She walked slowly down the road musing on the odd thing she had dreamed, and seeking in her mind for the reason and cause of it, finding fault with herself for being able to dream such things. It is one thing to be able to call up images of ideal men, and to tell the truth she strove even against that; but it is quite another matter to find one particular man so much in your thoughts that you dream of his running away with you.
She looked up, and a little church was before her, the door being open. She hesitated a moment; she had come out to walk, but it would be so pleasant to kneel in the cool, quiet place, in the half lights and deep shadows; to think, and think, and to pray sweet wordless heart-prayers, half mystic, half religious; to pour out the confessions of her soul's suffering, and to find, even for a brief space, that trust in something unseen, which her troubled spirit could not give to earthly wisdom or earthly love. She raised the curtain and entered.
It was a simple little church, with a floor of green and white tiles, whereon stood rows of green benches and a few straw chairs. The light was high, and the sun did not penetrate into the building. Everything was very clean and cool. Over the altar was a great picture, neither bad nor good, of a monk saint, dark in colour and inoffensive in composition; there were two or three small chapels at the sides, and the plain white arch of the roof was supported by two rows of square masonry pillars.
When Leonora entered she saw that she was alone, and the anticipated pleasure of religious exaltation was heightened by the sensation of solitude. She stood one moment, and then, being sure that no one saw her, she touched with her fingers the holy water in the basin by the door and made the sign of the cross, bending her knee slightly towards the altar. Had there been any one in the church she would perhaps not have done so; but being alone she loved to experience the forms of a religion in which she did not seriously believe, but in which she trusted far more than she knew. She went forward, took a straw chair, turned it round and kneeled on the tiles, burying her face in her hands.
At first, as she knelt there, she trembled with a strange emotion that she loved,—a sort of wave of contrition, of faith, of penitence, and of uncertainty, half painful and yet wholly delicious, that seemed to her the sweetest and most salutary sensation in the world. It was just painful enough to make the pleasure of it keener and rarer. She could not have described it, but she loved it and sought it, when she was in the humour. Gradually her troubles, real and fancied, would answer to her command, and array themselves in rank and file for her inspection; the domestic difficulties, small and snappish little knots of mosquito-like annoyance, biting tiny bites to right and left, and with little stings stinging their way to notice in the foreground; then the troubles of the heart, the temptations of a wild, unspoken and ideal love, streaming by her in the sweep of tempest and storm, stretching out sweet faces and fierce hands to take her with them, and to bear her away from hope of salvation or thought of heaven to the strange unknown space beyond; then again the shapeless and awful host of her fancied philosophies, now towering in fearful strength and menace to the sky, and rending and tearing each other to empty nothing and howling hollowness, now falling down to earth in miserable shapes and slinking insignificantly away; but last and worst of all, there was a deep dark shadow, the trouble of her heart, the certainty that she had made the great mistake and done the irretrievable sin against truth, that she had married a man she could never love, but whom—God forbid the thought!—whom she might hate for the very lack he had of anything that could deserve hating. And then all the pleasure of her exultation was gone; and the dull, uncertain pain, that would not take shape because it had no remedy, filled all her soul and mind and body; she had never felt it as she felt it to-day, but she knew that each time she came to the church to let her heart talk to her in the silence, this same pain had come, sooner or later, and that each time it was stronger and more real. She bent low under its weight, and the tears gathered and fell upon her hands and on the rough straw chair.
Julius Batiscombe had passed the day after the dinner in his boat, sailing far out to sea in the early morning, among the crested waves and the dancing sunbeams, smelling the salt smell gladly, and enjoying the sharp, cool spray that flew up over the bows. And at noon, when the west wind sprang up, he went about and ran homewards over the rolling water. All that day he was thinking of Leonora, but he was persuading himself that he could and would make her his friend, and that the sudden attraction he had felt for her was nothing but a little natural sympathy of minds, striving to assert itself.
He found these thoughts so agreeable and edifying that he determined to repeat the experience on the following day, and test their reality by their durability. But somehow the hours seemed longer, and before the wind turned, as it does every day in summer on the southern coast, he put the helm down, furled sail, and bade his men pull home. He was discontented, and, having no one but himself to consult, he thought he would try something else. Once in his room at the hotel he tried to sleep, but he could not; he tried to read, but everything disgusted him; he tried to write, and wrote nonsense. At six o'clock he went out for a walk. It was not unnatural, perhaps, that he should take the road toward Leonora's villa, between the high walls of the narrow lanes, for it was still hot, and the dust lay thick in the road. Besides, he knew that Leonora was away, and that consequently there would not be the temptation to call upon her. For in spite of his visions of friendship he felt an instinctive conviction that he ought not to see her. Consequently, as he strolled along the road, smoking a cigarette and studying the extremely varied types of the Sorrento beggar, he was conscious of a comforting assurance that he was not in mischief.
At the end of half an hour he was passing the gate of the Carantoni villa. He stopped a moment to look at the little vision of flowers and orange-trees that gleamed so pleasantly through the iron rails, in contrast to the dead monotony of stone walls in the lane. A servant was coming toward the gate, and seeing Batiscombe standing there, opened it wide and took off his hat. Batiscombe carelessly asked if the Signora Marchesa were at home, expecting to be told that she was gone to Rome.
"No, Signore," returned the man; "the Signora Marchesa is this minute gone out, it may be a quarter of an hour. Your excellency"—everybody is an excellency in the south—"will probably find her in the little church along the road, where she often goes." The man bowed, and Batiscombe turned on his heel, not wishing to talk with him. But he turned toward the church.