Matilde Serao

“ In the semi-darkness of the carriage, which was making for old Rome from the Quirinal hill at a slow trot, Francesco Sangiorgio dwelt now on that sweet face, whose continued pallor rendered it more fascinating than ever, and now on that little hand, lying as listlessly in her lap as if she were overcome with mortal fatigue. In the long-awaited rapture of that moment, in the strange seclusion of the dark little blue nest, conveying the sweetest of her sex homeward, her lover was seized with not a single desire, with no care for the time which was speeding and bringing separation nearer. ”

“ I am a fatal woman: I shall bring misfortune upon you.”
“So be it. I love you.”
“This love is madness, Andrea.”
“So be it. I will have it so.”
“You are binding yourself for life, Andrea.”
“Oh! Lucia; tell me that you love me.”
She moved towards the shore, and spread her arms as if in invocation:
“Oh! distant sky, oh! passing clouds, oh! trees that crowd together to mirror yourselves in the lake, bear witness that I have told him the truth. Oh! sorrowing willow, oh! still waters, oh! reeds and lilies, you have heard my words. Oh! Mother, Venus, Goddess, I have read the future for him. ”

“ The meeting of soul and spirit is a spring of life. Bianca Maria, don't be ungrateful, don't be cruel; tell me all.'
'You are trying to kill me,' she repeated, desperately and resignedly.
'You are a fool! Do you wish me, your father, to pray to you? Well, I will; there is nothing else to be done. Children are ungrateful and wicked; they give back cruelty for our love. I pray to you, Bianca, I beg of you, as if you were my patron saint, to tell me all.'
'I will die of this, father,' she murmured, her voice choked in the pillows that helped her to curb her crying and sobs. ”

“ Donna Maria, does it please you to continue to live outside the laws, outside morality, outside society, when the great cause of it is at an end? Does it please you still to sacrifice your decorum, your dignity, your name, not to love but to your fancy? Where are there any more the supreme compensations for all that you have lost? Where are there any more the rich sentimental and sensual rewards for that which you have thrown away and abandoned? How does your abnegation profit you any more? You have given all and are giving all, and meanwhile your life is empty, your soul is empty. ”

“ Create none, Vittorio. When at last the beautiful, dazzling figure of Mabel Clarke has vanished from your spirit, love your wife, who is good and sweet, who has been humble and patient, who is fond of you, and attends your good. Love her, not another woman; love her, and never the woman of another. Vittorio, don't be lost as I am lost; don't throw to the monster adultery—your flesh, and senses, and heart. Don't create for yourself remorses which will render your life a place of torment as it is for me. ”

“ She sat in the shade behind Alberto, so that she might gaze her fill on Andrea, without attracting any observation.
Sometimes she opened her fan before her eyes, looking through its sticks. Now and then, when Alberto was away and Caterina bent over her sewing, Lucia’s great eyes flashed in Andrea’s face: the lids dropped immediately. All the evening Lucia maintained her air of melancholy, her tired voice and weary intonation. If for a moment she found herself alone with Andrea, she would rise, quivering with life, and cry, close to his face:
“I love you.” ”

“ Oh, Laura, Laura, you who were so pure and beautiful, you who are worthy of a young man's love, why do you throw away your life and your honour for Cesare?"
"But you? Don't you also love him? You too are young. Yet didn't you love him so desperately that you would gladly have died, if he hadn't married you? I have followed your example, that is all. As you love him, I love him, Anna. We are sisters, and the same passion burns in our veins." ”

“ The supreme hour of their life had come for old and young, gentlemen and working men—the tragic hour when nothing can prevent a tragedy, when everything pushes men forward to a tragedy.
Hearing the medium weep like a child, drying his tears with a flaming, torn pocket-handkerchief, none of them felt pity. All felt the warmer, keener desire for lottery numbers to save them from the ruin that threatened them. They left him, to weep meanly, like a frightened fool; one by one, making no noise, they went slowly from that house that had become a prison. ”

“ Passing the dividing line between the Pincio and the Villa Medici, Sangiorgio cast a regretful glance at the gloomy darkness of the dense alley of trees where his sweet idyll would have been safe from the bright, lavish sunlight, but she had refused, since a special permit would have been requisite for the Villa Medici. What disturbed Sangiorgio, in his walk round the big garden, was the part which faced Rome and the Piazza del Popolo, all that open side, that gigantic breach, whence at moments came a deep drone, the clamour of the crowd in its mirth or disappointment. ”

“ To reunite when we no longer have love as the excuse of our betrayal, nor passion as an excuse for the sorrow we are inflicting on others! Why? Why?”
“Because nothing else remains,” he said desolately.
“Is there really nothing else, Marco?” she cried, wringing her hands.
“Really, Maria, nothing else.”
“And that unfortunate at Rome? That unfortunate Emilio? What has he done to be so disgraced? And why must I bring about his misfortune?” she cried, with a sob, hiding her face in her hands.
“Pity him; let us pity him,” said Marco; “he is an unfortunate.” ”

“ The morning that had spread over the Engadine a sky which seemed a shimmering mantle of azure silk, and that had given to the eye an inexplicable brightness, and to every panting breast a contented appearance, almost as if it were a strange, sublime potion, had developed into a splendid afternoon. Men and women who had lazily passed the morning hours in an hotel room, or in strolling up and down the nearer meeting-places of the Bad and Dorf, were seized with a desire of faring forth, away along the majestic roads and paths and hills—everywhere an afternoon could be lived in the open air. ”

“ How can I try again with Vittoria? Must I return and fall at the feet of my wife, simulating a passion I do not feel? Must I play a comedy, I who despise a lie? Could I ever take my wife in my arms like you? Oh, she knows, perhaps, and understands; at any rate she would soon understand, that I was lying and deceiving her. Do you know that I inspire her with repulsion? Do you know that she neither wants me as a husband, a companion, or a friend? Do you know that she wants me as a lover? Can I be the lover of Vittoria, Maria? ”

“ For a whole week after the scene in the English Garden, their love had been so calm that it needed no expression; it was self-concentrated and subjective. They exchanged stolen glances without any agitation, they neither blushed nor turned pale, nor did they tremble at the touch of each other’s hands. Lucia had an absorbed air, as if she were immersed in the contemplation of her own mind; neither the outer world nor her lover could distract her from their state of contemplation. Andrea’s demeanour was that of a man who is secure of himself and of the future. ”

“ Donna Angelica did not hate Don Silvio, not knowing how to hate, but he was shut out of her heart for evermore; she could not love him because he had neglected to love her; could not respect him because politics force a man into too much bargaining and baseness. But she did not hate him—oh no! he was merely indifferent to her. And she uttered her little assertions of indifference with such frigid precision, with such icy simplicity, that Sangiorgio shivered with the thought that these killing words might some day apply to him. ”

“ Luigi was too expert a student of women not to interpret rightly her pallor, her emotion, her distress. He did not know, but he could easily guess that Anna wrote to Cesare every day, and that he responded rarely and briefly. He understood how heavy her long hours of solitude must be, amid the blue and green of the Sorrento landscape, passed in constant longing for her husband's presence. He understood perfectly that she was consumed by secret jealousy, and that he tortured her cruelly when by a word, or an insinuation he inspired her with new suspicions. ”

“ Mabel, you alone can make of me another man, with another soul, with another heart! Mabel, remember, remember our dreams of love in the Engadine, remember that you consented to love me up there; you did love me, you have been my beloved, you can't forget! Change yourself, change me; be another woman, give yourself to love, as I let myself be taken in the great battle for you! Change yourself, as I change myself! Deny not the arguments of love; be a woman as other women, as I ask to be a man in every strife however cruel. ”

“ The fascination of a vision more subjugating than any form of tangible life! Marco Fiore’s heart began to melt, seeing Maria weeping in his dream, and an immense regret and remorse overpowered him, because by every movement and deed of his he had caused her sadness that evening, because he had not spoken a single word of love to her, because he had not yielded to her timid and impassioned invitation to return to her after midnight, as he had always done in the past; because she was there in her room alone with the sorrow of her abandonment and desertion. ”

“ Consider. Isn't knowledge better than ignorance? Isn't the calm of autumn better than the storms of spring? You are our master—the master of us all. We all revere him, don't we, Signorina?" said Luigi, turning to Anna.
A shadow crossed Anna's face, and she let the conversation drop.
"And you, who say nothing, reasonable and placid Laura?" asked Cesare Dias. "Which is better—youth or age? Which is better—knowledge or ignorance? Here are knotty problems submitted to your wisdom, dear Minerva. You are a young girl, but you are also Minerva. Illuminate us. ”

“ Hope and desire declined within the bosom of the lover, who was sunk in lethargy; the fire declined in the grate, the light failed, the embers blackened, and the gray ashes of night descended upon the earth, upon love, upon the fire. At half-past seven each evening he would depart, in the chill of the evening and of the street, in the chill of his own disappointment. He would go away pale and stooping, his hands in his pockets and his head down on his chest, like a wretched victim to fever, whose system is pervaded with the disease, like a gambler who has lost his last game. ”

“ Marco was sleeping heavily, with his head buried in the pillows just as if it was his last sleep, and all his face was decomposed in its fatigue and pallor, even the lips were white beneath the moustaches, and his forehead had a crease of weariness and bitterness. Too long, indeed, did she gaze at that sight, and drink in its poison with her soul and eyes. She felt her heart like a stone within her breast, and her soul wound her person like a sharp rock with a tremendous spasm. She felt, too, the floods of bitterness like a poison diffuse themselves through her being. ”

“ Lucia, fragile, thin, and languishing, made up a picture of pitiable humanity. Galimberti shrank in his chair, bowing his head. Alberto Sanna contemplated Andrea from his feet upwards, with profound admiration, making himself as small as possible, like a weak being who craves the protection of a strong one. Lucia, on the contrary, threw herself back in her rocking-chair, attitudinising like a serpent in the folds of rich Turkish stuff, just showing the point of a golden embroidered slipper. ”

“ I leave my bed at the dead of night, steal out during my sister's sleep—out of my room, out of my house, like a guilty servant, so that they might call me the lowest of the low. I do all this to come to you; and you are thinking of speculations, of what the world will say about you. Oh, how strong you are, you men! How well you know your way; how straight you march, never listening to the voices that call to you, never feeling the hands that try to stop you—nothing, nothing, nothing! ”

“ He grew pale with love, as their row towards Sils Maria, where the two old maids were waiting for them, ended in a gentle movement, that almost seemed a gliding upon the waters. Both more moved than at any other time, more touched in the deepest essence of their souls, by that beautiful hour, by the landscape of peace and grandeur, by the words they had pronounced, by those they had not said, they experienced in every glance they exchanged, in every rare accent and gesture, an emotion they strove in vain to calm. ”

“ You have given me all yourself, and I have known what exaltation a man can enjoy without dying of too much joy. And for this, my lady, gentle and proud, for all this that I owe you I cannot give you a sorrow which has not its equal, that of loving still when one is not loved. Swear that your desolation is only for the dream which has vanished in you as in me; that your tears are of an infinite bitterness for love and not for me; that I am as a brother in sorrow and not a fickle and forgetful lover; that you can think of me without a shock, but with sadness for things which are extinct ”

“ After the snow of the 26th of August a pure sky was resplendent in vain in the Upper Engadine, an exaltation for the eye and the imagination; in vain a wondrous golden sun enlivened everything, in vain did an even more victorious and absorbing fascination emanate from the whole countryside, and in vain the beauty of things became more absorbing and penetrating. Everything was in vain for a crowd that wished to depart, and nothing availed to keep it now that it was bent on fleeing. It was a crowd that no longer had eyes, or feelings, or nerves, with which to see and feel and respond ”

“ So, on the stage, Raoul and Valentina, victims of an irrepressible but impossible passion, were calling upon Heaven for death, praying to be allowed to die in their divine moment of love. Anna, recoiling from the thought of the future, with its inevitable vicissitudes, struggles, tears, and disappointments, realised the fascination of death. Involuntarily, she looked at Cesare. He smiled upon her, and thereat she too smiled, like his faithful image in a mirror. And her sublime longing to die, disappeared before the reality of his smile. ”

“ They delighted in her as the country of their dearest poesy, they shut her up in their fantasy, as the purest of their dreams, they blessed her in the name of their love. The divine Engadine had offered all her most precious treasure to them, even to those seized by a light caprice, even to those transported by a little flirtation in a summer night in the high mountains, even to lovers' tears, even to those who must forget everything at once: the divine Engadine had given to those men and women all her dearest gifts. ”