Front matter (continued 4)

George's lips became more ardent, and, as she used to say, more voracious. He checked himself; he removed her cloak; he helped her to remove her gloves; he took her bare hands and pressed them against his temples, in a mad desire to be caressed. And Hippolyte, holding him thus by the temples, drew him towards her, enveloped him in a long caress, passed over his entire face a mouth which, languishing and warm, crept along in a multiple kiss. George recognized the divine, the incomparable mouth, the mouth which, he had thought so often, felt as if it rested on the surface of his soul, for a voluptuousness which would surpass carnal sensibility and would communicate itself to an ultra-sensible element of the inner being.

"You will kill me," he murmured, vibrating like a bundle of stretched cords, feeling at the back of his neck a lancinating cold which, from vertebra to vertebra, was propagated through all the marrow.

And, at the bottom of himself, he noticed a vague movement of that instinctive terror which he had already observed under other circumstances.

Hippolyte disengaged herself.

"Now, I'll leave you," she said. "Where is—my room? Oh, George, how comfortable we shall be here."

She glanced around her, smiling. She made a few steps towards the threshold, stooped to gather a handful of furze, breathed in the perfume with visible sensual pleasure. She once more felt agitated, and as if intoxicated by this sovereign homage, by this fragrant glory which George had scattered along her path. Was she not dreaming? Was it she herself—was it really Hippolyte Sanzio who, in this unknown place, in this magic landscape, found herself surrounded and glorified by all this poesy?

Suddenly, with new tears in her eyes, she threw her arms around George's neck, and said:

"How grateful I am to you."

This poesy intoxicated her heart. She felt herself lifted above her humble existence by the ideal apotheosis which enveloped her lover; she felt that she lived another life, a superior life which at times gave to her soul that kind of choking sensation which a strong wind provokes in a breast accustomed to breathe an impoverished air.

"How proud I am to belong to you! You are my pride. One single minute passed near you suffices to make me feel another woman, absolutely other. You suddenly communicate to me another blood and another mind. I am no longer Hippolyte, the Hippolyte of yesterday. Give me a new name."

He named her:

"Soul!"

They fell into each other's arms in a furious embrace, as if to pluck and unroot the kisses which blossomed on their lips. Then Hippolyte disengaged herself, and repeated:

"Now, I'll leave you. Where's my room? Let me see it."

George passed an arm around her waist and led her into the bedroom. She gave a cry of admiration when she perceived the thalamus thalamorum, draped with a large yellow damask counterpane.

"But we shall get lost in it!"

And she laughed as she walked all round the monument.

"The most difficult thing will be to get into it."

"First, you'll place your foot upon my knee, in accordance with the old-time custom of the peasants in these parts."

"What a lot of saints!" she exclaimed, looking at the long line of pious images on the wall, at the head of the bed.

"They must be covered."

"Yes, you are right."

Both had difficulty in finding words; both their voices were changed in tone; both of them trembled, agitated by irresistible desire, feeling almost faint at the thought of the approaching ecstasies.

They heard someone knock at the door of the staircase. George went into the loggia. It was Helen, Candia's daughter; she came to say that luncheon was ready.

"What do you wish to do?" said George, turning toward Hippolyte, irresolute, almost convulsed.

"Really, George, I have not the least appetite. I will eat this evening, if you'll let me."

In an agonized voice, George said:

"Come into your room. Everything is ready for your bath. Come!"

He led her into a room which he had covered all over with large rustic mats.

"You see, your trunks and your boxes are already here. Now, I'll leave you—alone. Be quick. Remember, I'm waiting. Every minute's delay will be one torture more. Remember——"

He left her alone. A few moments later he heard the splashing of the water which ran from the enormous sponge and fell back again into the bath-tub. He knew the icy coldness of this spring water well, and he imagined the little starts of Hippolyte's body, that long and flexible body, beneath the refreshing shower.

Then there remained nothing in his mind than thoughts of fire. Everything about him disappeared. And, when the splashing stopped, he was seized by a trembling so strong that his teeth began to chatter, as if shivering from a mortal fever. With the terrible eyes of desire, he saw the woman disengage herself from her dressing-gown, already dried, pure, delicate as an alabaster with golden tones.

CHAPTER VIII.

More fatigued now, almost fainting, Hippolyte sank gradually into slumber. By degrees the smile on her mouth became unconscious, disappeared. Her lips met for a second; then, with infinite slowness, they opened, and from between appeared a jasminelike whiteness. Again the lips met for a second; and again, slowly, very slowly, they parted, and from between reappeared the whiteness, moistened.

Raised on one elbow, George looked at her. She appeared so beautiful, so beautiful, beautiful in the same way as he had seen her the first time, in the mysterious oratory, in front of the philosopher Alexander Memmi's orchestra, amidst the evaporated perfume of the incense and the violets. She was pale, very pale, just as on that day.

She was pale, but it was that singular pallor which George had never found in any other woman—an almost mortal pallor, a profound and dead pallor which, when in the shade, became almost livid. A long shadow was cast on the upper part of her cheeks by the eyelashes; a masculine shadow, barely perceptible, veiled the upper lip. The mouth, large if anything, had a sinuous curve, very soft and yet sad, which, in the absolute silence, took on a very intense expression.

George thought: "How spiritual her beauty becomes in illness and in languor! Tired as she is now, she pleases me more. I recognize the unknown woman who passed before me that February evening—the woman who had not a single drop of blood left in her body. I believe that when she is dead she will attain the supreme perfection of her beauty.... Dead? And if she were to die? She would then become an object for thought, a pure ideality. I should love her after life without jealous inquietude, with a soothed and always even sorrow."

He recalled that in other circumstances he had already imagined Hippolyte's beauty in the peacefulness of death. "Oh, that day of the roses! Great sheafs of white roses languished in the vases in June, at the beginning of their love. She was dozing on the divan, motionless, almost breathless. And he had contemplated her for a long time; then a sudden phantasy had taken him to cover her with roses, softly, softly, so as not to awaken her; and he had arranged a few roses in her hair. But thus flowered and garlanded, she had appeared to him like a body without a soul, a corpse. This spectacle had filled him with terror; he had shaken her to arouse her; but she remained inert, paralyzed by one of those syncopes to which she was subject at that time. Oh, what terror, what anguish, until she recovered her senses! And also what enthusiasm for the sovereign beauty of that face, which was so extraordinarily ennobled by that reflection of death!" This episode recurred to his memory; but while he lingered over these strange thoughts, he felt a sudden impulse of pity and of remorse. He bent over to kiss the forehead of the sleeper, who remained unconscious of his kiss. It was with the greatest difficulty that he restrained himself from embracing her more ardently, so that she might be cognizant of his caress, and respond to it. And then he felt all the vanity of a caress which would not be to the loved object a rapid communication of joy; he felt all the vanity of a love which would not be a continual and immediate correspondence of acute sensations; he felt the impossibility of becoming intoxicated unless an equally intense intoxication should correspond with his own.

"Am I certain," he thought, "am I positively certain that always, when I have enjoyed her, she has enjoyed me? How often has she been present, a lucid witness, during my moments of delirium? How often has my ardor appeared senseless to her?" A heavy wave of anxieties invaded him while he contemplated the sleeping woman. "The true and profound sensual communion is also a chimera. The senses of my mistress are as obscure as her soul. Never shall I succeed in surprising in her fibres a secret disgust, an appetite unsatisfied, an irritation unappeased. Never shall I succeed in knowing the different sensations which are given to her by a similar caress repeated at different moments. In the course of a single day, an organism as unhealthy as hers passes through a great number of physical states, each in discord with the other, and sometimes in complete opposition. Such an instability misleads the most penetrating clairvoyance. The same caress which, at dawn, draws from her moans of pleasure, may, an hour later, seem to her importunate. Consequently, it is possible that her nerves become hostile towards me, in spite of her will. A kiss which I prolong too far, and which gives me the vertigo of supreme enjoyment, may in her flesh arouse impatience. In the matter of sensuality, however, simulation and dissimulation are common to all women, to those who love and to those who do not. What do I say? The woman who loves, the passionate woman, is more inclined to physical simulation and dissimulation; because she fears to grieve her lover if she shows she is little disposed to surrender herself entirely. Moreover, the passionate woman often delights in exaggerating the semblance of pleasure; because she knows well that that will flatter the man's virile pride and increase his ecstasy. I confess that a proud joy swells my heart when I see Hippolyte delirious with sensual delight. I feel she is happy at thus showing herself so vanquished and prostrated by my power; and she also knows that my vain ambition as a young lover is precisely to succeed in making her plead for mercy, in drawing from her a convulsive cry, in seeing her fall back exhausted on the pillow. Which, then, in these demonstrations, is the share of the physical sincerity and that of the passionate exaggeration? Is not her ardor an artificial attitude, assumed to please me? Does she not often sacrifice herself to my desire without desiring me? Has she not, at times, to repress a commencement of repugnance?"

Attentive and almost anxious, he leaned over the impenetrable creature. But, little by little, the contemplation of her beauty seemed to appease him. And he began to consider his new state. So, from this day on, a new life commenced for him.

For a minute, he concentrated mind and ear, in order to lose nothing of the great peace surrounding him. Only the slow, monotonous wash of the calm sea was to be heard in the propitious silence. Against the window-panes the branches of the olive-tree swayed imperceptibly, silvered by the sun, balancing light shadows on the whiteness of the curtains. At intervals a few human voices were heard, and almost unintelligible.

After this perception of the environing peace, he leaned once more over the adored one. A manifest harmony existed between the respiration of the woman and the respiration of the sea; and the concordance of the two rhythms gave an added charm to the sleeper.

She reposed on her right side, in a graceful attitude. Her form was supple and long, rather too long perhaps, but of serpentine elegance. The narrowness of the thigh made it resemble that of an adolescent. The sterile abdomen had preserved its primitive virginal purity. The bosom was small and firm, as if sculptured in very delicate alabaster, and the points of her extraordinarily erect breasts were of a rose-violet hue. The posterior part of her body, from the nape of the neck down to the middle, made one think once more of an Ephebe: it was one of those fragments of the ideal human type which Nature sometimes throws among the multitude of mediocre imprints by which the race perpetuates itself. But the most precious singularity of this body was, in George's eyes, the coloration. The skin had an indescribable color, very rare, very different from the ordinary color of brunettes. The comparison of an alabaster gilded by an inner flame but scarcely conveyed the idea of this divine fineness. It seemed that a diffusion of gold and impalpable amber enriched the tissues, variegating them with a variety of harmonious pallors, like music, darker in the depressions of the loins and where the loins join the sides, lighter on the breast and on the groins, where the epidermis makes its most exquisite suavity.

George thought of Othello's words: "I had rather be a toad, and live upon the vapour of a dungeon, than keep a corner in the thing I love for others' uses."

In her slumber, Hippolyte made a movement, with a vague air of suffering, which disappeared immediately. She threw back her head on the pillow, exposing her extended breast, on which was defined the light network of the veins. Her lower jaws were rather powerful, the chin rather long in profile, the nostrils broad. In the abstract, the defects of her head were accentuated; but they did not displease George, because it would have been impossible for him to imagine that they could be corrected without removing from the physiognomy an element of living expression. The expression, that immaterial thing which irradiates all matter, that changing and immeasurable force which invades the corporeal face and transfigures it, that significative external which superposes a symbolic beauty of an order far more elevated and complex on the precise reality of the lines—that was Hippolyte Sanzio's great charm, because it offered to the passionate thinker a continual motive of emotions and dreams.

"Such a woman," he thought, "has belonged to others before being mine. She has shared the couch of another man; she has slept with another man in the same bed, on the same pillow. In all women there exists a sort of extraordinarily active physical memory, the memory of sensations. Does she remember the sensations which she received from that man? Can she have forgotten him who was the first, and who violated her? What were her feelings beneath her husband's caress?" At these questions, which he repeated to himself for the thousandth time, a well-known anguish oppressed his heart. "Oh! why can we not put to death the creature we love, and resuscitate her afterwards with a virgin body, with a new soul?"

He recalled certain words which Hippolyte had said in an hour of supreme intoxication: "You are embracing a virgin; I have never known any voluptuousness in love."

Hippolyte was married the spring preceding that of their love. A few weeks after the wedding, she had begun to suffer from a slow and cruel malady which had confined her to bed, and kept her for a long time between life and death. But, happily, this malady had spared her all new contact with the odious man who had seized her like an inert prey. When she emerged from her long convalescence, she gave herself up to passion as in a dream: suddenly, blindly, passionately, she abandoned herself to the young stranger whose soft and curious voice had addressed to her words she had never heard before. And she had not lied when saying to him: "You are embracing a virgin; I have never known any voluptuousness."

Since then, what a profound change in this woman! Something new, indefinable yet real, had entered into her voice, into her gestures, into her eyes, into her slightest tones, into her slightest movements, into the slightest external signs. George had been present at the most intoxicating spectacle of which an intellectual lover can dream. He had seen the loved woman become metamorphosed after his own image, borrow his thoughts, his judgments, his tastes, his disdains, his predilections, his melancholies, all that which gives a special imprint and character to the mind. In speaking, Hippolyte used the forms of speech he preferred, pronounced certain words with the inflexion peculiar to him. In writing, she imitated even his hand. Never had the influence of one being on another been so rapid and so strong. Hippolyte had merited the device which George had given her: Gravis dum suavis. But this grave and suave creature, she in whom he had succeeded in inculcating, with so much art, the disdain for a commonplace existence, among what humiliating contacts had she spent the distant hours?

George thought again of his anguish of long ago, when he saw her go away, return beneath the conjugal roof, into the house of a man of whom he knew nothing, into a world of which he knew nothing, into the platitudes and the pettiness of the middle-class life in which she was born, and in which she had grown like a rare plant in a common flower-pot. Had she, at that time, never hidden anything from him? Had she never lied to him? Had she always been able to withdraw from her husband's importunities on the pretext that her cure was not yet complete? Always?

George remembered the horrible pang he felt one day when she came late, panting, her cheeks more colored and warmer than usual, with a persistent odor of tobacco in her hair, that bad odor which impregnates him who remains a long time in a room where there are many smokers. "Pardon me, if I am late," she had said to him; "but I had several of my husband's friends to dinner, and they kept me until now." And these words had suggested to him the vision of a vulgar-looking dining-table around which the boors exhibited their brutality.

George recalled a thousand similar little details, and an infinity of other cruel sufferings, and also recent sufferings, caused by Hippolyte's new condition—her stay at her mother's, in a house not less unknown and not less free from suspicion. "At last, here she is now with me! Every day, every minute, continually, I shall see her, I shall enjoy her; I will see that her thoughts are occupied continually with me, my thoughts, my dreams, my sorrows. I will consecrate to her every instant, uninterruptedly; I will invent a thousand new ways of pleasing her, of agitating her, of making her sad, of exalting her; I will so penetrate her with my being that she will end by believing me to be an essential element of her own life."

He bent over her softly; he kissed her softly on the shoulder near the arm, on that little rounded eminence of exquisite form and color, whose skin had the softness of velvet fine enough as to seem almost impalpable. He respired the perfume of this woman, so subtle and sweet, that cutaneous perfume which, during the instant of pleasure, became as intoxicating as that of tuberoses and gave a terrible lash to desire. Watching thus closely the sleep of this delicate and complicated creature, whom slumber enveloped in a mystery, that strange creature who from every pore seemed to irradiate towards him some occult fascination of unbelievable intensity, he remarked once more in his inner self a vague movement of instinctive terror.

Again Hippolyte changed her position, without awakening, but with a faint moan. She turned on her back. A light perspiration imparted a dampness to her temples; through her half-closed mouth the breathing respired came more rapidly, rather irregularly; at moments, her eyebrows contracted. She was dreaming. Of what was she dreaming?

George, seized by an inquietude which soon increased to an insane anxiety, set himself to detect upon her face the slightest indications, in the hope of surprising there some revealing sign. Revealing what? He was incapable of reflecting, incapable of repressing the furious tumults of fears, doubts, and suspicions.

In her slumber Hippolyte started; her entire body was convulsed as if racked by nightmare; she turned over on her side towards George; she groaned, and cried:

"No, no!"

Then she drew two or three breaths, almost like sobs, and started again.

A prey to insane fear, George watched her fixedly, his ear strained—fearing to hear other words, another's name, the name of a man! He waited, in horrible uncertainty, as if under the menace of a thunderbolt which could destroy him in a second.

Hippolyte awoke; she saw him confusedly, without thinking, still sleeping; she nestled close up to him, with an almost unconscious movement.

"Of what were you dreaming?" he asked her, in a changed voice which seemed to reverberate his heart-beats.

"I do not know," she answered, languid, still drowsy, leaning her cheek on her lover's breast. "I don't remember."

She fell asleep again.

Under the soft pressure of her cheek, George remained motionless, with a dull rancor at the bottom of his soul. He felt himself a stranger to her, isolated from her, uselessly curious. All his bitter recollections came back to him in a tumult. He lived over again, in a single instant, his miseries of two years. He could oppose nothing to the immense doubts which crushed his soul and made the head of his loved one seem as heavy as a rock.

Suddenly Hippolyte started a second time, moaned, twisted, cried again. And she opened her eyes, frightened, groaning.

"Oh! my God!"

"What ails you? Of what were you dreaming?"

"I do not know."

Her face was contracted convulsively.

She added:

"You must have been leaning on me. I thought you were pushing me, hurting me."

She suffered visibly.

"Oh! my God! My pains have come back."

Since her illness, she sometimes had short attacks, spasms that quickly passed, but whose passage forced from her a groan or cry.

She turned towards George, looked fixedly into his eyes, and found there the traces of the tempest. And in a coaxing, reproachful tone she repeated:

"You did so hurt me!"

All at once George seized her in his arms, clasped her passionately to his breast, and smothered her under his kisses.

CHAPTER IX.

As the air was of an almost summer-like warmth, George proposed:

"Shall we dine outside?"

Hippolyte consented. They went down.

On the stairway they held each other's hand; and went down step by step slowly, stopping to look at the crushed flowers, turning round towards each other simultaneously, as if they saw each other for the first time. Each saw in the other eyes larger, more profound, as if more distant, and circled by an almost supernatural shadow. They smiled at each other without speaking, both dominated by the charm of that indefinable sensation which seemed to disperse into the uncertainty of space the substance of their being, transformed into a fluid like a vapor. They walked towards the parapet; they stopped to look around, to listen to the sea.

What they saw was unusual, extraordinarily great, yet illumined by an inner light and as if by an irradiation of their hearts. What they heard was unusual, extraordinarily high, yet contemplated as if a secret revealed to them alone.

A second, as quickly passed! They were recalled to themselves, not by a gust of the wind nor by the noise of a wave, nor by a bellowing, nor by a bark, nor by a human voice, but by the very anxiety which arose from their too intense joy. A second, as quickly passed, irrevocable! And both recommenced to feel that life was slipping by, that time was flying; that everything was becoming once more foreign to their being, that their souls were becoming anxious again and their love imperfect. This second of supreme oblivion, this unique second, was gone forever.

Hippolyte, moved by the solemnity of the solitude, oppressed by a vague fright in the presence of those vast waters, beneath that desert sky, which, from the zenith to the horizon, paled by slow gradations, murmured:

"What endless space!"

It seemed now to both that the point of space in which they breathed was infinitely distant from the frequented spots, out of the way, isolated, unknown, inaccessible, almost outside of the world. Now they saw the wish of their hearts realized, they both felt the same inward terror, as if they foresaw their impotence to sustain the plenitude of the new life. For a few instants longer, silent, standing side by side, but apart, they continued to contemplate the melancholy and icy Adriatic, whose great white-capped waves sported in endless playfulness. From time to time a stiff breeze swept through the tufts of the acacias, bearing off their perfume.

"Of what are you thinking?" asked George, drawing himself up, as if to rebel against the importunate sadness which was about to conquer him.

He was there, alone with his mistress, living and free; and, nevertheless, his heart was not satisfied. Did he, then, bear in himself an inconsolable hopelessness?

Feeling anew a separation between the silent creature and himself, he took her again by the hand, and gazed into the pupils of her eyes.

"Of what are you thinking?"

"I am thinking of Rimini," answered Hippolyte, with a smile.

Always the past! She remembers bygone days at such a moment! Was it the same sea which lay extended before their eyes, veiled in the same illusion? His first motion was one of hostility against the unconscious evocatrice. Then, as if in a lightning flash, with sudden uneasiness, he saw all the summits of his love light up, and scintillate in the past, prodigiously. Far-distant things came back to his memory, accompanied by waves of music which exalted and transfigured them. He lived again, in one second, the most lyric hours of his passion, and he lived them again in propitious places, among the sumptuous scenery of nature and art which had rendered his joy nobler and more profound. Why then, now, in comparison with that past, had the moment just previous lost part of its charm? In his eyes, dazzled by the rapid gleam of his recollections, everything now seemed colorless. And he perceived that the progressive diminution of the light caused him a kind of indefinable corporeal uneasiness, as if this external phenomenon were in immediate correspondence with some element of his own life.

He sought some phrase that would bring Hippolyte closer to him, to attach her to him by some sensitive tie, to restore to himself of the present reality the exact feeling which he had just lost. But this search was painful to him; the ideas escaped him, dispersed, left him void.

As he had heard a rattle of plates, he asked:

"Are you hungry?"

This question, suggested by a slight material fact, and propounded unexpectedly, with puerile vivacity, made Hippolyte smile.

"Yes, a little," she answered, smiling.

And they turned round to look at the table spread beneath the oak. In a few minutes the dinner would be ready.

"You must be satisfied with what there is," said George. "Very countrified cooking."

"Oh! I should be very well satisfied with grass."

And, gayly, she approached the table, examined with curiosity the cloth, the knives and forks, the glassware, the plates, found everything pretty; rejoiced like a child at the sight of the large flowers which decorated the white and fine porcelain.

"Everything here pleases me," she said.

She bent over a large round loaf of bread, yet warm beneath its beautiful browned and rounded crust. She breathed in the odor with delight.

"Oh! what a delightful odor!"

And, with childish greediness, she broke off the crusty edge of the loaf.

"What fine bread!"

Her white and strong teeth shone in the bitten bread; the play of her sinuous mouth expressed vigorously the pleasure enjoyed. In this act, her whole person shed a pure and simple grace which seduced and surprised George as if it were an unexpected novelty.

"Here! taste how good it is."

And she handed him the piece of bread on which was imprinted the humid trace of her bite; and she pushed it between his lips, laughing, imparting the sensual contagion of her hilarity.

"Just see!"

He found the taste delicious; and he abandoned himself to this fugitive enchantment, permitted himself to be enveloped by this seduction which seemed a novelty. A mad longing suddenly seized him to embrace the temptress, to lift her in his arms, to carry her off like a prey. His heart swelled with a confused aspiration towards physical force, towards robust health, towards an almost savage life of joy, towards simple and primitive love, towards the great primordial liberty. He felt a sudden desire to rend the mortal frame which oppressed him, to leave it and be entirely renewed, indemnified for all the woes he had suffered, for all the deformity which had hindered his flight.

He had the hallucination of a future existence which would be his, and in which, freed from every harmful habit, from every foreign tyranny, from every bad error, he would look at things as if he saw them for the first time and had before him all the surface of the World, exposed like a human visage.

"Was it then impossible that the miracle should come from this young woman, who, at the stone table, beneath the protecting oak, had broken the new bread and shared it with him? Could not the New Life really commence from to-day?"

IV.

THE NEW LIFE.

CHAPTER I.

Over the Adriatic swept the humid and oppressive heat of the east wind. The sky was cloudy, nebulous, white as milk. The sea, having lost all motion and all materiality, seemed mingled with the diffused vapors in the distance—very white, without respiration. A white sail, a single white sail—so rare a thing in the Adriatic—was visible yonder, near the Diomede Islands, motionless, indefinitely lengthened by the reflection of the water, the visible centre of this inert world, which gradually seemed to evaporate.

Seated in a tired attitude, on the parapet of the loggia, Hippolyte fixed her gaze on the sail, her eyes magnetized by its whiteness. A little bent, her whole figure relaxed, she had an air of stupor, almost of hebetude, which revealed the momentary eclipse of her inner life. And this absence of expressive energy accentuated all that there was commonplace and irregular in her features, rendered heavier the lower part of her face. Even the mouth—that elastic and sinuous mouth—whose contact had so often communicated to George a sort of instinctive and indefinable terror, seemed now despoiled of its bewitching charm, and reduced to the physical appearance of a vulgar organ which only recalled kisses as a mechanical art deprived of all beauty.

George considered with attention and clear-sightedness the naked reality of this unconscious woman, with whose life he had, up to now, so furiously joined his own life. And he thought: "In an instant, all has ended. The flame is extinguished. I love her no longer! ... How has that happened so quickly?" What he felt was not only the disgust following abuse, that carnal aversion which follows prolonged pleasures, but a more profound detachment which seemed to him definite and irremediable. "How could anyone still love, after having seen what I see?" The usual phenomenon took place in him; with its first perceptions, real, isolated and exaggerated, he composed by association an inner phantom which gave to his nerves a much stronger impulse than the present object. Henceforth, what he saw in Hippolyte's person with inconceivable intensity was the sexual being exclusively, the inferior being deprived of all spiritual value, a simple instrument of pleasure and of luxury, the instrument of ruin and of death. And he had a horror of his father! But, after all, was he not doing the same thing? And the recollection of the concubine crossed his mind; he found in his memory certain details of the horrible altercation with that odious man, in the country house, in front of the open window through which he had heard the cries of the little bastards, in front of the large table littered with papers on which he had perceived the disk of glass and the obscene vignette.

"How heavy the air is!" murmured Hippolyte, removing her gaze from the white sail, which still remained motionless in the infinite. "Does it not oppress you, too?"

She rose, took a few listless steps towards a willow seat, provided with cushions, and sank down as if dead with fatigue, sighing deeply, throwing back her head, half-closing her eyes, the curved lids of which trembled. She had suddenly become very beautiful again. Her beauty was rekindled, unexpectedly, like a torch.

"When will the mistral blow? Look at that sail. It is always in the same place. It's the first white sail since my arrival. It seems as if I dream it is there."

As George remained silent, she added:

"Have you seen any others?"

"No; it's the first I have seen, too!"

"From where did it come?"

"From Gargano, perhaps."

"And where is it going?"

"Perhaps to Ortona."

"What is her cargo?"

"Perhaps oranges."

She began to laugh; and even her laugh, enveloping her as if in a live wave of freshness, transfigured her anew.

"Look, look!" she cried, raising herself on one elbow and pointing to the horizon of the sea, where it appeared as if a curtain had fallen. "Five other sails, over there in file. Do you see them?"

"Yes, I see them."

"There are five?"

"Yes, five."

"More, more! Over there! Look, another file! What a number there are!"

The sails appeared at the extreme limit of the sea, red like little flames, motionless.

"The wind is changing. I feel that the wind is changing. Look there, how the water is beginning to ripple."

A sudden breeze assailed the tufts of the acacias, which, bending on their stems, shed several blossoms like dead butterflies. Then, before those light remains could touch the earth, all was at peace again. During the interval of silence, the low murmur of the water as it was dashed against the beach could be heard; and this murmur died away with the flight of the wave as it passed along the shore, and then ceased.

"Did you hear it?"

She had risen and leaned on the parapet, listening intently, in the attitude of a musician who is tuning his instrument.

"Here is the wave coming back," she cried again, pointing to the mobile rippling of the water, upon which the shower was advancing; and she waited, animated by impatience, ready to fill her lungs with the wind.

After a few seconds the acacias, assailed, once more bent on their stems, causing a shower of other flowers. And the strong gust bore as far as the loggia the saline odor mingled with the perfume of the withered bunches. A silvery sound, of singular harmony, filled with its kettledrum vibrations the concavity of the little bay between the two promontories.

"Do you hear?" said Hippolyte, in a low but exulting voice as if this music had penetrated as far as her soul, and that all her life were participating in the vicissitudes of the things around her.

George followed all her actions, all her gestures, all her movements, every word, with such intense attention that the rest was for him as if it had never existed. The preceding image no longer coincided with the actual appearance, though it still dominated his mind to the extent of maintaining the profound sensation of the moral detachment, and of preventing him from replacing this woman in her first frame, of not reëstablishing her in her original state of being, of not reintegrating her. But from every one of these actions, from every one of these gestures, from every one of these movements, from every one of these words, emanated an inevitable power. All these physical manifestations seemed to compose a web which trapped him, and held him prisoner. It seemed that between this woman and himself there was formed a sort of corporeal bond, a sort of organic dependence, a correspondence by virtue of which the slightest gesture provoked in him an involuntary sensual modification, and that henceforth he would no longer be capable of living and feeling independently. How could he reconcile this evident affinity with the occult hate which he had just discovered at the bottom of his heart?

Hippolyte, through a spontaneous curiosity, through an instinctive desire to multiply her sensations and to make the surrounding neighborhood part of herself, was still absorbed in the spectacle. The facility she exhibited in entering into communication with every form of natural life and of finding a world of analogies between human expressions and the appearances of the most diverse things; this rapid and diffuse sympathy, which attached her not only to objects with which she was in daily contact, but also to foreign objects; that sort of imitative virtue which often permitted her to express by a single sign the distinctive character of an animate or inanimate being, of talking to the domestic animals and understanding their language—all these mimic faculties properly concurred in rendering more visible, in George's eyes, the predominance in her of the inferior life.

"What's that?" she said, surprised at noticing a sudden, mysterious rumbling. "Didn't you hear it?"

It was like a dull blow, which other blows followed in rapid succession—blows so strange that it could not be discerned if they came from near or far, in the air that became more and more limpid.

"Didn't you hear that?"

"It may be distant thunder."

"Oh, no!"

"What, then?"

They looked around them, perplexed. Every moment the sea was changing color in proportion as the sky became clearer; here and there it took on that shade of indefinable green, like unripe flax, as when the sun's oblique rays pass through the diaphanous stems in an April twilight.

"Ah! it's the sail flapping—that white sail, yonder," cried Hippolyte, happy at being the first to discover the mystery. "Look. She's caught the wind. She's off."

CHAPTER II.

With a few intervals of drowsy indolence, she felt a mad desire to wander off, to venture out in the heat of the sun, to scour the beach and surrounding country, to explore unfamiliar paths. She stimulated her companion; at times she carried him off almost by force; at times, too, she started off alone, and he joined her unexpectedly.

In order to climb a hill, they followed a small pathway bordered by thick hedges of violet flowers, among which blossomed the large and delicate calices of other snowy fragrant flowers with fine petals. On the other side of the hedges, ears of corn waved to and fro on their stems, yellowish-green in color, more or less ready to change into gold; and in other places the corn was so thick and high that it towered over the tops of the hedges, suggesting a beautiful, overflowing cup.

Nothing escaped Hippolyte's vigilant eye. Every minute she stooped to blow away certain spheres of down, very fragile, at the tips of their long, slender peduncles. Every minute she stopped to observe the small spiders climbing by an invisible thread from a flower situated low down to a branch above.

On the hill, in a narrow, sunny circle, there was a small field of flax already dry. The yellowish stems bore at their summits a ball of gold, and here and there the gold seemed tarnished by an ironlike rust. The highest stems were waving almost imperceptibly. And, because of this extreme lightness, the whole gave the idea of some delicate piece of gold-work.

"Look, it is just like filigree!" said Hippolyte.

The furze was commencing to shed its flowers. A few feet away hung a sort of white foam in flakes; on others crawled large black and brown caterpillars, soft to the touch as velvet. Hippolyte took up one whose delicate down was streaked with vermilion, and she kept it calmly on the palm of her hand.

"It is more beautiful than a flower," she said.

George remarked, and it was not the first time, that she was almost totally devoid of instinctive repugnance towards insects, and that, in general, she did not feel that keen and invincible repulsion which he himself felt for a host of things considered unclean.

"Throw it away, I beg of you!"

She began to laugh, and stretched out her hand as if to put the caterpillar on his neck. He gave a cry and sprang back, which made her laugh all the more.

"Oh, what a brave man!"

In a spirit of mischief, she started to pursue him between the trunks of the young oaks, through the narrow paths that formed a sort of mountainous labyrinth. Her peals of laughter started from between the gray stones flocks of wild sparrows.

"Stop! Stop! You frighten the sheep."

A small flock of frightened sheep dispersed, dragging behind them up the rocky incline a bundle of bluish rags.

"Stop. I have it no longer. See."

And she showed the runaway her empty hands.

"Let us help the Mute."

And she ran towards the woman in rags, who was making ineffectual efforts to hold back the sheep attached to the long cords of twisted osier. Hippolyte seized the bunch of cords, and braced her feet against a stone in order to have more resisting power. She panted, her face purple; and in this violent attitude she was very beautiful. Her beauty lighted up, unexpectedly, like a torch.

"Come, George, come you too!" she cried to George, communicating to him her frank and childish joy.

The sheep stopped in a clump of furze. There were six of them, three black and three white, and bore the osier cords around their woolly necks. The woman who looked after them, emaciated, poorly covered by her bluish rags, gesticulated while giving vent, from her toothless mouth, to an incomprehensible grumbling. Her little greenish eyes, without eyelashes, bleary, tearful and congested, had a malignant look.

When Hippolyte gave her alms, she kissed the pieces of money. Then, letting go the cords, she removed from her head a rag which no longer had either form or color, stooped to the ground, and slowly, with greatest care, tied up the pieces of money in a multiplicity of knots.

"I am tired," said Hippolyte. "Let us sit down here for a moment."

They sat down. George then perceived that the spot was near the great furze field where, on that May morning, the five virgins had plucked the flowers to strew the path of the beautiful Roman. That morning already seemed very far off, lost in dreamy haze. He said:

"Do you see, over yonder, those bushes which are now almost flowerless? Well, it was there that we filled the baskets to strew flowers on your path when you arrived. Oh, what a day! Do you remember?"

She smiled, and in a transport of sudden tenderness took one of his hands, which she kept pressed in her own; and she leaned her cheek on the shoulder of the loved one, burying herself in the sweetness of that memory, of that solitude, of that peace, of that poesy.

From time to time a breath of wind passed through the tops of the oaks; and below, farther on, in the gray of the olive-trees, passed, from time to time, a clear wave of silver. The Mute moved away slowly behind the feeding sheep; and she seemed to leave something fantastic in her traces, as if a reflect of the legends in which malignant fairies transform themselves into toads at every turn of the path.

"Aren't you happy now?" murmured Hippolyte.

George thought: "It is already two weeks, and there has been no change in me. Still the same anxiety, the same inquietude, the same discontent! We are hardly at the beginning, and I already foresee the end. What shall we do to enjoy the passing hour?" Certain phrases of a letter from Hippolyte recurred to him: "Oh! when will it be given me to be near you during entire days, to live your life? You will see, I shall no longer be the same woman. I will be your mistress, your friend, your sister; and if you think me worthy, I will be also your adviser.... In me you should find nothing but sweetness and repose.... It will be a life of love such as has never before been seen." ...

He thought: "For the past two weeks our whole existence has been composed of petty, material incidents, like those of to-day. It is true; I have already seen in her another woman! She is commencing to change, even in appearance. It is unbelievable how rapidly she is gaining in health. One would say that every breath is a gain; that, for her, every fruit turns into blood; that the healthfulness of the air penetrates her every pore. She was made for this life of idleness, of liberty, of physical enjoyment, of carelessness. Up to now, she has not uttered a single thoughtful word which revealed preoccupation of the soul. Her intervals of silence and immobility are caused only by muscular fatigue, just as at the present moment."

"Of what are you thinking?" she demanded.

"Of nothing. I am happy."

After a pause, she added:

"We'll go on now, shall we?"

They rose. She bestowed upon his mouth a sonorous kiss. She was gay and restless. Every few minutes she darted away from him to run down an incline free from rocks; and when she wished to check her speed, she grasped the trunk of a young oak, which groaned and bent beneath the shock.

She gathered a violet flower and sucked it.

"It's honey."

She gathered another, and placed it on her lover's lips.

"Taste it!"

And it seemed as if she enjoyed the savor for the second time, at seeing the motions of his mouth.

"With all these flowers, and all these bees, there must certainly be a hive near by," she went on. "One of these mornings, while you are asleep, I must come here and search for it.... I'll bring you a honeycomb."

She prattled at a great rate about this adventure, which tickled her fancy; and in her words appeared, with the vivacity of an actual sensation, the freshness of the morning, the mystery of the woods, the impatience of the search, the joy of the discovery, the pale color and wild fragrance of honey.

They halted half-way up the hill, at the border of the woody region, charmed by the melancholy which ascended from the sea.

The sea was delicately colored, between a blue and a green, in which the green had a progressive tendency to dominate; but the sky, of a leaden azure at the zenith, and streaked here and there by clouds, was rose-colored in the curve toward Ortono. This light was reflected in pale tints on the surface of the water, and recalled deflowered roses floating. Against the maritime background were arranged in steps, in harmonious degrees, first the two large oaks with their dark foliage, then the silvery olive-trees, then the fig-trees with their bright foliage and violet branches. The moon, orange-colored, enormous, almost at its full, rose up above the ring of the horizon, like a globe of crystal through whose transparency could be seen a chimerical country figured in bas-relief on a massive disk of gold.

One heard the warbling of birds, near and far. One heard the lowing of an ox; then a bleating; then the wailing of a child. There was a pause during which all these voices were silent, and only this single wail was heard.

It was a wail, not violent or interrupted, but shrill, continuous, almost feeble. And it attracted the soul, detached it from all the rest, snatched it from the seduction of the twilight, to oppress it with a veritable anguish which responded to the suffering of the unknown creature, of the little, invisible being.

"Do you hear?" said Hippolyte, whose voice, already changed by compassion, became involuntarily lower. "I know who the child is that's crying."

"You know?" asked George, to whom his mistress's voice and appearance had given a strange shock.

"Yes."

She was again listening intently to the lamentable moaning, which now seemed to fill the whole place. She added: "It's the infant that the Ghouls are sucking."

She had pronounced these words without the shadow of a smile, as if she herself were beneath the empire of the superstition.

"It lives over there, in that tumble-down cottage. Candia told me."

After a slight hesitation, during which they listened to the wails and had a fantastic vision of the dying child, Hippolyte suggested:

"Shall we go and see it? It's not far."

George was perplexed, dreading the sadness of the spectacle, and the contact of the distressed and coarse people.

"Shall we?" repeated Hippolyte, whose curiosity became irresistible. "It is over there, in that old cottage, beneath the pine. I know the way."

"Let's go!"

She went straight ahead, hastening her steps, across a sloping field. Both were silent; both heard only the infantile wail which served them as a guide. And, step by step, their anguish became more poignant and in proportion as the wailing became more distinct and indicated better the poor, bloodless body from which pain forced it.

They traversed a copse of odorous orange-trees, treading on the flowers scattered on the ground. On the threshold of a cottage close to the one they sought an enormously stout woman was seated; and on her monstrous body was a small round head, with soft eyes, white teeth, a placid smile.

"Where are you going, signora?" asked the woman, without rising.

"We are going to see the child whom the Ghouls are sucking."

"What's the use? You'd better stay here, and take a rest. I do not lack children, either. Look!"

Three or four naked children, who had also such large stomachs that one would have believed them to be dropsical, dragged themselves along on the ground, grunting and tumbling over, putting in their mouths everything that fell into their hands. And the woman held in her arms a fifth child, all covered with brownish scabs, from the midst of which shone out a pair of large clear blue eyes, like miraculous flowers.

"You see that I have plenty of them too, and that this one, here, is sick. Stay here a bit."

She smiled, soliciting with her eyes the strangers' generosity. And, with an expression in which one guessed the desire to dissuade the curiosity of the woman by the vague presentiment of a peril:

"What's the good of going there?" she repeated. "See how ill this one is."

And again she showed the afflicted child, but without simulating any sorrow, as if she simply offered to the passer-by a nearer object of compassion in exchange for a more distant one—as if she wished to say: "Since you desire to be compassionate, have compassion for the one before you." George examined, with deep pain, the poor, spotted face, whose large, bright, and clear eyes seemed to drink in all the light shed on this June evening.

"What is he suffering from?" he asked.

"Ah! signor, who ever knows?" answered the fat woman, always with the same placidity. "He has what God wishes."

Hippolyte gave her some money; and they resumed their way towards the other cottage, bearing with them the nauseous odor emanating from that door full of shadow.

They did not speak. They felt a contraction of their hearts, a disgust in their mouths, a weakness in their limbs. They heard the shrill wailing, mingled with other voices, other sounds; and they were stupefied at having been able to hear this single sound so far away, and so distinctly. But what attracted their eyes was the tall and straight pine whose robust trunk stood out black against the diffused light of the twilight, sustaining a melodious summit filled with sparrows.

At their approach, a whisper passed among the women gathered around the victim.

"Here are the gentlefolk—Candia's strangers."

"Come, come!"

And the women opened their circle to permit the arrivals to draw nearer. One of them, an old woman, with wrinkled skin, of the color of parched earth, expressionless eyes, whitish and as if vitrified in the depths of their hollow orbits, said, addressing Hippolyte, and touching her arm:

"Look, signora! Look! The Ghouls are sucking it, poor creature! Look at the state they've reduced it to! May God protect your children!"

Her voice was so dry that it appeared artificial, and resembled the sounds articulated by an automaton.

"Cross yourself, signora!" she added again.

The advice seemed lugubrious in that lifeless mouth, in which the voice lost its human character and became a dead thing. Hippolyte made the sign of the cross, and looked at her companion.

In the space before the door of the hut the women ere in a circle as around a spectacle, making; from time to time some mechanical sign of condolence. And the circle was unceasingly renewed; some, already tired of looking, went away; others arrived from neighboring houses. And almost all, at the sight of this slow death, repeated the same gesture, repeated the same words.

The child reposed in a little cradle, of rough pine boards, like a small, lidless coffin. The poor creature, naked, sickly, emaciated, greenish, was wailing continuously and waving its debilitated arms and legs, which had nothing more than skin and bone, as if asking for help. And the mother, seated at the foot of the cradle, bent in two, her head so low that it almost touched her knees, seemed to hear nothing. It seemed as if some terrible weight rested on her neck and prevented her from rising. At times, mechanically, she placed on the edge of the cradle a coarse, callous hand, burnt by the sun; and she made the gesture of rocking without altering her attitude or breaking the silence. Then the holy images, the talismans, and the relics, with which the pine cradle was almost entirely covered, undulated and tinkled, during a momentary pause in the wail.

"Liberata! Liberata!" cried one of the women, shaking her. "Look, Liberata! The lady has come—the lady is in your house! Look!"

The mother slowly raised her head and looked around her, with a bewildered air; then she fixed on her visitor her dry and mournful eyes, in whose depths there was less of fatigued sorrow than inert and shadowy terror—the terror of nocturnal witchcraft against which no exorcism prevailed, the terror of those insatiable beings who now had the house in their power, and who would not abandon it perhaps but with the last corpse.

"Speak! Speak!" insisted one of the women, shaking her again by the arm. "Speak! Ask the lady to send you to the Madonna of the Miracles."

The others surrounded Hippolyte with supplications.

"Yes, signora. Be charitable to her! Send her to the Madonna. Send her to the Madonna!"

The child cried louder. In the tops of the pine-tree the sparrows were emitting heart-rending cries. In the neighborhood, between the deformed trunks of the olive-trees, a dog barked. The moon was beginning to cast its shadows. "Yes," stammered Hippolyte, incapable of sustaining longer the fixed gaze of the silent mother. "Yes, yes, we will send her—to-morrow."

"No, not to-morrow; Saturday, signora."

"Saturday is the Vigil."

"Let her buy him a candle."

"A fine candle."

"A ten-pound candle."

"Do you hear, Liberata? Do you hear?"

"The lady will send you to the Madonna!"

"The Madonna will pity you."

"Speak! Speak!"

"She's become dumb, signora."

"She hasn't spoken for three days."

In the midst of the confused cries of the women, the child cried still louder.

"Do you hear how he cries?"

"He always cries loudest, signora, at nightfall."

"Perhaps it's coming soon."

"Perhaps the child has seen——"

"Make the sign of the cross, signora."

"It's getting dark."

"Do you hear how he cries?"

"Isn't that the bell tolling?"

"No; one can't hear it here."

"Silence!"

"One can't hear it here."

"But I hear it."

"I hear it, too."

"Ave Maria!"

All were silent, made the sign of the cross, and bowed. It seemed as if several sonorous waves, scarcely perceptible, arrived from the distant market-town; but the child's wail filled every listener's ear. Once more, only this single wail could be heard. The mother had fallen on her knees at the foot of the cradle, prostrated to the earth. Hippolyte, her head bowed, was praying with fervor.

"Look, there, in the doorway!" whispered one of the women to her neighbor.

George, watchful and uneasy, turned his head. The doorway was full of shadow.

"Look, there, in the doorway! Don't you see something?"

"Yes, I see," replied the other, uncertain, a little frightened.

"What is it? What do you see?" asked a third.

"What is it?" demanded a fourth.

"What is it?"

Suddenly curiosity and fright seized them all. They looked toward the door. The child cried. The mother rose, and she, too, began to fix her dilated eyes on the door which the shadows rendered mysterious. The dog barked among the olive-trees.

"What is it?" said George, in a low voice, but not without requiring some effort to shake off the increasing uneasiness of his imagination. "What do you see?"

None of the women dared to answer. All, in the shadow, saw the outlines of a vague form.

Then he advanced toward the door. When he crossed the threshold, a furnace-like heat and a repugnant stench cut short his breath. He turned round, went out.

"It's a scythe," he said.

In fact, it was a scythe hanging on the wall.

"Ah! a scythe."

And the voices recommenced.

"Liberata! Liberata!"

"Are you mad?"

"She is mad."

"It's getting dark. Let us go."

"He's not crying any more."

"Poor creature! Is he asleep?"

"He has stopped crying."

"Take in the cradle; the evening is damp. We will help you, Liberata."

"Poor creature! Is he asleep?"

"One would think he were dead. He no longer moves."

"Take in the cradle, won't you? Don't you hear us, Liberata?"

"She is mad."

"Where is the lamp? Joseph will soon return. Have you no lamp? Joseph will soon return from the lime-kiln."

"She is mad. She doesn't speak any more."

"We are going. God be with you!"

"Poor tormented flesh! Is he sleeping?"

"He's sleeping, he's sleeping.... He's not in pain now."

"Oh, Lord Jesus, save him!"

"Protect us, O Lord!"

"Farewell, farewell! Good night!"

"Good night!"

"Good night!"

CHAPTER III.

The dog continued to bark in the olive-groves, while George and Hippolyte came back by the path towards Candia's house. When the animal recognized the guests of the house, he stopped barking, and came to meet them joyfully.

"Why, it's Giardino!" cried Hippolyte. And she stooped to caress the poor beast, with whom she had already become friends. "He was calling us. It's getting late."

The moon rose in the silence of the sky, slowly, preceded by a luminous wave which gradually covered the azure. All the sounds of the surrounding fields died away beneath this pacific light. And the unexpected cessation of every noise seemed almost supernatural to George, whom an inexplicable fright kept alert.

"Stop a moment," he said, holding Hippolyte back.

And he listened intently.

"What are you listening to?"

"It seemed to me——"

And both looked back in the direction of the barn, which the olive-trees concealed from view. But they heard nothing except the even and rocking rhythm of the sea in the curve of the little gulf. Over their heads a cricket clove the air in its flight with a grating sound like that of a diamond on a pane of glass.

"Don't you think the child is dead?" asked George, without dissimulating his emotion. "He stopped crying."

"That's true!" said Hippolyte. "And you believe he's dead?"

George did not reply. And they resumed their way back beneath the silvery olive-groves.

"Did you notice the mother well?" he asked at last, after a silence, possessed internally by the sombre image.

"My God! My God!"

"And that old woman who touched your elbow! What a voice! What eyes!"

His words betrayed the strange fright which dominated him, as if the recent spectacle had been a frightful revelation to him, as if life had suddenly been made manifest to him under a mysterious and savage aspect, bruising and stamping him with an indelible sign.

"You know, when I entered the house, on the ground behind the door there was the corpse of some beast—already half-decomposed. The smell was simply choking."

"What do you mean?"

"It was either a cat or a dog. I could not distinguish very well. It was difficult to see well inside."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, yes. Without any doubt there was a dead animal. The stench——"

A shudder of disgust ran through him as he thought of it.

"What could it be?" said Hippolyte, who felt herself becoming infected by the contagion of fear and disgust.

"How can I know?"

The dog gave a bark to announce their coming. They had arrived. Candia was waiting for them, and the table was already spread beneath the oak.

"How late you are, signora!" cried the affable hostess, with a smile. "Where have you been? What will you give me if I guess? Well, you have been to see the child of Liberata Maunella. May Jesus guard us from the Cunning One!"

When the lovers were at table, she approached, curious, to speak and question.

"Did you see him, signora? He gets no better; he's just as bad. Yet his father and mother have done everything to save him."

What had they not done! Candia related all the remedies attempted, all the exorcisms. The priest had been there, and, after having covered the child's head with the edge of his stole, had read verses from the Bible. The mother had suspended from the lintel of the door a waxen cross, blessed on Ascension Day; she had sprinkled with holy water the hinges of the imposts, and recited aloud the Credo, thrice in succession; she had put a handful of salt in a piece of linen, which afterwards she had knotted and hung around the neck of her dying son. The father had done the seven nights; for seven consecutive nights he had watched in the dark, before a lighted lantern covered with a pot, attentive to the slightest sound, ready to assail and seize the Ghoul. A single pin-prick would have sufficed to render it visible to human eyes. But the seven vigils had gone by without result. The child wasted away, and was consumed hour by hour, hopelessly. Finally, on the advice of a witch, the despairing father had killed a dog and put the body behind the door. This prevented the Ghoul entering before having counted all the hairs of the dead beast.

"Do you hear?" said George to Hippolyte.

They did not eat, their hearts oppressed with pity, struck with terror at the sudden apparition of these phantoms of an obscure and atrocious life, which environed the leisures of their useless love.

"May Jesus protect us from the Cunning One!" repeated Candia; and piously, with her open hand, she indicated the place where lay the living fruit. "May God protect your children, signora!"

Then she added:

"You're not eating this evening! You've no appetite. That innocent soul distresses your hearts. And your husband isn't eating, either. Look!"

Hippolyte said:

"Do many die—like that?"

"Oh!" went on Candia, "this is a bad district. The cursed brood swarms hereabouts. One is never safe. May Jesus protect us from the Cunning One!"

She repeated the conjuration, then added, pointing to a plate on the table:

"Do you see those fish? They are from the Trabocco; they were brought by Turchin."

And she lowered her voice.

"Do you want to know? For nearly a year, Turcum and all his family have been in the power of some witchcraft from which he has not yet been able to free himself."

"Who is Turchin?" asked George, listening breathlessly to the woman's words, fascinated by the mystery of these things. "The man from the Trabocco?"

And he recalled that earthy visage, almost chinless scarcely larger than a fist, with a long nose, prominent and pointed like the snout of a pike, between two small, glittering eyes.

"Yes, signor. Look over there. If your sight is good you can see him. To-night he is fishing by moonlight."

And Candia pointed out on the rocks the great fishing machine—that collection of trunks freed from their bark, planks and cables, whose strange whiteness resembled the colossal skeleton of some antediluvian amphibian. In the calm air was heard the creaking of the capstan. As the tide was low and the rocks were uncovered, the odor of the algæ came up victorious from the beach, stronger and fresher than the effluvia from the fertile hill.

Hippolyte breathed in the intoxicating odor, already entirely occupied by that intense sensation which made her nostrils quiver and her eyes half-close. She murmured:

"Oh, how delicious! Don't you smell it, George?"

He, on his part, was very attentive to Candia's words, and saw in imagination the silent drama suspended over the sea. To the phantoms evoked by this simple woman in the serene night his soul, inclined to mystery and naturally superstitious, gave limitless life and tragic horror. For the first time he had a vast and confused vision of that race unknown to him, of all that miserable flesh, full of animal instincts and of bestial afflictions, bent and sweating on the glebe or buried in the depths of the cottages, beneath the perpetual menace of those dark powers. Amidst the sweet richness of the country which he had selected as the theatre of his love, he discovered a violent human agitation; and it was as if he had discovered a swarm of insects in the masses of magnificent hair impregnated with aroma. He felt the same shudder, already felt before this, at the contact with brutally revealed life: "recently, at the sight of his relatives, of his father, of his brother, of the poor, bigoted glutton." All at once, he felt as if he were no longer alone with his mistress amidst the benign growths, under the bark of which he had one day believed he had surprised a new emotion. He felt himself, on the contrary, environed and almost jostled by an unknown crowd, which, bearing in itself the same vitality which the trunks of trees possess, blind, tenacious, and unconquerable, adhered to him by the bond of the species and could immediately communicate to him its suffering, by a look, a gesture, a sigh, a sob, a groan, a cry.

"Ah! this district is bad," repeated Candia, shaking her head. "But the Messiah of Chapelles will come to purify the earth."[*]

{*} The episode of the Messiah of Chapelles is historical. Oreste de Amicis born in 1824 at Chapelles, played precisely the rôle assigned to him here by the novelist. He died in 1889. Antonio de Nino has collected and published curious documents concerning this personage.

"The Messiah?"

"Father," cried Candia, in the direction of the house, "when is the Messiah to be here?"

The old man appeared upon the threshold.

"One of these days," he replied.

And, turning toward the beach, which in the dim light cast by the half-moon disappeared to view in the direction of Ortona, he signified with a vague gesture the mystery of that new deliverer in whom the country people had placed their hope and faith.

"One of these days—very soon."

And the old man, who wanted to talk, approached the table, looked at his guests with an uncertain smile, and asked:

"Don't you know who it is?"

"Perhaps it is Semplice," said George in whose memory revived a distant and indistinct recollection of that Semplice di Sulmone who fell into an ecstasy, his eyes fixed on the sun.

"No, signor; Sembri is dead. The new Messiah is Oreste of Chapelles."

And the old man, in fervent and vividly colored language, related the new legend, such as it had been conceived by the rural population.

Oreste, being a capuchin monk, had known Semplice at Sulmone, and had learned from him the art of reading the future on the face of the rising sun. Then he began to travel all over the world: he had gone to Rome, and had spoken with the Pope; in another place he had spoken with the king. On his return to Chapelles, his birthplace, he had passed seven years in the cemetery in the company of skeletons, wearing a hair shirt, flagellating himself night and day, according to discipline. He had preached in the parish church, and had drawn tears and cries from the fishers. Then he had started once more on a pilgrimage to all the sanctuaries; he had remained thirty days on the mountain of Ancona; he had remained twelve days on Mount St. Bernard; he had climbed the highest peaks, struggling through the snow, his head bared. Returned again to Chapelles, he had recommenced to preach in his church. But, shortly afterwards, persecuted and driven away by his enemies, he had sought refuge in the Island of Corsica; and there he had made himself an apostle, resolved to traverse all Italy and to write the name of the Virgin in his blood on the gate of every city. As an apostle, he had returned to his native place, announcing that he had seen a star in the midst of a thicket of trees, and that from it he had received the Word. And, finally, by the inspiration of the Eternal Father, he had taken the great name of the New Messiah.

He was now making his pilgrimage through the rural districts dressed in a red tunic and a blue mantle, with long hair down to his shoulders, and his beard trimmed like Christ's. His apostles accompanied him—men who had abandoned the spade and plough to devote themselves to the triumph of the new faith. In Pantaleoni Donadio revived the spirit of Saint Matthew; in Antonio Secamiglio revived the spirit of Saint Peter; in Giuseppe Scurti, that of Maximin; in Maria Clara, that of Saint Elizabeth; and Vincent di Giambattista, who represented the archangel Saint Michael, was the messenger of the Messiah.

All these men had tilled the soil, mown the wheat, pruned the vines, pressed the olives; they had led the cattle to the fair and disputed over the prices; they had led a woman to the altar, and procreated children, and seen these children grow, flourish, die; in short, they had lived the ordinary life of country people amidst their equals. And now they passed, followers of the Messiah, considered as divine personages by the same people with whom, the previous week, they had argued concerning a measure of wheat. They passed transfigured, participating in the divinity of Oreste, invested with his grace. Whether in the fields or in the house, they had heard a voice, they had all at once felt pure souls enter into their sinful flesh. The spirit of Saint John was in Giuseppe Coppa; that of Saint Zacharias, in Pascal Basilico. The women, also, had received the sign. A woman of Senegallia, married to a certain Augustinone, a tailor at Chapelles, in order to demonstrate to the Messiah the ardor of her faith, had wanted to renew the sacrifice of Abraham, by setting fire to a mattress on which slept her children. Other women had given other proofs.

And the Elect now wandered through the country with his escort of Apostles and of Marys. From the most distant places of the coast and mountain, multitudes flocked to see him pass. At daybreak, when he appeared at the door of the house in which he had lodged, he always saw a great crowd kneeling in expectation. Erect on the threshold, he delivered the Word, received confessions, administered communion with pieces of bread. For his nourishment, he preferred eggs prepared with elder flowers, or with the tips of wild asparagus; he also ate a mixture of honey, nuts, and almonds, which he called manna, to recall the manna of the desert.

His miracles could no longer be counted. By the simple virtue of the thumb, index and middle fingers, raised in the air, he delivered the possessed, cured the infirm, resurrected the dead. If anyone went to consult him, he did not even give him time to open his mouth, and immediately told him the names of his parents, explained his family affairs, and revealed to him the most obscure secrets. He also gave news of the souls of the dead; he indicated places where treasures were hidden; with certain scapularies in the form of a triangle, he delivered hearts from melancholies.

"It's Jesus come back to earth," concluded Colas di Sciampagne, with a voice fervent with faith. "He will pass near here, too. Didn't you see how high the wheat is? Have you not noticed how the olive-trees are flourishing? Didn't you notice how the vines are laden with grapes?"

Respectful of the old man's beliefs, George asked gravely:

"And where is he now?"

"He is at Piomba," replied the old man.

And he pointed to the distant shores on the other side of Ortono, evoking in his guest's mind the vision of that corner of the province of Teramo bathed by the sea—an almost mystic vision of fertile lands watered by little, sinuous rivers, where, beneath the endless shivering of the poplars, a stream of water ran over a bed of polished sand.

After an interval of silence, Colas added:

"At Piomba, one word from him sufficed to stop the train on the railroad! My son saw it. Didn't Vito tell us that, Candia?"

Candia confirmed the old man's words, and gave the details of the wonderful event. The Messiah, attired in his red tunic, had advanced to meet the train, walking calmly between the two rails.

While speaking, Candia and the old man incessantly directed their gaze, as well as their gestures, towards the distance, as if the sacred person of the expected arrival were already visible to them.

"Listen!" interrupted Hippolyte, pulling the arm of George, who was absorbed in an inner view more and more vast and distinct. "Don't you hear something?"

She rose, crossed the court, went close to the parapet under the acacias. He followed her. They listened.

"It's a procession going on a pilgrimage to the Madonna of Casalbordino," said Candia.

In the peaceful moonlight a religious chant swelled its slow and monotonous rhythm, with an alternation of masculine and feminine voices at equal intervals. One of these half-choirs chanted a strophe in a low tone; the other half-choir chanted a refrain in a higher key, indefinitely prolonging the cadence. It was like the approach of a wave continuously rising and falling.

The procession approached with a rapidity which contrasted with the slowness of the rhythm. Already the first pilgrims appeared at the turn of the path, near the bridge of the Trabocco.

"Here they are," exclaimed Hippolyte, moved by the novelty of the scene and sounds. "Here they are. What a number of them!"

They advanced in a compact mass. And the opposition of the measure between their march and their chant was so strange that it gave them an almost fantastic appearance. It seemed as if a supernatural force impelled them on, unconscious, towards the goal, while the words emitted from their mouths remained suspended in the luminous air and continued to vibrate after their passage.

Viva Maria!

Viva Maria!

They passed with a heavy trampling, exhaling a sour, herdlike odor, so jammed one to the other that nothing emerged from their mass except the long sticks fashioned like a cross. The men marched in front, and the women, more numerous, behind, with the glittering of golden ornaments underneath their white bandelets.

Viva Maria!

Viva her Creator!

Near by, at every repetition, their chant had the vehemence of a cry; then it diminished in vigor, betraying fatigue, surmounted by a continual and unanimous effort, the initiative of which, in the two half-choirs, almost always started in a single and more powerful voice. And this voice dominated not only the others when it intoned the measure; but often, in the midst of the musical wave, it was maintained high and recognizable during the entire duration of the strophe or refrain, denoting a more imperious faith, a singular and dominating soul among that indistinct crowd.

George remarked it, and, very attentive, followed it as it waned in the distance, as long as his ear could recognize it. And that gave rise in him to an extraordinary sentiment of the mystic power which lay at the roots of the great indigenous race from which he himself had sprung.

The procession disappeared in the curve of the coast; then reappeared on the summit of the promontory, in the light; then disappeared again. And the chant, through the distant night, became veiled, softened; became so light that the slow and uniform modulation of the calm sea almost drowned it.

Seated on the parapet, her shoulders leaning against the trunk of an acacia, Hippolyte remained silent, motionless, not daring to disturb the religious meditations in which her lover seemed plunged.

What could the beams of the brightest sunlight reveal to George, that this simple chant in the night had not already revealed to him? All the scattered images, recent and ancient, those still vibrating with the keen sensation which had given birth to them and those buried in the deepest recesses of his memory, all these were bound together internally, and composed for him an ideal spectacle which carried him over the most vast and most august reality. His land and his race appeared to him transfigured, uplifted from time, with a legendary and formidable aspect, weighty with mysterious, eternal, and nameless things. A mountain, like unto an enormous primeval stump, reared up in the centre in the form of a breast, perpetually covered with snows; and the sloping sides, the promontories devoted to the olive-trees, were bathed there by an inconstant and sad sea, on which the sails bore the colors of mourning and flame. Roads wide as rivers, green with grass, and sown with bare rocks, with gigantic vestiges scattered here and there, descended from the heights to conduct to the plains the migrations of the herds. The rites of dead and forgotten religions survived; incomprehensible symbols of powers fallen since centuries subsisted there intact; the usages of primitive peoples, gone forever, persisted there, transmitted without change from generation to generation; the rich fashions, strange and useless, were retained there as witnesses of the nobility and the beauty of an anterior life. Long strings of horses laden with wheat-corn passed there; and the devotees rode on the loads, their heads crowned with ears of corn, with belts of paste, and deposited at the foot of a statue the cereal offerings. The young girls, with baskets of wheat on their heads, led along the roads a she-ass bearing a still larger basket on its crupper, and, with their offering, they went towards the altar, singing. The men and boys, crowned with roses and with dewy berries, climbed in their pilgrimage on a rock on which was impressed a footprint of Sampson. A white bullock, fattened for a year on a rich pasturage, covered by a vermilion gualdrape and ridden by a child, advanced with pomp among the standards and candles; it knelt on the threshold of the temple, in the midst of the applause of the people; then, arrived at the centre of the nave, it voided its excrements, and the devotees drew from this steaming matter presages as to their agriculture. On feast days the fluvial populations bound their heads with bryony and, at night, they crossed the water with songs and music, bearing in their hands branches full of leaves. At daybreak, in the fields, the virgins washed their hands, feet, and faces in the fresh dew, to accomplish a vow. On the mountains, on the plains, the first sun of the spring was saluted by ancient hymns, by the clash of crashing metals, by cries and dances. Throughout the entire district the men, women, and children sought the first serpents emerged from their lethargy, seized them alive, and wound them around their necks and arms, so as to present themselves thus ornamented before their Saint, who would render them proof against venomous bites. On the inclines of the sun-bathed hills the young toilers, with their yoked oxen, in presence of their old men, rivalled one another as to who should trace the straightest furrow from the hill-top to the plain; and the judges awarded the prize to the conqueror, while the father, in tears, opened his arms to his well-deserving son. And so, in all the ceremonies, in all the pomps, in all the labors, in all the games, in the births, in the loves, in the marriages, funerals, everywhere was present and visible a georgic symbol, everywhere was represented and venerated the great producer Earth, from whose womb gushed forth the sources of all that was good and joyful. The women of the family gathered at the house of the newly married, bearing on their heads a basket of wheat-corn, on the wheat a loaf of bread, and on the loaf a flower; they entered one by one, and sprinkled a handful of that augural grain on the head of the happy wife. At the foot of a dying man's bed, when the death-agony was prolonged, two kinsmen deposited a ploughshare, which had the virtue of interrupting the horrors and of hastening death. The tool and the fruit thus assumed superior significance and power. A profound sentiment and continual desire for mystery gave to all these environing things an active soul, benign or malignant, of good or evil augury, that participated in every vicissitude of fortune, by a manifest or occult action. A vesicating leaf pressed on the bared arm revealed love or indifference; the hearth-chain; thrown in the road exorcised the menacing hurricane; a mortar placed on the edge of the window recalled the lost pigeons; the swallowed heart of a sparrow communicated wisdom. Mystery intervened in every event, envelopes and bound every existence; and the supernatural life dominated, concealed, and absorbed the ordinary life by creating innumerable and indestructible phantoms, which peopled the fields, inhabited the houses, encumbered the heavens, troubled the eyes.

Mystery and rhythm, those two essential elements of every cult were scattered everywhere. Men and women continually expressed their soul in song, accompanied by song all their labors under roof and heaven, celebrated by song both life and death. Around the cradles and around the biers, music was shed, slow and persistent, very ancient, as ancient, perhaps, as the race whose profound sorrows they manifested. Sad, grave, fixed in immutable rhythm, they seemed the fragments of hymns that had belonged to the immemorial liturgies which had survived the destruction of some great primordial myth. They were few in number, but so dominating that the new songs could not displace them or diminish their hold. They were transmitted from generation to generation like an inner heritage, inherent in the corporeal substance; and each one, on awaking in this life, heard them resound in himself like an innate language to which the voice gave a visible form. Just as well as the mountains, the valleys, and the rivers; just as well as the customs, the vices, the virtues and beliefs, they termed a part of the structure of the country and of the race. They were as immortal as the glebe and as the blood.

Such was the country, such was the race, visited by this New Messiah, of whom the old peasant had related the life and miracles. Who was this man? An ascetic, ingenuous and innocent as Semplice, the worshipper of the sun? A cunning and covetous charlatan, who was trying to play upon the credulity of his devotees for his own profit? Who, really, was this man who, from the border of a small river, could gather, by his name alone, multitudes from both near and far, induce mothers to desert their children, awaken in the souls of the most ignorant the visions and the voices of another world?

And, once more, George evoked the figure of Oreste, attired in his red tunic, going up the little, sinuous river, where, beneath the endless shivering of the poplars, a stream of water ran over a bed of polished sand.

"Who knows," he thought, "if this unexpected revelation will not be my salvation? In order that I should be myself again, in order that I should recognize my true essence, do I not need to put myself in immediate contact with the race from which I have sprung? In burying again the roots of my being in the natal soil, shall I not suck up a pure and revivifying sap, which will have the power to expel all that is false and heterogeneous in me, all that I have consciously and unconsciously received by a thousand contagions? Just now, I do not seek the truth; I seek only to recuperate my own substance, to replace in myself the characters of my race, so as to strengthen them and render them as intense as possible. In thus harmonizing my soul with the diffused soul, I shall recover that equilibrium which I lack. For the intellectual man, the secret of equilibrium is to know how to transport the instincts, the wants, the tendencies, and the fundamental sentiments of his race to a superior order."

Mystery and rhythm were scattered everywhere. Near by, on the foaming beach, the sea breathed at equal intervals; but during the pauses one heard, more and more feebly, the cadences of the waves, which touched the shore at constantly increasing periods. Reverberated, doubtless by the echo of some sonorous hollow, the chant of the pilgrims was heard once more, then died away. Over the Vasto d' Aimone the sky was lit up by frequent flashes of lightning, and in the calm moonlight the flashes appeared red. Hippolyte was dreaming, leaning against the trunk of a tree, her eyes watching the silent flashes.

She had not made a single movement. Her prolonged immobility in the same attitude was frequent enough; and, at times, it took on a cataleptic appearance which was almost alarming. She had then no longer the young and kind aspect which the plants and beasts knew so well, but the appearance of a taciturn and indomptable creature in whom were concentrated all the isolated, exclusive, and destructive virtues of the passion of love. The three divine elements of her beauty—her brow, her eyes, her mouth—had perhaps never attained such a degree of symbolic intensity to illustrate the principle of the eternal feminine fascination. It seemed that the serene night favored this sublimation of her form, that it liberated the true, ideal essence of her being, that it permitted her lover to know her entirely, not by the acuteness of view but by that of thought. The summer night, full of lunary brilliancy and of dreams, and of pale or invisible stars, and of the most melodious marine voices, seemed the natural field of that sovereign image. The same as the shadow grew at times out of entire proportion to the body that caused it, the same as against the infinity of that background, the fatality of love rendered the person of Hippolyte higher and more tragic for the spectators whose prescience became every instant more lucid and more terrible.

Was it not, in the same immobility, the same woman who, from the height of the loggia, had contemplated the single white sail on the dead waters? It was she; and now again, in spite of the night which despoiled her person of all brutal reality, the same hatred moved under the sentiment excited by her—that mortal hatred of the sexes which is at the bottom of love, and which, occult or openly, subsists at the bottom of every effect, from the first glance up to extreme disgust.

"So," he thought, "she is the Enemy. As long as she lives, as long as she can exercise her empire over me, she will prevent me from putting foot on the threshold I perceive. And how can I recover my substance, if a great portion of myself is in the hands of this woman? Vain is the aspiration towards the new world, towards a new life. As long as love endures, the axis of the world rests on a single being, and life is shut in by a narrow circle. To revive and conquer, I must free myself from love; I must deliver myself from the Enemy."

Once more he imagined her dead.

"Dead, she would become an object for thought, a pure ideality. From a precarious and imperfect existence, she would enter into an integral and definite one, freed forever from her weak flesh, so frail and sensual. Destroy to possess! He who seeks the absolute in love has no other means."

Suddenly, Hippolyte started violently, as if an extraordinary shudder had shaken her. She said, alluding to the common superstition:

"Death has just passed."

And she smiled. But her lover, struck by the strange coincidence, could not repress an instinctive movement of stupor and fright.

"Could she have felt my thought?"

The dog began to bark with sudden fury, and they both rose at the same time.

"Who is it?" said Hippolyte, uneasy.

The dog barked with renewed energy, still turned in the direction of the olive-groves. Candia and the old man came out of the house.

"What is it?" repeated Hippolyte, uneasy.

"Who can it be?" said the old man, gazing into the darkness.

The sound of a human voice came from the olive-trees, an imploring, sobbing voice. Then appeared an indistinct form, which Candia immediately recognized.

"Liberata!"

The mother carried on her head the cradle, covered with a dark cloth. She walked erect, almost rigid, without turning, without deviating from her path, absorbed in herself, mute like a sinister somnambulist, blindly impelled towards an unknown goal. And a man followed her bareheaded, beside himself, sobbing, imploring, calling her by her name, bending, beating his sides or burying his hands in his hair with gestures of atrocious despair. Grotesque and miserable, following the steps of the deaf woman, he howled, amidst his sobs:

"Liberata! Liberata! Listen! Listen! Come back to the house! Oh, my God, my God! where are you going? What are you going to do? Liberata! Listen! Listen! Oh, my God, my God!"

He implored to retain her, to stop her; but he did not touch her. He held his hands out to her with gestures frantic with pain; but he did not touch her, as if some mysterious cause prevented him, as if a charm had rendered that person intangible.

Candia neither went to meet her, nor did she bar her way. She simply asked the man:

"What's the matter? What's happened?"

The man, with a gesture, signified her dementia. And that recalled to the memory of George and Hippolyte the words of the gossips: "She is mad. She has become mute, signora. She has not spoken for three days."

"She is mad. She is mad."

Candia pointed to the covered cradle, asking again in a low voice:

"Is he dead?"

The man sobbed louder. And that recalled to the memory of George and Hippolyte the words of the gossips: "He's stopped crying. Poor creature! Is he asleep? He looks like a little corpse. He doesn't move. He's asleep, he's asleep.... He's not in pain now."

"Liberata!" cried Candia, with all the strength of her lungs, as if to rouse the impassive creature. "Liberata! Where are you going?"

But she did not move her, did not prevent her from going her way.

Then, all were silent, and watched.

The mother continued to advance, tall and erect, almost rigid, without turning, fixing before her her dilated and dry eyes, her mouth tightly closed, a mouth which seemed closed as by a seal, as if already vowed to perpetual silence and deprived of breath. On her head she balanced the cradle, changed into a coffin; and the lamentation of the man assumed the continuous rhythm of a monody.

The tragic couple crossed the court in this way, descended the path recently beaten by the steps of the pilgrims, and on which still floated the religious soul that the hymn had left there.

And the lovers, their hearts oppressed by pity and horror, followed with their eyes the figure of the funereal mother, who disappeared in the night, in the direction of the flashing lightning.

CHAPTER IV.

Now it was no longer Hippolyte, but George, who proposed long excursions, long explorations. Condemned to "be always waiting for life," he believed in going to meet it, to find and gather it in the visible realities.

His factitious curiosity was attracted now to those things which, scarcely capable of effectively moving the surface of the soul, could not penetrate it and stir it to its depth. He tried to discover, between his soul and certain things, connections which did not exist; he tried to shake the indifference of his inmost being, that inert indifference that had rendered him so long a stranger to all external agitation. Collecting all the perspicuous faculties he possessed, he applied himself to find some living resemblance between himself and the surrounding nature that he might reconcile himself in a filial way with that nature, and vow to it eternal fidelity.

But there was not awakened in him the extraordinary emotion which had several times exalted and astounded him in the first days of his stay at the Hermitage, before the arrival of the loved one. He could resuscitate neither the panicky intoxication of the first day, when he had believed he truly felt the sun in his heart, nor the melancholy charm of the first solitary walk, nor the unexpected and divine joy which had been communicated to him on that May morning by the song of Favetta and the perfume of the furze, freshened by the dew. On the earth and on the sea, men cast a tragic shadow. Poverty, disease, dementia, terror, and death lay in wait, or were exhibited everywhere on his path. A wave of fierce fanaticism was sweeping from one end of the country to the other. Night and day, far and near, religious hymns resounded, monotonous and interminable. The Messiah was expected, and the poppies in the wheat recalled the image of his red tunic.

Around him, faith consecrated every vegetable form. The Christian legend twined itself around the trunks of the trees, blossomed amid the branches. On the knees of the Madonna, a fugitive, and pursued by the Pharisees, the Infant Jesus was changed into wheat that overflowed. Hidden in the bin, he made the dough rise and rendered it inexhaustible. Over the dry and thorny lupines which had wounded the Virgin's gentle feet was suspended a curse; but the flax was blessed, because their hulls had dazzled the Pharisees. Blessed also the olive-tree for having given shelter to the Holy Family in its open trunk, in the form of a cabin, and for having lighted it with its pure oil; blessed the juniper for having held the Infant enclosed in its tufts; and blessed the holly for the same courteous service; and blessed the laurel because it springs from the soil sprinkled by the water in which had been washed the Son of God.