"Que faire?" he exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders. "I was so sad, so broken in bone and soul, as if I had fallen from a precipice, and had been dragged out half living. I was so bored. And poor little Livia was languishing in silence waiting for me. And did not my mother look at me with beseeching eyes every time I went to Terni? I married through sadness, fastidiousness, weakness, to make an end of everything, and, as you see, in spite of all my ardent love for Mabel Clarke I did not know how to be faithful to her for more than a year. The American girl had foreseen it—Mabel Clarke was stronger, wiser, more direct than I, and much better too. She humbled me in sending a rich gift to Livia on her wedding, and she invited us to America. Ah, how strange these women are!"
"She invited you to America? She writes to you?"
"Often, long letters. From the very first she wanted me to go to America to gain money with John Clarke, and she did not believe she would offend me by asking me."
They were both silent for a moment, absorbed and concentrated. Around them people began to leave the tables, as the shadows of dusk were falling from the sky on sea and beach and the flowered island; but they were unaware of it.
"Besides, dear Sabini," resumed Vittorio, with a degree of greater sarcasm, "I am less poor than I was formerly. Then I spent too much to find the heiress with the great fortune, to live grandly, and to travel. When I announced that I was marrying Livia, Uncle Costrucci, an old clerical, was moved, and let us have, for our natural lifetime, a beautiful suite of apartments in old Rome, in via Botheghe Oscure. Mamma has come to live with us, and her cousin, Farnese, made her a present of a carriage. Ours is a marriage which has been made by public subscription! We have our house and our carriage. Livia is so charming in her discreet toilettes, discreet in every fashion. I haven't to strive as I thought, I have not even been forced to work as I supposed. There is nothing of the heroic in me—a mediocre destiny, and a mediocre life!"
"Ah, Vittorio, you still suffer," said Lucio, in a deeply moved voice.
"In my amour-propre, I confess. Think, Lucio, how I have been treated—surrounded, knocked on the head like a lamb under calumnies, defamations and vituperations, in every land where international society gathers—and how I have been unable to cuff a single one of my adversaries. Think how rivers of ink have been poured out in the papers of two worlds to defame me, and how I have been unable to spit in the face of a single one of those journalists; think how I have been unable to defend myself or offer a fight, solely because I loved Mabel and Mabel loved me. And afterwards, Lucio, what an incurable offence to my amour-propre, this breaking off the marriage, which sanctions the calumnies, this breaking off ... and how everyone laughed at me afterwards, and if they do not laugh at Livia and me now it is because we are a quiet, modest ménage that lives in the shade—we are an insignificant couple now."
"Another man, Vittorio, would never have consented to breaking off the marriage."
"Another! I consented because I loved Mabel; I loved her like a child, like a Don Quixote, with such fire and devotion as to become a hero—and I so mediocre! Through love I renounced my every good, but of my own free will. Ah, if I had not loved her! If I had been a cold and interested man, even under the impulse of an amorous caprice; if I had kept my clearness of mind, even in flirting to extremes, how different everything would have been. If I had not loved her I could have fled with her ten times from the Engadine, and she would have been compromised and the marriage would have been inevitable. If I had not loved her I would not so ingenuously have allowed her to set out alone for America; if I had not loved her I would have provoked a duel at every defamation and reduced my defamers to silence. At the first injurious article of the American newspapers I would have gone over there to make them show cause in the law courts; if I had not loved her I should have been able to force her to keep her engagements, and I should have obtained her by force, her and her fortune; but I should have obtained her. I loved her, and I destroyed my happiness and my life."
With dreamy eyes, full of incurable sadness, he gazed at the Adriatic which was becoming intensely green, like an emerald, in the twilight. He added: