“Dress me quickly,” said Maria to Chiara distractedly.
Chiara gave a glance towards the balcony, concealed by the white lace curtains, but said not a word. The dress for the races at Tor di Quinto was on the bed, a costume of bright cream voile, trimmed with a sort of silver lace, with a large belt of silver cloth, and a large black hat covered with a black feather held by an antique silver buckle, together with a very fine black veil, which surrounded it like a light cloud. Chiara accomplished the work of dressing her beloved mistress rapidly, without talking. Maria seemed wrapped in her thoughts, and mechanically performed the successive acts by which a lady dresses herself.
“Give me the turquoise necklace,” she said, still distractedly.
Chiara went to the cupboard where the jewels were kept, and took a bizarre necklace, in peculiar twisted gold, embellished with large turquoises.
Maria fixed it, still mechanically. Then her eyes, wandering indifferently and uncertainly, stopped at the balcony. She opened them wide, as if at an unexpected spectacle, and listened.
“It is raining in torrents,” she said to Chiara, surprised and gloomily.
“Dreadfully,” replied Chiara, with a sigh.
Maria’s hands, which were fixing her hat, fell back as if tired.
“Then why have I dressed?” she asked, as if to herself, with an accent of weariness and annoyance.
“Perhaps it will stop raining in a little while,” said the faithful creature timidly.
“You’ll see, it will rain the whole day!” exclaimed Maria, discouraged.
She threw herself into a chair as if a sudden fatigue had mastered her. Her face had the almost infantile sadness of disillusion, and with the sadness flowed the sense of a tedium ever greater, while the pattering rain beat upon the pavement, the marble balcony, and the windows. Chiara retired discreetly at a call from another part, and in a few minutes reappeared.
“The Principessa della Marsiliana is at the telephone, and is asking for Your Excellency.”
With a great effort Maria arose and crossed the room to her husband’s study. The study was deserted and gloomy with its almost black carved furniture and the dark maroon, green, and red leather of its chairs and sofas. The telephone was there in a corner.
“Well, Carolina, well?”
“No one is going to the races; they have been postponed. What a pity!” exclaimed the gentle, and always a little nervous, voice of the Principessa della Marsiliana.
“Well, then, what are you going to do?”
“Since it is raining, later on I shall get rid of a bothering duty. I am going to the Sacro Cuore at Trinità dei Monti, to visit Guiglia Strozzi’s daughter, who is ill. Will you come?”
“No, thank you.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“Nothing; the usual—I shall bore myself. Au revoir, Carolina.”
“Au revoir. What a pity! I had a beautiful dress.”
“So had I. It doesn’t matter. Au revoir.”
The telephone was rung off.
Maria remained standing in the middle of the study, looking around so uncertainly and fleetingly that it seemed as if she was almost seeking help. Her eyes directed themselves to the chair which Emilio used behind the writing-table, and she almost seemed to be looking for some one. But suddenly she silently recrossed all the rooms she had first crossed, and re-entered her room, where Chiara was replacing all the things in the cupboard.
“Would you like to take off your dress, Excellency?” she asked.
“No, it tires me,” replied Maria exhaustedly.
She only took off her hat, drawing out the two pearl-headed pins, and consigning them to Chiara. The rain poured incessantly and noisily.
Once more Maria made a gesture of indecision, looked at her watch, and shook her head discouragedly.
It was only two o’clock in the afternoon. On that Sunday, with the rain falling for nearly an hour, not a sound was to be heard in the streets; not a step or a shadow came to break the silence or populate the desert of Casa Guasco.
“Do you want me any more?” asked Chiara.
Maria hesitated for a minute, almost as if she wished to ask that human being, that living creature, who was her servant, to remain with her to keep her company; but she felt ashamed of her moral wretchedness, and a motive of pride counselled her to immerse herself in solitude.
“No, you may go,” she replied.
Quite alone she passed into her boudoir, which was very light, papered and furnished in an almost white stuff, with bunches of pale roses and soft green grasses, with frames of pale gold, and a carpet of light yellow, with cushions of a very pale colour. With its exquisite taste toned to the surroundings, in that sunless afternoon and incessant rain, the room seemed like that of a person dead for a long time, like a room uninhabited for a long time. Maria sat down in her usual arm-chair, placed her feet on a buffet, and leaned her head against a cushion, letting her arms fall and closing her eyes to allow all the mortal tedium of her soul to expand, to allow all the despair of her heart to cross the lines of her beautiful and noble countenance.
Some time passed thus. Occasionally the rain diminished, becoming a dull noise like steps in the distance, or increased with a pattering as if a fresh whirlwind were spreading over the streets and houses. Maria in her absolute silence started twice and raised her head, stretching her hand towards a table. She took up a book bound in soft chamois leather, with strange designs, and with troubled and indifferent eyes glanced through several pages; even the noise of turning leaves in the silence of Casa Guasco caused her to tremble. The poet whose verses she was slowly reading was of all the most sorrowful, and amidst the gloomy sadness of the sky and earth, of that house and her soul, Maria felt the ardent and powerful words with which Sapho’s soul takes leave of life spreading in her spirit. Her head sank on her breast, the book remained open on her knees, and she thought bitterly of the grand lover of Mitylene, to whom everything was unprofitable from birth till death, save her lofty genius, which love had not conceded her; she thought of the most sorrowful poet of all, whose bitterness was joined in that hour to her own bitterness, of Giacomo Leopardi, to whom genius had not even conceded love. An obscure anguish closed her heart in the profound silence and solitude, in that mortally long hour of boredom and sadness. Her hand almost involuntarily touched a bell concealed behind her chair. After a moment a servant appeared.
“Has the post been?”
“Yes; there is nothing for Your Excellency.”
“Good; you may go.”
She was expecting no letters from any one. But every now and then in her blackest crises of moral abandonment, of ineptitude to live or act, she began to desire an unknown letter written by an unknown hand, she found herself desiring an unexpected telegram, where might be contained from destiny the secret which should help her to do something with her useless life and useless days. While the time passed with desperate slowness, while the soft persistent rain continued to fall on Rome and envelope it in a grey veil of mist and water, she thought that there were not so many mysterious letters written by far-off mysterious persons containing powerful aid, that there are no unthought-of telegrams where a word tells the way for those who have consumed the forces of passion and goodness.
With a second familiar gesture she took a large work-bag of heavy material from a basket, lined with white silk and covered with pretty little bows of ribbon, and took out an embroidery of an old-fashioned kind, with slightly archaic colours, of a charming and rather childish design. Her beautiful hands sought among the tangled skeins of silk the threads suitable for the continuation of the work, and began to pierce the piece of silk with calm and regular movement. Two or three times her hands, as if oppressed with fatigue, dawdled over the embroidery, and she placed the piece of silk on her knees; two or three times a sigh full of annoyance and impatience escaped her breast, and her head fell back on the little cushion in silent exasperation; two or three times she shot a glance round her of anger and hate, yes, of hate, but mechanically her hands resumed the embroidery. The afternoon light began to be obscured, the corners of the room were in shadow; she had to stoop over her work to continue the embroidery.
Again a step approached.
It was the servant with the teapot and kettle. Without speaking he drew a table near Maria’s chair and placed everything there, and lit the spirit stove beneath the little kettle. Then, as it was getting darker, he stretched his hand towards a large pedestal lamp to turn on the electric light.
“No,” said Maria.
The sound of her voice after such an intense and mortal silence surprised her. The man left. The little flame alone seemed to live and breathe, a bluish little spirit flame, which licked the bottom of the silver kettle. Maria, with her hands stretched along her person, kept her eyes fixed on that poor form of life, a little passing light which was consuming itself, a little form of passing heat which was evaporating. The methodical work of preparing tea she accomplished in half obscurity, bending over the table, while the slight noise of the rain, with which the afternoon was lapsing into evening, still reached her ears. While the warm beverage smoked in the little china cup, she smiled silently with immense bitterness; for the servant had placed two cups on the tray.
She threw herself back in her chair, crossed her two hands behind her neck, stretched out her feet, closed her eyes and tried hard to sleep, at least to sleep and forget her useless life; her useless days, her hours of empty solitude, of savage impatience waiting for the person she did not know who would never come, waiting for a deed she was ignorant of which would never happen, for something strange, far off, unknown, but which should be living and let her live: to sleep, at any rate, since all this was no more possible when one has lived and loved too much; to sleep since no one comes again from afar, since nothing happens again when the heights of good and evil have been touched, and one has descended into the obscure valley of indifference and aridity.
A sudden light and a harsh voice aroused her at once from her torpor. Some one had suddenly turned on the electric light, and was before her talking harshly. It was her husband.
“Are you here, Maria?”
“I am here, as you see,” she replied dully.
He had returned suddenly as usual, entering the house and crossing all the rooms to reach her, as if he always wanted to surprise a visit, a secret colloquy, or the furtive scribbling of a letter. He was still in hunting costume, with his maroon velvet coat spattered and discoloured, a big waistcoat with full pockets with bone buttons, and the breeches stuffed in a pair of dirty riding-boots. Standing there, his face was more than ever gloomy and distrustful, on his temple his hair was completely white, which threw into stronger relief the olive darkness of his face.
“What are you doing here, Maria?”
“Nothing,” she replied dully.
“Were you sleeping?”
“I have dozed.”
“Didn’t you go to the races with Carolina della Marsiliana?”
“No; it rained. The races have been postponed.”
“I know. I was told on entering Rome.”
“Ah! and why did you ask me?”
“Just,” he replied in a subdued voice, “to learn it from you.”
“Ah!” she exclaimed evenly.
The soft white hand played nervously with the gilt arm of her chair, but the woman’s closed lips uttered no protest.
“Have you had tea?” He resumed his questions in the same cold, suspicious tone.
“Yes. Would you like a cup? I can warm it up.”
“No, thanks. You know I hate tea. Did you have it alone?”
“Alone!” she replied, with a fleeting smile of bitterness.
“Hasn’t one of your usual courtiers been?”
“I haven’t many of them, and even those few have abandoned me,” she murmured, with an accent of weariness.
“Still you were expecting some one?”
“I?” she said; “I? No. I never expect any one.”
There was something grievous in her words which the man, blind, deaf, and insensible to other impressions which were not his own, did not notice.
“I see two cups here,” he pointed, raising his eyebrows.
“One is clean!” she exclaimed, with a burst of laughter meant to be jolly, but really gloomy.
“Yes; but the servant has brought two. He must know something, that fellow; when I am hunting he brings two cups; he is bound to know something.”
“Ask him, Emilio, ask him,” she said gleefully, with an increasingly mischievous laugh.
“I shall do it, don’t doubt,” he said harshly; “but all the servants I pay here adore you far too much. Hence they lie; they lie, the whole lot of them, and I shall never know all the truth.”
“Oh, poor Emilio!” she exclaimed, pitying him, but without any tenderness.
Emilio Guasco’s eyes blazed with anger; for an instant his face became almost livid. He advanced with his heavy, dirty boots on the delicate carpet, and in a vibrant and subdued accent, restraining himself with an effort, but placing in every word, pronounced almost through his closed teeth, all the hidden tempest of his tortured spirit—
“Tell me why you have compassion on me? Why ever you pity me? Do I seem very ridiculous to you? You laugh at me in your mind, it is true, and in speaking to me pretend to have pity on me.”
Maria was silent, with an air of glacial detachment on her face, nor did she deign to reply to him. He sat on a chair near her, lowered his head, so that speaking very softly she could hear him well, and continued—
“It is you, you know it, who are making me ill or mad: you have no right to laugh at me. I have no right to accept your compassion. You are my enemy. I am sick of you, of your presence, of your contact. You have been my scourge. I have always thought everything of being calm and content, if not happy. You appeared in my life, and my peace has been destroyed and every joy.”
She leant her head against the back of the chair, on the little cushion in the form of a heart, kept her lips closed, and the eyes slightly contracted, her hands on the arms of the chair, like a person making a great effort internally to restrain herself, not to reply, not to rebel, to listen to the last word of what was thrown in her face.
“Yes, it is so,” he added fiercely, but subduedly; “no evil, no disaster, could devastate my existence worse than you. It would have been better if I had died on the day I knew you”—and he abandoned himself on the seat heavily, so that it cracked beneath his weight.
She opened her eyes, and looked at the disturbed brownish face without any emotion, and that great body on its chair, and asked quietly—
“Am I then, Emilio, as you say, an enemy of yours?”
He started, darted a contemptuous glance at her, and replied—
“Yes, an enemy of mine.”
“Does my presence exasperate you?”
“It exasperates me; that’s the word!”
“My contact causes you horror?”
“You know it,” he replied, looking peculiarly at her.
Maria understood in a flash to what Emilio was alluding. She grew pale, and then blushed violently, her eyes for a minute filled with tears which offended pride placed there, and which pride’s flame absorbed at once. The injurious word, the ferocious word of outrage, which was about to be disgorged from her lips, the mortal horror she had had of her husband on the night of suffering and pain, in which he had wished to possess her only by a cruel instinct of possession, a ferocious instinct of jealousy, and after fleeing from her like a madman she had nearly died of shame and sorrow; the word which would have expressed her womanly horror she had the extreme pity not to pronounce. Then he understood by that face where her lively expressions were depicted, by the eyes which had nearly poured out the rare and scorching tears which her wounded pride snatched from her soul, by the quick breathing in which she seemed to have repressed her cry of rebellion, he understood that in evoking that recollection he had made the disagreement between them deeper and more invincible.
“I loved you—do love you perhaps,” he murmured, almost speaking to himself. “I believe it is so. But your contact causes me horror.”
Every time he repeated the phrase fatal in its truth, insulting in its brutality, he made a material movement of repulsion. Every time, too, this expression made the woman’s face colour in an impetus of anger. Then mastering herself with the singular courage of a strong soul, she answered him with a proud calmness.
“Don’t delude yourself, dear Emilio, that you love me; love is quite another thing. I know that. You do me the honour, like any other man, even now, of desiring me; that is all. That would be very flattering to me if this desire of yours—in fact it would be very simple, very common and quite trivial—were not overcome by the horror with which my desired and repugnant person inspires you. Would you tell me why, if you don’t mind—out of simple curiosity, my friend, nothing else—I cause you horror: now why?”
Gradually Maria’s tone became more disingenuous and frivolous, as if it were a question of a fashionable conversation of very relative interest, yes, although she was hearing words which tortured still more her throbbing soul.
Emilio raised his eyebrows. He knew quite well how much more intelligent, finer, and braver Maria’s character was than his, and how he had almost struck her by reminding her of that night of violence and sorrow, after which they had been divided like two enemies. Now he felt he was in her power, which was loftier for defence, and better adapted to conquer her own and another’s soul. Not attempting to wrestle with her, as with truth itself in all its harshness and vulgarity, he replied in a low voice without looking at her—
“You cause me horror, because I can’t forget.”
“What, please?” she asked, toying with her emerald rings.
“Your betrayal; your flight with Marco Fiore; your three years’ life with him. It is impossible to forget all this, and this recollection scorches me like a red-hot iron.”
“Still,” she said, with some disingenuousness, and the same frivolity in which she had kept up the conversation politely from the beginning, “still you desired my return to your house.”
“I confess it; I ardently desired it.”
“You condescended, then, to pardon an unfaithful wife,” she concluded, with a gracious and slight smile, a conventional smile to conclude a worldly discourse.
“It is true, I pardoned you,” he replied, still more gloomily: “but I repented of it at once; I repent it every day.”
“You think you made a mistake?”
“Much more than a mistake; far more than a mistake!” he exclaimed, raising his voice suddenly.
She motioned to him courteously with her hand, just as if she were asking him to talk more quietly in a room where music was being played.
“I committed a cowardice in pardoning you. I was a fool and a coward. Every one laughs at me; every one. You yourself will laugh at me. There couldn’t be a bigger fool or coward than I was on that evening.”
Again she grew pale and blushed, as if the blood were moving in waves from the heart to the brain, from the brain to the heart.
“Do you curse that evening?” she asked slowly.
“I curse it every instant, and despise myself for my mistake, for my ineptitude, for my weakness. Every one, every one is laughing at me, who have been dishonoured, who have enjoyed the dishonour, and retaken, as if it were nothing, the woman who inflicted this incancellable dishonour on me.”
“Other men have pardoned like you,” she said slowly, and somewhat absorbed.
“Others! others!” he exclaimed, suddenly touched on the bleeding wound of his heart, “men different, quite different to me. Perhaps they were perfect cynics: I am not cynic enough, and I suffer for my dishonour, as if it were yesterday, as it were to-day. Or perhaps they were simple people. I also am not simple enough; I understand, I know, I measure, and I remember everything. Perhaps they had children, these men, and it was necessary at any cost to recompose the family: we have no children. Or perhaps grave questions of interest came in between; money, you know, money! That had nothing to do with that stupid cowardly pardon I gave you that evening; nothing. Certainly, certainly, many men have pardoned their faithless wives, will pardon, and are pardoning them for so many reasons and causes; but I should like to question them one by one, as man to man, alone and with open heart, and you would see the reply would always be the same from however many of them.”
“That is——” she said quietly.
“That it is cowardice to pardon this offence; that one ought not to pardon betrayal in a mistress, but one never pardons betrayal in a wife.”
“Is that your idea?”
“It is mine.”
“When you pardoned you didn’t think so. Do you believe that now you can again change your opinion?” she asked, as she strove in vain to hide a little anxiety in the question.
“It is useless,” he replied desolately, “I know myself. I am a straightforward man. I can’t change the idea which for two years has caused me to suffer as I have never suffered. I am too straightforward, and for this I pity you. I can’t change; when one is a man like I am one can’t pardon dishonour and absolve betrayal.”
She lowered her eyes and said no more, though she seemed very calm and indifferent.
“Well?” he said, questioning her anxiously.
“Well?” she questioned in turn.
“Haven’t you anything to say to me?”
“I? No,” she replied simply.
“What is your idea, then?”
“I have none,” she added, with the same simplicity.
“None? Nothing? Does nothing of this matter to you?” he cried, surprised.
“It would matter very much to me, if I could bring you a remedy. Your sufferings once moved me very much, you know, and I believed I could cure them. I have not succeeded. You haven’t wished to know me as a consoler. My mission here has failed completely. Instead of doing you good I am doing you harm. And in exchange you load me every time you can with expressions of your loathing and contempt. What is to be done? There is no remedy.”
“If you had liked, there could have been,” he replied in a low voice.
“Exactly, exactly!” she exclaimed, smiling ironically. “I ought to have had a great passion for you. That was necessary for your jealousy and amour propre—a great passion;” and the smile became more ironical.
“And you did not succeed? Is it not so?” he cried, trembling.
“I haven’t even tried,” she replied, seriously and nobly. “I never returned for that, I never promised it; I couldn’t give it.”
“Then it would have been better not to have returned;” and the man’s fury increased.
“It would have been better,” replied the woman still more austerely.
“It would be better, then, for you to go away,” cried the man, blind with fury.
“It would certainly be better,” she said austerely and finally.
She rose from her seat, crossed the room, and disappeared.