"Dear, dear soul!" said Stelio, leaning toward her and lightly touching the pale cheek with his lips. "Lean on me; give yourself entirely to me; have confidence in me. Never will I fail you, never will you fail me. We shall find it—we shall find the true secret on which our love can rest forever, immovable. Do not be reserved with me. Do not suffer alone, nor hide your sorrows from me. When your heart swells with grief, speak to me. Let me believe that I can comfort you. Let us not hide anything from each other. I shall venture to recall to you a condition that you yourself made. Speak to me, and I will always answer you truthfully. Let me help you—me, who have received from you so much of good. Tell me that you do not fear to suffer. I believe your soul capable of supporting all the sadness of the world. Do not let me lose faith in that force of passion, whereby more than once you have seemed to me divine. Tell me you do not fear suffering.... I don't know.... I may be mistaken. But I have felt a shadow around you, like a desperate wish to withdraw yourself, to leave me, to find some end. Why? Why? And, just now, looking at all this terrible desolation that smiles at us, a great fear suddenly filled my heart—I thought that perhaps even your love might change like all things, and pass away into nothingness. 'You will lose me.' Ah, those words were yours, Foscarina! They fell from your own lips."
She did not answer. For the first time since she had loved him, his words seemed vain, useless sounds, moving powerless through the air. For the first time, he seemed to her a weak and anxious creature, bound by inexorable laws. She pitied him as well as herself. He asked her to be heroic, a compact of grief and of violence. At the moment when he attempted to console and comfort her, he predicted a difficult test, prepared her for torture. But what was courage worth, of what use was any effort? What were all miserable human agitations worth, and why think of the future, even of the uncertain morrow?
The Past reigned supreme around them, and they themselves were nothing, and everything was nothing.—We are dying; both of us are dying. We dream, and then we die.—
"Hush! Hush!" was all she said, softly, as if they were in a cemetery. A slight smile touched her lips, and rested there as fixedly as the smile on the lips of a portrait.
The wheels rolled on over the white road, along the shores of the Brenta. The stream, sung and praised in the sonnets of the gallant abbés in the days when gondolas laden with music and pleasure had glided down its current, had now the humble aspect of a canal, where the iris-necked ducks splashed in flocks. On the damp, low plain the fields smoked, the bare trees showed plainly, their leaves rotting on the damp earth. A slow, golden mist floated above an immense vegetable decay that seemed to encroach even upon the walls, the stones, the houses, seeking to destroy them like the leaves. The patrician villas—where a pale life, delicately poisoned by cosmetics and perfumes, had burned itself out in languid pastimes—were now in ruins, silent and abandoned. Some had an aspect like a human ruin, with empty spaces that suggested hollow orbits and toothless mouths; others were crumbling, and looked as if ready to fall in powder, like a dead woman's hair when her tomb is opened; and here, there, everywhere, rose the still surviving statues. They seemed innumerable, like a scattered people. Some were still white, others were gray or yellow with lichens, or green and spotted with moss. They stood in all sorts of attitudes: goddesses, heroes, nymphs, seasons, hours, with their bows and arrows, their wreaths, cornucopias, and torches, with all the emblems of power, riches and pleasure, exiled now from fountains, grottoes, labyrinths, arbors, and porticoes: friends of the greenwood and the myrtle, protectors of fleeting loves, witnesses of eternal vows, figures of a dream far more ancient than the hands that had carved them, and the eyes that had contemplated them in the ruined gardens. And, in the sweet sunlight of the dying season, their shadows were like the shadows of the irrevocable Past—all, all that loves no longer, laughs and weeps no more, never will live, never will return. And the unspoken word on their marble lips was the same that was expressed in the fixed smile on the lips of the world-weary woman—NOTHING!
CHAPTER IX
THE LABYRINTH
But that day they were to pass through other shadows, to know other fears.
Henceforth the tragic meaning of life filled both their minds, and they tried in vain to banish the physical sadness which from moment to moment made their spirits more clear yet more disturbed. They clasped each other's hand, as if they were groping in dark, dangerous places. They spoke little, but often they gazed into each other's eyes, and the look of the one poured into that of the other a wave of confused emotion, the mingling of their love and horror. But it did not calm their hearts.
"Shall we go farther?"