Too charming, alas! to remain unapproached by desire,—and too reckless, perchance, to resist!
With a jerk he reined in his steed.
Of a sudden, the fears that had been squirming below consciousness heaved up their heads and Francesco heard himself cry aloud:
"God! If one's lady of the stars should prove a wanton!"—
The uttered words struck cold upon his ear. He had stopped abruptly, throwing his open palm against the rough bark of a tree. The hurt mixed with the sound of his own voice.
Dismounting, he permitted the disturbed animal to graze in an adjacent meadow-land; then, invaded by the terror of the fact, he flung himself face downward, pressing his cheek into the wet grass, recalling every too significant word and look of the Proserpina of yore, thrilled in his senses by her last glance at him and troubled by a passion he despised. Slowly to the first pain, with which the image of his dream-lady faded, there succeeded another. The friend of his youth, the one woman he loved,—what was befalling her? Was she happy? Had the memory of the past faded from her mind? This pain was sharper than the other, though Francesco knew it not. It healed the pang of fleshly desire.
He called to his steed, mounted, and rode on with a new gravity. According to his curious wont in concrete experience, his relations with Ilaria became the index to wider questionings.
The old spell had been renewed, with a difference, and Francesco found himself trembling on the verge of a genuine passion. Through the mystic reverence which he sought to cultivate towards his lady flashed the allurement of the senses, and an occasional pang of reproach for his own cowardly surrender. He reproached himself bitterly for it, as he rode down the long hill that stretched in uneven rise and fall from Tivoli to Bracciano. Not that it troubled him, to find in his own love an earthly taint; many he knew who had struggled, had conquered, not without salt-tears. But to distrust the brightness of his lady's image; this surely in the annals of high love was a crime unparalleled. He tried to cast the evil thought aside, to exalt at once his love and his ideal. Breathing the morning air, the thing seemed possible. The situation helped; delicate enough to tickle his sense of honor, dramatic enough to absorb fancy.
The Ilaria of the ilex-wood grew dim as a fading fresco to Francesco's memory. He saw in her stead the little maid of the old castle of Avellino, whose waywardness, whose bright and ready gaiety had seemed to his more despondent temperament a gift of enchanting sweetness. Thinking of these things, dubious traits vanished from her image; she shone before his eyes, the piteous lady of his desire, and the devotion for which he longed rose ardent within him. It brought a fulness to the throat, to the eyes a smart which he coaxed into a tear. Then he rode on in a happier mood. The dark trees, which crowned the hill, were giving way as he descended to a wood of fresher green.