Part 11

He remained a few moments before the door which shut off the tragic chamber. He felt that henceforth he was no longer master of himself. His nerves dominated him, imposed on him the disorder and excess of their sensations. He felt about his head a band that contracted and enlarged according to the palpitations of his arteries, as if it were an elastic and cold substance. The same cold chill ran down his spinal column.

With sudden energy, in a sort of rage, he turned the knob and entered. Without looking about him, walking in the ray of light which, projected through the open door, was shed across the floor, he went straight towards one of the balconies, opened the two shutters. He also opened the shutters of the other balcony. After this rapid action, accomplished under the impulse of a sort of horror, turned, agitated, gasping. He felt his flesh creep.

What he saw before anything else was the bed stationed in front of him, with its green counterpane, all of walnut, but simple in form, without carving, without ornaments without curtains. For several moments he saw nothing but the bed, like on that terrible day when, crossing the threshold of the room, he had stopped petrified at the sight of the corpse.

Evoked by the survivor's imagination, the corpse, with its head enveloped in a black veil and its arms stretched alongside the body, retook its place on the mortuary couch. The strong light which entered from the wide-open balconies did not succeed in dissipating the phantom. It was a vision, not continuous but intermittent, seen now and then, as if by a rapid closure of the eyelids, although the witness's eyelids remained immovable.

In the silence of the room, and in the silence of his soul, George heard, very distinctly, the scratching of the wood-tick. And this trifling fact sufficed to dissipate momentarily in him the extreme violence of the nervous tension, as the prick of a needle suffices to empty a swollen blister.

Every particular of the terrible day came back to his memory: the unexpected news brought to Torricelle di Sarsa, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, by a breathless messenger who stammered and wept; the exhausting journey on horseback, in the heat of the dog-days, across the scorched hills, and, during the journey, the sudden fainting spells which made him reel in his saddle; then the house filled with sobs, filled with noises of doors banged by the gale, filled with the buzzing he had in the arteries; and, finally, the impetuous entry into the room, the sight of the corpse, the curtains swelling and swishing, the tinkling of the holy-water basin suspended on the wall.

The deed had been done on the morning of the fourth of August, without any suspicious preparations. The suicide had left no letter, not even for his nephew. The will by which he constituted George his sole legatee was already of old date. Demetrius had taken evident precautions to conceal the causes of his resolution, and even to avoid every pretext for hypotheses; he had taken care to destroy even the least traces of the acts which had preceded the supreme act. In the apartment, everything was found in order, in an order almost excessive; not a paper remained on the desk, not a book was missing from the shelves of the bookcase. On the little table, near the bed, was the pistol-case, open; nothing more.

For the thousandth time, a question arose in the mind of the survivor: "Why did he kill himself? Had he a secret which gnawed at his heart? Or else, was it the cruel sagacity of his intelligence which rendered life insupportable? He bore his destiny within himself, as I bear mine in myself."

He looked at the little silver emblem still suspended on the wall at the head of the bed, a symbol of religion, a maternal pious souvenir. It was a fine piece of workmanship by an old master goldsmith of Guardiagrele, Andrea Gallucci--a sort of hereditary jewel. "He loved religious emblems, sacred music, the odor of incense, crucifixes, the hymns of the Latin Church. He was a mystic, an ascetic, the most passionate contemplator of the inner life; but he did not believe in God."

He looked at the pistol-case; and a thought, latent in the deepest recesses of his brain, was revealed to him as by a lightning flash. "I, too, will kill myself with one of these pistols--_with the same, on the same bed_." After a short appeasement, his exaltation took hold of him again; again he felt his flesh creep. Once more he felt the actual and profound sensation of the shudder already experienced on the tragic day, when he had wished to raise, with his own hands, the black veil spread over the dead man's face, and when, through the linen wrappings, he believed he could see the ravages of the wound, the horrible ravage made by the explosion of the firearm, by the impact of the ball against the bone of the skull, against that brow so delicate and so pure. In reality, he had seen only a portion of the nose, the mouth, and the chin. The rest was hidden by the bandages several times folded, perhaps because the eyes had started from their sockets. But the mouth, intact, permitted a view of the beard, silky and thin--the mouth, pale and withered, which, living, opened so softly for the unexpected smile--the mouth had received from the seal of death an expression of superhuman calmness, rendered more extraordinary by the bloody havoc hidden by the bandages.

This image, fixed in an ineffaceable imprint, was graven in the soul of the inheritor, in the centre of his soul; and after five years it still preserved the same evidence, preserved by a fatal power.

In thinking that he also would stretch himself on the same bed, and that he would kill himself with the same weapon, George did not feel that tumultuous and vibrant emotion which sudden resolutions impart; it was rather an indefinable feeling, as if it concerned a project formed a long time ago, and approved in a rather indefinite fashion, and that the time had come to decide about it and to accomplish it. He opened the case, examined the pistols.

They were fine weapons, rifled duelling pistols, of old English make, with a stock perfectly fitted to the hand. They reposed on a light-green velvet, a little frayed at the edges of the compartments which contained everything necessary for loading them. As the barrels were of large calibre, the balls were large; those which, when they touch their object, always produce a decisive effect.

George took one and weighed it in the palm of his hand. "In less than five minutes I could be dead. Demetrius has left on this bed the hollow where I shall lie." And by an imaginary transposition it was himself whom he saw stretched on the couch. But that wood-tick! That wood-tick! He had a perception of being gnawed by the insects, as distinctly and as frightfully as if the animals were in his brain. This implacable gnawing came from the bed, and he perceived it. Then he understood the sadness of the man who, before dying, hears beneath him the gnawing of the wood-tick. When he pictured himself in the act of pressing the trigger, he felt an agonized and repulsive contraction of all his nerves. When he came to the conclusion that nothing forced him to kill himself, and that he could wait, he felt at the deepest recesses of his substance the spontaneous expansion of intense relief. A thousand invisible ties still bound him to life. "Hippolyte!"

He went towards the balcony, towards the light, with a sort of impetuosity. A background of an immense landscape, bluish and mysterious, melted in the languor of the day. The sun was slowly setting on the mountain, which it flooded with gold, like the couch of a mistress who awaited. The Majella, enormous and white, all bathed in this liquid gold, reared its huge mass in the sky.

*III.*

*THE HERMITAGE.*

*CHAPTER I.*

In her letter of May 10th, Hippolyte had said: "I can at last dispose of a free hour to write you a long letter. My brother-in-law has now been dragging his pain from hotel to hotel around the lake for the last ten days; and we both follow him like troubled souls. You could never imagine the melancholy of this pilgrimage. I myself am utterly exhausted; I await the first favorable opportunity to leave them. Have you already found the Hermitage?" She had said: "Your letters increase my torment inexpressibly. I know well your malady; and I divine that words fail you to express your suffering. I would give half of my blood to succeed in convincing you, once for all, that I am yours, absolutely yours, forever, until death. I think of you, of you only, uninterruptedly, every instant of my life. Away from you, I cannot enjoy one moment's calm and happiness. Everything disgusts and irritates me. Oh, when will it be given me to be with you entire days, to live your life! You will see; I shall no longer be the same woman. I shall be amiable, tender, gentle. I shall take care to be always the same, always discreet. I shall tell you all my thoughts, and you will tell me all yours. I shall be your mistress, your friend, your sister; and, if you believe me worthy, I will be also your counsellor. I have a lucid intuition of things, and a hundred times I have experienced this lucidity, which has never led me into error. My sole care will be to please you always, never to be a burden in your life. In me you should find only sweetness and repose.... I have many faults, my friend; but you will aid me to conquer them. You will make me _perfect_, for yourself. I await from you the first encouragement. Later, when I am sure of myself, I will say to you: Now I am worthy; now I have the consciousness of being what you desire. And you, too, will be proud to think that I owe you all, that I am your creature in everything; and then it will seem to you that I am more intimately yours, and you will love me always more, always more. It will be a life of love such as has never before been seen."

In a postscript: "I send you a rhododendron gathered in the park of Isola Madre.... Yesterday, in the pocket of that gray dress which you know, I found the note from Albano which I had asked you for as a souvenir. It is dated _April 9th_. It has been marked with several _baskets of wood_. Do you recall our great fires of love? Courage, courage! The renewal of happiness is approaching. In one week, in ten days at the most, I shall be wherever it pleases you. With you, no matter where."

*CHAPTER II.*

And George, who at heart hardly believed in success, but who was suddenly seized by an insensate ardor, attempted the supreme test.

He left Guardiagrele for the littoral, in quest of the Hermitage. The country, the sea, the motion, the physical activity, the variety of the incidents strewn along the course of this exploration, the singularity of his own condition--all these new things stirred him, restored his equilibrium, gave him an illusory confidence. It seemed to him that he had just escaped by a miracle from the assault of a mortal malady in which he had been face to face with death. For the first few days, life had for him that sweetness and depth which it only has for convalescents. Hippolyte's romantic dream floated about his heart.

"If she should succeed in curing me! To cure me would require a _healthy_ and _strong love_." He avoided looking into the very bottom of his conscience; he fought shy of the interior sarcasm that those two adjectives provoked. "On earth, there is but one durable intoxication: _security_ in the possession of another creature, absolute and unshakable security. This intoxication I am seeking. I would like to be able to say: My loved one, present or absent, lives entirely in me; my will is her only law; if I ceased to love her she would die; in dying, she will regret only my love." Instead of resigning himself to enjoy love in the form of suffering, he persisted in following it in the form of pleasure. He felt that his mind was corroded irreparably. Once more he felt he had degraded his manhood. He discovered the Hermitage at San Vito, in the land of the furze, on the borders of the Adriatic. It was the ideal Hermitage--a house built on a plateau, half-way up on the cliffs, in a grove of orange and olive trees, facing a little bay closed in by two promontories.

Very primitive, the architecture of the house. An outer stairway led up to a loggia on which opened the four doors of four rooms. Each room had its door, and vis-a-vis, in the wall opposite, a window looking out on the olive-grove. To the upper loggia there was a corresponding lower loggia; but the rooms on the ground floor, with the exception of one, were uninhabitable.

On one side, the house was contiguous to an old ruin inhabited by the peasants who owned it. Two enormous oaks, that the persevering breath of the northerly winds had bent towards the hill, shaded the court and protected the stone tables, useful for dining in summer time. This court was surrounded by a stone parapet, and, rising above the parapet, acacia-trees, loaded with odorous bloom, delineated against the background of the sea the delicate elegance of their foliage.

This house was used only for lodging strangers who rented it for the bathing season, according to the industry practised by all the villagers of the coast in the region of San Vito. It was about two miles distant from the borough, on the border of a territory called Portelles, in quiet and mild solitude. Each of the two promontories was pierced by a tunnel, the two openings of which were visible from the house. The railroad ran from one to the other in a straight line, along the shore, a distance of from five to six hundred yards. At the extreme point of the right-hand promontory, on a bank of rocks the Trabocco stretched, a strange fishing machine, constructed entirely of beams and planks, like a colossal spider-web.

The tenant, out of season, was greeted like an unhoped for and extraordinary piece of good fortune.

The head of the family, an old man, said:

"The house is yours."

He refused to name a price, and said: "If you are satisfied with it, you will give me what you wish and when you please."

While uttering these cordial words, he examined the stranger with an eye so scrutinizing that the latter was embarrassed and surprised by this too piercing look. The old man was blind with one eye, bald on the top of his head, with two little tufts of white hair on the temples; his chin was shaven, and he carried his entire body before him, sustained by two bow legs. His limbs were deformed by hard work: by the labor at the plough, which advances the right shoulder and twists the body; by the labor of mowing, which forces the knees apart; by the labor of thinning the vines, which bends the body in two; by all the slow and patient labors of agriculture.

"You'll give what you wish."

He had already scented in this affable young man, with his somewhat distracted and almost wandering air, the generous milord, inexperienced, careless of money. He knew that the generosity of his guest would be much more profitable for him than if he made his own terms.

George asked:

"Is the place quiet, without visitors, without noise?"

The old man pointed to the sea and smiled:

"Look; you will hear nothing but that."

He added:

"Sometimes the sound of the loom, too. But now Candia hardly weaves at all."

And he smiled, pointing to the threshold where stood his daughter-in-law, blushing.

She was _enceinte_, already very large at the waist, blond, a clear carnation, her face sown with freckles. She had big gray eyes, the iris veined like agates. She wore in her ears two heavy gold rings, and on her bosom the presenfoso, a large star of filigree work, with two hearts in the centre. On the threshold beside her was a little girl of ten, a blonde also, with a sweet expression.

"One could drink down that little madcap in a glass," said the old man. "That's all! There are only us and Albadora."

He turned toward the olive-grove and began to call:

"Albadora! Albado!"

Then, addressing his granddaughter:

"Helen, go and call her," he said.

Helen disappeared.

"Twenty-two children!" cried the old man. "Albadora gave me twenty-two children--six boys and sixteen girls. I have lost three boys and seven girls. The other nine girls are married. One of my boys went to America; another has made his home in Tocco, and works in the petroleum mines; the youngest, the one whom Candia married, is employed on the railway, and only visits us every two weeks. We are left all alone. Ah! signor, it is well said that one father supports a hundred children, and that a hundred children do not support one father."

The septuagenarian Sibyl appeared, bearing in her apron a heap of large earth-snails, a slimy and flaccid heap, from which protruded long tentacles. She was a woman of tall stature, but bent, emaciated, broken by fatigue and by frequent pregnancies, weakened by childbirths, with a small head, wrinkled like a withered apple, on a neck full of hollows and tendons. In her apron the snails stuck together, twisted about one another, glued to one another, greenish, yellowish, whitish, frothy, with colorations of pale iridescent reflections. One of them had crawled up on her hand.

The old man exclaimed:

"This gentleman wishes to rent the house from to-day on."

"God bless you!" she cried.

And, with a rather silly yet kind air, she drew closer to George, leering at him with eyes sunk deep in their orbits, almost sightless.

She added:

"It's Jesus come back to earth. God bless you! May you live as long as there's bread and wine. May you become as great as the sun!"

And, with a joyous step, she passed on into the house, through the same door which all her twenty-two children had passed through on their way to baptism.

The old man said to George:

"My name is Colas di Cinzio; but, as my father's surname was Sciampagne, everybody calls me Colas di Sciampagne. Come and see the garden."

George followed the peasant.

"The crops are very promising this year."

The old man, walking in front, praised the plantations, and, as is common with persons who have grown old in the midst of nature, he made prognostications. The garden was luxuriant, and seemed to enclose in its circle all the gifts of abundance. The orange-trees shed such waves of perfume that, at moments, the atmosphere acquired a sweet and powerful savor, like that of a generous wine. The other fruit-trees were no longer in flower, but their innumerable fruits hung from nourishing branches, rocked by the breath of heaven.

George thought: "This, perhaps, is what the superior life would be: a limitless liberty; a noble and fruitful solitude which would envelop me with its warmest emanations; to journey on amidst the vegetal creation as one would amongst a multitude of intelligences; to wrest from it the occult thought and to divine the mute sentiment which reigns beneath the externals; to successively render my being comfortable with each of these beings, and to successively substitute for my weakened and oblique soul each of these simple and strong souls; to contemplate nature with such a continuity of attention that I should succeed in reproducing, in my own person, the harmonious palpitation of all creatures; finally, by a laborious and ideal metamorphosis, identify myself with the robust tree whose roots absorb the invisible subterranean ferments, and whose summit imitates, by its agitation, the voice of the sea. Would not that be truly a superior life?" At the sight of the spring-time exuberance that transfigured the surrounding places, he permitted himself to be dominated by a sort of drunken panic. But the fatal habit of contradiction cut short this transport, brought him back to his old ideas, opposed reality to dreams. "We have no contact whatever with nature. We have only the imperfect perception of exterior forms. It is impossible for man to enter into communion with things. Man has certainly the power to inject into things all his own substance; but he never receives anything in return. The sea will never speak to him in an intelligible language, the earth will never reveal to him its secret. Man may feel all his blood circulate in the fibres of the tree, but the tree will never give him one drop of its vital sap."

Pointing out with his finger such or such a marvel of luxuriance, the one-eyed old peasant said:

"A stableful of dung performs more miracles than a churchful of saints."

Pointing with his finger to a field of flowering beans at the end of the garden, he said:

"The bean is the spy of the year."

The field undulated almost imperceptibly. The small leaves, of a grayish green, agitated their thin points beneath the white or azure flowering. Every flower resembled a half-closed mouth, and bore two spots, black as eyes. Among those that were not yet faded, the superior petals slightly covered the spots, like pale eyelids on pupils which regard sidewise. The quivering of all those lipped and eyed flowers had a strange animal expression, attractive and indescribable.

George thought: "How happy Hippolyte will be here! She has a delicate and passionate taste for all the humble beauties of the earth. I remember her little cries of admiration and pleasure on discovering some plant of unknown form, a new flower, a leaf, a bay, a bizarre insect, a shadow, a reflection." He pictured her to himself, slim and agile, in graceful attitudes, among the verdure. And an anguish suddenly overwhelmed him: the anguish of taking her again, of reconquering her entirely, of making himself loved immensely by her; of giving her a new joy every second. "Her eyes will be always filled with me. All her senses will remain closed to all sensations but those that will come to her from me. My words will seem to her more delicious than any other sound." Suddenly the power of love appeared to him to be unlimited. His inner life acquired a vertiginous acceleration.

When he mounted the stairway of the Hermitage, he believed that his heart would break under the pressure of his increasing anxiety. Arrived at the loggia, he took in the landscape with an intoxicated look. In his profound agitation, he believed he felt that at that minute the sun beamed truly on the bottom of his heart.

The sea, stirred by an equal and continuous thrill, reflecting the happiness scattered in the sky, seemed to refract this happiness in myriads of inextinguishable smiles. Through the crystal air, all the distant vistas were clearly defined--the Vasto Point, Mount Gargano, the Tremiti Islands, on the right; Cape Moro, the Nicchiola, Cape Ortona, on the left. The white Ortona resembled a glittering Asiatic city on a hill in Palestine, standing boldly against the azure, all in parallel lines, without minarets. That chain of promontories and gulfs, in the shape of a half-moon, suggested the image of a row of offerings, because each handle bore a cereal treasure. The furze spread its mantle of gold over the entire coast. From every bush arose a dense cloud of effluvia, as from a censer. The air respired was just as delicious as a sip of elixir.

*CHAPTER III.*

The first few days, George gave all his care to the little house which was to receive the New Life within its great peace; and to help him in the preparations he had Colas di Sciampagne, who seemed expert at all trades. On a band of fresh plastering he had written with the point of a reed this old device, suggested by the illusion: _Parva domus, magna quies_. And he saw a favorable presage even in the three blades of bay sown by the wind between the interstices of the raised edge of the window.