L'Innocente E-Book

Gabriele D’annunzio

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Decadent fin-de-siecle novel about aristocratic Romans, made into a film by Visconti.

Das E-Book L'Innocente wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

CAN I go before a judge and say: ‘I have committed a murder; the poor little thing would not have died if I had not killed it—I, Tullio Hermil, with my own hands. I planned the crime in my own house, and carried it out in the full consciousness of what I was doing, with calm precision and absolute immunity. And afterwards, I continued to live on in my home with that secret in my heart, for a whole year—up till the present day. To-day is the anniversary of the deed. I am here in your hands. Listen to me and judge me——’ I say, can I do this?

I cannot, and I will not. Human justice cannot touch me. No tribunal on earth could pronounce judgment upon me.

And yet the desire is strong in me to accuse myself—to confess. I must unburthen myself to some one.

To whom?

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

CHAPTER XXXVI

CHAPTER XXXVII

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CHAPTER XXXIX

CHAPTER XL

CHAPTER XLI

CHAPTER XLII

CHAPTER XLIII

CHAPTER XLIV

CHAPTER XLV

CHAPTER XLVI

CHAPTER XLVII

CHAPTER XLVIII

CHAPTER XLIX

CHAPTER L

CHAPTER LI

CHAPTER LII

Copyright

CHAPTER I

TO begin, then.

It was April. We had come to the country a few days before—Giuliana and I and our two children, Maria and Natalia—to spend Easter with my mother in her large old country-house called La Badiola. We had been married seven years.

Three years had passed since another Easter which had seemed to me truly a festival of pardon, peace, and love in that same house, white and solitary as a monastery, steeped in the scent of lilacs; when Natalia, our second little girl, was adventuring her first steps and beginning to emerge from the swathing bands of babyhood like a flower from the sheath, and Giuliana was full of kind indulgence towards me, though not without a touch of chastened sadness in her smile. For I had just come back to her, penitent and submissive, after my first grave infidelity. Innocent of the state of affairs, my mother, with her own dear hands, had fastened a branch of olive above our bed and replenished the little silver holy-water vessel that hung upon the wall.

But in the three years between then and now, how much had happened! Between me and Giuliana the rupture had become final, irremediable. My transgressions had heaped themselves up. I had sinned against her in a thousand cruel ways, without remorse, without reserve, driven along by my thirst for pleasure, by the rapid impulse of my passions, by the licentious curiosity of my corrupt mind. I had been the lover of two of her intimate friends. I had openly spent several weeks at Florence with Teresa Raffo and had a duel with the sham Count Raffo, in which my disreputable adversary had covered himself with ridicule through certain unseemly occurrences. And none of these things had been unknown to Giuliana, but she had suffered proudly and almost in silence.

There had been but few conversations between us on the subject, and those of the briefest. I had never lied to her, thinking that by perfect candour I lessened the magnitude of my transgressions in the eyes of this gentle and noble woman whom I knew to be liberal-minded.

I was also aware that she recognised the superiority of my intellect, and that she partly excused my excesses by the specious theories I had frequently propounded to her on the subject of the moral doctrines ostensibly professed by the majority of mankind. The certainty of not being judged by her as an ordinary individual lightened the burden on my conscience. ‘So she too understands,’ thought I to myself, ‘that, being different from the common herd and having a different conception of life, I am exempt from the laws that others would impose upon me, and can afford to live in the absolute sincerity of my exceptional nature, regardless of the opinion of the multitude.’

For I was convinced of being not only a choice but an exceptionally rare spirit, and imagined that the rare quality of my sentiments and sensations lent an added nobility and distinction to my every action. Proud of and interested in this acuteness of sensibility, I was utterly unable to grasp the necessity of any self-control, any more than I ever thought of denying myself one expression, one manifestation of my desires. But at the bottom of all my subtleties lay nothing but stupendous egotism, seeing that while I withdrew from all its obligations I accepted all the benefits of my condition.

In point of fact, piece by piece I had managed to regain my original liberty, and that with Giuliana’s consent and without any recourse to hypocrisy or degrading subterfuges and lies. I made it as much my aim and object to be open with her as others do to dissemble. I sought on all occasions to confirm between me and Giuliana the new compact of fraternity, of pure friendship. She was to be my sister, my best friend.

My only sister, Costanza, had died at the age of nine, leaving a void in my heart that had never been filled. I often thought with poignant regret of the dear child who had never been able to offer me the tender treasure of her love, a treasure which I imagined inexhaustible. Of all human affections, of all the various kinds of love in this world, that of a sister has always appeared to me the highest and most consoling. And I thought of this lost source of consolation with a sorrow which the irrevocability of death rendered almost mystical. Where, indeed, should I find another sister?

Spontaneously this affectionate aspiration turned towards Giuliana.

Disdaining to share me with others, she had abandoned the slightest approach to a caress, and I, for a long time now, had not felt my senses stir by a hair’s-breadth when at her side; her breath upon my cheek, the sight of the two little beauty-spots she had on her neck, left me perfectly cold. It did not seem possible that she could be the same woman I had seen grow pale and faint under the burning ardour of my kisses.

I therefore offered her my brotherly love, and she accepted it quietly. If she was grieved, I was still more so at the thought that we had buried our love for good and all without hope of resurrection, that our lips would perhaps never meet again—never again. And in my crass selfishness I considered that she ought to be grateful to me in her heart for this grief which I felt to be irremediable, and that she should account herself repaid and solaced by it as by a reflection of the love that was lost. Time was, when we had dreamed not only of love but of passion that should last till death—usque ad mortem Yes, we believed in that dream, and how often had we not used those grand and illusory words: For ever! Never! Finally, we believed firmly in the affinity of the flesh, in that mysterious affinity which unites two human beings in the mighty bond of insatiable desire; we believed in it because the keenness of our sensations had in no wise diminished even after the obscure Genius of the species had, by means of us, attained his sole purpose: the creation of a new being.

But that dream had fled, the flame was spent. My spirit—I swear it—had wept sincerely over the ruins. And yet—how rise up against a necessary phenomenon of nature? How avoid the inevitable?

Thus, it was by great good fortune that, love being dead through the inexorable fatality of natural circumstances and not by any fault of ours, we could still live on together joined by a new sentiment, perhaps no less profound than the old, assuredly loftier and more unusual. We were, indeed, blessed in that a new illusion should succeed the old, and establish between our souls an interchange of unsullied affection, of delicate emotions, and exquisite sadness.

But towards what, in reality, did all this platonic rhetoric tend? Simply to this: that a victim should submit smilingly to the sacrifice.

Plainly, this new life — no longer conjugal but fraternal—was entirely based on one presumption: the absolute self-renunciation of the sister. I regained my full liberty, could go in search of those keen sensations which my nerves demanded, could absorb myself passionately in another woman, live my life outside my home and then go back and find my sister awaiting me, find in my rooms a thousand traces of her thoughtful care—roses on my table arranged by her hand, all around me the order, the elegance, the spotless brightness of some favourite abode of one of the Graces. Of a surety, an enviable state of things for me! And where find another such pearl beyond price as the woman who thus consented to sacrifice her youth and beauty for me, content to be repaid merely by a kiss of gratitude, almost of religious devotion, on her pure and gentle brow?

My gratitude became at times so warm, that it displayed itself in a multitude of delicate and affectionate attentions. I knew myself to be the best of brothers. When I was away, I wrote Giuliana long letters full of tender melancholy which were often posted at the same time as those addressed to my whilom mistress. And my mistress could no more have been jealous of those letters than of my devotion to the memory of my dead sister Costanza.

However, absorbed though I might be in the intensity of my own individual experiences, I could not quite shut out certain questions which rose in my mind from time to time. For Giuliana to be able to continue her unprecedented form of self-sacrifice, she needs must love me with a surpassing love; and loving me so, and yet being nothing more to me than a sister, she must surely carry in her heart a mortal despair. Was not that man a brute who, without one pang of remorse, could sacrifice to other vain and turbid loves a creature so single-hearted, so courageous, so pathetically smiling?

I remember (and the perversion of my mind in those days fairly amazes me now), I remember that among the arguments I brought forward to appease my conscience, this was the favourite: Moral grandeur being the result of violent griefs overcome, it was necessary, if she was to attain to these heroic heights, that she should go through what I have made her suffer.

But there came a day when I could not but notice that she was suffering in body as well as mind; I saw that her natural pallor was more pronounced, and that sometimes a livid shadow crept into it. More than once, I surprised a spasm of suppressed pain on her face; more than once, she was seized, in my presence, with violent tremblings that shook her from head to foot, and made her teeth chatter as in a sudden attack of ague. One evening, from a distant room, I caught the sound of a piercing cry of pain. I hurried in and found her leaning against a wardrobe, her features convulsed, writhing in agony as if she had taken poison. She stretched out a hand to me, and held on to mine with a vice-like grip.

‘Tullio, Tullio, how horrible! Oh, how horrible!’

She looked full at me, her face close to mine, holding my gaze with her dilated eyes, which seemed to me extraordinarily large in the gathering gloom. And in those great eyes I saw her nameless sufferings pass like a wave, and that fixed, intolerable gaze suddenly awakened a wild terror in me.

It was evening; the room was full of shadows, the window wide open and the curtains swelling and fluttering in the breeze, and a candle burned on a table in front of the looking-glass. I do not know why, but the flapping of the curtains, the agitated flickering of the candle reflected in the pale mirror—all assumed a sinister significance in my mind, and added unspeakably to my terror. The thought of poison flashed across me. At the same instant, she cried out again, and beside herself with sudden pain, threw herself distractedly on my breast.

‘Oh, Tullio, Tullio! Help me! Help me!’

Frozen with horror, I remained a moment unable to utter a single word or move a muscle.

‘What have you done? What have you done, Giuliana? Speak—tell me—what have you done?’

Startled by the profound agitation in my voice, she lifted her head a little and looked at me. My face must have been paler and more convulsed than her own, for in frightened, hurried accents she exclaimed—

‘Nothing, nothing, Tullio; don’t be alarmed. It is not serious—see—it is only my old pain—you know, one of my old attacks—it soon passes—you must not be frightened.’

But I, overcome by that horrible suspicion, doubted her word. Everything around seemed to point to some tragic occurrence, and a voice within me whispered: ‘It was for you—for your sake she wished to die. You—you have driven her to this.’ I seized her hands; they were icy cold, and drops of moisture stood upon her brow.

‘No, no—you are deceiving me,’ I burst out; ‘you are deceiving me. For pity’s sake, Giuliana—dearest—speak—tell me, what did you—tell me, for pity’s sake, what did you—drink?’

And my horror-stricken eyes searched about the room, on the tables, the floor, anywhere—for some sign to guide me.

Then she understood. She sank once more upon my breast, and tremulously—her lips against my shoulder (never, never shall I forget the indefinable tone of her voice)—she said :

‘No, no, no, Tullio—no.’

Ah, is there anything under the sun that can equal the sudden giddy quickening of our inner life? We two stood there silent in the middle of the room, and a whole world of sentiments and thoughts—vast, inconceivable — rushed through my brain, circling round one fixed point of terrifying lucidity: ‘And what if it had been true?’ cried the voice. ‘What if it had been true?’

Giuliana shivered unceasingly upon my breast and still kept her face hidden, and I knew that in spite of all her bodily sufferings she had no thought but for the possibility of the deed I had suspected, and for my unreasoning terror.

A question rose to my lips—‘Have you ever had that temptation?’ and another—‘Would you yield to such a temptation?’ I asked her neither one nor the other, but I am sure she heard them. We were both, for the moment, dominated by the thought of that death and the images it called up; we both entered into a certain state of tragic exaltation, heedless of the mistaken idea which had given it birth, lost to all sense of reality. All at once, she began to sob, and her tears drew forth mine, till the drops mingled that were so hot, and yet, alas! could not alter our destinies.

I learned afterwards that for some months she had been suffering from a complicated internal trouble, one of those dreadful and obscure ailments which strike at the root of a woman’s being and disturb every functional activity. The doctor, with whom I insisted on having an interview, gave me plainly to understand that for a long time to come any demonstration of affection, however slight, must be avoided between my wife and me, and that for her to have another child might prove fatal to her.

This news, although it was somewhat of a shock to me, relieved my mind on two scores—it showed me that I was not to blame for Giuliana’s failing health, and also furnished me with a simple explanation to my mother of the necessary separation in our domestic life. For my mother had just arrived in Rome from the country, where she spent the greater part of the year with my brother Federico.

My mother was tenderly attached to her young daughter-in-law. In her eyes, Giuliana was in truth the ideal wife—the very companion she had dreamed of for her son. She knew no other woman in the world to be compared with her for beauty, or sweetness, or high-breeding. It would have been inconceivable to her that I should desire any other woman, abandon myself to other arms, lay my head on any other bosom. Having been loved by one man for twenty years with unwavering devotion and unbroken faithfulness—even unto death—she was totally ignorant of the weariness, the disgust, the treachery, all the wretchedness and misery that may lie concealed beneath the cloak of matrimony. She was unconscious of the indignities I heaped upon that gentle, uncomplaining head. Deceived by Giuliana’s generous dissimulation, she still believed in our mutual happiness. If she had known!——

At that time I was still under the baleful spell of Teresa Raffo, who always brought to my mind Apollonio’s words to Menippo—ah, that intoxicating poem!—‘O beau jeune homme, tu caresses un serpent; un serpent te caresse!’

Circumstances favoured me. The death of a relative obliged Teresa to leave Rome and remain away for some time. By an unwonted assiduity towards my wife, I should be enabled to fill the great void which the absence of the ‘Biondissima’ left in my days. For the agitation of that evening had not quite died out, and something new and indefinable had sprung up between me and Giuliana since that hour.

Though her physical sufferings increased rapidly, my mother and I managed with great difficulty to persuade her to undergo the operation necessitated by her condition. The operation would have to be followed by a month or six weeks of absolute rest in bed and a careful convalescence. The poor creature’s nerves were already extremely worn and irritable. The long and painful preparatives so exhausted and worried her that more than once she threatened to give it all up and revolt against the torture which violated, humiliated, and disgusted her.

‘Tell the truth,’ she cried one day with lines of bitterness about her mouth; ‘when you think of it, haven’t you a horror of me? Ah, how ugly, how vile it all is!’ And she made a gesture of repulsion at herself and lapsed into sullen silence.

Another day, she noticed, as I came into her room, that some smell of disinfectant was unpleasant to me. Turning as white as her night-dress, she cried excitedly—

‘Go away, Tullio—go away! I implore you—and don’t come back till I am well again! If you stay here you will hate me. I am hateful like this—I am disgusting. Don’t look at me.’ And she burst into tears.

Some hours after this, when she had grown quieter, and I sat silent thinking she was falling asleep, she suddenly murmured, in the peculiar tones of one speaking in a dream—

‘Ah, if I had really done it! It was a good suggestion——’

‘What are you saying, Giuliana?’

She did not answer.

‘What are you thinking about, Giuliana?’

She only answered with a movement of the lips that tried to be a smile, but failed.

But I thought I understood, and a wave of remorse, of tenderness and pity, swept over me. I would have given anything for her to be able to read in my soul at that moment, to have understood the full measure of my unrevealable, inarticulate, and now ineffectual emotion. ‘Forgive me, forgive me! Tell me what I must do so that you may forgive me, so that you may forget all these cruel things. I will come back to you, I will belong to none but you from this time forth—for ever. I have never really loved any but you; I love but you alone. My soul always turns to you in yearning and regret. This I swear,—away from you, I have never tasted true happiness, never known one moment of complete self-forgetfulness—never, never—I swear it! You alone of all the world are good and kind. You are the noblest-hearted, the sweetest woman I could ever have imagined in my fondest dreams—the One and Only. And to think that I have wronged you, have made you suffer, have made you look on death as a welcome deliverance! Ah, you may forgive me, but I can never forgive myself—you may forget, but I never can. I shall always look upon myself as unworthy; not all the devotion of a lifetime could make amends to you for that. From this time forth, you shall be once more my love, my friend, my sister—once more my guardian and my guide. I will tell you all, will open my whole heart to you. You shall see what stores of tenderness I can bring out for your healing and comfort. Ah, you know it! Remember, remember! You were ill then, too, and you would have none but me to cure you; and I never moved from your bedside, day or night. And you said then—“Giuliana will never forget this of you—never.” There were tears in your eyes, and tremblingly I kissed them away. Dear saint! Recall that day. And when you are better and may get up, we will go down to Villalilla. You will still be rather weak and ailing, but you will soon feel stronger. My spirits will rise as in the old days, and I shall make you smile, I shall make you laugh. You will recover that silvery laugh that always refreshed my heart; you will have all your delicious girlish ways again, and wear your hair in the one long plait I was always so fond of. We are young still. We will reconquer our lost happiness, if only you are willing. We will live—live——’

All this I said to her in my own mind, but the words did not pass my lips; for, though I was profoundly moved, and my eyes were wet, I knew well that the mood was fleeting and that my promises were vain. Besides, I also knew that Giuliana would not be deceived, and that her only answer would have been the pale and distrustful smile that had appeared upon her lips many a time before. ‘Yes,’ that smile said, ‘I know that you are kind and do not like to cause me pain, but you are not master of yourself; you cannot resist the fatal impulses that drive you on. Why try to make me close my eyes to the truth?’

I was silent therefore that day; and although, in the days that followed, I fell more than once into the same state of agitation, of confused proposals and vague dreams, I dared not speak. ‘If you return to her, you must give up those things in which you take delight, and the woman who corrupts you. Have you the strength to do this?’ I answered my own question—‘Who can say?’ And from day to day, I waited for this strength to come to me, waited day after day for something to happen (I knew not what) that should force me to come to a decision—make it inevitable. I allowed myself to dream of our new life, the slow re-blossoming of our rightful love, the strange new savour of certain half-forgotten sensations. ‘We would go down to Villalilla, to the house where lay embalmed our sweetest memories—we two by ourselves, having left Maria and Natalia with their grandmother at Badiola. The weather would be mild and warm, and, leaning on my arm, the convalescent would wander slowly through all the well-known paths, where every step we took awakened a memory. I would see a little bright flush flicker now and then over her pale face, and we would turn a little shy towards each other—would, now and then, seem lost in thought, and then avoid meeting one another’s eyes. For what reason? And then a day would come when, the suggestions of the place being strong upon me, I would venture to remind her of all our sweetest follies in those first days of wedded life here. Do you remember?—and this?—and this? And, little by little, our emotion would increase, become well-nigh unendurable, till, with a simultaneous impulse, we would fall into each other’s arms and our lips would meet in a kiss that made our senses reel and faint. She would faint in very truth, and I would hold her in my arms calling her by every fond name my boundless love could suggest. Presently, she would open her eyes, the mask she had worn so long would fall, and for one instant her very soul would gaze fixedly at me, and she would seem transfigured. After so long! After so long!’——

But ah, how like to die she seemed on that morning when the doctor put her under chloroform, and she, feeling herself slipping away into the unconsciousness of death, tried two or three times to put out her arms to me, to call to me for help. I could not bear it; I left the room.

Two long, mortal hours I waited, sharpening my pain on the grindstone of my imagination, while a desperate sense of pity wrung my very vitals for the unhappy creature, not alone whose flesh the surgeon’s knife was rudely penetrating, but the inner sanctuary of her being, the very centre of the most hidden and delicate sentiments a woman possesses.

When I re-entered Giuliana’s room, she was still under the influence of the anæsthetic, unconscious, speechless—like one dead. My mother was very pale and agitated, but the operation appeared to have been successful, and the doctors were well pleased. The smell of iodoform filled the air. In a corner of the room, an English nursing Sister was engaged in filling an ice-bag, the surgeon’s assistant was rolling up a bandage. Things were gradually returning to their accustomed state of well-ordered neatness.

The patient remained for a long time in a sort of stupor; there seemed but little fever. In the night, however, she was seized with frightful spasms of pain and sickness. Opium was powerless to relieve her. And I, beside myself with horror and anxiety at the sight of her cruel sufferings, expecting her to die every minute, did not know what I was saying or doing. I could only share her agony.

Next day she was better, and, after that, improved steadily day by day. She very slowly regained her strength.

I was unwearying in my attentions. I used a certain ostentation in reminding her, by my various actions, of that former illness of hers; my sentiments, however, were not the same as then—I was still her brother. Frequently while reading aloud to her from some favourite book, my thoughts would be occupied with a passage in a letter from my absent mistress. Out of sight was not out of mind. There were also times, however, when I felt a lazy disinclination to answer these letters—in one of those peculiar pauses that come even to the strongest passion—and this I took to be a sign of growing indifference, and said once more to myself—‘Who knows?’

One day my mother said to Giuliana, in my presence—

‘When you are well enough to get up and be moved, we will all go down together to Badiola—won’t we, Tullio?’

Giuliana looked at me.

‘Yes, mama,’ I answered without a moment’s hesitation, without thinking; ‘and Giuliana and I will go on to Villalilla.’

Giuliana gave me another quick look; then she smiled—a sudden, indescribable smile that was full of almost childlike credulity, like a sick child who has been promised some great and unexpected treat. Her eyelids drooped, but she continued to smile faintly with half-closed eyes that gazed at something far, far away.

How beautiful she looked! How I adored her at that moment! I felt that nothing in the world could compare with her sweet and simple emotion.

A sense of infinite goodness seemed to emanate from her and penetrate my whole being, filling my heart to o’erflowing. She was sitting up in bed propped by two or three pillows, and her face, framed in the loosened masses of her chestnut hair, had a look of extreme, almost ethereal delicacy; her hands lay listlessly before her, so white that the blue veins alone distinguished them from the sheet.

Taking one of these hands in mine—my mother had, by this time, left the room—I said softly—

‘So we will go back—to Villalilla.’

The convalescent answered—

‘Yes.’

We said no more, so that we might prolong our emotion, preserve our illusion. We both understood the intense significance hidden in the few words we had just exchanged under our breath. An instinct warned us not to be more definite, to go no further. Had we said more, we should have found ourselves face to face with realities incompatible with that illusion which was lapping our souls in such sweet dreams.

We spent a whole long afternoon mostly by ourselves, reading at intervals, leaning over the same page, our eyes following the same lines. We had some volumes of poems, and we put into the verses an intensity of meaning which they did not really possess. We made the gentle poet the mouthpiece of our emotions. I underlined with my nail the lines that seemed to interpret the feelings I dared not express.

Je veux, guidé par vous, beaux yeux aux flammes douces,

Par toi conduit, o main où tremblera ma main,

Marcher droit, que ce soit par des sentiers des mousses

Ou que rocs et cailloux encombrent le chemin.

Oui, je veux marcher droit et calme dans la Vie …

And she, after having read, lay back a little while upon her pillows with closed eyes, an almost imperceptible smile upon her lips.

Toi la bonté, toi le sourire,

N’es tu pas le conseil aussi,

Le bon conseil, loyal et brave …

But I saw the lace upon her bosom flutter in response to her breathing, and it began to disturb and affect me like the faint scent of orris-root that rose from the sheets and pillows. I hoped and expected that, overcome by sudden emotion, she would twine an arm about my neck and press her cheek to mine, so that I should feel the corner of her mouth against my face.

She laid a slender forefinger on the page, and, marking the margin with her nail, guided my eyes along the lines:—

La voix vous fut connue (et chère ?)

Mais à présent elle est voilée

Comme une veuve désolée …

Elle dit, la voix connue,

Que la bonté c’est notre vie …

Elle parle aussi de la gloire

D’être simple sans plus attendre,

Et de noces d’or et du tendre

Bonheur d’une paix sans victoire.

Accueillez la voix qui persiste

Dans son naïf épithalame

Allez, rien n’est meilleur à l’âme

Que de faire une âme moins triste!

I clasped her wrist, and, slowly bending my head, pressed my lips in the hollow of her hand.

‘You—could forget?’ I murmured.

She laid her hand upon my mouth and uttered her great watchword—

‘Silence.’

At that moment, my mother came in to announce the visit of Signora Talice. I read Giuliana’s annoyance in her face, and I too felt full of irritation against the inopportune visitor.

‘Oh, mio Dio!’ sighed Giuliana.

‘Tell her that Giuliana is asleep,’ I suggested to my mother in a tone of entreaty.

But she warned me that the visitor was waiting in the next room. She would have to be received.

Now the lady in question was a most spiteful and inveterate gossip. She cast a curious and inquiring glance at me from time to time. When, in the course of conversation presently, my mother happened to remark that I had kept the patient company from morning till night, almost from the beginning of her illness, Signora Talice exclaimed in a tone of undisguised irony—

‘What a perfect husband!’

My annoyance increased so much that I rose, and, under some trivial pretext, left the room.

I left the house, but on the stairs encountered Maria and Natalia coming in with their governess. They rushed at me as usual, smothering me with kisses, and Maria, the elder of the two, gave me some letters she had got from the hall-porter. Amongst them I instantly noticed the handwriting of the absent one. I shook myself free of the children, almost impatiently, and hurried into the street. Once safely there, I stopped to read the letter.

It was short but passionate, and contained two or three sentences of a nature which Teresa well knew were calculated to affect me acutely. She informed me that she would be in Florence between the 20th and 25th of the month, and that she would meet me there ‘like the time before.’ She promised me more definite news at the time of our meeting.

On the instant, all the dreams and plans born of my recent emotion fell from me like the blossoms of a tree that is shaken by a sudden gust of wind. And as the fallen blossoms are irretrievably lost to the tree, so it is with the things of the soul; to me, it was as if they had never been. I made an effort to collect myself, but to no purpose. I set off aimlessly strolling through the streets; I went into a confectioner’s and into a book shop, and bought sweets and books mechanically. Evening began to close in; the lamps were lighted; the pavements were crowded; two or three ladies responded to my bow from their carriages; a friend passed me with his sweetheart who was carrying a great bunch of roses, they were walking fast and talking and laughing gaily. The venomous breath of city life enveloped me, and all my thirst for fresh sensations, my sensual appetite, my vicious curiosity, awoke with redoubled vigour. Teresa had laid hold upon me once more by those words in her letter, and my whole desire went out to her unrestrainedly.

But when the first tumult of feeling had somewhat abated, and I was mounting the stairs in my own house, I grasped the full gravity of what had occurred, of what I had done; I saw clearly that, only a few hours before, I had in reality renewed a bond, engaged my honour, made a promise—tacit, no doubt, but none the less solemn—to a poor unsuspecting creature who was still weak and ill; I knew that I could not draw back without infamy. How I regretted having let myself be tricked by that deceptive emotion! How could I have been such a fool as to allow a sentimental languor to steal over me! I carefully examined every word and deed that day with all the cold subtlety of a fraudulent tradesman seeking for some loophole by which to escape from certain stipulations in a contract already concluded. Ah, my last words had been too binding! That ‘you could forget,’ spoken in such a tone after reading those verses, had all the weight of a definite confirmation. And Giuliana’s ‘silence’ had set the seal upon it.

‘But,’ thought I, ‘does she really believe this time in my repentance? Was she not habitually somewhat sceptical on the subject of my good intentions?’ and again I saw the mistrustful smile that had appeared many a time upon her lips. ‘If at the bottom of her heart she does not believe in it, if her illusions, too, have vanished suddenly, then the breaking of my promise will not be such a very serious matter, it will not wound or offend her too deeply; the episode will remain without further consequences, I shall continue to be free as before, and Villalilla will retire again into the realm of dreams.’ But now I saw that other smile—new, unexpected, credulous—which the name of Villalilla had brought to her lips. What was I to do? What course to pursue? How restrain myself? Teresa Raffo’s letter burned in my pocket.

When I went into Giuliana’s room, I saw at a glance that she had been on the watch for me. She seemed in good spirits, her eyes were bright, her pallor less marked.

‘Tullio, where have you been?’ she laughingly asked.

‘Signora Talice routed me,’ I replied.

She laughed again—a liquid, girlish laugh that transfigured her. I gave her the books and the box of sweets.

‘For me?’ she exclaimed delightedly, and like a greedy child hurried to open the box with little graceful movements of the hands that brought back distant memories to my heart. ‘For me?’

She took out a bonbon, but in the act of carrying it to her mouth she hesitated, dropped it, and pushing away the box, she said—‘Presently, presently——’

‘Do you know, Tullio,’ said my mother, ‘she has not eaten anything yet. She insisted on waiting for you.’

‘Ah, by the by, I have not told you yet,’ broke in Giuliana, flushing rosy-red. ‘I have not told you that the doctor was here while you were out. He says I am much better. I am to get up on Thursday—do you hear that, Tullio? I may get up on Thursday. And in ten days, or a fortnight at most, I shall be able to travel.’

Then, after a little pause, she murmured softly—

‘Villalilla!’

So she had thought of nothing, dreamed of nothing else! So she had believed, after all—she believed. I had the utmost difficulty in concealing my agitation; and busied myself with extra assiduity in the preparations for her little meal, finally placing the tray myself upon her knees.

She followed my every movement with a caressing gaze that positively hurt me. ‘Ah, if she could guess!’ Suddenly my mother exclaimed, in tones of frank admiration—

‘How beautiful you look this evening, Giuliana!’

It was quite true; an extraordinary animation lit up her whole face and beamed from her eyes; she looked years younger. At my mother’s exclamation, she blushed, and the shadow of that blush remained on her cheeks during the rest of the evening,

‘I am going to get up on Thursday,’ she repeated. ‘Thursday—only three days more! I shall have forgotten how to walk.’

She persistently returned to the subject of her cure and of our departure to the country, and asked my mother for details as to the state of the villa and of the garden.

‘I planted a slip of willow close to the fish-pond the last time I was there—do you remember, Tullio? I wonder if I shall find it there still?’

‘Yes, yes,’ answered my mother, beaming with delight, ‘you will; it has come on well—it is quite a tree now; you can ask Federico.’

‘Really, really? But tell me, mama——’

This little detail appeared to be of incalculable importance to her at the moment. She became gaily talkative. I could not help marvelling that she should give the rein so completely to her imagination, should be so transfigured by a mere dream. ‘Oh, why, why did she believe just this time? How can she let herself be so carried away—whence this unusual confidence?’ The thought of my meditated treachery, though it was unavoidable, filled me with impotent rage.

‘But why unavoidable? Was I never to throw off that bondage? I ought to—I must fulfil my promise. My mother was a witness to that promise; cost it what it may, I will keep it.’ And with a strong effort, almost, as it were, a violent shake of my conscience, I threw off my indecision and turned with the whole strength of my soul to Giuliana.

Her beauty struck me afresh; thus excited, gay and young, she reminded me of the Giuliana of old whom I had so often startled out of the tranquillity of our home life by suddenly snatching her to my breast, and kissing her with all the mad ardour of a lover.

‘No, no, mama; don’t make me drink any more,’ she begged, preventing my mother from pouring out more wine. ‘I have drunk too much already without noticing. Ah, that Chablis! Do you remember, Tullio?’

And she laughed into my eyes as she evoked a memory of our love over which floated the delicate aroma of that pale golden wine she preferred before all others.

‘Yes, I remember.’

She closed her eyes with a quiver of the lashes; then she said: ‘It is very warm in here, surely. My ears are burning.’

She pressed her hands to each side of her head to feel the heat. The lamp which burned beside the bed lit up intensely the oval lines of her face, and struck out gleams of gold from the ripples of her chestnut hair just above the small delicate ears, now tipped with red.

Shortly afterwards, when I was relieving her of the tray (my mother and the maid had gone into the next room for a moment), she whispered—

‘Tullio!’ and, drawing me down to her with a furtive gesture, she pressed a kiss upon my cheek.

Now, by that kiss, surely she might lay claim to me again, body and soul, for ever? Such an act, on the part of one so reserved and proud, must mean that she had put away from her all the remembrance of the past in order to begin life anew with me. Could she have given herself to me again with more touching grace, with more entire confidence? At one stroke, the sister had changed back into the wife—the wife who still preserved in her secret heart the memory of my kisses, that physical memory of sensations which is so vivid and so tenacious in woman. Reviewing it all again when I was alone that night, I had interrupted visions of days gone by, of certain evenings in the far past. A warm, rosy June twilight, fraught with mysterious perfumes, the kind of evening so dreadful to the solitary and to those who regret, or who desire in vain. I enter a room; she is sitting near the window, an open book in her lap—languid, deadly pale, apparently half-fainting. ‘Giuliana!’ She starts, and raises herself. ‘What is the matter?’ ‘Nothing’, she replies; and an indefinable agitation like the struggle of things suppressed passes in her dilated eyes. How often since those days of sad renunciation has she suffered tortures in her poor flesh? My thoughts lingered round the images suggested by her recent little outburst of affection, and these thoughts led me to decide in my own mind in favour of my promise.

But when I awoke the next morning, I had but a confused recollection of all that had passed. My vileness and unrest took immediate possession of me again the moment I set eyes on a letter from Teresa Raffo, in which she fixed our meeting at Florence for the 21st, adding precise instructions as to time and place. The 21st was a Saturday, and on Thursday, the 19th, Giuliana was to get up for the first time. For long I discussed every possibility with myself. Disputing thus, I began to waver in my decision. Yes, there was no doubt about it; the rupture is both necessary and inevitable. But how to bring it about? under what pretext? Can I announce my decision to Teresa simply by letter? My very last was still hot with passion, full of fierce desire. How could I justify such a sudden change? Did my poor friend deserve so brutal and unexpected a blow? She had loved me deeply, loved me still; she had, at one time, braved a good deal for my sake. I had loved her, and did so still. Our grand and singular passion was well known, was even looked upon with envious and unfriendly eyes. How many men cherished the ambition of supplanting me! Their name was legion. I rapidly went over the rivals I had most to fear, my most probable successors. ‘Is there in all Rome a lovelier, a more fascinating, a more desirable woman than she?’ I asked myself; and the thought of voluntarily renouncing her seemed to me absurd, inadmissible. ‘No, no, I should never have the strength of mind; I could not, and I will not do it.’ And although, the first tumult of my mind having subsided, I recommenced my futile debate with myself, at the bottom of my heart I knew full well that when the moment came I should not be able to resist the call.

However, I had the courage, on leaving the invalid’s room, and being thrilled by emotion—I had the supreme courage to write to Teresa, ‘I am not coming.’ I invented some excuse, and I remember well that, half-unconsciously, I chose one that should not sound too serious. ‘So you hope that she will take no heed of your excuse and insist upon your coming?’ cried a voice within me. I could not escape from this sarcasm, and a fierce anxiety and irritation took hold upon me and gave me no rest. I made incredible efforts to dissemble before Giuliana and my mother; studiously avoided being alone with the poor deluded creature; and every moment I seemed to read in her gentle, glistening eyes the first shadow of a doubt; I fancied I saw a cloud pass over her pure brow.

On Wednesday I received an imperious and threatening telegram (had I not more than half expected it ?): ‘Either you come, or you never see me again. Answer.’ And I answered: ‘Will come.’

Immediately upon this, moved by that species of unconscious over-excitement which accompanies all the decisive acts of one’s life, I felt a distinct relief; circumstances seemed to be determining their own course. The sense of my irresponsibility, the sense of the necessity of all that had happened, and of all that was going to happen, impressed me profoundly. ‘If, although fully conscious of the evil I am doing, and although I condemn myself I still cannot act otherwise, it is clear that I am obeying a superior power of which I am ignorant. I am the victim of a cruel Fate, a Fate that is both ironical and invincible.’

Nevertheless, as I stood upon the threshold of Giuliana’s room, a horrible weight seemed to fall upon my heart; I swayed giddily behind the portière. ‘She has only to look at me, and she will guess all in a moment,’ was my terrified thought. I was on the point of turning back when she called, in a voice that had never sounded to me so sweet—

‘Is that you, Tullio?’

I came forward a step. She looked at me.

‘Tullio,’ she screamed, ‘what is it? Are you ill?’

‘A little giddy—it is passing over,’ I answered; and I reassured myself, saying: ‘She does not guess.’

And in truth, she was quite unconscious of any cause for doubt, though it seemed to me most strange that such should be the case. Should I prepare her for the brutal stroke? Should I speak to her frankly, or fabricate some specious lie? Or should I slip away without a word of warning, leaving her my confession in a letter? Which would be the most preferable course? Which would make the blow less difficult for me, and the surprise less cruel to her?