They parted in the Piazza di Spagna, at the foot of the steps, and as Elena came across the square in the direction of the Via due Macelli to go up to the Quattro Fontane, Secinaro joined her and walked on with her.
The strain of dissimulation once over, Andrea"s heart sank within him like a leaden weight. He did not know how he was to drag himself up the steps. He was quite a.s.sured that, after this, Secinaro would tell him everything, and somehow this seemed to him a point to his advantage. By a sort of intoxication, a species of madness, resulting from the severity of his sufferings, he rushed blindly into new and ever more cruel and senseless torments; aggravating and complicating his miserable state in a thousand ways; pa.s.sing from perversion to perversion, from aberration to aberration, without being able to hold back or to stop for one moment in his giddy descent. He seemed to be devoured by an inextinguishable fever, the heat of which made all the germs of human l.u.s.t lying dormant in the hidden depths of his being flourish and grow big. His every thought, his every emotion showed the same stain.
And yet, it was the very deception itself that bound him so strongly to the woman he deceived. His mind had adapted itself so thoroughly to the monstrous comedy that he was no longer capable of conceiving any other way of satisfying his pa.s.sion. This incarnation of one woman in another was no longer a result of exasperated desire, but a deliberate habit of vice, and now finally an imperious necessity. From thenceforth, the unconscious instrument of his vicious imagination had become as necessary to him as the vice itself. By a process of sensual depravity, he had almost come to think that the real possession of Elena would not afford him such exquisite and violent delight as the imaginary. He was hardly able to separate the two women in his thoughts. And just as he felt that his pleasure would be diminished by the actual possession of the one, so his nerves received a shock if by some la.s.situde of the imagination he found himself in the presence of the other without the interposing image of her rival.
Thus he felt crushed to the earth at the thought that Don Manuel"s ruin meant for him the loss of Maria.
When she came to him that evening, he saw at once that the poor thing was ignorant as yet of her misfortune. But the next day, she arrived, panting, convulsed, pale as death. She threw herself into his arms, and hid her face on his breast.
"You know?" she gasped between her sobs.
The news had spread. Disgrace and ruin were inevitable, irremediable.
There followed days of hideous torture, during which Maria, left alone after the precipitate flight of the gamester, abandoned by the few friends she possessed, persecuted by the innumerable creditors of her husband, bewildered by the legal formalities of the seizure of their effects, by bailiffs, money-lenders and rogues of all sorts, gave evidences of a courage that was nothing less than heroic, but failed to avert the utter ruin that overwhelmed the family.
From her lover she would receive no a.s.sistance of any kind; she told him nothing of the martyrdom she was enduring even when he reproached her for the brevity of her visits. She never complained; for him she always managed to call up a less mournful smile; still obeyed the dictates of her lover"s capricious pa.s.sion, and lavished upon her ruthless destroyer all the treasures of her fond heart.
Her presentiments had not deceived her. Everything was falling in ruins around her. Punishment had overtaken her without a moment"s warning.
But she never regretted having yielded to her lover; never repented having given herself so utterly to him, never bewailed her lost purity.
Her one sorrow--stronger than remorse, or fear, or any other trouble of mind--was the thought that she must go away, must be separated from this man who was the life of her life.
"My darling, I shall die. I am going away to die far from you--alone--all alone--and you will not be there to close my eyes----"
She smiled as she spoke with certainty and resignation. But Andrea endeavoured to kindle an illusive hope in her breast, to sow in her heart the seeds of a dream that could only lead to future suffering.
"I will not let you die! You will be mine again and for a long time to come. We have many happy days of love before us yet!"
He spoke of the immediate future.--He would go and establish himself in Florence; from there he could go over as often as he liked to Sienna under the pretext of study--could pa.s.s whole months there copying some Old Master or making researches in ancient chronicles. Their love should have its hidden nest in some deserted street, or beyond the city, in the country, in some villa decorated with rural ornaments and surrounded by a meadow. She would be able to spare an hour now and then for their love. Sometimes she would come and spend a whole week in Florence, a week of unbroken happiness. They would air their idyll on the hillside of Fiesole in a September as mild as April, and the cypresses of Montughi would not be less kind to them than the cypresses of Schifanoja.
"Would it were true! Would it were true!" sighed Maria.
"You don"t believe me?"
"Oh yes, I believe you; but my heart tells me that all these sweet things will remain a dream."
She made Andrea take her in his arms and hold her there for a long time; and she leaned upon his breast, silently crouching into his embrace as if to hide herself, with the shiver of a sick person or of one who seeks protection from some threatening danger. She asked of Andrea only the delicate caresses that in the language of affection she called "kisses of the soul" and that melted her to tears sweeter than any more carnal delights. She could not understand how in these moments of supreme spirituality, in these last sad hours of pa.s.sion and farewell her lover was not content to kiss her hands.
"No--no, dear love," she besought him, half repelled by Andrea"s crude display of pa.s.sion, "I feel that you are nearer to me, closer to my heart, more entirely one with me, when you are sitting at my side, and take my hand in yours and look into my eyes and say the things to me that you alone know how to say. Those other caresses seem to put us far away from each other, to set some shadow between you and me----I don"t know how to express my thought properly----And afterwards it leaves me so sad, so sad--I don"t know what it is----I feel then so tired--but a tiredness that has something evil about it----!"
She entreated him, humbly, submissively, fearing to make him angry. Then she fell to recalling memories of things recent and pa.s.sed, down to the smallest details, the most trivial words, the most insignificant facts, which all had a vast amount of significance for her. But it was towards the first days of her stay at Schifanoja that her heart returned most fondly.
"You remember? You remember?"
And suddenly the tears filled her downcast eyes.
One evening Andrea, thinking of her husband, asked her--"Since I knew you, have you always been _wholly_ mine?"
"Always."
"I am not speaking of the soul----"
"Hush!----yes, always wholly yours."
And he, who had never before believed one of his mistresses on this point, believed Maria without a shadow of doubt as to the truth of her a.s.sertion.
He believed her even while he deceived and profaned her without remorse; he knew himself to be boundlessly loved by a lofty and n.o.ble spirit, that he was face to face with a grand and all-absorbing pa.s.sion, and recognised fully both the grandeur of that pa.s.sion and his own vileness.
And yet under the lash of his base imaginings he would go so far as to hurt the mouth of the fond and patient creature, to prevent himself from crying aloud upon her lips the name that rose invincibly to his; and that loving and pathetic mouth would murmur, all unconscious, smiling though it bled--
"Even thus you do not hurt me."
CHAPTER VIII
It wanted but a few days now to their parting. Miss Dorothy had taken Delfina to Sienna, and then returned to help her mistress in the last and most trying arrangements and to accompany her on the journey. In the mother"s house in Sienna the truth of the story was not known, and Delfina of course knew nothing. Maria had merely written that Don Manuel had been suddenly recalled by his government. And she made ready to go--to leave these rooms, so full of cherished things, to the hands of the public auctioneers who had already drawn up the inventory and fixed the date of the sale for the 20th of June, at ten in the morning.
On the evening of the 9th, as she was leaving Andrea, she missed a glove. While looking for it she came upon a volume of Sh.e.l.ley, the one which Andrea had lent her in Schifanoja, the dear and affecting book in which, before the excursion to Vicomile, she had underlined the words
"And forget me, for I can _never_ Be thine."
She took up the book with visible emotion and turned over the pages till she came to the one which bore the mark of her underlining.
"_Never!_" she murmured with a shake of the head. "You remember? And hardly eight months have pa.s.sed since."
She pensively turned over a few more leaves and read other verses.
"He is our poet," she went on. "How often you promised to take me to the English Cemetery! You remember, we were to take flowers for his grave.
Shall we go? You might take me before I leave. It will be our last walk together."
"Let us go to-morrow," he answered.
The next evening, when the sun was already declining, they went in a closed carriage; on her knees lay a bunch of roses. They drove along the foot of the leafy Aventino and caught a glimpse of the boats laden with Sicilian wine anch.o.r.ed in the port of Ripa Grande.
In the neighbourhood of the cemetery they left the carriage and went the rest of the way to the gates on foot and in silence. At the bottom of her heart, Maria felt that not only was she here to lay flowers on the tomb of a poet, but that in this place of death she would weep for something of herself irreparably lost. A _Fragment_ of Sh.e.l.ley, read in the sleepless watches of the night echoed through her spirit as she gazed at the cypresses pointing to the sky on the other side of the white wall.
"Death is here, and Death is there, Death is busy everywhere; All around, within, beneath, Above, is death--and we are death.
Death has set his mark and seal On all we are and all we feel, On all we know and all we fear--
First our pleasures die, and then Our hopes, and then our fears: and when These are dead, the debt is due, Dust claims dust--and we die too.
All things that we love and cherish, Like ourselves must fade and perish.
Such is our rude mortal lot: Love itself would, did they not----"
As she pa.s.sed through the gateway she put her arm through Andrea"s and shivered.
The cemetery was solitary and deserted. A few gardeners were engaged in watering the plants along by the wall, swinging their watering-cans from side to side with an even and continuous motion and in silence.