He bowed and left--flew down the stairs like lightning and jumped into his carriage, shouting to the coachman--

'To the Pincio--quick!'

He was filled with a frenzied longing to reach Maria Ferres' side, to enjoy the delights which he had refused before. The rapid pace of his horses was not quick enough for him. He looked out anxiously for the Trinita de' Monti, the avenue--the gates.

The carriage flashed through the gates. He ordered the coachman to moderate his pace and to drive through each of the avenues. His heart gave a bound every time the figure of a woman appeared in the distance through the trees. He got out and, on foot, explored the paths forbidden to vehicles. He searched every nook and corner--in vain.

The Villa Borghese being open to the public, the Pincio lay deserted and silent under the languid smile of the February sun. Few carriages or foot-pa.s.sengers disturbed the peaceful solitude of the place. The grayish-white trees, tinged here and there with violet, spread their leafless branches against a diaphanous sky, and the air was full of delicate spider-webs which the breeze shook and tore asunder. The pines and cypresses--all the evergreen trees--took on something of this colourless pallor, seemed to fade and melt into the all-prevailing monotone.

Surely something of Donna Maria's sadness still lingered in the atmosphere. Andrea stood for several minutes leaning against the railings of the Villa Medici, crushed beneath a load of melancholy too heavy to be borne.

CHAPTER IV

In the days that followed, the double pursuit continued with the same tortures, or worse, and with the same odious mendacity. By a phenomenon which is of frequent occurrence in the moral degradation of men of keen intellect, he now had a terrible lucidity of conscience, a lucidity without interruptions, without a moment of dimness or eclipse. He knew what he was doing and criticised what he had done. With him self-scorn went hand in hand with feebleness of will.

But his variable humour, his incert.i.tude, his unaccountable silences and equally unaccountable effusions, in short, all the peculiarities of manner which such a condition of mind inevitably brings along with it, only increased and excited the pa.s.sionate commiseration of Donna Maria.

She saw him suffer, and it filled her with grief and tenderness. 'By slow degrees I shall cure him,' she thought. But slowly and surely, without being aware of it, she was losing her strength of purpose and was bending to the sick man's will.

The downward slope was gentle.

In the drawing-room of the Countess Starnina, an indefinable thrill ran through her when she felt Andrea's gaze upon her bare shoulders and arms. It was the first time he had seen her in evening dress. Her face and her hands were all he knew. This evening he saw how exquisite was the shape of her neck and shoulders and of her arms too, although they were a little thin.

She was dressed in ivory-white brocade trimmed with sable. A narrow band of fur edged the low bodice and imparted an indescribable delicacy to the tints of the skin. The line of the shoulders, from the neck to the top of the arms, had that gracious slope which is such a sure mark of physical aristocracy and so rare nowadays. In her magnificent hair, arranged in the manner affected by Verocchio for his busts, there was not one jewel, not one flower.

At two or three propitious moments, Andrea murmured words of pa.s.sionate admiration in her ear.

'This is the first time we have met in society,' he said to her. 'Give me a glove as a souvenir.'

'No.'

'Why not, Maria?'

'No, no. Be quiet.'

'Oh, those hands of yours! Do you remember when I copied them at Schifanoja? I feel as if I had a right to them; as if you ought to grant them to me; of your whole person they are the part that is most intimately connected with your soul, the most spiritualised, almost, one might say, the purest--Oh, hands of kindness--hands of pardon. How dearly I should love to possess at least a semblance of their form, some token to which their delicate perfume still clings. You will give me a glove before you leave?'

She did not answer. The conversation dropped. A short time afterwards, on being asked to play, she consented, and drawing off her gloves laid them on the music-stand in front of her. Her fingers, tapering and glittering with rings, looked very white as she drew off their delicate covering. On the ring finger of her left hand blazed a great opal.

She played the two Sonata-Fantasias of Beethoven (Op. 27). The one, dedicated to Giulietta Guicciardi, expressed a hopeless renunciation, told of an awakening after a dream that had lasted too long. The other, from the first bars of the _Andante_, described by its full smooth rhythm the calm that comes after the storm; then, pa.s.sing through the disquietude of the second movement, opened out into an _Adagio_ of luminous serenity, and ended in an _Allegro Vivace_ in which there was a rising note of courage, almost of fervour.

Though surrounded by an attentive audience, Andrea felt that she was playing for him alone. From time to time, his eyes wandering from the fingers of the pianist to the long gloves hanging from the music stand, which still retained the form of those hands, still preserved an inexpressible charm in the small opening at the wrist where, but a short time ago, a tiny morsel of her soft flesh had been visible.

Maria rose amidst a round of applause. She left the piano, but she did not take away her gloves. Andrea was tempted to steal them.--Had she not perhaps left them for him?--But he only wanted one. As a connoisseur in amatory matters has said, a pair of gloves is a totally different thing from a single one.

Led back to the piano by the insistence of the Countess Starnina, Maria removed her gloves from the desk and placed them in a corner of the keyboard, in the shadow. She then played Rameau's Gavotte--_the Gavotte of the Yellow Ladies_--the never-to-be-forgotten dance of Indifference and Love.

Andrea regarded her fixedly with a little trepidation. When she rose, she took up one of her gloves. The other she left in the shadowy corner of the piano--for him.

Three days afterwards, when astonished Rome had awakened to find itself under a covering of snow, Andrea received a note to the following effect--

'_Tuesday, 2 p. m._--To-night, between eleven and twelve o'clock, you will wait for me in a carriage in front of the Palazzo Barberini, outside the gates. If by midnight I am not there, you can go away again.--_A stranger_.'

The tone of the note was mysterious and romantic. Was it in remembrance of the 25th of March two years ago? Lady Heathfield seemed particularly fond of the use of carriages in her love affairs. Had she the intention of taking up the adventure at the point where it broke off? And why--_A stranger_? Andrea could not repress a smile. He had just come back from a visit to Maria--a very pleasing visit--and his heart inclined, for the moment, more to the Siennese than to the other. His ear still retained the sound of her sweet and gentle words as they stood together at the window and watched the snow falling soft as peach or apple blossom on the trees of the Villa Aldobrandini, already touched with the presentiment of the coming Spring. However, before going out to dinner, he gave very particular orders to Stephen.

Eleven o'clock found him in front of the palace, devoured by impatience and curiosity. The novelty of the situation, the spectacle of the snowy night, the mystery and uncertainty of it all, inflamed his imagination and transported him beyond the realities of life.

Over Rome, on that memorable February night, there shone a full moon of fabulous size and unheard of splendour. In that immense radiance, the surrounding objects seemed to exist only as in a dream, impalpable, meteoric, and visible at a great distance by virtue of some fantastic irradiation of their own. The snow covered the railings of the gateway, concealing the iron and transforming it into a piece of open-work, more frail and airy than filigree; while the white-robed Colossi supported it as oaks support a spider's web. The garden looked like a motionless forest of enormous and mis-shapen lilies all of ice; a garden under some lunar enchantment, a lifeless paradise of Selene. Mute, solemn and ma.s.sive the Palazzo Barberini reared its great bulk into the sky, its most salient points standing out dazzlingly white and casting a pale blue shadow as transparent as light.

He waited, leaning forward on the watch; and under the fascination of that marvellous spectacle, he felt the spirits that wait on love awake in him, that the lyric summits of his sentiment began to gleam and glitter like the frozen shafts of the gateway under the moon. But he could not make up his mind which of the two women he would prefer as the centre of this fantastic scenery: Elena Heathfield robed in imperial purple, or Maria Ferres robed in ermine. And as he lingered pleasurably over this uncertainty of choice, he ended by mingling and confounding his two anxieties--the real one for Elena and the imaginary one for Maria.

A clock near by struck in the silence with a clear vibrating sound, and each stroke seemed to break something crystalline in the air. The clock of the Trinita de' Monti responded to the call, and after that the clock of the Quirinal--then others faintly out of the distance. It was a quarter past eleven.

Andrea strained his eyes towards the portico. Would she dare to traverse the garden on foot? He pictured the figure of Elena in the midst of all this dazzling whiteness, then, in an instant, that of Donna Maria appeared to him, obliterating the other, triumphant over the whiteness, _Candida super nivem_. This night of moonlight and snow then was under the dominance of Maria Ferres as under some invincible actual influence.

The image of the pure creature grew symbolically out of the sovereign purity of the surrounding aspect of things. The symbol re-acted forcibly on the spirit of the poet.

While still watching to see if the other one would come, he gave himself up to a vision suggested by the scene before him.

It was a poetic, almost a mystic dream. He was waiting for Donna Maria--she had chosen this night of supernatural purity on which to sacrifice her own purity to her lover's desire. All the white things about her, cognisant of the great sacrifice about to be accomplished, were waiting to cry _Ave_ and _Amen_ at the pa.s.sage of their sister. The silence was alive.

And behold, she comes! _Incedit per lilia et super nivem._ She comes, robed in ermine; her tresses bound about with a fillet; her steps lighter than a shadow; the moon and the snow are less pale than she--_Ave_!

A shadow, azure as the light that tints the sapphire, accompanies her.

The great mis-shapen lilies bend not as she pa.s.ses; the frost has congealed them, has made them like the asphodels that illumine the paths of Hades. And yet, like those of the Christian paradise, they have a voice and say with one accord--_Amen_.

So be it--the Beloved glides on to the sacrifice. Already she nears the watcher sitting mute and icy, but whose eyes are burning and eloquent.

And on her hands, the dear hands that close his wounds and open the doors of dreams, he presses his kiss.--So be it.

Then on her lips, the dear lips that know no word of falseness, he lays his kiss. Released from the fillet, her hair spreads like a glorious flood in which all the shadows of the night put to flight by the moon and the snow seem to have taken refuge. _Comis suis ob.u.mbrabit tibi, et sub comis peccavit. Amen._

And still the other did not come! Through the silence, through the poetry, the hours of men sounded again from the towers and belfries of Rome. A carriage or two rolled noiselessly past the Four Fountains towards the Piazza or crawled slowly up towards Santa Maria Maggiore; and each street-lamp shone yellow as a topaz in the light. It seemed as if the night, reaching its highest point, had grown more luminously radiant. The filigree of the gateway twinkled and flashed as if its silver embroideries were studded with jewels. In the palace, great circles of dazzling light shone on the windows like diamond florins.

'What if she does not come?' thought Andrea to himself.

The flood of lyric fervour that had pa.s.sed over his soul at Maria's name had submerged the anxiety of his vigil, had appeased his desire and calmed his impatience. For a moment, the thought that she would not come only made him smile. But the next, the anguish of uncertainty began again worse than ever, and he was tortured by the vision of the joys that might have been his, here in the warm carriage where the roses breathed so sweet an atmosphere. Besides which, his sufferings were further increased, as on New Year's Eve, by a sharp touch of wounded vanity; it annoyed him particularly that his delicate preparations for a love scene should thus be wasted and useless.

In the carriage, the cold was tempered by the pleasant warmth diffused by a metal foot-warmer, full of hot water. A bunch of white roses, snowy, moonlike, lay on the bracket in front of the seat. A white bear-skin covered his knees. Everything pointed to an intentional arrangement of a sort of _Symphonie en blanc-majeur_.

The clocks struck for the third time. It was a quarter to twelve. The vigil had lasted too long--Andrea was growing tired and cross. In Elena's apartments, in the left wing of the palace, there was no light but that which came from outside. Was she coming? And if so, in what manner? Secretly? Under what pretext? Lord Heathfield was certainly in Rome--how would she explain her nocturnal absence? Once more the soul of the former lover was torn with curiosity; once more jealousy gnawed at his heart and carnal pa.s.sion inflamed him. He thought of Musellaro's derisive suggestion about the husband, and he determined to have Elena again at all costs, both for pleasure and for revenge. Oh, if only she would come!

A carriage drove through the gates and into the garden. He leaned forward to look at it. He recognised Elena's horses and caught a glimpse inside of the figure of a woman. The carriage disappeared into the portico. He remained perplexed. She had been out then? She had returned alone? He fixed a scrutinising gaze upon the portico. The carriage came out, pa.s.sed through the garden and drove away towards the Via Rasella; it was empty.

It wanted but two or three minutes to midnight and she had not come!

It struck the hour. A bitter pang smote the heart of the deluded watcher. She was not coming.