He passed his hands over his downcast eyes, which he then, as if accidentally, raised to her. She also had drooped her eyelids; but a pink tinge was on her pale cheeks. Was it the reflection of the sunlight of that evening? Giraldi hoped so; he did not suspect how wonderfully mixed were the feelings that these memories awakened in the heart of the unhappy woman. He hoped also that her eyes would be raised to his with a glance in which might still gleam a ray of the old love: but her eyelids were not raised. He must touch a deeper chord.
“And then again I saw neither you nor myself, or rather I saw us both in a third figure, the peasant figure—in which, in spite of all, by God’s decree, and the will of the Holy Virgin, he perhaps now wanders on the earth.”
“No! no! no!” she cried.
She had started from her chair, but immediately sank back again, her slender hands pressed to her brow and eyes, while repeated shudders shook her tender frame.
“No! no! no!” she murmured again; “the righteous God could not permit that!” Then recollecting how fearfully ambiguous her words were, she added: “In peasant’s dress! my son!”
“And mine!” said Giraldi softly. “Valerie, remember; is not life sweet because it is life; because it is sunshine and the chirping of the cicala, and moonlight, and the sound of the lute! Ah! how often I have wished I had never seen any other light, I had never heard any other music!”
“But he is no longer alive!” she exclaimed; “cannot be alive after all we heard! Who was it then who proved it to me with such terrible clearness at that time when I would have given all I had for a smile from him?”
“At that time? and now no longer?”
A voice within her repeated, “No! no! no! for then the fetters which bind you to him would be unbreakable!” But she did not dare to speak the words, and once more bowed her head silently in her hands.
His dark eyes were fixed firmly on her bowed figure. “And now no longer?” The question had not been answered. “Was it in reality only the pain of the wound which had taken so long to heal, and which she did not wish now to have torn open again? Was it the doubt that is quenched in despair, or did treason lurk in her silence? Was it one of those signs of which he had observed more than one lately; a sign of silently planned desertion, of secret rebellion against his mastery?”
His dark glance sought the clock. “At this very moment I am still working and planning for her. Let her beware lest the time come when I do so for myself, and then necessarily against her! Let her beware of saying ‘Now no longer!’
“May I continue, Valerie?”
She nodded without speaking.
“I am almost afraid to do so. It is so seldom that I allow myself to be carried away by my feelings, when sober reason, which smooths the troubled work of life, should alone reign. I know it does not become me.”
In his voice there was not the slightest trace of the dark thoughts that were passing through his mind: there was rather a tone of pain, which he would have wished to conceal, a tone of reproach which resigns its rights and asks for pardon.
“When after a little while I turned away from the statue, I saw a few paces distant from it, leaning against the window-frame, a youth, evidently the original of the figure; the same height, at that moment even in the same attitude, with the same luxuriant curly hair, the same brow and mouth, and especially the same eyes—magnificent deep black velvet eyes, which were fastened with a curious expression of fixed melancholy on his own likeness. I saw at the first glance that the young man was an Italian, and in the first words he spoke I recognised a native of the Campagna. They were spoken in answer to the question whether the statue were his! It was not; he had only stood several times as a model for it. ‘But you are an artist?’ I asked again. ‘I do not know,’ he answered; ‘I sometimes think so, and sometimes again I think not. I only know one thing for certain, that I am miserable, the most miserable of men.’ He had murmured the last words to himself, as turning suddenly from me he was about to hasten away. I do not believe he meant me to hear them, but I had heard them and held him back by the arm. ‘We are fellow-countrymen,’ I said, ‘fellow-countrymen should always stand by one another; doubly so in a strange land; trebly so when it is a case of bearing misfortune or giving help.’
“He looked at me with his large eyes, which gradually filled with tears. ‘No one can help me,’ he said. ‘Even confession is a help, and often the greatest, most effectual to a heavy-laden heart.’ ‘Are you a priest?’ ‘Did the wounded man ask that who lay bleeding on the ground, when the Samaritan bent charitably over him?’ Two large tears ran down his beautiful face, on which, while I spoke, the colour had come and gone. I had won him over. He promised—as I could not wait then—to meet me that evening in an Italian wine-shop, which he pointed out to me. We could talk better in a wine-shop than in
