"Which is occasionally snapped up by the rich man's dog," put in Marianna.
The other laughed nervously.
"Just so!" she said.
The Princess raised her little yellow eyes to Regina's face and studied it for a moment, then turned to the lady at her side and talked to her in German. Regina fancied Madame had meant her to understand something by that look, something distressing, disagreeable, humiliating; and her laughter ceased.
"June 28, 1900.
"Antonio,—
"You will read this letter after I am gone, while you are still sad. You will perhaps think it dictated by a passing caprice. If you could only know how many days, how many weeks, how many months even, I have thought it over, examined it, tortured myself with it! If you knew how many and many times I have tried to express in words what I am now going to write to you! I have never found it possible to speak; some tyrannous force has always prevented me from opening my heart to you. I felt that by word of mouth we should never arrive at understanding each other. Who knows whether, even now, you can or will understand me! I fancied it would be easy to explain in a letter; but now—now I feel how painful and difficult it must be. I should have liked to wait till I was there, at home, to write this letter to you; but I don't want to put it off any longer, and above all I don't wish you to think that outside influences, or the wishes of others, have pushed me to this step. No, my best, dearest Antonio! we two by ourselves, far from every strange and molesting voice, we two, alone, shall decide our destiny. Hear me! I am going to try and explain to you my whole thought as best I can. Listen, Antonio! A few days ago I said, 'Suppose I were to fall ill and the doctors were to order me to return to my native air and to stay for a short time in my own country, would you forbid me to obey?' And you ended by confessing you would be the first to counsel obedience. Well, I am really ill, of a moral sickness which consumes me worse than any physical disorder; and I do need to return to my own country and to remain there for some time. Oh, Antonio! my adored, my friend, my brother, force yourself to understand me; to read deep into these lines as if you were reading my very soul! I love you. I married you for love; for that unspeakable love born of dreams and enchantments which is felt but once in a life. More than ever at this moment I feel that I love you, and that I am united to you for my whole life and for what is beyond. When you appeared to me there, on the green river-banks, the line of which had cut like a knife through the horizon of all my dreams, I saw in you something radiant; I saw in you the very incarnation of my most beautiful visions. How many years had I not dreamed of you, waited for you! This delicious expectation was already beginning to be shrouded in fear and sadness, was beginning to seem altogether vague when you appeared! You were to me the whole unknown world, the wondrous world which books, dreams—heredity also—had created within me. You were the burning, the fragrant, the intoxicating whirlwind of life; you were everything my youth, my instinct, my soul, had yearned for of maddest and sweetest. Even if you had been ugly, fat, poorer than you are, I should have loved you. You had come from Rome, you were returning to Rome—that was enough! No one, neither you nor any one not born and bred in provincial remoteness, can conceive what the most paltry official from the capital—dropped by chance into that remoteness—represents to an ignorant visionary girl. How often here in Rome have I not watched the crowds in Via Nazionale, and laughed bitterly while I thought that if the lowest of those little citizens walking there, the meanest, the most anæmic, the most contemptible of those little clerks, one with an incomplete soul, dropped like an unripe fruit, one of those who now move me only to pity, had passed by on that river-bank before our house—he might have been able to awaken in me an overwhelming passion! My whole soul revolts at the mere thought. But do not you take offence, Antonio! You are not one of those; you were and you are for me something altogether different. And now, though the enchantment of my vain dreams has dissolved, you are for me something entirely beyond even those dreams. You were and you are for me, the one man, the good loyal man, the lover, young and dear, whom the girl places in the centre of all her dreams—which he completes and adorns, dominating them as a statue dominates a garden of flowers.
"But our garden, Antonio, our garden is arid and melancholy. We were as yet too poor to come together and to make a garden. My eyes were blindfolded when I married you and came with you to Rome; I fancied that in Rome our two little incomes would represent as much as they represented in my country. I have perceived, too late, that instead they are hardly sufficient for our daily bread. And on bread alone one cannot live. It means death, or at least grave sickness for any one unused to such a diet. And love, no matter how great, is not enough to cure the sick one!
"Alas! as I repeat, I am sick! The shock of reality, the hardness of that daily bread, has produced in me a sort of moral anæmia; and the disease has become so acute that I can't get on any longer. For me this life in Rome is a martyrdom. It is absolute necessity that I should flee from it for a time, retire into my den, as they say sick animals do, and get cured—above all, get used to the thought, to the duty, of spending my life like this.
"Antonio! my Antonio! force yourself to understand me, even if I don't succeed in expressing myself as I wish. Let me go back to my nest, to my mother! I will tell her I am really ill and in need of my native air. Leave me with her for a year, or perhaps two. Let us do what we ought to have done in the first instance, let us wait. Let us wait as a betrothed couple waits for the hour of union. I will accustom myself to the idea of a life different from what I had dreamed. Meanwhile your position (and perhaps mine, too, who knows?) will improve. Are there not many who do this? Why, my own cousin did it! Her husband was a professor in the Gymnasium at Milan. Together they could not have managed. But she went back home, and he studied and tried for a better berth, and presently became professor at the Lyceum in another town. Then they were re-united, and now they're as happy as can be.
"'But,' you will say, 'we can live together. We have no lack of anything.'
"'True,' I repeat, 'we don't lack for bread; but one cannot live by bread alone,' Do you remember the evening when I asked you whether from our habitation you could see the Great Bear? You laughed at me and said I was crazy; and who knows! perhaps I am really mad! But I know my madness is of a kind which can be cured; and that is all I want, just to be cured—to be cured before the disease grows worse.
"Listen, Antonio! You also, unintentionally I know, but certainly, have been in the wrong. You did not mean it; it's Fate which has been playing with us! In the sweet evenings of our engagement, when I talked to you of Rome with a tremble in my voice, you ought to have seen I was the dupe of foolish fancies. You ought to have discerned my vain and splendid dream through my words, as one discerns the moon through the evening mist. But instead you fed my dream; you talked of princesses, drawing-rooms, receptions! And when we arrived in Rome, you should have taken me at once to our own little home; you shouldn't have put between us for weeks and months persons dear, of course, to you, but total strangers to me. They were kind to me, I know, and are so still; I did my best to love them, but it was impossible to have communion of spirit with them all at once. Above all, you ought to have kept me away from that world of the rich of which I had dreamed, which is not and never will be mine.
"Do you see? It's as if I had touched the fire and something had been burned in me. Is it my fault? If I am in fault it's because I am not able to pretend. Another woman in my place, feeling as I feel, would pretend, would apparently accept the reality, would remain with you; but—would poison your whole existence! Even I, you remember, I in the first months worried you with my sadness, my complaints, my contempt. I knew how wrong I was, I was ashamed and remorseful. If we had gone on like that, if the idea which I am broaching now had not flashed into my mind, we should have ended as so many end; bickering to-day, scandal to-morrow; crime, perhaps, in the end. I felt a vortex round me. It is not that I am romantic; I am sceptical rather than romantic; but everything small, sordid, vulgar, wounds my soul. I am like a sick person, who at the least annoyance becomes selfish, loses all conscience, and is capable of any bad action. Again I say, is it my fault? I was born like that and I can't re-make myself. There are many women like me, some of them worse because weaker. They don't know how to stop in time, on the edge of the precipice; they neither see, nor study how to avoid it. And yet, Antonio, I do care for you! I love you more, much more than when we were betrothed. I love you most passionately. It is chiefly on this account that I make the sacrifice of exiling myself from you for a while. I don't want to cause you unhappiness! Tears are bathing my face, my whole heart bleeds. But it is necessary, it is fate, that we separate! It kills me thinking of it, but it's necessary, necessary! Dear, dear, dear Antonio! understand me. Beloved Antonio, read and re-read my words, and don't give them a different signification from what is given by my heart. Above all, hear me as if I were lying on your breast, weeping there all my tears. Hear and understand as sometimes you have heard and understood. Do you remember Christmas morning? I was crying, and I fancied I saw your eyes clouded too: it was at that moment I realised that I loved you above everything in all the world, and I decided then to make some sacrifice for you. This is the sacrifice; to leave you for a while in the endeavour to get cured and to come back to you restored and content. Then in my little home I will live for you; and I will work; yes, I also will bring my stone to the edifice of our future well-being. We are young, still too young; we can do a great deal if we really wish it. Neither of us have any doubts of the other; you are sure of me; I also am sure of you. I know how you love me, and that you love me just because I am what I am.
"Listen; after two or three weeks you shall come to my mother's as we have arranged. You must pretend to find me still so unwell that you decide to leave me till I am better. Then you shall return to Rome and live thinking of me. You shall study, compete for some better post. The months will pass, we will write to each other every day, we will economise—or, what is better, accumulate treasures—of love and of money. Our position will improve, and when we come together again we shall begin a new honeymoon, very different from the first, and it shall last for the whole of our life."
Having reached this point in her letter, Regina felt quite frozen up, as if a blast of icy wind had struck her shoulders. This she was writing—was it not all illusion? all a lie? Words! Words! Who could know how the future would be made? The word made came spontaneously into her thought, and she was struck by it. Who makes the future? No one. We make it ourselves by our present.
"I shall make my future with this letter, only not even I can know what future I shall make."
Regina felt afraid of this obscure work; then suddenly she cheered, remembering that all she had written in the letter was really there in her heart. Illusion it might be, but for her it was truth. Then, come what might, why should she be afraid? Life is for those who have the courage to carry out their own ideas!
It seemed needless to prolong the letter. She had already said too many useless things, perhaps without succeeding in the expression of what was really whirling in her soul. She rapidly set down a few concluding lines.