Sophy found herself with her hand in Amaldi's. She wanted to laugh
nervously. She could think of nothing clearly for a moment.
Amaldi noticed how pale she was. She did not seem less beautiful than he
remembered her, but his heart winced, for he thought that she looked
ill.
He had the advantage of Sophy in this sudden meeting, because he had
been prepared for it. However, "preparation" in such a case is something
as if a man imprisoned for years in a dark dungeon should "prepare" to
see the sunlight. As much as he might school himself, he would be sure
to quake to his inmost core when once again it flooded him.
Amaldi had tried hard to forget. If he had not forgotten he had at least
succeeded in dulling the edge of his feeling for her. But it was by time
and work that he had chiefly commanded his love.
He flung himself into all sorts of agricultural and civic reforms and
enterprises. Political life, as an end in itself, did not appeal to him,
but he thought with Cavour in regard to the "need which every worthy man
feels of making himself useful to the society of which he is a part."
Then had come the news of Sophy's marriage to Loring. Amaldi had had
another bitter recrudescence of feeling over that. He was filled with a
contemptuous anger against himself for what seemed to him a
poor-spirited fidelity. He was nothing, had never been anything to this
woman who spread devastation through his life. He had always despised
the love that starves on in faithful submission. He would on every
occasion have altered where he alteration found, and bent with the
remover to remove--only he discovered that it was not in his power to do
so. This emotion which had seized him without his volition or consent,
proved stronger than his will. Even though he succeeded in curbing it,
though it lay in chains, as it were, in the profundity of his being--yet
it stirred and threatened at the idea of any other love. It was like a
jealous, ill-governed prisoner who will not share his cell.
This one, supreme flame had burned out in Amaldi all capacity for loving
any other woman.
As the years passed, however, a calmer temper rose in him. Reflecting on
those early days of his love for Sophy, he realised that he had demanded
much while offering little--that he had been unreasonable in expecting
her to love him under the circumstances. Why, indeed, he asked himself
one day, four years after he had parted from her so stormily--why truly
should she have loved him? His whole effort at that time had been to
repress himself. He had never been truly himself when with her, so much
of his will had been absorbed in trying to restrain his passion. He had
been silent, reserved, conventional. Yet he had expected her to return a
feeling, whose depth and intensity she could not possibly have realised.
Now for the second time she was the wife of another man....
No reasoning, no philosophy, no lapse of time could save Amaldi from
crisping in the furnace of this thought.
But when, two years afterwards, his agricultural interests made a
journey to America seem necessary, he faced the probability of meeting
her again with tolerable coolness. He was nearing forty and he
considered life a discipline to be endured with hardihood. His character
had deepened and strengthened.
The Marchesa, in daily contact with him, found a dear companion, though
his habit of long silences seemed to increase with growing years. To his
inmost self she never attained. She did not know whether any chord of
his former passion for Sophy still vibrated. He never alluded to her.
The situation in regard to his wife was just the same. When the Marchesa
looked at her son's fine, sensitive dark face, grown stronger for
controlled pain, and realised that in all likelihood no compensation
would ever come to him, she felt that incomparable bitterness with which
we watch the suffering of one for whom we would gladly die.
She might die for Marco ten times over, yet he would never really live.
"Two women have seen to that," she told herself bitterly. Yet in her
more rational moods she did not blame Sophy. She had known her too
intimately to blame her. No--that Marco had loved her was not Sophy's
fault. There had been in his love for her that inevitability which
characterises true passion as well as true poetry.
* * * * *
And Sophy, standing now with her hand in Amaldi's after all these years,
had at first no thoughts that could properly be called thoughts,--the
memory of the three windows in the room where she had first met him--of
how it had seemed to mean something, and yet had meant nothing, like all
else in her life....
Then with a shock that "brought her to," as it were, she recalled how
she and Amaldi had parted from each other six years ago, and the colour
welled into her face.
He knew what she was thinking of. He, too, was thinking of it.
Mrs. Van Raalt was chattering again. "Just think what an odd thing
Marco's been doing in America!... He's been all over the West studying
the system of agriculture. Isn't that the funniest way for an Italian to
spend his time in America?"
"But you've been in America before, haven't you?" said Sophy
mechanically.
She was thinking what an air of race Amaldi had, and how quiet and
strong he looked standing there against the whirling, parti-coloured
background of the ball. Somehow she did not remember in him this
powerful look of manhood. Then she realised--he _was_ more a man. Those
six intervening years had given him this new look.
"Oh, yes," he said, answering her question. "Twice. Once when I was a
boy--once about nine years ago. My mother gave me many messages for you,
Signora--'_tanti auguri_'...."
The Italian words swept Sophy back, and she paled again. This and the
mention of his mother brought so vividly the memory of Cecil's death.
"Please give her my love ... when you write...." she said, her voice a
little shaken. (Helen Van Raalt had turned away with some one.) "I shall
never forget her kindness to me...." she added. As if she felt her words
too formal, she repeated: "I shall never, never forget all her kindness
to me...."
"She will be very happy to get such a message from you," said Amaldi.
He, too, felt his tone to be formal. Yet what could there be between
them but formalities! His heart shook in his breast. He had been mad,
quite mad--a vain fool, to risk seeing her again. He had even thought
that to see her thus, married for the second time, and happily, would
allay the uneasy ache with which he always thought of her. He realised,
in these very first moments, that it was the contrary which had
happened. That half-numbed ache had sprung into a throb of acute pain at
the first sight of her face. And how delicate she looked! Then leaped
the question: Was she only ill ... or was she unhappy?
This thought of her possible unhappiness had not before occurred to
Amaldi. That a woman with such bitter experience to guide her should
make a second mistake in a question so vital as marriage had not seemed
possible. Now as he observed her it seemed quite possible ... even
probable. It took his breath. He felt that he must look strange and so
began to speak casually. After a few moments Sophy said: "I must
introduce you to some of these pretty girls.... They will be thinking me
very negligent."
He followed her submissively. He had come to this debutante ball just
for the opportunity of seeing her. Now he must pay the penalty.
Sophy led him first to Belinda.
"Belinda, this is my friend, the Marchese Amaldi," she said. "This is
the heroine of the ball, Marchese ... Miss Horton, my...." she almost
stumbled--"my husband's cousin," it came out bravely.
Belinda thought that Amaldi looked "a great swell." She set herself at
once to enthrall him. Amaldi lent himself idly to the old, old game.
Belinda had at times the stupidity of all cock-sureness. She went to
bed that night firmly convinced that Amaldi was her future slave.
She said something of the sort jestingly to Sophy. Sophy looked at her
gravely, then she coloured a little and said:
"I must tell you Belinda that the Marchese Amaldi is married. He is
separated from his wife--but in Italy there is no divorce."
"Pooh!" said Belinda airily. "I don't want to be his marchioness.... I
only want to see how a stately dago like that makes love...."
Sophy had not replied. And Belinda, safe in her bedroom, taking off her
jewels with little pussy-cat yawns of replete pleasure, had thought:
"He must have been in love with _her_ once ... when she was younger.
Just common or garden jealousy--her telling me that!"
Then she looked at a little red mark on her white arm, and forgot all
about Amaldi and Sophy. She lifted her arm and rubbed her cheek softly
to and fro over the mark. It had been left there by a violent kiss.
"Oh, Morry ... Morry...." she purred, caressing her own arm where he had
caressed it, full of voluptuous reminiscence. "As if I care whether all
the dagoes in the world have as many wives as Bluebeard!-- My Jove ...
my _darling_!"
And she kissed and kissed the little red seal of love on her arm that
was white like peeled almonds.