And his mother's tired eyes asked: "_For whom_ are you abandoning me?"

*CHAPTER IV.*

It was the afternoon. George explored the tortuous path which, by a

succession of ups and downs, led towards the Vasto Point on the edge of

the sea. He gazed before and around him with a curiosity always awake,

almost betraying an effort to be attentive, as if he wished to surprise

some obscure thought translated by these simple semblances, or to render

himself master of some unseizable secret.

In a fold of the hill which followed the sea line, the water of a stream

derived from a sort of small aqueduct, made from hollowed trunks and

sustained by dead trees, traversed the dale from one shore to the other.

There were also trenches carried in hollow tiles, as far as the fertile

field where the crops were prospering; and here and there on the

reflecting and murmuring trenches, beautiful violet flowers bent with

airy grace. All these humble things appeared to have a profound life.

And the excess of water ran and spread on the slope towards the sandy

beach, passing beneath a small bridge. In the shade of the arch, several

women were washing linen, and their gestures were reflected in the water

as in a mobile mirror. On the beach, the linen spread out in the sun

was of dazzling whiteness. A man was walking along the railroad tracks,

his feet naked, carrying his shoes hanging in his hand. A woman came

out of the toll-house and, with a rapid gesture, threw some debris from

out of a basket. Two little girls, loaded with linen, were running,

each trying to outdo the other, laughing. An old woman was hanging

blue-colored skeins from a pole.

Beyond, on the slope of the earth wall that bordered the path, small

shells made white spots, fragile roots fluttered in the wind. The

traces of the pickaxe that had cut into the fawn-colored earth were

still distinguishable. From the top of a heap of earth hung a tuft of

dead roots, as light as the scales of a serpent.

Farther on was a large farmhouse, with a porcelain flower at the summit

of its tiled roof. An outer stairway led up to a covered gallery. At

the head of the stairway two women were spinning, and, beneath the sun,

their distaffs had the resplendency of gold. One could hear the

clicking of a weaving machine. Through the window could be seen a

weaver, and her rhythmic gesture as she plied the shuttle. Lying down

in a neighboring field was a gray ox, a beast of enormous size, shaking

ears and tail, peacefully and unceasingly, in order to chase away the

flies. Around him, chickens were scratching.

A little farther, a second stream traversed the path--laughing,

rippling, gay, frisking, limpid.

A little farther on still, near another house, there was a silent

garden, full of bushy laurels, closed all round. The stems, slender and

straight, rose up motionless, with their crown of shining foliage. And

one of these laurels, the most robust, was entirely enveloped by a

large, amorous bryonia which triumphed over the austere foliage by the

delicacy of its snowlike flowers, and by the freshness of its nuptial

perfume. Below, the earth seemed to have been newly turned over. In a

corner a black cross shed over the mute enclosure that sort of resigned

sadness which reigns in cemeteries. At the end of the path could be

seen a stairway, half in the sun and half in the shadow, by which one

mounted to a half-open door, which protected two branches of a blessed

olive-tree, suspended at the rustic architrave. Below, on the last

step, an old man was seated, asleep, his head bare, his chin on his

breast, his hands resting on his knees; and the sun was about to touch

his venerable brow. From above, through the half-open door, as if to

favor the senile slumber, descended the equal sound of a cradle rocking

and the equal cadence of a hummed ballad.

All these humble things seemed to have a profound life.

*CHAPTER V.*

Hippolyte announced that, according to her promise, she would arrive at

San Vito, Tuesday, May 20th, by train direct, about one o'clock in the

afternoon.

That would be in two days. George wrote to her:

"Come, come! I await you, and never was waiting more tantalizing.

Every minute that passes is irremediably lost to happiness. Come.

Everything is ready. Or rather, no, nothing is ready, save my desire.

It is necessary, my friend, that you provide yourself with an

inextinguishable fund of patience and indulgence; because, in this

savage and impracticable solitude, every commodity of life is lacking.

Oh, how impracticable! Picture to yourself, my friend, that from the

station of San Vito to the Hermitage takes three-quarters of an hour by

road; and to cover this distance, the only means is to follow on foot

the path cut through the granite, rising perpendicularly from the sea.

You must be careful to come provided with heavy shoes, and gigantic

parasols. As to dresses, it is useless to bring many; a few gay and

durable costumes for our morning walks will suffice. Do not forget your

bathing suit....

"This letter is the last I shall write you. You will get it a few hours

before you start. I am writing you in _the library_, a room in which

there are heaps of books which we are hardly likely to read. The

afternoon is grayish, and the sea stretches out in endless monotony.

The hour is discreet, languorous, propitious for delicate sensualities.

Oh, if you were with me! This evening will be my second night at the

Hermitage, and I shall spend it alone. If you only saw the bed! It is

a rustic bed, a monumental hymeneal altar, large as a field, deep as the

slumber of the just--_thalamus thalamorum_! The mattresses contain the

wool of an entire flock, the straw-bed contains the shucks of an entire

field of maize. Can these chaste things have the presentiment of your

nudity?

"Good-by, good-by. How slowly the hours go by! Who says time has wings?

I do not know what I would give if I could go to sleep in this

enervating languor, and not awake until Tuesday morning. But no, I will

not sleep. I, too, have killed my sleep. I have the constant vision of

your mouth."

*CHAPTER VI.*

For several days voluptuous visions had haunted him without a truce.

Desire awoke in his flesh with inconceivable violence. A warm puff of

air, a waft of perfume, the rustle of a skirt, mere trifles, sufficed to

modify his entire being, to make him languorous, to light up his face

with a flame, to accelerate the pulsations of his arteries, to throw him

into an agitation bordering on delirium.

At the profoundest depths of his substance he bore the germs inherited

from his father. He, the creature of thought and sentiment, had in his

flesh the fatal heredity of that brutish being. But in him instinct had

become a passion, and sensuality had assumed almost morbid forms. He was

as grieved over this as if it were a shameful malady: he had a horror of

these fevers which assailed him unexpectedly, which consumed him

miserably; which left him debased, arid, powerless to think. He

suffered from certain passions as though they degraded him. Certain

sudden passages of brutality, similar to hurricanes over a growing

field, devastated his mind, dried up all his inner sources, made painful

furrows which for a long time he could not succeed in filling up.

At the dawn of the great day, as he awoke after a few hours of a

restless dozing, he thought, with a thrill of all his nerves: "She

arrives to-day! To-day, in the light of to-day, my eyes will see her!

I will hold her in my arms! It almost seems to me as if it will be the

first possession; it seems to me, too, that I could die of it." The

vision conjured up gave him so rude a shock that he felt his body

traversed from tip to toe by a start similar to that caused by an

electric discharge. In him appeared those terrible physical phenomena

against the tyranny of which he was defenceless. All his conscience

fell beneath the absolute empire of desire. Once more the hereditary

lewdness broke out with an invincible fury in this delicate lover whom

it pleased to call his mistress "sister," and who had a thirst for

spiritual communions. He contemplated, in mind, his mistress's beauty;

and every contour, seen through the flame, assumed in his eyes a radiant

splendor, chimerical, almost superhuman. He contemplated, in mind, his

mistress's grace; and every attitude assumed a voluptuous fascination of

inconceivable intensity. In her, all was light, perfume, and rhythm.

This admirable creature he possessed--he, he alone.... But,

spontaneously, as the smoke rises from a poor fire, a jealous thought

disengaged itself from his desire. To dissipate the agitation which he

felt growing, he sprang from the bed.

At the window, at dawn, the olive-tree branches had an imperceptible

undulation, pale, between gray and white. The sound of the sparrows

discreetly twittering was heard above the dull, monotonous wash of the

sea. In a stable a lamb bleated timidly.

He went out into the loggia, comforted by the tonic virtue of a bath,

and drank in deeply the morning air charged with savory odors. His

lungs dilated; his thoughts took their flight, agile, each marked with

the image of the waited-for woman; a feeling of renewed youth made his

heart palpitate.

Before him was the maturity of the sun, pure, simple, without a vestige

of clouds, without mystery. Above the silver sea arose a crimson disk,

clearly defined, almost sharp, like a disk of metal fresh from the

forge.

Colas di Sciampagne, who was busy cleaning the court, cried out to him:

"To-day is a great holiday. The lady is coming. The corn comes into

the ear without waiting for the Ascension."

George smiled at the courteous remark of the old man, and asked:

"Did you think of the women to gather the furze flowers? The entire

length of the road must be strewn with them."

The old man gave an impatient gesture, as if to signify that he required

no reminder.

"I sent for five!"

And he named them, showing the places where the young girls lived.

"The Monkey's daughter, the Ogress's daughter, Favetta, Splendor, and

Garbin's daughter."

These names provoked in George a sudden mirth. It seemed to him that

all the spirit of springtime entered into his heart, that a wave of

fragrant poesy inundated it. Did not these virgins step out of a fairy

tale to strew flowers on the road under the feet of the beautiful Roman?

He abandoned himself to the anxious enjoyment of expectation. He asked,

restlessly:

"Where are they gathering their harvest of furze?"

"Up yonder," replied Colas di Sciampagne, pointing to the hillock; "up

yonder, on the Chesnaie. Their singing will guide you."

In fact, a feminine chant came at intervals from the hill. George

started up the incline, in search of the singers. The small, tortuous

path wound through a copse of young oaks. At a certain place it

branched out into a number of paths, the ends of which could not be

seen; and the narrow groves, hollowed between the thickets, crossed by

innumerable roots close to the ground, formed a sort of mountainous

labyrinth in which the sparrows twittered and the blackbirds whistled.

George, led by both chant and perfume, did not go astray. He found the

field of furze.

It was a plateau on which the furze flourished so plentifully that it

presented to the eye the uniformity of a vast yellow mantle,

sulphur-colored, resplendent. The five lasses were gathering the

flowering branches in order to fill their baskets, and were singing.

They were singing at the top of their voices, in a perfect chord of the

third and fifth. When they came to the refrain, they straightened up

above the bushes to permit the note to more freely emerge from their

unconfined chests; and they held the note a long time, looking in each

other's eyes, holding before them their hands full of flowers.

At the sight of the stranger they stopped, and bent over the bushes.

Ill-suppressed laughter ran along the yellow carpet. George asked:

"Which of you is named Favetta?"

A young girl, brown as an olive, rose to reply, astonished, almost

afraid.

"It is I, signor."

"Aren't you the best singer in San Vito?"

"No, signor. That is not true."

"It is true, it is true!" cried all her companions. "Make her sing,

signor."

She denied it, laughing, her face on fire; and while her companions

insisted, she twisted her apron. She was of small stature, but very

well formed, her bosom large and heaving, developed by singing. She had

curly hair, heavy eyebrows, an aquiline nose, a rather defiant carriage

of her head.

After several refusals, she consented. Her companions threw their arms

around her, imprisoned her in their circle. They emerged from among the

flowering tufts up to their waists, amid the buzzing of the diligent

bees.

Favetta commenced, at first timidly; then, note by note, her voice

became more assured. She had a limpid voice, fluid, crystalline as a

spring of water. She sang a distich, and her companions took up the

refrain in chorus. They prolonged the final notes in unison, their

mouths close together so as to make but one vocal wave; and this wave

undulated in the light with the slowness of liturgic cadences.

Favetta sang:

All the fountains are dry,

My love is dying of thirst,

Tromme lari, lira....

Love, forever!

Love, I am thirsty, oh! so thirsty,

Where is the water you bring me?

Tromme lari, lira....

Love, forever!

I bring you a bowl of potter's clay.

Suspended from a chain of gold,

Tromme lari, lira....

Love, forever!

And her companions repeated:

Love, forever!

This salutation of May to love, gushing from these bosoms, which perhaps

did not know it yet, which perhaps would never know its veritable

sorrows, resounded in George's ears like a good augury. The girls, the

flowers, the woods, the sea, all these free and unconscious things which

breathed around him the voluptuousness of life--all that caressed the

surface of his soul, soothed, lulled him in the habitual sentiment that

he had concerning his own being, gave him an increasing, harmonious, and

rhythmic sensation of a new faculty which had developed little by little

in the intimacy of his substance, and that would be revealed to him in a

very vague manner, as in a sort of confused vision of a divine secret.

It was a fugitive enchantment, a state of consciousness so exceptional

and so incomprehensible that he could not retain even its phantom.

The singers pointed to the already overflowing baskets--a heap of

flowers humid with dew. Favetta asked:

"Will that do?"

"No, no, that won't be enough. Keep on gathering them. The entire road

from the Trabocco to the house must be strewn. The stairway, the

loggia, must be covered."

"But what shall we do for Ascension Day? Won't you leave a single

flower for Jesus?"

*CHAPTER VII.*

She had arrived. She had trod on the flowers, like the Madonna who is

going to perform a miracle; she had trod on a carpet of flowers. She

had at last arrived! She had at last crossed the threshold!

And now, tired, happy, she presented to her lover's lips a face all

bathed in tears, without speaking, with a gesture of inexpressible

abandon. Tired, happy, she wept and smiled beneath the innumerable

kisses of the adored one. What mattered the recollections of the days

from which he had been absent? What mattered the miseries, the

chagrins, the anxieties, the heart-breaking struggles against the

inexorable brutalities of life? What mattered all the discouragements

and all the despairs, in comparison with this supreme joy? She lived,

she respired between her lover's arms; she felt herself infinitely

loved. All else disappeared, returned to oblivion, seemed to have never

existed.

"Oh, Hippolyte, Hippolyte! Oh, my soul! how much, how much I have

longed for you! And here you are! And now, you will stay with me a

long, long time, will you not? Before leaving me, you will kill me."

And he kissed her on the mouth, on the cheeks, on the neck, on the eyes,

insatiable, profoundly thrilled every time he met a tear. Those tears,

that smile, that expression of felicity on the tired-looking face, the

thought that this woman had not hesitated for a second in consenting;

the thought that she had come to him from a great distance, and that,

after a fatiguing journey, she wept beneath his kisses, powerless to say

a word because her heart was too full--all these passionate and

delightful things refined his sensations, freed his desire from

impurity, gave him an emotion of almost chaste love, exalted his soul.

Removing the long pin that fastened the hat and veil, he said:

"How tired you must be, my poor Hippolyte! You are very pale!"

Her veil was raised on her brow; she still had on her travelling cloak

and her gloves. He removed the veil and hat, with a gesture that was

customary with him. The beautiful brown head appeared, unencumbered,

with that simple coiffure which made of the hair a sort of adherent

helmet, without altering the delicate and elegant outline of the

occiput, without hiding any of the nape of the neck.

She wore a gorget of white lace, and a narrow black velvet ribbon which

was defined with exquisite violence against the whiteness of the skin.

Under the cloak could be seen a gray cloth dress--the dress of the

memorable Albano days. She spread around her a faint odor of violets,

the familiar perfume.

George's lips became more ardent, and, as she used to say, more

_voracious_. He checked himself; he removed her cloak; he helped her to

remove her gloves; he took her bare hands and pressed them against his

temples, in a mad desire to be caressed. And Hippolyte, holding him

thus by the temples, drew him towards her, enveloped him in a long

caress, passed over his entire face a mouth which, languishing and warm,

crept along in a multiple kiss. George recognized the divine, the

incomparable mouth, the mouth which, he had thought so often, felt as if

it rested on the surface of his soul, for a voluptuousness which would

surpass carnal sensibility and would communicate itself to an

ultra-sensible element of the inner being.

"You will kill me," he murmured, vibrating like a bundle of stretched

cords, feeling at the back of his neck a lancinating cold which, from

vertebra to vertebra, was propagated through all the marrow.

And, at the bottom of himself, he noticed a vague movement of that

instinctive terror which he had already observed under other

circumstances.

Hippolyte disengaged herself.

"Now, I'll leave you," she said. "Where is--my room? Oh, George, how

comfortable we shall be here."

She glanced around her, smiling. She made a few steps towards the

threshold, stooped to gather a handful of furze, breathed in the perfume

with visible sensual pleasure. She once more felt agitated, and as if

intoxicated by this sovereign homage, by this fragrant glory which

George had scattered along her path. Was she not dreaming? Was it she

herself--was it really Hippolyte Sanzio who, in this unknown place, in

this magic landscape, found herself surrounded and glorified by all this

poesy?

Suddenly, with new tears in her eyes, she threw her arms around George's

neck, and said:

"How grateful I am to you."

This poesy intoxicated her heart. She felt herself lifted above her

humble existence by the ideal apotheosis which enveloped her lover; she

felt that she lived another life, a superior life which at times gave to

her soul that kind of choking sensation which a strong wind provokes in

a breast accustomed to breathe an impoverished air.

"How proud I am to belong to you! You are my pride. One single minute

passed near you suffices to make me feel another woman, absolutely

other. You suddenly communicate to me another blood and another mind.

I am no longer Hippolyte, the Hippolyte of yesterday. Give me a new

name."

He named her:

"Soul!"

They fell into each other's arms in a furious embrace, as if to pluck

and unroot the kisses which blossomed on their lips. Then Hippolyte

disengaged herself, and repeated:

"Now, I'll leave you. Where's my room? Let me see it."

George passed an arm around her waist and led her into the bedroom. She

gave a cry of admiration when she perceived the _thalamus thalamorum_,

draped with a large yellow damask counterpane.

"But we shall get lost in it!"

And she laughed as she walked all round the monument.

"The most difficult thing will be to get into it."

"First, you'll place your foot upon my knee, in accordance with the

old-time custom of the peasants in these parts."

"What a lot of saints!" she exclaimed, looking at the long line of pious

images on the wall, at the head of the bed.

"They must be covered."

"Yes, you are right."

Both had difficulty in finding words; both their voices were changed in

tone; both of them trembled, agitated by irresistible desire, feeling

almost faint at the thought of the approaching ecstasies.

They heard someone knock at the door of the staircase. George went into

the loggia. It was Helen, Candia's daughter; she came to say that

luncheon was ready.

"What do you wish to do?" said George, turning toward Hippolyte,

irresolute, almost convulsed.

"Really, George, I have not the least appetite. I will eat this

evening, if you'll let me."

In an agonized voice, George said:

"Come into your room. Everything is ready for your bath. Come!"

He led her into a room which he had covered all over with large rustic

mats.

"You see, your trunks and your boxes are already here. Now, I'll leave

you--alone. Be quick. Remember, I'm waiting. Every minute's delay

will be one torture more. Remember----"

He left her alone. A few moments later he heard the splashing of the

water which ran from the enormous sponge and fell back again into the

bath-tub. He knew the icy coldness of this spring water well, and he

imagined the little starts of Hippolyte's body, that long and flexible

body, beneath the refreshing shower.

Then there remained nothing in his mind than thoughts of fire.

Everything about him disappeared. And, when the splashing stopped, he

was seized by a trembling so strong that his teeth began to chatter, as

if shivering from a mortal fever. With the terrible eyes of desire, he

saw the woman disengage herself from her dressing-gown, already dried,

pure, delicate as an alabaster with golden tones.

*CHAPTER VIII.*

More fatigued now, almost fainting, Hippolyte sank gradually into

slumber. By degrees the smile on her mouth became unconscious,

disappeared. Her lips met for a second; then, with infinite slowness,

they opened, and from between appeared a jasminelike whiteness. Again

the lips met for a second; and again, slowly, very slowly, they parted,

and from between reappeared the whiteness, moistened.

Raised on one elbow, George looked at her. She appeared so beautiful,

so beautiful, beautiful in the same way as he had seen her the first

time, in the mysterious oratory, in front of the philosopher Alexander

Memmi's orchestra, amidst the evaporated perfume of the incense and the

violets. She was pale, very pale, just as on that day.

She was pale, but it was that singular pallor which George had never

found in any other woman--an almost mortal pallor, a profound and dead

pallor which, when in the shade, became almost livid. A long shadow was

cast on the upper part of her cheeks by the eyelashes; a masculine

shadow, barely perceptible, veiled the upper lip. The mouth, large if

anything, had a sinuous curve, very soft and yet sad, which, in the

absolute silence, took on a very intense expression.

George thought: "How spiritual her beauty becomes in illness and in

languor! Tired as she is now, she pleases me more. I recognize the

unknown woman who passed before me that February evening--the woman _who

had not a single drop of blood left in her body_. I believe that when

she is dead she will attain the supreme perfection of her beauty....

Dead? And if she were to die? She would then become an object for

thought, a pure ideality. I should love her after life without jealous

inquietude, with a soothed and always even sorrow."

He recalled that in other circumstances he had already imagined

Hippolyte's beauty in the peacefulness of death. "Oh, that day of the

roses! Great sheafs of white roses languished in the vases in June, at

the beginning of their love. She was dozing on the divan, motionless,

almost breathless. And he had contemplated her for a long time; then a

sudden phantasy had taken him to cover her with roses, softly, softly,

so as not to awaken her; and he had arranged a few roses in her hair.

But thus flowered and garlanded, she had appeared to him like a body

without a soul, a corpse. This spectacle had filled him with terror; he

had shaken her to arouse her; but she remained inert, paralyzed by one

of those syncopes to which she was subject at that time. Oh, what

terror, what anguish, until she recovered her senses! And also what

enthusiasm for the sovereign beauty of that face, which was so

extraordinarily ennobled by that reflection of death!" This episode

recurred to his memory; but while he lingered over these strange

thoughts, he felt a sudden impulse of pity and of remorse. He bent over

to kiss the forehead of the sleeper, who remained unconscious of his

kiss. It was with the greatest difficulty that he restrained himself

from embracing her more ardently, so that she might be cognizant of his

caress, and respond to it. And then he felt all the vanity of a caress

which would not be to the loved object a rapid communication of joy; he

felt all the vanity of a love which would not be a continual and

immediate correspondence of acute sensations; he felt the impossibility

of becoming intoxicated unless an equally intense intoxication should

correspond with his own.

"Am I certain," he thought, "am I positively certain that always, when I

have enjoyed her, she has enjoyed me? How often has she been present, a

lucid witness, during my moments of delirium? How often has my ardor

appeared senseless to her?" A heavy wave of anxieties invaded him while

he contemplated the sleeping woman. "The true and profound sensual

communion is also a chimera. The senses of my mistress are as obscure

as her soul. Never shall I succeed in surprising in her fibres a secret

disgust, an appetite unsatisfied, an irritation unappeased. Never shall

I succeed in knowing the different sensations which are given to her by

a similar caress repeated at different moments. In the course of a

single day, an organism as unhealthy as hers passes through a great

number of physical states, each in discord with the other, and sometimes

in complete opposition. Such an instability misleads the most

penetrating clairvoyance. The same caress which, at dawn, draws from

her moans of pleasure, may, an hour later, seem to her importunate.

Consequently, it is possible that her nerves become hostile towards me,

in spite of her will. A kiss which I prolong too far, and which gives

me the vertigo of supreme enjoyment, may in her flesh arouse impatience.

In the matter of sensuality, however, simulation and dissimulation are

common to all women, to those who love and to those who do not. What do

I say? The woman who loves, the passionate woman, is more inclined to

physical simulation and dissimulation; because she fears to grieve her

lover if she shows she is little disposed to surrender herself entirely.

Moreover, the passionate woman often delights in exaggerating the

semblance of pleasure; because she knows well that that will flatter the

man's virile pride and increase his ecstasy. I confess that a proud joy

swells my heart when I see Hippolyte delirious with sensual delight. I

feel she is happy at thus showing herself so vanquished and prostrated

by my power; and she also knows that my vain ambition as a young lover

is precisely to succeed in making her plead for mercy, in drawing from

her a convulsive cry, in seeing her fall back exhausted on the pillow.

Which, then, in these demonstrations, is the share of the physical

sincerity and that of the passionate exaggeration? Is not her ardor an

artificial attitude, assumed to please me? Does she not often sacrifice

herself to my desire without desiring me? Has she not, at times, to

repress a commencement of repugnance?"

Attentive and almost anxious, he leaned over the impenetrable creature.

But, little by little, the contemplation of her beauty seemed to appease

him. And he began to consider his new state. So, from this day on, a

new life commenced for him.

For a minute, he concentrated mind and ear, in order to lose nothing of

the great peace surrounding him. Only the slow, monotonous wash of the

calm sea was to be heard in the propitious silence. Against the

window-panes the branches of the olive-tree swayed imperceptibly,

silvered by the sun, balancing light shadows on the whiteness of the

curtains. At intervals a few human voices were heard, and almost

unintelligible.

After this perception of the environing peace, he leaned once more over

the adored one. A manifest harmony existed between the respiration of

the woman and the respiration of the sea; and the concordance of the two

rhythms gave an added charm to the sleeper.

She reposed on her right side, in a graceful attitude. Her form was

supple and long, rather too long perhaps, but of serpentine elegance.

The narrowness of the thigh made it resemble that of an adolescent. The

sterile abdomen had preserved its primitive virginal purity. The bosom

was small and firm, as if sculptured in very delicate alabaster, and the

points of her extraordinarily erect breasts were of a rose-violet hue.

The posterior part of her body, from the nape of the neck down to the

middle, made one think once more of an Ephebe: it was one of those

fragments of the ideal human type which Nature sometimes throws among

the multitude of mediocre imprints by which the race perpetuates itself.

But the most precious singularity of this body was, in George's eyes,

the coloration. The skin had an indescribable color, very rare, very

different from the ordinary color of brunettes. The comparison of an

alabaster gilded by an inner flame but scarcely conveyed the idea of

this divine fineness. It seemed that a diffusion of gold and impalpable

amber enriched the tissues, variegating them with a variety of

harmonious pallors, like music, darker in the depressions of the loins

and where the loins join the sides, lighter on the breast and on the

groins, where the epidermis makes its most exquisite suavity.

George thought of Othello's words: "I had rather be a toad, and live

upon the vapour of a dungeon, than keep a corner in the thing I love for

others' uses."

In her slumber, Hippolyte made a movement, with a vague air of

suffering, which disappeared immediately. She threw back her head on the

pillow, exposing her extended breast, on which was defined the light

network of the veins. Her lower jaws were rather powerful, the chin

rather long in profile, the nostrils broad. In the abstract, the

defects of her head were accentuated; but they did not displease George,

because it would have been impossible for him to imagine that they could

be corrected without removing from the physiognomy an element of living

expression. The expression, that immaterial thing which irradiates all

matter, that changing and immeasurable force which invades the corporeal

face and transfigures it, that significative external which superposes a

symbolic beauty of an order far more elevated and complex on the precise

reality of the lines--that was Hippolyte Sanzio's great charm, because

it offered to the passionate thinker a continual motive of emotions and

dreams.

"Such a woman," he thought, "has belonged to others before being mine.

She has shared the couch of another man; she has slept with another man

in the same bed, on the same pillow. In all women there exists a sort

of extraordinarily active physical memory, the memory of sensations.

Does she remember the sensations which she received from that man? Can

she have forgotten him who was the first, and who violated her? What

were her feelings beneath her husband's caress?" At these questions,

which he repeated to himself for the thousandth time, a well-known

anguish oppressed his heart. "Oh! why can we not put to death the

creature we love, and resuscitate her afterwards with a virgin body,

with a new soul?"

He recalled certain words which Hippolyte had said in an hour of supreme

intoxication: "You are embracing a virgin; I have never known _any

voluptuousness_ in love."

Hippolyte was married the spring preceding that of their love. A few

weeks after the wedding, she had begun to suffer from a slow and cruel

malady which had confined her to bed, and kept her for a long time

between life and death. But, happily, this malady had spared her all

new contact with the odious man who had seized her like an inert prey.

When she emerged from her long convalescence, she gave herself up to

passion as in a dream: suddenly, blindly, passionately, she abandoned

herself to the young stranger whose soft and curious voice had addressed

to her words she had never heard before. And she had not lied when

saying to him: "You are embracing a virgin; I have never known any

voluptuousness."

Since then, what a profound change in this woman! Something new,

indefinable yet real, had entered into her voice, into her gestures,

into her eyes, into her slightest tones, into her slightest movements,

into the slightest external signs. George had been present at the most

intoxicating spectacle of which an intellectual lover can dream. He had

seen the loved woman become metamorphosed after his own image, borrow

his thoughts, his judgments, his tastes, his disdains, his

predilections, his melancholies, all that which gives a special imprint

and character to the mind. In speaking, Hippolyte used the forms of

speech he preferred, pronounced certain words with the inflexion

peculiar to him. In writing, she imitated even his hand. Never had the

influence of one being on another been so rapid and so strong.

Hippolyte had merited the device which George had given her: _Gravis dum

suavis_. But this grave and suave creature, she in whom he had

succeeded in inculcating, with so much art, the disdain for a

commonplace existence, among what humiliating contacts had she spent the

distant hours?

George thought again of his anguish of long ago, when he saw her go

away, return beneath the conjugal roof, into the house of a man of whom

he knew nothing, into a world of which he knew nothing, into the

platitudes and the pettiness of the middle-class life in which she was

born, and in which she had grown like a rare plant in a common

flower-pot. Had she, at that time, never hidden anything from him? Had

she never lied to him? Had she always been able to withdraw from her

husband's importunities on the pretext that her cure was not yet

complete? Always?

George remembered the horrible pang he felt one day when she came late,

panting, her cheeks more colored and warmer than usual, with a

persistent odor of tobacco in her hair, that bad odor which impregnates

him who remains a long time in a room where there are many smokers.

"Pardon me, if I am late," she had said to him; "but I had several of my

husband's friends to dinner, and they kept me until now." And these

words had suggested to him the vision of a vulgar-looking dining-table

around which the boors exhibited their brutality.

George recalled a thousand similar little details, and an infinity of

other cruel sufferings, and also recent sufferings, caused by

Hippolyte's new condition--her stay at her mother's, in a house not less

unknown and not less free from suspicion. "At last, here she is now

with me! Every day, every minute, continually, I shall see her, I shall

enjoy her; I will see that her thoughts are occupied continually with

me, my thoughts, my dreams, my sorrows. I will consecrate to her every

instant, uninterruptedly; I will invent a thousand new ways of pleasing

her, of agitating her, of making her sad, of exalting her; I will so

penetrate her with my being that she will end by believing me to be an

essential element of her own life."

He bent over her softly; he kissed her softly on the shoulder near the

arm, on that little rounded eminence of exquisite form and color, whose

skin had the softness of velvet fine enough as to seem almost

impalpable. He respired the perfume of this woman, so subtle and sweet,

that cutaneous perfume which, during the instant of pleasure, became as

intoxicating as that of tuberoses and gave a terrible lash to desire.

Watching thus closely the sleep of this delicate and complicated

creature, whom slumber enveloped in a mystery, that strange creature who

from every pore seemed to irradiate towards him some occult fascination

of unbelievable intensity, he remarked once more in his inner self a

vague movement of instinctive terror.

Again Hippolyte changed her position, without awakening, but with a

faint moan. She turned on her back. A light perspiration imparted a

dampness to her temples; through her half-closed mouth the breathing

respired came more rapidly, rather irregularly; at moments, her eyebrows

contracted. She was dreaming. Of what was she dreaming?

George, seized by an inquietude which soon increased to an insane

anxiety, set himself to detect upon her face the slightest indications,

in the hope of surprising there some revealing sign. Revealing what?

He was incapable of reflecting, incapable of repressing the furious

tumults of fears, doubts, and suspicions.

In her slumber Hippolyte started; her entire body was convulsed as if

racked by nightmare; she turned over on her side towards George; she

groaned, and cried:

"No, no!"

Then she drew two or three breaths, almost like sobs, and started again.

A prey to insane fear, George watched her fixedly, his ear

strained--fearing to hear other words, another's name, the name of a

man! He waited, in horrible uncertainty, as if under the menace of a

thunderbolt which could destroy him in a second.

Hippolyte awoke; she saw him confusedly, without thinking, still

sleeping; she nestled close up to him, with an almost unconscious

movement.

"Of what were you dreaming?" he asked her, in a changed voice which

seemed to reverberate his heart-beats.

"I do not know," she answered, languid, still drowsy, leaning her cheek

on her lover's breast. "I don't remember."

She fell asleep again.

Under the soft pressure of her cheek, George remained motionless, with a

dull rancor at the bottom of his soul. He felt himself a stranger to

her, isolated from her, uselessly curious. All his bitter recollections

came back to him in a tumult. He lived over again, in a single instant,

his miseries of two years. He could oppose nothing to the immense

doubts which crushed his soul and made the head of his loved one seem as

heavy as a rock.

Suddenly Hippolyte started a second time, moaned, twisted, cried again.

And she opened her eyes, frightened, groaning.

"Oh! my God!"

"What ails you? Of what were you dreaming?"

"I do not know."

Her face was contracted convulsively.

She added:

"You must have been leaning on me. I thought you were pushing me,

hurting me."

She suffered visibly.

"Oh! my God! My pains have come back."

Since her illness, she sometimes had short attacks, spasms that quickly

passed, but whose passage forced from her a groan or cry.

She turned towards George, looked fixedly into his eyes, and found there

the traces of the tempest. And in a coaxing, reproachful tone she

repeated:

"You did so hurt me!"

All at once George seized her in his arms, clasped her passionately to

his breast, and smothered her under his kisses.

*CHAPTER IX.*

As the air was of an almost summer-like warmth, George proposed:

"Shall we dine outside?"

Hippolyte consented. They went down.

On the stairway they held each other's hand; and went down step by step

slowly, stopping to look at the crushed flowers, turning round towards

each other simultaneously, as if they saw each other for the first time.

Each saw in the other eyes larger, more profound, as if more distant,

and circled by an almost supernatural shadow. They smiled at each other

without speaking, both dominated by the charm of that indefinable

sensation which seemed to disperse into the uncertainty of space the

substance of their being, transformed into a fluid like a vapor. They

walked towards the parapet; they stopped to look around, to listen to

the sea.

What they saw was unusual, extraordinarily great, yet illumined by an

inner light and as if by an irradiation of their hearts. What they

heard was unusual, extraordinarily high, yet contemplated as if a secret

revealed to them alone.

A second, as quickly passed! They were recalled to themselves, not by a

gust of the wind nor by the noise of a wave, nor by a bellowing, nor by

a bark, nor by a human voice, but by the very anxiety which arose from

their too intense joy. A second, as quickly passed, irrevocable! And

both recommenced to feel that life was slipping by, that time was

flying; that everything was becoming once more foreign to their being,

that their souls were becoming anxious again and their love imperfect.

This second of supreme oblivion, this unique second, was gone forever.

Hippolyte, moved by the solemnity of the solitude, oppressed by a vague

fright in the presence of those vast waters, beneath that desert sky,

which, from the zenith to the horizon, paled by slow gradations,

murmured:

"What endless space!"

It seemed now to both that the point of space in which they breathed was

infinitely distant from the frequented spots, out of the way, isolated,

unknown, inaccessible, almost outside of the world. Now they saw the

wish of their hearts realized, they both felt the same inward terror, as

if they foresaw their impotence to sustain the plenitude of the new

life. For a few instants longer, silent, standing side by side, but

apart, they continued to contemplate the melancholy and icy Adriatic,

whose great white-capped waves sported in endless playfulness. From

time to time a stiff breeze swept through the tufts of the acacias,

bearing off their perfume.

"Of what are you thinking?" asked George, drawing himself up, as if to

rebel against the importunate sadness which was about to conquer him.

He was there, alone with his mistress, living and free; and,

nevertheless, his heart was not satisfied. Did he, then, bear in

himself an inconsolable hopelessness?

Feeling anew a separation between the silent creature and himself, he

took her again by the hand, and gazed into the pupils of her eyes.

"Of what are you thinking?"

"I am thinking of Rimini," answered Hippolyte, with a smile.

Always the past! She remembers bygone days at such a moment! Was it

the same sea which lay extended before their eyes, veiled in the same

illusion? His first motion was one of hostility against the unconscious

evocatrice. Then, as if in a lightning flash, with sudden uneasiness, he

saw all the summits of his love light up, and scintillate in the past,

prodigiously. Far-distant things came back to his memory, accompanied

by waves of music which exalted and transfigured them. He lived again,

in one second, the most lyric hours of his passion, and he lived them

again in propitious places, among the sumptuous scenery of nature and

art which had rendered his joy nobler and more profound. Why then, now,

in comparison with that past, had the moment just previous lost part of

its charm? In his eyes, dazzled by the rapid gleam of his

recollections, everything now seemed colorless. And he perceived that

the progressive diminution of the light caused him a kind of indefinable

corporeal uneasiness, as if this external phenomenon were in immediate

correspondence with some element of his own life.

He sought some phrase that would bring Hippolyte closer to him, to

attach her to him by some sensitive tie, to restore to himself of the

present reality the exact feeling which he had just lost. But this

search was painful to him; the ideas escaped him, dispersed, left him

void.

As he had heard a rattle of plates, he asked:

"Are you hungry?"

This question, suggested by a slight material fact, and propounded

unexpectedly, with puerile vivacity, made Hippolyte smile.

"Yes, a little," she answered, smiling.

And they turned round to look at the table spread beneath the oak. In a

few minutes the dinner would be ready.

"You must be satisfied with what there is," said George. "Very

countrified cooking."

"Oh! I should be very well satisfied with grass."

And, gayly, she approached the table, examined with curiosity the cloth,

the knives and forks, the glassware, the plates, found everything

pretty; rejoiced like a child at the sight of the large flowers which

decorated the white and fine porcelain.

"Everything here pleases me," she said.

She bent over a large round loaf of bread, yet warm beneath its

beautiful browned and rounded crust. She breathed in the odor with

delight.

"Oh! what a delightful odor!"

And, with childish greediness, she broke off the crusty edge of the

loaf.

"What fine bread!"

Her white and strong teeth shone in the bitten bread; the play of her

sinuous mouth expressed vigorously the pleasure enjoyed. In this act,

her whole person shed a pure and simple grace which seduced and

surprised George as if it were an unexpected novelty.

"Here! taste how good it is."

And she handed him the piece of bread on which was imprinted the humid

trace of her bite; and she pushed it between his lips, laughing,

imparting the sensual contagion of her hilarity.

"Just see!"

He found the taste delicious; and he abandoned himself to this fugitive

enchantment, permitted himself to be enveloped by this seduction which

seemed a novelty. A mad longing suddenly seized him to embrace the

temptress, to lift her in his arms, to carry her off like a prey. His

heart swelled with a confused aspiration towards physical force, towards

robust health, towards an almost savage life of joy, towards simple and

primitive love, towards the great primordial liberty. He felt a sudden

desire to rend the mortal frame which oppressed him, to leave it and be

entirely renewed, indemnified for all the woes he had suffered, for all

the deformity which had hindered his flight.

He had the hallucination of a future existence which would be his, and

in which, freed from every harmful habit, from every foreign tyranny,

from every bad error, he would look at things as if he saw them for the

first time and had before him all the surface of the World, exposed like

a human visage.

"Was it then impossible that the miracle should come from this young

woman, who, at the stone table, beneath the protecting oak, had broken

the new bread and shared it with him? Could not the New Life really

commence from to-day?"

*IV.*

*THE NEW LIFE.*

*CHAPTER I.*

Over the Adriatic swept the humid and oppressive heat of the east wind.

The sky was cloudy, nebulous, white as milk. The sea, having lost all

motion and all materiality, seemed mingled with the diffused vapors in

the distance--very white, without respiration. A white sail, a single

white sail--so rare a thing in the Adriatic--was visible yonder, near

the Diomede Islands, motionless, indefinitely lengthened by the

reflection of the water, the visible centre of this inert world, which

gradually seemed to evaporate.

Seated in a tired attitude, on the parapet of the loggia, Hippolyte

fixed her gaze on the sail, her eyes magnetized by its whiteness. A

little bent, her whole figure relaxed, she had an air of stupor, almost

of hebetude, which revealed the momentary eclipse of her inner life.

And this absence of expressive energy accentuated all that there was

commonplace and irregular in her features, rendered heavier the lower

part of her face. Even the mouth--that elastic and sinuous mouth--whose

contact had so often communicated to George a sort of instinctive and

indefinable terror, seemed now despoiled of its bewitching charm, and

reduced to the physical appearance of a vulgar organ which only recalled

kisses as a mechanical art deprived of all beauty.

George considered with attention and clear-sightedness the naked reality

of this unconscious woman, with whose life he had, up to now, so

furiously joined his own life. And he thought: "In an instant, all has

ended. The flame is extinguished. I love her no longer! ... How has

that happened so quickly?" What he felt was not only the disgust

following abuse, that carnal aversion which follows prolonged pleasures,

but a more profound detachment which seemed to him definite and

irremediable. "How could anyone still love, after having seen what I

see?" The usual phenomenon took place in him; with its first

perceptions, real, isolated and exaggerated, he composed by association

an inner phantom which gave to his nerves a much stronger impulse than

the present object. Henceforth, what he saw in Hippolyte's person with

inconceivable intensity was the sexual being exclusively, the inferior

being deprived of all spiritual value, a simple instrument of pleasure

and of luxury, the instrument of ruin and of death. And he had a horror

of his father! But, after all, was he not doing the same thing? And the

recollection of the concubine crossed his mind; he found in his memory

certain details of the horrible altercation with that odious man, in the

country house, in front of the open window through which he had heard

the cries of the little bastards, in front of the large table littered

with papers on which he had perceived the disk of glass and the obscene

vignette.

"How heavy the air is!" murmured Hippolyte, removing her gaze from the

white sail, which still remained motionless in the infinite. "Does it

not oppress you, too?"

She rose, took a few listless steps towards a willow seat, provided with

cushions, and sank down as if dead with fatigue, sighing deeply,

throwing back her head, half-closing her eyes, the curved lids of which

trembled. She had suddenly become very beautiful again. Her beauty was

rekindled, unexpectedly, like a torch.

"When will the mistral blow? Look at that sail. It is always in the

same place. It's the first white sail since my arrival. It seems as if

I dream it is there."

As George remained silent, she added:

"Have you seen any others?"

"No; it's the first I have seen, too!"

"From where did it come?"

"From Gargano, perhaps."

"And where is it going?"

"Perhaps to Ortona."

"What is her cargo?"

"Perhaps oranges."

She began to laugh; and even her laugh, enveloping her as if in a live

wave of freshness, transfigured her anew.

"Look, look!" she cried, raising herself on one elbow and pointing to

the horizon of the sea, where it appeared as if a curtain had fallen.

"Five other sails, over there in file. Do you see them?"

"Yes, I see them."

"There are five?"

"Yes, five."

"More, more! Over there! Look, another file! What a number there

are!"

The sails appeared at the extreme limit of the sea, red like little

flames, motionless.

"The wind is changing. I feel that the wind is changing. Look there,

how the water is beginning to ripple."

A sudden breeze assailed the tufts of the acacias, which, bending on

their stems, shed several blossoms like dead butterflies. Then, before

those light remains could touch the earth, all was at peace again.

During the interval of silence, the low murmur of the water as it was

dashed against the beach could be heard; and this murmur died away with

the flight of the wave as it passed along the shore, and then ceased.

"Did you hear it?"

She had risen and leaned on the parapet, listening intently, in the

attitude of a musician who is tuning his instrument.

"Here is the wave coming back," she cried again, pointing to the mobile

rippling of the water, upon which the shower was advancing; and she

waited, animated by impatience, ready to fill her lungs with the wind.

After a few seconds the acacias, assailed, once more bent on their

stems, causing a shower of other flowers. And the strong gust bore as

far as the loggia the saline odor mingled with the perfume of the

withered bunches. A silvery sound, of singular harmony, filled with its

kettledrum vibrations the concavity of the little bay between the two

promontories.

"Do you hear?" said Hippolyte, in a low but exulting voice as if this

music had penetrated as far as her soul, and that all her life were

participating in the vicissitudes of the things around her.

George followed all her actions, all her gestures, all her movements,

every word, with such intense attention that the rest was for him as if

it had never existed. The preceding image no longer coincided with the

actual appearance, though it still dominated his mind to the extent of

maintaining the profound sensation of the moral detachment, and of

preventing him from replacing this woman in her first frame, of not

reestablishing her in her original state of being, of not reintegrating

her. But from every one of these actions, from every one of these

gestures, from every one of these movements, from every one of these

words, emanated an inevitable power. All these physical manifestations

seemed to compose a web which trapped him, and held him prisoner. It

seemed that between this woman and himself there was formed a sort of

corporeal bond, a sort of organic dependence, a correspondence by virtue

of which the slightest gesture provoked in him an involuntary sensual

modification, and that henceforth he would no longer be capable of

living and feeling independently. How could he reconcile this evident

affinity with the occult hate which he had just discovered at the bottom

of his heart?

Hippolyte, through a spontaneous curiosity, through an instinctive

desire to multiply her sensations and to make the surrounding

neighborhood part of herself, was still absorbed in the spectacle. The

facility she exhibited in entering into communication with every form of

natural life and of finding a world of analogies between human

expressions and the appearances of the most diverse things; this rapid

and diffuse sympathy, which attached her not only to objects with which

she was in daily contact, but also to foreign objects; that sort of

imitative virtue which often permitted her to express by a single sign

the distinctive character of an animate or inanimate being, of talking

to the domestic animals and understanding their language--all these

mimic faculties properly concurred in rendering more visible, in

George's eyes, the predominance in her of the inferior life.

"What's that?" she said, surprised at noticing a sudden, mysterious

rumbling. "Didn't you hear it?"

It was like a dull blow, which other blows followed in rapid

succession--blows so strange that it could not be discerned if they came

from near or far, in the air that became more and more limpid.

"Didn't you hear that?"

"It may be distant thunder."

"Oh, no!"

"What, then?"

They looked around them, perplexed. Every moment the sea was changing

color in proportion as the sky became clearer; here and there it took on

that shade of indefinable green, like unripe flax, as when the sun's

oblique rays pass through the diaphanous stems in an April twilight.

"Ah! it's the sail flapping--that white sail, yonder," cried Hippolyte,

happy at being the first to discover the mystery. "Look. She's caught

the wind. She's off."

*CHAPTER II.*

With a few intervals of drowsy indolence, she felt a mad desire to

wander off, to venture out in the heat of the sun, to scour the beach

and surrounding country, to explore unfamiliar paths. She stimulated

her companion; at times she carried him off almost by force; at times,

too, she started off alone, and he joined her unexpectedly.

In order to climb a hill, they followed a small pathway bordered by

thick hedges of violet flowers, among which blossomed the large and

delicate calices of other snowy fragrant flowers with fine petals. On

the other side of the hedges, ears of corn waved to and fro on their

stems, yellowish-green in color, more or less ready to change into gold;

and in other places the corn was so thick and high that it towered over

the tops of the hedges, suggesting a beautiful, overflowing cup.

Nothing escaped Hippolyte's vigilant eye. Every minute she stooped to

blow away certain spheres of down, very fragile, at the tips of their

long, slender peduncles. Every minute she stopped to observe the small

spiders climbing by an invisible thread from a flower situated low down

to a branch above.

On the hill, in a narrow, sunny circle, there was a small field of flax

already dry. The yellowish stems bore at their summits a ball of gold,

and here and there the gold seemed tarnished by an ironlike rust. The

highest stems were waving almost imperceptibly. And, because of this

extreme lightness, the whole gave the idea of some delicate piece of

gold-work.

"Look, it is just like filigree!" said Hippolyte.

The furze was commencing to shed its flowers. A few feet away hung a

sort of white foam in flakes; on others crawled large black and brown

caterpillars, soft to the touch as velvet. Hippolyte took up one whose

delicate down was streaked with vermilion, and she kept it calmly on the

palm of her hand.

"It is more beautiful than a flower," she said.

George remarked, and it was not the first time, that she was almost

totally devoid of instinctive repugnance towards insects, and that, in

general, she did not feel that keen and invincible repulsion which he

himself felt for a host of things considered unclean.

"Throw it away, I beg of you!"

She began to laugh, and stretched out her hand as if to put the

caterpillar on his neck. He gave a cry and sprang back, which made her

laugh all the more.

"Oh, what a brave man!"

In a spirit of mischief, she started to pursue him between the trunks of

the young oaks, through the narrow paths that formed a sort of

mountainous labyrinth. Her peals of laughter started from between the

gray stones flocks of wild sparrows.

"Stop! Stop! You frighten the sheep."

A small flock of frightened sheep dispersed, dragging behind them up the

rocky incline a bundle of bluish rags.

"Stop. I have it no longer. See."

And she showed the runaway her empty hands.

"Let us help the Mute."

And she ran towards the woman in rags, who was making ineffectual

efforts to hold back the sheep attached to the long cords of twisted

osier. Hippolyte seized the bunch of cords, and braced her feet against

a stone in order to have more resisting power. She panted, her face

purple; and in this violent attitude she was very beautiful. Her beauty

lighted up, unexpectedly, like a torch.

"Come, George, come you too!" she cried to George, communicating to him

her frank and childish joy.

The sheep stopped in a clump of furze. There were six of them, three

black and three white, and bore the osier cords around their woolly

necks. The woman who looked after them, emaciated, poorly covered by

her bluish rags, gesticulated while giving vent, from her toothless

mouth, to an incomprehensible grumbling. Her little greenish eyes,

without eyelashes, bleary, tearful and congested, had a malignant look.

When Hippolyte gave her alms, she kissed the pieces of money. Then,

letting go the cords, she removed from her head a rag which no longer

had either form or color, stooped to the ground, and slowly, with

greatest care, tied up the pieces of money in a multiplicity of knots.

"I am tired," said Hippolyte. "Let us sit down here for a moment."

They sat down. George then perceived that the spot was near the great

furze field where, on that May morning, the five virgins had plucked the

flowers to strew the path of the beautiful Roman. That morning already

seemed very far off, lost in dreamy haze. He said:

"Do you see, over yonder, those bushes which are now almost flowerless?

Well, it was there that we filled the baskets to strew flowers on your

path when you arrived. Oh, what a day! Do you remember?"

She smiled, and in a transport of sudden tenderness took one of his

hands, which she kept pressed in her own; and she leaned her cheek on

the shoulder of the loved one, burying herself in the sweetness of that

memory, of that solitude, of that peace, of that poesy.

From time to time a breath of wind passed through the tops of the oaks;

and below, farther on, in the gray of the olive-trees, passed, from time

to time, a clear wave of silver. The Mute moved away slowly behind the

feeding sheep; and she seemed to leave something fantastic in her

traces, as if a reflect of the legends in which malignant fairies

transform themselves into toads at every turn of the path.

"Aren't you happy now?" murmured Hippolyte.

George thought: "It is already two weeks, and there has been no change

in me. Still the same anxiety, the same inquietude, the same

discontent! We are hardly at the beginning, and I already foresee the

end. What shall we do to enjoy the passing hour?" Certain phrases of a

letter from Hippolyte recurred to him: "Oh! when will it be given me to

be near you during entire days, to live your life? You will see, I

shall no longer be the same woman. I will be your mistress, your

friend, your sister; and if you think me worthy, I will be also your

adviser.... In me you should find nothing but sweetness and repose....

It will be a life of love such as has never before been seen." ...

He thought: "For the past two weeks our whole existence has been

composed of petty, material incidents, like those of to-day. It is

true; I have already seen in her _another woman_! She is commencing to

change, even in appearance. It is unbelievable how rapidly she is

gaining in health. One would say that every breath is a gain; that, for

her, every fruit turns into blood; that the healthfulness of the air

penetrates her every pore. She was made for this life of idleness, of

liberty, of physical enjoyment, of carelessness. Up to now, she has not

uttered a single thoughtful word which revealed preoccupation of the

soul. Her intervals of silence and immobility are caused only by

muscular fatigue, just as at the present moment."

"Of what are you thinking?" she demanded.

"Of nothing. I am happy."

After a pause, she added:

"We'll go on now, shall we?"

They rose. She bestowed upon his mouth a sonorous kiss. She was gay and

restless. Every few minutes she darted away from him to run down an

incline free from rocks; and when she wished to check her speed, she

grasped the trunk of a young oak, which groaned and bent beneath the

shock.

She gathered a violet flower and sucked it.

"It's honey."

She gathered another, and placed it on her lover's lips.

"Taste it!"

And it seemed as if she enjoyed the savor for the second time, at seeing

the motions of his mouth.

"With all these flowers, and all these bees, there must certainly be a

hive near by," she went on. "One of these mornings, while you are

asleep, I must come here and search for it.... I'll bring you a

honeycomb."

She prattled at a great rate about this adventure, which tickled her

fancy; and in her words appeared, with the vivacity of an actual

sensation, the freshness of the morning, the mystery of the woods, the

impatience of the search, the joy of the discovery, the pale color and

wild fragrance of honey.

They halted half-way up the hill, at the border of the woody region,

charmed by the melancholy which ascended from the sea.

The sea was delicately colored, between a blue and a green, in which the

green had a progressive tendency to dominate; but the sky, of a leaden

azure at the zenith, and streaked here and there by clouds, was

rose-colored in the curve toward Ortono. This light was reflected in

pale tints on the surface of the water, and recalled deflowered roses

floating. Against the maritime background were arranged in steps, in

harmonious degrees, first the two large oaks with their dark foliage,

then the silvery olive-trees, then the fig-trees with their bright

foliage and violet branches. The moon, orange-colored, enormous, almost

at its full, rose up above the ring of the horizon, like a globe of

crystal through whose transparency could be seen a chimerical country

figured in bas-relief on a massive disk of gold.

One heard the warbling of birds, near and far. One heard the lowing of

an ox; then a bleating; then the wailing of a child. There was a pause

during which all these voices were silent, and only this single wail was

heard.

It was a wail, not violent or interrupted, but shrill, continuous,

almost feeble. And it attracted the soul, detached it from all the

rest, snatched it from the seduction of the twilight, to oppress it with

a veritable anguish which responded to the suffering of the unknown

creature, of the little, invisible being.

"Do you hear?" said Hippolyte, whose voice, already changed by

compassion, became involuntarily lower. "I know who the child is that's

crying."

"You know?" asked George, to whom his mistress's voice and appearance

had given a strange shock.

"Yes."

She was again listening intently to the lamentable moaning, which now

seemed to fill the whole place. She added: "It's the infant that the

Ghouls are sucking."

She had pronounced these words without the shadow of a smile, as if she

herself were beneath the empire of the superstition.

"It lives over there, in that tumble-down cottage. Candia told me."

After a slight hesitation, during which they listened to the wails and

had a fantastic vision of the dying child, Hippolyte suggested:

"Shall we go and see it? It's not far."

George was perplexed, dreading the sadness of the spectacle, and the

contact of the distressed and coarse people.

"Shall we?" repeated Hippolyte, whose curiosity became irresistible.

"It is over there, in that old cottage, beneath the pine. I know the

way."

"Let's go!"

She went straight ahead, hastening her steps, across a sloping field.

Both were silent; both heard only the infantile wail which served them

as a guide. And, step by step, their anguish became more poignant and

in proportion as the wailing became more distinct and indicated better

the poor, bloodless body from which pain forced it.

They traversed a copse of odorous orange-trees, treading on the flowers

scattered on the ground. On the threshold of a cottage close to the one

they sought an enormously stout woman was seated; and on her monstrous

body was a small round head, with soft eyes, white teeth, a placid

smile.

"Where are you going, signora?" asked the woman, without rising.

"We are going to see the child whom the Ghouls are sucking."

"What's the use? You'd better stay here, and take a rest. I do not

lack children, either. Look!"

Three or four naked children, who had also such large stomachs that one

would have believed them to be dropsical, dragged themselves along on

the ground, grunting and tumbling over, putting in their mouths

everything that fell into their hands. And the woman held in her arms a

fifth child, all covered with brownish scabs, from the midst of which

shone out a pair of large clear blue eyes, like miraculous flowers.

"You see that I have plenty of them too, and that this one, here, is

sick. Stay here a bit."

She smiled, soliciting with her eyes the strangers' generosity. And,

with an expression in which one guessed the desire to dissuade the

curiosity of the woman by the vague presentiment of a peril:

"What's the good of going there?" she repeated. "See how ill this one

is."

And again she showed the afflicted child, but without simulating any

sorrow, as if she simply offered to the passer-by a nearer object of

compassion in exchange for a more distant one--as if she wished to say:

"Since you desire to be compassionate, have compassion for the one

before you." George examined, with deep pain, the poor, spotted face,

whose large, bright, and clear eyes seemed to drink in all the light

shed on this June evening.

"What is he suffering from?" he asked.

"Ah! signor, who ever knows?" answered the fat woman, always with the

same placidity. "He has what God wishes."

Hippolyte gave her some money; and they resumed their way towards the

other cottage, bearing with them the nauseous odor emanating from that

door full of shadow.

They did not speak. They felt a contraction of their hearts, a disgust

in their mouths, a weakness in their limbs. They heard the shrill

wailing, mingled with other voices, other sounds; and they were

stupefied at having been able to hear this single sound so far away, and

so distinctly. But what attracted their eyes was the tall and straight

pine whose robust trunk stood out black against the diffused light of

the twilight, sustaining a melodious summit filled with sparrows.

At their approach, a whisper passed among the women gathered around the

victim.

"Here are the gentlefolk--Candia's strangers."

"Come, come!"

And the women opened their circle to permit the arrivals to draw nearer.

One of them, an old woman, with wrinkled skin, of the color of parched

earth, expressionless eyes, whitish and as if vitrified in the depths of

their hollow orbits, said, addressing Hippolyte, and touching her arm:

"Look, signora! Look! The Ghouls are sucking it, poor creature! Look

at the state they've reduced it to! May God protect your children!"

Her voice was so dry that it appeared artificial, and resembled the

sounds articulated by an automaton.

"Cross yourself, signora!" she added again.

The advice seemed lugubrious in that lifeless mouth, in which the voice

lost its human character and became a dead thing. Hippolyte made the

sign of the cross, and looked at her companion.

In the space before the door of the hut the women ere in a circle as

around a spectacle, making; from time to time some mechanical sign of

condolence. And the circle was unceasingly renewed; some, already tired

of looking, went away; others arrived from neighboring houses. And

almost all, at the sight of this slow death, repeated the same gesture,

repeated the same words.

The child reposed in a little cradle, of rough pine boards, like a

small, lidless coffin. The poor creature, naked, sickly, emaciated,

greenish, was wailing continuously and waving its debilitated arms and

legs, which had nothing more than skin and bone, as if asking for help.

And the mother, seated at the foot of the cradle, bent in two, her head

so low that it almost touched her knees, seemed to hear nothing. It

seemed as if some terrible weight rested on her neck and prevented her

from rising. At times, mechanically, she placed on the edge of the

cradle a coarse, callous hand, burnt by the sun; and she made the

gesture of rocking without altering her attitude or breaking the

silence. Then the holy images, the talismans, and the relics, with

which the pine cradle was almost entirely covered, undulated and

tinkled, during a momentary pause in the wail.

"Liberata! Liberata!" cried one of the women, shaking her. "Look,

Liberata! The lady has come--the lady is in your house! Look!"

The mother slowly raised her head and looked around her, with a

bewildered air; then she fixed on her visitor her dry and mournful eyes,

in whose depths there was less of fatigued sorrow than inert and shadowy

terror--the terror of nocturnal witchcraft against which no exorcism

prevailed, the terror of those insatiable beings who now had the house

in their power, and who would not abandon it perhaps but with the last

corpse.

"Speak! Speak!" insisted one of the women, shaking her again by the

arm. "Speak! Ask the lady to send you to the Madonna of the Miracles."

The others surrounded Hippolyte with supplications.

"Yes, signora. Be charitable to her! Send her to the Madonna. Send

her to the Madonna!"

The child cried louder. In the tops of the pine-tree the sparrows were

emitting heart-rending cries. In the neighborhood, between the deformed

trunks of the olive-trees, a dog barked. The moon was beginning to cast

its shadows. "Yes," stammered Hippolyte, incapable of sustaining longer

the fixed gaze of the silent mother. "Yes, yes, we will send

her--to-morrow."

"No, not to-morrow; Saturday, signora."

"Saturday is the Vigil."

"Let her buy him a candle."

"A fine candle."

"A ten-pound candle."

"Do you hear, Liberata? Do you hear?"

"The lady will send you to the Madonna!"

"The Madonna will pity you."

"Speak! Speak!"

"She's become dumb, signora."

"She hasn't spoken for three days."

In the midst of the confused cries of the women, the child cried still

louder.

"Do you hear how he cries?"

"He always cries loudest, signora, at nightfall."

"Perhaps it's coming soon."

"Perhaps the child has seen----"

"Make the sign of the cross, signora."

"It's getting dark."

"Do you hear how he cries?"

"Isn't that the bell tolling?"

"No; one can't hear it here."

"Silence!"

"One can't hear it here."

"But I hear it."

"I hear it, too."

"_Ave Maria!_"

All were silent, made the sign of the cross, and bowed. It seemed as if

several sonorous waves, scarcely perceptible, arrived from the distant

market-town; but the child's wail filled every listener's ear. Once

more, only this single wail could be heard. The mother had fallen on

her knees at the foot of the cradle, prostrated to the earth.

Hippolyte, her head bowed, was praying with fervor.

"Look, there, in the doorway!" whispered one of the women to her

neighbor.

George, watchful and uneasy, turned his head. The doorway was full of

shadow.

"Look, there, in the doorway! Don't you see something?"

"Yes, I see," replied the other, uncertain, a little frightened.

"What is it? What do you see?" asked a third.

"What is it?" demanded a fourth.

"What is it?"

Suddenly curiosity and fright seized them all. They looked toward the

door. The child cried. The mother rose, and she, too, began to fix her

dilated eyes on the door which the shadows rendered mysterious. The dog

barked among the olive-trees.

"What is it?" said George, in a low voice, but not without requiring

some effort to shake off the increasing uneasiness of his imagination.

"What do you see?"

None of the women dared to answer. All, in the shadow, saw the outlines

of a vague form.

Then he advanced toward the door. When he crossed the threshold, a

furnace-like heat and a repugnant stench cut short his breath. He

turned round, went out.

"It's a scythe," he said.

In fact, it was a scythe hanging on the wall.

"Ah! a scythe."

And the voices recommenced.

"Liberata! Liberata!"

"Are you mad?"

"She is mad."

"It's getting dark. Let us go."

"He's not crying any more."

"Poor creature! Is he asleep?"

"He has stopped crying."

"Take in the cradle; the evening is damp. We will help you, Liberata."

"Poor creature! Is he asleep?"

"One would think he were dead. He no longer moves."

"Take in the cradle, won't you? Don't you hear us, Liberata?"

"She is mad."

"Where is the lamp? Joseph will soon return. Have you no lamp? Joseph

will soon return from the lime-kiln."

"She is mad. She doesn't speak any more."

"We are going. God be with you!"

"Poor tormented flesh! Is he sleeping?"

"He's sleeping, he's sleeping.... He's not in pain now."

"Oh, Lord Jesus, save him!"

"Protect us, O Lord!"

"Farewell, farewell! Good night!"

"Good night!"

"Good night!"

*CHAPTER III.*

The dog continued to bark in the olive-groves, while George and

Hippolyte came back by the path towards Candia's house. When the animal

recognized the guests of the house, he stopped barking, and came to meet

them joyfully.

"Why, it's Giardino!" cried Hippolyte. And she stooped to caress the

poor beast, with whom she had already become friends. "He was calling

us. It's getting late."

The moon rose in the silence of the sky, slowly, preceded by a luminous

wave which gradually covered the azure. All the sounds of the

surrounding fields died away beneath this pacific light. And the

unexpected cessation of every noise seemed almost supernatural to

George, whom an inexplicable fright kept alert.

"Stop a moment," he said, holding Hippolyte back.

And he listened intently.

"What are you listening to?"

"It seemed to me----"

And both looked back in the direction of the barn, which the olive-trees

concealed from view. But they heard nothing except the even and rocking

rhythm of the sea in the curve of the little gulf. Over their heads a

cricket clove the air in its flight with a grating sound like that of a

diamond on a pane of glass.

"Don't you think the child is dead?" asked George, without dissimulating

his emotion. "He stopped crying."

"That's true!" said Hippolyte. "And you believe he's dead?"

George did not reply. And they resumed their way back beneath the

silvery olive-groves.

"Did you notice the mother well?" he asked at last, after a silence,

possessed internally by the sombre image.

"My God! My God!"

"And that old woman who touched your elbow! What a voice! What eyes!"

His words betrayed the strange fright which dominated him, as if the

recent spectacle had been a frightful revelation to him, as if life had

suddenly been made manifest to him under a mysterious and savage aspect,

bruising and stamping him with an indelible sign.

"You know, when I entered the house, on the ground behind the door there

was the corpse of some beast--already half-decomposed. The smell was

simply choking."

"What do you mean?"

"It was either a cat or a dog. I could not distinguish very well. It

was difficult to see well inside."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, yes. Without any doubt there was a dead animal. The stench----"

A shudder of disgust ran through him as he thought of it.

"What could it be?" said Hippolyte, who felt herself becoming infected

by the contagion of fear and disgust.

"How can I know?"

The dog gave a bark to announce their coming. They had arrived. Candia

was waiting for them, and the table was already spread beneath the oak.

"How late you are, signora!" cried the affable hostess, with a smile.

"Where have you been? What will you give me if I guess? Well, you have

been to see the child of Liberata Maunella. May Jesus guard us from the

Cunning One!"

When the lovers were at table, she approached, curious, to speak and

question.

"Did you see him, signora? He gets no better; he's just as bad. Yet

his father and mother have done everything to save him."

What had they not done! Candia related all the remedies attempted, all

the exorcisms. The priest had been there, and, after having covered the

child's head with the edge of his stole, had read verses from the Bible.

The mother had suspended from the lintel of the door a waxen cross,

blessed on Ascension Day; she had sprinkled with holy water the hinges

of the imposts, and recited aloud the _Credo_, thrice in succession; she

had put a handful of salt in a piece of linen, which afterwards she had

knotted and hung around the neck of her dying son. The father _had done

the seven nights_; for seven consecutive nights he had watched in the

dark, before a lighted lantern covered with a pot, attentive to the

slightest sound, ready to assail and seize the Ghoul. A single

pin-prick would have sufficed to render it visible to human eyes. But

the seven vigils had gone by without result. The child wasted away, and

was consumed hour by hour, hopelessly. Finally, on the advice of a

witch, the despairing father had killed a dog and put the body behind

the door. This prevented the Ghoul entering before having counted all

the hairs of the dead beast.

"Do you hear?" said George to Hippolyte.

They did not eat, their hearts oppressed with pity, struck with terror

at the sudden apparition of these phantoms of an obscure and atrocious

life, which environed the leisures of their useless love.

"May Jesus protect us from the Cunning One!" repeated Candia; and

piously, with her open hand, she indicated the place where lay the

living fruit. "May God protect your children, signora!"

Then she added:

"You're not eating this evening! You've no appetite. That innocent soul

distresses your hearts. And your husband isn't eating, either. Look!"

Hippolyte said:

"Do many die--like that?"

"Oh!" went on Candia, "this is a bad district. The cursed brood swarms

hereabouts. One is never safe. May Jesus protect us from the Cunning

One!"

She repeated the conjuration, then added, pointing to a plate on the

table:

"Do you see those fish? They are from the Trabocco; they were brought

by Turchin."

And she lowered her voice.

"Do you want to know? For nearly a year, Turcum and all his family have

been in the power of some witchcraft from which he has not yet been able

to free himself."

"Who is Turchin?" asked George, listening breathlessly to the woman's

words, fascinated by the mystery of these things. "The man from the

Trabocco?"

And he recalled that earthy visage, almost chinless scarcely larger than

a fist, with a long nose, prominent and pointed like the snout of a

pike, between two small, glittering eyes.

"Yes, signor. Look over there. If your sight is good you can see him.

To-night he is fishing by moonlight."

And Candia pointed out on the rocks the great fishing machine--that

collection of trunks freed from their bark, planks and cables, whose

strange whiteness resembled the colossal skeleton of some antediluvian

amphibian. In the calm air was heard the creaking of the capstan. As

the tide was low and the rocks were uncovered, the odor of the algae

came up victorious from the beach, stronger and fresher than the

effluvia from the fertile hill.

Hippolyte breathed in the intoxicating odor, already entirely occupied

by that intense sensation which made her nostrils quiver and her eyes

half-close. She murmured:

"Oh, how delicious! Don't you smell it, George?"

He, on his part, was very attentive to Candia's words, and saw in

imagination the silent drama suspended over the sea. To the phantoms

evoked by this simple woman in the serene night his soul, inclined to

mystery and naturally superstitious, gave limitless life and tragic

horror. For the first time he had a vast and confused vision of that

race unknown to him, of all that miserable flesh, full of animal

instincts and of bestial afflictions, bent and sweating on the glebe or

buried in the depths of the cottages, beneath the perpetual menace of

those dark powers. Amidst the sweet richness of the country which he had

selected as the theatre of his love, he discovered a violent human

agitation; and it was as if he had discovered a swarm of insects in the

masses of magnificent hair impregnated with aroma. He felt the same

shudder, already felt before this, at the contact with brutally revealed

life: "recently, at the sight of his relatives, of his father, of his

brother, of the poor, bigoted glutton." All at once, he felt as if he

were no longer alone with his mistress amidst the benign growths, under

the bark of which he had one day believed he had surprised a new

emotion. He felt himself, on the contrary, environed and almost jostled

by an unknown crowd, which, bearing in itself the same vitality which

the trunks of trees possess, blind, tenacious, and unconquerable,

adhered to him by the bond of the species and could immediately

communicate to him its suffering, by a look, a gesture, a sigh, a sob, a

groan, a cry.

"Ah! this district is bad," repeated Candia, shaking her head. "But the

Messiah of Chapelles will come to purify the earth."[*]

{*} The episode of the Messiah of Chapelles is historical. Oreste de

Amicis born in 1824 at Chapelles, played precisely the role assigned to

him here by the novelist. He died in 1889. Antonio de Nino has

collected and published curious documents concerning this personage.

"The Messiah?"

"Father," cried Candia, in the direction of the house, "when is the

Messiah to be here?"

The old man appeared upon the threshold.

"One of these days," he replied.

And, turning toward the beach, which in the dim light cast by the

half-moon disappeared to view in the direction of Ortona, he signified

with a vague gesture the mystery of that new deliverer in whom the

country people had placed their hope and faith.

"One of these days--very soon."

And the old man, who wanted to talk, approached the table, looked at his

guests with an uncertain smile, and asked:

"Don't you know who it is?"

"Perhaps it is Semplice," said George in whose memory revived a distant

and indistinct recollection of that Semplice di Sulmone who fell into an

ecstasy, his eyes fixed on the sun.

"No, signor; Sembri is dead. The new Messiah is Oreste of Chapelles."

And the old man, in fervent and vividly colored language, related the

new legend, such as it had been conceived by the rural population.

Oreste, being a capuchin monk, had known Semplice at Sulmone, and had

learned from him the art of reading the future on the face of the rising

sun. Then he began to travel all over the world: he had gone to Rome,

and had spoken with the Pope; in another place he had spoken with the

king. On his return to Chapelles, his birthplace, he had passed seven

years in the cemetery in the company of skeletons, wearing a hair shirt,

flagellating himself night and day, according to discipline. He had

preached in the parish church, and had drawn tears and cries from the

fishers. Then he had started once more on a pilgrimage to all the

sanctuaries; he had remained thirty days on the mountain of Ancona; he

had remained twelve days on Mount St. Bernard; he had climbed the

highest peaks, struggling through the snow, his head bared. Returned

again to Chapelles, he had recommenced to preach in his church. But,

shortly afterwards, persecuted and driven away by his enemies, he had

sought refuge in the Island of Corsica; and there he had made himself an

apostle, resolved to traverse all Italy and to write the name of the

Virgin in his blood on the gate of every city. As an apostle, he had

returned to his native place, announcing that he had seen a star in the

midst of a thicket of trees, and that from it he had received the Word.

And, finally, by the inspiration of the Eternal Father, he had taken the

great name of the New Messiah.

He was now making his pilgrimage through the rural districts dressed in

a red tunic and a blue mantle, with long hair down to his shoulders, and

his beard trimmed like Christ's. His apostles accompanied him--men who

had abandoned the spade and plough to devote themselves to the triumph

of the new faith. In Pantaleoni Donadio revived the spirit of Saint

Matthew; in Antonio Secamiglio revived the spirit of Saint Peter; in

Giuseppe Scurti, that of Maximin; in Maria Clara, that of Saint

Elizabeth; and Vincent di Giambattista, who represented the archangel

Saint Michael, was the messenger of the Messiah.

All these men had tilled the soil, mown the wheat, pruned the vines,

pressed the olives; they had led the cattle to the fair and disputed

over the prices; they had led a woman to the altar, and procreated

children, and seen these children grow, flourish, die; in short, they

had lived the ordinary life of country people amidst their equals. And

now they passed, followers of the Messiah, considered as divine

personages by the same people with whom, the previous week, they had

argued concerning a measure of wheat. They passed transfigured,

participating in the divinity of Oreste, invested with his grace.

Whether in the fields or in the house, they had heard _a voice_, they

had all at once felt pure souls enter into their sinful flesh. The

spirit of Saint John was in Giuseppe Coppa; that of Saint Zacharias, in

Pascal Basilico. The women, also, had received the sign. A woman of

Senegallia, married to a certain Augustinone, a tailor at Chapelles, in

order to demonstrate to the Messiah the ardor of her faith, had wanted

to renew the sacrifice of Abraham, by setting fire to a mattress on

which slept her children. Other women had given other proofs.

And the Elect now wandered through the country with his escort of

Apostles and of Marys. From the most distant places of the coast and

mountain, multitudes flocked to see him pass. At daybreak, when he

appeared at the door of the house in which he had lodged, he always saw

a great crowd kneeling in expectation. Erect on the threshold, he

delivered the Word, received confessions, administered communion with

pieces of bread. For his nourishment, he preferred eggs prepared with

elder flowers, or with the tips of wild asparagus; he also ate a mixture

of honey, nuts, and almonds, which he called _manna_, to recall the

manna of the desert.

His miracles could no longer be counted. By the simple virtue of the

thumb, index and middle fingers, raised in the air, he delivered the

possessed, cured the infirm, resurrected the dead. If anyone went to

consult him, he did not even give him time to open his mouth, and

immediately told him the names of his parents, explained his family

affairs, and revealed to him the most obscure secrets. He also gave news

of the souls of the dead; he indicated places where treasures were

hidden; with certain scapularies in the form of a triangle, he delivered

hearts from melancholies.

"It's Jesus come back to earth," concluded Colas di Sciampagne, with a

voice fervent with faith. "He will pass near here, too. Didn't you see

how high the wheat is? Have you not noticed how the olive-trees are

flourishing? Didn't you notice how the vines are laden with grapes?"

Respectful of the old man's beliefs, George asked gravely:

"And where is he now?"

"He is at Piomba," replied the old man.

And he pointed to the distant shores on the other side of Ortono,

evoking in his guest's mind the vision of that corner of the province of

Teramo bathed by the sea--an almost mystic vision of fertile lands

watered by little, sinuous rivers, where, beneath the endless shivering

of the poplars, a stream of water ran over a bed of polished sand.

After an interval of silence, Colas added:

"At Piomba, one word from him sufficed to stop the train on the

railroad! My son saw it. Didn't Vito tell us that, Candia?"

Candia confirmed the old man's words, and gave the details of the

wonderful event. The Messiah, attired in his red tunic, had advanced to

meet the train, walking calmly between the two rails.

While speaking, Candia and the old man incessantly directed their gaze,

as well as their gestures, towards the distance, as if the sacred person

of the expected arrival were already visible to them.

"Listen!" interrupted Hippolyte, pulling the arm of George, who was

absorbed in an inner view more and more vast and distinct. "Don't you

hear something?"

She rose, crossed the court, went close to the parapet under the

acacias. He followed her. They listened.

"It's a procession going on a pilgrimage to the Madonna of

Casalbordino," said Candia.

In the peaceful moonlight a religious chant swelled its slow and

monotonous rhythm, with an alternation of masculine and feminine voices

at equal intervals. One of these half-choirs chanted a strophe in a low

tone; the other half-choir chanted a refrain in a higher key,

indefinitely prolonging the cadence. It was like the approach of a wave

continuously rising and falling.

The procession approached with a rapidity which contrasted with the

slowness of the rhythm. Already the first pilgrims appeared at the turn

of the path, near the bridge of the Trabocco.

"Here they are," exclaimed Hippolyte, moved by the novelty of the scene

and sounds. "Here they are. What a number of them!"

They advanced in a compact mass. And the opposition of the measure

between their march and their chant was so strange that it gave them an

almost fantastic appearance. It seemed as if a supernatural force

impelled them on, unconscious, towards the goal, while the words emitted

from their mouths remained suspended in the luminous air and continued

to vibrate after their passage.

_Viva Maria!_

_Viva Maria!_

They passed with a heavy trampling, exhaling a sour, herdlike odor, so

jammed one to the other that nothing emerged from their mass except the

long sticks fashioned like a cross. The men marched in front, and the

women, more numerous, behind, with the glittering of golden ornaments

underneath their white bandelets.

_Viva Maria!_

_Viva her Creator!_

Near by, at every repetition, their chant had the vehemence of a cry;

then it diminished in vigor, betraying fatigue, surmounted by a

continual and unanimous effort, the initiative of which, in the two

half-choirs, almost always started in a single and more powerful voice.

And this voice dominated not only the others when it intoned the

measure; but often, in the midst of the musical wave, it was maintained

high and recognizable during the entire duration of the strophe or

refrain, denoting a more imperious faith, a singular and dominating soul

among that indistinct crowd.

George remarked it, and, very attentive, followed it as it waned in the

distance, as long as his ear could recognize it. And that gave rise in

him to an extraordinary sentiment of the mystic power which lay at the

roots of the great indigenous race from which he himself had sprung.

The procession disappeared in the curve of the coast; then reappeared on

the summit of the promontory, in the light; then disappeared again. And

the chant, through the distant night, became veiled, softened; became so

light that the slow and uniform modulation of the calm sea almost

drowned it.

Seated on the parapet, her shoulders leaning against the trunk of an

acacia, Hippolyte remained silent, motionless, not daring to disturb the

religious meditations in which her lover seemed plunged.