Saracinesca Part 11

She thought of her own life. She, too, had sacrificed herself; she, too, had tied herself for life to a man she despised in her heart, and she had done it for an object she had thought good. She looked steadily at the clock, for she would not give way, nor bend her head and cry bitter tears again; but the tears were in her eyes, nevertheless.

"Giovanni, you must not do it--you must not do it!" Her lips formed the words without speaking them, and repeated the thought again and again.

Her heart beat fast and her cheeks flushed darkly. She spread out the crumpled letter and read it once more. As she read, the most intense curiosity seized her to know who this woman might be whom Giovanni so loved; and with her curiosity there was a new feeling--an utterly hateful and hating pa.s.sion--something so strong, that it suddenly dried her tears and sent the blood from her cheeks back to her heart. Her white hand was clenched, and her eyes were on fire. Ah, if she could only find that woman he loved! if she could only see her dead--dead with Giovanni Saracinesca there upon the floor before her! As she thought of it, she stamped her foot upon the thick carpet, and her face grew paler. She did not know what it was that she felt, but it completely overmastered her.

Padre Filippo would be pleased, she thought, for she knew how in that moment she hated Giovanni Saracinesca.

With a sudden impulse she again sat down and opened the letter next to her hand. It was a gossiping epistle from a friend in Paris, full of stories of the day, exclamations upon fashion and all kinds of emptiness; she was about to throw it down impatiently and take up the next when her eyes caught Giovanni's name.

"Of course it is not true that Saracinesca is to marry Madame Mayer..." were the words she read. But that was all. There chanced to have been just room for the sentence at the foot of the page, and by the time her friend had turned over the leaf, she had already forgotten what she had written, and was running on with a different idea. It seemed as though Corona were haunted by Giovanni at every turn; but she had not reached the end yet, for one letter still remained. She tore open the envelope, and found that the contents consisted of a few lines penned in a small and irregular hand, without signature. There was an air of disguise about the whole, which was unpleasant; it was written upon a common sort of paper, and had come through the city post. It ran as follows:--

"The d.u.c.h.essa d'Astrardente reminds us of the fable of the dog in the horse's manger, for she can neither eat herself nor let others eat. She will not accept Don Giovanni Saracinesca's devotion, but she effectually prevents him from fulfilling his engagements to others."

If Corona had been in her ordinary mood, she would very likely have laughed at the anonymous communication. She had formerly received more than one pa.s.sionate declaration, not signed indeed, but accompanied always by some clue to the ident.i.ty of the writer, and she had carelessly thrown them into the fire. But there was no such indication here whereby she might discover who it was who had undertaken to criticise her, to cast upon her so unjust an accusation. Moreover, she was very angry and altogether thrown out of her usually calm humour. Her first impulse was to go to her husband, and in the strength of her innocence to show him the letter. Then she laughed bitterly as she thought how the selfish old dandy would scoff at her sensitiveness, and how utterly incapable he would be of discovering the offender or of punishing the offence. Then again her face was grave, and she asked herself whether it was true that she was innocent; whether she were not really to be blamed, if perhaps she had really prevented Giovanni from marrying Donna Tullia.

But if that were true, she must herself be the woman he spoke of in his letter. Any other woman would have suspected as much. Corona went to the window, and for an instant there was a strange light of pleasure in her face. Then she grew very thoughtful, and her whole mood changed. She could not conceive it possible that Giovanni so loved her as to marry for her sake. Besides, no one could ever have breathed a word of him in connection with herself--until this abominable anonymous letter was written.

The thought that she might, after all, be the "person very dear to him,"

the one who "took no interest whatever in him," had nevertheless crossed her mind, and had given her for one moment a sense of wild and indescribable pleasure. Then she remembered what she had felt before; how angry, how utterly beside herself, she had been at the thought of another woman being loved by him, and she suddenly understood that she was jealous of her. The very thought revived in her the belief that it was not she herself who was thus influencing the life of Giovanni Saracinesca, but another, and she sat silent and pale.

Of course it was another! What had she done, what word had she spoken, whereby the world might pretend to believe that she controlled this man's actions? "Fulfilling his engagements," the letter said, too. It must have been written by an ignorant person--by some one who had no idea of what was pa.s.sing, and who wrote at random, hoping to touch a sensitive chord, to do some harm, to inflict some pain, in petty vengeance for a fancied slight. But in her heart, though she crushed down the instinct, she would have believed the anonymous jest well founded, for the sake of believing, too, that Giovanni Saracinesca was ready to lay his life at her feet--although in that belief she would have felt that she was committing a mortal sin.

She went back to her interview that morning with Padre Filippo, and thought over all she had said and all he had answered; how she had been willing to admit the possibility of Giovanni's love, and how sternly the confessor had ruled down the clause, and told her there should never arise such a doubt in her mind; how she had scorned herself for being capable of seeking love where there was none, and how she had sworn that there should be no perhaps in the matter. It seemed very hard to do right, but she would try to see where the right lay. In the first place, she should burn the anonymous letter, and never condescend to think of it; and she should also burn Giovanni's, because it would be an injustice to him to keep it. She looked once more at the unsigned, ill-written page, and, with a little scornful laugh, threw it from where she sat into the fire with its envelope; then she took Giovanni's note, and would have done the same, but her hand trembled, and the crumpled bit of paper fell upon the hearth. She rose from her chair quickly, and took it up again, kneeling before the fire, like some beautiful dark priestess of old feeding the flames of a sacred altar. She smoothed the paper out once more, and once more read the even characters, and looked long at the signature, and back again to the writing.

"This lady, who, I confess, takes no interest whatever in me...."

"How could he say it!" she exclaimed aloud. "Oh, if I knew who she was!"

With an impatient movement she thrust the letter among the coals, and watched the fire curl it and burn it, from white to brown and from brown to black, till it was all gone. Then she rose to her feet and left the room.

Her husband certainly did not guess that the d.u.c.h.essa d'Astrardente had spent so eventful a morning; and if any one had told him that his wife had been through a dozen stages of emotion, he would have laughed, and would have told his informant that Corona was not of the sort who experience violent pa.s.sions. That evening they went to the opera together, and the old man was in an unusually cheerful humour. A new coat had just arrived from Paris, and the padding had attained a higher degree of scientific perfection than heretofore. Corona also looked more beautiful than even her husband ever remembered to have seen her; she wore a perfectly simple gown of black satin without the smallest relief of colour, and upon her neck the famous Astrardente necklace of pearls, three strings of even thickness, each jewel exquisitely white and just lighted in its shadow by a delicate pink tinge--such a necklace as an empress might have worn. In the raven ma.s.ses of her hair there was not the least ornament, nor did any flower enhance the rich blackness of its silken coils. It would be impossible to imagine greater simplicity than Corona showed in her dress, but it would be hard to conceive of any woman who possessed by virtue of severe beauty a more indubitable right to dispense with ornament.

The theatre was crowded. There was a performance of "Norma" for which several celebrated artists had been engaged--an occurrence so rare in Rome, that the theatre was absolutely full. The Astrardente box was upon the second tier, just where the amphitheatre began to curve. There was room in it for four or five persons to see the stage.

The d.u.c.h.essa and her husband arrived in the middle of the first act, and remained alone until it was over. Corona was extremely fond of "Norma,"

and after she was seated never took her eyes from the stage. Astrardente, on the other hand, maintained his character as a man of no illusions, and swept the house with his small opera-gla.s.s. The instrument itself was like him, and would have been appropriate for a fine lady of the First Empire; it was of mother-of-pearl, made very small and light, the metal-work upon it heavily gilt and ornamented with turquoises. The old man glanced from time to time at the stage, and then again settled himself to the study of the audience, which interested him far more than the opera.

"Every human being you ever heard of is here," he remarked at the end of the first act. "Really I should think you would find it worth while to look at your magnificent fellow-creatures, my dear."

Corona looked slowly round the house. She had excellent eyes, and never used a gla.s.s. She saw the same faces she had seen for five years, the same occasional flash of beauty, the same average number of over-dressed women, the same paint, the same feathers, the same jewels. She saw opposite to her Madame Mayer, with the elderly countess whom she patronised for the sake of deafness, and found convenient as a sort of flying chaperon. The countess could not hear much of the music, but she was fond of the world and liked to be seen, and she could not hear at all what Del Ferice said in an undertone to Madame Mayer. Sufficient to her were the good things of the day; the rest was in no way her business.

There was Valdarno in the club-box, with a knot of other men of his own stamp. There were the Rocca, mother and daughter and son--a boy of eighteen--and a couple of men in the back of the box. Everybody was there, as her husband had said; and as she dropped her glance toward the stalls, she was aware of Giovanni Saracinesca's black eyes looking anxiously up to her. A faint smile crossed her serene face, and almost involuntarily she nodded to him and then looked away. Many men were watching her, and bowed as she glanced at them, and she bent her head to each; but there was no smile for any save Giovanni, and when she looked again to where he had been standing with his back to the stage, he was gone from his place.

"They are the same old things," said Astrardente, "but they are still very amusing. Madame Mayer always seems to get the wrong man into her box. She would give all those diamonds to have Giovanni Saracinesca instead of that newsmonger fellow. If he comes here I will send him across."

"Perhaps she likes Del Ferice," suggested Corona.

"He is a good lapdog--a very good dog," answered her husband. "He cannot bite at all, and his bark is so soft that you would take it for the mewing of a kitten. He fetches and carries admirably."

"Those are good points, but not interesting ones. He is very tiresome with his eternal puns and insipid compliments, and his gossip."

"But he is so very harmless," answered Astrardente, with compa.s.sionate scorn. "He is incapable of doing an injury. Donna Tullia is wise in adopting him as her slave. She would not be so safe with Saracinesca, for instance. If you feel the need of an admirer, my dear, take Del Ferice. I have no objection to him."

"Why should I need admirers?" asked Corona, quietly.

"I was merely jesting, my love. Is not your own husband the greatest of your admirers, and your devoted slave into the bargain?" Old Astrardente's face twisted itself into the semblance of a smile, as he leaned towards his young wife, lowering his cracked voice to a thin whisper. He was genuinely in love with her, and lost no opportunity of telling her so. She smiled a little wearily.

"You are very good to me," she said. She had often wondered how it was that this aged creature, who had never been faithful to any attachment in his life for five months, did really seem to love her just as he had done for five years. It was perhaps the greatest triumph she could have attained, though she never thought of it in that light; but though she could not respect her husband very much, she could not think unkindly of him--for, as she said, he was very good to her. She often reproached herself because he wearied her; she believed that she should have taken more pleasure in his admiration.

"I cannot help being good to you, my angel," he said. "How could I be otherwise? Do I not love you most pa.s.sionately?"

"Indeed, I think so," Corona answered. As she spoke there was a knock at the door. Her heart leaped wildly, and she turned a little pale.

"The devil seize these visitors!" muttered old Astrardente, annoyed beyond measure at being interrupted when making love to his wife. "I suppose we must let them in?"

"I suppose so," a.s.sented the d.u.c.h.essa, with forced calm. Her husband opened the door, and Giovanni Saracinesca entered, hat in hand.

"Sit down," said Astrardente, rather harshly.

"I trust I am not disturbing you," replied Giovanni, still standing. He was somewhat surprised at the old man's inhospitable tone.

"Oh no; not in the least," said the latter, quickly regaining his composure. "Pray sit down; the act will begin in a moment."

Giovanni established himself upon the chair immediately behind the d.u.c.h.essa. He had come to talk, and he antic.i.p.ated that during the second act he would have an excellent opportunity.

"I hear you enjoyed yourselves yesterday," said Corona, turning her head so as to speak more easily.

"Indeed!" Giovanni answered, and a shade of annoyance crossed his face.

"And who was your informant, d.u.c.h.essa?"

"Donna Tullia. I met her this morning. She said you amused them all--kept them laughing the whole day."

"What an extraordinary statement!" exclaimed Giovanni. "It shows how one may unconsciously furnish matter for mirth. I do not recollect having talked much to any one. It was a noisy party enough, however."

"Perhaps Donna Tullia spoke ironically," suggested Corona. "Do you like 'Norma'?"

"Oh yes; one opera is as good as another. There goes the curtain."

The act began, and for some minutes no one in the box spoke. Presently there was a burst of orchestral music. Giovanni leaned forward so that his face was close behind Corona. He could speak without being heard by Astrardente.

"Did you receive my letter?" he asked. Corona made an almost imperceptible inclination of her head, but did not speak.

"Do you understand my position?" he asked again. He could not see her face, and for some seconds she made no sign; at last she moved her head again, but this time to express a negative.

"It is simple enough, it seems to me," said Giovanni, bending his brows.

Corona found that by turning a little she could still look at the stage, and at the same time speak to the man behind her.

"How can I judge?" she said. "You have not told me all. Why do you ask me to judge whether you are right?"

"I could not do it if you thought me wrong," he answered shortly.