In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 27
CHAPTER XXVII.
STE'S had been the usual tranquil, amorous, unoccupied life of young Italian men in old Italian cities that are away from the common track of travel: a life of sleepy calm, of often harmless dalliance, that usually has its story told from birth to death within the circle of the old town walls. Why not? Men used to be greater when they lived only on one spot, and more content. Unhappily, now, the greatness and the content are gone, because that which used to be repose too often 1s now but apathy, languor, rust.
He had studied under monks in an ecclesiastical college, ancient and solemn in art and architecture, where no boy laughed above his breath, and a Greek chorus was second to a Latin hymn. There he had grown up a beautiful, graceful, pensive lad, in a home straitened by penury and made austere by devotion, but keeping something of the stateliness of grander times.
To drop slowly down the wide lagoons and thread the mazes of the reed-thickets was his chief, often his only, occupation; to make his mandoline throb a love-lay under some old sculptured casement, where some fancy of the hour was hiding behind a curtain of frayed velvet or tattered tapestry, was his sole diversion. There was enough to live on; that slender pittance that kept his father and himself in a corner of the dark old palace would be enough for him to live on afterwards. No one spoke to him of action or of ambition; they were unknown words in Mantua; he lived through his years as idly and as thoughtlessly as any one of the dragon-flies above the rushes lived out their summer hour. If he were pensive and serious, it was only because the spirit of the place was on him and the sense of narrow fortunes curbed his youth.
Then, when he was twenty-four, this passion for an old man's young wife came on him with force and sorcery, and changed the whole tenor of his dreaming, sleepy days. He lived thenceforward only for one woman, in all the beguiling mystery of a secret and mutual love.
What he saw now was the beauty of that dead mistress. There is no coldness so unchanging, so unyielding, so absolute, as the coldness of one who loves what is lost. Actually, he never saw Musa with any eyes that realised her beauty or her girlhood.
He saw some one who was good to him in his sickness and extremity; that was all. The woman slain in Mantua, with the cruel hole in her breast and the datura lilies red with her blood, was for ever between him and this creature who tended him, fed him, sheltered him, saved him.
He had passed through one of those terrible hours in life which even in the most sensual temperaments burn out for the moment all fires of sense and quench desire in horror. He loved with all his force the woman murdered in Mantua; and yet he knew she was dead, dead, dead—a putrid thing pushed away under the friable, watery soil. The terror of that, the ghastliness of it, the despair of it, froze the blood in his veins. What was this girl to him?
No more than the empty lamps of the tomb whose lights had been out two thousand years.
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