Lucrezia Floriani, page 23
“And little Salvator?” asked Vandoni, as he was about to leave, “am I not to see him again?”
“He is asleep,” replied Lucrezia. “Come and say good night to him.”
“No, no,” he said in a low voice, but not too low for the prince and the count not to hear, “that would make me lose the little courage I still have.”
He was rather pleased with the intonation of the last sentence and the gesture he made as he tore himself away from that house. It was only a small effect, but it was correct, and not all the children in the world would have induced him to forgo a dramatic and abrupt exit at this point.
“Unless the prince is an ass,” he thought, “he cannot doubt but that my character contains a certain natural heroism which makes me greatly superior to the subordinate tasks to which I am reduced by the injustice of the public and the jealousy of rivals.”
The secret weakness of poor Vandoni was that he thought he was born for higher destinies and when he began to become acquainted with someone, he never failed to tell him of all the intrigues which went on behind the scenes and of which he regarded himself as a victim. Nor did he spare the count any of these stories during their walk together. Because Salvator encouraged him out of kindness and submitted to this appalling boredom in order to allow Karol and Lucrezia a little time to be together, Vandoni seized the opportunity to unfold to him all the setbacks of his theatrical life and could not even resist the desire to recite out loud, on the beach, fragments of Alfieri and Goldoni, so as to show him how well he could have acquitted himself in leading parts.
While Salvator was undergoing this ordeal, Karol, sitting in a corner of the drawing room, was maintaining an absolute silence and Lucrezia was attempting to start a conversation which would lead them to pour out their mutual feelings. She had not yet penetrated the depths of his heart on the matter of jealousy, and she refused to believe Vandoni’s warning. As it was no part of her natural frankness to beat about the bush in a matter which concerned her, she rose, approached the prince and taking his hand firmly, said: “You are mortally sad this evening. I wish to know the reason. You are trembling! You are ill or suffering from a secret grief. Karol, your silence hurts me. Speak! I order you to in the name of love and I beg you on my knees. Answer me! Is it my persistence in refusing to unite my fate with yours that affects you thus and will you never resign yourself to it? Well, Karol, if that is so I will yield. I only ask you for a year in which you may reflect.”
“You have been very well advised by your friend, Signor Vandoni,” replied the prince, “and I owe him a great debt for his intervention. But you will allow me not to submit myself to the conditions that you deign to lay down for me on his behalf. I ask your permission to retire. I am a little fatigued after the declamations I have heard this evening. Perhaps I shall grow accustomed to them if your friends again become constant visitors at your house. But as yet I am not accustomed to them and my head aches. As for the persecutions I have made you suffer and of which you yourself must be weary, I implore you to forget them and to believe that I shall henceforth respect your peace of mind sufficiently not to renew them.”
Speaking thus in an icy tone, Karol rose and bowing very low to Lucrezia he went and locked himself in his room.
25.
Of all angers, of all vengeances, the darkest, the most atrocious and the most agonising is the one which remains cold and polite. When you will see a person master himself to that degree, say if you wish that he is great and strong, but never say that he is tender and good. I prefer the coarseness of the jealous peasant who beats his wife to the dignity of the prince who rends his mistress’ heart without turning a hair. I prefer the child who scratches and bites to the one who sulks in silence. By all means let us lose our tempers, be violent, ill bred, let us insult one another, break mirrors and clocks! It would be absurd, but it would not prove that we hate one another. Whereas, if we turn our backs on one another very politely as we part, uttering a bitter and contemptuous word, we are doomed, and no matter what we do to be reconciled we will become more and more alienated.
Such were the thoughts of Lucrezia when she was left alone and in a state of utter dismay. Although usually mild-tempered she had had great outbursts of indignation in her life. At such times she had abandoned herself to the violence of her distress, she had cursed, she had broken things, she may even have used coarse language – I could not vouch for that; she was a fisherman’s daughter and came from a country where at every turn oaths by the body of Bacchus and that of the Madonna, by the blood of Diana and that of Christ make the Christian and pagan heaven intervene in the agitations of domestic life. But what is certain is that she had never been able to repulse and drive away from her heart, absolutely and suddenly, the beings whom she loved sufficiently to be irritated with them. Consequently she was utterly unable to understand those cold and pale furies which signify an antihuman detachment, a hateful stoicism, an eternal relinquishment. For more than a quarter of an hour she sat motionless, crushed by the outrageous words of her lover.
At last she stood up and walked to the drawing room, wondering if she had just had a frightful dream and if it was indeed Karol, the man who this very morning had wept at her feet with love and seemed to be consumed in divine ecstasy, who only a moment ago had spoken the language of spite and affectation, worthy of the puerile tricks of drama, but surely unworthy of real affection and deeply felt passion.
Incapable of enduring anxiety of this kind for long without understanding it, she went up to the prince’s room, first knocked discreetly, then with authority, and finally, seeing that there was no reply and the door resisted, she forced the bolt and entered.
Karol was sitting on the edge of his bed, his averted face sunk in the pillows which were reduced to tatters. His cuffs and his handkerchief had been torn to shreds by the nails of his fingers which were hooked and quivering like the claws of a tiger, the pallor of his face was terrifying, his eyes were bloodshot; his beauty had disappeared as if by hellish magic.
With him, extreme suffering turned to a fury all the more difficult to contain as he did not know he possessed this deplorable faculty and never having been thwarted he did not know how to fight against himself.
Lucrezia set down her candlestick beside him. She removed his feverish hands from his face and looked at him dumbfounded. She was not surprised to see a jealous man in the throes of a fit of fury. It was not a sight which was new to her and she also knew that one does not die of it. But to see this angelic being reduced to the same excesses of violence and weakness as Tealdo Soavi or any other man of his stamp was so unreal and made so little sense that she could not believe her eyes.
“You wish to humiliate and degrade me right to the end,” cried Karol, repulsing her. “You wished to see how far below myself you could make me sink. Are you satisfied now? With which of your lovers are you going to compare me?”
“These are very bitter words,” answered Lucrezia, gently and sadly. “I shall not be offended by them because I see that you are certainly not yourself at this moment I expected to find you cold and disdainful as you were just now, and I was coming, in the name of love and truth, to ask you to explain your scorn. I am distressed to find you as enraged as you are and I do not think that the triumph you attribute to me is very flattering to my pride. What language is this between us, Karol? Oh God, what has happened that you should doubt the dreadful pain I endure when I see you suffer so? But if I am the unwitting cause of it I must possess the power to bring it to an end. Tell me what I can do. If you need my life, my reason, my dignity, my conscience, I shall put them all at your feet if I can only cure you and calm you Speak to me, explain yourself, make me understand you, that is all I ask. To remain in doubt and let you endure these torments without attempting to alleviate them, that is impossible for me, that you will never get me to do. So open that bruised sick heart to me and if in order to help me to read into it you must overwhelm me with reproaches and insults, do not restrain yourself I prefer that to silence. Nothing will offend me, I shall justify myself gently and humbly, I will even beg your forgiveness if needs be, although I am entirely ignorant of my crimes. But they must be very grave if they hurt you so much. Answer, upon my knees I beg you.”
In order to show so much patience and resignation Lucrezia must have been overwhelmed by an immense love such as she had never believed she could experience after so many storms of the same nature, after so many disappointments, so many fatigues of heart and mind, so many humiliations and rebuffs. She had never lied, had always been devoted and ready for self-sacrifice, yet had never debased or compromised herself even for the sake of personal interest All this was dictated by a real and sensitive pride and to descend to justifying herself had always appeared to her to be beyond her powers, and suspicion was a mortal insult to her.
However she humiliated herself for a long time with infinite meekness before this unhappy child who did not wish to speak because he could not.
What could he have said, to be sure? The chaos into which his reason had sunk was too painful to be deliberate. To follow Lucrezia’s advice, insult her, reproach her bitterly, would doubtless have relieved him, but he did not have the faculty of involving others in his sufferings because he did not have the egoism which wants others to share them. And besides, how could he insult his mistress? He would have preferred to kill her – and kill himself with her, and carry his passion into the grave. But desecrate her with words? It seemed to him that if he could have resolved to do so, he would have condemned her before God and God would have parted them for all eternity. To be reduced to such a state he would have to love her no more, and the more he suffered through her the more he felt himself the slave of passion.
She could only guess at what was happening within him, for he only revealed himself by indirect replies and painful nondisclosures. She appeared to be defending herself feebly, but actually her restraint was perfect and it was impossible for the name of Vandoni to come to her lips.
“Come now,” she said when she had reached the end of her patience and had exhausted all the strength of her love in dragging out of him a few vague words terrifying in their depth or obscurity. “Come, my poor angel, are you jealous and don’t want to admit it? You, jealous? Ah, how bitter it is for me to have to say it, for me whom you have accustomed to soar above all human woes on the wings of sublime love! How you are hurting me and how far I was from believing thatyou could have done so! Ah! Let me only answer you with painful and frank reproaches. You do not wish to reproach me. I would prefer it because then I could clear myself, whereas now I am reduced to finding something to defend myself with. But before I talk reason to you – since I must – let me grieve, let me weep! This is the last cry of our unhappy love which is vanishing towards the heaven from which it had descended and where it will now return forever. Let me tell you that this day you have committed a great crime against me, against yourself and against God who had blessed our infinite trust in one another. Alas! Through suspicion you have sullied the purest, most perfect, most exquisite passion of my life. I had never loved, never been happy. Why do you tear my joy and delight from me so soon? You swept me up to heaven and now you hurl me brutally down to earth. Oh God, dear God, I did not deserve it I was floating with you in the empyrean. I believed in the eternity of our bliss. Everything of this earth appeared to be no more than dreams and ghosts to me; except for my children whom I bore in my arms towards this higher world, I cared for nothing … And now I must descend, I must walk on human paths, tear myself against the thorns, bruise myself against the rocks …
“See, you wished it thus. So let me speak of those things, of Vandoni, of my past and of the duties, perplexities and troubles which the future can hold in store for me. I was hoping to traverse them alone, leaving you calm and indifferent to these miseries which are alien to our love. The burden of the work and duties of this earth would have been light to me if I had been able to preserve you from coming into contact with them. You would not have even noticed them, if you had remained yourself and if you had retained the high trust which made us so strong and so pure! You have lost it, you have taken away from me the talisman which would have made me invulnerable to pain and anxiety. I am now going to tell you what obligations weigh upon my real life, what considerations I must retain, what duties my conscience traces out for me. But in order for you to understand them, you must take the trouble to reason a little, to know my past, to judge it and draw a serious conclusion from it, once and for all! Vandoni …”
“Ah,” cried Karol, trembling like a child, “don’t pronounce that name again and spare me everything you wish to tell me. I haven’t nor will I perhaps ever have the strength to hear it. I hate this Vandoni, I hate everything in your life which is not yourself What does it matter? It is not part of your duties to reconcile me to what hurts and revolts me around you. Let me, seeing that it is possible to me – and only to me – let me see in you two distinct beings: the one whom I have not known and do not wish to know; the other whom I know, whom I possess and whom I do not wish to see involved in things which I detest Yes, yes, Lucrezia, you have said it; it would be descending and again falling into the mire of human paths. Come to my heart, let us forget the atrocious sufferings of this day and let us return to God. What does it matter to you what has happened within me? That concerns me and I have the strength to endure it, since I have the strength of loving you as much as if nothing had perturbed me. No, no, no explanations, no narrations, no confidences, no arguments. Take me in your arms and transport me far from this cursed world where I only see dimly, where I do not breathe, where I am condemned to crawl even lower than the rest of men if I am to live without your love and without your ecstasy.”
Lucrezia contented herself with this false reconciliation and for the sake of peace she pretended to be satisfied with it But in this she was fatally wrong and through her own fault was plunged into the depths of pain and distress. From that day Karol grew accustomed to believing that jealousy is not an offence and that the woman one loves can and must always forgive it.
Towards midnight she encountered Salvator who had just taken leave of Vandoni and had the delicacy not to tell her how ridiculous and boring he had found this worthy fellow. She had not the courage to admit to him the extent to which the prince had been irritated by the presence of her former lover, but she could not refrain from thinking how admirable friendship is, how much more indulgent, helpful and generous it is than love. For he no longer concealed from himself Vandoni’s weaknesses and she equally clearly saw that Salvator had sacrificed himself to rid her of him.
Lucrezia retired to her room and her children, resolved to forget the sorrows of this day and sleep in the hope of waking at daybreak like a watchful, active mother. But although in the course of her tragic life she had acquired more than anyone else the faculty of putting her troubles to rest, like a poor soldier on the field lying in the open with his hunger and his wounds, she spent a sleepless night, and all the bitter memories which had been lulled to silence in her breast awakened one by one to torture her relentlessly. Like so many mocking and menacing ghosts she saw her errors and disappointments, the ingrates she had created and the wicked she had been unable to convert She struggled against the terrors of the past by seeking refuge in the present, but to no avail; the present offered her no security and the ancient griefs were only re-awakened thus because a new sorrow deeper than all the rest had come to rouse them.
When she rose, pale and broken, the bright morning sun, the flowers heavy with wet perfume, the nightingales drunk with their own song, did not restore calm and hope to her heart as on other days. She did not feel alive with the poetic sense of nature as she usually did. It seemed to her that henceforth between this fresh and smiling nature and her poor heart there was a secret enemy, a gnawing worm which prevented the sap of life from reaching it However she refused to recognise the extent of her disaster.
Karol prostrated himself at her feet that day. He did not wish to make her forget his wrongs; he was unaware of them since, as was his habit, he had already forgotten them himself. But, after several days spent in tears and anger, he had need of tenderness, effusion and happiness. He was never more seductive and more adorable then when the paroxysm of his bitterness and spite had rid him of his suffering. Lucrezia still had to fight against his plan of marriage, but this time she resisted courageously. The happenings of the previous day had enlightened her and she was not in a mood to place herself in a position where he could withdraw his proposal a second time. If the offer of his name was, on his part, a great homage rendered to the love which she deserved, the fact of withdrawing his offer in a moment of jealous suspicion was an outrage whose force proud Lucrezia felt more than he did. Without telling him what new strength she had summoned against him in this situation, she deprived him of all hope and this time he provisionally accepted her decree, without bitterness, acknowledging that he deserved the punishment of being submitted to some long trial.
But two days did not go by without the return of fresh storms. A travelling salesman succeeded in entering the house in order to recommend the purchase of certain hunting weapons. Celio wanted a new gun and his mother first refused to let him have it Then, wishing to give him a surprise, she took the traveller aside to bargain over and ultimately buy the object of this childish desire. The young salesman had a handsome face and a rather familiar and talkative manner. The beauty and fame of his latest client made him more eloquent than usual without however making him lose his head and preventing him from selling his goods at a fair profit. It was the eve of Celio’s birthday and Lucrezia wanted to put the sporting gun, which was elegant and light in weight, under the boy’s bolster, so that he should find it at night when he went to bed. The salesman hastened after her into the bedroom without expressly asking for permission, merely to hide the gun personally and receive the price agreed upon. Karol who had been to take a siesta entered at that very moment and found Lucrezia alone in a bedroom with a handsome youth who was speaking to her in an animated manner, looking at her with bold eyes and straightening the counterpane on the bed, while she (thinking of Celio’s delight when he found his surprise) was smiling at him happily!
