"Oh!" she exclaimed, blushing furiously, and with a gesture that asked to be told no more.
"Ah, I beg your pardon, Miss Ford," exclaimed Lucio with a new exaltation, "I beg your pardon, if I offend your chastity and scandalise your modesty. But since you are here, Miss Ford, and since I shall not see you again, or again have before me a good, upright soul like yours, and since you will never again see the wretch before you, let me tell you, in the bitterest, most terrible words, all my horrible misery! Miss May, God is right, religion is right; one must not commit adultery. He who commits this fascinating sin pollutes his life indelibly, destroys his happiness, sows ashes in his heart, and gathers the fruits of the Dead Sea and poison. One must not commit adultery. Ten years ago Beatrice Herz was so beautiful: I was so passionate! The intoxication that joined us and exalted was so incomparable! Ah, don't draw back, I beg of you; listen to me to the end. I don't wish to exalt error, but blame it; I wish not to raise up sin, but vilify it; I do not wish to tell to myself, now too late, what an abomination was that fraud, what a shame that betrayal; I only wish to cry out to others, unconscious, trusting blindly in themselves, what a death in love, what a death in life is adultery. We loved each other for a year, Beatrice and I; but for this year we threw away our youth, our happiness, our liberty. A year of sin, Signorina, is a year of servitude, of misery, of shame. Ah, I have never so much cursed and execrated my sin as when Lilian Temple appeared to me."
May Ford trembled, and started: her attention seemed more intense.
"Lilian! Lilian!" he exclaimed, rising, as if in a vision, as if holding out his arms to a phantom; "a creature of twenty, of rare beauty, all delicacy and grace; a loyal heart, proud and sweet, like a precious treasure opened for me; a loving, pure soul, a flower of freshness and virginity. Purity and candour, love and ardour together—Lilian! Lilian! To me this creature came full of every fascination; to me she came with her eyes that in their blueness opened to me the way of heaven, with her lips that smiled at me and called me, with hands that were stretched out to me laden with every gift, her beautiful hands that wished to give me everything, even the very hands themselves; to walk with her for ever, step by step, until death. Lilian! Lilian! You who came to me to be mine, you who were given to me by God, you who were mine—Lilian.... And I believed that I could deserve you, that I could have you; Lilian, whom I gathered that you might be my bride, my companion, my good—so I believed."
Like a child, Lucio Sabini threw himself on a sofa, his head buried in his arms, as he wept and sighed.
Miss May Ford rose and went to him, but without bending or touching him, she said anxiously:
"Why are you crying?"
He jumped up and raised his head, showing a face convulsed with grief and furrowed by tears.
"I weep because I have been deceived, because I am profoundly disillusioned; because I deceived an innocent girl, because I lied to myself, in suddenly believing myself free to love and be loved; because I erred, believing that there was still time to live, to live again—while it was too late."
"Too late?"