Sometimes on Sunday, Jack read aloud to the two women and to Rondic. The parlor was the room in which they assembled on these occasions. The apartment was decorated with a highly colored view of Naples, some enormous shells, vitrified sponges, and all those foreign curiosities which their vicinity to the sea seemed naturally to bring to them. Handmade lace trimmed the curtains, and a sofa and an arm-chair of plush made up the furniture of the apartment. In the arm-chair Father Rondic took his seat to listen to the reading, while Clarisse sat in her usual place at the window, idly looking out. Zénaïde profited by her one day at home to mend the house-hold linen, disregarding the fact of the day being Sunday. Among the books given to Jack by Dr. Rivals was Dante’s Inferno. The book fascinated the child, for it described a spectacle that he had constantly before his eyes. Those half naked human forms, those flames, those deep ditches of molten metal, all seemed to him one of the circles of which the poet wrote.
One Sunday he was reading to his usual audience from his favorite book; Father Rondic was asleep, according to his ordinary custom, but the two women listened with fixed attention. It was the episode of Francesca da Rimini. Clarisse bowed her head and shuddered. Zénaïde frowned until her heavy eyebrows met, and drove her needle through her work with mad zeal.
Those grand sonorous lines filled the humble roof with music. Tears stood in the eyes of Clarisse as she listened. Without noticing them, Zenaïde spoke abruptly as the voice of the reader ceased.
“What a wicked, impudent woman,” she cried, “not only to relate her crime, but to boast of it!”
“It is true that she was guilty,” said Clarisse, “but she was also very unhappy.”
“Unhappy! Don’t say that, mamma; one would think that you pitied this Francesca.”
“And why should I not, my child? She loved him before her marriage, and she was driven to espouse a man whom she did not love.”
“Love him or not makes but little difference. From the moment she married him she was bound to be faithful. The story says that he was old, and that seems to me an additional reason for respecting him more, and for preventing other people from laughing at him. The old man did right to kill them,—it was only what they deserved!”
She spoke with great violence. Her affection as a daughter, her honor as a woman, influenced her words, and she judged and spoke with that cruel candor that belongs to youth, and which judges life from the ideal it has itself created, without comprehending in the least any of the terrible exigencies which may arise.
Clarisse did not answer. She turned her face away, and was looking out of the window. Jack, with his eyes on his book, thought of what he had been reading. Here, amid these humble surroundings, this immortal legend of guilty love had echoed “through the corridors of time,” and after four hundred years had awakened a response. Suddenly through the open casement came a cry, “Hats! hats to sell!” Jack started to his feet and ran into the street; but quick as he was, Clarisse had preceded him, and as he went out, she came in, crushing a letter into her pocket.