'Whenever you like.'
'Then dine with me to-night at the Club—about eight o'clock. That will give us an opportunity of seeing after the other affair too.'
'All right. Good-bye, Goldbeard. Run!'
They parted in the Piazza di Spagna, at the foot of the steps, and as Elena came across the square in the direction of the Via due Macelli to go up to the Quattro Fontane, Secinaro joined her and walked on with her.
The strain of dissimulation once over, Andrea's heart sank within him like a leaden weight. He did not know how he was to drag himself up the steps. He was quite assured that, after this, Secinaro would tell him everything, and somehow this seemed to him a point to his advantage. By a sort of intoxication, a species of madness, resulting from the severity of his sufferings, he rushed blindly into new and ever more cruel and senseless torments; aggravating and complicating his miserable state in a thousand ways; passing from perversion to perversion, from aberration to aberration, without being able to hold back or to stop for one moment in his giddy descent. He seemed to be devoured by an inextinguishable fever, the heat of which made all the germs of human lust lying dormant in the hidden depths of his being flourish and grow big. His every thought, his every emotion showed the same stain.
And yet, it was the very deception itself that bound him so strongly to the woman he deceived. His mind had adapted itself so thoroughly to the monstrous comedy that he was no longer capable of conceiving any other way of satisfying his passion. This incarnation of one woman in another was no longer a result of exasperated desire, but a deliberate habit of vice, and now finally an imperious necessity. From thenceforth, the unconscious instrument of his vicious imagination had become as necessary to him as the vice itself. By a process of sensual depravity, he had almost come to think that the real possession of Elena would not afford him such exquisite and violent delight as the imaginary. He was hardly able to separate the two women in his thoughts. And just as he felt that his pleasure would be diminished by the actual possession of the one, so his nerves received a shock if by some lassitude of the imagination he found himself in the presence of the other without the interposing image of her rival.
Thus he felt crushed to the earth at the thought that Don Manuel's ruin meant for him the loss of Maria.
When she came to him that evening, he saw at once that the poor thing was ignorant as yet of her misfortune. But the next day, she arrived, panting, convulsed, pale as death. She threw herself into his arms, and hid her face on his breast.
'You know?' she gasped between her sobs.
The news had spread. Disgrace and ruin were inevitable, irremediable. There followed days of hideous torture, during which Maria, left alone after the precipitate flight of the gamester, abandoned by the few friends she possessed, persecuted by the innumerable creditors of her husband, bewildered by the legal formalities of the seizure of their effects, by bailiffs, money-lenders and rogues of all sorts, gave evidences of a courage that was nothing less than heroic, but failed to avert the utter ruin that overwhelmed the family.