The Child of Pleasure Part 40

When I shut my eyes, I see the sea.'

Born of her love and of the silence, she saw a vision rise up before her and spread wide under the setting sun. Andrea's gaze was upon her; she said no more, but she smiled faintly. As she uttered the two words--'with you'--she closed her eyes, but her mouth seemed suddenly to grow luminous as if on it were concentrated all the splendour veiled by her quivering lids and her eyelashes.

'I feel as if none of these things existed outside of my consciousness, but that you had created them in my soul, for my delight. I am profoundly affected with this illusion each time I stand before some spectacle of beauty and you are at my side.'

The words came slowly, with pauses in between, as if her voice were the halting echo of some other voice imperceptible to the senses, imparting to her words a singular accent, a tone of mystery, revealing that they proceeded from the innermost depths of her heart; they were no longer the ordinary imperfect symbols of thoughts, they were transformed into a more intense means of expression, transcendant, quivering with life, of infinitely ampler signification.

'And from her lips, as from a hyacinth full Of honey-dew, a liquid murmur drops, Killing the sense with pa.s.sion, sweet as stops Of planetary music heard in trance.'

Andrea thought of Sh.e.l.ley's lines. He repeated them to Maria, feeling the contagion of her emotion, penetrated by the charm of the hour and the scene.

'Never, in my hours of loftiest spiritual flights, have I attained to such heights. You lift yourself above my sublimest dream, shine resplendent above my most radiant thoughts; you illumine me with a ray that is almost brighter than I can bear.'

She stood up straight and slender against the bal.u.s.trade, her hands clasping the stone, her head high, her face more pallid than on the memorable morning when they walked beneath the flowering trees. Tears filled her half-closed eyes and glittered upon her lashes, and as she gazed before her, she saw the sky all rosy-red through the mist of her tears.

The sky seemed to rain roses as on that evening in October when the sun, sinking behind the hill at Rovigliano, lit up the deep pools in the pine-wood. The Villa Medici, eternally green and flowerless, received upon the tops of its rigid arboreal walls this gentle rain of innumerable petals showered down from the celestial gardens.

She turned to go down. Andrea followed her. They walked in silence towards the stairway; they looked at the wood that stretched between the terrace and the Belvedere. The light seemed to stop short at the entrance to it, where stood the two guardian statues, unable to pierce the further gloom; and the trees looked as if they spread their branches in a different atmosphere, or rather in some dark waters at the bottom of the sea, like giant marine plants.

She was seized with sudden terror. Hastening towards the steps, she ran down five or six and then stopped, dazed and panting. Through the silence, she heard the beating of her heart like the roll of distant thunder. The Villa Medici was no longer in sight; the stairway was enclosed between two walls, damp and gray and with gra.s.s growing in the cracks, gloomy as a subterranean dungeon. She saw Andrea lean down swiftly to kiss her on the lips.

'No, no, Andrea--no!'

He stretched out his hands to draw her to him, to hold her fast.

'No!'

Wildly she seized one of his hands and carried it to her lips; she kissed it twice--thrice, with frenzied pa.s.sion. Then she fled down the steps to the gate like a mad creature.

'Maria! Maria! Stop!'

They stood together before the closed gate, pale, panting, shaken, trembling from head to foot, gazing at one another with wide distraught eyes, their ears filled with the throb of their mad pulses, a sense of choking in their throats. Then suddenly, with one impulse, they were in each other's arms, heart to heart, lips to lips.

'Enough--you are killing me,' she murmured, leaning, half fainting, against the gateway, with a gesture of supreme entreaty.

For a moment, they stood facing one another without touching. All the silence of the Villa seemed to weigh upon them in this narrow spot enclosed in its high walls like an open tomb. High above them sounded the hoa.r.s.e cawing of the rooks gathering on the roofs of the palaces or crossing the sky. Once more, a strange fear possessed Maria's heart. She cast a terror-stricken glance up at the top of the walls. Then, with a visible effort she said quickly:

'We can go now; will you open the gate!'

And, in her uncontrollable haste to get away, her hand met Andrea's on the latch of the gate.

As she pa.s.sed between the two granite columns and under the jasmin, Andrea said--'Look, the jasmin is just going to blossom!'

She did not turn but she smiled--a smile that was infinitely sad because of the shadow cast upon her heart by the sudden recollection of the name she had read in the Belvedere. And while she walked through the mysterious gloom of the avenue, and she felt his kiss flame in her blood, a ruthless torture graved deep into her heart, that name--oh, that name!

CHAPTER VI

Lord Heathfield opened the great book-case containing his private collection, and turning to Sperelli--

'You should design the clasps for this volume,' he said; 'it is in quarto and dated from Lampsacus, 1734. The engravings seem to me extremely fine. What do you think?'

He handed Andrea the rare volume, which was ill.u.s.trated with erotic vignettes.

'Here is a very notable figure,' he continued, pointing to one of the vignettes--'something that was quite new to me. None of my erotic authors mention it.'

He talked incessantly, discussing each detail and following the lines of the drawing with a flabby white finger, covered with hairs on the first joint and ending in a polished, pointed nail, a little livid like the nail of an ape. His voice grated hideously on Sperelli's ear.

'This Dutch edition of Petronius is magnificent. And here is the _Erotopoegnion_ printed in Paris, 1798. Do you know the poem attributed to John Wilkes, _An Essay on Women_? This is an edition of 1763.'

The collection was very complete. It comprised all the most infamous, the most refinedly sensual works that the human mind has produced in the course of centuries to serve as a commentary to the ancient hymn in honour of the G.o.d of Lampsacus, _Salve! Sancte pater._

The collector took the books down from their shelves and showed them in turn to his 'young friend,' never pausing in his discourse. His hands grew caressing as he touched each volume bound in priceless leather or material. A subtle smile played continually round his lips, and a gleam as of madness flashed from time to time into his eyes.

'I also possess a first edition of the Epigrams of Martial--the Venice one, printed by Windelin of Speyer, in folio. This is it. The clasps are by a master hand.'

Sperelli listened and looked in a sort of stupor that changed by degrees into horror and distress. His eyes were continually drawn to a portrait of Elena hanging on the wall against the red damask background.

'That is Elena's portrait by Frederick Leighton. But now, look at this!

The frontispiece, the headings, the initial letters, the marginal ornaments combine all that is most perfect in the matter of erotic iconography. Look at the clasps!'

The binding was exquisite. Shark-skin, wrinkled and rough as that which surrounds the hilts of j.a.panese sabres covered the sides and back; the clasps and bosses, of richly silvered bronze, were chased with consummate elegance, and were worthy to rank with the best work of the sixteenth century.

'The artist, Francis Redgrave, died in a lunatic asylum. He was a young genius of great promise. I have all his studies. I will show them to you.'

The collector warmed to his subject. He went away to fetch the portfolio from the next room. His gait was somewhat jerky and uncertain, like that of a man who already carries in his system the germ of paralysis, the first touch of spinal disease; his body remained rigid without following the movement of his limbs, like the body of an automaton.

Andrea Sperelli followed him with his eyes till he crossed the threshold of the room. The moment he was alone, unspeakable anguish rent his soul.

This room, hung with dark-red damask, exactly like the one in which Elena had received him two years ago, seemed to him tragic and sinister.

These were, perhaps, the very same hangings that had heard Elena say to him that day, 'I love you.' The book-case was open, and he could see the rows of obscene books, the bizarre bindings stamped with symbolic decorations. On the wall hung the portrait of Lady Heathfield side by side with a copy of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Nelly O'Brien. And the two women looked out of the canvas with the same, self-same piercing intensity, the same glow of pa.s.sion, the same flame of sensual desire, the same marvellous eloquence; each had a mouth that was ambiguous, enigmatical, sibylline, the mouth of the insatiable absorber of souls; and each had a brow of marble whiteness, immaculately, radiantly pure.

'Poor Redgrave!' said Lord Heathfield, returning with the portfolio of drawings. 'There was a genius for you. There never was an erotic imagination to equal his. Look! look! What style! What profound knowledge of the potentialities of the human figure for expression.'

He left Andrea's side for a moment in order to close the door. Then he returned to the table in the window and began turning over the collection under Sperelli's eyes, talking without a pause, pointing out with that ape-like finger the peculiar characteristics of each figure.

He spoke in his own language, beginning each sentence with an interrogative intonation and ending with a monotonous irritating drop of the voice. Certain words lacerated Andrea's ear like the sound of filing iron or the shriek of a steel knife over a pane of gla.s.s.

And the drawings pa.s.sed in review before him, appalling pictures which revealed the terrible fever that had taken hold upon the artist's hand, and the terrible madness that possessed his brain.

'Now here,' said Lord Heathfield, 'is the work which inspired these masterpieces. A priceless book--rarest of the rare! You are not acquainted with Daniel Maclisius?'

He handed Andrea the treatise: _De verberatione amatoria_. He had warmed more and more to his subject. His bald temples were flushed, and the veins stood out on his great forehead; every minute his mouth twitched a little convulsively and his hands, those detestable hands, were perpetually on the move, while his arms retailed their paralytic immobility. The unclean beast in him appeared in all its brazen ugliness and ferocity.

'Mumps! Mumps! are you alone?'

It was Elena's voice. She knocked softly at one of the doors.