The third act of the comedy should open on Selvaggia in her bed reading
the letter. Beautiful as she may have looked, flushed and loose-haired
at that time, it is better to leave her alone with her puzzle, and
choose rather the hour of her enlightenment. Ridolfo and Ugolino were
booted and spurred, their hooded hawks were on their wrists when she got
speech of them. They were not very willing witnesses in a cause which
now seemed to tell against themselves. Selvaggia's cheeks burned as with
poor Cino's live coal when she could piece together all the shameful
truth; tears brimmed at her eyes, and these too were scalding hot.
Selvaggia, you must understand, was a very good girl, her only sin being
none of her accomplishment; she was a child who looked like a young
woman. Certainly she could not help that, though all the practice of her
race were against her. She had never sought love, never felt to need it,
nor cared to harbour it when it came. Love knocked at her heart, asking
an entry; her heart was not an inn, she thought, let the wayfarer go on.
But the knocking had continued till her ears had grown to be soothed by
the gentle sound; and now it had stopped for ever, and, Pitiful Mother,
for what good reason? Oh, the thing was horrible, shameful,
unutterable! She was crying with rage; but as that spent itself a great
warm flood of genuine sorrow tided over her, floated her away: she cried
as though her heart was breaking; and now she cried for pity, and at
last she cried for very love. A pale ethereal Cino, finger on lip, rose
before her; a halo burned about his head; he seemed a saint, he should
be hers! Ugolino and Ridolfo, helpless and ashamed before her outburst,
went out bickering to their sport; and Selvaggia, wild as her name,
untaught, with none to tutor her, dared her utmost--dared, poor girl,
beyond her strength.
Late in the afternoon of that day Cino, in the oratory of his hermitage,
getting what comfort he could out of an angular Madonna frescoed there,
heard a light step brush the threshold. The sun, already far gone in the
west, cast on the white wall a shadow whose sight set his head spinning.
He turned hastily round. There at the door stood Selvaggia in a crimson
cloak; for the rest, a picture of the Tragic Muse, so woebegone, so
white, so ringed with dark she was.
Cino, on his feet, muttered a prayer to himself. He covered his scarred
mouth, but not before the girl had caught sight of it. She set to
wringing her hands, and began a low wailing cry.
"Ah, terrible--ah, terrible! That I should have done it to one who was
always so gentle with me and so patient! Oh, Cino"--and she held out her
hands towards him--"oh, Cino, will you not forgive me? Will you not? I,
only, did it; it was through me that they knew what you had said.
Shameful girl that I am!" She covered her face and stood sobbing before
him. But confronted with this toppled Madonna, Cino was speechless,
wholly unprepared by jurisprudence or the less exact science of love for
such a pass. As he knew himself, he could have written eloquently and
done justice to the piercing theme; but love, as he and his fellows
understood it, had no spoken language. I do not see, however, that
Selvaggia is to be blamed for being ignorant of this.
Yet he had to say something, since there stood the weeping girl, all
abandoned to her trouble. "I beseech you, Madonna," he was beginning,
when she suddenly bared her face, her woe, and her beauty to his
astonished eyes, looking passionately at him in a way which even he
could not misinterpret.
"Cino," she said brokenly, "I am a wilful girl, but not wicked, ah, no!
not hard-hearted. I think I did not understand you; I heard, but would
not hear; it was wantonness, not evil in me, Cino. You have never
wearied of telling me your devotion; is it too late to be thankful? Now
I am come to tell you what I should have said long before, that I am
grateful, proud of such love, that I receive it if still I may,
that--that"--her voice fell to a thrilled whisper--"that I love you,
Cino." Ah, but she had no more courage; she hid her blushes in her hands
and felt that now she should by rights sink into the earth.
Judge you, who know the theory of the matter, if this were terrible
hearing for Messer Cino. Terrible? It was unprecedented hearing; it was
a thing which, so far as he knew, had never happened to a lover before.
That love should go smooth, the lady smile, the lady love, the lady woo?
Monstrous! The lady was never kind. Where was anguish? Where martyrdom?
Where poetry and sore eyes? Yet stay, was not such a thing in itself a
torment, to be cut off your martyrdom?