The Best Short Stories of 1920 Part 58

We entered the hall. Under a wooden gallery adorned with carved and tinted s.h.i.+elds the supper-table was laid.

They awaited us, s.h.i.+mmering in their fantastic finery--the ladies Laura and Lina, my old friends Leonardo and Leonello, and the ineffable Fiammetta di Foscone. The visitors' cheeks seemed hectic from the excitement of the hour; but her face was flushed, her eyes shone, for her own reasons. As I approached her my heartbeats suffocated me. Yes, I would have taken Antonio's place and shouldered all his terrors! Before me the fair conqueror of time disappeared in a haze, out of which her voice emerged like a sweet utterance from beyond the tomb.

"You are pleased with the castle, messere?"

As I was striving to respond, Antonio said to her, half aside, in that quaint species of Italian which he had used before:

"He speaks our language with difficulty, Madonna, and in a dialect. This disability will embarra.s.s him till he finds himself more at home."

"Then let us sup," she exclaimed. "For since this new custom of a third meal has become fas.h.i.+onable in Florence, no doubt you are all expiring of hunger. So quickly does habit become tyrannous, especially when it involves a pleasure."

In some manner or other I seated myself at the table.

The servants bore in, on silver platters, small chickens garnished with sugar and rose-water, a sort of galantine, tarts of almonds and honey, caramels of pine-seed. From the gallery overhead came the tinkle of a rota, a kind of guitar. The musician produced a whimsical tune suggesting a picnic of lords and ladies in the garden of an antique villa, where trick fountains, masked by blossoms, drenched the unwary with streams of water. But in the chimney of the great, cold fireplace behind my back the wind still growled its threats; the voice of Nature still menaced these audacious mortals, who were celebrating the humiliation of her laws.

Beyond the candle-light the beauty of Fiammetta di Foscone became blinding. In her there was no sign of an unnatural preservation, as, for example, in a flower that has been sustained, yet subtly altered, by imprisonment in ice. Nor did her countenance show in the least that glaze of time which changes, without abating, the fairness of marble G.o.ddesses surviving for us from remote ages of esthetic victory. But wait; she was not an animated statue, nor any product of nature other than flesh and blood! And the flesh, the glance, the whole person of this creature from another era, expressed a glorious young womanhood. I was lost in admiration, pity, and dread. For over this s.h.i.+ning miracle hovered the shadow of disaster. One could not forget the countless menaces surrounding her.

If she should grasp the truth, if all of a sudden she should realize her disaccordance with the world of mortals, what would happen to her before our eyes? Would she succ.u.mb instantly? Or would she first shrivel into some appalling monstrosity? This deception could not last forever. Might it not end to-night?

Did the others have similar premonitions?

Their smiles seemed tremulous and wan, their movements constrained and timorous. All their efforts at gaiety were impeded by the inertia of fear. At every speech the lips of Lina and Laura quivered, the hands of Leonello and Leonardo were clenched in a nervous spasm. Antonio controlled himself only by the most heroic efforts.

What a price to pay for an illusion of happiness that was destined to a ghastly end! Yet I would still have paid that heavy price exacted from Antonio.

Fiammetta di Foscone became infected by our nervousness. At one moment her mirth was feverish; at another, a look of vague uneasiness crossed her face. Was our secret gradually penetrating to her subconscious mind?

Was she to learn the fact, and perish of it, not because of bungling word or action on our part, but merely from the unwitting transmission of our thoughts?

The others redoubled their travesty of merriment. They voiced the gossip of a vanished society; the politics, fas.h.i.+ons, and scandals of old Florence. One heard the names of n.o.ble families long since extinct, accounts of historic escapades related as if they had happened yesterday. Fiammetta recovered her animation.

Her dewy eyes turned to Antonio. Her fingers caressed her betrothal-ring, which was like the wedding-ring of the twentieth century. And in this hall tricked out with lies, amid these guests and servants who were the embodiment of falsehood, an oppressing atmosphere of dread was clarified, for a moment, by the strength and delicacy of her love.

They discussed the virtues of the Muses, the plagiarisms of Petrarch, the wonders of astrology. Her uneasiness revived. In a voice more musical than the rota in the gallery, she asked:

"My dear friends, would you attribute to some planetary influence a feeling of strangeness that I receive at times, even from the air? I demand of you whether the air does not have an unfamiliar smell to-night?"

There was a freezing moment of silence.

"It is this great wind," muttered Leonardo, "that has brought us new air from afar."

"Every place has its smell," was Leonello's contribution. "It is natural that the Castle of Manzecca should smell differently from the Castle of Foscone."

Antonio thanked his friends with an eloquent look.

"True," she a.s.sented, pensively, "every spot, every person, is surrounded by its especial ether, produced by its peculiar activity.

This house, not only in its smell, but in its tenor of life, and even in its food, differs vastly from my own house, which, nevertheless, is just across the hills."

Antonio drained his goblet at a gulp. He got out the words:

"We are provincial, we Manzecca. Like a race apart."

"All old families, jealous of their integrity, are the same," ventured Laura, who looked, nevertheless, as if she were about to faint.

"Or maybe," mused Fiammetta, "it is because I have been ill that things perplex me, and sometimes startle me by an effect of strangeness. There are moments when even the stars look odd to me, and when the countryside, viewed from the tower above us, is bewildering. In one direction I see woods where I should have expected meadows; in another direction, fields where I should have expected woods. But then, I now view the countryside from a tower other than my own, and see in a new aspect that landscape with which I thought myself so well acquainted.

Does that explain it?"

How touching, how pitiable, was her expression, half arch, half pleading, and so beautiful! "Oh, lovely and terrible prodigy!" I thought, "draw back; banish those thoughts; or, rather, no longer think at all--for you are on the edge of the abyss!"

Antonio spoke with difficulty:

"Dearest one, do not pain me by mentioning that illness of yours. Do not pain yourself by dwelling on it in your mind. The past with all its misfortunes is gone forever. Let us live in the present and contemplate a future full of bliss."

A quivering sigh of a.s.sent and relief went round the supper-table. But Fiammetta protested:

"I should not care to forget the past. It contained too much happiness.

The hours at twilight, when I waited on the platform of the Castle of Foscone, and you clambered up the wall, are not for oblivion! Do you remember, Antonio, how you once brought with you a bunch of little damask roses, which you tossed up to me while clinging to the masonry?

Those roses became my treasure. The sweetest one of them I locked in a tiny silver box which I kept always by me. That box came with me from the Castle of Foscone. The key is lost; but you shall open it with your dagger, and learn how I have cherished an emblem of that past which you ask me to forget."

With a rare smile, she drew from the bosom of her gown a very small coffer of silver, its chiseling worn smooth by innumerable caresses.

Poor soul! it was in her bosom that she had cherished this pretty little box, more cruelly fatal than a viper.

Antonio, his jaws sagging, rose half-way out of his chair, then sank back, speechless and livid. Unaware, eager, and imperious, Fiammetta demanded:

"A dagger!"

Too late Antonio managed to put out a shaking hand in protest. Already a fool of a servant had presented his dirk to her. In a twinkling--before we could stop her--Fiammetta had pried back the lid.

The silver box, its oxidized interior as black as ink, contained, in place of the damask rose that had bloomed in the year fifteen hundred, only a few grains of dust.

There was no sound except from the wind, which yelled its devilish glee round the castle and in the chimney of the fireplace.

She had risen to her feet. In her eyes, peering at the little coffer, bewilderment gave place to dismay. But in our faces she found a consternation far surpa.s.sing hers.

"Only dust?"

Antonio distorted his mouth in a vain effort to speak. At last, with a frantic oath, he swept the silver box into the fireplace, where it fell amid the brush-wood and inflammable rubbish piled ready for lighting under the big logs.

Fiammetta had tried to stop him. Under her clutching hand, his fur-trimmed sleeve had slipped up, exposing his forearm. She was staring at his forearm.

"The scar?" she whispered. "Was it not here, when you raised your arm to s.h.i.+eld yourself against them, that you caught the first knife-thrust?

How long does it take for such a scar to pa.s.s entirely away?"

Lina and Laura sank back in their chairs. Leonello averted his face.

Leonardo turned away. Again Antonio tried to speak. The terror that held us in its grip was communicated to Fiammetta di Foscone.

Her countenance became bloodless. Her teeth chattered. She murmured: