THE LABYRINTH
But that day they were to pass through other shadows, to know other
fears.
Henceforth the tragic meaning of life filled both their minds, and
they tried in vain to banish the physical sadness which from moment to
moment made their spirits more clear yet more disturbed. They clasped
each other's hand, as if they were groping in dark, dangerous places.
They spoke little, but often they gazed into each other's eyes, and
the look of the one poured into that of the other a wave of confused
emotion, the mingling of their love and horror. But it did not calm
their hearts.
"Shall we go farther?"
"Yes, let us go on."
Still they clasped each other's hand closely, as if they were about to
go through some strange test, and were resolved to experiment as to
what depths could be reached by the combined force of their melancholy.
At the Dolo, the wheels made the chestnut-leaves rustle and crackle
beneath them, and the tall changing trees flamed over their heads like
crimson draperies on fire. At a distance was the Villa Barbariga,
silent, deserted, of a reddish hue in its denuded garden, showing
vestiges of old paintings in the cracks of its façade, like streaks of
rouge on the wrinkled cheeks of an old woman. And, at every glance, the
distances of the landscape seemed fainter and bluer, like things slowly
submerged.
"Here is Strà."
They alighted before the Villa Pisani, and, accompanied by its
guardian, they visited the deserted apartments. They heard the sound
of their own footsteps on the marble that reflected them, the echoes
in the historic arches, the creaking of the doors, the tiresome voice
of the keeper awakening the memories of the place. The rooms were
vast, hung with faded draperies and furnished in the style of the
Empire, with Napoleonic emblems. The walls of one room were covered
with portraits of the Pisani, procurators of San Marco; of another,
with marble medallions of all the Doges; of a third, with a series of
flowers painted in water-colors and mounted in delicate frames, pale as
the dry flowers that are laid under glass, in memory of love or death.
As La Foscarina entered one room, she said:
"_In time!_ Here, too!"
There, on a bracket, stood a transformation into marble of _La Vecchia_
by Francesco Torbido, made even more repulsive by the relief, by the
subtle skill of the sculptor, to bring out with his chisel each tendon,
wrinkle, and hollow place in the old woman's face. And at the doors of
this room seemed to appear the ghosts of the crowned women that had
hidden their unhappiness and their decay in that vast dwelling, at once
like a palace and a monastery.
"Maria Luisa di Parma, in eighteen hundred and seventeen," continued
the monotonous voice.
"Ah, the Queen of Spain, wife of Charles the Fourth, and mistress of
Manuel Godoï," said Stelio. "She attracts me more than all the others.
She came here when they were in exile. Do you know whether she stayed
here with the King and the favorite!"
But the guardian knew only that name and the date.
"Why does she attract you?" La Foscarina asked. "I know nothing of her
history."
"Her end, the last years of her life of exile, after so much struggle
and passion, are extraordinarily full of poetry."
And he described that violent and tenacious character, the weak,
credulous King, the handsome adventurer who had enjoyed the smiles of
the Queen, and had been dragged through the streets by the infuriated
mob; the agitations of the three lives bound together by Fate, and
swept before Napoleon's will like leaves in a whirlwind; the tumult at
Aranjuez, the abdication, the exile.
"And Godoï--the Prince of Peace, as the King called him--faithfully
followed the sovereigns into exile; he remained faithful to his royal
mistress, and she to him. They all lived together under the same roof
thenceforth, and Charles never doubted the virtue of Maria Luisa.
Even to the day of his death, he lavished all manner of kindness on
the two lovers. Imagine their life in this place; imagine here such a
love coming safely through a storm so terrible. All was broken down,
overthrown, reduced to powder by the destroyer. Bonaparte had passed
that way, but had not smothered that love, already old, beneath the
ruins. The faithfulness of those two violent natures moves my heart not
less than the credulity of the kindly King. Thus they grew old. Imagine
it! The Queen died first, then the King; and the favorite, who was
younger than they, lived a wandering life a few years more."
"This is the Emperor's room," said the guardian solemnly, flinging open
a door.
The great shade seemed omnipresent in the villa of the Doge Alvise. The
imperial eagle, symbol of his power, dominated all the faded relics.
But in the yellow room, the shade seemed to occupy the vast bed, to
rest under the canopy, surrounded by the four bedposts ornamented at
the top with golden flames. The formidable sigla inscribed within the
laurel crown shone upon the polished side of the bed. And this species
of funereal couch seemed to be prolonged in the dim mirror hanging
between the two figures of Victory that supported the candelabra.
"Did the Emperor sleep in this bed?" inquired the young man of the
custodian, who pointed out to him on the wall the portrait of the great
_condottiere_ mantled in ermine, wearing a crown of laurel and holding
a scepter, as he appeared at the coronation blessed by Pius VII. "Is it
certain?"
He was surprised at himself at not feeling the emotion experienced by
ambitious spirits at the sight of the traces of heroes--that strong
throb he knew so well.
He lifted the edge of the yellow counterpane, and let it fall as
suddenly as if the pillow under it had been full of vermin.
"Let us go away from this place; let us go!" said La Foscarina, who had
been looking through the windows at the park, where the golden bars of
the setting sun alternated with bluish-green zones of shade. "We cannot
breathe here," she added.
The air, in truth, was like that of a vault.
"Now we pass into the room of Maximilian of Austria," said the droning
voice, "he took the dressing-room of Amélie de Beauharnais for his
bedroom."
They crossed this apartment in a flood of crimson light. The sunlight
struck on a crimson couch, flashed rainbows from a frail chandelier
with crystal drops that hung from the ceiling and kindled perpendicular
red lines on the wall. Stelio stopped on the threshold, evoking in his
fancy as he did so, the pensive figure of the young Archduke, with blue
eyes, that fair flower of Hapsburg fallen in a barbaric land one summer
morning!
"Let us go!" begged La Foscarina again, seeing him still delay.
She hastened through the immense salon, painted in fresco by Tiepolo;
the Corinthian bronze gate closing behind her gave forth a clang as
resonant as the stroke of a bell, sending prolonged vibrations through
space. She flew along, terrified, as if the whole palace were about
to crumble and fall, and the light to fail, and she dreaded lest she
should find herself alone among the shadows with these phantoms of
unhappiness and death. As Stelio followed, through the space wherein
the air was moved by her flight, between those walls enclosing
relics, behind the famous actress who had simulated the fury of deadly
passions, the desperate efforts of will and of desire, and the violent
conflict of splendid destines on the stage of all lands, the warm blood
in his veins grew chill, as if he were passing through a freezing
atmosphere; he felt his heart grow cold, his courage flag; his reason
for being lost its hold on his mind, and the magnificent illusions
with which he had fed his soul, that it might surpass itself and his
destiny, wavered and were dispersed.
"Are we still living?" he asked, when they found themselves in the air
without, in the park, far from the unwholesome odor.
He took La Foscarina's hand, shook her gently, gazed into her eyes and
tried to smile; then he drew her into the sunlight in the middle of the
green meadow.
"What heat! Do you feel it? How sweet the grass is!"
He half-closed his eyes, that he might feel the sun's rays on his
eyelids, and was once more filled with the joy of living. The woman
imitated him, calmed by the pleasure her beloved showed; and she looked
from under her half-closed eyelids at his fresh, sensuous mouth. They
sat thus for some time, hand-in-hand, their feet resting on the warm
grass. Her thoughts turned back to the Eugenean hills, which he had
described, to the villages pink as the buried shells, to the first
drops of rain on the tender leaves, Petrarch's fountain, to all things
fair and pleasant.
"Life might still be sweet!" she sighed, in a voice wherein was the
miracle of hope born anew.
The heart of her beloved became like a fruit suddenly ripened by a
miraculous ray. Joy, delight, and tenderness spread through his whole
being. Once more he reveled in the joy of the moment, as if it were the
last of life. Love was exalted above Destiny.
"Do you love me? Tell me?"
She made no answer, but she opened wide her eyes, and the vastness of
the universe was within the circle of those pupils. Never was boundless
love more powerfully signified by mortal woman.
"Ah, life with thee is sweet, sweet--yesterday as well as to-morrow!"
He seemed intoxicated with her, with the sunlight, the grass, the
divine sky, as with something never before seen or possessed. The
prisoner leaving his stifling cell, the convalescent who beholds the
sea after looking death in the face, are not more intoxicated.
"Would you like to go now? Shall we leave our melancholy behind us?
Would you like to go to a country where there is no autumn?"
--The autumn is in myself, and I carry it everywhere--she thought; but
she smiled the slight smile with which she veiled her sadness.--It is
I--it is I that must go away alone; I will disappear; I will go
far-away and die, my love, O my love!--
During this moment of respite, she had not succeeded either in
conquering her sadness or reviving her hope; but her anguish was
softened, and she had lost all bitterness and rancor.
"Do you wish to go away?"
--To go away, always to be going away, to wander throughout the world,
to go long distances!--thought the nomad woman.--Never to stop, never
to rest! The anxiety of the journey is not over yet, but already the
truce has expired. You wish to comfort me, my friend, and, to console
me, you propose that I should go far-away once more, although I
returned to my home, as it were, but yesterday.--
Suddenly her eyes looked like two sparkling springs.
"Leave me in my home a little while longer. And remain here, too, if
that is possible. Later, you will be free, you will be happy. You
have so long a time before you! You are young. You will win what you
deserve. They will not lose you, even if they must wait for you."
Her eyes had two crystal masks before them; they glittered in the
sunshine, and seemed almost fixed in her fevered face.
"Ah, always the same shadow!" Stelio exclaimed, with an impatience he
could not conceal. "But what are you thinking of? What do you fear? Why
not tell me what it is that troubles you? Explain yourself. Who is it
that must wait for me?"
She trembled with terror at that question, which seemed new and
unexpected, although he only repeated her own last words. She trembled
to find herself so near danger, as if, in walking across this fair
meadow, a precipice had suddenly opened under her feet.
And suddenly, in that unfamiliar place, on that beautiful grass, at the
end of the day, after all those specters, sanguinary or bloodless, rose
a living image of will and desire, which filled her with far greater
terror. Suddenly, above all the figures of the Past, arose the figure
of the Future, and again the aspect of her life was changed; and the
sweetness of the respite was already lost, and the fair meadow with its
sweet grass was worth nothing.
"Yes, let us talk, if you wish."
But she was obliged to lift her face a little to keep her tears from
falling.
"Do not be sad!" pleaded the young man, whose soul was suspended on
those eyelids, whence the tears would not fall. "You hold my heart
in your hand. I never will fail you. Then why torment yourself? I am
wholly yours."
For him, too, the image of Donatella was there, with her rounded
figure, her body as robust and agile as a wingless Victory, armed with
the glory of maidenhood, attractive yet hostile, ready to struggle, and
then to yield. But his soul was suspended from the eyelids of the other
woman, like the tears that veiled the eyes in which he had seen the
vastness of the universe, the infinity of love.
"Foscarina!"
At last the warm tears fell, but she did not let them course down
her cheeks. With one of those movements that sometimes sprang from
her sadness with the swift grace of a freed wing, she checked them,
moistened her finger-tips with them, and touched her temples without
drying them. And, while she still kept her tears upon herself, she
tried to smile.
"Forgive me, Stelio. I am so weak!"
"Ah, dear fingers--beautiful as Sofia's! Let me kiss them as they are,
still wet."
Within his caressing arm, he drew her across the field to a zone of
golden green. Lightly, with his arm supporting hers, he kissed her
finger-tips, one after another, more delicate than the buds of the
tuberose. She startled, and he felt her tremble at each touch of his
lips.
"They are salt!"
"Take care, Stelio! Some one may see us."
"No one is here."
"Perhaps down there, in the hothouses."
"There is not a sound. Hark!"
"What a strange silence! It is ecstasy."
"We might hear the falling of a leaf."
"And the keeper?"
"He has gone to meet some other visitor."
"Does anyone ever come here?"
"The other day Richard Wagner came here with Daniela von Bülow."
"Ah, yes, the niece of the Countess Agoult, of 'Daniel Stern.'"
"And, among all those phantoms, with which did that great stricken
heart converse?"
"Who can tell?"
"Only with himself, perhaps."
"Perhaps."
"Look at the glass windows and walls of the conservatories--how they
sparkle! They appear iridescent. Rain, sunshine and time have painted
it in that way. Does it not seem to reflect a distant twilight? Perhaps
you have sometimes stopped on the Pesaro quay, to look at the beautiful
pentafore window of the Evangelists. If you raised your eyes, you could
see the windows of the palace marvelously painted by the changes of
weather."
"You know all the secrets of Venice!"
"Not all yet."
"How warm it is here! See how tall those cedars are. There is a
swallow's nest hanging on that limb."
"The swallows went away very late this year."
"Will you really take me to the Euganean hills in the spring?"
"Yes, Foscarina, I should like to do so."
"Spring is so far-away!"
"Life can still be sweet."
"We are living in a dream."
"Look at Orpheus with his lyre, all dressed in lichens."
"Ah, what a land of dreams! No one comes here any more. Grass, grass
everywhere! There is not a single human footstep."
"Deucalion with his stones, Ganymede with his eagle, Diana with her
stag--all the gods of mythology."
"How many statues! But these, at least, are not in exile. The ancient
hornbeams still protect them."
"Here strolled Maria Luisa di Parma, between the King and the favorite.
From time to time she would pause to listen to the click of the
blades that cut the hornbeams to form arches. She would let fall her
handkerchief, perfumed with jessamine, and Don Manuel Godoï would pick
it up with a graceful gesture, hiding the pain he suffered when he
stooped--a souvenir of the outrages he had endured at the hands of the
mob in the streets of Aranjuez. How warm the sun was, and how excellent
the snuff in its enameled box, when the King said with a smile:
'Certainly, our dear Bonaparte is not so well off at Saint Helena as
we are here.' But the demon of power, of struggle, and of passion was
still alive in the Queen's heart. Look at those red roses!"
"They fairly burn. One would think each had a live coal at its heart.
Yes, they seem actually to burn."
"The sun is growing red. This is the hour for the Chioggia sails on the
lagoon."
"Gather a rose for me."
"Here is one."
"Oh, but its leaves are falling."
"Well, here is another."
"These leaves are falling too."
"They are all at the point of death. Perhaps this one is not."
"Do not break it off."
"Look! These seem to be redder still. Bonifazio's velvet--do you
remember it? It has the same strength."
"'The inmost flower of the flame.'"
"What a memory!"
"Listen! They are closing the doors of the conservatories."
"It is time to go," said Stelio, abruptly yet gently.
"The air is beginning to be cooler."
"Do you feel cold?"
"No, not yet."
"Did you leave your cloak in the carriage?"
"Yes."
"We will wait at Dolo for the train, and return to Venice by the
railway."
"Yes."
"We still have time to spare."
"What is this? Look!"
"I don't know."
"What a bitter odor! It is a sort of shrubbery of box and hornbeams."
"Ah, it is the labyrinth!"
A rusty iron gate barred the entrance to the labyrinth between two
columns that bore two Cupids riding on stone dolphins. Nothing was to
be seen on the other side of the gate, except the beginning of the
path, and a kind of solidly built and intricate thicket, dark and
mysterious. In the center of the maze rose a tower, at the summit of
which stood the statue of a warrior, as if reconnoitering from that
point.
"Have you ever been in a labyrinth?" Stelio inquired.
"No, never," she replied.
They lingered to examine the entrance to the deceptive playground,
composed by an ingenious gardener for the amusement of ladies and
their cavaliers in the days of hoops and flowered waistcoats. But age
and neglect had rendered it mournful and wild, had deprived it of
all appearance of grace and regularity, and had changed it into thick
yellowish-brown woodland, full of inextricable turns through which the
slanting rays of the setting sun shone so red that some of the shrubs
looked like smokeless fire.
"It is open," said Stelio, feeling the gate yield as he leaned on it.
"Do you see?"
He pushed back the rusty iron gate, took a step forward, and crossed
the threshold.
"Where are you going?" asked his companion, with instinctive fear,
putting out a hand to detain him.
"Do you not wish to go in?"
She was perplexed. But the labyrinth attracted them with its mystery,
illumined by deep flames.
"Suppose we should lose ourselves?"
"You can see for yourself that it is very small. We can easily find the
gate again."
"And suppose we don't find it?"
He laughed at this childish fear.
"We might remain in there through all eternity!" he said.
"No, no! No one is anywhere near. Let us go away."
She tried to draw him back, but he defended himself, stepping backward
toward the path. Suddenly he disappeared, laughing.
"Stelio! Stelio!"
She could see him no longer, but she heard his ringing laughter in the
midst of the wild thicket.
"Come back! come back!"
"No, no! Come in and find me."
"Stelio, come back! You will be lost," she called.
"I shall find Ariadne."
At that name, she felt her heart throb suddenly, then contract, then
palpitate confusedly. Was not that the name he had called Donatella,
that first night? Had he not called her Ariadne down there, in the
gondola, while seated at the young girl's feet? She even remembered his
words: "Ariadne possesses a divine gift, whereby her power transcends
all limits." She recalled his accent, his attitude, his look.
Tumultuous anguish seized upon her, obscured her reason, prevented
her from realizing the spontaneity of the happening, and the simple
careless jest in her friend's speech. The terror that lay hidden in
the depths of her love rose in rebellion, mastered her, blinded her
with misery. The trifling little accident assumed an appearance of
cruelty and derision. She could still hear that laugh ringing from the
melancholy maze.
"Stelio!"
In her frantic hallucination, she cried out as if she had seen him
embraced by the other woman, torn from her arms forever.
"Stelio!"
"Come and find me!" he answered laughing, still invisible.
She rushed into the labyrinth to find him, and advanced straight toward
the voice and the laugh, guided by her impulse. But the path turned;
a wall of bushes rose before her, impenetrable, and stopped her.
She followed the winding, deceiving path; but one turning followed
another, and all looked alike, and the circle seemed to have no end.
"Look for me!" cried the voice from a distance, through the living
hedges.
"Where are you? Where are you? Can you see me?"
She looked about for some opening in the hedge through which she might
see. But all she saw was thick, interlacing branches, and the redness
of the setting sun which lighted them on one side, while shadows
darkened them on the other. The box-bushes and the hornbeams were so
closely mingled that they increased momentarily the bewilderment of the
breathless woman.
"I am losing myself! Come and meet me!"
Again that boyish laugh came from the maze.
"Ariadne, Ariadne! the thread!"
Now the words came from the opposite side, striking her heart as if
with a blow.
"Ariadne!"
She turned back, ran, turned again, tried to break through the hedge,
to see through the undergrowth, to break the branches. She saw nothing
but the maze, always the same in every direction. At last she heard a
step, so close that she thought it must be just behind her, and she
started. But she was deceived. Again she explored her green prison; she
listened, waited; she could hear no sound but her own breathing and the
beating of her heart. The silence had become absolute. She gazed at
the clear sky, curving in its immensity over the two green walls that
held her prisoner. She felt that that immensity and narrowness were
the only things in the world. And she could not succeed in separating
in her thoughts the reality of that place from the image of her mental
torture, the natural aspect of things from that kind of living allegory
created by her own anguish.
"Stelio, where are you?"
No reply. She listened and waited in vain. The seconds seemed like
hours.
"Where are you? I am afraid!"
No reply. But where was he, then? Had he found the way out? Had he left
her there all alone? Would he continue to play this cruel game?
A mad desire to scream, to sob, to throw herself on the ground, to hurt
herself, to make herself ill, to die, assailed the distracted woman.
Again she raised her eyes to the silent sky. The tops of the tall
hornbeams were reddened, like logs when they have ceased to blaze and
are about to fall in ashes.
"I can see you!" suddenly said a laughing voice, in the deep shadows,
very near her.
"Where are you?"
He laughed among the leaves, but without revealing himself, like a
faun in hiding. This game excited him; his body grew warm and supple
by this exercise of his agility; and the wild mystery, the contact
with the earth, the odor of autumn, the strangeness of this unexpected
adventure, the woman's bewilderment, even the presence of the marble
deities mingled with his physical pleasure an illusion of antique
poetry and grace.
"Where are you? Oh, do not play any more! Do not laugh in that way!
Enough!"
He had crept, bareheaded, into the bushes on his hands and knees. He
felt the dead leaves, the soft moss. And as he breathed among the
branches, and felt his heart throb with the strange delight of the
situation, with the communion between his own life and the vegetable
life around him, the spell of his fancy renewed among those winding
ways the industry of the first maker of wings, the myth of the monster
that was born of Pasiphaë and the Bull, the Attic legend of Theseus
in Crete. All that ancient world became real to him. In that glowing
autumn evening, he was transfigured, according to the instincts of his
blood and the recollections of his mind, into one of those ambiguous
forms, half animal and half divine, one of those glittering genii whose
throats were swollen with the same gland that hangs from the neck of
the goat. A joyous voluptuousness suggested strange surprises to him,
suggested the swiftness of pursuit, of flight, capture, and a fleeting
embrace in the shadows of the wood. Then he desired some one like
himself, fresh youthfulness that could share his laughter, two light
feet to fly before him, two arms to resist him, a prize to capture at
last. Donatella with her curved figure recurred to his mental vision.
"Enough, Stelio! I cannot run any more. I shall fall."
La Foscarina uttered a scream on feeling her skirt pulled by a hand
that had reached through the shrubbery. She bent down, and saw in the
shadows the face of a laughing faun. The laughter struck her ear
without calming her distress, without breaking the sense of suffering
that overpowered her. As she looked at his boyish face, she saw at
the same instant the face of the singer, who seemed to be stooping
with her, imitating her movement as if she were a shadow. Her mind
became more confused, and she could not distinguish between illusion
and reality. The other woman seemed to overthrow her, oppress her,
suffocate her.
"Leave me! Leave me! It is not I whom you seek!"
Her voice was so changed that Stelio broke off his laughter and his
sport, withdrew his arm, and rose to his feet. She could not see him;
the leafy, impenetrable wall was between them again.
"Take me away from this place. I cannot bear any more. My strength is
gone. I suffer."
He could find no words to comfort her. The simultaneous coincidence
of his recent thought of Donatella, and her sudden divination of it,
impressed him deeply.
"Wait a little! I will try to find the way out. I will call some one."
"Are you going away?"
"Don't be afraid! There is no danger."
But while he spoke thus to reassure her, he felt the inaneness of his
words--the incongruity between that laughable adventure and the obscure
emotion born of a far different cause. And now he too felt the strange
ambiguity whereby the trifling event appeared in two confusing aspects:
a suppressed desire to laugh persisted under his concern for her, so
that his perturbation was new to him, like wild agitations born of
extravagant dreams.
"Do not go away!" she implored, a prey to her hallucinations. "Perhaps
we can meet there at the next turning. Let us try. Take my hands."
Through an opening, he took her hands; he started on touching them;
they were icy cold.
"Foscarina, what is the matter? Are you really ill? Wait! I will try to
break through."
He attempted to break down the hedge, and snapped off a few twigs, but
its thickness resisted him, and he scratched his hands uselessly.
"No, it is impossible."
"Cry out! Call some one."
He cried aloud in the silence.
The top of the hedge had lost its deep color, but a red light now
spread over the sky above them. A triangle of wild ducks passed in
sweeping flight.
"Let me go, Foscarina. I shall find the tower easily, and will call
from there. Some one will be sure to hear me."
"No! No!"
But she heard him move away, followed the sound of his steps, and
was once more bewildered by the maze, once more alone and lost. She
stopped, waited, listened, and looked at the sky. She lost all sense of
time; the seconds seemed hours.
"Stelio! Stelio!"
She was no longer capable of an effort to control her disordered and
exasperated mind. She felt the approach of a crisis of mad fear,
as one feels the approach of a whirlwind.
[Illustration: _HE WATCHED THE WOMAN TURNING AND RUNNING LIKE A MAD
CREATURE ALONG THE DARK, DELUSIVE PATHS_]
_From an Original Drawing by Arthur H. Ewer_
"Stelio!"
He heard that cry full of anguish, and hastened his search along the
winding paths that first seemed to lead him toward the tower and then
away from it. The laughter had frozen in his heart. His whole soul
shook to its foundation every time his name reached him, uttered by
that invisible agony. And the gradual lessening of the light brought up
an image of blood that is flowing away, of slowly fading life.
"I am here! I am here!"
One of the paths brought him at last to the open space where the tower
stood. He ran furiously up the winding stairs, felt dizzy when he
reached the top, closed his eyes while grasping the railing, opened
them again, and saw a long zone of fire on the horizon, the disk
of the rayless moon, the gray plain, and the labyrinth below him,
black and spotted with box-bush and horn-beam, narrow in its endless
convolutions, looking like a dismantled edifice covered with wild vines.
"Stop! Stop! Do not run like that! Some one has heard me. A man is
coming. I can see him coming. Wait! Stop!"
He watched the woman turning and running like a mad creature along the
dark, delusive paths, like something condemned to vain torture, to some
useless but eternal fatigue, like a sister of the fabulous martyrs.
"Stop!"
It seemed that she did not hear him, or that she could not control
her fatal agitation, and that he could not rescue her, but must always
remain there, a witness of that terrible chastisement.
"Here he is!"
One of the keepers had heard their cries, had approached them, and
now entered by the gateway. Stelio met him at the foot of the tower,
and together they hastened to find the lost woman. The man knew the
secret of the labyrinth, and Stelio prevented any chatter and jests by
surprising him with his generosity.
"Has she lost consciousness--has she fallen?" The darkness and the
silence were sinister, and he felt alarmed. She did not answer when
he called her, and he could not hear her footsteps. Night had already
fallen on the place, and a damp veil was descending from the purple sky.
"Shall I find her in a swoon upon the ground," he thought.
He started at seeing a mysterious figure appear at a turning, with a
pale face that attracted all the last rays of daylight, white as a
pearl, with large, fixed eyes, and lips closely compressed.
They turned back toward the Dolo, taking the same route beside the
Brenta. She never spoke, never opened her lips, never answered, as if
she could not unclose her teeth. She lay in the bottom of the carriage,
wrapped in her cloak, and now and then she shook with a deep shudder,
as one attacked by malarial fever. Her friend tried to take her hands
in his to warm them, but in vain--they were inert and lifeless. And as
they drove along, the statues passed and passed beside them.
The river flowed black between its banks, under the purple and silver
sky; the moon was rising. A black boat came down the stream, towed by
two gray horses with heavy hoofs, led by a man who whistled cheerfully,
and the funnel smoked on the deck like a chimney on a hut. The yellow
light of a lantern flashed, and the odor of supper floated on the air;
and here and there, as they drove along, the statues passed and passed
beside them.
It was like a Stygian landscape, like a vision of Hades, a region of
shadows, mist, and water. Everything grew misty and vanished like
spirits. The moon enchanted and attracted the plain, as it enchants
and attracts the water, absorbing the vapors of earth with insatiable,
silent thirst. Solitary pools shone everywhere; small, silvery canals
were visible, glittering at uncertain distances. Earth seemed to be
gradually losing its solidity, and the sky seemed to regard its own
melancholy reflected in innumerable placid mirrors.
And here and there, along the banks of the stream, like the ghosts of a
people disappeared, the statues passed and passed!