Front matter (continued 2)

Up to the month of November the letters followed one another without interruption; but, little by little, they became bitter, full of suspicions, doubts, reproaches.

"How far you have gone from me! I am tortured by something else than the chagrin of mere material separation. It seems to me that your soul has also left and abandoned me. Your fragrance makes others happy. To look at you, to hear you, is not that—to enjoy you? Write to me; tell me that you belong entirely to me, in all your acts, in all your thoughts, and that you desire me, and that you regret me, and that, separated from me, you find no beauty in any instant of life." Further on: "I think, I think, and my thought goads me; and the sting of this thought causes in me an abominable suffering. At times I am seized with a frenzied desire to pluck from my throbbing temples this impalpable thing, which is, however, stronger and more inflexible than a dart. To breathe is an insupportable fatigue for me, and the throbbing of my arteries goes through me as would the sound of hammer blows that I might be condemned to hear. Is that love? Oh, no. It is a kind of monstrous infirmity which can blossom only in me, for my joy and my martyrdom. I please myself by believing that no other human creature has ever felt as I do." Further on: "Never, no, never, shall I have complete peace and complete security. I could be content only on one condition—that I absorbed all, all your being; that you and I no longer were more than a single being; that I lived your life; that I thought your thoughts. Or, at least, I would wish that your senses were closed to all sensations that did not originate in me. I am a poor, ill patient. My days are but a long agony. I have rarely desired them to end, as much as I desire and pray for it now. The sun is about to set, and the night which descends on my soul envelops me in a thousand horrors. The shadows issue from every corner of my room and advance towards me as would a live person whose footsteps and breathing I could hear, whose hostile attitude I 'could see.'"

To await Hippolyte's return, George had returned to Rome in the first days of November; and the letters dated at that time alluded to a very unhappy and dismal episode. "You wrote me: 'I have had great difficulty in remaining true to you!' What do you mean by that? What were the terrible events which have upset you? My God! How you are changed! It makes me suffer inexpressibly, and my pride is irritated at my suffering. Between my eyebrows is a furrow, deep as the cleft of a wound, in which is heaped my repressed anger, in which gathers all the bitterness of my doubts, my suspicions, my disgusts. I believe that even your kisses would not suffice to rid me of it. Your letters, trembling with desires, disturb me. I am not grateful to you for them. For two or three days, I have something against you in my heart. I do not know what it is. Perhaps a presentiment? Perhaps a divination?"

While he read, George suffered as from a wound reopened. Hippolyte would have liked to stop him from continuing. She remembered that evening when her husband had called unexpectedly at the house in Caronno, with a cold, calm face, but with the look of a madman, declaring that he had come to take her back; she recalled the moment when she was alone with him, face to face, in an out-of-the-way room, the window curtains of which were blown about by the wind—in which the light abruptly flared up and then decreased—to which the moaning of the trees was borne up from below; she remembered the silent, savage fight sustained then against that man who had suddenly clasped her—horror!—in order to take her by force.

"Enough! enough!" she said, drawing George's head to her. "Enough! Don't let us read any more."

But he wanted to continue. "I cannot understand the reappearance of that man, and I cannot prevent a feeling of anger which is directed even at you, too. But, to spare you pain, I will abstain from writing you my thoughts on this subject. They are bitter and gloomy thoughts. I feel that my affection is poisoned for some time. It were better, I think, if you never saw me again. If you wish to avoid useless pain, do not return now. Now I am not in a good frame of mind. My soul loves you to adoration; but my thought rends and sullies you. It is a contrast which recommences incessantly, and which will never end." In the next day's letter he wrote: "A pain, an atrocious pain, intolerable, never felt before! O Hippolyte, come back! come back! I want to see you, to speak to you, to caress you. I love you more than ever. Yet, spare me the sight of your bruises. I am incapable of thinking of them without fear and without anger. I feel that, if I saw the marks impressed in your flesh by the hands of that man, my heart would break. It is horrible!"

"Enough, George! don't let us read anymore!" begged Hippolyte again, taking the loved one's head between her hands, and kissing his eyes. "Please, George!"

She succeeded in drawing him away from the table. He smiled that indefinable smile, which sometimes invalids have when they yield to the entreaties of others, knowing full well that the remedy is late and useless.

CHAPTER VII.

On Good Friday evening they started on their return to Rome.

Before their departure, about five o'clock, they took tea. They were taciturn. The simple existence they had led in this old house appeared extraordinarily beautiful and desirable to them, now it was about to end. The intimacy of the modest lodging seemed sweeter and more profound to them. The places where they had promenaded their melancholy and their tenderness were illuminated by ideal lights. It was, then, still another fragment of their love and of their being that fell, annihilated, into the abyss of time.

"That, too, is past," said George.

"What can I do?" said Hippolyte. "It seems to me as if I could no longer sleep anywhere than on your heart!"

They looked into each other's eyes, communicating each other's emotion, feeling the rising wave choking their throats. They remained silent; they listened to the regular and monotonous sound made by the pavers beating the pavement. But the irritating noise augmented their uneasiness.

"That is insupportable," said George, rising.

The measured blows revived in him the sentiment of the flight of time, which he had already so strongly felt; they inspired in him that sort of anxious terror which he had already often experienced when listening to the oscillations of a pendulum. And yet, on the preceding days, had not the same noise lulled him into a vague state of comfort? He thought: "In two or three hours we shall separate. I shall recommence my usual life, which is only a series of petty miseries. My habitual illness will inevitably seize upon me again. Moreover, I know the troubles that Spring revives in me. I shall suffer without cease. And I have already a premonition that one of my most pitiless tormentors will be the idea that Exili has put in my head. If Hippolyte wished to cure me, could she? Maybe, at least partly. Why should she not come with me to some lonely place, not for a week, but for a very long time? She is adorable in intimacy, full of trifling kind attentions and of childish graces. Maybe, by her constant presence, she would succeed in curing me, or at least in making me take life more lightly."

He stopped before Hippolyte, took her two hands in his, and asked: "Have you been very happy during these few days? Answer me."

His voice was agitated and persuasive. "I was never so happy before," she replied.

Feeling a deep sincerity in this answer, George pressed her hands with force, and continued: "Will it be possible for you to go back to your every-day existence?"

"I do not know," she answered; "I do not look before me. You know all is lost."

She lowered her eyes. George seized her in his arms, passionately.

"You love me, do you not? I am the only aim of your existence; you see only me in your future."

With an unexpected smile, which raised her long eyelashes, she said: "Yes, you know it."

He added once more in a low voice, his face bowed down: "You know my malady."

She seemed to have guessed her lover's thought. As if in confidence, in a whispering voice which seemed to draw closer the circle in which they breathed and palpitated together, she asked, "What can I do to cure you?"

They were silent, clasped in each other's arms. But in the silence their two souls dwelt and decided upon the same thing.

"Come with me," he cried, at length. "Let us go to some unknown country; let us stay there all Spring, all Summer, as long as we can—that will cure me."

Without hesitation she replied: "I am ready. I belong to you."

They disengaged themselves, comforted. The hour of departure had come; they strapped the last valise. Hippolyte gathered all her flowers, already withered in the glasses: the violets of the Villa Cesarini, the cyclamens, the anemones, and the periwinkles of the Chigi Park, the simple roses of the Castel-Gandolfo, a branch of an almond-tree gathered in the neighborhood of Diana's Baths, on their way home from the Emissary. These flowers could have told all their idylls. Oh, the frolicsome course in the park, in descending a steep incline, on the dry leaves in which their feet sank to the ankles! She shouted and laughed, pricked on the legs by the sharp nettles through the fine stockings: and then, before her, George beat down the sharp stems with blows of his cane, so that she could trample upon them without danger. Very green and innumerable nettles adorned the Diana's Baths, the mysterious cave in which favorable echoes were transformed into the music of slowly dropping water. And, from the depths of the humid shadow, they saw the country all covered with almond-trees and silver-and-pink peach trees, infinitely delightful beneath the light-green pallor of the limpid waters. So many flowers, so many souvenirs!

"See," she said, showing George a ticket, "it is the ticket for Segni-Paliano! I shall keep it."

Pancrazio knocked at the door. He brought George the receipted bill. In the emotion produced by the signor's generosity, he was all confused in his expressions of thanks and good wishes. Finally, he drew two visiting-cards from his pocket, and offered them to the signor and signora to recall to them his humble name, begging to be excused for his boldness.

Scarcely had he retired than the false newly wed couple began to laugh. The cards bore, in pompous letters, PANCRAZIO PETRELLA.

"I will keep them too as a remembrance," said Hippolyte.

Pancrazio knocked a second time at the door. He brought signora a gift—four or five magnificent oranges. His eyes sparkled in his rubicund visage. He warned them, "It is time to go down."

In descending the staircase the two lovers felt a certain sadness and a sort of fear fall upon them, as if on leaving this peaceful asylum they were about to face some unknown peril. The old hotel-keeper took leave of them at the door, saying with regret, "I had such beautiful larks for this evening."

George answered, with a contraction of his lips: "We will come again soon—we will come again soon."

While they proceeded to the station the sun sank below the sea, at the extreme horizon of the Roman campagna fiery-colored amidst the thick mists. At Cecchina it began to drizzle. When they separated, Rome, on that Good Friday evening, humid and foggy, appeared to them like a city in which one could only die.

II.

THE PATERNAL ROOF.

CHAPTER I.

About the end of April, Hippolyte left for Milan where her sister, whose mother-in-law was dying, had called her. George Aurispa had arranged to leave also, in search of a new and unfrequented place. Towards the middle of May they were to meet again.

But, just at that time, George received an alarming letter from his mother. She was unhappy, almost in despair. In consequence, he could no longer defer his return to the paternal house.

When he became convinced that his duty urged him to hasten at once where there was real sorrow, he was seized by feelings of anguish which overcame by degrees his first sentiment of filial piety, and he felt rise within him a sharp irritation which increased in acuteness as the scenes of the coming conflict, clearer and more numerous, surged through his conscience. And this irritation soon became so acute that it dominated him entirely, persistently nourished by the material annoyances of the departure, by the heart-breaking farewells.

The separation was more cruel than ever. George passed through a period of the most intense sensibility; the exasperation of all his nerves kept him in a constant state of uneasiness. He appeared to no longer believe in the promised happiness, the future peace. When Hippolyte bade him good-by, he asked:

"Shall we meet again?"

When he kissed her lips for the last time, as she passed through the door, he noticed that she lowered a black veil over the kiss, and this insignificant trifle caused him profound distress, assumed in his imagination the importance of a sinister presentiment.

On arriving at Guardiagrele, at his birthplace, under the paternal roof, he was so exhausted that, when he embraced his mother, he began to cry like a child. But neither the embrace nor his tears comforted him. It seemed to him that he was a stranger in his own home—that he was visiting a family which was not his own. This singular sensation of isolation, already experienced under other circumstances connected with his kin, returned now more vivid and more importunate than ever. A thousand little particulars of the family life irritated him, hurt him. During lunch, during dinner, certain silences, during which only the sounds of the forks were heard, made him feel horribly uncomfortable. Certain refinements, to which he was accustomed, received every moment a sudden and painful shock. The air of discord, hostility, and open warfare which weighed heavily on this household almost choked him.

The very evening of his arrival, his mother had taken him aside to recount her troubles and her ailments, to tell him about the bad behavior and dissoluteness of her husband. In a voice trembling with anger, looking at him with tears in her eyes, she had said to him:

"Your father is an infamous man!"

Her eyelids were somewhat swollen, reddened by the large tears; her cheeks were hollow; her whole person bore the signs of long-endured suffering.

"He is an infamous man! A wretch!"

As he went upstairs to his bedroom, George still had the sound of her voice in his ears; he saw before him his mother's attitude; he continued to hear the ignominious accusations against the man whose blood ran in his veins. And his heart was so heavy that he believed he could carry it no longer. But, suddenly, a furious rapture created a diversion, carried his thoughts back to his absent mistress; and he felt that he owed his mother no thanks for reciting to him all those woes—he felt he would have liked much better not to know of, or in any way to occupy himself with, anything but his love, to suffer from nothing but his love.

He entered his room, and locked himself in. The May moon illuminated the windows of the balconies. Thirsty for the night air, he opened the windows, leaned on the balustrade, drank in with deep breaths the cool air of the night. An infinite peace reigned below in the valley; and the Majella, still all white with snow, seemed to deepen the azure by the solemn simplicity of its outlines. Guardiagrele, like a flock of sheep, slept around the Santa Maria Maggiore. A single window lit up, in the house opposite, made a spot of yellowish light.

He forgot his recent wound. Before the splendor of the night he had but one single thought—"This is a night lost to happiness!"

He began to listen. Amidst the silence, he heard the stamping of a horse in a neighboring stable, then a feeble tinkling of small bells. His eyes wandered to the lighted window; and in the rectangle of light he saw shadows flit, as of persons in active motion within. He listened intently. He believed he heard a light knock at his door. He went to open it, although not sure.

It was his aunt Joconda. She entered.

"Have you forgotten me?" she said, kissing him.

In fact, not having seen her when he arrived, he had not thought of her. He excused himself, took her hand, made her sit down, spoke to her in an affectionate tone.

Aunt Joconda, his father's eldest sister, was almost sixty. She limped as the result of a fall, and she was rather short, but an unhealthy stoutness, flabby, pallid. Given entirely to religious practices, she lived by herself in her room, on the top floor of the house, without having almost any connection with the family, neglected, but little loved, considered as being weak-minded. Her little world was full of consecrated images, relics, emblems, symbols; she did nothing else but follow religious exercises, doze in the monotony of her prayers, endure the cruel tortures caused by her gormandizing. She had a greedy passion for confectionery, and all other nourishment she had no taste for. But often she lacked sweets; and George was her favorite, because, each time he came to Guardiagrele, he brought her a box of bon-bons and a box of rossolis.

"So," she said in a mumbling voice from between her almost empty gums, "so you have come back—eh! eh! You have come back——"

She regarded him with a sort of timidity, finding nothing else to say; but a manifest expectancy showed in her eyes. And George felt his heart contract with anxious pity. "This miserable creature," thought he, "has sunk to the lowest degradations of human nature; I am bound to this poor bigoted gormand by ties of blood; I am of her race!"

A visible uneasiness had taken possession of Aunt Joconda; a look that was almost impudent came into her eyes. She repeated:

"So—so."

"Oh! forgive me, Aunt Joconda," he said at last, with a painful effort. "I forgot to bring you some candy."

The old woman changed countenance, as if she were on the point of fainting; her eyes became dim; she stuttered: "It doesn't matter——"

"But to-morrow I will get you some," added George consolingly, yet with a sinking heart. "I will write——"

The old woman became livelier. She said very rapidly: "You know, at the Ursulines ... it's to be had."

A silence followed, during which Aunt Joconda had, without doubt, a foretaste of the morrow's delicacies; because her toothless mouth gave forth the little sound that one makes in re-swallowing the superabundant saliva.

"My poor George! Ah! if I had not my George! You see, what has occurred in this house is a punishment from heaven. But go, boy, go out on the balcony and look at the vases. I—I am the only one who waters them; I always think of George; formerly, I had Demetrius, but now I have no one but you."

She rose, took her nephew by the hand, and led him to one of the balconies. She showed him the flowering vases; she plucked a bergamot leaf and held it out to him. She stooped down to feel if the earth were dry.

"Wait!" she said.

"Where are you going, Aunt Joconda?"

"Wait!"

She went off with her limping gait, left the room, returned a minute later with a pitcher full of water which she could scarcely carry.

"But, aunt, why do you do this work? Why give yourself this trouble?"

"The vases require to be watered. If I did not think of them, who would?"

She sprinkled the vases. Her respiration was heavy, and the hoarse panting of her senile chest distressed the young man.

"That will do! That will do!" he said, taking the pitcher from her hands.

They stayed on the balcony, while the water from the vases dropped into the street with a light splash.

"What is that lighted window?" asked George, to break the silence.

"Oh," replied the old woman. "It is Don Defendente Scioli, who is dying."

And both watched the moving shadows in the rectangle of yellow light. The old woman began to shiver in the cold night air.

"Come! Go to bed, Aunt Joconda."

He wanted to escort her to her room, on the floor above. While following a lobby, they met something which was dragging itself heavily along the floor. It was a tortoise. The old woman stopped to say: "It is as old as you are—twenty-five; and it has become lame like myself. Your father, with a blow of his heel——"

He remembered the plucked turtle-dove and Aunt Jane, and certain hours spent at Albano.

They arrived at the threshold of her chamber. A disgusting odor of sickness emanated from the interior. By the feeble light of a lamp, one could see the walls covered with madonnas and crosses, a torn screen, an arm-chair showing the stuffing and the springs.

"Will you come in?"

"No, thanks, Aunt Joconda; go to bed."

She entered quickly, then came back to the door with a paper packet, which she opened before George, and emptied a little sugar on the palm of her hand.

"You see? It is all I have left."

"To-morrow, aunt; come, go to bed. Good night!"

And he left her, his courage exhausted, his stomach upset, his heart saddened.

He returned to his balcony.

The full moon was suspended in the middle of the sky. The Majella, inert and glacial, resembled one of those selenious promontories which the telescope has brought close to the earth. Guardiagrele slumbered at the foot of the mountain. The bergamots filled the air with fragrance.

"Hippolyte! Hippolyte!"

At that hour of supreme anguish, all his soul went out towards the loved one, demanding assistance.

Suddenly, from the lighted window, a cry arose in the silence, the cry of a woman. Other cries followed; then there was a continued sobbing, which rose and fell like a rhythmic chant. The agony had ended; a soul had dissolved itself into the serene and funereal night.

CHAPTER II.

"You must help me," said his mother. "You must speak to him; you must make him listen to you. You are his first-born. Yes, George, it is essential."

She continued to enumerate her husband's faults, to lay bare before the son the shame of the father. This father had for a concubine a chamber-maid, formerly in the service of the family, a degraded and very mercenary woman; it was for her and the children born in adultery that he dissipated all his fortune, without regard for anybody—careless of his affairs, neglecting his property, selling his crops at a sacrifice to the first comer, in order to obtain money. And he went so far that, sometimes, through his fault, the house lacked necessities; and he refused to give a dowry to his younger sister, although she had been engaged for a long time; and if any observation was made to him, he responded by cries, insults, sometimes even by the most brutal violence.

"You live far from us, and do not know in what a hell we live. You cannot even imagine the smallest part of our sufferings. But you are the eldest. You must speak to him. Yes, George, you must."

His eyes cast down, George remained silent; and to repress the exasperation of all his nerves in the presence of this unhappiness, which disclosed itself to him in so brutal a manner, he required a prodigious effort. What? Was this his mother? That contorted mouth, so full of bitterness, which was contracted so sharply when she uttered coarse words, was that his mother's mouth? Had misery and anger changed her so much? He raised his eyes and looked at her, to see if traces of the old-time gentleness still lingered on the maternal visage. How gentle he had always known this mother to be formerly! What a beautiful and tender creature she always was! And how tenderly he had loved her in his childhood, in his adolescence. In those days Donna Silveria was tall and svelte, pale and delicate; her hair was almost blond, her eyes black; all her person bore the stamp of a noble race, for she descended from that Spina family which, like the Aurispas, has its armorial bearings sculptured beneath the portal of the Santa Maria Maggiore. What an affectionate being she used to be! Why, therefore, this great change? The son was distressed by all his mother's abrupt gestures, at the bitterness of her words, at all the ravages which a rancorous hate had made in her features; and he was distressed also to see his father covered with so much ignominy, to find such a terrible abyss yawning between the two beings to whom he owed his existence. And what an existence!

"You understand, George!" insisted his mother. "You must be energetic. When will you speak to him? Make up your mind."

He heard her, and he felt at the bottom of his entrails the shock of a thrill of horror; and he said to himself: "Oh! mother, demand of me everything, ask of me the most atrocious of sacrifices; but spare me this step, do not compel me to do that. I am a coward." At the thought that he must face his father, that he must accomplish an act of vigor, and of his own will, an unconquerable repugnance arose from the very roots of his being. He would prefer to have a hand cut off.

"Very well, mother," he replied gloomily. "I will speak to him. I will wait for a favorable opportunity."

He took her in his arms and kissed her cheeks as if to tacitly demand forgiveness for the lie; for he said to himself: "I shall not find a favorable opportunity. I shall not say anything."

They stayed in the embrasure of the window. The mother opened the shutters, saying:

"They are about to take away Don Defendente Scioli's body."

They leaned on the balcony, side by side. Then, looking up at the sky, she added:

"What a day this has been!"

Guardiagrele, the city of stone, shone resplendent in the serenity of May. A fresh breeze agitated the grasses on the gargoyles. In every crevice, from the base to the summit, Santa Maria Maggiore was adorned with minute, delicate plants, bloomed with innumerable violet flowers, and as the old cathedral reared its head in the azure sky it seemed clad in a double mantle of marble flowers and of living flowers.

"I will not see Hippolyte again," thought George. "I have dark forebodings. I know that, in five or six days, I shall go to seek the hermitage of our dreams; but, at the same time, I know that it will be in vain, that I shall achieve nothing, that I shall hurl myself against an unknown obstacle! How strange and indefinable are my feelings! It is not I who know; but some one in me knows that all is about to end."

He thought: "She does not write to me any more. Since I am here I have received from her only two short telegrams—one from Pallanza, the other from Bellagio. I never felt so far away from her. Perhaps at this moment another man pleases her. Is it possible that love falls out of a woman's heart all at once? Why not? Her heart is tired; at Albano, warmed anew by buried memories, it palpitated for perhaps the last time. I was mistaken. But certain incidents, for him who knows how to consider them under their ideal forms, bear in themselves secret significance, precise and independent of appearances. Well! when I examine in thought all the little incidents constituting our life at Albano, they assume an unquestionable significance and an evident character; they are final. On the evening of Good Friday, when we arrived at the station at Rome, and when we said good-by, and the cab carried her off in the fog, did it not seem to me that I had just lost her forever? Had I not the innate conviction that all was at an end?" His imagination presented to him the gesture with which Hippolyte had lowered her black veil after the last kiss. And the sun, the azure, the flowers, the general joyousness of nature, suggested to him only this reflection: "Without her, life for me is impossible."

At this moment his mother leaned over the balustrade, looked towards the porch of the cathedral, and said:

"The procession is leaving the church."

The funereal brotherhood left the porch with its insignia. Four men in cowled robes carried the coffin on their shoulders. Two long files of men, also in cowled robes, marched behind with lighted tapers, only their eyes being visible through the two holes in their hoods. From time to time the breeze made the tiny and almost invisible flames flicker, and even extinguished some of them; and the candles consumed themselves in tears. Each cowled man had at his side a barefooted child, who collected the melted wax in the hollow of his two hands.

When the whole cortège had spread out in the street, musicians dressed in red with white facings struck up a funeral march. The undertaker's assistants regulated their steps to the time of the music; the brass instruments glittered in the sun.

"What sadness and ridicule in the honors rendered to the dead!" thought George. He saw himself in a coffin, imprisoned between the boards, carried by that masquerade of people, escorted by those candles and that horrible noise of trumpets; and the idea filled him with disgust. Then his attention was attracted to the ragged urchins who strove to collect the waxen tears, walking unevenly, painfully, the body bent, their eyes fixed on the flickering flames.

"Poor Don Defendente!" murmured the mother, watching the cortège as it disappeared in the distance.

Then, immediately, as if she were addressing herself and not her son, she added wearily:

"Why poor? He is at peace now; it is we who are to be pitied."

George looked at her. Their eyes met; and she smiled at him, but a smile so faint that not a line of her face was moved. It was like a very light veil, scarcely visible, which had spread over this face ever stamped with sorrow. But the imperceptible gleam of this smile had the same effect on George as some sudden great illumination; and then, for the first time, he saw distinctly on the maternal face the irremediable work of a great grief.

Confronted with the terrible revelation which came to him from this smile, an impetuous wave of tenderness welled up in his bosom. His mother, his own mother, could no longer smile but in that way—only in that way. Henceforth the stigmas of suffering would be indelible on the dear face which he had seen bent over him so often, and with such affection, in sickness and in affliction! His mother, his own mother, was killing herself little by little, was wearing herself out day by day, was drifting slowly to the inevitable tomb! And what caused his own suffering just now, while his mother was breathing out her distress, was not the maternal sorrow so much as the wound inflicted on his egotism, the shock given his unstrung nerves by the unvarnished expression of this sorrow.

"Oh! mother," he stammered, suffocated by tears.

And he took her hands and drew her into the room.

"What's the matter, George? What's the matter, my child?" asked the mother, frightened at seeing his face all bathed in tears.

"What's the matter? Tell me."

Ah, now he had found the dear voice again, that unique, unforgettable voice, which touched his soul to its very bottom; that voice of consolation, of forgiveness, of good advice, of infinite goodness, which he had heard in his darkest days—he had found it again, he had found it! In short, he recognized the tender creature of long ago, the adored one.

"Oh! mother, mother!"

And he pressed her in his arms, sobbing, wetting her with burning tears; kissing her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead, in a wild transport.

"My poor mother!"

He made her sit down, knelt before her, and looked at her. He looked at her for a long time, as if it were the first time he had seen her after a long separation. She, her mouth contracted, with a sob but badly concealed which choked her, asked:

"Have I pained you very much?"

She dried her son's tears and caressed his hair. Then, in a voice interspersed with convulsive starts, she said:

"No, George. No! It is not for you to suffer. God has kept you far away from this house. It is not for you to suffer. All my life, since your birth, all my life, always, always, I have sought to spare you a single pain, a moment's unhappiness. Oh! why did I not have the strength to remain silent this time? I should have said nothing; I should not have told you. Forgive me, George. I did not think I should cause you so much unhappiness. Don't cry any more, I entreat you. George, I entreat you, don't cry any more. I cannot bear to see you cry."

She was on the point of breaking down, overcome by anguish.

"See," he said, "I am not crying now."

He leaned his head on his mother's knees, and beneath the caress of the maternal fingers soon became calm. From time to time a sob shook his body. Through his mind, in the form of vague sensations, passed once more the distant afflictions of his adolescence. He heard the twittering of the swallows, the grating of the scissors grinder's wheel, the shrill cries on the streets—familiar sounds, heard in the afternoons of long ago, which used to make his heart grow faint. After the crisis, his soul found itself in a state of indefinable fluctuation. But the image of Hippolyte reappeared; and he felt within him a new upheaval, so tumultuous that the young man gave vent to a sigh on his mother's knees.

"How you sigh!" she murmured, bending over him. Without raising his eyelids, he smiled; but an immense prostration came over him—a desolate lassitude, a desperate desire to withdraw from this truceless struggle.

The desire to live left him little by little, as the heat gradually leaves a corpse.

Of the recent emotion nothing remained; his mother had once more become a stranger to him. "What could he do for her? Save her? Restore peace to her? Restore to her health and happiness? But was not the disaster irreparable? Henceforth, was not this woman's existence forever poisoned? His mother could no longer be a refuge for him as in the days of his childhood, in the bygone years. She could neither understand, console, nor cure him. Their souls, their lives, were too different. She could only offer him the spectacle of his own torture!"

He arose, embraced her, disengaged himself, went out, ascended to his room, and leaned on the balcony. He saw the Majella all pink in the twilight, enormous and delicate, against a greenish sky. The deafening cries of the swallows which were whirling around drove him in. He went to lie down on his bed.

As he lay on his back, he thought to himself: "Good; I live, I breathe. But what is the substance of my life? To what forces is it subjected? What laws govern it? I do not belong to myself—I escape from myself. The sensation I have of my being resembles that of a man who, condemned to hold himself upright on a surface constantly in oscillation and never in equilibrium, feels support constantly lacking, no matter where he places his foot. I am in a perpetual anguish, and even this anguish is not well defined. Is it the anguish of the fugitive who feels someone at his heels? Is it the anguish of the follower who can never reach his aim? Perhaps it is both."

The swallows twittered as they passed and repassed in flocks, like black arrows, before the pale rectangle formed by the balcony.

"What do I lack? What is the lacuna of my moral being? What is the cause of my impotency? I have the most ardent desire to live, to give all my faculties a rhythmic development, to feel myself complete and harmonious. And, on the contrary, I secretly destroy myself every day; each day my life goes out by invisible and innumerable fissures; I am like a half-emptied bladder, which becomes misshapen in a thousand different ways at every agitation of the liquid it contains. All my strength does not serve me more than to enable me to drag, with immense fatigue, a little grain of dust to which my imagination gives the weight of a gigantic rock. A perpetual conflict confuses all my thoughts and renders them sterile. What is it I lack? Who is it holds in his power that portion of my being which eludes my consciousness and yet which, I feel sure, is indispensable for the continuance of my life? Or rather, is not this portion of my existence already dead, so that only death will enable me to regain it? Yes, that is it. In fact, death attracts me."

The bells of Santa Maria Maggiore tolled for vespers. Again he saw the funeral convoy, the coffin, the cowled men, and the ragged children who strove to collect the waxen tears, walking unevenly, painfully, the body bent, their eyes fixed on the flickering flames.

These children greatly preoccupied him. Later, when he wrote to his mistress, he developed the secret allegory which his mind, interested in such studies, had confusedly perceived:

"One of them, sickly, yellowish, leaning with one arm on a crutch and collecting the wax in the hollow of his disengaged hand, dragged himself along by the side of a species of giant with a hood, whose enormous fist brutally grasped the taper. I still see them both, and I shall not forget them. Perhaps there is something in myself which makes me resemble that child. My real life is in the power of some one, a mysterious and unknowable being who holds it in a grasp of iron; and I see it being consumed, and I drag myself after it, and I tire myself trying to collect at least a few drops, and every drop that falls burns my poor hand."

CHAPTER III.

On the table, in a vase, there was a bunch of fresh roses, May roses, which Camille, his younger sister, had gathered in the garden. Around the table were seated the father, the mother, the brother Diego, Albert—Camille's fiancé, invited to dinner—and the elder sister Christine, with her husband and child, a blond boy with a snowy-white complexion, fragile as a blooming lily.

George was seated between his father and mother. Christine's husband, Don Bartolomeo Celaia, Baron of Palleaura, was speaking of municipal intrigues in an irritating tone. He was a man approaching fifty, dried up, bald at the top of his head, as if tonsured, his face clean shaven. The almost insolent acrimony of his gestures and manners contrasted strangely with his ecclesiastic aspect.

As George listened to him, and observed him, he thought: "Can Christine be happy with that man? Can she love him? Dear Christine, the affectionate, melancholy creature, whom I have so often seen weep from sudden effusions of tenderness, to be tied for life to that heartless creature, almost an old man, soured by the silly wrangles of provincial politics! And she has not even the consolation of finding comfort in maternity; she must be racked with worry and anguish for her child—sickly, anæmic, always pensive. Poor creature!"

He gave his sister a look full of sympathetic kindness. Christine smiled at him over the roses, inclining her head slightly to the left, with a graceful movement peculiar to her.

Seeing Diego by her side, he thought: "Who would believe they were of the same race? Christine has largely inherited the amiability of her mother; she has her mother's eyes, and, above all, has her ways and gestures. But Diego!" He observed his brother with that instinctive repulsion that every being feels in the presence of an uncongenial, contradictory, absolutely opposite being. Diego ate voraciously, without once raising his head from above his plate, wholly absorbed in his work. He was not yet twenty, but he was thick-set, already heavy on account of a commencing embonpoint, and his face was congested. His eyes, small and grayish, beneath a low forehead, did not reveal the slightest intellectual light; a yellow down covered his cheeks and strong jaws, and cast a shadow on his projecting, sensual mouth; the same down was noticeable also on his hands, the badly kept nails of which attested a disdain for personal cleanliness.

"Can I love him?" thought George. "Even to address a single insignificant word to him—even to respond to his simple greeting, I have to surmount an almost physical repugnance. When he speaks to me, his eyes never meet mine; and if by chance our eyes do meet, he averts his immediately with a strange precipitation. He reddens before me almost continually, and without apparent cause. How curious I am to know his sentiments regarding me! Without a doubt, he hates me."

By a spontaneous transition, his attention was transferred to his father, to the man whose traits Diego most truly inherited.

Stout, sanguine, powerful, the man seemed to exhale from his whole body an inexhaustible warmth of carnal vitality. His jaws were heavy, his mouth thick-lipped, imperious, full of a vehement respiration, his eyes restless and malignant-looking; his nose was swollen, freckled, and twitched spasmodically; every feature of his face bore the impress of a violent and cruel nature. Every gesture, every attitude, had the abruptness of an effort, as if the whole muscular system of his massive body was in continual struggle with the encumbering fat. His flesh, that coarse stuff full of veins, nerves, tendons, glands, and bones, full of instincts and necessities; the flesh that sweats and stinks; flesh which deforms and sickens, ulcerates and is covered with wrinkles, pimples, warts, and hairs; that bestial stuff, flesh, flourished in him with a species of impudence, and inspired in the refined visitor an unconquerable repulsion. "No, no," said George to himself. "Ten or fifteen years ago he was not like that. I remember distinctly that he was not like that. This growth of latent and unsuspected brutality appears to have occurred slowly, progressively. And I—I am that man's son!"

He observed his father. He noticed that at the angle of his eyes, on his temples, the man had a number of wrinkles, and beneath each eye a swelling, or species of violet-colored pouch. He noted the short neck, swollen, congested, apoplectic. He perceived that the mustache and hair bore traces of dye. The beginning of old age in the voluptuary, the implacable work of vice and time, the vain and clumsy artifice to hide the senile grayness, the menace of a sudden death—all these sad, miserable, and tragic things of human life filled the son's heart with profound distress. An immense pity entered into his heart, even for his father. "Blame him? But he suffers, too. All this flesh, which inspires such a strong aversion in me, all this heavy mass of flesh, is inhabited by a soul. What anguish he may have felt, and what weariness! He certainly has a terrible fear of death." Suddenly, he had a mental vision of his father in his death agony. An attack had overthrown him, stricken him mortally; he panted, still alive, livid, mute, unrecognizable, his eyes full of the horror of death; then, as if stricken to earth by a second blow of the invisible sledge-hammer, he lay motionless, a mass of inert flesh. "Would my mother weep?"

"You are not eating anything," his mother said to him. "You do not drink. You have eaten almost nothing. Perhaps you are not well?"

"No, mother," he replied. "I have no appetite this morning."

The sound of something dragging itself along near the table caused him to turn. He perceived the decrepit tortoise, and remembered the words of Aunt Joconda: "She became lame like me. Your father, with a blow of his heel——"

While he was looking at the tortoise, his mother said to him, with the glimmer of a smile:

"She is as old as you are. I was carrying you when it was given to me."

With the same imperceptible smile, she added: "She was quite small. The shell was almost transparent; she resembled a toy. She has lived in our house ever since, growing bigger every year."

She took an apple paring and offered it to the tortoise. She looked for a moment at the poor animal, which moved its yellowish, old, serpent-like head with a kind of dazed trembling. Then dreamily she began to peel an orange for George.

"She remembers," thought George, seeing his mother so absorbed. He guessed the inexpressible sadness which, without any doubt, entered her soul at the recollection of the happy days, now that the ruin was complete, now that, after so many treasons, after so many infamies, all was irreparably lost. "She was loved by him formerly; she was young; perhaps she had not yet suffered! How her heart must sigh! What regret, what hopelessness must well up from her entrails!" The son suffered from the maternal suffering—reproduced in himself his mother's anguish. And he dwelt so long, savoring the supreme delicacy of his emotion, that his eyes became veiled in tears. He repressed the tears by an effort, and felt them fall, very softly, within himself. "Oh! mother, if you only knew."

On turning round, he saw that Christine was smiling at him over the roses.

Camille's fiancé was just saying:

"That is what one might call being ignorant of the first word of the Code. When one claims to——"

The baron approved the young doctor's arguments, and repeated after each sentence:

"Assuredly, assuredly."

They were demolishing the mayor.

Young Albert was seated beside Camille, his fiancée. He was dressed foppishly and his complexion was pink and white, like a wax figure; he wore a little pointed beard, his hair was parted in a straight line, a few curls were coquettishly arranged around his forehead, and a pair of gold-mounted glasses were on his nose. "That is Camille's ideal," thought George. "For several years they have loved one another with an all-powerful love. They believe in their future happiness. They have long sighed for that happiness. Without doubt, Albert has promenaded with this poor girl on his arm through all the commonplaces of the idyll. Camille is not robust; she suffers imaginary ailments; she does nothing from morning to night but weary her confidant, the piano, with nocturnes. They will get married. What will be their lot? A young man vain and empty, a sentimental young girl, in the petty provincial world—" An instant longer he followed in imagination the development of these two mediocre existences, and he felt moved by pity for his sister. He looked at her.

Physically, she resembled him somewhat. She was tall and slim, with beautiful chestnut-colored hair. Her eyes were bright but changing, green, blue, or ashen in turn. A light application of poudre de ris rendered her still paler. She wore two roses on her bosom.

"Perhaps she, too, resembles me otherwise than in he features. Perhaps, unknown to her, her soul bears some of the fatal germs which have developed in my consciousness with such might. Her heart must be full of mediocre anxieties and melancholies. She is ill, without knowing what her trouble is."

At this moment his mother rose. They all followed her excepting the father and Don Bartolomeo Celaia, who remained at the table to chat; which rendered them both more odious to George. He had put one arm around his mother's waist and the other around Christine's waist, affectionately, and so they passed into the adjoining room, he almost dragging them. He felt his heart swollen by extraordinary tenderness and compassion. At the notes of the nocturne which Camille commenced to play, he said to Christine:

"Will you come down into the garden?"

The mother remained near the engaged couple. Christine and George went down, accompanied by the silent child.

At first they walked side by side, without speaking. George had taken his sister's arm, as he was accustomed to do with Hippolyte. Christine stopped, murmuring:

"Poor, neglected garden! Do you remember our games when we were little?"

And she looked at her son Luke.

"Go, my Luchino; run and play a little."

But the child did not move from his mother's side; on the contrary, he seized her hand. She sighed, looking at George.

"You see! It is always the same! He never runs, he never plays, he never laughs. He never leaves me, never wishes to be away from me. He's afraid of everything!"

Absorbed in thoughts of his absent mistress, George did not hear what Christine was saying.

The garden, half in the sun, half in the shade, was girt by a wall on the top of which glittered fragments of broken glass fixed in the cement. Along one side ran a vine. Along the other side, at equal distances, reared tall cypresses, slim and straight as candles, with a meagre tuft of sombre foliage, almost black, shaped like a lance-head, at the summit of their trunks. In the part exposed to the south, on a sunny strip of ground, flourished several rows of orange and lemon trees, just then in bloom. The rest of the ground was strewn with rose-bushes, lilacs, and aromatic herbs. Here and there could be seen several small myrtle-bushes planted at regular intervals, and which had served to line the now ruined borders. In one corner there was a handsome cherry-tree; in the centre there was a round basin, filled with gloomy-looking water in which were growing lentils.

"Tell me," said Christine, "do you remember the day you fell into the basin, and how poor Uncle Demetrius dragged you out? How you frightened us that day! It was a miracle that you were taken out alive."

At the name of Demetrius, George started. It was a well-beloved name, the name which always made his heart palpitate when he heard it mentioned. He listened to his sister; he watched the water, over which long-legged insects made rapid flights. An anxious desire came to him to speak of the dead, to speak of him freely, to revive all his memories; but he checked himself, feeling that selfish pride which prompts one to conceal a secret, in order that the soul may feed upon it in solitude. He experienced a sensation almost akin to jealousy at the thought that his sister should have been touched and moved at the memory of the dead man. That memory was his own property exclusively. He guarded it, in the intimacy of his soul, with a grieved and profound cult, forever. Demetrius had been his veritable father; he was his only and unique parent.

And he reappeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full of a virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the centre of his forehead, among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.

"Do you remember," said Christine, "the evening that you hid yourself and passed the whole night out of doors without showing yourself until morning? How frightened we were that time, too! How we looked for you! How we cried!"

George smiled. He remembered having hid himself, not out of fun, but from a cruel curiosity, to make his people believe he was lost, and to make them weep for him. During the evening—a humid, calm evening—he had heard the voices calling him, he had listened eagerly for the slightest sounds which came from the house in an uproar, he had held his breath with a joy mixed with terror on seeing the persons who were seeking him pass near his hiding-place. After the entire garden had been ransacked without result, he still lay crouching in his hiding-place. And then, at the sight of the household in confusion, which could be seen by the quick going and coming of shadows before the lighted windows, he was seized by an extraordinary emotion, acute to the point of tears; he felt sorry for his parents and for himself, just as though he were really lost; but, in spite of all, he obstinately persisted in concealing himself. And then the morning came; and the slow diffusion of the light in the silent immensity had swept from his brain as if a mist of folly, had given him the consciousness of the reality, had awakened in him remorse. He had thought of his father and the punishment with terror and despair; and the basin had fascinated him. He felt himself attracted by that pale and gentle piece of water which reflected the sky—the water in which a few months before he had almost perished.

"It was during Demetrius's absence," he remembered again.

"Do you smell that perfume, George?" said Christine. "I will gather a bouquet."

The air, impregnated with a warm humidity, and charged with heavy perfumes, disposed one to indolence. The bunches of lilac, the orange-blossom, the roses, thyme, marjoram, sweet basil, myrtle—all their essences combined to form one single essence, delicate yet powerful.

All at once, Christine asked:

"Why are you so thoughtful?"

The perfume had just aroused in George a great tumult, a furious resurrection of all his passion, a desire for Hippolyte which had routed every other sentiment, a thousand recollections of sensual delights which coursed through his veins.

Smiling and hesitating, Christine added:

"You are thinking—of her?"

"Ah! it is true, you know," said George, reddening suddenly under his sister's indulgent gaze.

He remembered he had spoken to her of Hippolyte the previous autumn, in September, at the time he stayed at her house at Torricelle di Sarsa, on the seacoast.

Still smiling, still hesitating, Christine again asked:

"Do you—still love her as much as you did?"

"Still."

Without further speech, they directed their steps towards the orange and lemon trees, both disturbed, but in a different manner. George felt his regrets augmented by having confided in his sister; Christine felt a confused revival of her smothered aspirations, as she thought of the unknown woman whom her brother adored. Their eyes met and they smiled, and the smile seemed to diminish their pain.

She made a few rapid steps towards the orange-trees, exclaiming:

"Goodness! what a quantity of flowers!"

She began to pluck the flowers, her arms raised, shaking the boughs to break off the small branches. The corollas fell on her head, shoulders, and bosom. All around, the ground was strewn with the fallen petals, as if with a fragrant snow. She was charming in this attitude, with her oval face and long, white neck. The effort animated her visage. All at once her arms dropped, she grew pale, and tottered as if overcome by vertigo.

"What's the matter, Christine? Are you ill?" cried George, frightened, as he supported her with his arm.

But a violent nausea choked her, and she was unable to answer. She motioned that she wished to be taken away from the trees, and, supported by her brother, she made a few uncertain steps forward, while Luke watched her with terrified eyes. Then she stopped, gave a sigh, regained her color little by little, and in a voice that was still weak said:

"Do not be alarmed, George. It is nothing. I am enceinte. The strong odor made me feel ill. It is gone now. I am all right now."

"Shall we go back to the house?"

"No. Let us stay in the garden. Let us sit down."

They sat under the vine, on an old stone bench. Noticing the child's grave and absorbed look, George called him to rouse him from his stupor.

"Luchino!"

The child leaned his heavy head on his mother's knees. He was frail as a lily-stem; he seemed to have difficulty in carrying his head upright on his shoulders. His skin was so delicate that every vein was visible, delineated as if threads of blue silk. His hair was so blond that it was almost white. His eyes, gentle and humid, like those of a lamb, showed their pale azure from between long, fair eyelashes.

His mother caressed him, pressing her lips together to restrain a sob. But two tears welled up, and rolled down her cheeks.

"Oh, Christine!"

Her brother's affectionate tone only increased her emotion. Other tears welled up, and rolled down her cheeks.

"You see, George! I have never claimed anything; I have always accepted everything; I have always been resigned to everything; I have never complained—never rebelled. You know that. George. But now this—now this! Oh! Not even to be able to find a little consolation in my son!"

She spoke tearfully, and in a desolate tone.

"Oh! George, you see; you see how it is. He does not speak, or laugh, or play; he is never merry, and he never does what other children do. And it seems to me that he loves me so much, that he adores me! He never leaves my side, never. I begin to believe that he only lives from my breath. Oh! George, if I were to tell you of certain days, long, long days, which seem endless. I work near the window; I raise my eyes, and I meet his eyes gazing, gazing at me. It is a slow torture, a punishment that I cannot describe. It is as if I felt my blood flowing drop by drop from my heart."

She stopped, choked by anguish. Drying her tears, she went on:

"If at least the one I am bearing is born, I will not say beautiful, but with health! If, for this once, God will come to my aid!"

She became silent, attentive, as if to draw an omen from the trembling of the new life which she carried in her womb. George took her hand. And for several minutes the brother and sister sat mute and motionless on the bench, overwhelmed by existence.

Before them stretched out the solitary and abandoned garden. The cypress-trees, straight and motionless, reared their tall trunks religiously towards the sky, like votive candles. The rare zephyrs which passed over the neighboring rose-trees had scarcely enough strength to cause the fall of the leaves of the few faded roses. From time to time, after intervals of silence, came sounds of a piano from the distant house.

CHAPTER IV.

"When? When? The action they wish to force on me becomes inevitable then? I shall be obliged, then, to face that brute?" George saw the hour approach with ungovernable dread. An insurmountable repugnance arose from the roots of his being at the very thought that he was going to find himself alone, in a closed room, in a tête-à-tête, with that man.

As the days passed, he felt increase his anxiety and humiliation, caused by culpable inertia. He felt that his mother, that his sister, that all the victims, expected from him, the first-born, some energetic action, some kind of protest—protection. Why, in fact, had he been summoned? Why had he come? From now on, it no longer seemed possible for him to leave without having done his duty. Without doubt, at the last minute, he could have escaped without saying good-by, and then written a letter justifying his conduct by any plausible pretext. When his distress was at its height, he ventured to think of this ignominious resource; he stopped to consider a way, to arrange the most trifling details, to picture the results. But, in the scenes conjured up, the unhappy and ravaged face of his mother awoke in him an intolerable remorse. The reflections which he made on his egotism and his weakness revolted him against himself: and he sought with puerile fury to find some particle of energy which he could excite and efficaciously employ against the greater part of his being, and which would permit him to triumph over it as over a cowardly brute. But this false energy did not last, did not serve in the least to press him to a manly resolution. Then he undertook to calmly examine his situation, and he deluded himself by the very vigor of his reasoning. He thought: "What good could I do? What evils could my intervention remedy? Will this unhappy effort which my mother and the rest demand from me yield any real advantage? And what advantage?" As he had not found in himself the energy necessary for the execution of the act, as he had not succeeded in provoking in himself a satisfactory revolt, he had recourse to the opposite method—he attempted to demonstrate to his own satisfaction the uselessness of the effort. "What would be the result of the interview? It would certainly have none. According to my father's humor or according to the trend of his conversation, he would be either violent or persuasive. In the first case, his violence and insults would take me by surprise. In the second case, my father would find a mass of arguments to prove to me either his innocence or the necessity of his faults, and I should be taken equally by surprise. The facts are irreparable. When vice is rooted in the intimate substance of a man, it becomes indestructible. Now, my father is at the age when vice can no longer be rooted out, when habits can no longer be changed. For years he has been associated with that woman and those children. Have I the slightest chance to convince him that he ought to break off all those ties? Yesterday, I saw the woman. It sufficed to see her, to guess that she will never let go her hold on the man whose flesh she holds in her clutches. She will dominate him until his death. The thing is now irremediable. And then, there are those children and those children's rights. Besides, after all that has occurred, would a reconciliation be possible between my father and mother? Never. All my attempts would then be fruitless. And then? There still remains the question of material damage, of money squandered, of dilapidation. But does it fall on me to put all this in order, since I live far away from the house? It would require constant vigilance to do that, and only Diego could do it. I will speak to Diego; I will arrange with him. In short, the most urgent matter just now is Camille's dowry. Albert frequently brings the subject up, and is even the most annoying of all my solicitors. Perhaps I shall be able to make some arrangement without difficulty."

He intended to favor his sister by contributing towards her dowry; for, the heir of all his uncle Demetrius's fortune, he was rich, and already in possession of his property. The intention to perform this generous act raised him once more in his own conscience. He believed himself freed from all other duties, from any other disagreeable step, by the sacrifice which he consented to make of his money.

When he turned his steps towards his mother's room he felt less uneasy, lighter, more comfortable. Moreover, he had learned that since morning his father had returned to the country place where he usually went in order to have more freedom in his actions. And it relieved him greatly to think that in the evening, at table, a certain place would be vacant.

"Ah! George, you have come just in time," cried his mother, directly she saw him enter.

The angry voice gave him such a rude and unexpected shock that he stopped, and he looked at his mother with stupor, so transfigured by the transport of anger as to be almost unrecognizable. He also looked at Diego, not understanding; he looked at Camille, who stood still, mute and hostile.

"What is the matter?" stammered George, fixing his eyes once more on his brother, attracted by the bad expression which he saw for the first time on the young man's face.

"The strong box in which the silverware is kept is no longer in its place," said Diego, without raising his eyes, contracting his eyebrows and mumbling. "They charge me with having made away with it."

A flood of bitter words fell from the unhappy woman's mouth.

"Yes, you—in league with your father. You are your father's accomplice. Oh! what infamy. And now this frightful thing! Now this frightful thing! The child who has nursed at my breast to turn against me! But you are the only one who resembles him. God has been more merciful with the others. O God, blessed be thy name, blessed forever, for having spared me that supreme misfortune! You are the only one who resembles him, the only one——"

She turned towards George, who stood paralyzed, motionless, voiceless. Her chin trembled spasmodically; and she was so convulsed that one would have believed that she was going to sink down on the floor at any moment.

"Do you see now the life that we lead? Tell me, do you see it now? Every day, some new infamy. Every day, the same struggle to prevent the pillage of this unfortunate house. Are you convinced now that, if your father could, he would turn us into the streets, snatch the bread from our mouths? And it will come to that; we shall end by seeing that. You will see, you will see."

She continued, panting, with a choking sob in her throat at every pause, giving vent at times to hoarse shrieks, which expressed an almost savage hate, a hate inconceivable in a creature apparently so delicate. And once more accusations fell from her lips. The man had no longer the slightest consideration, the slightest shame. He would stop at nothing and for nobody to make money. He had become insane; he seemed a prey to uncontrollable madness. He had ruined his real estate, cut down his woods, sold his herds at hazard, blindly, to the first comer, to the one who offered most. Now he began to despoil the house in which his children were born. For a long time he had had designs upon the silver, family silver, old and hereditary, piously guarded as a relic of the house of Aurispa, preserved intact until now. Hiding it had proved useless. Diego was in league with his father; and the two confederates, eluding the keenest vigilance, had taken it, to do with it God only knows what.

"Have you no shame?" she went on, turning towards Diego, who restrained with difficulty an explosion of his violence. "Are you not ashamed to take part with your father against me—against me, who have never refused you anything, who have always done as you wished? And yet you know, you know perfectly well, where the silver has gone And you are not ashamed? You've nothing to say? Won t you answer? Look, there's your brother. Tell me where the box has gone. I must know, do you hear?"

"I have already said that I don't know, that I haven't seen the box, and that I did not take it," cried Diego, unable to longer contain himself, with an explosion of brutality, and shaking his head; and the sombre flame which lit up his face made him resemble the absentee. "Do you understand?"

The mother, pale as death, looked at George, to whom the look seemed to impart a similar color.

Seized with a fit of trembling impossible to hide, the elder brother said to the younger:

"Diego, leave the room."

"I'll leave when it pleases me," replied Diego insolently, shrugging his shoulders, without, however, looking his brother in the face.

Then a sudden exasperation seized George, one of those extreme exasperations which, in feeble and irresolute men, have such an excessive vehemence that they cannot manifest themselves by any external act, but cause to pass before the thwarted will flashes of criminal visions. The hatred between brothers, that odious hate which, since the creation, breeds secretly at the bottom of human nature to break out at the first discord, more ferocious than every other hate—that inexplicable hostility which exists, latent, between the males of the same blood, even though the customs and peace of the birthplace have created between them affectionate bonds; and, also, that horror which accompanies the execution or the thought of a crime, and which is perhaps only the vague sentiment of the law inscribed by secular heredity in the Christian conscience—all this surged confusedly in a sort of vertiginous whirl which, for a second, superseded all other sentiment in his soul, and gave him an aggressive impulse. The very aspect of Diego, his thick-set and sanguine body, his fallow head on the bull-like neck, the evident physical superiority of this robust, muscular fellow, the offence against his authority as the elder—all contributed to augment his fury. He would like to have had a prompt means of dominating, subjugating, felling this brute, without resistance and without a struggle. Instinctively he looked at his fists, those large, powerful fists, covered with a reddish down, which at dinner, employed in the service of a voracious appetite, had already caused him such a strong repulsion.

"Leave the room! Leave the room immediately!" he repeated in a higher and more commanding key; "or else ask my mother's pardon immediately."

He advanced towards Diego, his hand extended as if to grasp an arm.

"I do not permit anyone to give me orders," cried Diego, at last looking his elder brother in the face.

And, beneath his low forehead, his little gray eyes expressed a resentment which had been brooding for years.

"Take care, Diego!"

"You don't frighten me."

"Take care!"

"Who are you, I'd like to know? What business have you here?" shouted Diego angrily. "You have no right to interfere. You are a stranger. I do not want to know you. What has been your rôle up to now? You have never done anything for anybody; you have always thought only of your comfort, and your interest. The caresses, the preferences, the adorations, have all been for you. What do you want now? Go back to Rome and squander your heritage as you choose; but don't meddle in what does not concern you."

So he breathed out all his rancor, all his jealousy, all his envious hate against the fortunate brother who, in the great city yonder, lived a life of unknown pleasures, a stranger to his family, as though a being of another race, favored by a thousand privileges.

"Hold your tongue! Hold your tongue!"

And the mother, beside herself, and throwing herself between them, slapped Diego's face.

"Leave the room! Not another word! Get out of here! Go to your father! I don't want to hear you any more! I don't even want to see you again!"

Diego hesitated, shaken by the quivering of fury, perhaps only waiting for a gesture from his brother to fling himself on him.

"Go!" repeated the mother, at the end of her energy.

And she fell fainting into Camille's arms, extended to receive her.

Then Diego went out, livid with rage, muttering between his teeth a word which George did not understand, and they heard his heavy steps grow fainter as he passed through the gloomy enfilade of rooms in which the daylight was already dying.

CHAPTER V.

It was a rainy evening. Stretched out on his bed, George felt himself so broken physically, and so sad, that he had given up thinking, so to speak. His thoughts wavered, vague and incoherent; but his sadness was modified and exasperated by the influence of the slightest sensations—occasional words pronounced in the street by passersby, the tick-tick of the clock on the wall, the tinkling of a distant bell, the stamping of a horse, a whistle, the banging of a door. He felt alone, isolated from the rest of the world, separated from his own anterior existence by the abyss of incalculable time. His imagination represented to him, in an indistinct vision, the gesture with which his mistress had lowered her black veil after the last kiss; it represented to him the child with the crutch collecting the waxen tears. He thought: "There is nothing more left to me but to die." Without definite cause, his anguish increased all at once, and became unbearable. The palpitations of his heart choked him, as if in a nightmare. He threw himself from his bed and paced up and down his room, distracted, agitated, incapable of containing his anguish. And his steps resounded in his brain.

"Who is there? Someone calling me?" The sound of a voice rang in his ear. He strained his ear to listen. He heard nothing more. He opened the door, walked in the corridor, and listened. All was silent. His aunt's room was open, and lit up. A strange fear seized him, a sort of panicky terror, as he thought that he might all at once see that old woman, with the mask of a cadaver, appear on the threshold. One doubt crossed his mind; she was perhaps dead, seated over there in her easy-chair, motionless, her chin on her bosom—dead. This vision had the clearness of reality, and froze him with veritable fright. He did not stir, no longer dared make a movement, standing still with a band of iron around his head, a band which, like some cold and elastic substance, expanded and contracted according to the pulsation of his arteries. His nerves tyrannized him, imposing on him the disorder, the excess, of their sensations. The old woman commenced to cough, and that made him start. Then he retired softly, quietly, on tiptoe, so as not to be heard.

"What is the matter with me this evening? I cannot stay any longer alone in this room. I must go down." Besides, he foresaw that, after the atrocious scene, it would be equally impossible for him to bear his mother's unhappy appearance. "I will go out. I will go to Christine's." What prompted him to make this visit was the recollection of the touching and sad hour spent with his sweet sister in the garden.

It was a rainy evening. In the streets, already almost deserted, the few gas-jets threw out a dull glow. From a closed bakery came the voices of the bakers at work, and an odor of bread; from a cabaret came the sounds of a guitar and the refrain of a popular air. A band of wandering dogs ran by and was lost in the sombre alleys. The hour struck in the belfry.

By degrees, the walk in the open air calmed his exaltation. He seemed to have freed himself from the phantasies which encumbered his conscience. His attention was attracted to all he saw and heard. He stopped to listen to the sounds of the guitar, to smell the odor of the bread. Someone passed in the shadow on the other side of the street, and he thought he recognized Diego. Meeting him caused him agitation; but he felt that all his rancor was gone, that no violence remained at the bottom of his sorrow. Certain of his brother's words came back to his memory. He thought: "Who knows if he did not speak the truth? I have never done anything for anybody; I have always lived for myself alone. Here I am a stranger. Everyone here judges me perhaps in the same way. My mother said: 'You see now the life we lead? You see now, don't you?' I might see all her tears flow, and still should not have the strength to save her." ...

He arrived at the gate of the Celaia palace. He entered, and crossed the vestibule. As he traversed the court, he raised his eyes. Not a light was visible at any of the high windows; there was in the air an odor of rotten straw; the tap of a water-fountain dripped in an obscure angle; beneath the portico, beneath an image of the Virgin covered with a grating, a little lantern was burning, and through the grating, at the feet of the Virgin, could be seen a bouquet of artificial roses; the steps of the large stairway were hollowed in the centre by usage, like those of an antique altar, and every hollow in the stone shone with yellowish reflections. Everything expressed the melancholy of the old, hereditary house to which Don Bartolomeo Celaia, left to solitude, and arrived at the threshold of old age, had conducted his bride and in which he had begotten his heir.

As he went upstairs, George saw with the eyes of his soul the young, pensive wife and the anæmic child; he saw them in the distance, at a chimerical distance, at the end of an out-of-the-way room to which nobody could penetrate. For a moment he had the idea to turn back, and he stopped, perplexed, in the middle of the high and silent white staircase. He was in a state of indefinable uneasiness. Once more he had lost the sense of the present reality; he felt himself once more under the influence of a vague terror, like a short time before in the corridor, when he had perceived the door open and the room empty. But, suddenly, he heard a noise, and a voice as if someone were chasing something; and a gray dog, a gaunt and dirty-looking mongrel, doubtless driven to enter the house by hunger, came flying down the stairway half a dozen steps at a time, and brushed by him. A servant, noisily chasing the fugitive, appeared on the landing.

"What is the matter?" asked George, visibly agitated by the surprise.

"Oh, nothing, sir. I am chasing a dog, an ugly, dirty beast, that gets into the house every night, no one knows how, just like a ghost."

This trifling, insignificant fact, combined with the servant's words, aroused in him that inexplicable uneasiness which resembled the confused anguish of a superstitious presentiment. It was this anguish which prompted the question:

"Is Luchino well?"

"Yes, sir; thanks to God."

"Is he asleep?"

"No, sir; he has not yet gone to bed."

Preceded by the domestic, he crossed the large rooms, which seemed almost empty, and in which the furniture, old-fashioned in design, was placed symmetrically. Nothing indicated the presence of inhabitants, as if the rooms had remained closed up to then. And he said to himself that Christine could not love this dwelling, since she had not shed over it the grace of her soul. Everything had remained there just as it was, in the same order in which the bride found it on entering on her wedding-day, in the same order left by the last of the wives of the house of Celaia.

George's unexpected visit delighted his sister, who was alone and preparing to put the child to bed.

"Oh! George, how good you are to have come!" she exclaimed, with an effusion of sincere joy, pressing him in her arms, and kissing his forehead; and this tenderness had the immediate effect of dilating her brother's depressed heart. "Look, Luchino, look; there's your uncle George. Have you nothing to say to him? Come, give him a kiss."

A feeble smile appeared upon the child's pale mouth; and as he had lowered his head, his long, blond eyelashes were lit up from above and threw their trembling shadow on his blanched cheeks.

George took him in his arms, unable to prevent a sensation of profound emotion in feeling beneath his hands the leanness of the child's chest, in which beat so debilitated a heart. And he was almost afraid, as if his slight pressure were sufficient to extinguish the pitiful little life. He felt both fear and pity, as he used to do in his boyhood when he held a little scared bird prisoner in his hand.

"Light as a feather!" he said.

The emotion which trembled in his voice did not escape Christine.

He seated the child on his knees, caressed his head, and asked him:

"Do you love me very much?"

His heart was filled with unusual tenderness. He felt a melancholy desire to see the poor, sickly child smile, to see his cheeks tinted at least once a fleeting rouge, to see a light effusion of blood beneath the diaphanous skin.

"What have you here?" he asked, seeing a finger wrapped up in linen.

"He cut himself the other day," said Christine, whose attentive eyes followed her brother's slightest gestures. "A slight cut, but it is obstinate in healing."

"Let me see, Luchino," said George, prompted by a painful curiosity, but smiling to call forth a smile. "I will cure it by blowing on it."

The child, surprised, permitted the bandage to be removed from his finger. Watched anxiously by his sister, George took infinite precautions in untying it. The end of the linen had adhered to the slight wound, and he had not the heart to detach it; but at the edge exposed to view he saw appear a whitish drop, resembling whey. His lips trembled. He raised his eyes; he saw that the face of his sister, intent on his every movement, had undergone a change and was contracted by grief. He felt that at that moment the poor woman's soul was wholly concentrated in that little hand.

"It is nothing," he said. And he forced a smile, as he breathed on the cut, to give the illusion to the child, who was waiting for the miracle. Then he rebound the finger with infinite care. He thought once more of the strange anguish which had seized him on the deserted staircase, of the chase after the dog, of the servant's words, of the questions which a superstitious fear had suggested to him, of all his baseless anxiety.

Noticing how absorbed he was, Christine said to him:

"What are you thinking of?"

"Nothing."

Then, all at once, without thinking, without having any other intention than to say something which would arouse the attention of the already sleepy child, he said:

"Do you know, I met a dog on the staircase."

The child opened wide his eyes.

"A dog which comes every night."

"Yes," said Christine, "Gian spoke to me about it."

But she stopped at the appearance of the dilated and terrified eyes of the child, who was on the point of bursting into sobs.

"No, no, Luchino; no, no, it's not true," she cried, lifting him from George's knees, and pressing him to her bosom. "No, it's not true. Your uncle said that for fun."

"It's not true, it's not true," repeated George, rising in consternation at these tears, which no other child would weep, for they seemed to ravage the poor creature.

"Come, come," said the mother in a coaxing tone; "Luchino's going to bed now, isn't he?"

She passed into the adjoining room, still caressing and rocking her weeping child.

"Come, too, George."

While she undressed the child, George watched her. She undressed him slowly, with infinite precautions, as if she were afraid to break him; and each of his gestures showed sadly the wretchedness of his slender limbs, which already began to show the deformities of an incurable rachitis. The neck was long and flexible, like a withered stem; the breastplate, the ribs, the shoulder-blades, almost visible through the skin, making a projection which the shadows cast in the hollowed parts accentuated even more strongly; the enlarged knees appeared to be knotted; the abdomen somewhat swollen, the navel projecting, rendering still more prominent the angular leanness of the hips. When the child raised its arms while the mother changed its chemise, George felt a painful pity, almost an anguish, on perceiving the fragile little arm-pits, which, in this simple act, appeared to express the difficulty of an effort required to overcome the deathly languor in which this feeble life was on the point of being extinguished.

"Kiss him," said Christine to George. And she held the child out to him, before putting him beneath the bedclothes. Then she took the child's hands, carried that having the bandaged finger from the face to the chest, then from the left to the right shoulder, to make the sign of the cross; and then she joined them, saying: Amen.

In all this there was a funereal solemnness. The child, in his long white night-shirt, had already the appearance of a little corpse.

"Sleep, now; sleep, my love. We will stay near you."

The brother and sister, united once more in the same sorrow, sat down one on each side of his bed.

They spoke no more. The odor of the medicines heaped together on a table near the bed pervaded the room. A fly detached itself from the wall, flew with a loud buzz towards the flame of the lamp, and alighted on the coverlid. A piece of furniture creaked in the heavy silence.

"He is falling asleep," said George in a low voice.

Both were absorbed in the contemplation of the child's slumber, which suggested to both the image of death. A species of oppressive stupor dominated them, without their being able to distract their thoughts from the picture.

An indefinite time passed.

Suddenly the child gave a frightful cry, opened wide his eyes, raised himself on his pillow as if terrified by some horrible vision.

"Mamma! Mamma!"

"What is it, what is it, my love?"

"Mamma!"

"What is it, my love? I am here."

"Chase it away! Chase it away!"

CHAPTER VI.

At supper, at which Diego had abstained from showing himself, had not Camilla repeated the accusation in a veiled form when she said, "When the eyes do not see the heart does not suffer"? And, in his mother's words,—oh, how quickly his mother had forgotten the tears with which the conversation at the window had ended,—even in his mother's words, had the accusation not cropped up several times?

George thought, not without bitterness: "Everybody here judges me in the same way. In short, nobody forgives me either for my voluntary renunciation of my rights as the eldest, or for the inheritance left me by my uncle Demetrius. I ought to have stayed at home to look after the conduct of my father and my brother, to defend the domestic happiness! According to them, nothing would have happened if I had remained here. Consequently, I am the guilty one, and this is the expiation." The farther he advanced in the direction of the suburban villa to which the enemy had retired and towards which he had been pushed by extreme measures, by merciless cudgel blows, so to speak, the more he felt the weight of a kind of vexatious oppression, the indignation provoked by an unjust compulsion.

He was, in fact, in his own eyes the victim of cruel and implacable persons, who were unwilling to spare him any kind of torture. And the recollection of certain phrases uttered by his mother in the embrasure of the window on the day of the funeral, amid their joint tears, augmented his bitterness, soured his irony: "No, George, no! It is not for you to suffer! I ought to have said nothing. I shouldn't have told you. Don't cry any more. I can't bear to see you cry." And, nevertheless, since that day no kind of torture had been spared him. That little scene had not made any change in his mother's attitude towards him. The following day, and ever since, she had been just as angry and violent; she had insisted on his listening over and over again to old and new accusations, aggravated by a thousand odious particulars; she had morally forced him to count on her face, one by one, the marks of the suffering endured; she had almost said to him: "See how my eyes are scorched by tears; how deep my wrinkles have become; how white my hair has grown at the temples And what would it be could I show you my heart?" What had been the good, therefore, of the grief of the other day? Was it necessary for his mother to see burning tears shed to be moved to pity? Then she did not appreciate the cruelty of the pain she inflicted uselessly on her son? "Oh, how rare on earth are those beings who know how to suffer in silence and accept the sacrifice with a smile!" Still disturbed and exasperated by the recent excesses of which he had been an involuntary witness, already pervaded by the horror of the decisive act which he was preparing to accomplish, he had thus come to despise his mother to the point of complaining that she did not know how to suffer with sufficient perfection.

The farther he advanced on his way (he had not wished to take the carriage, and had started on foot, so as to be free to lengthen at his will the time of the journey, and perhaps, also, to have the possibility, at the last moment, of retracing his steps, or to lose himself on the country roads)—the farther he advanced, he felt grow that indomitable horror; so much so, that finally it surmounted every other sentiment and masked every other thought. The one image of his father occupied his mind, and with the relief of an actual figure. And he began to imagine the scene which would take place soon—he studied the countenance which he would assume, prepared his first sentences, lost himself in improbable hypotheses, explored the most distant memories of his childhood and adolescence, tried to represent the successive attitudes of his soul towards his father during the successive periods of his past life. He thought: "Perhaps I have never loved him." And, in fact, in not one of his clearest recollections did he find a spontaneous movement of confidence, or a warm effusion of tenderness, or an intimate and agreeable emotion. What he did find, in the memories of his early childhood, was a continual fear which oppressed all affection—the fear of corporal punishment, of cross words followed by blows. "I have never loved him." Demetrius had been his real father; he was his sole and only parent.

And he appeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full of a virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the centre of his forehead among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.

As always, the image of the dead man solaced him immediately and banished from his mind the things which had just preoccupied him. His uneasiness became composed, his bitterness disappeared, and his repugnance gave place to a new sensation of tranquil security. What had he to fear? Why did his imagination exaggerate so childishly the suffering which awaited him and which henceforth was inevitable? And once more he had the intimate consciousness that he had radically transported himself from his present life, from the present state of his being, from the contingencies which had most troubled him. Once more, under the influence that his uncle exercised on him from the depth of his tomb, he felt himself enveloped by a sort of isolating atmosphere, and lost the precise notion of what had occurred and what was still going to occur; the real events seemed to be divested of all significance as far as he was concerned, and to have but a momentary importance. It was like the resignation of a man whom fatality obliged to submit to a trial in order to attain the future deliverance of which his soul had already had the prevision and certitude. This interruption of internal care, this singular respite which he had obtained without effort and which did not surprise him, permitted his eyes to be opened finally to the spectacle of the solitary and magnificent landscape. The attention he gave to it was calm and serene. In the aspect of the country he believed he recognized a symbol of his own sentiments and a visible imprint of his thoughts.

It was the afternoon. A clear and liquid sky bathed all the terrestrial objects in its own color, and appeared to subtilize all matter by an infinitely slow penetration. The various forms of vegetation, distinct close by, became effaced in the distance, lost by degrees their contours, appeared to evaporate at the top, tended to become combined into a single form, immense and confused, which a single rhythmic respiration would animate. Little by little, beneath a deluge of azure, the hills became equal in size, and the depths of the valley took on the appearance of a peaceful gulf which reflected the sky. From this united gulf the isolated mass of the mountain soared up, opposing to the liquid space the immovable solidity of its ridges, which the whiteness of the snows illumined with an almost supernatural light.

CHAPTER VII.

At last the villa appeared, between the trees, close by, with its two broad lateral terraces provided with balustrades supported by little stone pilasters, and ornamented with terra-cotta vases in the shape of busts representing kings and queens upon whose heads the sharp points of the aloes formed living crowns.

The view of these coarse reddish figures, several of which stood out clearly outlined against the luminous azure, suddenly awakened in George new memories of his distant childhood, confused recollections of rural recreations, of sports, of races, of romances imagined concerning these motionless and deaf kings, in whose hearts of clay the tenacious plants had fastened their roots. He even recalled that he had long had a predilection for a queen whose thick and long hair was formed by the hanging foliage of a fertile plant, which, in Spring, dotted it with innumerable golden flowerets. He looked for her with curiosity, while in his mind he multiplied the images of the obscure and intense life with which his childish phantasy had animated her. As he recognized her on a corner pilaster, he smiled as if he had recognized a friend; and, for several seconds, all his soul inclined towards the irrevocable past with an agitation which was not without sweetness. Thanks to the final resolution which had assumed shape in him since his unexpected calmness in the midst of the pale green and silent country, he found now in his sensations a forgotten savor, and took pleasure in tracing, to its most remote sinuosities, the course of his own existence, so close, thenceforth, to the end determined upon. This curiosity for the manifestations, even the most fugitive, that his being had dispersed in the past, this agitated sympathy for the things with which he had formerly been in affinity, tended to change into a languishing, tearful, and almost feminine tenderness. But, when he heard voices near the railing, he shook off this languor; and when he perceived an open window at which the cage of a canary-bird hung between the white curtains, he came back to the sentiment of the present reality, and felt anew his previous anguish. The surroundings were calm, and one could distinctly hear the singing of the imprisoned bird.