The Child of Pleasure Part 41

'Mumps!'

Andrea started violently; the blood rushed to his head and drew a veil of mist before his eyes, and there was a roar in his ears as if he were going to be seized with vertigo. In the midst of the fever of excitement into which he had been thrown by these books, these pictures, the maddening discourses of his host, a furious instinct rose out of the blind depths of his being, the same brutal impetus which he had already experienced on the race-course after his victory over Rutolo amid the acrid exhalations of his steaming horse. The phantasm of a crime of love tempted and beckoned to him: to kill this man, take the woman by force, wreak his brutal will upon her, and then kill himself. But it pa.s.sed rapidly as it had come.

'No, I am not alone,' answered the husband, without opening the door.

'In a few minutes I shall have the pleasure of bringing Count Sperelli to you--he is here with me.'

He replaced the book in the book-case, closed the portfolio and carried it back into the next room.

Andrea would have given all he possessed not to have to undergo the ordeal that awaited him, and yet it attracted him strangely. Once more, he raised his eyes to the crimson wall and the dark frame out of which Elena's pallid face looked forth, that face with the haunting eyes and the sibylline mouth. A penetrating and continuous fascination emanated from that imperious image. That strange pallor dominated tragically the whole crimson gloom of the apartment. And once again he felt that his miserable pa.s.sion was incurable.

'Will you come into the drawing-room?' asked the husband, reappearing in the doorway perfectly calm and composed. 'Then, you will design those clasps for me?'

'I will try,' answered Andrea.

He was quite unable to control his inward agitation. Elena looked at him with a provocative smile.

'What were you doing in there?' she asked him, still smiling in the same manner.

'Your husband was showing me some unique curiosities.'

'Ah!'

There was a sardonic sneer upon her lips, a manifest mocking scorn in her voice. She settled herself on a wide divan covered with a Bokhara carpet of faded amaranthine hues on which languished great cus.h.i.+ons embroidered with spreading palms of dull gold. Here she leaned back in an easy, graceful att.i.tude, and gazed at Andrea from under her drooping eyelids, while she spoke of trivial society matters in a voice that insinuated its tones into the young man's heart, and crept through his blood like an invisible fire.

Two or three times, he surprised a look which Lord Heathfield fixed upon his wife--a look that seemed surcharged with all the infamies he had stirred up just now. Again that criminal thought sped through his mind.

He trembled in every fibre of his being. He started to his feet, livid and convulsed.

'Going already?' exclaimed Lord Heathfield. 'Why, what is the matter?'

and he smiled a singular smile at his 'young friend.' He knew well the effect of his books.

Sperelli bowed. Elena gave him her hand without rising. Her husband accompanied him to the door, where he repeated in a low voice--'You won't forget those clasps?'

As Andrea stood in the portico, he saw a carriage coming up the drive. A man with a great golden beard nodded to him from the window. It was Galeazzo Secinaro.

In a flash, the recollection of the May Bazaar came back to him, and the episode of Galeazzo offering Elena a sum of money if she would dry her beautiful hands, all wet with champagne, on his beard. He hurried through the garden and out into the street. He had a dull confused sense as of some deafening noise going on inside his head.

It was an afternoon at the end of April, warm and moist.

The sun appeared and disappeared again among the fleecy slow-sailing clouds. The languor of the sirocco lay over Rome.

On the pavement in front of him in the Via Sistina, he perceived a lady walking slowly in the direction of the Trinita. He recognised her as Donna Maria Ferres. He looked at his watch; it was on the stroke of five; only a minute or two before the accustomed hour of meeting. Maria was a.s.suredly on her way to the Palazzo Zuccari.

He hastened forward to join her. When he reached her side, he called her by name.

She started violently. 'What? You here? I was just going up to you. It is five o'clock.'

'It wants a minute or two yet to the hour. I was hurrying on to receive you. Forgive me.'

'But you seem quite upset and very pale. Where were you coming from?'

She frowned slightly, regarding him fixedly through her veil.

'From my stables,' Andrea replied, meeting her look unblus.h.i.+ngly as though he had not a drop of blood left to send to his face. 'A horse that I thought a great deal of has been hurt in the knee--the fault of the jockey--and now it will not be able to run in the Derby on Sunday.

It has annoyed and upset me very much. Please forgive me, I over-stayed the time without noticing it. But it is still a few minutes to five.'

'It does not matter. Good-bye. I am going back.'

They had reached the Piazza del Trinita. She stopped and held out her hand. A furrow still lingered between her brows. With all her great sweetness of temper, she occasionally had moments of angry impatience and petulancy that seemed to transform her into another creature.

'No, Maria--come, be kind! I am going up now to wait for you. Go on as far as the gates of the Pincio and then come back. Will you?'

The clock of the Trinita de' Monti begun to strike.

'You hear that?' he added.

She hesitated for a moment.

'Very well, I will come.'

'Thank you so much! I love you.'

'And I love you.'

They parted.

Donna Maria went on across the piazza and into the avenue. Over her head, the languid breath of the sirocco sent a broken murmur through the green trees. Subtle waves of perfume rose and fell upon the warm, damp breeze. The clouds seemed lower; the swallows skimmed close to the ground; and in the languorous heaviness of the air there was something that melted the pa.s.sionate heart of the Siennese.

Ever since she had yielded to Andrea's persuasions, her heart had been filled with a happiness that was deeply fraught with fear. All her Christian blood was on fire with the hitherto undreamed-of raptures of her pa.s.sion, and froze with terror at her sin. Her pa.s.sion was all-conquering, supreme, immense, so despotic that for hours sometimes it obliterated all thought of her child. She went so far as to forget, to neglect Delfina! And afterwards, she would have a sudden access of remorse, of repentance, of tenderness, in which she covered the astonished little girl's face with tears and kisses, sobbing in horrible despair as over a corpse.

Her whole being quickened at this flame, grew keener, more acute, acquired a marvellous sensibility, a sort of clairvoyance, a faculty of divination which caused her endless torture. Hardly a deception of Andrea's but seemed to send a shadow across her spirit; she felt an indefinite sense of disquietude which sometimes condensed itself into a suspicion. And this suspicion would gnaw at her heart, embittering kisses and caresses, till it was dissipated by the transports and ardent pa.s.sion of her incomprehensible lover.

She was jealous. Jealousy was her implacable tormentor; not jealousy of the present but of the past. With the cruelty that jealous people exercise against themselves, she would have wished to read the secrets of Andrea's memory, to find the traces left there by former mistresses, to know--to know--. The question that most often rose to her lips if Andrea seemed moody and silent was, 'What are you thinking about?' And yet, at the very moment of asking the question, a shadow would cross her eyes and her spirit, an inevitable rush of sadness would rise out of her heart.

To-day again, when he turned up so unexpectedly in the street, had she not had an instinctive movement of suspicion? With a flash of lucidity, the idea had leapt into her mind that Andrea was coming from the Palazzo Barberini, from Lady Heathfield.

She knew that Andrea had been this woman's lover; she knew that her name was Elena; she knew also that she was the Elena of the inscription--'Ich lebe!' Goethe's distich rang painfully in her heart. That lyric cry gave her the measure of Andrea's love for this most beautiful woman. He must have loved her boundlessly!

Walking slowly under the trees, she recalled Elena's appearance in the concert-hall and the ill-disguised uneasiness of the old lover. She remembered her own terrible agitation one evening at the Austrian Emba.s.sy when the Countess Starnina said to her, seeing Elena pa.s.s by--'What do you think of Lady Heathfield? She was, and is still, I fancy, a great flame of our friend Sperelli's.'

'Is still, I fancy.' What tortures in a single sentence! She followed her rival persistently with her eyes through the throng, and more than once her gaze met that of the other, sending a nameless s.h.i.+ver through her. Later on in the evening, when they were introduced to one another by the Baroness Bockhorst, in the middle of the crowd, they merely exchanged an inclination of the head. And that perfunctory salutation had been repeated on the rare occasions on which Maria Ferres had joined in any social function.

Why should these doubts and suspicions, beaten down and stifled under the flood of her pa.s.sion, rise up again now with so much vehemence? Why had she not the strength to repress them or put them away from her altogether? The least touch brought them up to the surface as lively as ever.

Her distress and unhappiness increased with every moment. Her heart was not satisfied; the dream that had risen up within her on that mystical morning under the flowering trees in sight of the sea, had not come true. All that was purest and fairest in that love had remained down there in the sequestered glades in the symbolical forest that bloomed and bore fruit perpetually in contemplation of the Infinite.

She stood and leaned against the parapet that looks towards San Sebastianello. The ancient oaks, their foliage so dark as almost to seem black, spread a sombre artificial roof over the fountain. There were great rents in their trunks filled up with bricks and mortar like the breaches in a wall. Oh, the young arbutus-trees all radiant and breathing in the light! The fountain, dripping from the higher into the lower basin, moaned at intervals, like a heart that fills with anguish and then overflows in a torrent of tears; oh, the melody of the Hundred Fountains in the laurel avenue! The city lay as dead, as if buried under the ashes of an invisible volcano, silent and funereal as a city ravaged by the plague, enormous, shapeless, dominated by the cupola that rose out of its bosom like a cloud. Oh, the sea, the tranquil sea!

Her uneasiness increased. An obscure menace emanated from these things.