“Andrea mio, I love you.”
He appeared to collect his thoughts for a moment, and then breathed in her ear:
“Love, my love, my witch—I love you!”
Then he returned to his place. But Alberto wanted to know absolutely; if he didn’t, he should die of curiosity. Lucia, pretending to yield, confessed that she had said; “Alberto is as curious as a woman; let us tease him, poor fellow.” This incident amused the lovers immensely, but they did not repeat the experiment. They had other devices: there was the proffer of the arm—indoors, on the terrace, on the stairs, and fugitive clasping and light touches in the corridor. Sometimes, for an instant, the two heads were so close that they might have kissed. When Caterina was not there and Alberto happened to turn his back to them, they exchanged glances as intense as if there had been pain in them. When they spent the evening in the drawing-room, Lucia chose her position with infinite art. She sat in the shade behind Alberto, so that she might gaze her fill on Andrea, without attracting any observation.
Sometimes she opened her fan before her eyes, looking through its sticks. Now and then, when Alberto was away and Caterina bent over her sewing, Lucia’s great eyes flashed in Andrea’s face: the lids dropped immediately. All the evening Lucia maintained her air of melancholy, her tired voice and weary intonation. If for a moment she found herself alone with Andrea, she would rise, quivering with life, and cry, close to his face:
“I love you.”
She fell back exhausted, while he was like one dazed. Now they found a hundred ways of passing letters to each other, running the risk of discovery every time, but succeeding with amazing dexterity; hiding notes in balls of wool, handkerchiefs or books, in packs of cards, at the bottom of the box of dominoes, in a copy of music, under the drawing-room clock; in fact, wherever a scrap of paper could be hidden. Lucia’s eye indicated the place; Andrea watched his opportunity, took a turn round the room; then, when he reached the spot, abstracted the letter with a masterly ease, acquired by habit, and substituted his own for it. Under an assumed hilarity and noisy joking manner, he concealed the most ardent anxiety and a continual uneasiness. Without looking at Lucia, he studied her every movement; he, great lion though he was, acquired the feline habit of certain tiger-like gestures; he, who was frankness personified, became accustomed to profound dissimulation; he grew sagacious, cunning and wily, oblique of glance and of crouching gait. During the night he meditated the plan for the morrow, so that on the morrow he might give Lucia a letter, or grasp her hand. He prepared all the mock questions and departures, all the improvised returns, the business pretexts and fictitious appointments. During the night he rehearsed the lies that were to deceive Alberto and Caterina on the morrow. Continual prevarication gradually degraded his character and drowned the cries of his conscience, to which perfidy and veiled evil were naturally repugnant. He lent a new spirit to the letter of his doctrine, one steeped in mental restrictions and Jesuitical excuses.
But this same spiritual corruption that tainted every characteristic of his frank, loyal nature, these hypocritical concessions, this sentimental cowardice, bound him the more firmly to Lucia. The more he gave himself up to her the more he became penetrated by her influence, the more acutely did he feel the delight of his slavery and the exquisite bitterness of his subjugation. The sacrifice of his honesty, the greatness of all his renunciations, strengthened the fetters that bound him to her who inspired it. Although he was prepared for anything, and ever on the look-out for any new, infernal, love-inspired invention, that Lucia’s brain might devise, she always succeeded in amazing him. One morning they met under a portière, on the threshold of the drawing-room; she dropped the curtain, threw her arms round his neck, and flew past him into the room. He thought he must be dreaming, and could hardly restrain himself from running after her. One evening, while Alberto was half asleep and Caterina playing one of her eternal rêveries, she called him out to her on the balcony, under the pretext of showing him a star, and there in the corner had for a second fallen into his arms. Then she said, imperiously:
“Go away.”
In one of those moments he had murmured, with every feature quivering: