Throughout this scene I had forgotten the past, little by little, and had not once thought of the future. The voice of Lila, who went with me to the gate, roused me from my trance.
"O Signor Lelio!" she said to me, "you didn't keep your promise. You were not my mistress's father nor her friend to-night."
"It is true," I replied gloomily; "it is true, I have done wrong. But never mind, my child, to-morrow I will make up for it all."
The next day it was the same story, and so with the next and the next. But I felt that I was more deeply in love every day; and the sentiment which, on the first day, was simply an inclination to fall in love, had become a genuine passion on the third. Lila's heart-broken air would have told me so plainly enough, had I not discovered it first myself. All along the road I reflected upon the future of that love-affair, and I returned home pale and distressed. Checchina soon found out what was the matter.
"Poor boy!" she said, "I told you that you would weep before long."
And as I opened my mouth to remonstrate, she added: "If you have not wept yet, you soon will; and there is reason enough. Your position is a pitiful one, and, what is worse, absurd. You love a mere girl whom your pride forbids you to try to marry, and whom your delicate sense of honor deters you from seducing. You do not wish to ask for her hand, in the first place because you know that if she bestowed it on you she would make a tremendous sacrifice, and would expose herself for your sake to innumerable discomforts, and you are too generous to accept a happiness which would cost her so dear; secondly, because you dread being refused, and are too proud to run the risk of being treated with disdain. Nor do you want to take what you have determined not to ask for, and I am very sure that you would much prefer to go off and be a monk than to take advantage of the ignorance of a girl who trusts you. But you must decide on something, my poor fellow, if you don't want the end of the world to come and find you sighing for the stars and throwing kisses to the clouds. Let dogs bay at the moon; we artists must live at any price and every moment. So make up your mind."
"You are right," I replied gravely. And I went to bed.
The next night I went again to the rendezvous. I found the signora excited and in high spirits, as on the preceding night; but I was taciturn and gloomy for some time. She joked me at first on my carbonaro-like manner, and asked me laughingly if I was thinking of dethroning the pope or reconstructing the Roman empire. Then, as I did not reply, she gazed earnestly at me, and said, taking my hand:
"You are sad, Lelio. What is the matter?"
Thereupon I opened my heart to her, and said that my passion for her was a misfortune to me.