“Can I come in, Marco?” said a dear and well-known voice at the door.
“Always, always, mamma bella,” he cried vivaciously from his bed.
Donna Arduina entered, with slow and dignified tread, and approached the bed where her son was smoking a cigarette after his coffee. He threw the cigarette away at once to embrace her. Instinctively, with maternal care, she adjusted the pillow, and pulled the counterpane over a little. The son smiled as he let her do it. She looked at him, studied him, and found his appearance tired and run down. He leaned again on his pillow, as if still glad to repose. The mother sat by the bed quietly watching.
“You came home late yesterday evening?” she asked.
“A little late, it is true.”
“I waited for you till midnight, like I used to, Marco mio.”
“Fifteen years ago, madra mia: how old I am growing!”
“I want to preach you a sermon now as I used to. Do you remember? A sermon on your too jolly and disordered life.”
“Oh, mother dear,” he protested, with a veil of sadness in the accent.
“Suppose I were to preach you a sermon this morning?” she added, still tenderly.
“I don’t deserve it, mamma; I don’t deserve it.”
“Marco, you are again leading a too disordered and jolly life.”
“You are wrong. Few men in the world bore themselves more than I do.”
“Where do you go, when you don’t dine with us, Marco?”
“To some place where I can bore myself less than in Casa Fiore, madre bella. Not on your account, see. You know I adore you.”
“Is it to fly from poor Vittoria?”
“Even you, mamma, say poor Vittoria! Even you are moved with compassion for her! And why aren’t you moved with compassion for your son, for him whom you have placed in the world? Why don’t you say, poor Marco? Don’t you see that I am unhappy?” And his exclamations were half melancholy and ironical, while his face grew disturbed and sad.
“Alas, my son, what a cross for me to see all this, and to be able to do nothing! It seems that all are wrong and all are right. What am I to do, my God, what am I to do?”
“Pity your son. Love him more than ever; caress him as you used to four or five years ago; try to make him forget his domestic unhappiness.”
“But why are you unhappy? Why is Vittoria unhappy? Is it through a misunderstanding; through a hundred misunderstandings? Is it not so?”
Marco shook his head, and, without replying, lit another cigarette.
“Marco, why have you resumed your bachelor room? Why do you sleep here?” And she threw a glance round the old room, where all around were large and small portraits of Maria Guasco, with fresh flowers in some vases before them.
“I sleep here because Vittoria wishes it,” he said, with a sarcastic laugh.
“Vittoria?”
“Yes. Sometimes for one reason, sometimes for another; sometimes for a novena, sometimes because she is not well, sometimes because of my departure or my return from hunting. In fact it is she, mamma, who has given me liberty, so I have taken it, and I am naturally at present most contented with it.”
“I am sure that she has suffered, and is suffering about this.”
“Perhaps yes, perhaps no. At any rate she dissimulates perfectly, that is to say, mother, she lies; I can’t go beyond appearances.”
“How sad, Marco!”
“Mamma, I have always been used to truthful women. You are one of them. Vittoria is a hypocrite.”
“You are unjust and cruel to her.”
“Certainly. I recognise it. But she has done everything to make me so. If only you knew, mamma, what I was to her at the beginning! If only you knew! Suffering, weak and exhausted by an immense passion, I tried to conquer myself. I searched for strength, for gaiety, for tenderness to give them to Vittoria. Since it was said to me: render this woman happy, do this work of repentance and beauty, I have tried to obey, mamma; but everything has been useless. Vittoria has not understood me.”
“Perhaps you have not understood her. She loved you ardently from the first moment of her engagement; she still loves you so.”
“No, mamma, no. Either Vittoria does not love me or she does not know how to love.”
“So young, so inexperienced, and so ignorant!”
“Mother, mother, Vittoria knew everything. All my violent and brutal betrayal has told her that my only and unique love romance has been with Maria Guasco; the only one, mamma. She dreamed of making another in matrimony, another romance of passion and madness, as if matrimony were not a union wise and tender, sweet and profound, not passionate and frenetic.”
“She deceived herself. She hoped for too much. She dared to hope too much. Don’t punish her for that.”
“It is she who has punished me for having wished to make her happy. All my affection has seemed little to her, all my tenderness has seemed mean to her. But you know, mamma, how she and she only has spurned me. You know that I have seen all my proofs of affection refused.”
“O Dio mio!”
“It is so. From the moment that I could not offer her passion, she did not wish to know me. A silent drama, understand, a drama of matrimony developed between us, and I have had ever before me a face as pale and cold as marble; she is a soul closed, indifferent and scornful; she is a spirit that is inattentive and bored, and hers is an iciness which sometimes reaches the point of contempt.”
“Oh, Marco, in spite of that she adored you and does adore you!”
“It may be, it may be; but she adores me badly. Nevertheless, believe me, this adoration is composed entirely of egoism, of amour propre, and jealousy.”
“Even of jealousy?”
“Above all. I know it, I know this is so; Vittoria has lived, and lives, with the incubus of Maria Guasco on her soul and heart. And all this love of hers is the offended pride of a woman who would overcome her supposed rival; all her love is exalted amour propre, is a monstrous egoism.”
“O Marco, Marco!”
“Mother, I am suffering, let me say it, let me unburden myself. To whom should I say it but to you? Who has placed me before this waxen doll, this poor little animal of a body with cold blood, this dissembling soul, all craftiness, all deceit, this heart full of a desire which it is impossible for it to realise, full of cold anger; in fact this creature without abandon, without loyalty and without fascination?”
“O Marco, my son!”
“Since you have come here this morning you must listen to me. I have, in short, bound my life to her, I have given my name to her and I would have given her all my existence, since they told me to give it to her. Mother, see what she has done with it! Among other things she is childless. We have no sons; we shall not have any; and this marriage is another of those immoral and indecent unions between two persons of opposite temperaments, of opposite character, hostile in fact to one another, made not to understand each other, made not to fuse, made to contradict each other, and at last to hate each other. I am perfectly positive Vittoria hates me.”
“You are so unjust to her, my son.”
“She does not hate me to-day; but she will to-morrow. For her I represent an immense disillusion of amour propre, a defeat of her egoism, a real sentimental rout. You will see, you will see how Vittoria will hate me.”
“But what should this unfortunate creature have done to please you, to unite herself to you in spirit, to render to you the happiness you were giving to her?”
“Love me, mother!”
“Doesn’t she love you?”
“To love me, mother, not for herself; to give all and ask nothing; to be happy that a man delivered from the fatality of an unlawful passion is in a haven of peace; to be serenity itself; to be, in short, the Christian wife, the ideal companion of our hearth whose scope is every soft desire of ours.”
“Oh, what a gulf, my son, what a gulf!”
“Between me and Vittoria? Immense, immeasurable, it is impossible to bridge it, impossible to surmount it.”
“What is to be done, what is to be done?”
“Nothing, mother dear. You can do nothing. Let Vittoria execrate me to-morrow; let her consider me as the cause of all her misfortune; let me be an object of repulsion to her. It is better so.”
“But you already have a sweetheart, after two years of married life?”
“Who, I, a sweetheart? You are joking, mother?”
“But that woman, that actress.”
“Who, Gemma? Oh, what a saint you are, my mother! We don’t call those sweethearts. They are a slight distraction; a home where there is a different woman who greets you with constant good humour, who lets you play or joke or sleep as you please; who asks you nothing, who understands nothing, but who does not ask to be understood.”
“How awful, Marco!”
“O Saint Arduina! O sainted mother mine!”
“Your wife knows of this relation: they have told her of it as being a great scandal.”
“You too; and are you scandalised?”
“I? very much.”
“If you like I will leave Gemma, mother dear.”
“You don’t love her, it is true?”
“If you were not an angel you would know that it is not a question of love. But if it annoys you so much I will leave Gemma.”
“Do so, do so, my son.”
“Nevertheless, I shall soon take another. And after her a third and a fourth.”
“You never used to be so, sonny! You have never before said such things to me.”
Her tone was so sorrowful, that it smote the son. He half raised himself in bed, exclaiming—
“It is true, it is true, mother! But there is nothing left for me to do but to become a dissolute.”
“What horror!” and she hid her face in her hands.
“A horror, is it not? I cause you horror, my sainted mother, my angelic mother! See to what life has brought me. A great, powerful, and beautiful love has only lasted a short time with me, and has left my heart dead to every fresh ardour. Mother, no one will take the place of Maria Guasco in my existence; she has been all, and that all has descended into the tomb. Afterwards I tried to attach myself to an idea, to a sentiment, to a loving duty, but the creature herself for whom I wished to live, for whom I wished to fight my life, spurned me and fled from me. What more have I to do? I have no love, I have no affection, I have no son, and I have no family risen from me. Nothing remains but to become a vicious and perverse person, to allow all my wicked instincts to pour from me; to give myself to women and play; to lose my fortune; to abase my name; to be a trivial pleasure-lover, and to cause you horror, my mother.”
Desperately the mother took him in her arms, pressed him to herself and kissed him, as if to defend him against life itself.
“You are good, you are noble, you are loyal, and you will not do this.”
“I used to be that!” cried the son desolately; “and I deserved the love of Maria Guasco; and I should have deserved that Vittoria Fiore knew how to love me and become happy with me and in my dedication. But all has been useless; I have been broken against this subtle, pallid, silent and cold shadow of a woman. If I want to live I must be perverse and dissolute.”
“No, my son, no.”
“There remains nothing else for me, mamma,” he repeated desolately.