Nostalgia

by Grazia Deledda

FOOTNOTES:

[3] The cheapest reserved seats.

[4] Seats next above the Sedie.

CHAPTER V

Later, when she thought over that first year of marriage, Regina divided it into many little chapters. Amongst them she attached importance to the chapter of her first visit to the Princess Makuline.

It took place on a warm, cloudy evening at the beginning of January. Antonio was missing, having been detained at the Department till nine, doing extra work; but Arduina and Regina waited in the Piazza dell' Indipendenza for Massimo, who was to escort them. The Piazza, almost deserted, was illumined by the pale gold rays of the veiled moon. The bare trees were scarce visible in the vaporous air, the small, motionless flames of the street lamps seemed far away. Regina, standing in the middle of the great square, was pleasantly conscious of silence, solitude, immensity. For the first time since she had been in Rome she caught herself admiring something.

"Come along!" said Massimo, arriving hurriedly, and brandishing a pair of new gloves; "three-fifty they cost me! Woe to Madame if she doesn't pay me with some hope!"

"I believe you'd be capable of marrying her," said Regina, with a gesture of disgust.

"She'd like it," said Arduina.

"Shut up! The point is—should I like it?" said the young man. "I'm not for sale."

Passing the Princess's little garden gate, Massimo said, "This is the entrance for Madame's lovers!"

But they walked on and rang at the hall door of the villa, or rather of the villas, for there were two; small but handsome houses, joined by an aërial terrace or hanging garden.

"Like two little brothers holding each other's hands," said Regina, with a sigh.

A servant in plain clothes opened the polished door, and disclosed two great wolves, apparently alive, lying in ambush on the red rugs of the entrance hall.

The rooms were much overheated. Thick carpets, skins of bears spread before large low divans, themselves covered with furs, exhaled what seemed the hot breath of wild beasts sleeping in the sun—an atmosphere wild, voluptuous, noxious. Huge waving branches of red-berried wild plants rose from tall metal vases. The Princess, richly but clumsily dressed in black velvet and white lace, was discoursing in French to two elderly ladies, telling them the adventures of her aunt, wife of the man who had known Georges Sand.

"At that time," she was saying, "my aunt was the best dressed woman in Paris. Georges Sand described one of her costumes in the Marquis de Villemer...."

Beyond the two elderly ladies, an old gentleman, shaven and bald, his head shining like a bowl of pink china, lolled in an arm-chair and listened sleepily.

Marianna, in a low pink dress, ran to the new-comers with her little rat-like steps, and surveyed Regina inquisitively.

"You look very well, Madame," she said; "is there no news?"

"What news do you expect?" asked Regina.

Marianna giggled, her little eyes shining unnaturally. Regina could not resist the suspicion that the rat was excited with wine, and she felt a resurgence of the curious physical disgust with which the Princess and this girl inspired her.

Madame at first paid scant attention to the Venutellis. Other guests were arriving, the greater number elderly foreign ladies in dresses of questionable freshness and fashion. Arduina soon got into conversation with an unattractive gentleman whose round eyes and flat nose surmounted an exaggerated jowl. Massimo followed in the wake of Marianna, who came and went, running about, frisking and shrieking. Regina was stranded between a stout lady who made a few observations without looking at her, and the bald old gentleman who said nothing at all. She soon grew bored, finding herself neglected and forgotten, lost among all these fat superannuated people, these old silk gowns which had outlived their rustle. How tedious! Was this the world of the rich, the enchanted realm for which she had pined?

"Regina shall not be seen here again," she told herself.

Presently she saw Arduina smiling and beckoning to her from the distance; but just then the Princess came over, and put her small refulgent hand in Regina's with an affectionate and familiar gesture.

"Won't you come and take a cup of tea?" she said.

Regina started to her feet overwhelmed by so much attention.

"How is your husband?" said the Princess, leading her to the supper-room.

"Very well, thank you," said Regina, in a low voice; "he hasn't been able to come to-night because——"

"Beg pardon?" said the Princess.

All the elderly ladies and gentlemen followed the hostess, and seated themselves round the room, in which a sumptuous table was laid. Marianna ran hither and thither, distributing the tea.

"Could you help?" she asked, passing Regina; "you seem like a girl. Come with me."

Regina followed her to the table, but did not know what to do; she upset a jug and blushed painfully.

"Here!" said Marianna, giving her a plate, "take that to the man like a dog."

"Which man? Speak low!"

"The man beside your sister-in-law. He's an author."

Regina crossed the room shyly, carrying the plate, and imagining every one was looking at her. There was consolation in the thought that she was about to offer a slice of tart to an author.

"Oh, Signorina!" he exclaimed, with a deprecating bow.

"Signora, if you please!" said Arduina, "she's my sister-in-law."

"My compliments and my condolences," said the man, insolently; he rolled his great eyes round the room and added, "In this company you seem a child."

"Why condolences?" asked Arduina.

"Because she's your sister-in-law," replied he.

Regina perceived that the author was very impudent, and she retreated to the table. Not finding Marianna she timidly possessed herself of another plate and took it to Massimo, who, also neglected and forgotten, was standing near the door.

"Oh, you're doing hostess, are you?" he said. "Look here! bring me a glass of that wine in the tall, gold-necked bottle at the corner of the table. Drink some yourself."

Regina went for it, but found the Princess herself pouring wine at that moment from the bottle with the golden neck.

"Massimo would like a glass of that," she murmured ingenuously.

"Beg pardon?" said the Princess, who fortunately had not heard.

Regina, however, found a wine-glass ready filled, and carried it to her brother-in-law; exquisite bouquet rose from the glass as perfume from a flower.

"It's port, you know," said Massimo, with genuine gratitude; "thanks, little sister-in-law! You're my salvation! 'Tis the wine of the modern gods."

"You are facetious to-night."

"Hush! I'm bored to death. Let's go. We'll leave Arduina. Who's that baboon-faced person she's got hold of?"

"That's an author."

"Connais pas," said the other, eating and drinking. "What a rabble! No one but rabble."

"Just so," said Regina, "and we belong to it."

"On the contrary, we'll snap our fingers at it. No! we are young and may some day be rich. Those folk are rich, but they'll never be young, my dear!"

"Take care! I think you are right though."

"Then bring me another glass of port!" said Massimo, imploringly.

"Certainly not!"

The old ladies and gentlemen, mildly excited by the wines and the tea, raised their voices, moved about, clustered in knots and circles. In the confusion Regina again found herself beside the hostess.

"But you've had positively nothing!" said Madame; "come with me. Have a glass of port? How's your husband?"

"The second time!" thought Regina; and she shouted, "Very well indeed, thank you."

"Have you moved yet? How do you like your house? Come, drink this! Have some sweets? The pastry's pretty good to-day. Oh, Monsieur Massimo! won't you have another cup of tea? No? A glass of port, then? Tell me, are you also at the Treasury?"

"No, Madame; in the War Office."

Marianna no sooner observed that the Princess was talking to the Venutellis than she thrust her restless face behind Regina's shoulder; and it struck the latter that this girl watched her patroness over much.

"I've a bothersome affair on hand," said Madame, slowly; "some money due in Milan which I want paid to me in Rome. I'm told I must have a warrant from the Treasury, Monsieur Antonio must come and speak to me to-morrow."

"I'll tell him the moment I get in," cried Regina.

Marianna said something in Russian, turning to Madame with an air almost of command. The Princess replied with her usual calm, but quickly afterwards she moved away.

"Now I must pay for the help you gave me," said Marianna to Regina, pouring out a glass of a white liqueur. "Drink this."

"No, thanks."

"It's vodka. The Russian ladies get tipsy with this. See how I drink it! I'm half tipsy already," she went on, raising the glass and looking through it; "I don't mind! It has the opposite effect on me to what it has on every one else. After drinking, I no longer speak the truth."

"I don't observe it," said Massimo, dryly. "So this is vodka, is it? It's nasty."

"Oh, I've had none to speak of to-day!" said Marianna. She laughed and sipped; then held the glass to Regina's lips and made her drink too.

"Now we'll go and interrupt the idyll of the dog and the cat," said Marianna, leading the way to the next room where Arduina and the author were still tête-à-tête under the branches of the red-berried plant.

Regina and Marianna sat down opposite to them on a divan of furs, and Massimo remained standing. In the next room one of the old ladies was playing "Se a te, O cara!"

Regina now felt an inexplicable content; the gentle yet impassioned music, the warmth of the divan whose soft furriness suggested a pussy cat to be stroked; the indefinable perfume with which the hot air was charged, the vodka, too, which still pulsed in her throat—all gave her the initial feelings of a pleasant intoxication. Arduina also seemed excited. She spoke loud, in the tones which Regina had noted in the flirtatious cousin, Claretta. She seemed no longer to recognise her relations.

"What's the matter with the silly thing?" Regina asked herself, and Marianna must have guessed her thought, for she said slyly, "They're love-making."

Regina laughed unthinkingly. Then suddenly she felt shocked.

"Is it possible!" she murmured.

"Anything is possible," said the rat. "You are such a child as yet; but in time you'll see—anything is possible."

CHAPTER VI

Next day Antonio went to the Princess about the collection of her rents. She invited him and his wife to dinner on Sunday, and this invitation was followed by others. Regina accepted them all, but unwillingly. The dinners were magnificent, served by pompous men servants, whose solemnity, said Antonio, spoiled his digestion. Regina found the entertainments dull, and came away out of temper. The guests were elderly foreigners or obscure Italian poets and artists; their conversation might have been interesting, for it touched on letters, art, the theatre, matters of palpitating contemporary life, but only stale commonplaces were uttered, and Regina heard nothing at all correspondent to the ideas sparkling in her own mind.

She was bored; yet no sooner was she back in the atmosphere of Casa Venutelli than she thought enviously of the Princess's saloons, where the servants passed and waited, silent and automatic as machines, where all was beauty, luxury, splendour, and the light itself seemed to shine by enchantment.

At last the day came when Antonio and his wife chose the furniture for their own Apartment in Via Massimo d'Azeglio.

"We'll go on Sunday and settle how to arrange it," said Antonio, and Regina thought dolefully of all the fatigue and worry awaiting her.

"Fancy coping with a servant!" she reflected, panic-struck.

On Sunday morning they went to their little habitation. It was late in January, a pure, soft morning with whiffs of spring in the air. Regina ran up the hundred-odd steps, and when, panting and perspiring, she arrived at her hall door she amused herself by ringing the bell.

"Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle! Who is there? Mr. Nobody! What fun going to visit Mr. Nobody!"

Antonio opened with a certain air of mystery and marched in first. Then he turned and made Regina a low bow. She looked round astonished, and exclaimed, with faint irony, "But I thought this kind of thing only happened in romances!"

The Apartment was all in complete order. Curtains veiled the half-open windows. The large white bed stood between strips of carpet, upon which were depicted yellow dogs running with partridges in their mouths. Even in the kitchen nothing was missing or awry.

Antonio stood at the window, leaving Regina time to get over her surprise. She hated herself because somehow she did not feel all the pleasurable emotion which her husband might justly expect of her. However, she understood quite well what she must do. She thought—

"I must kiss him and say, 'How good you are!'"

So she did kiss him, and said "How good you are!" quite cheerfully. His eyes filled with boyish delight, and at sight of this she felt touched in earnest.

"Antonio," she cried, "you really are good, and I am very wicked. But I'm going to improve, I really, really am!"

And for a week or a fortnight she was good; docile and even merry. She was very busy settling her treasures in the cabinets, her clothes in the wardrobes, altering this table and that picture; never in her whole life had she worked so hard! The first night she slept in the soft new bed, between the fine linen sheets of her trousseau, she felt as if delivered from an incubus, and about to begin a new life, with all the happiness, all the renewed energy of a convalescent. By this time fine weather had come. The Roman sky was cloudless; springtime fragrance filled the air; the city noises reached Regina's rooms like the sound of a distant waterfall, subdued and sweet. In the sun-dappled garden below, a thin curl of water was flung by a tiny fountain into a tiny vase, dotted with tiny goldfish; monthly roses bloomed; and a couple of white kittens chased each other along the paths. The little garden seemed made expressly for the two graceful little beasts.

Regina passed several happy days. But when all the things were safely installed in the wardrobes and cabinets she found she had nothing more to do. The servant, of whom she had thought with so much dread, looked after everything, was well behaved and prettily mannered. She was an expense, but worth it. Regina's only worry was making out the account for the maid's daily purchases. She got used even to this; and again began to be bored. She stood before her glass for long hours, brushing, washing and dressing her hair, polishing her nails and teeth. She looked at herself in profile, from this side and that, powdered her face, took to using "Crema Venus," laced herself very tight. But afterwards, or indeed at the moment, she asked with impatient and disgusted self-reproach, "Are you a fool, Regina? What's all this for? What on earth is the good of it?"

Of her few visitors, almost all were tiresome relations; among them Aunt Clara and Claretta. Aunt Clara, jealous of Arduina's aristocratic acquaintances, had much to relate of banquets and receptions at which she had assisted.

"And Claretta, as I need not say——"

Claretta admired herself in all the mirrors, ransacked Regina's toilet-table, passed through the little Apartment like the wind, upsetting everything. Regina hated the mother, hated the daughter, hated the whole connection, including Arduina, who nevertheless took her about, introducing her to countesses and duchesses at whose houses she met others of like rank.

"It's appalling the number of countesses in Rome," said Regina to her husband.

She was partly amused, partly wearied; she was not offended when the grand ladies failed to return her visits; and she no longer wondered at the shocking things said in almost all the drawing-rooms about the people most distinguished in the literary, the political, and even in the private world.

"Anything is possible," said Marianna, "and what is most possible of all is that the things they say are calumnies."

In the early spring Regina had a recrudescence of nostalgia and discontent. The little Apartment began to be hot. She stood for hours at the window with the nervous unquiet of a bird not yet used to its cage. From the "Pussies' Garden" rose a smell of damp grass which induced in her spasms of homesickness. Sometimes she looked down through her eye-glass, and saw a certain short and plump, pale and bald young man, strolling round and round the little vase into which the fountain wept tears of tedium. Life was tedious also for that young man. Regina remembered seeing him on the evening of San Stefano in a box at the Costanzi, his face bloated and yellow as an unripe apricot; and she had included him in her incendiary hatred. Now he, too, was bored. Was he bored because he had come down into the garden, or had he come down into the garden because he was bored? Sometimes he stood and teased the goldfish; then he yawned and battered the flowers with his stick, the wistaria on the walls, the monthly roses, the innocent daisies.

"He must beat something," thought Regina, and remembered that she herself was itching to torment any one or anything. On rainy days—frequent and tedious—she became depressed, even to hypochondria. Only one thought comforted her—that of the return to her home. She counted the days and the hours. Strange, childish recollections, distant fancies, passed through her mind like clouds across a sad sky. Details of her past life waked in her melting tenderness; she remembered vividly even the humblest persons of the place, the most secret nooks in the house or in the wood; with strange insistence she thought of certain little things which never before had greatly struck her. For instance, there was an old millstone, belonging to a ruined mill, which lay in the grass by the river-side. The remembrance of that old grey millstone, resting after its labour beside the very stream with which it had so long wrestled, moved Regina almost to tears. Often she tried to analyse her nostalgia, asking herself why she thought of the millstone, of the old blind chimney sweep, of the portiner (ferryman), who had enormous hairy hands and was getting on for a hundred; of the clean-limbed children by the green ditch, intent on making straw ropes; of the little snails crawling among the leaves of the plane-trees.

"I am an idiot!" she thought; yet with the thought came a sudden rush of joy at the idea of soon again seeing the millstone, the ferryman, the children, the green ditches, and the little snails.

And outside it rained and rained. Rome was drowned in mire and gloom. Regina raged like a furious child, wishing that upon Rome a rain of mud might fall for evermore, forcing all the inhabitants to emigrate and go away. Then, then she would return to her birth-place, to the wide horizons, the pure flowing river of her home; she would be born anew, she would be Regina once more, a bird alive and free!

Antonio went out and came in, and always found her wrapped in her homesick stupor, indifferent to everything about her.

"Let's take a walk, Regina!"

"Oh, no!"

"It would do you good."

"I am quite well."

"You can't be well. You are so dull. You don't care for me, that's what it is!"

"Oh, yes, I do! And if I don't, how can I help it?"

Sometimes, indeed, she included even Antonio in the collective hatred which she nourished against everything representative of the city. At those moments he seemed an inferior person, bloodless and half alive, one among all the other useless phantasms scarce visible in the rain, through which she alone in her egotism and her pride loomed gigantic.

But the warm and luminous spring came at last, and troops of men, women and flower-laden children spread themselves through the streets, in the depths of which Regina's short-sighted eyes fancied silvery lakes. In the fragrant evenings, bathed it would seem in golden dust, companies of women, fresh as flowers in their new spring frocks, came down by Via Nazionale, by the Corso, by Via del Tritone. Carriages passed heaped up with roses, red motor-cars flew by, bellowing like young monsters drunk with light, and even they were garlanded with flowers.

Regina walked and walked, on Antonio's arm, or sometimes alone; alone among the crowd, alone in the wave of all those joyous women, whose thoughtlessness she both envied and despised; alone among the smiling parties of sisters, companions, friends, by not one of whom, however, would she have been accompanied for anything in the world! One day, as she was going up Piazza Termini, she saw Arduina in the famous black silk dress with wrinkles on the shoulders. Regina would have avoided her sister-in-law, but did not set about it soon enough.

"I've been to your house," said Arduina; "why are you never at home? it's impossible to catch you. What are you always doing? Where have you been? Even our mother complains of you. Why don't you have a baby?"

"Why don't you? And where are you going?" said Regina, with sarcasm.

"I'm going to the Grand Hotel, to see a very rich English 'miss.' You can come too, if you like. She's worth it!"

Regina went, so anxious was she for something to do. The sunset tinged the Terme and the trees with orange-red. From the gardens came the cry of children and twitterings like the rustling of water from innumerable birds. Higher than all else, above the transparent vastness of the Piazza, above the fountain, which clear, luminous, pearly, seemed an immense Murano vase, towered the Grand Hotel, its gold-lettered name sparkling on its front like an epigraph on the façade of a temple.

There was a confusion of carriages before the columns of the entrance, of servants in livery, of gentlemen in tall hats, of fashionably attired ladies. A royal carriage with glossy, jet-black horses, was conspicuous among the others.

"It must be the Queen," said Arduina. "I'd like to wait!"

"Good-bye to you, then," returned her sister-in-law, "where there is one Regina there's no room for another!"

"Good heavens! what presumption!" laughed the other. "Well, then, come on."

Arduina led the way through the carriages and through the smart crowd which animated the hall; then humbly inquired of a waiter if Miss Harris were at home. The waiter bent his head and listened, but without looking at the two ladies.

"Miss Harris? I think she's at home. Take a seat," he replied absently, his eyes on the distance.

Regina remembered Madame Makuline's awe-inspiring servants; this man provoked not only awe, but a sort of terror. They went into the conservatory, and Arduina looked about with respectful admiration. The younger lady was silent, lost in the dream world she saw before her.

Apparently they had intruded into a fête. A strange light of ruddy gold streamed from the glass roof; among the palm-trees, treading on rich carpets, was a phantasmagoria of ladies dressed in silks and satins, with long rustling trains, their heads, ears, necks, brilliant with jewels. Bursts of laughter and the buzz of foreign voices mixed with the rattle of silver and the ring of china cups. It was a palace of crystal; a world of joy, of fairy creatures unacquainted with the realities of life, dwelling in the enchantment of groves of palms, rosy in the light of dream!

"The realities of life!" thought Regina, "but is not this the reality of life? It's the life of us mean little people which is the ugly dream!"

Just then a splendid creature, robed in yellow satin, who, as she passed, left behind her the effulgence of a comet, crossed the conservatory, and stopped to speak to two ladies in black.

"It's Miss Harris!" whispered Arduina; "she's coming!"

Regina had never imagined there could exist a being so beautiful and luminous. She watched her with dilated eyes, while from the far end of the conservatory breathed slow and voluptuous music overpowering the voices, the laughter, the rattle of the cups. Miss Harris drew nearer. Regina's eyes grew wild, she was overpowered by almost physical torture, by burning sadness. The rosy sunset light brooding over the palms as in an Oriental landscape, the warmth, the scent, the music, the dazzling aspect of the wealthy foreigner, all produced in her a kind of nostalgia, the atavic recollection of some wondrous world, where all life was pleasure and from which she had been exiled. Ah! at that moment she realised quite clearly what was the ill disease gnawing at her vitals! Ah! it was not the regret, the nostalgia for her early home, for her childish past; it was the death of the dreams which had filled that past, dreams which had perfumed the air she had breathed, the paths she had trod, the place where she had dwelt: dreams which were no fault of her own because born with her, transmitted in her blood, the blood of a once dominant race.

Miss Harris approached the corner where sat the two little bourgeois ladies, trailing her long shining train, her whole elegant slimness suggesting something feline. The two foreign ladies accompanied her talking in incomprehensible French. Arduina had to get up and smile very humbly before the Englishwoman recognised her, shook her hand, and spoke with condescending affability. Then Miss Harris sat down, her long tail wound round her legs like that of a reposing cat, and began to talk. She was tired and bored; she had been for a drive in a motor, had had a private audience of the Pope, and in half-an-hour was due at some great lady's reception. She did not look at Regina at all. After a minute she appeared to forget Arduina; a little later, the two foreign ladies also. She seemed talking for her own ears; in her beauty and splendour she was self-sufficient, like a star which scintillates for itself alone. From far and near everybody watched her.

Regina trembled with humiliation. In her modest short frock she felt herself disappearing; she was ashamed of her lace scarf; when Miss Harris offered her a cup of tea she repulsed it with an inimical gesture. She felt again that sense of puerile hatred which had assaulted her at the Costanzi on the evening of San Stefano.

As they left the hotel she said to her sister-in-law, "I can't think what you came for! Why are you so mean-spirited? Why did you listen so slavishly to that woman who hardly noticed your presence?"

"But weren't you listening quite humbly, too?"

"I? I'd like to have seized and throttled you all! Good God, what fools you women are!"

"My dear Regina," said the other, confounded, "I don't understand you!"

"I know you don't. What do you understand? Why do you go to such places? What have you to do with people like that? Don't you take in that they are the lords of the earth and we the slaves?"

"But we're the intelligent ones! We are the lords of the future! Don't you hear the clatter of our wooden shoes going up and of their satin slippers coming down?"

"We? What, you?" said Regina, contemptuously.

"Mind that carriage!" cried Arduina, pulling her back.

"You see? They drive over us! What's the good of intelligence? What is intelligence compared with a satin train?"

"Oh, I see! You're jealous of the satin train," said the other, laughing good-humouredly.

"Oh, you're a fool!" cried Regina, beside herself.

"Thanks!" said Arduina, unoffended.

Returned home, Regina threw herself on the ottoman in the ante-room, and remained there nearly an hour, beating the devil's tattoo with her foot in time to the ticking of the clock, which seemed the heart of the little room. Her own heart was overflown by a wave of humiliating distress. Ah! even the ridiculous Arduina had guessed what ailed her.

Daylight was dying in the adjacent room, and the dining-room, which looked out on the courtyard, was already overwhelmed in heavy shadow. The open door made a band of feeble light across the passage of the ante-room, while in its angles the penumbra continually darkened. Watching it, Regina reflected.

"The penumbra! What a horrid thing is the penumbra! Horrid? No, it's worse! It's noxious—soul-stifling! Better a thousand times the full shadow, complete darkness. In the shadow there is grief, desperation, rebellion—all that is life; but in this half-light it's all tedium, want, agony. It's better to be a beggar than a little bourgeois. The beggar can yell, can spit in the face of the prosperous. The little bourgeois is silent; he's a dead soul, he neither can nor ought to speak. What does he want? Hasn't he got the competence already, which some day every one is to have? His share is already given to him. If he asks for more he's called ambitious, egotistic, envious. Even the idiots call him so! Satin trains—green and shining halls like gardens spread out in the sun—motors like flying dragons! And the gardens, the beautiful gardens 'half seen through little gates,' country houses hidden among pines, like rosy women under green lace parasols! That should be the heritage of the future, of the to-morrow, promised us though not yet come. But no! all that is to disappear! The world is small and can't be divided into more than two parts, the day and the night, the light and the shade. But some day it's to be all penumbra! Every one's to be like us, every one's to live in a little dark Apartment with interminable stairs; all the streets are to be dusty, overrun by smelly trams, by troops of middle-class women who will go about on foot, dressed with sham elegance, wearing mock jewellery, carrying paper fans; joyous with a pitiable joy. The whole world will be tedium and destitution. The beggars won't have attained to the dreams which made them happy; the children of the rich will live on nostalgia, remembering the dream which was once reality to them. What will be the good of living then? Why am I living now?"

Then suddenly she remembered three figures, all exactly alike; three figures of an old man in a dreary room, who smiled and looked at each other with humorous sympathy, like three friends who understand without need of words. Work! Work! There's the secret of life!

The voice of the old Senator resounded still in Regina's soul. Since seeing him she had learned his story; his wife, a beautiful woman, brilliant and young, had killed herself, for what reason none could say. Work! Work! That was the secret! Perhaps the old Senator, panegyrising the working woman, had been thinking of his wife who had never worked.

Work! This was the secret of the world's future. All would eventually be happy because all would work.

"No! I don't represent the future as I have fondly fancied. I belong to the present—very much to the present! I am the parasite par excellence. I eat the labour of my husband, and I devour his moral life as well, because he loves me—loves me too much. I don't even make him happy. Why do I live? What's the good of me? What use am I? I'm good for nothing but to bear children; and, in point of fact, I don't want any children! I shouldn't know how to bring them up! Besides, what's the good of bringing children into the world? Wouldn't it be better I had never been born? What's the good of life?"

Surely her soul had become involved in the shadow darkening round her! Everything in her seemed dead. And then suddenly she thought of the luminous evenings on the shores of her great river at home; and saw again the wide horizons, the sky all violet and geranium colour, the infinite depths of the waters, the woods, the plain. She passed along the banks, the subdued splendour of all things reflected in her eyes, the water of rosy lilac, the heavens which flamed behind the wood, the warm grass which clothed the banks. Young willow-trees stretched out to drink the shining water, and they drank, they drank, consumed by an inextinguishable thirst. She passed on, and as the little willows drank, so she also drank in dreams from the burning river. What limitless horizons! What deeps of water! What tender distant voices carried by the waves, dying on the night! Was it a call out of a far world? Was it the crying of birds from the wood? Was it the woodpecker tapping on the poplar-tree?

Alas, no! it was her own foot beating the devil's tattoo; it was the clock ticking away indifferently in the penumbra of the little room; it was the caged canary moaning for nostalgia in the window opposite, above the lurid abyss of the courtyard.

Regina jumped to her feet; she was rebellious and desperate, suffocated by a sense of rage.

"I'll tell him the moment he comes in," she thought; "I'll cry, 'Why did you take me from there? Why have you brought me to this place? What can I do here? I must go away. I require air. I require light. You can't give me light, you can't give me air, and you never told me! How was I to know the world was like this? Away with all these gimcracks, all this lumber! I don't want it. I only want air! air! air! I am suffocating! I hate you all! I curse the city and the men who built it, and the fate which robs us even of the sight of heaven!'"

She went to her room, and automatically looked in the glass. By the last glimmer of day she saw her beautiful shining hair, her shining teeth, her shining nails, her fine skin which (softened by a light stratum of "Crema Venus") had almost the transparent delicacy of Miss Harris's. Her resentment grew. She went to her dressing-table, snatched up the bottle of "Crema" and dashed it against the wall. The bottle bounded off on the bed without breaking. She picked it up and replaced it on the table.

"No! no! no!" she sobbed, throwing herself on the pillow, "I will not bear it! I'll say to him, 'Do you see what I'm becoming? Do you see what you're making me? To-day a soiling of the face, to-morrow soiling of the soul! I will go away—I will go away—away! I will go back home. You are nothing to me!' Yes, I will tell him the moment he comes in!"

When he came in he found her seated quietly at the table, busy with the list of purchases for the following day. It was late, the lamps were lit, the table was laid, the servant was preparing supper. The whole of the little dwelling was pervaded by the contemptible yet merry hissing of the frying-pan and the smell of fried artichokes. From the window, open towards the garden, penetrated the contrasting fragrance of laurels and of grass.

	lire. cent.
Milk	0.20
Bread	0.20
Wine	1.10
Meat	1.00
Flour	0.50
Eggs	0.50
Salad	0.05
Butter	0.60
Asparagus	0.50
	——
	L. 4.65

Antonio came over to the table, bent down, and looked at the paper on which Regina was writing.

"I was here at six, and couldn't find you," he said.

"I was out."

"Listen. The Princess sent a note to the office asking me to go to her at half-past six; so I went."

"What did she want?"

"Well—she's beginning to be a nuisance, you know—she wants me to keep an eye on the man who speculates for her on the Stock Exchange."

Regina looked up and saw that Antonio's face was pale and damp.

"On the Stock Exchange? What does that mean?"

"What it means? I'll explain some time. But—well, really, that woman is becoming a plague!"

"But if she pays you?" said Regina; "and are you good at speculating?"

"I only wish I had the opportunity!" he exclaimed, tossing his hat to the sofa; "I wish I had a little of Madame's superfluous money! But this isn't a case of speculating. I'm to study the state of the money-market and audit the operations carried out by Cavaliere R—— on the Princess's account; take note of the details of daily transactions; get information from the brokers; in short, exercise rigorous control over all the fellow does."

"But," insisted Regina, "she'll pay you well, won't she?"

"Beg pardon?" he said, mimicking the Princess.

"How much will she pay you?" shouted Regina.

"A hundred lire or so. She's a skinflint, you know."

"Supper's on the table, Signora," announced the servant with her accustomed elegant decorum.

During the meal Antonio expounded the operations on 'Change, and other financial matters, talking with a certain enthusiasm. She appeared interested in what he told her; yet while she listened her eyes shone with the vague light of a thought very far away from what Antonio was saying. That thought was straying in a dark and empty distance; like a blind man feeling his way in a strange place, it sought and sought something to be a point of rest, a support, or at least a sign.

Suddenly, however, Regina's eyes sparkled and returned to the world about her.

"Why shouldn't you be Madame's confidential agent?" she said; "her secretary? I remember what I dreamed the first night I saw her at Arduina's—that she was dead and had left us her money!"

"It would be easy enough," said Antonio.

"To get the money?"

"No—the administration of her affairs. True, one would have to flatter and cringe, and take people in, especially as she employs two or three others in addition to the Cavaliere. One would have to intrigue against them all. I don't care for that sort of business."

"Nor I," said Regina, stiffening.

She rose and moved to the window which overlooked the garden. Antonio followed her. The night was warm and voluptuous. The scent of laurel rose ever sweeter and stronger; patches of yellow light were spread over the little garden paths like a carpet. Regina looked down, then raised her eyes towards the darkened blue of the heavens and sighed, stifling the sigh in a yawn.

"After all," said Antonio, pursuing his own line of thought, "are we not happy? What do we lack?"

"Nothing and everything!"

"What is lacking to us, I say?" repeated Antonio, questioning himself rather than his wife; "what do you mean by your 'everything'?"

"Do you see the Bear?" she asked, looking up, and pretending not to have heard this question. He looked also.

"No, I don't——"

"Then we do lack something! We can't see the stars."

"What do you want with the stars? Leave them where they are, for they're quite useless! If there were anything you really wanted you wouldn't be crying for the stars."

"Then you think I am lacking in——?" She touched her forehead.

"So it seems!"

"Perhaps the deficiency is in you," she said quickly.

"Now you're insulting me, and I'll take you and pitch you out of the window!" he jested, seizing her waist. "If my wits are deficient, it's because you're making me lose them with your folly!"

CHAPTER VII

She was not guilty of folly in action, but certainly her words became stranger and stranger. Antonio sometimes found them amusing; more often they distressed him. Though seemingly calm, Regina could not hide that she was under the dominion of a fixed idea. What was she thinking about? Even when he held her in his arms, wrapped in his tenderest embrace, Antonio felt her far, immeasurably far, away from him. In the brilliant yet drowsy spring mornings while the young pair still lay in the big white bed, Antonio would repeat his questions to himself: "What do we lack! Are we not happy?"

Through the half-shut windows soft light stole in and gilded the walls. Infinite beatitude seemed to reign in the room veiled by that mist of gold, fragrant with scent, lulled to a repose unshaken by the noises of the distant world. In the profound sweetness of the nuptial chamber Regina felt herself at moments conquered by that somnolent beatitude. Antonio's searching question had its echo in her soul also. What was it that they lacked? They were both of them young and strong; Antonio loved her ardently, blindly. He lived in her. And he was so handsome! His soft hands, his passionate eyes, had a magic which often succeeded in intoxicating her. And yet in those delicious mornings, at the moments when she seemed happiest, while Antonio caressed her hair, pulling it down and studying it like some precious thing, her face would suddenly cloud, and she would re-commence her extravagant speeches.

"What are we doing with our life?"

Antonio was not alarmed.

"What are we doing? We are living; we love, we work, eat, sleep, take our walks, and when we can we go to the play!"

"But that isn't living! Or, at least, it's a useless life, and I'm sick of it!"

"Then what do you want to be doing?"

"I don't know. I'd like to fly! I don't mean sentimentally, I mean really. To fly out of the window, in at the window! I'd like to invent the way!"

"I've thought of it myself sometimes."

"You know nothing about it!" she said, rather piqued. "No, no! I want to do something you couldn't understand one bit; which, for that matter, I don't understand myself!"

"That's very fine!"

"It's like thirsting for an unfindable drink with a thirst nothing else can assuage. If you had once felt it——"

"Oh, yes, I have felt it."

"No, you can't have felt it! You know nothing about it."

"You must explain more clearly."

"Oh, never mind! You don't understand, and that's enough. Let my hair alone, please."

"I say, what a lot of split hairs you have! You ought to have them cut, I was telling you——"

"What do I care about hair? It's a perfectly useless thing."

"Well," he said, after pretending to seek and to find a happy thought, "why don't you become a tram-conductor?" and he imitated the rumble of the tram and the gestures of the conductor.

"I won't demean myself by a reply," she said, and moved away from him; but presently repented and said—

"Do the little bird!"

"I don't know how to do the little bird!"

"Yes, you do. Go on, like a dear!"

"You're making a fool of me. I understand that much."

"You don't understand a bit! You do the little bird so well that I like to see you!"

He drew in his lips, puffed them out, opened and shut them like the beak of a callow bird. She laughed, and he laughed for the pleasure of seeing her laugh, then said—

"What babes we are! If they put that on the stage—good Lord, think of the hisses!"

"Oh, the stage! That's false if you like! And the novel. If you wrote a novel in which life was shown as it really is, every one would cry 'How unnatural!' I do wish I could write!—could describe life as I understand it, as it truly is, with its great littlenesses and its mean greatness! I'd write a book or a play which would astonish Europe!"

He looked at her, pretending to be so overwhelmed that he had no words, and again she felt irritated.

"You don't understand anything! You laugh at me! Yet if I could——"

In spite of himself Antonio became serious.

"Well, why can't you?"

"Because first I should have to——No, I won't tell you. You can't understand! Besides, I can't write; I don't know how to express myself. My thoughts are fine, but I haven't the words. That's the way with so many! What do you suppose great men, the so-called great thinkers, are? Fortunate folk who know how to express themselves! Nietzsche, for instance. Don't you think I and a hundred others have all Nietzsche's ideas, without ever having read them? Only he knew how to set them down, and we don't. I say Nietzsche, but I might just as well say the author of the Imitation."

"You should have married an author," said Antonio, secretly jealous of the man whom Regina had perhaps dreamed of but never met.

Again she felt vexed. "It's quite useless! You don't understand me. I can't get on with authors a bit. Let me alone now. I told you not to fiddle with my hair!"

"Stop! Don't go away! Let's talk more of your great thoughts. You think me an idiot. But listen, I want to say one thing; don't laugh. You want to do something wonderful. Well, an American author—Emerson, I think—said to his wife, that the greatest miracle a woman could perform is——"

"Oh, I know! To have a baby!" she replied, with a forced smile. "But you see, I think humanity useless, life not worth living. Still, I don't commit suicide, so I suppose I do accept life. I admit that a son would be a fine piece of work. I'd enter on it with enthusiasm, with pride, if I were sure my son wouldn't turn out just a little bourgeois like us!"

"He might make a fortune and be a useful member of society."

"Nonsense! Dreams of a little bourgeois!" she said bitterly; "he would be just as unhappy as we are!"

"But I am happy!" protested Antonio.

"If you are happy it shows you don't understand anything about it, and so you are doubly unhappy," she said vehemently, her eyes darkening disquietingly.

"My dear, you're growing as crazy as your great writers."

"There you are! the little bourgeois who doesn't know what he is talking about!"

And so they went on, till Antonio looked at the clock and jumped up with a start.

"It's past the time! My love, if you had to go down to the office every day I assure you these notions would never come into your head."

He hurried to wash; and still busy with the towel, damp and fresh with the cold water, he came back to kiss her.

"You're as pink as a strawberry ice!" she said admiringly, and so they made peace.

With the coming on of the hot days Regina's nostalgia, nervousness and melancholy increased. At night she tossed and turned, and sometimes groaned softly. At last she confessed to Antonio that her heart troubled her.

"Palpitations for hours at a time till I can hardly breathe! It feels as if my chest would burst and let my heart escape. It must be the stairs. I never used to have palpitations!"

Much alarmed, her husband wished to take her to a specialist, but this she opposed.

"It will go off the moment I get away," she said.

They decided she must go at the end of June. Antonio would take his holiday in August and join her, remaining at her mother's for a fortnight.

"After that, if we've any money left, we'll spend a few days at Viareggio."

Regina said neither yea nor nay. After the first seven months the young couple had only 200 lire in hand. This was barely enough for the journey; Antonio, however, hoped to put by a little while his wife was away.

The days passed on; Rome was becoming depopulated, though the first brief spell of heat had been followed by renewal of incessant and tiresome rain.

Antonio counted the days.

"Another ten—another eight—and you'll be gone. What's to become of me all alone for a month?"

Such expressions irritated her. She wished neither to speak nor to think of her departure.

"Alone? Why need you be alone? You've got your mother and your brothers!"

"A wife is more than brothers, more than a mother."

"But if I were to die? Suppose I fell ill and the doctors prescribed a long stay in my home?"

"That's impossible."

"You talk like a child. Why is it impossible? It's very possible indeed!" she said, still vexed; "whatever I say you think it nonsense—a thing which can't happen. Why can't it happen? It's enough to mention some things——"

"But, Regina," he exclaimed, astonished, "what makes you so cross?"

"Well, you just explain to me why it's impossible I should get ill? Am I made of iron? The doctor might forbid me to climb stairs for a while, and might tell me to live in the open air, in the country. If he took that line where would you have me go unless to my home? Would you forbid me to go there?"

"On the contrary, I should be the first to recommend it. But it's not the state of affairs at present. Oh! your palpitation? that will go off. We must see about an Apartment on a lower floor—though, to say truth, I've got to regard this little nest of ours with the greatest affection. We're so cosy here!" he said, looking round lovingly.

She did not reply, but stepped to the window and looked out. Her brow clouded. What was the matter with her? Detestation of the little dwelling where she felt more and more smothered? or irritation at her husband's sentimentality?

"This is Friday," she said presently; "I suppose I ought to go and bid your Princess good-bye. When is she going away?"

"Middle of July, I think. She's going to Carlsbad."

"Well, let her go to the devil, and all the smart people with her!"

"That's wicked! Aren't you going to the country yourself? Think of all the folk who have to stay in the burning city, workmen in factories, bakers at their ovens——"

"Precisely what made me swear!" said Regina.

Later she dressed and went to Madame Makuline's; not because she wanted to see her, but in order to occupy the interminable summer afternoon.

She pinched her waist very tight, and put on a new blue dress with many flounces and a long train; she knew she looked well in it and far more fashionable than on her first arrival in Rome, but the thought gave her little satisfaction.

As she was passing the Costanzi she saw the yellow-faced gentleman who strolled in the "Pussies' Garden." He was talking to a friend, plump as himself with round, dull blue eyes, a restless little red dog under his arm. Regina knew this personage also. He was an actor who played important parts at the Costanzi. Regina fancied the two men looked at her admiringly, and she coloured with satisfaction; then suddenly conceived something blameworthy in her pleasure, and felt angry with herself, as a few hours earlier she had been angry with Antonio for "talking like a child." She arrived at the Princess's in an aggressive humour, and came in with her head very high. She did not speak to the servant nor even look at him, remembering that he always received her husband and herself with a familiarity not exactly disrespectful, but somehow humiliating.

Madame Makuline's drawing-room, though its furs and its carpets had been removed, was still very hot. Branches of lilac in the great metal vases diffused an intense, pungent, almost poisonous fragrance. Only two ladies had called; one of them was abusing Rome to Marianna, and the girl, unusually ugly, in an absurd, low red dress, was protesting ferociously and threatening to bite the slanderer. The Princess listened, pale, cold, her heavy face immobile. Regina came in, and at once Marianna rushed to meet her, crying—

"If you are going to say horrid things, too, I shall go mad!"

Regina sat down, elegantly, winding her train round her feet as she had seen Miss Harris do; and, having learned the subject in dispute, said with a malicious smile—

"Most certainly Rome is odious."

"I'll have to scratch you!" cried Marianna; "and it will be a thousand pities, for you're quite lovely to-day! Now you're blushing and you look better still! Your hat's just like one I saw at Buda-Pesth on a grand duchess."

"Rome odious?" said the Princess, turning to Regina, who was still smiling sarcastically; "that's not what you said a few days ago."

"It's easy to change one's opinion."

"Beg pardon?"

"It's easy to change one's opinion," shouted Regina, irritated; "besides, I said the other day that Rome was delightful for the rich. It's altogether abominable for the poor. The poor man, at Rome, is like a beggar before the shut door of a palace, a beggar gnawing a bone——"

"Which is occasionally snapped up by the rich man's dog," put in Marianna.

The other laughed nervously.

"Just so!" she said.

The Princess raised her little yellow eyes to Regina's face and studied it for a moment, then turned to the lady at her side and talked to her in German. Regina fancied Madame had meant her to understand something by that look, something distressing, disagreeable, humiliating; and her laughter ceased.

---

"June 28, 1900.

"Antonio,—

"You will read this letter after I am gone, while you are still sad. You will perhaps think it dictated by a passing caprice. If you could only know how many days, how many weeks, how many months even, I have thought it over, examined it, tortured myself with it! If you knew how many and many times I have tried to express in words what I am now going to write to you! I have never found it possible to speak; some tyrannous force has always prevented me from opening my heart to you. I felt that by word of mouth we should never arrive at understanding each other. Who knows whether, even now, you can or will understand me! I fancied it would be easy to explain in a letter; but now—now I feel how painful and difficult it must be. I should have liked to wait till I was there, at home, to write this letter to you; but I don't want to put it off any longer, and above all I don't wish you to think that outside influences, or the wishes of others, have pushed me to this step. No, my best, dearest Antonio! we two by ourselves, far from every strange and molesting voice, we two, alone, shall decide our destiny. Hear me! I am going to try and explain to you my whole thought as best I can. Listen, Antonio! A few days ago I said, 'Suppose I were to fall ill and the doctors were to order me to return to my native air and to stay for a short time in my own country, would you forbid me to obey?' And you ended by confessing you would be the first to counsel obedience. Well, I am really ill, of a moral sickness which consumes me worse than any physical disorder; and I do need to return to my own country and to remain there for some time. Oh, Antonio! my adored, my friend, my brother, force yourself to understand me; to read deep into these lines as if you were reading my very soul! I love you. I married you for love; for that unspeakable love born of dreams and enchantments which is felt but once in a life. More than ever at this moment I feel that I love you, and that I am united to you for my whole life and for what is beyond. When you appeared to me there, on the green river-banks, the line of which had cut like a knife through the horizon of all my dreams, I saw in you something radiant; I saw in you the very incarnation of my most beautiful visions. How many years had I not dreamed of you, waited for you! This delicious expectation was already beginning to be shrouded in fear and sadness, was beginning to seem altogether vague when you appeared! You were to me the whole unknown world, the wondrous world which books, dreams—heredity also—had created within me. You were the burning, the fragrant, the intoxicating whirlwind of life; you were everything my youth, my instinct, my soul, had yearned for of maddest and sweetest. Even if you had been ugly, fat, poorer than you are, I should have loved you. You had come from Rome, you were returning to Rome—that was enough! No one, neither you nor any one not born and bred in provincial remoteness, can conceive what the most paltry official from the capital—dropped by chance into that remoteness—represents to an ignorant visionary girl. How often here in Rome have I not watched the crowds in Via Nazionale, and laughed bitterly while I thought that if the lowest of those little citizens walking there, the meanest, the most anæmic, the most contemptible of those little clerks, one with an incomplete soul, dropped like an unripe fruit, one of those who now move me only to pity, had passed by on that river-bank before our house—he might have been able to awaken in me an overwhelming passion! My whole soul revolts at the mere thought. But do not you take offence, Antonio! You are not one of those; you were and you are for me something altogether different. And now, though the enchantment of my vain dreams has dissolved, you are for me something entirely beyond even those dreams. You were and you are for me, the one man, the good loyal man, the lover, young and dear, whom the girl places in the centre of all her dreams—which he completes and adorns, dominating them as a statue dominates a garden of flowers.

"But our garden, Antonio, our garden is arid and melancholy. We were as yet too poor to come together and to make a garden. My eyes were blindfolded when I married you and came with you to Rome; I fancied that in Rome our two little incomes would represent as much as they represented in my country. I have perceived, too late, that instead they are hardly sufficient for our daily bread. And on bread alone one cannot live. It means death, or at least grave sickness for any one unused to such a diet. And love, no matter how great, is not enough to cure the sick one!

"Alas! as I repeat, I am sick! The shock of reality, the hardness of that daily bread, has produced in me a sort of moral anæmia; and the disease has become so acute that I can't get on any longer. For me this life in Rome is a martyrdom. It is absolute necessity that I should flee from it for a time, retire into my den, as they say sick animals do, and get cured—above all, get used to the thought, to the duty, of spending my life like this.

"Antonio! my Antonio! force yourself to understand me, even if I don't succeed in expressing myself as I wish. Let me go back to my nest, to my mother! I will tell her I am really ill and in need of my native air. Leave me with her for a year, or perhaps two. Let us do what we ought to have done in the first instance, let us wait. Let us wait as a betrothed couple waits for the hour of union. I will accustom myself to the idea of a life different from what I had dreamed. Meanwhile your position (and perhaps mine, too, who knows?) will improve. Are there not many who do this? Why, my own cousin did it! Her husband was a professor in the Gymnasium at Milan. Together they could not have managed. But she went back home, and he studied and tried for a better berth, and presently became professor at the Lyceum in another town. Then they were re-united, and now they're as happy as can be.

"'But,' you will say, 'we can live together. We have no lack of anything.'

"'True,' I repeat, 'we don't lack for bread; but one cannot live by bread alone,' Do you remember the evening when I asked you whether from our habitation you could see the Great Bear? You laughed at me and said I was crazy; and who knows! perhaps I am really mad! But I know my madness is of a kind which can be cured; and that is all I want, just to be cured—to be cured before the disease grows worse.

"Listen, Antonio! You also, unintentionally I know, but certainly, have been in the wrong. You did not mean it; it's Fate which has been playing with us! In the sweet evenings of our engagement, when I talked to you of Rome with a tremble in my voice, you ought to have seen I was the dupe of foolish fancies. You ought to have discerned my vain and splendid dream through my words, as one discerns the moon through the evening mist. But instead you fed my dream; you talked of princesses, drawing-rooms, receptions! And when we arrived in Rome, you should have taken me at once to our own little home; you shouldn't have put between us for weeks and months persons dear, of course, to you, but total strangers to me. They were kind to me, I know, and are so still; I did my best to love them, but it was impossible to have communion of spirit with them all at once. Above all, you ought to have kept me away from that world of the rich of which I had dreamed, which is not and never will be mine.

"Do you see? It's as if I had touched the fire and something had been burned in me. Is it my fault? If I am in fault it's because I am not able to pretend. Another woman in my place, feeling as I feel, would pretend, would apparently accept the reality, would remain with you; but—would poison your whole existence! Even I, you remember, I in the first months worried you with my sadness, my complaints, my contempt. I knew how wrong I was, I was ashamed and remorseful. If we had gone on like that, if the idea which I am broaching now had not flashed into my mind, we should have ended as so many end; bickering to-day, scandal to-morrow; crime, perhaps, in the end. I felt a vortex round me. It is not that I am romantic; I am sceptical rather than romantic; but everything small, sordid, vulgar, wounds my soul. I am like a sick person, who at the least annoyance becomes selfish, loses all conscience, and is capable of any bad action. Again I say, is it my fault? I was born like that and I can't re-make myself. There are many women like me, some of them worse because weaker. They don't know how to stop in time, on the edge of the precipice; they neither see, nor study how to avoid it. And yet, Antonio, I do care for you! I love you more, much more than when we were betrothed. I love you most passionately. It is chiefly on this account that I make the sacrifice of exiling myself from you for a while. I don't want to cause you unhappiness! Tears are bathing my face, my whole heart bleeds. But it is necessary, it is fate, that we separate! It kills me thinking of it, but it's necessary, necessary! Dear, dear, dear Antonio! understand me. Beloved Antonio, read and re-read my words, and don't give them a different signification from what is given by my heart. Above all, hear me as if I were lying on your breast, weeping there all my tears. Hear and understand as sometimes you have heard and understood. Do you remember Christmas morning? I was crying, and I fancied I saw your eyes clouded too: it was at that moment I realised that I loved you above everything in all the world, and I decided then to make some sacrifice for you. This is the sacrifice; to leave you for a while in the endeavour to get cured and to come back to you restored and content. Then in my little home I will live for you; and I will work; yes, I also will bring my stone to the edifice of our future well-being. We are young, still too young; we can do a great deal if we really wish it. Neither of us have any doubts of the other; you are sure of me; I also am sure of you. I know how you love me, and that you love me just because I am what I am.

"Listen; after two or three weeks you shall come to my mother's as we have arranged. You must pretend to find me still so unwell that you decide to leave me till I am better. Then you shall return to Rome and live thinking of me. You shall study, compete for some better post. The months will pass, we will write to each other every day, we will economise—or, what is better, accumulate treasures—of love and of money. Our position will improve, and when we come together again we shall begin a new honeymoon, very different from the first, and it shall last for the whole of our life."

Having reached this point in her letter, Regina felt quite frozen up, as if a blast of icy wind had struck her shoulders. This she was writing—was it not all illusion? all a lie? Words! Words! Who could know how the future would be made? The word made came spontaneously into her thought, and she was struck by it. Who makes the future? No one. We make it ourselves by our present.

"I shall make my future with this letter, only not even I can know what future I shall make."

Regina felt afraid of this obscure work; then suddenly she cheered, remembering that all she had written in the letter was really there in her heart. Illusion it might be, but for her it was truth. Then, come what might, why should she be afraid? Life is for those who have the courage to carry out their own ideas!

It seemed needless to prolong the letter. She had already said too many useless things, perhaps without succeeding in the expression of what was really whirling in her soul. She rapidly set down a few concluding lines.

"Write to me at once when you have read this—no, not at once! let a few hours pass first. There is much more I should like to say, but I cannot, my heart is too full, I am in too great suffering. Forgive me, Antonio, if I cause you pain at the moment in which you read this; out of that pain there will be born great joy. Reassure me by telling me you understand and approve my idea. Far away there I shall recover all we have lost in the wretched experience of these last months. I will await your letter as one awaits a sentence; then I will write to you again. I will tell you, or try to tell you, all which now swells my heart to bursting. Good-bye—till we meet again. See! I am already crying at the thought of the kiss which I shall give you before I go. God only knows the anguish, the love, the promise, the hope, which that kiss will contain.

"Whatever you shall think of me, Antonio, at least do not accuse me of lightness. Remember that I am your own Regina; your sick, your strange, but not your disloyal and wicked.

"Regina."

The letter ended, she folded and shut it hurriedly without reading it over. Then she felt qualms; some little word might have escaped her; some little particle which might change the whole sense of a phrase. She reopened the envelope, read with apprehension and distaste, but corrected nothing, added nothing. Her grief was agonising. Ah! how cold, how badly expressed, was that letter! Into its lifeless pages had passed nothing of all which was seething in her heart!

"And I was imagining I could write a novel—a play! I, who am incapable of writing even a letter! But he will understand," she thought, shutting the letter a second time, "I am quite sure he will understand! Now where am I to put it? Suppose he were to find it before I am off? Whatever would happen? He would laugh; but if he finds it afterwards—he will perhaps cry. Ah! that's it, I'll lay it on his little table just before I go."

With these and other trivial thoughts, with little hesitations which she had already considered and resolved, she tried to banish the sadness and anxiety which were agitating her.

She pulled out her trunks, for she was to start next morning by the nine o'clock express, and she had not yet packed a thing. The whole long afternoon had gone by while she was writing.

"What will he do?" she kept thinking; "will he keep on the Apartment? And the maid? Will he betray me? No, he won't betray me. I'm sure of that. I'll suggest he should go back to his mother and brothers. So long as they don't poison his mind against me! Perhaps he'll let the rooms furnished. How much would he get for them? 100 lire? But no! he's sentimental about them. He wouldn't like strangers, vulgar creatures perhaps, to come and profane our nest, as he calls it. And shouldn't I hate it myself? Folly! Nonsense! I have suffered so much here that the furniture, these two carpets with the yellow dogs on them, are odious to me. I never wish to see any of the things again! And yet——Come, Regina! you're a fool, a fool, a fool! But what will he do with my trousseau things? Will he take them to his mother's? Well, what do I care? Let him settle it as he likes."

Every now and again she was assailed by a thought that had often worried her before. If he were not to forgive? In that case how was their story going to end? But no! Nonsense! It was impossible he should not forgive! At the worst he would come after her to persuade or force her to return. She would resist and convince him. Already she imagined that scene, lived through it. Already she felt the pain of the second parting. Meanwhile she had filled her trunk, but was not at all satisfied with her work. What a horrid, idiotic thing life was! Farewells, and always farewells, until the final farewell of death.

"Death! Since we all have to die," she thought, emptying the trunk and rearranging it, "why do we subject ourselves to so much needless annoyance? Why, for instance, am I going away? Well, the time will pass all the same. It's just because one has to die that one must spend one's life as well as one can. A year or two will soon go over, but thirty or forty years are very long. And in two years——Well," she continued, folding and refolding a dress which would not lie flat in the tray, "is it true that in two years our circumstances will have improved? Shall I be happier? Shall I not begin this same life over again—will it not go on for ever and ever to the very end? To die—to go away——Well, for that journey I shan't anyhow have the bother of doing up this detestable portmanteau; There!" (and she snatched up the dress in a fury and flung it away), "why won't even you get yourself folded the way I want? Come, what's the good of taking you at all? There won't be any one to dress for there!"

She threw herself on the bed and burst into tears. She realised for the moment the absurdity, the naughtiness of her caprice. She repeated that it was all a lie; what she wanted was just to annoy her husband, out of natural malice, out of a childish desire for revenge.

But after a minute she got up, dried her eyes, and soberly refolded the dress.

When Antonio came in he found her still busy with the luggage.

"Help me to shut it," said Regina, and while he bent over the lock, which was a little out of order, she added—

"Suppose there's a railway accident, and I get killed?"

"Let's hope not," he replied absently.

"Or suppose I am awfully hurt? Suppose I am taken to some hospital and have to remain there a long time?"

This time he made no reply at all.

"Do say something! What would you do?"

"Why on earth are you always thinking of such things? If you have these fancies why are you going away? There! It's locked. Where are the straps?" he asked, getting up.

She looked at him as he stood before her, so tall, so handsome, so upright, his eyes brilliant in the rosy sunset light.

"To-morrow we shall be far apart!" she cried, flinging herself on his neck and kissing him deliriously; "you will be true to me! Say you will be true to me! Oh, God! if we should never see each other again!"

"You do love me, then?"

"So much—so much——"

He saw her turn pale and tremble, and he pressed her to him, losing all consciousness of himself, overwhelmed by the pleasure and the passion which intoxicated him each time Regina showed him any tenderness.

They kissed each other, and their kisses had a warmth, a bitterness, an occult savour of anguish, which produced a sense of ineffable voluptuousness. Regina wept; Antonio said senseless things and implored her not to leave him.

Then they both laughed.

"After all you aren't going to the North Pole," said Antonio. "I declare you are really crying! Pooh! a month will soon pass. And I'll come very soon. At this hour we'll go out together in a boat, when the Po is all rosy——"

"If there isn't a railway accident!" she said bitterly. "Well! here are the straps. Pull them as tight as you can."

PART II

CHAPTER I

The crazy little carriage belonging to Petrin il Gliglo rattled along by the river-side towards Viadana. Regina was seated, not particularly comfortably, between her brother and sister, who had come to meet her at Casalmaggiore station. She laughed and talked, but now and then fell silent, absent-minded, and sad. Then Toscana and Gigino, being slightly in awe of her, became also silent and embarrassed.

The night was hot; the sky opaque blue, furrowed by long grey clouds. The big red moon, just risen above the horizon, illumined the river and the motionless woods with a splendour suggestive of far-off fire. The immense silence was now and then broken by distant voices from across the Po; a sharp damp odour of grass flooded the air, waking in Regina a train of melancholy associations.

Now she had arrived, now she was in the place of her nostalgia, in the dreamed-of harbour of refuge, it was strange that her soul was still lost to her. Just as at one time she had seemed to herself to have taken only her outward person to Rome, leaving her soul like a wandering firefly on the banks of the Po, so now it was only her suffering and tired body which she had brought back to the river-side. Her soul had escaped—flown back to Rome. What was Antonio doing at this hour? Was he very miserable? Was he conscious of his wife's soul pressing him tighter than ever her arms had pressed him? Had he written to her? Antonio! Antonio! Burning tears filled her eyes, and she suddenly fell silent, her thoughts wandering and lost in a sorrowful far-away.

She had already repented her letter, or at least of having written it so soon. She could have sent it quite well from here! He would have felt it less—so she told herself, trying to disguise her remorse.

"And the Master? And Gabri and Gabrie?" she asked aloud, as they passed Fossa Caprara, whose little white church, flushed by the moon, stood up clearly against the blackness of the meadow-side plane-trees. At the other side of the road was a row of silver willows, and between them the river glistened like antique, lightly oxidised glass. The whole scene suggested a picture by Baratta.

Toscana and Gigi both broke into stifled laughter.

"What's the matter?" queried Regina.

The boy controlled himself, but Toscana laughed louder.

"Whatever is it? Is the Master going to be married?"

"Lu el vorres, se, ma li doni li nal veul mia, corpu dla madosca (He'd be willing enough, but the women won't have him)," said Petrin, turning a little and joining in the "children's" talk.

"They want to go to—to Rome! Gabri and Gabrie!" said Toscana at last, and her brother again burst out laughing.

"Why do they want to go to Rome?"

"Gabri wants to get a place and to help Gabrie in her studies, as she intends to be a Professor——"

"Ah! Ah! Ah!"

Then they laughed, all four, and Regina forgot her troubles. The boy and girl thought of going to Rome, as they thought of going to Viadana, without help and without money! It was amusing.

"And what does the Master say?"

"He's mad!" interrupted Petrin, turning his face, which was round and red like the moon. "El diss, chi vaga magari a pe: i dventarà na gran roba (He says let them go if it's even on foot! they'll turn out great!)."

Then Gigi mimicked Gabri, who talked through his nose:—

"We could go to Milan, of course, but there's no university there which admits women, like the universities of Florence and Rome. Rome is the capital of Italy; we'll go there. I'll be a printer, and Gabrie shall study."

And Toscana mimicked Gabrie:—

"My brother shall print all my books."

"My dear children, I think you are jealous," said Regina.

"Oh!" they cried, cut to the quick, for Gigi did verily want to go to Rome for his college course, and Toscana, who had a pretty mezzo-soprano voice, had a plan of living at her sister's to learn singing.

Regina became thoughtful, guessing their own and their friends' dreams, and remembering her own earlier illusions. She vainly sought to shake off the sadness, the remorse, the presentiment of evil, which was weighing her down.

"And you, Petrin, I suppose you want to go to Rome too? Couldn't you bring Gabri and Gabrie in this chaise?"

"I'm going to Paris," the man answered, stolidly.

"To be sure! I remember you thought of it last year. You said you had enough money."

"So I have still. I can't spend it here, and my uncle in Paris keeps writing 'Come! Come!'"

Regina was not listening. She was caught up in a pleasure, expected indeed, which yet took her by surprise, soothing her sick heart as a balsam soothes a wound. For there, in the hollow behind the row of black trees bordering the viassolin (lane), was the little white house, a lamp shining from its window! Already she heard the scraping voice of the frogs, which croaked in the ditch beside the lane. Shadows of two persons were spread across the road, and a soprano voice resounded in a prolonged call, like the shout of a would-be passenger to the ferryman on the opposite bank of the river—

"Regina—a—a——"

"It's that fool Adamo," said Gigi; "he's always calling you like that. He says you ought to hear him in Rome. She shouts, too," he added, pinching Toscana's knee.

"And so do you," said Toscana.

The voice rang out again, sent back by the water, echoing to the farther shore. Regina jumped from the carriage, and ran towards the two dear shadows. One of them separated itself from the other and rushed madly. It was the boy, and he fell upon Regina like a thunderbolt, hugging her, squeezing her tightly, even pretending to roll her into the river.

"Adamo! Are you gone mad?" she cried, resisting him. "Do you want to break my bones?"

Then Adamo, whose great dark eyes were brilliant in the moonlight, remembered Regina had written something about being ill, and he too became suddenly shy of her.

"How you've grown!" she exclaimed. "Why, you're two inches taller than I am!"

"Ill weeds grow apace," said Gigino. Then Adamo, who for fifteen was really a giant, gave Toscana a push en passant, and sprang upon his brother, trying to roll him down the bank. Shouts of laughter, exclamations, a perfect explosion of fun and childish thoughtlessness filled the perfumed silence. Regina left the children to forget her in this rough amusement, and hurried on to her mother.

They embraced without a word; then Signora Tagliamari asked for Antonio.

"I thought he would have come to take care of you!" she said. "Frankly now, how are you getting on together? You haven't had any little difference——"

"Oh dear no!" cried Regina. "I told you he couldn't get away just now. I've been bothered with a lot of palpitation—we've more than a hundred steps, you know. Fancy having to climb a hundred steps three or four times every day! Antonio got anxious and took me to a specialist—an extortioner—who demanded ten lire for just putting a little black cup against my chest! 'Native air,' he said; 'a few months of her native air!' But now I'm all right again. It's almost gone off. I'll stay for a month, or two months at the outside. Then Antonio will come for me——"

Mother and daughter talked in dialect, and looked each other fixedly in the face. The moon, white now and high in the heavens from which the clouds had cleared, illumined their brows. Signora Caterina, not yet forty-five years of age, was so like Regina that she seemed her elder sister. Her complexion was even fresher, and she had great innocent eyes, more peaceful than her daughter's. Regina, however, thought her much aged, and her black dress with sleeves puffed on the shoulders, which a year ago she had believed very smart, now seemed absurdly antiquated.

"He's coming to fetch you?" repeated the mother; "that's all right."

Regina's heart tightened. Would Antonio really come? Suppose he were mortally offended and refused to come? But no—no—she would not even fancy it!

Before traversing the short footpath which led between hedges to the villa, she stood to contemplate the beautiful river landscape bathed in moonlight. A veil seemed to have been lifted. Everything now was clear and pure; the air had become fresh and transparent as crystal. The dark green of the grass contrasted with the grey-green of the willows; the ditches reflected the moon and the light trunks of the poplar-trees, whose silver leaves were like lace on the velvet background of the sky. The house, small to her who was returning from the city of enormous buildings, was white against the green of the meadows. Round it the vines festooned from tree to tree, following each other, interlacing with each other, as in some silent nocturnal dance. The great landscape, surrounding and encompassing like the high seas seen from a moving ship, the wide river, familiar from her childhood, with its little fantastic islands, shut in by the solemn outline of the woods, by the far-reaching background, where a few white towers gleamed faintly through the lunar mist, relieved and expanded Regina's soul by pure immensity.

Swarms of fireflies flashed like little shooting stars; the mills made pleasant music; the freshness and sweetness of running water vivified the air; all was peace, transparence, purity. Yet Regina felt some subtle change even in the serenity of the great landscape, as she felt it in the countenance of her mother, in the manners of her brothers and sister. No, the landscape was no longer that; the dear people were no longer those. Who, what had changed them thus? She descended the little path, and the frogs redoubled their croaks as if saluting her passage. She remembered the damp and foggy morning in which she had gone away with Antonio. Then all around was cloud, but a great light shone in her soul; now all was brilliant—the heaven, the stream, the fireflies, the blades of grass, the water in the ditches—but the gloom was dark within herself.

Another minute, and she was inside the house. Alas! it also was changed! The rooms were naked and unadorned. Dear! how small and shabby was Baratta's picture over the chimneypiece in the dining-parlour! It was no longer that one!

They sat down to supper, which was lively and noisy enough. Then Regina went out again, and, in spite of the fatigue which stiffened her limbs, she walked a long way by the river-side. Adamo and her sister were with her, but she felt alone, quite alone and very sad. He was far away, and his presence was wanted to fill the wondrous solitude of that pure and luminous night. What was he doing? Even in Rome at the end of June the nights are sweet and suggestive. Regina thought of the evening walks with Antonio, through wide and lonely streets near the Villa Ludovisi. The moon would be rising above the tree tops, and sometimes Antonio would take his inattentive wife in by saying—

"How high up that electric light is!"

The fragrance of the gardens mixed with the scent of hay carted in from the Campagna, and the tinkle of a mandoline, moved the heart of the homesick Regina. Yes; even at Rome the nights had been delicious before the great heat had come, when already many of the people had gone away. Now she too had gone, and who could know if she would return? Who could tell if Antonio would want her ever again! Lost in this gnawing fear, she suddenly started and checked her steps. There, on the edge of the bank, abandoned in the lush grass, was that despised old millstone, which so often had stood before her eyes in her attacks of Nostalgia. Now she saw it in reality, and she noticed for the first time that it lay just exactly where a little track started, leading to the river through a grove of young willows and acacias. One evening, last autumn, standing on that little sandy path in the rosy shadow of the thicket, Antonio had sung her the song "The Pearl Fishers," and presently they had exchanged their first kiss. Now still she heard his voice vibrating in her soul.

"Mi par d'udire ancora."
(Still meseems I hear thee.)

And now she understood why she had always remembered the old stone. It would have meant nothing to her if it had not lain exactly at that spot, on that little tree-shadowed pathway, which was full of memories of him.

She stepped down it, standing for a minute among the willows, which had grown immensely, then approaching the water, now all bluish-white, gleaming under the moon. But the Po had made a new island, as soft and frothy as a chocolate cream, and even the river-side seemed to her changed.

Adamo and Toscana descended also to the water's edge, and the girl began to sing. Her voice trembled in the moonlit silence like the gurgle of a nightingale. Why she knew not, but Regina remembered the first evening at the Princess's and the voice of the elderly lady who had sung

"A te, cara."

How far off was that world! So far that perhaps she might never—never enter it again!

Ah! well! that mattered nothing! In this moonlight hour, in face of the purity of the river and of her native landscape, she seemed to have awakened from some pernicious intoxicating dream. Yet she was tormented by the doubt, the fear, that never again would she see the personages of her fevered dream, because never would Antonio come to lead her back into that far-off world. The days would pass, the months, the years. He would never come. Never! not after the three years of her suggesting, nor after ten, nor after twenty! How was it she had not thought of this when she had secretly planned her flight, even as a bird schemes to leave its cage without considering the perils to which it must expose itself? How could she help it? Which of us knows what we shall think or feel to-morrow? She had been dreaming; she was dreaming still. Even her increased terror, her fear that Antonio would forget her, was perhaps no more than a dreadful dream. But—if her dread should prove reality——

"What would become of me?" she thought, seemingly fascinated by the splendour of the running water. "There is no longer any place for me here. Everything is changed; everything seems to mistrust me. I have been a traitor to my old world, and now it pushes me from it! And I—I did not foresee that!"

"Come! Let us go!" she said, shaking herself and returning to the main path. She walked along, her head drooping, thinking she was surely mistaken. Her old world could not betray her! It was too old to be guilty of any such crime!

"Life is certainly quite different here, but I'll get used to it again. To-morrow, by daylight, when I am rested, I shall see everything in its old sweet aspect!"

For the present she dared not raise her eyes, lest she should see the willow which had protected their first kiss. She hurried past, fearful of an unforgettable spectre.

Toscana followed her singing, while Adamo, whose figure showed like a black spot on the glistening enamel of the water, amused himself shouting—

"Antonio—o—o. Antonio—o—o."

The sonorous tones echoed back from the river, and Regina hastened her steps lest her sister should see her scalding tears.

Ah! He made no response. Never again would he answer, never again!

---

But the next morning's sun dispersed Regina's childish fears, her anxiety, and her remorse.

"I shall hear from him to-day or to-morrow," she thought, waking in her old room, the window of which gave on the river. A swallow, which was used to come in and roost on the blind rod, flew round the room and pecked at the shut window. Regina jumped out of bed and opened it. The sight of the swallow had filled her heart with sudden joy, which increased at sight of the smiling landscape. Irresistibly impelled, she left the house and wandered through the fields, refreshing her spirit in the intoxicating bath of greenness and morning sun and lingering dew. She followed little grassy paths, at the entrance to which tall poplars reared their white stems like gigantic columns, their tops blending into one shimmering roof. She passed along the ditches populated by families of peaceful ducks; the little snails crept along, leaving their silvery tracks upon the grass; woodpeckers concealed in the poplars marked time with their beaks in the serenity of space and solitude.

As in the moonlit evening, so now in the sunshine, every blade of grass, every leaf, every little stone, sparkled and shone. The river rolled on its majestic course, furrowed by paths of gold, flecked here and there by pearly whirlpools. The islands, covered with evanescent vegetation, with the lace of trembling foliage, divided the splendours of the water and of the sky. Spring was still luxuriant over the immensity of the plain—spring strong as a giantess, kissed by her lover the river, decked by the thousand hands of the husbandmen, her slaves.

But when she was tired Regina threw herself upon the clover, still wet with dewdrops, and at once her thoughts flew far away. In the afternoon she began again to feel anxious and sad.

That very day visits began from inquisitive, tiresome, interested people—relations, friends, persons who wanted favours. They all imagined Regina influential to obtain anything, just because she lived in Rome. She was amused at first, but presently she wearied. All these people who came to greet and to flatter her seemed to have changed, to have grown older, simpler, less significant, than she had left them.

The Master himself came, with Gabriella, a small fair-haired creature, with pale, round face, and steely eyes, very bright, very deep, very observant.

"And so here is our Regina!" said the Master, buttoning his coat across his narrow chest. "Oh, bravissima! I got the postcard with the picture of the Colosseum. That really is a monument! Oh, brava, our Regina! I suppose you have visited all the monuments, both pagan and Christian? And seen the works of Michaelangelo Buonarotti? Oh, Rome! Rome! Yes, I wish my two children could get to the eternal Rome."

"Papa!" said Gabrie, watching Regina to see if she were laughing at him.

But Regina was merely cold and indifferent—an attitude which relieved but slightly intimidated the future lady-professor. A little later came a young lady of a titled family from Sabbioneta. She had a lovely slender figure, and was very pale, with black hair dressed à la Botticelli; she was smart also, wearing white gloves and tan shoes with very high heels.

Toscana, Gabrie and this young lady were all the same age—about eighteen—clever and unripe, like all school-girls. They were nominally friends. Regina, however, saw they envied and nearly hated each other. The aristocratic damsel gave herself airs, and spoke impertinences with much grace.

"Good gracious! What heels!" said Gabrie, whom nothing escaped. "But they're quite out of fashion!"

"They're always in fashion among the nobility," explained the other, condescendingly. Then they talked of a little scandal which had arisen the day before, in consequence of two Sabbioneta ladies having quarrelled in the street.

"Wives of clerks!" said the Signorina, contemptuously. "Women of the upper aristocracy would never behave like that!"

"But," said Regina, "where have you known any women of the upper aristocracy?"

"Oh! one meets them everywhere!"

"Look here, my dear; if you were to find yourself beside a lady of the upper aristocracy, and if she deigned to look at you at all, you would be frozen with humiliation and alarm."

The other girls giggled, and the Master asked eagerly—

"Regina, I wonder do you know the Duchess Colonna of San Pietro?"

"Chi lo sa? There are no end of duchesses in Rome!"

"We have an introduction to that great lady from a friend of ours at Parma."

"Papa!" cried Gabrie, red with indignation and pride, "I don't require any introductions! I snap my fingers at great ladies one and all! What could they possibly do for me?"

"My dear child," began Regina, pitying and sarcastic, "great ladies rule the world; and so——"

She stopped and turned pale, for there was a loud knock at the door. She fancied it the bicycling postman, who brought telegrams to the villages between Casalmaggiore and Viadana. But no; it was not he.

Evening fell—red and splendid as a conflagration. The three girls went out, and Regina lingered at the window, scrutinising the distance and looking for the telegraph messenger's bicycle.

The Master and Signora Tagliamari sat on a blue Louis XV sofa at the end of the room, and talked quietly. Now and then they threw a glance at Regina, who scarcely tried to conceal her sadness and disquiet. The Master, hoping she was listening, talked of the dreams and ambitions of his children.

"Well, as they wish it, we must let them work and conquer the world. What can they do here? Be a school-master? A school-mistress? No, thank you!"

"But if they go away, won't you miss them very much?"

"That's not the question, Signora Caterina! It's like a tearing out of the vitals when the young ones leave the parents. But the parents have brought them into the world to see them live, not vegetate. Ah, my children!" said the Master, stretching out his arms with great emotion, "the nest will remain empty and the old father will end his days in sorrow as, in truth, he began them; but in his heart, Signora Caterina, in his heart he will say with great joy, 'I have done my duty. I have taught my little ones to fly!' Oh, that my parents had done as much for me. Ah!"

Regina still looked out. She heard the Master's babble; she heard the fresh voices and the laughter of the three young girls who were strolling along the river; she watched the sky grow pale, diaphanous, tender green like some delicate crystal, flecked with little wandering clouds like a flight of violet-grey birds. She began to feel irritated. She knew not why. Perhaps because the girls made too much noise, or the Master was talking nonsense, or the postman did not appear out of the lonely distance.

The Master pulled a note-book from his pocket, and, interrupting himself now and then to explain that he did it without his daughter's knowledge, began to read aloud some of Gabrie's sketches.

"Listen to this! See how cleverly she observes people! It's a character for a future novel. My Gabrie is always on the look-out. She sees a character, observes, sets it all down. She's like those careful housewives who preserve everything in case it may come in useful. Listen to this!"

And he read: "'A young lady of eighteen, of titled but worn-out family, anæmic, insincere, vain, envious, ambitious; knows how to hide her faults under a cold sweetness which appears natural. She is always talking of the aristocracy. Some one once told her she resembled a Virgin of Botticelli's, and ever since she has adopted a pose of sentiment and ecstasy.' Isn't it excellent, Signora Caterina?"

"Yes, indeed; quite excellent!" said the lady, with gentle acquiescence. "Regina, come and listen. Hear how Gabrie is going to write her novel. It's quite excellent."

Regina remembered the novel she also had wished to write, with which she was quite out of tune to-day. Her irritation increased. She had recognised the signorina from Sabbioneta in Gabrie's sketch, and resented the pretensions, the ambitions, the dreams of the Master's little daughter. The simple father's delusions were pitiable. Better tear them away and bid him teach his child to make herself a real life, refusing to send her forth into the world where the poor are swallowed up like straws in the pearly whirlpools of the river.

But in the faded eyes of the humble school-master she saw such glow of tenderness, of regret, of dream, that she had not the heart to rob him of his only wealth—Illusion.

"It's so dreadful to have no more illusions," she said to herself, and added that to-day there would come no telegram from Antonio.

As evening came on she again fell a prey to puerile terrors and unwholesome thoughts. She was wrapped in frozen shadows—a mysterious wind drove her towards a glacial atmosphere, where all was dizziness and grief. She seemed suspended thus in a twilight heaven, wafted towards an unknown land, like the little wandering clouds, the violet-grey birds, migrating without hope of rest. The old world to which she had returned had become small, melancholy, tiresome. She was no longer at her ease in it. But at last she was driven to confess a melancholy thing. It was not her old world which had changed; oh no! it was herself.

CHAPTER II

That night she dreamed she was standing on the river-bank in the company of Marianna, Madame Makuline's companion, who had come to hurry her back to Rome.

"Monsieur Antonio is in an awful rage," she said. "He came to Madame and told her all about it, and has borrowed 10,000 lire to set up a finer house. Then he sent me to bring you back."

In her dream Regina shook with shame and anger. She set off with rapid steps to Viadana, intending to send Antonio a thundering telegram.

"If he has still got the money," she sobbed, "I wish him to give it all back this very moment. I don't want a finer house. I don't want anything! I'll come home at once. I'd come back, even if we had grown poorer, even if we had to live in a garret!"

And she walked and walked, as one walks in dreams, vainly trying to run, crushed by unspeakable grief. Night fell; the mist covered the river. Viadana seemed farther and farther. Marianna ran behind Regina, telling her that the day before in Via Tritone she had met the ugly fireman who had rescued her at Odessa.

"He had turned into a priest, if you please; but coquettish, and under his cassock he had a silk petticoat with three flounces, which made a frou-frou." And she laughed.

Her unpleasant expression exasperated Regina almost to fits. She was not laughing at the fireman, but at something else, unknown, mysterious and terrible. Suddenly Regina turned and tried to strike her, but the signorina started backwards and Regina tumbled down.

The shock of this fall wakened the dreamer, whose first conscious thought was of the fireman priest with the silk flounces. In the dream this detail had disgusted her horribly, and the disgust remained for long hours. Sleep had deserted her. It was still night, but already across the deep silence which precedes the dawn came the earliest sounds of the quiet country life—a tinkling of tiny bells trembling on the banks of the streams, going always farther and farther away. The silvery, insistent, childish note seemed to Regina the voice of infinite melancholy.

A thousand memories started up in her mind, insistent, puerile, melancholy, like that little silvery tinkling.

"My whole life has been useless," she thought, "and now, now, just when I might have found an object, I have flung it away like a rag! But what object could I have had?" she asked herself presently. "Well, family life is supposed to be an object. Everything is relative. The good wife who makes a good family contributes no less than the worker or the moralist to the perfection of society. I have never made anything but dreams. I remember the dream I had the second night after our arrival. I thought Madame Makuline had given me a castle."

Just then she heard a faint rustle, and something like a scarce perceptible but tender groan emitted by some minute dreaming creature.

"It's the swallow! Does it also dream? Do birds think and dream? I expect they do. Why, I wonder, is this one all alone? And he!"

She felt a sudden movement of joy, thinking that this day the letter from Antonio would surely come!

The hours passed. Post hour came, but there was no post. Regina went out of doors to hide her agitation, to forget, to flee from the extravagant fears which assailed her. As on the preceding day, she wandered in the woods and lanes, by the river-side, upon which beat the full rays of the sun. Everywhere fear followed her like her shadow.

"He has not forgiven me. He will not write. In his place I would do the same. He wants to punish me by his silence, or he is coming to take me back by force. A wife has to follow her husband, otherwise he can demand a legal separation. What would become of me if he did that?"

Pride would not allow her to confess that if Antonio insisted on her return she would go to him at once merely to be forgiven. But as the slow hours rolled on her pride weakened. Memory assailed her with consuming tenderness. She sickened at the thought of passing her life's best years deprived of love.

"Oh, why didn't I think of all this before?" she asked herself. And she remembered she had thought of it, but so vaguely, so lightly, that her faint fears had not held her back from folly. In an opposing sense she reasoned thus.

"It's my character made up of discontent and contradiction which tosses me hither and thither like a wave of the sea. Why have I changed so soon? If I go back to Rome I shall be sorry immediately that I didn't carry out my project, which is perhaps better than I am now thinking it. Perhaps after all he thinks it reasonable, and is delaying to write that I may see he accepts it. Oh! there's a bit of four-leaved clover! Yes; that's what it is. He accepts my plan."

She stooped, but did not pick the four-leaved clover. What luck could it bring to her?

She felt hurt and saddened by the idea that Antonio was not broken-hearted; that he would not try by all means in his power to get her back; would not reproach, punish, coax her, move her to agonies of despair and love.

"He has not written. He isn't going to write," she said again. "He will come himself to-morrow, or the next day, at the first moment he can. What shall I say when I see him?"

And in the joy of renewed confidence she forgot everything else.

---

He neither wrote nor came. The days went by; the slow, cruel hours passed in a waiting increasingly apprehensive. Regina wondered at the presentiment she had felt from the very moment of her arrival—the presentiment that her husband would write to her no more. Yet still she waited.

She perceived that her mother, observant of Antonio's silence, was watching her with those beautiful serene eyes now disturbed and unquiet. So one morning she feigned to have met the postman and brought back a letter. She came into the house, an envelope in her hand, crying—

"He's not well! He's laid up with fever!"

The mother was opening a silvery fish from the Po, and she looked at her daughter, scarcely raising her eyes from her work. Regina saw that her mother was not deceived, and that wistful maternal glance agitated her to the very depths of her soul. And the silver fish, in whose inside was discovered another little black fish, reminded her of Antonio's promise—

"We will go out together in a boat. We will fish together in the beautiful red evenings——" and of all the torturing tenderness of that last afternoon they had spent together.

She went to her room and wrote him a letter. Pride would not let her set down her real thoughts; but between the lines he might read all her stinging anxiety, her fear, her penitence. He did not reply.

Suppose he were really ill? Regina thought of writing to Arduina, but quickly felt ashamed of the idea. No. All those people whom Antonio's unfortunate notion had thrust between her and him on the first days of her arrival—all those people, the prime cause, perhaps, of their present misery, were repugnant to her, positively hateful.

But what was he doing? Had he shut up the Apartment in Via d'Azeglio and gone back to his family? The mere recollection of the marble stair which led to that place of suffering, to that low, grey room where a mysterious incubus had weighed down her soul, was enough to darken her countenance.

She wrote again. Antonio did not reply.

Then Regina felt something rebound violently within her, like a rod which straightens itself with a whirr after breaking the fetters which have tied it down. It was her pride. She thought Antonio must have guessed her unspoken drama of grief, lament, tenderness and remorse, and that he was passing the bounds of just punishment.

"He is taking advantage of me," she thought, "but we will see which is the stronger!"

"Antonio," she wrote to him, "I have been here for a whole fortnight of patience and suffering. What is the meaning of your silence? If you have neither understood nor pardoned the letter I left for you, surely you must have written to tell me so? If you have understood, and have forgiven, or, better still, if you have consented to what I ask, equally in that case you must have written. You cannot be ill, or one of your people would certainly have informed me. Your conduct is so strange that now I am more offended than grieved by it. Am I a child that you punish me in this childish way? Perhaps it has been a caprice on my part; but, mind, it is not the freak of a child! It is one of those caprices which, punished too severely, may end fatally. Antonio, don't suppose your silence will bring me back to your side like a whipped and famished hound. If you think you can take advantage of my love for you, you are altogether mistaken. I will never go back unless you call me; and whether this return is to be soon or not for a long time, that is what we must decide together. Either write or come to me at once. If within eight days you have not replied, I shall not write again—not until you have written yourself. But don't imagine that my answer then could be what it would be now. After all, Antonio, we are husband and wife; we are not mere lovers who can allow themselves jesting and nonsense, because their passion is perhaps destined to come to nothing and to remain for them only a memory. You and I are united by duty, and by more serious, stronger, more tragic fetters than passion. If I have been—let us admit it—thoughtless, romantic, even childish, this is no reason why you should be the same. And if you wish to be like that, I, at any rate, don't wish it any longer. This is why I am writing to-day. This is why I still wait. I repeat—write to me or come. We will decide together. And now it all depends upon you whether the fault is to be all mine or all yours, or to belong partly to us both. I am waiting.

"Regina."

Two days later Antonio replied with a telegram:—

"Starting to-morrow. Meet me at Casalmaggiore. Love and kisses!"

Love and kisses! Then he forgave! He was coming! He would forget—had already forgotten! Regina felt as if she had awakened from an evil dream. Ever afterwards she remembered the immense joy—melancholy perhaps, but on this very account soothing and delicious—which she experienced that day. She seemed to have come off victorious in the family battle. It was she who, just to save appearances, had recalled her husband. He was apparently defeated. But in reality it was she, it was she! And by her own wish and without repentance. Still, by this first victory she had tested her hidden strength and had found it great. Henceforth she could rely upon it as a safeguard in all the dangers of life.

"Life belongs to the strong," she thought, "and who knows, who knows but that I too may succeed in achieving fortune? From this out I am a different person. What has changed me I do not know!" she exclaimed, wandering along by the river as if lovelorn.

"How full of strange incoherence and contradiction is the human soul! Who is it says that inconsistency is the true characteristic of man? Certainly the greater part of our disasters come from punctiliousness, from pride, as to letting ourselves be inconsistent. We often ought to be, we often wish to be, inconsistent. Well!" she continued, increasingly surprised at herself, "it's very strange! A month, a fortnight ago, I was another person! Why, how have I changed like this? Here I am ready, without the smallest complaint, to leave this world which held me so tight. Here I am ready to follow my husband and to take up again the modest monotonous life which I did detest, but which now I do not mind in the least. Is it because I love Antonio? Yes; certainly; but there is some other reason as well—something which I can't make out. I don't want to make it out. I won't torment myself any more. I will understand only that happiness lies in love, in domestic peace, in the picture which life makes, not in the picture's frame. But how wonderfully changed I am!" she repeated, in astonishment. "Such a strange, sudden metamorphosis would seem unnatural in a novel. Yet it is true! the soul—what a strange thing it is! Well, I won't think any more! He is coming, and that is all the world!"

She walked on and on, analysing, and, at the same time, enjoying her happiness. Rays of pleasure flashed across her spirit as she remembered Antonio's eyes, lips, hands. Hers! Hers! Hers, this young man! his love, his soul, his body! She had never before rightly realised this great, this only happiness!

She walked and walked. The sunset hour came. Though it was mid-July, the country was still fresh. Now and then a transparent cloud veiled the sun. A gabbia[5] passed her. The driver, fair complexioned and careless as a child, was singing to himself. The wheels seemed mere diaphanous clouds of dust, rosy lilac in the sunset. Quietly the great river rolled in from the horizon; quietly it vanished to the horizon, passing along, calm, luminous, solemn. In its omnipotent force the river also appeared beneficent and happy, bringer of peace to its fertile shores. In the very depths of her soul Regina was stirred by the peace of the wide-stretched valley, by the far-reaching beauty of the horizon, by the sublime, health-giving tranquillity of the fields, the woods, the shores, by all the emanations of grace from what she fancied a god transformed into a stream. She had renewed her youth. Everything within, everything around her was poetic, beautiful, stainless. Sorrow and evil had fled far off, carried away by the river, vanished below the meeting line of earth and heaven. The western sky had become all one soft yet burning rose colour; the Po grew ever redder and more resplendent; the woods were drawn out in long black lines against the flaming background; the pungent perfume of grass hung on the air. Regina, vaguely watching a laden boat as it descended the sunlit water from Cicognara, became pensive and even sad. She asked herself whether all the enchantment of this peace did not hide something insidious, whether it were not like those mock islands covered with evanescent verdure, amorously encircled by the river which yet reserved the right of swallowing them at the first flood; enchanted islets for the eye, unstable and engulfing for the unwary foot.

There were three mills on the river close to where Regina was standing. She had often admired the most ancient one, the lower walls of which were rudely decorated with prehistoric pictures, red and blue scrawls representing the Madonna and St. James, a bush, and a boat. The mill was surrounded by silvery-green water, which dashed against the shining wheel. Boats came and went laden with white sacks. On the platform stood the white figure of the miller, a young woman sometimes by his side.

Regina had often seen those two figures. The man was elderly but still erect, his face shaven, lean and sallow, his cynical green eyes half shut. The young woman also had half-shut, light eyes. She was tall and lithe, pretty, in spite of too rosy a face, and hair dishevelled and over red. She must be the miller's daughter, Regina had supposed, probably in love with the mill servant. Life at the mill must be happy as in a fairy tale.

But later she had heard that the girl was the miller's wife, that he drank, that he was jealous, and kept his wife imprisoned with him in the mill. Evidently a tragedy was being played in the interior of this prehistoric habitation! The running water, the turning wheel, were reciting the eternal tale of human grief—were singing of the jealous, tipsy, disagreeable old man, and of the girl, fiery as her curls, brooding continually over rebellious and sinful thoughts.

The boat, laden with workmen, touched the shore, and Regina recognised one or two whom she knew. They invited her to go with them to the mill, to eat gnocchi.[6]

She agreed.

The Po was becoming more and more splendid, reflecting the whole west, the great golden clouds, the reversed woods. An enchanted land seemed to be submerged there in the water. Regina admired and was silent, listening to the lively chatter of her companions. They were talking of ghosts. Old Joachin, the rich miller—big, purple-faced, goggle-eyed—one night, when he was passing along the bank in his cart, saw a huge white dog, which jumped out of a bush and silently and obstinately followed him. Who could believe this dog a dog? It was a spirit.

And one moonshiny night Petrin the boatman had seen from the river a most strange, glistening creature flying along the shore.

"A bicycle," pronounced old Joachin, beating his empty pipe against the palm of his hand.

"Oh, very well! Then your white dog was just a white dog!"

Presently the party arrived at the mill. The miller came forward, all smiles, and stretched out his hand to Regina.

"Ma benissimo! This is an honour, Signora Regina! I know you well; and here is my wife, who knows you quite well too!"

The ruddy young woman hung back shyly.

"How do you do?" said Regina, looking at her curiously. She noticed that the miller was not quite so old nor the woman so young as they had seemed from the distance.

The inside of the mill was very clean. A fire was burning at the foot of the plank bed. Pots and pans of red earthenware were arranged on the dresser. The mechanism of the mill was of the most primitive pattern. Two large, round stones of a bluish hue were revolving one upon the other, moved by the wheel. The flour slipped out slowly, falling into a sack.

And the wheel turned and turned, pursued, battered, lashed by the noisy water. Wheel and water seemed to be whirling in a fight, merry in appearance, pitiless and cruel in reality.

Old Joachin took his wife by the shoulder and shook her.

"Go and make the gnocchi, woman! Make them as fat as your fingers!"

She giggled, looking at her hands, which were enormous, then took flour and kneaded it with river water.

Regina, finding her presence embarrassed the woman, went to the platform and sat down on a sack of flour. She lost herself in contemplation of the wonderful sunset. Already the sun was touching the river, making a great column of gold. The water came burning down from that magic spot, but upon reaching the mill its fire began to go out, and it disappeared into the east, pallid as mother-o'-pearl.

Regina saw the whirlpools all luminous like immense shells; the mill wheel flapped in the golden water like a huge metallic fan; the falling drops, in which the slant rays of the sun were refracted, showed all the rainbow colours.

The miller drew near Regina and bent towards her. His feet were bare, his thin legs and arms naked. His little green eyes smiled cynically.

"If I may, I'll speak two words with you," he murmured, respectfully.

"Yes?" said Regina.

Instead of two words, he told her a great number of interesting things. For instance, that he had all his teeth; that he paid 100 lire tax on his richezze mobili; that the wheel could be stopped with a rope; that his wife was timid and diffident, and always wanted to be tied to her husband's coat tails. Regina listened, half-disappointed that her tragedy had been wholly imaginary.

"You know," said the miller, who, while he talked, never stopped rubbing his arms and scratching one foot with the other, "I wish to goodness she'd go away for a fortnight or a month."

"Why?" asked Regina, ingenuously.

"Why, Signora Regina——" said the man, embarrassed, and scratching with all his might—"well, you have no baby either, have you? And you want one, I suppose? You'll be certain to have one now, after being away for a month. Well, if you'll come with me, I'll show you how we stop the wheel," he said, alarmed lest he had offended her.

Regina followed him. The old man stopped the wheel with the rope and asked his guest to examine the flour, the sack, the mill stones. In the sudden silence of the wheel he laughed without any reason. A dense cloud involved everything. The miller's wife, quite confounded by Regina's presence, turned scarlet as she fried the gnocchi. The figures on the platform were silhouetted against the golden background.

The miller looked at Regina and laughed, and suddenly, without knowing why, she laughed herself.