CHAPTER II

That night she dreamed she was standing on the river-bank in the company of Marianna, Madame Makuline's companion, who had come to hurry her back to Rome.

"Monsieur Antonio is in an awful rage," she said. "He came to Madame and told her all about it, and has borrowed 10,000 _lire_ to set up a finer house. Then he sent me to bring you back."

In her dream Regina shook with shame and anger. She set off with rapid steps to Viadana, intending to send Antonio a thundering telegram.

"If he has still got the money," she sobbed, "I wish him to give it all back this very moment. I don't want a finer house. I don't want anything! I'll come home at once. I'd come back, even if we had grown poorer, even if we had to live in a garret!"

And she walked and walked, as one walks in dreams, vainly trying to run, crushed by unspeakable grief. Night fell; the mist covered the river. Viadana seemed farther and farther. Marianna ran behind Regina, telling her that the day before in Via Tritone she had met the ugly fireman who had rescued her at Odessa.

"He had turned into a priest, if you please; but coquettish, and under his cassock he had a silk petticoat with three flounces, which made a _frou-frou_." And she laughed.

Her unpleasant expression exasperated Regina almost to fits. She was not laughing at the fireman, but at something else, unknown, mysterious and terrible. Suddenly Regina turned and tried to strike her, but the _signorina_ started backwards and Regina tumbled down.

The shock of this fall wakened the dreamer, whose first conscious thought was of the fireman priest with the silk flounces. In the dream this detail had disgusted her horribly, and the disgust remained for long hours. Sleep had deserted her. It was still night, but already across the deep silence which precedes the dawn came the earliest sounds of the quiet country life--a tinkling of tiny bells trembling on the banks of the streams, going always farther and farther away. The silvery, insistent, childish note seemed to Regina the voice of infinite melancholy.

A thousand memories started up in her mind, insistent, puerile, melancholy, like that little silvery tinkling.

"My whole life has been useless," she thought, "and now, now, just when I might have found an object, I have flung it away like a rag! But what object could I have had?" she asked herself presently. "Well, family life is supposed to be an object. Everything is relative. The good wife who makes a good family contributes no less than the worker or the moralist to the perfection of society. I have never made anything but dreams. I remember the dream I had the second night after our arrival. I thought Madame Makuline had given me a castle."

Just then she heard a faint rustle, and something like a scarce perceptible but tender groan emitted by some minute dreaming creature.

"It's the swallow! Does it also dream? Do birds think and dream? I expect they do. Why, I wonder, is this one all alone? And _he_!"

She felt a sudden movement of joy, thinking that this day the letter from Antonio would surely come!

The hours passed. Post hour came, but there was no post. Regina went out of doors to hide her agitation, to forget, to flee from the extravagant fears which assailed her. As on the preceding day, she wandered in the woods and lanes, by the river-side, upon which beat the full rays of the sun. Everywhere fear followed her like her shadow.

"He has not forgiven me. He will not write. In his place I would do the same. He wants to punish me by his silence, or he is coming to take me back by force. A wife has to follow her husband, otherwise he can demand a legal separation. What would become of me if he did that?"

Pride would not allow her to confess that if Antonio insisted on her return she would go to him at once merely to be forgiven. But as the slow hours rolled on her pride weakened. Memory assailed her with consuming tenderness. She sickened at the thought of passing her life's best years deprived of love.

"Oh, why didn't I think of all this before?" she asked herself. And she remembered she had thought of it, but so vaguely, so lightly, that her faint fears had not held her back from folly. In an opposing sense she reasoned thus.

"It's my character made up of discontent and contradiction which tosses me hither and thither like a wave of the sea. Why have I changed so soon? If I go back to Rome I shall be sorry immediately that I didn't carry out my project, which is perhaps better than I am now thinking it. Perhaps after all he thinks it reasonable, and is delaying to write that I may see he accepts it. Oh! there's a bit of four-leaved clover! Yes; that's what it is. He accepts my plan."

She stooped, but did not pick the four-leaved clover. What luck could it bring to her?

She felt hurt and saddened by the idea that Antonio was not broken-hearted; that he would not try by all means in his power to get her back; would not reproach, punish, coax her, move her to agonies of despair and love.

"He has not written. He isn't going to write," she said again. "He will come himself to-morrow, or the next day, at the first moment he can. What shall I say when I see him?"

And in the joy of renewed confidence she forgot everything else.

* * * * *

He neither wrote nor came. The days went by; the slow, cruel hours passed in a waiting increasingly apprehensive. Regina wondered at the presentiment she had felt from the very moment of her arrival--the presentiment that her husband would write to her no more. Yet still she waited.

She perceived that her mother, observant of Antonio's silence, was watching her with those beautiful serene eyes now disturbed and unquiet. So one morning she feigned to have met the postman and brought back a letter. She came into the house, an envelope in her hand, crying--

"He's not well! He's laid up with fever!"

The mother was opening a silvery fish from the Po, and she looked at her daughter, scarcely raising her eyes from her work. Regina saw that her mother was not deceived, and that wistful maternal glance agitated her to the very depths of her soul. And the silver fish, in whose inside was discovered another little black fish, reminded her of Antonio's promise--

"We will go out together in a boat. We will fish together in the beautiful red evenings----" and of all the torturing tenderness of that last afternoon they had spent together.

She went to her room and wrote him a letter. Pride would not let her set down her real thoughts; but between the lines he might read all her stinging anxiety, her fear, her penitence. He did not reply.

Suppose he were really ill? Regina thought of writing to Arduina, but quickly felt ashamed of the idea. No. _All those people_ whom Antonio's unfortunate notion had thrust between her and him on the first days of her arrival--all those people, the prime cause, perhaps, of their present misery, were repugnant to her, positively hateful.

But what was he doing? Had he shut up the Apartment in Via d'Azeglio and gone back to his family? The mere recollection of the marble stair which led to that place of suffering, to that low, grey room where a mysterious incubus had weighed down her soul, was enough to darken her countenance.

She wrote again. Antonio did not reply.

Then Regina felt something rebound violently within her, like a rod which straightens itself with a whirr after breaking the fetters which have tied it down. It was her pride. She thought Antonio must have guessed her unspoken drama of grief, lament, tenderness and remorse, and that he was passing the bounds of just punishment.

"He is taking advantage of me," she thought, "but we will see which is the stronger!"

"Antonio," she wrote to him, "I have been here for a whole fortnight of patience and suffering. What is the meaning of your silence? If you have neither understood nor pardoned the