The woman felt a chill run through the roots of her hair. Her fingers trembled round the crystal cup, wherein the colors of sky and water were blended.
"I believed that you yourself had chosen her. Your look was that of one who knows and foresees. I was struck by it."
By her keen torture, the woman realized how sweet a falsehood would have been. She wished that he would either lie or be silent. She measured the distance that lay between her and the canal—the water that swallows and lulls to sleep.
"There was something about her that was hostile to me. She remained to me obscure, incomprehensible. Do you remember the way she disappeared? Her image faded, and only the desire of her song remained. You yourself, who led her to me, have more than once revived the remembrance of her. You have seen her shadow even where she was not."
She saw Death itself. No other wound had gone deeper, had hurt her so cruelly.—I alone! I alone have brought it on myself!—And she remembered the cry that had brought this misery: "Go! She awaits you!" Suddenly the internal tempest seemed to become a mere hallucination. She thought herself non-existent, and wondered to see the glass shining in her hand; she lost all corporeal sense. All that had happened was only a trick of the imagination. Her name was Perdita. The dead Summer was lying in the depths of the lagoon. Words were words, that was all.
"Could I love her? Were I to see her again, should I desire to turn her destiny toward mine? Perhaps. But of what use would that be? And of what use would all the vicissitudes and necessities of life be against the faith that links us? Could you and I resemble commonplace lovers who pass their days in quarreling, weeping, and cursing?"
The woman gnashed her teeth. She had a wild instinct to defend herself, and to hurt him as in a hopeless struggle. A murderous desire flashed across her maddened brain.
—No, you shall not have her!—And the brutality of her tyrant seemed monstrous to her. Under the measured and repeated blows, she felt that she was like a man she had once seen on the dusty road of a mining town, prostrated by repeated blows on his head from a mallet in his enemy's hand. That hideous memory mingled with her mental torture. She sprang up, impelled by the savage force that filled her being. The glass broke in her convulsed hand, cut her, fell in a sparkling shower at her feet.
Stelio startled. The woman's motionless silence had deceived him, but now he looked at her and saw her at last; and once more he saw, as on that night in her room when the logs had crackled on the hearth, the expression of madness on her agitated face. He stammered some words of regret, but impatience boiled under his concern.