On meeting, a few hours before in that same place, both had experienced, mingled with an ineffable happiness, a certain secret anguish, like that which two friends feel, after a long separation, on recognizing each other in a prison, on the morning of execution, unconscious accomplices of a fatal crime, and victims of the same persecution. One might also say that the sad joy with which Tito and Elena recognized each other, was equal to the bitter pleasure which the corpse of a jealous husband would experience (if corpses feel) in the tomb, on hearing the door of the cemetery open at night, knowing that it is his wife whom they are bringing to inter. “So you are here!” the poor corpse would say; “it is now four years that I have been alone, thinking of what you were doing in the world, you, so beautiful, so unloving, that you discarded your mourning the very year of my death. You have waited long; but you are here, and if love is no longer possible between us, neither is infidelity or forgetfulness. We belong to each other negatively. Although nothing unites us, we are united, because nothing can separate us. For the jealousies, uncertainties, anxieties of life, you have substituted an eternity of love and remembrance. I pardon you all.”
These impressions, softened in the gentle characters of Tito and Elena, by her innocence, by his lofty intelligence, and by the exalted virtue of both, shone like funeral torches in the souls of the two lovers, by whose light they saw an illimitable future of peaceful love, which nothing could disturb or destroy, unless all that then passed was but a fugitive dream.
They gazed at each other for a long time with fervent idolatry. Elena’s blue eyes lost themselves in the dark orbs of Tito, as the high heaven her brightness in the utter darkness of our nights; whilst his melted in the fathomless transparency of the pure celestial blue of hers, lost, as are sight, idea, and even sentiment, when attempting to measure infinite space.
So, perhaps they would have remained for eternity, had not Death attracted Tito’s attention.
“What do you wish?” asked the youth.
“That thou lookest upon her no longer.”
“Ah! you love her!” exclaimed Tito, with indescribable anguish.
“Yes,” answered Death, gently.