“She hasn’t moved?”
“No.”
“I have made you your orangeade.”
“Have you made up your mind to sit up?”
“Yes, I shall stay here; you don’t mind?”
And as they were in the dark, but for the faint light of the lamp, she stood on tiptoe for him to kiss her. He went away as slowly as possible, and Caterina watched until dawn.
Henceforward, all the letters ended with, “Take me away;” all of them were despairing.
Lucia wrote with such tragic concision, that he feared to open her letters. There was nothing in them but crime, malediction, suicide, death, eternal damnation, hellish remorse, teeth chattering, fever, burning fire. She was afraid of God, of man, of her husband, of Caterina, of Andrea himself; she felt degraded, lost, precipitated into a bottomless pit. “To die, only to die!” she exclaimed, in her letters. And she appeared so truly miserable, so really lost, that he accused himself of having ruined a woman’s existence, and craved her forgiveness, as if she had been a victim and a martyr. “I am your assassin; I am your executioner; I am your torment,” wrote Andrea, who had adopted the formulas of her emphatic style, with all its fantastic lyricism.
October was drawing to an end. One Sunday, at table, Lucia calmly announced that they would be leaving on the following Tuesday, despite the popular dictum.[2]