“She had a great emerald at her throat.”
She was sitting at my side, and a new emotion swept over me as with
an involuntary movement I leant slightly towards her, and breathed
the perfume which I thought was growing stronger, and overpowering
the honeyed fragrance of the flowers. A sudden aversion for all the
people and things present came over me; they gave me a feeling of
impatience and annoyance that was almost an aversion; they seemed at
that moment to be weighing on me and oppressing me in quite a peculiar
way. I looked across with instinctive hostility at the prince’s
cousin, Ottavio Montaga, who sat at one end of the table, a taciturn
individual with something of the sinister look of a mask, the symbol of
a mysterious prohibition not to be transgressed. I felt all the health,
strength, and passion in me rise in hatred against the sickness, the
sadness, against the mortal dulness by which this wonderful creature
was being consumed without a chance of escape. The uneasiness which
had troubled my spirit after the successive apparitions of the three
different figures was now subdued, and I believed myself to have set
my choice on her whom all the glory and solemnity of the past seemed
uniting to ennoble. Once more, it was she alone who stirred my being as
she had stirred it before when she lifted her head at the cry of the
hawk.