It was like a Stygian landscape, like a vision of Hades, a region of shadows, mist, and water. Everything grew misty and vanished like spirits. The moon enchanted and attracted the plain, as it enchants and attracts the water, absorbing the vapors of earth with insatiable, silent thirst. Solitary pools shone everywhere; small, silvery canals were visible, glittering at uncertain distances. Earth seemed to be gradually losing its solidity, and the sky seemed to regard its own melancholy reflected in innumerable placid mirrors.
And here and there, along the banks of the stream, like the ghosts of a people disappeared, the statues passed and passed!
CHAPTER X
THE POWER OF THE FLAME
"Do you think often of Donatella, Stelio?" La Foscarina inquired suddenly, after a long silence, during which neither had heard anything but the sound of their own footsteps along the canal path of the Vetrai, illumined by the multi-colored lights from the fragile objects that filled the windows of the neighboring shops.
Her voice sounded harsh and strained. Stelio stopped suddenly, as one who finds himself confronted by an unexpected difficulty. His spirit had been roaming over the red and green isle of Murano, begemmed with flowers in her present desolate poverty, which seemed to blot out the memory of the joyous time when poets had sung her praises as "a sojourn for nymphs and demigods." He had been thinking of the famous gardens where Andrea Navagero, Cardinal Bembo, Aretino, Aldo, and their learned followers, rivaled one another in the elegance of their Platonic dialogues, lauri sub umbra. He had been thinking of convents, luxurious as boudoirs, inhabited by little nuns dressed in white camelot and laces, with curls on their temples, and necks uncovered, after the fashion of the ancient honored courtesans, given to secret loves, much sought after by wealthy patricians, with such euphonious names as Ancilla Soranzo, Cipriana Morosini, Zanetta Balbi, Beatrice Falier, Eugenia Muschiera, pious instructors in the ways of love. His changeful dreams were accompanied by a plaintive little air, a forgotten dance measure, in which the faint soul of Murano tinkled and whispered.
At this abrupt question, the air fled from his memory, all imaginings were dispersed, the enchantment of the old life vanished. His wandering mind was called back, and came with reluctance. He felt beside him the throbbing of a living heart, which he must inevitably wound. He looked at his friend.
She was walking beside the canal, calm, with no sign of agitation, between the green water and the iridescence of the rows of delicate vases. Only her slender chin trembled slightly, between her short veil and fur collar.
"Yes, sometimes," he replied, after an instant of hesitation, recoiling from falsehood, and feeling the necessity to elevate their love above ordinary deceptions and pretensions, so that it should remain for him a cause of strength, not of weakness, a free agreement, not a heavy chain.
She pursued her way without wavering, but she had lost all consciousness of movement in the terrible throbbing of her heart, which shook her from head to foot. She saw nothing more: all she was aware of was the nearness of the fascinating water.