murmured Andrea, withdrawing his head from the carriage window.

'What are you saying!' cried the Princess.

At the corner of the Chigi palace the commotion a.s.sumed the aspect of a riot. The carriage had to stop. Elena leaned forward to look out, and her face emerging from the shadows and lighted up by the glare of the gas and the reflection of the sunset seemed of a ghastly whiteness, an almost icy pallor, reminding Andrea of some head he had seen before, he could not say where or when--in some gallery or chapel.

'Here we are,' said the Princess, as the carriage drew up at last at the Palazzo Fiano. 'Good-bye--we shall meet again at the Angelieris' this evening. Ugenta will come and lunch with us to-morrow? You will find Elena and Barbarella Viti and my cousin there----'

'At what time?'

'Half-past twelve.'

'Thanks, I will.'

The Princess got out. The footman stood at the carriage door awaiting further orders.

'Where shall I take you?' Elena asked Sperelli, who had promptly taken the place of the Princess beside her.

'Far, far away----'

'Nonsense--tell me now,--home?' And without waiting for his answer she said--'To the Palazzo Zuccari, Trinita de' Monti.'

The footman closed the carriage door and they drove off down the Via Frattina leaving all the turmoil of the crowd behind them.

'Oh, Elena--after so long----' Andrea burst out, leaning down to gaze at the woman he so pa.s.sionately desired and who had shrunk away from him into the shadow as if to avoid his contact.

The brilliant lights of the shop windows pierced the gloom in the carriage as they pa.s.sed, and he saw on Elena's white face a slow alluring smile.

Still smiling thus, with a rapid movement she unwound the boa from her neck and cast it over Andrea's head like a la.s.so, and with that soft loop, all fragrant with the same perfume he had noticed in the blue fox of her coat, she drew the young man towards her and silently held up her lips to his.

Well did those two pairs of lips remember the rapture of by-gone days, those terrible and yet deliriously sweet meetings prolonged to anguish.

They held their breath to taste the sweetness of that kiss to the full.

Pa.s.sing through the Via due Macelli the carriage drove up the Via dei Tritone, turned into the Via Sistina and stopped at the door of the Palazzo Zuccari.

Elena instantly released her captive, saying rather huskily--

'Go now, good-bye.'

'When will you come?'

'_Chi sa!_'

The footman opened the door and Andrea got out. The carriage turned back to the Via Sistina and Andrea, still vibrating with pa.s.sion, a veil of mist before his eyes, stood watching to see if Elena's face would not appear at the window; but he saw nothing. The carriage drove rapidly away.

As he ascended the stairs to his apartment, he said to himself--'So she has come round at last!' The intoxication of her presence was still upon him, on his lips he still felt the pressure of her kiss, and in his eyes was the flash of the smile with which she had thrown that sort of smooth and perfumed snake about his neck. And Donna Maria?--Most a.s.suredly it was to her he owed these unexpected favours. There was no doubt that at the bottom of Elena's strange and fantastic behaviour lay a decided touch of jealousy. Fearing perhaps that he was escaping her she sought thus to lure him back and rekindle his pa.s.sion. 'Does she love me, or does she not?' But what did it matter to him one way or another? What good would it do him to know? The spell was broken irremediably. No miracle that ever was wrought could revive the least little atom of the love that was dead. The only thing that need occupy him now was the carnal body, and that was divine as ever.

He indulged long in pleasurable meditation on this episode. What particularly took his fancy was the arch and graceful touch Elena had given to her caprice. The thought of the boa evoked the image of Donna Maria's coils, and so, confusedly, all the amorous fancies he had woven round that virginal ma.s.s of hair by which, once on a time, the very school-girls of the Florentine convent had been enthralled. And again he let his two loves melt into one and form the third--the Ideal.

The musing mood still upon him while he dressed for dinner, he thought to himself--'Yesterday, a grand scene of pa.s.sion almost ending in tears; to-day, a little episode of mute sensuality--and I seemed to myself as sincere in my sentiment yesterday as I was in my sensations to-day.

Added to which, scarcely an hour before Elena's kiss, I had a moment of lofty lyrical emotion at Donna Maria's side. Of all this not one vestige remains. To-morrow, most a.s.suredly I shall begin the same game over again. I am unstable as water; incoherent, inconsistent, a very chameleon! All my efforts towards unity of purpose are for ever vain. I must resign myself to my fate. The law of my being is comprised in the one word--_Nunc_--the will of the Law be done!'

He laughed at himself, and from that moment began a new phase of his moral degradation.

Without mercy, without remorse, without restraint, he set all his faculties to work to compa.s.s the realisation of his impure imaginings.

To vanquish Maria Ferres he had recourse to the most subtle artifices, the most delicate machinations; taking care to deceive her in matters of the soul, of the spiritual, the ideal, the inmost life of the heart. In carrying on the two campaigns--the conquest of the new and the re-conquest of the old love--with equal adroitness, and in turning to the best advantage the chance circ.u.mstances of each enterprise, he was led into an infinity of annoying, embarra.s.sing, and ridiculous situations, to extricate himself from which he was obliged to descend to a series of lies and deceptions, of paltry evasions, ign.o.ble subterfuges and equivocal expedients. All Donna Maria's goodness and faith and single mindedness were powerless to disarm him. As the foundation of his work of seduction with her he had taken a verse from one of the Psalms:--_Asperges me hyssopo et mundabor--lavabis me et super nirem dealbabor_. And she, poor, hapless, devoted creature, imagined that she was saving a soul alive, redeeming an intellect, washing away by her own purity the stains that sin had left on him. She still believed implicitly in the ever-remembered words he had spoken to her in the park, on that Epiphany of Love, within sight of the sea; and it was just in this belief that she found comfort and support in the midst of the religious conflict that rent her conscience; this belief that blinded her to all suspicion and filled her with a soil of mystic intoxication wherein she opened the secret floodgates of her heart and let loose all her pent-up tenderness, and let the sweetest flowers of her womanhood blossom out resplendently.

For the first time in his life, Andrea Sperelli found himself face to face with a _real_ pa.s.sion--one of those rare and supreme manifestations of woman's capacity for love which occasionally flash their superb and terrible lightnings across the shifting gray sky of earthly loves. But he did not care a jot, and went on with the pitiless work which was to destroy both himself and his victim.

CHAPTER III

The next day, according to their agreement at the concert, Andrea found Donna Maria in the Piazza di Spagna with Delfina, looking at the antique jewellery in a shop window. At the first sound of his voice she turned, and a bright flush stained the pallor of her cheek. Together they then examined the eighteenth-century jewels, the paste buckles and hair ornaments, the enamelled watches, the gold and ivory tortoise-sh.e.l.l snuff-boxes, all these pretty trifles of a by-gone day which afforded an impression of harmonious richness under the clear morning sun.

Everywhere about them, the flower-sellers were offering yellow and white jonquils, double violets, and long branches of flowering almond. There was a breath of Spring in the air. The column of the Immaculate Conception rose lightly into the sunshine, like a flower stem with the _Rosa mystica_ on its summit; the Barcaccia glistened in a shower of diamonds, the stairway of the Trinita opened its arms gaily towards the church of Charles VIII., the two towers of which stood out boldly against the blue cloud-flecked sky.

'How exquisite!' exclaimed Donna Maria. 'No wonder you are so deeply enamoured of Rome!'

'Oh, you don't know it yet,' Andrea replied, 'I wish I might be your guide'--she smiled--'and undertake a pilgrimage of sentiment with you this spring.'

She smiled again, and her whole person a.s.sumed a less grave and chastened air. Her dress, this morning, had a quiet elegance about it, but revealed the refined taste of an expert in style and in the delicate combinations of colour. Her jacket, of a shade of gray inclining to green, was of cloth trimmed round the edge with beaver and opening over a vest of the same fur, the blending of the two tones--indefinable gray and tawny gold--forming a harmony that was a delight to the eye.

'What did you do yesterday evening?' she asked.

'I left the concert-hall a few minutes after you and went home; and I stayed there because I seemed to feel your spirit near me. I thought much. Did you not _feel_ my thought?'

'No, I cannot say I did. I pa.s.sed a very cheerless evening. I do not know why. I felt so dreadfully alone!'

The Contessa di Lucoli pa.s.sed in her dog-cart, driving a big roan.

Giulia Moceto, accompanied by Musellaro, pa.s.sed on foot, and then Donna Isotta Cellesi.

Andrea bowed to each. Donna Maria asked him the names of the ladies.

That of Giulia Moceto was not new to her. She recalled the day on which she heard Francesca mention it while looking at Perugino's Archangel Michael, when they were turning over Andrea's drawings at Schifanoja.

She followed her curiously with her eyes, seized with a sudden vague fear. Everything connecting Andrea with his former life was distasteful to her. She wished that that life, of which she knew next to nothing, could be entirely wiped out of the memory of this man who had flung himself into it with such avidity and dragged himself out with so much weariness, so many losses, so many wounds--'To live solely in you and for you, with no to-morrow and no yesterday--without other bond or preference--far from the world----' Were not those his words to her?

What a dream!

Matters of very different import were troubling Andrea. It was fast approaching the Princess of Ferentino's lunch hour.

'Where are you bound for?' he asked of his companion.

'Wishing to make the most of the sunshine, Delfina and I had tea and sandwiches at Nazzari's and thought of going up to the Pincio and visiting the Villa Medici. If you would care to come with us----'

He had a moment of painful hesitation. The Pincio, the Villa Medici, on a February afternoon--with her! But he could not well get out of the lunch; besides, he was desperately anxious to meet Elena again after yesterday's episode, for though he had gone to the Angelieris', she did not put in an appearance.

He therefore answered with an inconsolable air--'How wretchedly unfortunate! I am obliged to be at a lunch in a quarter of an hour. I accepted the invitation a week ago, but if I had known, I would have found some way of getting out of it--What a nuisance!'

'Oh, then you must go without losing a moment--you will be late.'