“Poor thing, she suffers a great deal, sai. If I could but tell you what she tells me, when neither of you are there. I fear we were to blame in advising her to marry Alberto....”
“What does she say to you? Tell me.”
“Are you going out?”
“Right you are: I am off. If any one wants me, say I am out on business. One can’t breathe in the drawing-room; it smells like a sick-room.”
“They will soon be leaving us, and then....”
“I don’t mean that; you’ll tell me the rest to-night. Au revoir.”
To make matters worse, sometimes in the evening, when Lucia chose to be most beautiful, she would gaze at him with a look of calm and persistent provocation that was torture to him. And he tortured himself, for he had neither the habit of patience nor the phlegmatic capacity for conquering obstacles. His was the haste of one who is accustomed to live well and quickly—who cares rather for a reality to enjoy day by day than for an ideal to live up to. What was this torment of having Lucia within reach—beautiful, desirable, desired—and yet not his? He would struggle on undaunted, clenching those fists that were ready to knock something down; and then he would fall back, wearied to exhaustion, no longer caring for life, with the eternal refrain in his mind: “that it would always be the same; that there was no way out of it; that life was not worth having.”
At night, it was no longer possible to pass an hour in the balcony. If the bed only creaked, Caterina awoke and inquired:
“Do you need anything?”
“No,” was the curt reply. Sometimes he did not answer at all. Then she fell asleep again, but her sleep was light. He knew that had he gone out on the balcony Caterina would soon have followed him, in her white wrapper—a tiny, faithful, loving shadow, ready to watch with him if he could not sleep. Oh! he knew her well, Caterina. He had taken the measure of the calm, deep, provident, almost maternal affection that welled over in the little heart. At times, when her head rested trustfully against his broad chest, as if it had been a haven of rest, an immense pity, a despairing tenderness for the little woman whom he no longer loved, stole upon him. All that was over. Finis had been written and the volume closed. But from this very pity and tenderness arose more potent his love for Lucia, who slept or watched two rooms away from him. Some nights he could have run his head against the walls to knock them down. He felt a seething in his brain that made him capable of anything. At last he lighted on the desperate remedy of talking to his wife of Lucia whenever they were alone. Caterina, who was desirous of awakening her husband’s interest in her friend, was fond of speaking of her. In a measure, Lucia’s personality modified Caterina’s temperament; her fantasy exercised a certain influence on her. Caterina proved this by her ingenuous employment of metaphor—she with whom it was unusual—when her talk ran on Lucia. To tell the truth, Andrea was rather unskilled in interrogatory, and in veiling a too acute curiosity; but Caterina was no expert in such matters. She talked on, in her quiet way, a gentle, continuous flow of words. It was at night, before going to sleep, that these conversations took place. She told him of Lucia’s mystico-religious mania; how she had turned the whole College topsy-turvy with her penances, her ecstasies, her tears during the sermons, her faintings at the Sacraments; she had even worn a hair-shift, but the Directress had taken it away from her because it made her ill. She told him of her strange answers, and of the fantastic compositions that excited the whole class; of the strange superstitions that tormented her. Sometimes, in the dead of the night, Lucia used to get out of bed and come and sit by hers (Caterina’s), and weep, weep silently.