The actress was smiling, her face illumined by the magic fire. She was suddenly possessed by that singular gayety of hers which Stelio knew well, and which, because of its effect of incongruity with her usual pose, suggested to him the image of a dark, closed house where violent hands had suddenly opened on rusty hinges all the doors and windows.
"We must praise Ariadne," he replied, "for having uttered, in all this harmony, the most sublime note."
Stelio said those flattering words only to induce the fair singer to speak, only through a desire to know the timbre of that voice when it descended from the heights of song. But his praise was lost in the reiterated clamor of the crowd, which overflowed on the Molo, making a longer stay impossible. From the bank, Stelio assisted the two friends into their gondola; then he sat down on a stool at their knees, and the long, dentellated prow sparkled, like all else, in the magic fire.
"To the Rio Marin, by the Grand Canal," La Foscarina ordered the gondolier. "Do you know, Effrena, we are to have at supper some of your best friends: Francesco de Lizo, Daniele Glauro, Prince Hoditz, Antimo della Bella, Fabio Molza, Baldassare Stampa"—
"Then it will be a banquet?"
"But not, alas! like that of Cana."
"And will not Lady Myrta, with her Veronese greyhounds, be there?"
"Rest assured that we shall have Lady Myrta. Did you not see her in the hall? She sat in the first row, lost in admiration of you."
Because they had looked into each other's eyes as they spoke, a sudden emotion seized them. The remembrance of that full twilight hour on the water that rippled beneath their oar filled their hearts with a wave of troubled blood; and each was surprised by a swift return of the same agitation felt when leaving the silent estuary already in the power of shadow and death. Their lips refused to utter vain, light words; their souls refused to make the effort to incline themselves through prudence toward the passing trivialities of the superficial life, which now seemed worthless to both; and their spirits became absorbed in the contemplation of the strange fancies that rose from their inmost thoughts in a garb of indescribable richness, like the heaped-up treasures the streams of light seemed to reveal in the depths of the nocturnal waters.
And, because of that very silence, they felt the presence of the singer weigh heavily upon them, as in the moment when her name had first been spoken between them; and little by little the oppression became intolerable. Although Stelio was seated close to her, she appeared no less distant than when she rose above the forest of instruments; she was as absent and unconscious as she had been when her voice soared high in song. She had not yet spoken.