"Let us go away from this place; let us go!" said La Foscarina, who had been looking through the windows at the park, where the golden bars of the setting sun alternated with bluish-green zones of shade. "We cannot breathe here," she added.
The air, in truth, was like that of a vault.
"Now we pass into the room of Maximilian of Austria," said the droning voice, "he took the dressing-room of Amélie de Beauharnais for his bedroom."
They crossed this apartment in a flood of crimson light. The sunlight struck on a crimson couch, flashed rainbows from a frail chandelier with crystal drops that hung from the ceiling and kindled perpendicular red lines on the wall. Stelio stopped on the threshold, evoking in his fancy as he did so, the pensive figure of the young Archduke, with blue eyes, that fair flower of Hapsburg fallen in a barbaric land one summer morning!
"Let us go!" begged La Foscarina again, seeing him still delay.
She hastened through the immense salon, painted in fresco by Tiepolo; the Corinthian bronze gate closing behind her gave forth a clang as resonant as the stroke of a bell, sending prolonged vibrations through space. She flew along, terrified, as if the whole palace were about to crumble and fall, and the light to fail, and she dreaded lest she should find herself alone among the shadows with these phantoms of unhappiness and death. As Stelio followed, through the space wherein the air was moved by her flight, between those walls enclosing relics, behind the famous actress who had simulated the fury of deadly passions, the desperate efforts of will and of desire, and the violent conflict of splendid destines on the stage of all lands, the warm blood in his veins grew chill, as if he were passing through a freezing atmosphere; he felt his heart grow cold, his courage flag; his reason for being lost its hold on his mind, and the magnificent illusions with which he had fed his soul, that it might surpass itself and his destiny, wavered and were dispersed.
"Are we still living?" he asked, when they found themselves in the air without, in the park, far from the unwholesome odor.
He took La Foscarina's hand, shook her gently, gazed into her eyes and tried to smile; then he drew her into the sunlight in the middle of the green meadow.
"What heat! Do you feel it? How sweet the grass is!"
He half-closed his eyes, that he might feel the sun's rays on his eyelids, and was once more filled with the joy of living. The woman imitated him, calmed by the pleasure her beloved showed; and she looked from under her half-closed eyelids at his fresh, sensuous mouth. They sat thus for some time, hand-in-hand, their feet resting on the warm grass. Her thoughts turned back to the Eugenean hills, which he had described, to the villages pink as the buried shells, to the first drops of rain on the tender leaves, Petrarch's fountain, to all things fair and pleasant.