That smiling and weeping monster, with the moving tears, the enchanting voice, the bewitching flexibility and poetry of diction, that profound and feminine egoism, had absorbed all that surrounded her.... Caterina had pitied and loved her, Galimberti had loved and pitied her, Alberto had loved her, Andrea had loved her. She had stood in their midst and had drawn all the love out of them. At the languor of her countenance, all had languished; in her mystic prostration, all had suffered; her mock passion had burned deep into their flesh. Her egoism had battened on sacrifice and abnegation: yet they who loved her, loved her more and more. Whoever had approached her had been taken. Those whom she took never regained their freedom. Their souls blended with her soul, they thought her thoughts, dreamed her dreams, shuddered with her thrills; their bodies clung to her irrevocably, without hope of deliverance, receiving from her their health and their disease. And for the aggrandisement of this potent egoism, its glory and its triumph, Caterina beheld the misery of those who had surrounded Lucia: the fate of Galimberti, who was dying in a madhouse; the misery of his starving, despairing mother and sister; the lugubrious and dishonoured agony of Alberto, the husband she had abandoned; the dishonour of her father and her name; the ruin of Andrea, who left home, wife, and country to live a life of despair with Lucia; and the last most innocent victim, Caterina herself, bereft by Lucia of her all.
All these wrongs were irreparable. Horrible was the agony of the dying, who cried for Lucia and loved her; horrible the life of the survivors, who hated, cursed, and loved her. Irreparable the past, irreparable the present. Lucia towered above the ruins, enthroned, audacious, triumphant, formidable, casting on the earth the shadow of her inhuman egoism, obscuring the sky with it.
The dawn rose livid and frozen. Caterina was still there, stiffened in her chair, pressing the wedding ring that had been returned to her between her icy fingers. She uttered a cry of terror when, in the grey morning light, she saw the white bed, so smooth and cold; a cry so terrible that it did not sound human. She opened her arms and threw herself down on the spot where Andrea had slept—and wept upon that tomb.
V.
“You had better go to bed, Signora,” said Giulietta, pityingly; “you haven’t even undressed.”
“I was not sleepy,” replied Caterina, simply.
“Will you breakfast?”
“No.”
“At least, I may bring you your coffee?”