutinising eye, but the pure face assumed that cold and closed aspect against which every glance failed.
“I am going for a small stroll,” he said, shrugging his shoulders lightly, “the luggage will be examined later on in the train.”
He disappeared along the corridor, and a little later Vittoria saw him walking up and down in the gloomy station, which not even the late May sun managed to lighten. Then she rose and placed herself before the window on the other side of the compartment, watching another train stop on its way to France. Her eyes were fixed on the train. She tried to discover the faces of those who were travelling within, to question if possible their physiognomies, and read there what was passing.
She heaved a deep sigh, and felt jealous of those who were leaving Italy perhaps for ever, and were travelling to France or England, or further, perhaps, never to return. She would have liked to have been one of those unknown travellers, to turn her back for ever on her country, to take away with her the man she adored, far, far away to unknown countries, losing at last the recollection of her own country, of her own people.
“Oh, this returning, this returning!” she thought to herself so desperately that she almost said it aloud.
She fell back on her seat and searched among the flowers and books in front of her for something to distract herself, a volume or a time-table. Then she leaned her head against the arm of the seat, and closed her eyes in an endeavour not to think, to suppress the subtle and voracious work of the jealousy which caused her to think.
“We are off at last,” said Marco, entering the compartment.
Heavily the train started, leaving the shadow of the gloomy station, and began to run among the green meadows completely covered with flowers, which stretched beneath the mountains around Mont Cenis.
“We are returning home, little Vittoria; we are returning to our own house, to our own bed, where no one else has slept the night before, and where no stranger will sleep the night after. Home, home; no more hotels, no more restaurants where the cooking is of an unknown provision and quantity. I assure you, my dear, that at Casa Fiore there is an excellent cook, whose kitchen presents no mysteries. What a pleasure to dine and sleep in the house of the Fiore in via Bocca di Leone!”
Vittoria listened attentively to Marco’s tirade, with its forced gaiety, where a little irritation was pressing.
“This journey has tired you, Marco?” she asked, as if she had noticed something of no importance.
“Physically, perhaps,” he replied quickly; “I am not so young as I was.”
“You are thirty-two.”
“But I have lived far more than my years,” he replied, with candour.
“That is true,” she replied calmly; “instead of travelling we could have gone to Spello.”
“Oh, Spello isn’t very amusing, dear. You will see it this summer. Besides, oughtn’t you to have a nice honeymoon.”
“I?” she exclaimed, trembling.
“Yes, you, Vittoria. I had to give you, my beauty, a nice, amusing, pleasing honeymoon. You deserved it; I hope I behaved well?”
“Very well,” she replied ambiguously.
“Have I been a good travelling companion—intelligent, zealous, amiable?”
“You have been all that, Marco,” she replied coldly.
“Have I, then, accomplished that part of my mission? Have I accomplished it as I ought to?”
“Have you, Marco, a mission? And what is it?” she asked, not without some harshness.
“That which the priest told me in Santa Maria del Popolo; that which the mayor told us at Campidoglio; that which I have given myself.”
“That is?” she replied, still coldly.
“To make you happy, darling,” he concluded somewhat caressingly, to alleviate the solemnity of the words.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, without further observation.
“Then you give me my first certificate, my wife? Have you been happy or not on your travels? Have I done everything to make you happy?”
“You have done as much as you could,” she replied, without emphasising the words.
“That is all?” he insisted, looking at her.
“All you could.”
He frowned, and was silent. She, too, was silent, turning her head away. An instant afterwards, with a fastidious accent, he added—
“Now I am a little tired, and am glad to return home.”
The train ran on through the country that leads to Susa, and from Susa to Turin.
“Have you written to your mother and sister that we are returning?” he asked absently.
“No,” she replied.
“When do you count on doing it?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking of counter orders, of a prolonging of the journey, of delay. I don’t know,” she said, confused.
“We will telegraph, then, from Turin; we stop two hours there,” he added somewhat drily.
“Are we going straight on to Rome?” she asked a little timidly.
“Naturally, naturally. We arrive at Rome at ten to-morrow.”
“Ah.”
In spite of her intense power of dissimulation, she did not succeed in hiding an expression of fear.
“It seems to me, Vittoria,” said Marco, who had become very bad-tempered, “that you view with little pleasure our returning to Rome.”
“You are mistaken.”
“Perhaps I am not mistaken. All other wives feel a real need of their homes; you, it seems, scarcely experience this need.”
“It isn’t true; it isn’t true,” she stammered.
“Do me the honour not to take me for an idiot,” he retorted quickly; “Casa Fiore doesn’t seem good enough for your presence!”
“Oh, Marco!” she protested, with a voice full of tears.
“Rome seems a capital too small for you? The place where your mother and my mother live seems mean and empty to you, perhaps?”
“Marco! Marco!” she begged.
But her husband was now exasperated. The first angry, violent conjugal dispute had broken out, and she tried in vain to calm it. Trembling prevented her from pronouncing a word. She felt suffocated.
“Can you deny it?” he replied, in a voice where anger and irony hissed. “Do you deny that you don’t share my consolation in returning to Rome?”
Without speaking she clasped her hands as if to implore him to torture her no more.
“I am sorry to tell you, dear Vittoria,” he continued implacably, “that sometimes you lie.”
“Oh! oh!” she exclaimed, with a movement of horror, hiding her face in her hands.
“Or you dissimulate, which amounts to the same thing.”
Although he saw that she was growing pale, he was unable to restrain his indignation.
“Vittoria!” he exclaimed loudly, as if to startle her, “will you answer me?”
Terrified, she looked at him with wide-open eyes.
“I have always been used to truthful women; will you tell me the truth?”
“Yes,” she declared, as if this reminder had offended her mortally, restoring all her strength to her.
“Why aren’t you glad to return home? Why don’t you rejoice to embrace your people again? Why aren’t you happy to find yourself in Rome again to-morrow, to begin your new life? Reply, conceal nothing, and don’t dissimulate. Tell me the truth as it has always been told to me.”
“I hate Rome!” she exclaimed, offended, and making a supreme effort to tell her secret.
“You hate Rome! Why?”
“You know the reason; don’t oblige me to tell it,” she added, with dignity and supplication.
Immediately all the man’s anger evaporated. Again human charity and fraternal pity moved him.
“You are ill, Vittoria,” he said. “You must get well.”
She made a vague gesture of denial and of impossibility, and said nothing more. Nor did he attempt to break the heavy silence.