The Child of Pleasure Part 23

'Oh sweet and tranquil death of September!

'Another month ended, lost, dropped away into the abyss of Time--Farewell!

'I have lived more in this last fortnight than in fourteen years; and not one of my long weeks of unhappiness has ever equalled in sharpness of torture this one short week of pa.s.sion. My heart aches, my head swims; in the depths of my being, I feel a something obscure and burning--a something that has suddenly awakened in me like a latent disease, and now begins to creep through my blood and into my soul in spite of myself, baffling every remedy--desire.

'It fills me with shame and horror as at some dishonour, some sacrilege or outrage; it fills me with wild and desperate terror as at some treacherous enemy who will make use of secret paths to enter the citadel which are unknown to myself.

'And here I sit in the night watches, and while I write these pages, with all the feverish ardour that lovers put into their love-letters, I cease to listen to the gentle breathing of my child. She sleeps in peace; she little knows how far away from her her mother's spirit is!

'_October 1st._--I see much in him that I did not observe before. When he speaks, I cannot take my eyes off his mouth--the play of his lips and their colouring occupies my attention more than the sound or the sense of his words.

'_October 2nd._--To-day is Sat.u.r.day--just a week since the never-to-be-forgotten day, the 25th of September.

'By some strange chance, although I no longer avoid being alone with him--for I am anxious now for the dread and heroical moment--by some strange chance, that moment has not yet occurred.

'Francesca has always been with me the whole day long. This morning we had a ride along the road to Rovigliano, and we spent the best part of the afternoon at the piano. She made me play some sixteenth-century dance music, and then Clementi's famous Toccata and two or three Caprices of Scarlatti's, and, after that, I had to sing certain songs from Schumann's _Frauenliebe_--what contrasts!

'Francesca has lost much of her old gaiety, she is not as she used to be in the first days of my stay here. She is often silent and preoccupied, and when she does laugh or make fun, her gaiety seems to me very forced.

I said to her once. "Is something worrying you?"

'"Why?" she answered with a.s.sumed surprise.

'"Because you seem to me a little out of spirits lately."

'"Out of spirits? oh, no, you are quite mistaken," she answered, and she laughed, but with an involuntary note of bitterness. This troubles me and causes me a vague sense of uneasiness.

'We are going to Vicomile to-morrow afternoon.

'He asked me--"Would it tire you too much to come on horseback? In that way we could cut right through the pine wood!"

'So we are going to ride and Francesca will join us. The others, including Delfina, will come in the mail-coach.

'What a strange state of mind I am in this evening! I feel a kind of dull and angry bitterness at the bottom of my heart, without knowing why--am impatient with myself, my life, the whole world--my nervous irritation rises, at times, to such a pitch, that I am seized with an insane desire to scream aloud, to dig my nails into my flesh, to bruise my fingers against the wall--any physical suffering would be better than this intolerable mental discomfort, this unbearable wretchedness. I feel as if I had a burning knot in my bosom, that my throat were closed by a sob I dared not give vent to--I am icy cold and burning hot by turns and, from time to time, a sudden pang darts through me, an irrational terror that I can neither shake off nor control. Thoughts and images flash suddenly across my brain, coming from I know not what ign.o.ble depths of my soul.

'_October 3rd._--How weak and miserable is the human soul, how utterly defenceless against the attacks of all that is least n.o.ble and least pure in us, and that slumbers in the obscurity of our unconscious life, in those unexplored abysses where dark dreams are born of hidden sensations!

'A dream can poison a whole soul, a single involuntary thought is sufficient to corrupt and break down the force of will.

'We are just starting for Vicomile. Delfina is in raptures.

'It is the festival of Our Lady of the Rosary. Courage, my heart!

'_October 4th._--I found no courage.

'Yesterday was so full of trifling incidents and great emotions, so joyful and so sad, so strangely agitating that I am almost at a loss when I try to remember it all. And yet all--all other recollections pale and vanish before the one.

'After having visited the tower and admired the monstrance, we prepared to return home at about half-past five. Francesca was tired and preferred going back in the coach to getting on horseback again. We followed them for a while, riding behind or beside them, while Delfina and Muriella waved long flowering bulrushes at us, laughing and threatening us with their splendid spears.

'The evening was calm, not a breath of wind stirred. The sun was sinking behind the hill at Rovigliano in a sky all rosy-red, like a sunset in the Far East.

'When we came in sight of the pine-wood, he suddenly said to me: "Shall we ride through it?"

'The high road skirted the wood, describing a wide curve, at one part of which it almost touched the sea-sh.o.r.e. The wood was already growing dark and was full of deep-green twilight, but under the trees the pools gleamed with a pure and intense light, like fragments of a sky far fairer than the one above our heads.

'Without giving me time to answer, he said to Francesca, "We are going to ride through the wood and shall join you at the other side, on the high road, by the bridge"--and he reined in his horse.

'Why did I consent--why did I follow him? There was a sort of dazzle before my eyes. I felt as if I were under the influence of some nameless fascination, as if the landscape, the light, this incident, the whole combination of circ.u.mstances were not new to me, but things that had all happened to me before, in another existence, and were now only being repeated. The impression is quite indescribable. My will seemed paralysed. It was as when some incident of one's life reappears in a dream, but with added details that differ from the real circ.u.mstances. I shall never be able to adequately describe even a part of this strange phenomenon.

'We rode in silence at a foot's pace; the cawing of the rooks, the dull beat of the horses' hoofs and their noisy breathing in no way disturbed the all-pervading peace that seemed to grow every minute deeper and more magical.

'Ah, why did he break the spell we ourselves had woven?

'He began to speak; he poured out upon me a flood of burning words--words which, in the silence of the wood, frightened me because they carried with them an impression of something preternatural, something indefinably weird and compelling. He was no longer the humble suppliant of that morning in the park, spoke no more of his diffident hopes, his half-mystical aspirations, his incurable sense of sorrow.

This time he did not beg and entreat. It was the voice of pa.s.sion, full of audacity and virile power, a voice I did not know in him.

'"You love me, you love me--you cannot help but love me--tell me that you love me!"

'His horse was close beside mine. I felt him brush me; I almost felt the breath of his burning words upon my cheek, and I thought I must swoon with anguish and fall into his arms.

'"Tell me that you love me," he repeated obstinately, relentlessly.

"Tell me that you love me!"

'Under the terrible strain of his insistent voice, I believe I answered wildly--whether with a cry or a sob, I do not know--

'"I love you, I love you, I love you!" and I set my horse at a gallop down the narrow rugged path between the crowded tree-trunks, unconscious of what I was doing.

'He followed me crying--"Maria, Maria, stop--you will hurt yourself."

'But I fled blindly on. I do not know how my horse managed to keep clear of the trees, I do not know why I was not thrown; I am incapable of retracing my impressions in that mad flight through the dark wood, past the gleaming patches of water. When at last I came out upon the road, near the bridge, I seemed to have come out of some hallucination.

'"Do you want to kill yourself?" he said almost fiercely. We heard the sound of the approaching carriage and turned to meet it. He was going to speak to me again.

'"Hush, for pity's sake," I entreated, for I felt I was at the end of my forces.

'He was silent. Then, with an a.s.surance that stupefied me, he said to Francesca--"Such a pity you did not come! It was perfectly enchanting."

'And he went on talking as quietly and unconcernedly as if nothing had happened, even with a certain amount of gaiety. I was only too thankful for his dissimulation which screened me, for if I had been obliged to speak, I should inevitably have betrayed myself, and for both of us to have been silent would doubtless have aroused Francesca's suspicions.

'A little further on, the road wound up the hill towards Schifanoja. Oh, the boundless melancholy of the evening! A new moon shone in the faintly-tinted, pale-green sky, where my eyes, and perhaps mine alone, detected a lingering rosy tinge--that same rosy light that gleamed upon the pools down in the pine wood.

'_October 5th._--He knows now that I love him, and knows it from my own lips. Nothing is left for me but flight--this is what I have come to!

'When he looks at me now, there is a strange gleam in the depths of his eyes that was not there before. To-day, while Francesca was absent for a moment, he took my hand and made as if he would kiss it. I managed to draw it away, but I saw his lips tremble; I caught, as it were, the reflection of the kiss that never left his lips, and the image of that kiss haunts me now--it haunts me--haunts me----

'_October 6th._--On the 25th of September, on the marble seat in the arbutus wood, he said to me--"I know you do not love me and that you never will love me!" And on the 3rd of October--"You love me--you love me--you cannot help but love me----"

'In Francesca's presence, he asked if I would allow him to make a study of my hands, and I consented. He will begin to-day.