A Lady of Rome

by F. Marion Crawford

They were face to face now, and very near together, so that Castiglione distinctly felt her sharply drawn breath as she looked up at him.

‘It is the next floor,’ he said unsteadily, for he could not take his eyes from her now.

The meeting had been too sudden, too close; Maria could not bear it, but Castiglione would have let his right hand be cut off at the wrist, as it held the door, rather than have moved it towards her. With the other he held his sabre close to his left side, and his blue eyes gazed hungrily into hers. A moment more and the lift would stop; there was only that moment left, for, without looking away from him, she was aware of the landing just overhead. Then she spoke.

‘I love you more than ever!’

The words came to him in a fierce whisper. She had never spoken in that way, even in days of the short sweet dream that was all he had left. His answer was in his eyes, and in the sudden pallor that overspread his face, the ghastly white pallor of fair men who are deeply moved.

Then the lift stopped, the door slid sideways in its grooves, and he was leading the way through a wide corridor under the electric light. Maria was not pale just then; there was a little dark red flush in each cheek, for shame at what she had done.

Her visit was soon over, she hardly knew how, and when she came out Castiglione was not to be seen. A servant offered to call for the lift, but she refused it and almost ran down the stairs in her haste to get out of the hotel. A quarter of an hour later she was alone in her boudoir, sitting before the small wood fire with her elbows on her knees and her chin supported on her clasped hands.

She was terrified when she thought of what she had done, and an unreasoning fear of the future took possession of her. She felt that she had broken her solemn promise and betrayed her husband’s unbounded faith in her; for she knew how she had spoken the half-dozen words, and that if Castiglione had taken her into his arms then, her lips would have met his instantly, willingly, passionately. It had not been possible there; but if they had been in another place, could she have blamed him as she blamed herself? And by and by, when it was late, perhaps she would hear the familiar knock at her unlocked door, and the lips that had spoken those fierce little whispered words to the man she loved would have to say ‘Come in’ to the man whom she was pledged to honour. That was the sum and result, after so many months of pain and prayer and self-abasement, by which she had hoped to rise heavenwards. If only the man had spoken first, she could have grasped at the straw of self-excuse, she could have deluded herself with the thought that she had been tempted. But he had been silent, he had stood quite still, only looking at her, brave against himself and constant to his plighted promise. It was she who had tempted him; that was what she had come to!

There was only one way now, she would tear the thought of him from her heart for ever, and trample out his memory as men stamp upon the embers of the camp fire when the wind rises, lest the dry grass be kindled, and they themselves be burnt to death in the storm of flame. It was well that Montalto had taken her back and that the dream had ended in that sharp agony; if there had been no such waking it would have turned into a reality she shuddered to think of.

She rose and went to her writing-table and opened a deep drawer. It was there that she kept the small locked desk she had used in Via San Martino, the one in which she had put away Castiglione’s letters, meaning to burn them. With them there was also that letter of her husband’s in which he had first spoken of reconciliation, and she had never opened the writing-case since she had placed it there.