Part 44 (1/2)
”What is all this?” he demanded, insistently--”I MUST speak to you! You have been weeping! What is troubling you?”
She drew her hands gently away from his.
”Nothing, Giulio!” and she smiled kindly--”I grieve for the griefs of others--quite uselessly!--but I cannot help it!”
”There is no hope, then?” he said.
”None--not for the man”--she replied--”His body will live,--but his brain is dead.”
Rivardi gave an expressive gesture.
”Horrible! Better he should die!”
”Yes, far better! But the girl loves him. She is an ardent Spanish creature--warm-hearted and simple as a child,--she believes”--and Morgana's eyes had a pathetic wistfulness--”she believes,--as all women believe when they love for the first time,--that love has a divine power next to that of G.o.d!--that it will work miracles of recovery when all seems lost. The disillusion comes, of course, sooner or later,--but it has to come of itself--not through any other influence. She--Manella Soriso--has resolved to be his wife.”
”Gran' Dio!” Rivardi started back in utter amazement--”His wife?--That girl? Young, beautiful? She will chain herself to a madman? Surely you will not allow it!”
Morgana looked at him with a smile.
”Poor Giulio!” she said, softly--”You are a most unfortunate descendant of your Roman ancestors as far as we women are concerned! You fall in love with me--and you find I am not for you!--then you see a perfectly lovely woman whom you cannot choose but admire--and a little stray thought comes flying into your head--yes!--quite involuntarily!--that perhaps--only perhaps--her love might come your way! Do not be angry, my friend!--it was only a thought that moved you when you saw her the other day--when I called you to look at her as she recovered consciousness and lay on her bed like a sleeping figure of the loveliest of pagan G.o.ddesses! What man could have seen her thus without a thrill of tenderness!--and now you have to hear that all that beauty and warmth of youthful life is to be sacrificed to a stone idol!--(for the man she wors.h.i.+ps is little more!) ah, yes!--I am sorry for you, Giulio!--but can do nothing to prevent the sacrifice,--indeed, I have promised to a.s.sist it!”
Rivardi had alternately flushed and paled while she spoke,--her keen, incisive probing of his most secret fancies puzzled and vexed him,--but with a well-a.s.sumed indifference he waved aside her delicately pointed suggestions as though he had scarcely heard them, and said--
”You have promised to a.s.sist? Can you reconcile it to your conscience to let this girl make herself a prisoner for life?”
”I can!” she answered quietly--”For if she is opposed in her desire for such imprisonment she will kill herself. So it is wisest to let her have her way. The man she loves so desperately may die at any moment, and then she will be free. But meanwhile she will have the consolation of doing all she can for him, and the hope of helping him to recover; vain hope as it may be, there is a divine unselfishness in it. For she says that if he is restored to health she will go away at once and never let him know she is his wife.”
Rivardi's handsome face expressed utter incredulity.
”Will she keep her word I wonder?”
”She will!”
”Marvellous woman!” and there was bitterness in his tone--”But women are all amazing when you come to know them! In love? in hate, in good, in evil, in cleverness and in utter stupidity, they are wonderful creatures! And you, amica bella, are perhaps the most wonderful of them all! So kind and yet so cruel!”
”Cruel?” she echoed.
”Yes! To me!”
She looked at him and smiled. That smile gave such a dreamy, spiritlike sweetness to her whole personality that for the moment she seemed to float before him like an aerial vision rather than a woman of flesh and blood, and the bold desire which possessed him to seize and clasp her in his arms was checked by a sense of something like fear. Her eyes rested on his with a full clear frankness.
”If I am cruel to you, my friend”--she said, gently, ”it is only to be more kind!”
She left him then and went out. He saw her small, elfin figure pa.s.s among the chains of roses which at this season seemed to tie up the garden in brilliant knots of colour, and then go down the terraces, one by one, towards the monastic retreat half buried among pine and olive, where Don Aloysius governed his little group of religious brethren.
He guessed her intent.
”She will tell him all”--he thought--”And with his strange semi-religious, semi-scientific notions, it will be easy for her to persuade him to marry the girl to this demented creature who fills the house with his shouting 'There shall be no more wars!' I should never have thought her capable of tolerating such a crime!”
He turned to leave the loggia,--but paused as he perceived Professor Ardini advancing from the interior of the house, his hands clasped behind his back and his furrowed brows bent in gloomy meditation.