The travellers who run over our land and see our women laughing with wide-opened rose-red mouths upon their balconies at Berlingaccio or at Pentolaccia can never understand the immense, the inconsolable, desolation of dulness which weighs on the lives of these women in the little towns of the provinces and the country-houses of the hills and plains. They have the priest and the chapel; that is all.
In Italy we have no choice between the peasant-woman toiling in the ploughed fields, and growing black with the scorch of the sun, and bowed and aged with the burdens she bears, and the ladies who live between the alcove and the confessional, only going forth from their chambers by night as fireflies glisten, and living on secret love and daily gossip. What can these do in their gaunt, dull villas—they who detest the sough of the wind and the sight of a tree, who flee from a dog and scream at a tempest, who will not read, and whose only lore is the sweet science of the passions?
This I came to know later. All I saw that day, as I tramped around it wet and cold, was the gloomy evil shadow of the great place that had once been a fortress, the barred and shattered windows, the iron-studded doors, the grass-grown bastions. She had made me kill Phœbus, and yet I only lived to see her face again.
Sometimes I think love is the darkest mystery of life: mere desire will not explain it, nor will the passions or the affections. You pass years amidst crowds and know naught of it: then all at once you meet a stranger's eyes, and never again are you free. That is love. Who shall say whence it comes? It is a bolt from the gods that descends from heaven and strikes us down into hell. We can do nothing.
I went home slowly when evening fell. I had seen her eyes across the crowd in Orte once, and once across the pool that was the Vadimon, and I was hers for evermore. Explain that, ye wise men, who in your pride have long words for all things. Nay, you may be wise, but it is beyond you.
My mother and I spoke but little at this time. That home was a sad one: the death of the child and the absence of long years had left a chill in it. We ate together, chiefly in silence: it was always a pain to her that I was but Pipistrello the gymnast—not a steadfast, deep-rooted, well-loved citizen of Orte, with a trade to my hand and a place in church and market. Every day she thought I should wander again; every day she knew my savings shrank in their bag; every day she heard her neighbors say, "And your Pippo? will he not quiet down and take a wife and a calling?"
Poor mother! Other women had their sons safe stay-at-homes, wedded fathers of children, peaceable subjects of the king, smoking at their own doors after the day's work was done. She would have been so blessed had I been like them—I, who was a wrestler and a roysterer, a mere public toy that had broken down in the sight of all Orte. My father had never failed as I had failed. He had never killed a child that trusted in his strength: he had fallen himself and died. That difference between us was always in her eyes. I saw it when I met them; and she would make up little knots of common flowers and carry them to the tiny grave of Phœbus, my victim. Once I said to her, "I could not help it: I would have given my life to save him." She only replied, "If you had consented to bide at home the child would be living."
Nay, I thought, if she had not looked at me—But of that I said nothing. I kept the memory of that woman in my heart, and went night and day about the lake and the river and the marshes of Sant' Aloïsa. Once or twice I saw Taddeo Marchioni, the old count—a gray, shrunken, decrepit figure of a man, old, with a lean face and a long hard jaw—but of her, for days that lengthened into weeks, I saw nothing. There are fish in the Lagherello. I got the square huge net of our country, and set it in the water as our habit is, and watched in the sedges from dawn to eve. What I watched for was the coming of the vision I had once seen there: the fish came and went at their will for me.
One day, sick of watching vainly, and having some good fish in the net, I dragged them out into the reeds, and pushed them in a creel, and shouldered them, and went straight to the gloomy walls of Sant' Aloïsa. There were no gates: the sedges of the low lands went along the front of the great pile, almost touching it. Around it were fields gray with olives, and there was neither garden nor grass-land: all had been ploughed up that was not marsh and swamp.
The great doors were close fastened. I entered boldly by a little entrance at the side, and found myself in the great naked hall of marble, empty and still and damp. There was a woman there, old and miserable, who called her master. Taddeo Marchioni came and saw the fish, and chaffered for them with long hesitation and shrewd greed, as misers love to do, and then at last refused them: they were too dear, he said. I threw them down and said to him, "Count, give me a stoup of wine and they are yours." That pleased him: he bade the serving-woman carry the fish away, and told me to follow him. He took me into a vaulted stone chamber, and poured with a niggard hand a glass of mezzo-vino. I looked at him: he was lean, gray, unlovely. I could have crushed him to death with one hand.