“You say he’d marry you?”
“I say one marriage brings another.”
“O! Sweet saints, direct me! Lead my distracted mind! I cannot come with you, I say!—Wait while I fetch my cloak!”
* * * * * * * *
Fiorentina, bidden to hold her tongue to Louis-Marie, told him everything—under promise of secrecy: how that one was coming in a little to break his brain’s web and kill the wicked spider—a physician, maybe: maybe a wise woman; for indeed physicians were not “her,” and the signorina had stated distinctly, in answer to his cries, that she was going that moment to fetch her to cure him.
Fortunately or not, he heard her without comprehending. He was lying apathetic by then, quit of the “fellow in the cellarage.” That thundering whisper silenced, all commoner voices served him but as opiates. By-and-by he fell into a doze; and the little camerista drew his curtains, and lit his candles, and went below to gossip with her house-mate.
The storm laboured up and over, mingling with the sick man’s dreams. The rush of tempest smote on ice. He was alone in a surging darkness. It cracked, with a roar of thunder, and spilled a dead body at his feet. Madly he strove to spurn the thing—into monstrous-seeming abysses—for all their blackness they were shallow troughs. Or else the glacier rolled like water, and threw it up. He trampled it in fury—it writhed away, reshaping. Then it took to laughing; and the laugh was echoed from hard by—and there was Bonito hiding in a drift. He woke with a scream.
But he was sleeping again, when the little camerista hurried up, and looked into his pale exhausted face, and touched some pillows into comfort before leaving him.
Sweet dreams this time, but still of weeping rains. Only they fell softly on a Chapel roof. She was not there beside him, and he wondered why she lingered. Till, glancing at the coloured statue of the virgin, he saw it stir and smile, and stretch out wistful arms to him, and heard it breathe his name—“Louis, Louis!” And it was she herself, descending and coming to him; but, before they could reach and touch, she had vanished.
“Louis, Louis!” Her voice wept far remote, an infinite yearning, faint and always fainter; till suddenly, with a crash, the roof was rent, and a flood of fire rushed in, revealing her—quite close to him—a breathing apparition—all love and sorrow paining her sweet eyes.