"I'm going for the Avanti,"[9] he said, moving away; "make haste! it's half-past seven."
Left alone, Regina experienced a sort of crisis, as on the evening two years ago when she had been to the Grand Hotel.
"Ah!" she thought, putting on her home evening dress; "The moment he comes in I'll say to him, 'It's time to end this business! I am moving away—in reality this time! I don't wish you to visit her at Albano. I don't wish you ever again to go to her house. I will never go to it myself. End it, Antonio! End it! end it! Don't you see I am gnawing my heart out? Or is it that you do see and don't care? Why don't you care? At least tell me why! Why do you act like this? I don't know how to bear all these superfluities, these silk petticoats, chiffons, which you have bought me with that money. There! I fling them all from me—all! all! A garret is enough for me, a sack to dress myself in, black bread—but honour, Antonio, honour, honour!' Ah, they rob us even of our honour, even of that one gnawed bone! But you'll have to reckon with me, Madame! old viscous moon, blind and asthmatic personification of nocturnal vampires! Wrapped in your furs, isn't it enough that you've had an easy life, a soft life, which has corrupted you, body and soul, but you want pleasure also in your old age? You and your old, rich friends, taking advantage of the poor, of the poor and the young, who have been made tender by tears, by weariness and grief, just as you have been made soft by idleness and satiety!"
"All this rhetoric is very fine," she thought, presently, putting her clothes in order, "but the world belongs to the strong, and I—I am one of the weak. I am weak because I reason too much, while those people don't reason at all; they only enjoy. That deaf old witch has never thought. She has stolen my Antonio, and I—I have been torturing myself for a whole month thinking whether it is delicate to say to my husband, 'End it! End it!' But I will speak to-night! And he will retort, saying it was all done for me—to give me those things I demanded; and then—then what will happen? No; he won't reproach me at all! He isn't capable of it. We shall forgive each other. And then—what will happen? Is it true we can begin a new life? Yes; even a ruined house can be rebuilt. But it isn't the same house, and one can't live in it without constantly thinking of the horror of the ruin."
Antonio delayed in returning. The nurse also delayed. She was out of temper at present and inclined to take liberties, because she was soon to be dismissed. It was almost night. Regina gazed from the window, vaguely anxious about her child. Twilight still lingered in the lonely street, grass-grown like the streets of a deserted city. The gardens were odoriferous with roses. A few stars twinkled on the still blood-stained veil of the heavens.
And, notwithstanding her proud resolve, Regina was overcome with grief at the thought of abandoning that poetic street, every blade of whose grass had known the illusion of her happiness.
But she kept silence on this evening also. How could she help it? Caterina would not go to bed; she wanted to stay with her papa, whose golden moustache, beautiful eyes, beautiful scented hair, she admired prodigiously. Did Caterina see that her papa was beautiful? That cannot be known. But certainly she looked at his attractive countenance with great pleasure, and seemed to find special delight in touching the shaven face of Il Papaino with her little peach-blossom cheek. Antonio sang his favourite rhyme—
"Mousey doesn't care for cream,
Mousey wants to marry the Queen;
If the King won't let her go,
Mousey'll break his bones, you know."
Each time he repeated those lines Regina remembered, as in a troubled dream, the evening of her arrival in Rome. But to-night Caterina laughed and screamed with mad delight, and admired her papa more than ever; and then they talked together of so many things, of such secret things, comprehensible only to themselves! What could Regina do? Deprive Antonio, who had been working all day, of the pleasure of talking to his baby, wrest the little one from him, and send her away? She was not so cruel. When at last Caterina's big eyes became languid with sleep, and all her little body relaxed and sank, heavy and sweet like a ripe fruit, Antonio said—
"Now I am going out for a little."