“This evening? At the ball?” he insisted, still more sharply.
“This evening at the ball,” she assented, growing very pale.
But pity, sentiment without strength, was already extinguished in Marco’s heart, and there was substituted, as in every heart unjustly suspected, a dull and cruel indignation. He shrugged his shoulders, took his fur coat and hat, and left with a dry, “Good-night, Vittoria.”
She had no strength to reply. With difficulty she closed the door of her big room where she was alone, desperately alone. She dared not weep, for fear that he might return and find her weeping, for fear that, not being very far away, he might hear her weeping.
XVI
Maria Guasco wrote thus to Marco Fiore—
“Marco, this sudden and unexpected letter will not surprise you. You know already that it is not a love letter, because our souls united and understood themselves too intimately in that past which can never return, and they were too much agreed in feeling the irremediable end of their love for a sentimental misunderstanding ever again to happen between us. If anybody else, a stranger, were to lean over my shoulder, and read the first word written, he would at once have no other thought but this: ‘See, it was natural, she is writing to her lover, she has never ceased to love him.’ Let it be so. Not a short time has passed since we separated freely and voluntarily, overcome by anguish, but stronger than anguish itself, since the reason for our ardent and free union was at an end. Since it is now May it is nearly two years ago. It is a year since you married Vittoria, when, placing her little hand in yours, she will certainly have pardoned your long infidelity and desertion. Well, my friend, no one about me believes that I have ceased loving you with passion, not even those who know me well, such, for instance, as a faithful friend like Flaminia Colonna, not even a would-be lover like Gianni Provana, to give another instance. No one, and especially my husband, Emilio Guasco; he does not believe, can’t believe, never will believe that I have ceased to love you passionately.
“This is the cross that I have been carrying for a year, at first with energy and Christian courage, sustained by a burning desire for expiation, by a burning desire to repair the horrible suffering inflicted on others, to heal all the deep evil inflicted on others, and in fact with the great and lofty hope of giving all the happiness possible to the man who deserved it. Marco, how happily I embraced my cross at first, and how I suffered with humility and simplicity, like a child that feels it deserves all its punishment, or some self-effacing creature who performs every deep act of contrition! You know my pride, Marco; you know that it has always been my weapon of defence and attack in this war of life; you know that my pride has taken the place of many virtues and that, as it was perhaps too great and imperious, it formed also the source of all my sorrows. Well, Marco, I swear it, and I know you believe me, that I have every day thrown this pride at my husband’s feet, and my heart has been prostrated in an almost continual prayer for pardon. To accomplish what I had set myself for you, to accomplish all my vow of reparation I suffered so joyfully, but so bravely. At every fresh sting I did not bind the bleeding point, and from every new wound I let my blood gush forth, glad to suffer, glad to expiate, glad to be able by my secret and open sufferings to unfold and complete all my expiation, rejoicing to reach the goal of being a consolation to Emilio, of being, as of yore, the giver of his happiness. I have been intoxicated with the sacrifice, Marco, but now my intoxication has vanished. Alas, my friend, I see and know that it has been useless! My repentance has been in vain, and so have been all my acts of contrition, and the lowering of my pride. In vain, too, has been my desire to do good. Emilio is unhappier than ever, and I alone am the cause of his unhappiness. It is impossible for me, I swear, to make him happy even if I lived a hundred years, even if I died to-morrow. In life or death I can do nothing more for him—nothing, nothing.
“Listen, Marco, and see if it be not all irreparable. I didn’t understand at once, because I was infatuated with my fine hopes and desires of doing good; but now I know that all is irreparable. Do you know how long my husband’s pardon lasted? The fraction of an April evening in which he pronounced the sacred words which should absolve, cancel, and redeem. Immediately afterwards he despised himself and me, and the act of pardon seemed to him one of hypocrisy and lying humiliation. Later, when in one of our more furious crises, on reminding him that a Christian pardon is an act of renewed esteem, that Christian pardon should destroy the sin and purify the sinner, and that such an one should be loved as a new soul, he replied brutally: ‘Exactly; but Jesus who founded pardon was not married to an adulteress.’ What am I to say to him, Marco? The man loves me, longs for me, but at the same time he hates me. Never for an instant, understand, can he forget that I betrayed and abandoned him, and that for three years I was yours. He spies on me and makes me spy. He scrutinises every glance, he watches every action of mine. If I speak to him he doesn’t believe me; if I am kind he refuses my kindness. If my pity breaks out he understands at once, like all morbid hearts, that it is a question of pity and not of love, and he rejects my pity. He wrongs me and you with vituperation, and asks me to love him with passion as I loved you. But I can’t lie; I can’t, I can’t. I have never lied, and if I were to do so for a minute to save him and myself he wouldn’t believe me. What am I to say; what am I to do, Marco? I have said all; I have endured everything, and I don’t want to—I can’t—add anything else, my friend. I can’t write everything; my mind refuses to raise certain veils of shame. Let us leave it, let us leave it. My cross is so heavy on my shoulders that I am on the ground and breathless. What shall I say? What shall I do? Hasn’t all my repentance been useless? Hasn’t all my dedication been useless? And useless every abnegation? Whatever shall I do to-night? Whatever to-morrow? The man whom I have returned to comfort is, as far as I am concerned, in a state of sorrow and implacable agitation; this man whom I imagined so ingenuously and sweetly to make happy again, in spite of my sufferings, is still, and always will be, unhappy. After a terrible year, Marco, after a year of every experiment and attempt, in which I have consumed my will and weakened my energy, after a year in which I have seen all the good which was accumulated in my generous mind miserably dispersed, and day by day the sacred trust of doing good dissipated, I cry to you in my sadness and impotence, in my weariness and discouragement. I ask you whatever I shall do, Marco, with myself and my life, since it is of no further use but for evil? What shall I do with myself, inept for good, inept to give joy, and so involuntarily and fatally capable of evil?
“I am so lonely, Marco. When he is here he regards me with desire and anger. Both sentiments crucify and torture me, but I daren’t repress or combat either sentiment. I have become what I never was, a creature without will or object, a passive and resigned creature—I! I! think, Maria Guasco, a creature of resignation! Often he avoids me for days together, and I don’t know what to do with my dried-up and deserted existence. I do nothing, never, because I fear that all may be for the worse, even when he ignores me—ignores me! Sometimes he leaves Rome and goes away for two or three days, for a week. I don’t know where—in his distrust he won’t say. I don’t know when he returns, as he doesn’t wish it to be known. He enters suddenly and looks for me, as if he must always find me in sin, and I am always paralysed just as if my nerves had been cut, just as if a single gesture of mine may be an offence, or the pretext of an offence to him.