Unable to see any cause for her having missed the appointment he turned upon her in sudden anger; he even had a suspicion that she might have wished to inflict a humiliation, a punishment upon him, or else that she had merely indulged in a whim in order to inflame his desire afresh. The next moment he called to the coachman--
"Piazza del Quirinale."
He yielded to the attraction of Maria Ferres; he abandoned himself once more to the vaguely tender sentiment which, ever since his visit in the afternoon, had left, as it were, a perfume in his soul and suggested to him thoughts and images of poetic beauty. The recent disappointment, proving, as he considered, Elena"s malice and indifference, urged him more strongly than ever towards the love and goodness of the other. His regret for the loss of so beautiful a night increased, under the influence of the vision he had dreamed just now. And, truth to tell, it was one of the most enchanting nights Rome had ever known; one of those spectacles that oppress the human soul with deep sadness, because they transcend all power of admiration, all possibility of human expression.
The Piazza del Quirinale, magnified by the all-pervading whiteness, lay spread out solitary and dazzling, like an Olympian acropolis above the silent city. The edifices surrounding it reared their stately proportions into the deep sky; Bernini"s great portal to the royal palace surmounted by the loggia offered an optical delusion by seeming to detach itself from the building and stand out all alone in all its unwieldy magnificence, like some mausoleum sculptured out of a meteoric block of stone. The rich architraves to the Palazzo della Consulta were curiously transformed by the acc.u.mulated ma.s.ses of snow. Sublime amidst the uniform whiteness, the colossal statues seemed to dominate all things. The grouping of the Dioscuri and the horses looked bolder and larger in that light; the broad backs of the steeds glittered under jewelled trappings, there was a sparkle as of diamonds on the shoulders and the uplifted arm of each demi-G.o.d.
An august solemnity flowed from the monument. Rome lay plunged in a death-like silence, motionless, empty--a city under a spell. The houses, the churches, the spires and turrets, all the confusion and intermingling of Christian and Pagan architecture, resolved itself into one unbroken forest between the heights of the Janiculum and the Monte Mario, drowned in a silvery vapour, far off, infinitely immaterial, reminding one a little of a lunar landscape, calling up visions of some half extinct planet peopled by shades. The dome of St. Peter"s, shining with a peculiar metallic l.u.s.tre in the blue atmosphere looked gigantic and so close that one might have thought to touch it. And the two youthful Heroes, sons of the Swan, radiant with beauty in the vast expanse of whiteness as in the apotheosis of their origin, seemed to be the immortal Genii of Rome guarding the slumbers of the sacred city.
The carriage stopped in front of the palace and remained there for a long time. The poet was once more absorbed in his impossible dream. And Maria Ferres was quite near, was perhaps watching and dreaming also, perhaps she too felt the grandeur of the night weighing upon her heart and crushing it in vain.
Slowly the carriage pa.s.sed her closed door, while the windows reflected the full moon gazing at the hanging gardens of the Villa Aldobrandini where the trees looked like aerial miracles. And as he pa.s.sed, the poet threw the bunch of roses on to the snow before Donna Maria"s door in token of homage.
CHAPTER V
"I saw--I guessed--I had been at the window for a long time, unable to tear myself away from the fascination of all that whiteness. I saw the carriage pa.s.s slowly in the snow. I felt that it was you, before I saw you throw the roses. No words can describe to you the tenderness of my tears. I wept for you from love and for the roses out of pity. Poor roses! It seemed to me that they were alive and must suffer and die in the snow. I seemed to hear them call to me and lament like human creatures that have been deserted. As soon as your carriage had disappeared, I leaned out of the window to look at them. I was on the point of going down into the street to pick them up. But a servant was still in the hall waiting up for some one. I thought of a thousand plans but could find none that was practicable. I was in despair--You smile?
Truly, I hardly know what madness had come over me. I watched the pa.s.sers-by anxiously, my eyes full of tears. If any one of them had trodden on the roses, he would have trampled upon my heart. And yet in all this torment I was happy, happy in your love, in the delicacy of your pa.s.sionate homage, in your gentleness, your kindness.--When, at last I fell asleep, I was sad and happy together; the roses must have been nearly dead by that time. After an hour or two of sleep, the sound of spades upon the pavement woke me up. They were shovelling away the snow just in front of my door. I listened; the noise and the voices continued till after daylight and filled me with unutterable sadness!--Poor roses! But they will always live and bloom in my heart.
There are certain memories that can perfume a soul for ever--Do you love me very much, Andrea?"
She hesitated for a moment, and then--"Do you love only me? Have you forgotten all the rest? Do all your thoughts belong to me?"
Her breath came fast and she was trembling.
"I suffer--at the thought of your former life,--the past of which I know nothing--of your memories, of all the marks left upon your soul, of that in you which I shall never understand never possess. Oh, if I could but wipe it all out for you! Incessantly, Andrea, I hear your first, your very first words. I believe I shall hear them at the moment of my death----"
She panted and trembled, shaken by the force of all-conquering pa.s.sion.
"Every day I love you more, every day more!"
He intoxicated her with words of honied sweetness; he was more fervent than herself; he told her of his visions in the night of snow and of his despairing desire and some plausible story of the roses and a thousand other lyric fancies. He judged her to be on the point of yielding--he saw her eyes swim in melting languor, and on her plaintive mouth that nameless contraction which seems like an instinctive dissimulation of the physical desire to kiss; he looked at her hands, so delicate and yet so strong, the hands of an archangel, and saw them trembling like the strings of an instrument expressing all the anguish of her soul. "If, to-day, I could succeed in stealing even the most fleeting kiss from her," he thought, "I should find myself considerably nearer the goal of my desires."
But, conscious of her peril, she rose hastily with an apology and, ringing the bell, ordered tea and sent to ask Miss Dorothy to bring Delfina to the drawing-room.
"It is better so," she said, turning to Andrea with the traces of her agitation still visible in her face; "forgive me!"
And from that day she avoided receiving him except on Tuesday and Sat.u.r.day when she was at home to every one.
Nevertheless, she allowed Andrea to conduct her on long peregrinations through the Rome of the Emperors and the Rome of the Popes, through the villas, the museums, the churches, the ruins. Where Elena Muti had pa.s.sed, there Maria Ferres pa.s.sed also. Often enough, the sights they visited suggested to the poet the same eloquent effusions which Elena had once heard. Often enough, some recollection carried him away suddenly from the present and disturbed him strangely.
"What are you thinking of at this moment?" Donna Maria would ask him, looking him deep in the eyes with a shade of suspicion.
"Of you--always of you!" he answered. "I am sometimes seized with curiosity to look into my own soul to see if there remains one tiny particle that does not belong to you, one smallest corner still closed to your light It is an exploration made for you, as you cannot make it for yourself. I may say with truth, Maria, that I have nothing more to give you. You have absolute dominion over me. Never, I think, in spirit has one human being possessed another so entirely. If my lips were to meet yours my whole life would be absorbed in yours--I believe I should die of it."
She had full faith in his words, for his voice lent them the fire of truth.
One day, they were in the Belvedere of the Villa Medici and were watching the gold of the sun fade slowly from the sky while the Villa Borghese, still bare and leafless, sank gently into a violet mist.
Touched with sudden melancholy she said:
"Who knows how many times you have come here to feel yourself beloved?"
"I do not know," he answered, like a man lost in a dream, "I do not remember. What are you saying?"
She was silent. Then she rose to read the inscriptions written on the pillars of the little temple. They were, for the most part, written by lovers, by newly-married couples, by solitary dreamers. All expressed some sentiment of love, grave or gay; they sang the praises of a beauty or mourned a lost delight; they told of some burning kiss or ecstasy of languor; they thanked the ancient wooded glades that had sheltered their love, pointed out some secret nook to the happy visitor of the morrow, described the lingering charms of a sunset they had watched. All of them, whether lovers or married, under the fascination of the eternal feminine had been seized with lyric fervour in this little lonely Belvedere to which they ascended by a flight of steps carpeted with moss as thick as velvet. The very walls spoke. An indefinable melancholy emanated from these unknown voices of vanished lovers, a sadness that seemed almost sepulchral, as if they had been epitaphs in a chapel.
Suddenly Maria turned to Andrea. "You have been here too," she said.
"I do not know," he answered again, looking at her in the same dreamy way as before, "I do not remember. I remember nothing. I love you."
She read, written in Andrea"s hand, an epigram of Goethe"s, a distich, the one beginning--_Sage, wie lebst du?_ Say, how livest thou? _Ich lebe!_ I live! "And were it mine to live a hundred, hundred years, my only wish would be that to-morrow should be as to-day." Underneath this there was a date: _Die ultima februarii_ 1885, and a name: _Helena Amyclae_.
"Let us go," she said.
The canopy of branches cast deep shadows over the little moss-carpeted stairway.
"Will you take my arm?" he asked.
"No, thank you," she replied.
They went on in silence. The heart of each was heavy.
Presently she said--"You were very happy two years ago."
And he, persisting in his tone of reverie--"I do not know--I do not remember."
In the green twilight, the path was mysterious. The trunks and branches of the trees were coiled and interlaced like serpents; here and there a leaf gleamed through the shade like an emerald green eye.
After an interval of silence, she began again--"Who was that Elena?"
"I do not know, I have forgotten. I remember nothing but that I love you. I love none but you. I think only of you. I live for you alone. I know nothing, I wish for nothing but your love. Every fetter that binds me to my former life is broken. Now I am far from the world, utterly lost in you. I live in your heart and in your soul; I _feel myself_ in every throb of your pulse; I do not touch you, and yet I am as close to you as if I held you in my arms, pressed to my lips, to my heart. I love you and you love me; and that has been for ages and will last for ages, to all eternity. At your side, thinking of you, living in you, I am conscious of the infinite--the eternal--I love you and you love me. I know nothing else--I remember nothing else."
On all her sadness, all her suspicions, he poured out a flood of warm fond eloquence. And she listened, standing straight and slender in front of the bal.u.s.trade that runs round the wide terrace.
"Is it true? is it true?" she repeated, in a faint voice like the echo of a moan out of the depth of her soul--"is that true?"
"Yes, it is true--and that alone is true. All the rest is a dream. I love you and you love me. I am yours as you are mine. I know you to be so absolutely mine that I ask for no caress; I ask for no proof of your love. I can wait. My dearest delight is to obey you. I ask for no caresses, but I can feel them in your voice, in your eyes, your att.i.tudes, your slightest movement. All that comes to me from you intoxicates me like a kiss, and when I touch your hand I know not which is greater, the rapture of my senses or the exaltation of my soul."
He lightly laid his hand on hers. She trembled, drawn by a wild desire to throw herself upon his breast to offer him, at last, her lips, her kiss, herself. It seemed to her--for she believed blindly in Andrea"s words--that by so doing, she would bind him to her finally with an indissoluble bond. She felt that she was going to swoon, to die. It was as if the tumults of pa.s.sion from which she had already suffered swelled her heart and increased the present storm; as if, into this one moment of time were gathered all the varying emotions she had experienced since she first knew this man. The roses of Schifanoja bloomed again among the shrubs and laurels of the Villa Medici.
"I shall wait, Maria. I shall be true to my promises. I ask nothing of you. I wait and look forward to the supreme moment. That moment will come, I know it, for the power of love is invincible. And all your fears, all your terrors will vanish; and the communion of the body will seem to you as pure as the communion of the soul; for all flames are alike in purity."
He clasped Maria"s ungloved hand in his. The gardens seemed deserted.
From the palace of the Accademia came not a sound, not a voice. Clear through the silence, they heard the lisp of the fountain in the middle of the esplanade; the avenues stretched away towards the Pincio, straight and rigid as if enclosed between two walls of bronze, upon which the gilding of the sunset still lingered; the absolute immobility of all things suggested the idea of a petrified labyrinth; the reeds round the basin of the fountain were not less motionless than the statues.
"I feel," said Donna Maria, half-closing her eyes, "as if I were on one of the terraces at Schifanoja--far, far away from Rome--alone--with you.