V

The next day, at her habitual hour, Monna Lisa came to the studio for the first time unaccompanied. She knew it was their last interview. It was a brilliant morning, and Leonardo lowered the canvas curtain to produce that dim and tender light, transparent as submarine shadows, which gave her face its greatest charm.

They were alone.

He kept working on in silence, calm and absorbed, forgetting his thoughts of the previous night, forgetting the parting, the inevitable choice. Past and Future had alike vanished from his memory; time had come to a standstill; it seemed as if she had always sat, and would ever thus sit before him, with that calm strange smile. What he could not do in life he did by imagination; he blended the two images in one—mingled the reality and its reflection—the living woman and the immortal.

He had now the sense of a great deliverance. He no longer either pitied her or feared her. He knew her submissiveness, that she would accept all, endure all; die, perhaps, but never revolt. And momently he looked at her with that curiosity which had taken him to the execution of the condemned, that he might watch the last shudders of fear on the dying faces.

Suddenly he fancied that a strange shadow, as of an unbidden thought, which he had not evoked, which he wished away, appeared upon her countenance, like the cloud of human breath upon the surface of a mirror. To preserve her, to recall her anew to the Type, within the fatidic circle, to banish from her this human shadow, he related gravely, like a magician pronouncing an incantation, one of his mystic tales.

'Unable to resist the desire of beholding new forms, the secret creations of nature, I at length reached the cavern, and there at the entrance stood still in terror. I stooped, the left hand on the right knee, and shading my eyes with my hand to accustom myself to the darkness, I presently took heart and entered, and moved forward for several steps. Then, frowning, straining my sight to the utmost, I unwittingly changed my course and wandered hither and thither in the darkness, feeling my way and groping after the definite. But the obscurity was overpowering, and when I had passed some time in it, Fear and Curiosity contended most mightily within me: fear of searching that dark cavern, and curiosity after its secret.'

He was silent. The unwonted shadow lay still upon her face.

'Which of the two feelings gained the day?' La Gioconda murmured.

'Curiosity.'

'And you learned the stupendous secret?'

'I learned ... what could be learned.'

'And will reveal it to men?'

'I would not, nor could not, reveal all. But I would inspire them also with curiosity strong enough to vanquish fear.'

'And if curiosity be not enough, Messer Leonardo?' she said slowly, an unwonted fire in her eyes; 'if something further, a profounder feeling, were needed to lay bare the cavern's last and greatest treasure?'

And she turned toward him a smile he had never seen before.

'What more is needed?' he asked.

She was silent. Just then a slender blinding ray shone through a rent in the curtain; the dimness vanished; the mystery, the clear shadows, tender as distant music, fled.

'You leave to-morrow?' she said suddenly.

'No. To-night.'

'I, too, am soon departing.'

The artist looked at her steadily, attempted speech, and said nothing. He devined her meaning; that she would not stay in Florence without him.

'Messer Francesco,' she continued, 'goes presently for three months to Calabria. I have asked him to take me with him.'

He frowned. This sunshine was not to his mind; the fountain had been ghostly white; now it had taken the rainbow hues of life. Leonardo felt that he was returning to life, timid, weak, pitiable.

'No matter,' said Monna Lisa, 'draw closer the curtain. It is early yet. I am not tired.'

'I have painted enough,' he said, throwing down his brush.

'You will not finish my portrait?'

'Why not?' he cried hastily, as if alarmed. 'Will you not come to me when you return?'

'I will come. But shall I be the same? You have told me that faces, especially the faces of women, quickly change.'

'I long to finish it. But sometimes to me it seems impossible?'

'Impossible?' wondered La Gioconda. 'Ay, they tell me you finish nothing because you are always seeking the impossible.'

In these words he fancied a tender reproach.

'The moment has come!' he thought.

She rose and said with her usual calm:—

'Farewell, Messer Leonardo. I wish you a good journey.' He also had risen, and looking at her he saw again helpless entreaty and reproach on her face. He knew that this moment was irrevocable for both—final and solemn as death. He felt he must break this pregnant silence, yet no words came to him. The more he forced his will to find a solution, the more he was conscious of his own powerlessness and the profundity of the abyss which must divide them. Monna Lisa still smiled her quiet smile; that calmness, that brightness, seemed to him now the smile of the dead. Intolerable pity filled his heart and weakened him still more.

She stretched out her hand; he took it and kissed it for the first time since he had known her. As he did so she bent quickly, and he felt that La Gioconda touched his hair with her lips.

'May God have you in his keeping,' she said simply.

When he recovered from his wonder—she was gone. Around him was the dead silence of a summer afternoon, more menacing than midnight. Again he heard the heavy measured clanging of the clock, telling of the irremediable flight of time, of the darkness and loneliness of age, of the past, which can return no more. And as the last vibrations died away the words of the plaintive love song echoed in his ears:—

'Di doman non v'è certezza.'

'And count not on the day to come.'