I trembled from head to foot. I had said this bold and insolent thing to her face, and she still bade me return!
No doubt had I been a man well born I should have fallen at her feet and sworn a midsummer madness: I should have been emboldened to any coarse avowal, to any passionate effrontery. But I was only a stroller—a poor ignorant soul, half Hercules, half fool. I trembled and was mute.
When the air blew about me once more I felt as if I had been drunk—drunk on that sweet yeasty wine of a new vintage which makes the brain light and foolish. She had bade me return!
That day my mother ate alone at home. When night fell it found me by the Lagherello. I set my nets: I slept in a shepherd's hut. I had forgotten Phœbus: I only saw her face. What was she like? I cannot tell you. She was like Titian's Venus. Go and look at it—she who plays with the little dog in the Tribune at Pitti: that one I mean. With all that beauty, half disclosed like the bud of a pomegranate-flower, she had been given to Taddeo Marchioni, and here for seven years she had dwelt, shut in by stone walls.
Living so, a woman becomes a saint or a devil. Taddeo Marchioni forgot or never knew that. He left her in his chamber as he left the figures of the tapestry, till her bloom should fade like theirs, and time write wrinkles on her as it wove webs on them. He forgot! he forgot! He was old and slow of blood and feeble of sight: she was scarcely beautiful to him. There were a few poor peasants near, and a priest as old as Taddeo Marchioni was; and though Orte was within five miles, the sour and jealous temper of her husband shut her up in that prison-house as Pia Tolomei was shut in the house of death in the Maremma.
That night I watched impatient for the dawn. Impatient I watched the daybreak deepen into day. All the loveliness of that change was lost on me: I only counted the hours in restless haste. Poor fools! our hours are in sum so few, and yet we for ever wish them shorter, and fling them, scarcely used, behind us roughly, as a child flings his broken toys.
The sultry morning was broad and bright over the land before I dared take up such fish as had entered my girella in the night and bend my steps to Sant' Aloïsa. Fever-mists hung over the cane-brakes and the reedy swamps; the earth was baked and cracked; everything looked thirsty, withered, pallid, dull, decaying: in the heats of August it is always so desolate wherever Tiber rolls. "Marchioni is out," said the old brown crone whom I had seen the day before. "But come in: bring your fish to Madama Flavia."
It was a strange, gaunt wilderness of stone, this old villa of the Marchioni. It would have held hundreds of serving-men—it had as many chambers as one of the palaces down in Rome—but this old woman was all the servitor it had, and in the grand old hall, with sculptured shields upon the columns of it and Umbrian frescoes in the roof, she spread their board and brought them their onion-soup and their dish of pasta, and while they ate it looked on and muttered her talk and twirled her distaff, day after day, year after year, the same. Life is homely and frugal here, and has few graces. The ways of life in these grand old places are like nettles and thistles set in an old majolica vase that has had knights and angels painted on it. You know what I mean, you who know Italy. Do you remember those pictures of Vittorio Carpaccio and of Gentiléo? They say that this is the life our Italy saw once in her cities and her villas: that is the life she wants. Sometimes, when you are all alone in these vast deserted places, the ghosts of all that pageantry pass by you, and they seem fitter than the living people for these courts and halls.
"Madama Flavia will see the fish," said the old crone, and hobbled away.
Madama Flavia! How many times has Tiber heard such a name as that breathed on a lover's mouth to the sigh of the mandoline, uttered in revel or in combat, or as a poisoner whispered it stealing to mix the drug with the wine in the goblet. Madama Flavia! All Italy seemed in it—all love, all woe! There is a magic in some names.