'Oh look, look, Delfina!' her mother exclaimed in the excited tones of one who suddenly comes upon a thing of beauty.
Delfina had skilfully woven little sprays of orange blossom into a garland, and now, with the fancifulness of childhood, she was eager that it should encircle the head of the marble deity. She could not reach it, but did her best to accomplish her object by standing on tip-toe and stretching her arm to its utmost extent; her slender, elegant and vivacious little figure offering a striking contrast to the rigid, square and solemn form of the statue, like a lily-stem against an oak. All her efforts were, however, fruitless.
Smilingly, her mother came to her aid. Taking the wreath from the child's hand, she placed it on the pensive brows of the god. As she did so, her eyes fell involuntarily upon the inscriptions.
'Who has been writing verses here.—You?' she asked, turning to Andrea in surprise and pleasure. 'Yes—I recognise your hand.'
Forthwith, she knelt upon the grass to read with eager curiosity. While Donna Maria read the words in a low voice, Delfina leaned upon her mother's shoulder, one arm about her neck, cheek pressed to cheek. The two figures thus bending over the pedestal of the tall flower-wreathed statue, in the uncertain light, surrounded by the emblematical acanthus, formed a group so harmonious in line and colouring that the poet stood a moment lost in pure æsthetic pleasure and admiration.
But the next moment the old obscure sense of jealousy was upon him once more. The fragile little creature clinging to the mother, indissolubly connected with her mother's very being, seemed to him an enemy, an insurmountable obstacle rising up against his love, his desires, his hopes. He was not jealous of the husband, but he was of the daughter. It was not the body but the soul of this woman that he longed to possess, and to possess it wholly, undivided, with all its tenderness, all its joys, its hopes, its fears, its pain, its dreams—in short the sum total of her spiritual being, and be able to say—'I am the life of her life.'
But instead, it was the daughter who possessed all this incontestably, absolutely, continuously. When her idol left her side, even for a short time, the mother seemed to miss some essential element of her existence. Her face was instantaneously and visibly transfigured when, after a brief absence, that childish voice fell upon her ear once more. At times, unconsciously and as if by some occult correspondence, some law of common vital accordance, she would repeat a gesture of the child's, a smile, an attitude, a pose of the head. Again, when the child was in repose or asleep, she had moments of contemplation so intense that she seemed to have lost all sense of her surroundings and to have absorbed herself into the creature she was contemplating. When she spoke to her darling, every word was a caress, and the plaintive lines vanished from her mouth. Under the child's kisses, her lips quivered and her eyes filled with ineffable happiness like the eyes of an ecstatic at a beatific vision. If she happened to be conversing with other people or listening to their talk, she would appear to have sudden lapses of attention, momentary absence of mind, and this was for her daughter—for her—always for her.
Who could ever break that chain? Could any one ever succeed in conquering a part—even the very smallest atom of that heart? Andrea suffered as under an irreparable loss, some forced renunciation, some shattered hope. At this moment, this very moment, was not the child stealing something from him?
For Delfina was playfully constraining her mother to remain upon her knees. She hung with all her weight round Donna Maria's neck, crying through her laughter—
'No—no—no—you shall not get up!'