Qui sait ce qui peut advenir de la fragilite des
femmes? Qui sait jusq'ou peut aller l'inconstance de ce
sable mouvant?--ALFRED DE MUSSET.
The Italian winter was closing in. The nights were bitter cold.
Had Michael reached at last the death of love? Was its strait gate too
narrow for him?
After that one night he held his peace, even with himself, even with the
walls of his cell. He did not sleep nor eat. He had no time to sleep or
eat. He was absorbed in one idea.
Michael was not a thinker. He was a man of action, whose action, sharp,
rapier-like, and instantaneous, was unsheathed only by instinctive
feeling, by chivalry, honour, indignation, compassion, never by
reflection, judgment, experience. He could not really think. What he
learned had to reach him some other way. His mind only bungled up
against ideas, hustled them, so to speak, till they turned savage.
He sat idly in his cell when his work was done. There was a kind of
pressure on him, as if the walls were closing in on him. Sometimes he
got up, and pushed them back with his hands.
The sun had shifted his setting as the winter drew in, and for a few
minutes every afternoon laid a thong of red light upon his wall. He
looked at it sternly while it burned. It looked back sternly at him.
He had no wish to be free now, no wish for anything.
The doctor came to see him, and looked closely at him, and spoke kindly
to him. He was interested in the young Englishman, and, like several of
the warders, was convinced of his innocence.
Michael took no notice of him, barely answered his questions. He was
impatient of any interruption.
He was absorbed in one thought.
He had loved Fay for a long time. How long was it? Five years? Ten
years? Owing to his peculiar fate love had usurped in Michael's life too
large a place, the place which it holds in a woman's life, but which is
unnatural in a man's. He did not know it, but he had travelled a long
way on the road towards an entire oblivion of Fay when he came to Rome.
But the one great precaution against her he had not taken. He had not
replaced her, and "Only that which is replaced is destroyed." He had
grown accustomed to loving her.
In these days he went over, slowly, minutely, every step of his long
acquaintanceship with her, from the first day, when he was nineteen and
she was seventeen, to the last evening six years later, when he had
kissed the cold hand that could have saved him, and did not.
Old people, wise old learned people, smoke-dried Dons and genial bishops
sitting in their dignified studies, had spoken with guarded frankness to
him in his youth on the temptations of life. They had told him that
love, save when it was sanctified by marriage, was only a physical
passion, a temporary madness, a fever which all men who were men
underwent, but to which a man of principle did not succumb, and which if
vigorously suppressed soon passed away.
Why had it not been so with him? He had never had to contend with the
coarse forms of temptation of which his elders had spoken, as if they
were an integral part of his youth.
Why, then, had he loved this pretty, false, selfish woman so long? Why
had he allowed himself to be drawn back into her toils after he had
known she was false? Why was he more weak, more credulous, more
infatuated than other men?
The duke had actually been her husband, had actually possessed that
wonderful creature, and yet he, under the glamour of her personal
presence, which it made Michael gasp to think of, he, the duke, had not
been deceived.
Why had he, Michael, been deceived?
He remembered the exhortations of his tepid-minded, painlessly married
tutor at Oxford, who read the vilest French novels as a duty, and took a
walk with his wife on fine afternoons; and whose cryptic warnings on the
empire of the passions would have made a baboon blush.
Michael laughed suddenly as he recalled the mild old-maidish face. What
was the old prig talking about? What did he know, dried up and
shrivelled like a bit of seaweed between the leaves of a folio.
Everyone had told him wrong.
Why had they decried this awful power, why had they so confused it with
sensual indulgence that he had had to disentangle it for himself? Why
had they not warned him, on the contrary, that the love of woman was a
living death, a pitfall from which there was no escape, from the depths
of which you might stare at the sky till you starved to death, as he was
doing now.
With all their warnings they had not warned him, these grave men, these
instructors of youth, who had never known any world except their little
world of books, who ranged women into two camps, one in which they held
a docile Tennysonian place, as chaste adorners of the sacred home,
mothers of children, man's property, insipid angel housekeepers of his
demure middle age; the other where they were depicted as cheap, vulgar
temptresses, on a level with the wine cup and the gambling table.
Why had he allowed himself to be duped and hoodwinked by his elders and
by his own shyness, into chastity? They had entreated him to believe it
was the only happy life. _It was not._ To be faithful to his future
wife. Ha! Ha! That was the beginning of the trap, the white sand neatly
raked over the hidden gin.
If he had only lived like other men! If he had only listened to the
worst among them, if he had only torn the veil early from every limb of
that draped female figure, that iron maiden, if he had only seen it in
its horror of nudity, with its sharp nails for eyes, and its jagged
knives where the bosom should be, he should not be pressed to death in
its embrace now.
He had been deceived, betrayed, fooled. That was why he was shut up. He
had believed in a woman, had believed that the cobra's bite was only a
wasp's sting. Good Lord, what an imbecile! He was insane of course,
raving mad. And he had been here eighteen months and only saw the joke
now.
Michael laughed again, shouted with laughter.
The sun was setting again. It was always setting now. It set in the
mornings as well. The red thong of light was on the wall again. Blood
red! He rocked to and fro shaking with laughter.
The doctor and a warder came in. It was just like them. They were always
coming in when they were not wanted.
He pointed at the bar of light, stumbled to it, and tried to tear it
from the wall. It had been there long enough. Too long. And as he tore
at it with hands dyed crimson, something that was pressing upon him
lightened suddenly, and the blood gushed forth from his mouth, flooding
the sun-stained wall.
"I have put out that damned sunset at last," he said to himself as he
fell.