'Won't you sit down?' Trifari asked the medium in a whisper.
'Thank you, I will,' he replied, letting himself down on a chair.
'Do you wish to sleep?'
'No, thank you.'
The doctor sat down, too, then, beside the table, putting one hand over his eyes as if to shield them from the light. There was deep, nocturnal silence. Outside the rain had ended; inside the long, gloomy vigil began.
CHAPTER XV
SACRILEGE—LOVE'S DREAM FLED
Bianca Maria Cavalcanti and Antonio Amati's love for each other had got stronger and sadder. Indeed, the secret sorrow gave some attractive flavour of tears to their passion; what had been an idyll between the innocent pious girl of twenty and the man of forty had acquired dramatic force and depth. Innocently, with the trustingness of hearts that love for the first time, they had dreamt of living, spending their life together, holding each other by the hand as they went on the long road; but Formosa's hostile face rose continually between them. In that troubled summer which had unhinged the Marquis di Formosa's mind more, the position of the lovers had gone on getting worse, together with the old lord's increasing moroseness. People cannot live with impunity alongside of physical or moral infirmities, even if they are heroic or indifferent; and neither Bianca Maria nor Antonio Amati was selfish or indifferent. They did not manage to shut themselves from moral contact with Carlo Cavalcanti, nor to give themselves up entirely to their deep love. Moral as well as physical fevers fill the air with miasma; there is an infectious warmth that sets the atmospheric elements out of balance and poisons the air subtly and heavily, so that the healthiest have to bend their heads, feeling oppressed and suffocated. They were good, honest, and pitiful, their souls were purely filled with love, so that no acid, however powerful, could corrode the noble metal; but the air around was poisoned by Carlo Cavalcanti's moral disease, and they could hardly exist now in that atmosphere.
It was an unhealthy summer. Whatever means of persuasion Dr. Amati used, he could not get Carlo Cavalcanti to send his sickly daughter to the country. Stronger than any argument or anger was the obstinacy of the hardened gambler; he looked on his daughter as a spiritual source of lottery numbers, and put her to torture, so that she might fall into visions again, and he with his disturbed brain, like an old fool, tried to force her to see. When the doctor, in despair and anger, insisted she must go to the country, the Marquis, who felt no shame now in asking money from him, promising always to give it back, took up a tone of offended pride, and the doctor, intimidated at bottom by the old lord's grand airs, gave up insisting, and put off the attack till another time. Once he very nearly got Carlo Cavalcanti to go away too, with his daughter, by describing to him the healthy freshness of this out-of-the-way country place, and the old noble almost got ready to start. But he must have made inquiries, and found out that in that small village there was no lottery shop; it was necessary to write or telegraph to Campobasso. Even the telegraph-office was in another village; there were endless difficulties in playing a ticket, and he must have felt at that time more than ever chained to Naples, to the company of gamblers, and to Don Crescenzio's lottery shop. He bluntly refused to go, without giving any reason. The girl bent her head before his decision; she had always obeyed him, and she could not rebel. Amati trembled with rage, angry with her as well; but at once a great pity subdued him. The poor, innocent, suffering girl was wasting away; she could not bear that her lover should refuse to submit. She gazed at him so earnestly with astonished sad eyes that he forgave her for her filial submission.