Madama Flavia! Just such a woman as this it needs would be to fitly wear such a name—a woman with low brows and eyes that burn, and a mouth like the folded leaves that lie in the heart of a rose—a woman to kneel at morn in the black shadows of the confessional, and to go down into the crowd of masks at night and make men drunk with love.
"Madama Flavia!" The name (so much it said to me) halted stupidly on my lips: I stood in her presence like a foolish creature. I never before had lacked either courage or audacity: I trembled now. I had been awake all the night, gazing at the dim, dusky pile of her roof as it rose out from the olives black against the stars; and she knew it—she knew it very well. That I saw in her face. And she was Madama Flavia, and I was Pipistrello the juggler. What could I say to her? I could have fallen at her feet and kissed her or killed her, but I could not speak. No doubt I looked but a poor boor to her—a giant and a dolt.
She was leaning against a great old marble vase—leaning her hands on it, and her chin on her hands. She had some red carnations in her breast: their perfume came to me. She was surrounded by decay, dusty desolation, the barrenness of a poverty that is drearier than any of the poverty of the poor; but so might have looked Madama Lucrezia in those old days when the Borgia was God's vicegerent.
At the haul of fish she never glanced: she gazed at me with meditation in her eyes. "You are very strong," she said abruptly.
At that I could do no less than laugh. It was as if she had said the ox in the yoke was strong or the Tiber strong at flood.
"Why are you a fisherman now?" she said. "Why do you leave your arena?"
I shuddered a little. "Since the child fell"—I muttered, thinking she would understand the remorse that made my old beloved calling horrible to me.
"It was no fault of yours," she said with a dreamy smile. "They say I have the evil eye—"
"You have, madama," I said bluntly, and then felt a choking in my throat, fearing my own rashness.
Her beautiful eyes had a bright scorn in them, and a cold mockery of me. "Why do you stay, then?" she asked, and smiled at the red carnations carelessly.