Читать книгу The Triumph of Death - Gabriele D'Annunzio - Страница 9

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CHAPTER I.

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

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

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

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

"Shall we meet again?"

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

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

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

"Your father is an infamous man!"

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

"He is an infamous man! A wretch!"

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

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

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

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

It was his aunt Joconda. She entered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So—so."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Wait!" she said.

"Where are you going, Aunt Joconda?"

"Wait!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Come! Go to bed, Aunt Joconda."

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

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

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

"Will you come in?"

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

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

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

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

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

He returned to his balcony.

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

"Hippolyte! Hippolyte!"

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

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

CHAPTER II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What a day this has been!"

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

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

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

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

"The procession is leaving the church."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What's the matter? Tell me."

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

"Oh! mother, mother!"

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

"My poor mother!"

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

"Have I pained you very much?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Camille's fiancé was just saying:

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

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

"Assuredly, assuredly."

They were demolishing the mayor.

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

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

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

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

"Will you come down into the garden?"

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

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

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

And she looked at her son Luke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All at once, Christine asked:

"Why are you so thoughtful?"

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

Smiling and hesitating, Christine added:

"You are thinking—of her?"

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

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

Still smiling, still hesitating, Christine again asked:

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

"Still."

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

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

"Goodness! what a quantity of flowers!"

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

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

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

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

"Shall we go back to the house?"

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

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

"Luchino!"

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

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

"Oh, Christine!"

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

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

She spoke tearfully, and in a desolate tone.

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

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

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

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

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