The antithesis of the picture, bold, Medea-like, tall as a Pythoness, with hair of night, black flashing eyes and passion blent with ferocity, projected itself, like a materialization in a séance, from the air. He turned his head with a sensation of bodily presence, though he knew the one of whom he thought was then in Naples. If she should enter and find him with that ivory in his hand, what a rare sirocco would be let loose!
He tried to smile, but the old arrant raillery would not come. The miniature blotted out the figure of the Fornarina. Against his will, it suggested all the pure things that he had ever known—his youthful romance, his dreams, Ada, his child!
Holding it, he walked to a folded mirror in a corner of the wall and opened its panels. There had been a time when he had said no appetite should ever rule him; the face he saw reflected now wore the lines of incorrigible self-indulgence, animalism, the sinister badge of the bacchanal.
“Is that you, George Gordon?” he asked.
“IS THAT YOU, GEORGE GORDON?” HE ASKED. p. [178].
The ghosts drew nearer. They peered over his shoulders. He felt their fingers grasping at him. He cursed them. By what right did they follow him? By what damnable chance, ruled by what infernal jugglery, came this painted semblance to open old tombs? Something had awakened in him—it was the side that recollected, remorseless and impenitent but no longer benumbed, writhing with smarting vitality. Awake, it recoiled abashed from the voiceless vade retro of that symbol. What part had he in that purity whose visible emblem mocked and derided him? What comradeship did life hold for him save the hideous Gorgon of memory, the Cerberus of ill fame, spirits of the dark, garish fellows of the half-world—“they whose steps go down to hell!”
A fury, demoniac, terrible, fell on him. He seized the miniature, dashed it on the floor, stamped it with his heel and crushed and ground it into indistinguishable fragments.
Then he sprang up, and with an oath whose note was echoed by the tame raven croaking on the landing, rushed down the stairway and threw himself into his gondola.
The moon rose red as a house afire. Before it paled, he had passed the lagoon. In the dim light that presaged the sodden dawn he leaped ashore on the mainland, pierced the damp laurel thickets that skirted the river Brenta and plunged into the forest.