Stelio entered La Foscarina's house like a spirit. His mental exaltation changed the aspect of things. The hall, lighted by a galley lamp, appeared immense to him. The detached cabin of a gondola standing on the pavement near the door, startled him as if he had suddenly seen a coffin.
"Ah, Stelio!" exclaimed the actress, rising with a start and hastening toward him impetuously, with all the spring of her eagerness that had been repressed by expectation. "At last!"
She stopped before him suddenly, without touching him. The swift impulse vibrated in her visibly. She was like a wind when it falls. "Who has detained you from me?" was her thought, while her heart was filled with doubt; for in one instant she had discerned something about the beloved one that rendered him intangible to her—something strange and far-away in his eyes.
But he had found her most beautiful at the very moment when she sprang from the shadows, animated by a violence like that of the tempest sweeping the lagoons. The cry, the gesture, the sudden halt, the vibration of her body, the light in her countenance suddenly extinguished like a fire fallen to ashes, the intensity of her gaze, like the glow of battle, the breath that parted her lips as heat breaks open the lips of the earth—all these aspects of her real self showed a capability of pathos comparable only to the effervescence of natural energies, the power of cosmic force. The artist recognized in her the Dionysian creature, the living material, apt for receiving the rhythms of art, to be modeled according to poetic forms. And, because he saw her character as varying as the waves of the sea, he found inert the blind mask he thought to put on her face; the tragic fable through which she was to pass in sadness seemed narrow, and too limited was the order of sentiment whence she should draw her expressions, almost subterranean the soul she must reveal. His mental images were seized with a sort of panic, a fleeting terror. What could be that single work in the immensity of life? Æschylus composed more than a hundred tragedies, Sophocles still more. They had constructed a world with gigantic fragments lifted by their titanic arms. Their labor was as vast as a cosmogony. The Æschylian figures seemed still warm with ethereal life, shining with sidereal light, humid from the fertilizing cloud. The spirit of the Earth worked in the creators.
"Hide me, hide me! Do not ask me anything, and let me be silent!" he implored, incapable of concealing his perturbation, powerless to control the tumult of his disordered thoughts.
The woman's heart beat fast in the ignorance of fear.
"Why? What have you done?"
"I suffer."
"From what?"