How the birds sang that evening when the saffron afterglow had fainted over the forest spires, and when all was still with the hush of night, how the cry of a nightingale thrilled from a tree near the cottage!
The glamor of the day had passed, and now what mockery and bitterness came with the cold, unimpassioned light of the moon! Ilaria tossed and turned on her couch like one taken with a fever; her brain seemed afire, her hair like so much shadow about her head. As she lay staring with wide, wakeful eyes, the birds' song mocked her to the echo; the scent of rose and honeysuckle floated in like a sad savor of death, and the moonlight seemed to watch her without a quaver of pity. Her heart panted in the darkness; she was torn by the thousand torments of a troubled conscience; wounded to tears, yet her eyes were dry and waterless as a desert. Raniero's face seemed to glare down on her out of the dusky gloom, and she could have cried out with the fear that lay like an icy hand over her bosom.
How her heart wailed for Francesco; how she longed for the touch of his hand. God of heaven, she could not let him go again and starve her soul with the old, cursed life. His lips had touched hers; his arms had held her close; she had felt the warmth of his body, and the beating of his heart. Was all this nothing,--a dream, a splendid phantasm, to be rent away like a crimson cloud? Was she to be Raniero's wife despite of all, a bitter flower growing up under a gallows?
God of heaven, no! What had the world done for her, that she should obey its edicts, and suffer for its tyrannies? Raniero had cheated her of her youth, her happiness; let him pay the price to the fates! What honor, indeed, had she to preserve for him? If he was a brute piece of lust, a tyrant, a traitor, so much the better! It would ease her conscience. She owed him no fealty, no marriage vow! Her body was no more his than was her soul, and a dozen priests and a dozen masses might as well marry ice to fire! How could a fool in a cape and frock, by gabbling a service, bind an irresponsible woman to the man she hated with a hatred enduring as the stars? It was a stupendous piece of nonsense, to say the least of it. No God calling himself a just God, could hold such a bargain holy.
And then the truth! What a stumbling-block truth was on occasions. She knew Francesco's fine sensibilities, and his very love for her made him the victim of an ethical tyranny. And again! For all her passion and the fire of her rebellious heart she was not a woman who could fling reason to the winds and stifle up her conscience with a kiss. Besides, she loved Francesco to the very zenith of her soul. To have a lie understood upon her lips, to be shamed before the man's eyes, were things that scourged her in fancy even more than the thought of losing him. She trembled when she thought how he might look at her in the days to come, if a passive lie were proven against her with open shame.
And Francesco was a monk! He might break the shackles, defy the powers of the Church,--he was a monk nevertheless! It might be possible that his love proved stronger than his reason; it was possible that he might face the world and frown down the petty judgments of men! Glorious and transcendent sacrifice! She could face calumny beside him, as a rock faces the froth of the waves, she could look Raniero in the eye and know neither pity nor shame.
Her mood that night was like the passage of a blown leaf, tossed up to heaven, whirled over the tree-tops, driven down again into the mire. Strong woman that she was, her very strength made the struggle more indecisive and more racking. She could not renounce Francesco for the great love she bore him; and yet she could not will to play a false part by reason of this same great love! Her soul, like a wanderer in the wilds, halted and wavered between two tracks that led forward into the unknown.
As she tossed and tossed and thought of her life in Astura, her face became hard as stone. Even since they had journeyed from Naples, Ilaria had been conscious of a change. Her face showed melancholy, mingled with a constant scorn that had rarely found expression in the old days, within the walls of Avellino. For a time hope had waited wide-eyed in her heart. She had conjured up love like some Eastern house of magic, only to see its domes faint away into the gloom of night. The past was as a wounded dream to her! Her eyes had hungered for a face, grieving in dark reserve and silence. Her love, once forged, could bend to no new craft.
After the barren months at Astura, the long bondage of hate, Francesco had come into her life again. He had come to her with a glory of love in his eyes, he had taken her hands and kissed them, as though there were no such divine flesh in the whole wide world. How wonderful it was, to be touched so, to have such eyes pouring out so strong a soul before her face; to know the presence of a great love and to feel the echoing passion of it in her own heart!
Was this faery time but for an hour, a day, and no longer? Was she but to see the man's face, to feel the touch of his hands, the grand calm of his love, before losing him, perhaps for life? Her heart fluttered in her like a smitten bird. Could she but creep to him, where he lay, touch his hands, his lips! Her eyes stared out in the night with a starved frenzy.
"Francesco! Francesco!"--
It was like the wild cry of a woman over her dead love.
A wind had arisen. The thousand voices of the trees seemed to call to her with a weird, perpetual clamor. She saw their spectral hands jerking and clutching against the sky. The wind was crying through the trees, swaying them restlessly against the starry sky, making plaintive moan through all the myriad aisles.
How many a heart trembles with the return of day! What fears rise with the first blush of light in the purple bowl of night! To Ilaria the dawn would come as a message of misery; she dared not think what the coming hours would bring.
At last she closed her weary eyes, and under the sheer weight of her own grief fell into a deep and dreamless slumber, while the gloom was growing less and less, and dawn, like a pale phantom, stalked out of the east.
