"Do you feel the heat? Are you getting warm?" he asked softly.
He approached and bent over the poor soul. She slept; the contraction of her face had relaxed, and the lines of her mouth were composed in the equal rhythm of sleep; a calm like that of death spread over her pale face. "Sleep! Sleep!" He was so moved by love and pity that he would have liked to transfuse into that slumber an infinite virtue of consolation and forgetfulness.
He remained standing on the rug, watching her, counting her respirations. Those lips had said: "I can do one thing that love alone cannot do." Those lips had said: "Do you wish me to take you to her? Do you wish me to call her to you?" He neither judged nor resolved, but let his thoughts scatter. Once again he felt the blind, indomitable forces of life whirling over his head, over that sleeping form, and also his terrible desire to cling to life. "The bow is named BIOS, and its work is death."
In the silence, the fire and the rain continued to talk. The voice of the elements, the woman sleeping in her sadness, the imminence of fate, the immensity of the future, remembrance and presentiment, all these things created in his mind a state of musical mystery wherein the yet unwritten work surged anew and illumined his thought. He listened to his melodies developing themselves indefinitely, and heard a personage in the drama say: "This alone quenches our thirst, and all the thirst in us turns eagerly toward this freshness. If it did not exist, none could live here; we should all die of thirst." He saw a country furrowed by the dry, white bed of an ancient river, dotted with bonfires which lighted up the extraordinarily calm, pure evening. He saw a funereal gleam of gold, a tomb filled with corpses all covered with gold, and the crowned corpse of Cassandra among the sepulchral urns. A voice said: "How soft her ashes are! They run between the fingers like the sands of the sea." Another voice said: "She speaks of a shadow that passes over things, and of a damp sponge that effaces all traces." Then night fell; stars sparkled, the myrtles breathed perfume, and a voice said: "Ah! Behold the statue of Niobe! Before dying, Antigone sees a stone statue whence gushes an eternal fountain of tears." The error of the age had passed away; the remoteness of centuries was abolished.
CHAPTER III
A FALLEN GIANT
One afternoon in November, Stelio returned on the steamer from the Lido, accompanied by Daniele Glauro. They had left behind them the thunder of the greenish waves of the Adriatic, the trees of San Niccolò despoiled by a predaceous wind, whirlwinds of dead leaves, heroic phantoms of departures and arrivals, the memory of the archers playing to win the scarlet ensign, and the mad rides of Lord Byron, devoured by the desire to surpass his own destiny.
"I too, to-day, would have given a kingdom for a horse," said Effrena, in self-ridicule, irritated by the mediocrity of life. "Not a cross-bow nor a horse in San Niccolò, not even the courage of an oarsman! Perge andacter! So here we are, on this ignoble gray carcass that smokes and seethes like a kettle. Look at Venice, dancing down there!"
The anger of the waves was extending to the lagoon. The waters were agitated by a violent wind, and the agitation seemed to reach to the foundations of the city, and the palaces, cupolas, and campaniles appeared to heave like vessels on the water. Clusters of floating seaweed showed their white roots; and flocks of sea-gulls circled in the wind, their strange, wild laughter echoing above the crested waves.
"Wagner!" Daniele Glauro said suddenly, in a low tone, touched with emotion, as he pointed at an old man leaning against the railing of a prow. "There he is, with Franz Liszt and Donna Cosima. Do you see him?"