In the carriage, the cold was tempered by the pleasant warmth diffused by a metal foot-warmer, full of hot water. A bunch of white roses, snowy, moonlike, lay on the bracket in front of the seat. A white bear-skin covered his knees. Everything pointed to an intentional arrangement of a sort of Symphonie en blanc-majeur.
The clocks struck for the third time. It was a quarter to twelve. The vigil had lasted too long—Andrea was growing tired and cross. In Elena's apartments, in the left wing of the palace, there was no light but that which came from outside. Was she coming? And if so, in what manner? Secretly? Under what pretext? Lord Heathfield was certainly in Rome—how would she explain her nocturnal absence? Once more the soul of the former lover was torn with curiosity; once more jealousy gnawed at his heart and carnal passion inflamed him. He thought of Musellaro's derisive suggestion about the husband, and he determined to have Elena again at all costs, both for pleasure and for revenge. Oh, if only she would come!
A carriage drove through the gates and into the garden. He leaned forward to look at it. He recognised Elena's horses and caught a glimpse inside of the figure of a woman. The carriage disappeared into the portico. He remained perplexed. She had been out then? She had returned alone? He fixed a scrutinising gaze upon the portico. The carriage came out, passed through the garden and drove away towards the Via Rasella; it was empty.
It wanted but two or three minutes to midnight and she had not come!
It struck the hour. A bitter pang smote the heart of the deluded watcher. She was not coming.
Unable to see any cause for her having missed the appointment he turned upon her in sudden anger; he even had a suspicion that she might have wished to inflict a humiliation, a punishment upon him, or else that she had merely indulged in a whim in order to inflame his desire afresh. The next moment he called to the coachman—
'Piazza del Quirinale.'
He yielded to the attraction of Maria Ferrès; he abandoned himself once more to the vaguely tender sentiment which, ever since his visit in the afternoon, had left, as it were, a perfume in his soul and suggested to him thoughts and images of poetic beauty. The recent disappointment, proving, as he considered, Elena's malice and indifference, urged him more strongly than ever towards the love and goodness of the other. His regret for the loss of so beautiful a night increased, under the influence of the vision he had dreamed just now. And, truth to tell, it was one of the most enchanting nights Rome had ever known; one of those spectacles that oppress the human soul with deep sadness, because they transcend all power of admiration, all possibility of human expression.
The Piazza del Quirinale, magnified by the all-pervading whiteness, lay spread out solitary and dazzling, like an Olympian acropolis above the silent city. The edifices surrounding it reared their stately proportions into the deep sky; Bernini's great portal to the royal palace surmounted by the loggia offered an optical delusion by seeming to detach itself from the building and stand out all alone in all its unwieldy magnificence, like some mausoleum sculptured out of a meteoric block of stone. The rich architraves to the Palazzo della Consulta were curiously transformed by the accumulated masses of snow. Sublime amidst the uniform whiteness, the colossal statues seemed to dominate all things. The grouping of the Dioscuri and the horses looked bolder and larger in that light; the broad backs of the steeds glittered under jewelled trappings, there was a sparkle as of diamonds on the shoulders and the uplifted arm of each demi-god.
An august solemnity flowed from the monument. Rome lay plunged in a death-like silence, motionless, empty—a city under a spell. The houses, the churches, the spires and turrets, all the confusion and intermingling of Christian and Pagan architecture, resolved itself into one unbroken forest between the heights of the Janiculum and the Monte Mario, drowned in a silvery vapour, far off, infinitely immaterial, reminding one a little of a lunar landscape, calling up visions of some half extinct planet peopled by shades. The dome of St. Peter's, shining with a peculiar metallic lustre in the blue atmosphere looked gigantic and so close that one might have thought to touch it. And the two youthful Heroes, sons of the Swan, radiant with beauty in the vast expanse of whiteness as in the apotheosis of their origin, seemed to be the immortal Genii of Rome guarding the slumbers of the sacred city.