These great old villas in the lone places of Italy are usually full at least of pleasant life—of women hurrying to the silk-worms and the spinning and the linen-press, of barefooted men loitering about on a thousand pleas or errands to their master. But Sant' Aloïsa was silent and empty.
Passing an open door, I saw her. She was sitting, doing nothing, in a room whose faded tapestries were gray as spiders' webs, and she was beautiful as only one woman is here and there in a generation. She looked at me, and I thought she smiled.
I went out with my brain on fire and my sight dim. I saw only that smile—that sudden, momentary smile whose fellow had brought death to little Phœbus. And I felt she had known me again, though she had seen me but once, in my spangled coat of velvet and silver, and now I had my legs bare to the knee, and was clad in a rough blue shirt and woollen jacket, like any other country-fellow upon Tiber's side.
As I was going out the serving-wench plucked my sleeve and whispered to me, "Come back a moment: she wishes to see you."
My heart leaped, then stood still. I turned back into the house, and with trembling knees went into that chamber where the dusky tapestry mouldered on the walls. She looked at me, sitting idly there herself in the bare, melancholy room—a woman with the face of our Titian's Venus.
"Did the child die?" she asked.
I stammered something, I knew not what.
"Why did you tremble that day?" she said, with the flicker of a smile about her lovely mouth: "you look strong—and bold."
How the words had courage and madness enough to leap to my lips I know not, but I do know I said to her, "You looked at me."
She frowned a moment: then she laughed. No doubt she had known it before. "Your nerves were not of iron, then, as they should be," she said carelessly. "Well! the people wanted to see something die. They always do: you must know that. Bring more fish for my husband to-morrow. Now go."