[CHAPTER IV]
He waited in vain during the days that followed for the promised note to tell him when he might see Elena again——So she did intend to make another appointment with him; the question was—where? At the Casa Zuccari again? Would she risk such an imprudence a second time? This uncertainty kept him on the rack. He passed whole hours in searching for some way of meeting her, of seeing her again. He went several times to the Hotel Quirinal in the hope of being received, but never once did he find her at home. One evening, he saw her again in the theatre with 'Mumps,' as she called her husband. Though only saying the usual things about the music, the singers, the ladies, he infused a supplicating melancholy into his gaze. She seemed greatly taken up by the arrangement of their house. They were going back to the Palazzo Barberini, her old quarters, but were having them much enlarged, and she was for ever occupied with upholsterers and decorators, giving orders and superintending the placing of the furniture.
'Are you going to stay long in Rome?' asked Andrea.
'Yes,' she answered—'Rome will be our winter residence.' Then, after a moment's pause—'You could give us some very good advice about the furniture. Come to the palace one of these days. I am always there from ten to twelve.'
He took advantage of a moment when Lord Heathfield was talking to Giulio Musellaro, who had just entered the box, to say to her, looking her full in the eyes.
'By all means,' she replied with perfect simplicity, as if she had not noticed the tone of his question.
The next morning, about eleven, he set off on foot to the Palazzo Barberini through the Via Sistina. It was a road he had often traversed before—and, for a moment, the impressions of those days seemed to come back to him, and his heart swelled. The fountain of Bernini shone curiously luminous in the sunshine, as if the dolphins and the Triton with his conch-shell had, by some interrupted metamorphose transformed themselves into a more diaphanous material—not stone, nor yet quite crystal. The noise of the building of new Rome filled all the piazza and the adjoining streets; country children ran in and out between the carts and horses offering violets for sale.
As he passed through the gate and entered the garden, he felt that he was beginning to tremble. 'Then I do love her still?' he thought to himself—'Is she still the woman of my dreams?'