People said that Guido had ceased to be interesting since he had been
engaged to be married. Until that time, there had been an element of
romance about him, which many women thought attractive; and most men had
been willing to look upon him as a being slightly superior to
themselves, who cared only for books and engravings, though he never
thrust his tastes upon other people, nor made any show of knowing more
than others, and whose opinion on points of honour was the very best
that could be had. It was so good, indeed, that he was not often asked
to give it.
Now, however, they said that he was changed; that he was complacent and
pleased with himself; that this was no wonder, because he was marrying a
handsome fortune with a pretty and charming wife; that he had done
uncommonly well for himself; and much more to the same purpose. Also,
the mothers of impecunious marriageable sons of noble lineage said in
their maternal hearts that if they had only guessed that Countess
Fortiguerra would give her daughter to the first man who asked for her,
they would not have let Guido be the one.
The judgments of society are rarely quite at fault, but they are almost
always relative and liable to change. They are, indeed, appreciations of
an existing state of things, rather than verdicts from which there is no
appeal. The verdict comes after the state of things has ceased to exist.
Guido was happy, and nothing looks duller than the happiness of quiet
people. Nobody will go far to look at the sea when it is calm, if he is
used to seeing it at all; but those who live near it will walk a mile or
two to watch the breakers in a storm.
In the first place, Guido was in love, and more in love with Cecilia's
face and figure than he guessed. In the early days of their acquaintance
he had enjoyed talking with her about the subjects in which she was
interested. Such conversation generally brought him to that condition of
intellectual suspense which was peculiarly delightful to him, for though
she did not persuade him to accept her own points of view, she made him
feel more doubtful about his own, so far as any of them were fixed, and
doubt meant revery, musing, imaginative argument about questions that
might never be answered. But he and she had now advanced to another
stage. Unconsciously, all that side of his nature had fallen into
abeyance, and he thought only of positive things in the immediate
future. When he was with Cecilia, no matter how the conversation began,
it soon turned upon their plans for their married life; and he found it
so infinitely pleasant to talk of such matters that it did not occur to
him to ask whether she regarded them as equally interesting.
She did not; she saw the change in him, and regretted it. A woman who is
not really in love, generally likes a man less after he has fallen
hopelessly in love with her. It is true that she sometimes likes herself
the better for her new conquest, and there may be some compensation in
that; but there is something tiresome, if not repugnant to her, in the
placid, possessive complacency of a future husband, who seems to forget
that a woman has any intelligence except in matters concerning furniture
and the decoration of a house.
Cecilia was not capricious; she really liked Guido as much as ever, and
she would not even admit that he bored her when he came back again and
again to the same topics. She tried hard to look forward to the time
when all the former charm of their intercourse should return, and when,
besides being the best of friends, he would again be the most agreeable
of companions. It seemed very far off; and yet, in her heart, she hoped
that something might happen to hinder her marriage, or at least to put
it off another year.
Her life seemed very blank after the great struggle was ended, and in
the long summer mornings before Guido came to luncheon, she was
conscious of longing for something that should take the place of the old
dreams, something she could not understand, that awoke under the
listlessness which had come upon her. It was a sort of sadness, like a
regret for a loss that had not really been suffered, and yet was
present; it was a craving for sympathy where she had deserved none, and
it made her inclined to pity herself without reason. She sometimes felt
it after Guido had come, and it stayed with her, a strange yearning
after an unknown happiness that was never to be hers, a half-comforting
and infinitely sad conviction that she was to die young and that people
would mourn for her, but not those, or not that one, who ought to be
most sorry that she was gone. All her books were empty of what she
wanted, and for hours she sat still, doing nothing, or stood leaning on
the window-sill, gazing down through the slats of the blinds at the
glaring street, unconscious of the heat and the strong light, and of the
moving figures that passed.
Occasionally she drove out to the Villa Madama in the afternoon with her
mother, and Guido joined them. Lamberti did not come there, though he
often came to the house in the evening, sometimes with his friend, and
sometimes later. The two always went away together. At the villa,
Cecilia never sat down on the bench by the fountain, but from a distance
she looked at it, and it was like looking at a grave. In dreams she had
sat there too often with another to go there alone now; she had heard
words there that touched her heart too deeply to be so easily forgotten,
and there had been silences too happy to forget. She had buried all that
by the garden seat, but it was better not to go near the place again.
What she had laid out of sight there might not be quite dead yet, and if
she sat in the old place she might hear some piteous cry from beneath
her feet; or its ghost might rise and stare at her, the ghost of a
dream. Then, the yearning and the longing grew stronger and hurt her
sharply, and she turned under the great door, into the hall, and was
very glad when her mother began to chatter about dress and people.
But one day the very thing happened which she had always tried to avert.
Guido insisted on walking up and down the path with her, and they passed
and repassed the bench, till she was sure that he would make her sit
down upon it. She tried to linger at the opposite end, but he was
interested in what he was saying and did not notice her reluctance to
turn back.
Then it came. He stood still by the fountain, and then he sat down quite
naturally, and evidently expecting her readiness to do the same. She
started slightly and looked about, as if to find some means of escape,
but a moment later she had gathered her courage and was sitting beside
him.
The scene came back with excessive vividness. There was the evening
light, the first tinge of violet on the Samnite mountains, the base of
Monte Cavo already purple, the glow on Frascati, and nearer, on Marino;
Rome was at her feet, in a rising mist beyond the flowing river. Guido
talked on, but she did not hear him. She heard another voice and other
words, less gentle and less calm. She felt other eyes upon her, waiting
for hers to answer them, she felt a hand stealing near to hers as her
own lay on the bench at her side.
Still Guido talked, needing no reply, perfectly confident and happy. She
did not hear what he said, but when he paused she mechanically nodded
her head, as if agreeing with him, and instantly lost herself again. She
could not help it. She expected the touch, and the look, and then the
blinding rush that used to come after it, lifting her from her feet and
carrying her whole nature away as the south wind whirls dry leaves up
with it and far away.
That did not come, and presently she was covering her face with both
hands, shaking a little, and Guido was anxiously asking what had
happened.
"Nothing," she answered rather faintly. "It is nothing. It will be over
in a moment."
He thought that she had felt the sudden chill of the evening which is
sometimes dangerous in Rome in midsummer, and he rose at once.
"We had better go in before you catch cold," he said.
"Yes. Let us go in."
For the first time, his words really jarred on her. For the rest of her
life, he would tell her when to go indoors before catching cold. He was
possessive, complacent; he already looked upon her as a person in his
charge, if not as a part of his property. Unreasoningly, she said to
herself it was no concern of his whether she caught cold or not, and
besides, there was no question of such a thing. She had covered her eyes
with her hands for a very different reason, and was ashamed of having
done it, which made matters worse. In anger she told herself boldly that
she wished that he were not himself, only that once, but that he were
Lamberti, who at least took the trouble to amuse her and never put on
paternal airs to enquire about her health.
It was the beginning of revolt. Guido dined with them that evening, and
she was silent and absent-minded. Before the hour at which he usually
went away, she rose and bade him good night, saying that she was a
little tired.
"I am sure you caught cold to-day," he said, with real anxiety.
"We will not go to the villa again," she answered. "Good night."
It was late before she really went to bed, for when she was at last rid
of the conscientious Petersen, she sat long in her chair at the writing
table with a blank sheet of letter paper before her and a pen in her
hand. She dipped it into the ink often, and her fingers moved as if she
were going to write, but the point never touched the paper. At last the
pen lay on the table, and she was resting her chin upon her folded
hands, her eyes half closed, her breath drawn in short sighs that came
and went between her parted lips. Then, though she was all alone, the
blood rose suddenly in her face and she sprang to her feet, angry with
herself and frowning, and ashamed of her thoughts.
She felt hot, and then cold, and then almost sick with disgust. The
vision that had delighted her was far away now; she had forced herself
not to see it, but the man in it had come back to her in dreams; she had
driven him out of them, and for a time she had found peace, but now he
came to her in her waking thoughts and she longed to see his living face
and to hear his real voice. With utter self-contempt and scorn of her
own heart, she guessed that this was love, or love's beginning, and that
nothing could save her now.
Her first impulse was to write to him, to beg him to go away at any
price, never to see her again as long as she lived. As that was out of
the question, she next thought of writing to Guido, to tell him that she
could not marry him, and that she had made up her mind to retire from
the world and spend her life in a convent. But that was impossible, too.
There was no time to be lost. Either she must make one supreme effort to
drive Lamberti from her thoughts and to get back to the state in which
she had felt that she could marry Guido and be a good wife to him, or
else she must tell him frankly that the engagement must end. He would
ask why, and she would refuse to tell him, and after that she did not
dare to think of what would happen. It might ruin his life, for she knew
that he loved her very much. She was honestly and truly much more
concerned for him than for herself. It did not matter what became of
her, if only she could speak the truth to him without bringing harm to
him in the future. The world might say what it pleased.
It was right to break off her engagement, beyond question, and she had
done very wrong in ever agreeing to it; it was the greatest sin she had
ever committed, and with a despairing impulse she sank upon her knees
and poured out her heart in full confession of her fault.
Never in her life had she confessed as she did now, with such a
whole-hearted hatred of her own weakness, such willingness to bear all
blame, such earnest desire for forgiveness, such hope for divine
guidance in making reparation. She would not plead ignorance, nor even
any omission to examine herself, as an excuse for what she had done. It
was all her fault, and her eyes had been open from the first, and she
was about to see the whole life of a good friend ruined through her
miserable weakness.
As she went over it all, burying her face in her hands, the conviction
that she loved Lamberti grew with amazing quickness to the certainty of
a fact long known. This was her crime, that she had been too proud to
own that she had loved him at first sight; her punishment should be
never to see him again. She would abase herself before Guido and confess
everything to him in the very words she was whispering now, and she
would implore his forgiveness. Then, since Lamberti could not leave
Rome, she and her mother would go away on a long journey, to Russia,
perhaps, or to America, or China, and they would never come back. It
must be easy enough to avoid one particular person in the whole world.
This she would do, but she would not deny that she loved him. All her
fault had lain in trying to deny it in spite of what she felt when he
was near her, and it must be still more wrong to force the fact out of
sight now that it had brought her into such great trouble. There was
nothing to be done but to acknowledge it, though it was shame and
humiliation to do so. It stared her in the face, now that she had
courage to own the truth, and a voice called out that she had lied to
herself, to her mother, and to Guido for many weeks, and persistently,
rather than admit that she could fall so low. But even then, in the
midst of her self-abasement, another voice answered that it was no shame
to love a good and true man, and that Lamberto Lamberti was both.