CHAPTER X

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As if to initiate himself in the profound mystery into which he was about to enter, George desired to see once more the deserted apartment where Demetrius had passed the last days of his life.

In willing all his fortune to his nephew, Demetrius had also willed him this apartment. George had kept the rooms intact, with pious care, as one guards a reliquary. The rooms were situated on the upper floor, and looked south over the garden.

He took the key and went upstairs, treading cautiously, to avoid being questioned. But, as he traversed the corridor, he was necessarily obliged to pass by his Aunt Joconda's door. Hoping to pass unnoticed, he walked softly, on tip-toe, holding his breath. He heard the old woman cough; he made a few quicker strides, believing that the noise of the cough would cover the sounds of his footsteps.

"Who's there?" demanded a hoarse voice from within.

"It is I, Aunt Joconda."

"Ah! It's you, George? Come in, come in----"

She appeared upon the threshold, with her ugly, yellowish face, which, in the shadow, was almost cadaveric; and she glanced at her nephew's hands before looking at his face, as if to see first if his hands had brought something.

"I am going in the next apartment," said George, repelled by the ignoble bodily odor, which filled him with disgust. "I must air the rooms a little."

And he resumed his steps in the corridor, until he came to the other door. But, as he turned the key, he heard behind him the limping of the old woman.

George felt his heart sink, as he thought that perhaps he would not find a way to disembarrass himself of her, that perhaps he would be obliged to listen to her stammering voice amid the almost religious silence of these rooms, with their beloved yet terrible souvenirs. Without saying anything, without turning round, he opened the door and entered.

The first room was dark, the air somewhat warm and suffocating, impregnated with that singular odor peculiar to old libraries. A streak of faint light showed where the window was. Before opening the shutters, George hesitated; he strained his ear to hear the gnawing of the wood-ticks. Aunt Joconda began to cough, invisible in the darkness. Then, feeling on the window to find the iron catch, he felt a slight thrill, a fugitive fear. He opened it, and turned round; he saw the vague shapes of the furniture in the greenish penumbra produced by the shutters; he saw the old woman in the middle of the room, one side distorted, swaying her flaccid body to and fro, chewing something. He pushed back the shutters, which creaked on their hinges. A flood of sunlight inundated the interior. The discolored curtains fluttered.

At first he was undecided: the presence of the old woman prevented him from abandoning himself to his feelings. His irritation increased to such a degree that he did not speak a single word to her, fearing that his voice would only be cross and angry. He passed into the adjoining room and opened the window. The light spread everywhere, and the curtains fluttered. He passed into the third room and opened the window. The light spread everywhere, and the curtains fluttered. He went no farther. The next room, in the angle, was the bedroom. He wished to enter it alone. He heard, with nausea, the limping gait of the unfortunate old woman rejoining him. He took a chair and relapsed into an obstinate silence, waiting.

The old woman crossed the threshold slowly. Seeing George seated, and not speaking, she was perplexed. She did not know what to say. The fresh air that blew in from the window unquestionably irritated her catarrh; and she began to cough again, standing in the middle of the room. At every spell her body seemed to swell and then to subside, like the bag of a bagpipe beneath an intermittent breath. She held her hands on her breast--fat hands, like tallow, with nails bordered with black. And in her mouth, between the toothless gums, her whitish tongue quivered.

As soon as her fit of coughing was over, she drew from her pocket a dirty paper bag, and took out a pastille. Still standing, she chewed, staring at George in a stupid manner.

Her gaze wandered from George towards the closed door of the fourth room. And the old woman made the sign of the cross, then went and sat down on the seat nearest to George. Her hands on her abdomen, and the eyelids lowered, she recited a _Requiem_.

"She is praying for her brother," thought George; "for the soul of the _damned_." It seemed inconceivable to him that this woman should be the sister of Demetrius Aurispa! How could the proud and generous blood which had soaked the bed in the adjoining room, the blood sprung from a brain already corroded by the highest cares of the intelligence, have come from the same source as that which coursed, so impoverished, in the veins of this peevish and disgusting old woman? "With her, it is greediness--the greediness which regrets the liberality of the donor. How strange, this prayer of gratitude from an old, dilapidated stomach towards the most noble of suicides! How odd life is!"

All at once, Aunt Joconda began to cough again.

"You had better go from here, aunt; it isn't good for you," said George, who no longer had the strength to master his impatience. "The air here is bad for your cough. You had better go, really. Come, I will see you back to your room."

Aunt Joconda looked at him, surprised at his abrupt speech and unusual tone. She rose, and went limping through the rooms. When she reached the corridor, she again made the sign of the cross, as if muttering an exorcism. When she had gone, George closed the door, and gave the key a double turn. At last, he was alone and free, with an invisible companion.

He remained motionless for a few moments, as if under magnetic influence. And he felt his whole being invaded by the supernatural fascination which that man, existing without life, exercised over him from the bottom of the tomb.

And he reappeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full of a virile melancholy, and with a single white curl in the centre of his forehead, among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.

"For me," thought George, "he exists. Since the day of his corporeal death I have felt his presence every minute. Never so much as since his death have I felt our consanguinity. Never so much as since his death have I had the perception of the intensity of his being. All that he consumed in contact with his fellow-creatures; every action, every gesture, every word that he has sown in the course of time; every diverse manifestation which determined the special character of his being in relation with other beings; every characteristic, fixed or variable, which distinguished his personality from other personalities and made of him a man apart in the human multitude; in short, all that which differentiated his own life from other lives--all now seems to me to be collected, concentrated, circumscribed in the unique and ideal tie that binds him to me. He does not exist for anyone but me alone; he is freed from all other contact, he is in communication with me alone. He exists, purer and more intense than ever."

He took a few steps, slowly. The heavy silence was disturbed at moments by little, mysterious noises, scarcely perceptible. The fresh air, the warmth of the day, contracted the fibres of the benumbed furniture, accustomed to the obscurity of the closed windows. The breath of heaven penetrated the pores of the wood, shook the particles of dust, swelled the folds of the hangings. In a ray of sunlight, myriads of atoms whirled about. The odor of the books was overcome gradually by the perfume of the flowers.

The things suggested to the survivor a crowd of recollections. From these things arose a light and murmuring chorus which enveloped him. From every side arose the emanations of the past. One would have said that the things emitted the odors of a spiritual substance which had impregnated them. "Do I exalt myself?" he asked himself, at the aspect of the images that succeeded one another in his mind with prodigious rapidity, clear as visions, not obscured by a funereal shadow, but living a superior life. And he remained perplexed, fascinated by the mystery, seized by a terrible anguish at the moment of venturing on the confines of that unknown world.

The curtains, which a rhythmic breath seemed to swell, undulated softly, giving glimpses of a noble and calm landscape. The slight noises made by the wainscoting, the papers, and the partitions continued. In the third room, severe and simple, the recollections were musical, and came from mute instruments. On a long, violet-wood piano, whose varnished surface reflected things like a mirror, a violin reposed in its box. On a chair a page of music rose and fell at the pleasure of the breeze, and almost in time with the curtains.

George picked it up. It was a page from a Mendelssohn motet: DOMENICA II POST PASCHA: _Andante quasi allegretto. Surrexit pastor bonus_-- Farther on, on a table, there was a heap of parts for the violin and piano, Leipzig editions: Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Rode, Tartini, Viotti. George opened the case, examined the fragile instrument that slept on olive-colored velvet, with its four strings still intact. A curiosity seized him to awaken them. He touched the treble string, which gave a plaintive moan that vibrated through the entire body. It was a violin made by Andrea Guarneri, dated 1680.

Demetrius reappeared, tall and slender, a little bent, his neck long and pale, his hair brushed back, and with the single white lock in the centre of his forehead. He held the violin. He passed one hand through his hair on the temple, near the ear, with his usual gesture. He tuned the instrument, rosined the bow, then attacked the sonata. His left hand, shrivelled and proud, ran up and down the neck; the tips of his thin fingers pressed the strings, and, beneath the skin, the play of his muscles was so visible as to be painful; his right hand, when drawing the bow, moved with a long, faultless motion. Sometimes he held the instrument tighter with his chin, his head inclined, his eyes half-closed, enjoying keenly his inner voluptuousness.

Sometimes he drew himself erect, looked fixedly before him, his eyes strangely brilliant; smiled a fugitive smile; and from his brow beamed an extraordinary purity.

Thus the violinist reappeared to the survivor. And George lived again the hours of life already lived; he lived them again, not in pictures only, but in actual and profound sensations. He lived again the long hours of close intimacy and forgetfulness, the time when Demetrius and himself, alone, in the warm room to which no noise could penetrate, executed the music of their favorite masters. How they used to forget their very existence! In what strange raptures this music, executed by their own hands, soon threw them! Often the fascination of a single melody held them prisoners an entire afternoon, without their being able to leave the magic circle in which they were enclosed. How often they had rehearsed that _Song without Words_ of Mendelssohn, which had revealed to them both, at the bottom of their hearts, a sort of inconsolable hopelessness! How often they had rehearsed a Beethoven sonata which seemed to grasp their souls, to carry them away with a vertiginous rapidity across the infinity of space, and hover with them, during the flight, over every abyss!

The survivor went back in his recollections as far as the autumn of 188-, to that unforgetful autumn of melancholy and poetry, when Demetrius had scarcely emerged from convalescence. That was to be the last autumn! After a long period of enforced silence, Demetrius took up his violin again with strange disquietude, as if he feared having lost all his aptitude and all his mastery, all his knowledge of the instrument. Oh, what trembling of the enfeebled fingers on the strings and the incertitude of the bowing when he essayed the first tones! And those two tears that formed slowly in the cavity of his eyes, rolled down his cheeks, and were arrested in the threads of his beard, rather long and still untrimmed.

The survivor again saw the violinist about to improvise, while he himself accompanied him on the piano with an almost insupportable anguish, attentive in following him, in anticipating him, always fearing to break the measure, strike a false note, make a discord, or miss a note.

In his improvisations, Demetrius Aurispa was almost always inspired with poetry. George remembered the marvellous improvisation that, on a certain October day, the violinist had composed on a lyric poem by Alfred Tennyson, in _The Princess_. George himself had translated the verse so that Demetrius could understand it, and he had proposed it to him as a theme. Where was that page?

The curiosity of a sad sensation prompted George to search for it in an album placed among the pieces of music. He was sure he could find it; he remembered it very clearly. And, in fact, he found it.

It was a single sheet, written in violet ink. The characters had paled and the sheet had become rumpled, yellowish, without consistency, soft as a spider's web. It bore the sadness of pages traced a long time ago by a dear hand, gone henceforth forever.

George, who scarcely recognized the characters, said to himself: "It is I who wrote this page! This writing is mine!" It was a rather timid hand, unequal, almost feminine, recalling a schoolboy's writing, preserving the ambiguity of the recent adolescence, the hesitating delicacy of a soul that dares not yet know all. "What a change in that, too!" And he read again the poet's verse:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld. Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge; So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds To dying ears, when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

Demetrius improvised standing, beside the piano, a trifle paler, a trifle more bent; but from time to time he drew himself erect beneath the breath of inspiration, as a bent reed straightens beneath the breath of the wind. He kept his eyes fixed in the direction of the window, where, as if in a frame, appeared an autumn landscape, reddish and misty. According to the vicissitudes of the heavens without, a changeable light flooded at intervals his person, flashed in the humidity of his eyes, gilded his extraordinarily pure brow. And the violin said: "Sad as the last which reddens over one that sinks with all we love below the verge; so sad, so fresh, the days that are no more." And the violin repeated, with sobs: "O Death in Life, the days that are no more."

At the reminiscence, at the vision conjured up, a supreme anguish assailed the survivor. When the images had passed, the silence seemed to him still heavier. The delicate instrument through which Demetrius's soul had sung its loftiest songs had again sunk to sleep, with its four strings still intact, in the velvet-lined case.

George lowered the lid, as on a corpse. Around him the silence was lugubrious. But he still retained, at the bottom of his heart, like a refrain indefinitely prolonged, this sigh: "O Death in Life, the days that are no more."

He remained a few moments before the door which shut off the tragic chamber. He felt that henceforth he was no longer master of himself. His nerves dominated him, imposed on him the disorder and excess of their sensations. He felt about his head a band that contracted and enlarged according to the palpitations of his arteries, as if it were an elastic and cold substance. The same cold chill ran down his spinal column.

With sudden energy, in a sort of rage, he turned the knob and entered. Without looking about him, walking in the ray of light which, projected through the open door, was shed across the floor, he went straight towards one of the balconies, opened the two shutters. He also opened the shutters of the other balcony. After this rapid action, accomplished under the impulse of a sort of horror, turned, agitated, gasping. He felt his flesh creep.

What he saw before anything else was the bed stationed in front of him, with its green counterpane, all of walnut, but simple in form, without carving, without ornaments without curtains. For several moments he saw nothing but the bed, like on that terrible day when, crossing the threshold of the room, he had stopped petrified at the sight of the corpse.

Evoked by the survivor's imagination, the corpse, with its head enveloped in a black veil and its arms stretched alongside the body, retook its place on the mortuary couch. The strong light which entered from the wide-open balconies did not succeed in dissipating the phantom. It was a vision, not continuous but intermittent, seen now and then, as if by a rapid closure of the eyelids, although the witness's eyelids remained immovable.

In the silence of the room, and in the silence of his soul, George heard, very distinctly, the scratching of the wood-tick. And this trifling fact sufficed to dissipate momentarily in him the extreme violence of the nervous tension, as the prick of a needle suffices to empty a swollen blister.

Every particular of the terrible day came back to his memory: the unexpected news brought to Torricelle di Sarsa, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, by a breathless messenger who stammered and wept; the exhausting journey on horseback, in the heat of the dog-days, across the scorched hills, and, during the journey, the sudden fainting spells which made him reel in his saddle; then the house filled with sobs, filled with noises of doors banged by the gale, filled with the buzzing he had in the arteries; and, finally, the impetuous entry into the room, the sight of the corpse, the curtains swelling and swishing, the tinkling of the holy-water basin suspended on the wall.

The deed had been done on the morning of the fourth of August, without any suspicious preparations. The suicide had left no letter, not even for his nephew. The will by which he constituted George his sole legatee was already of old date. Demetrius had taken evident precautions to conceal the causes of his resolution, and even to avoid every pretext for hypotheses; he had taken care to destroy even the least traces of the acts which had preceded the supreme act. In the apartment, everything was found in order, in an order almost excessive; not a paper remained on the desk, not a book was missing from the shelves of the bookcase. On the little table, near the bed, was the pistol-case, open; nothing more.

For the thousandth time, a question arose in the mind of the survivor: "Why did he kill himself? Had he a secret which gnawed at his heart? Or else, was it the cruel sagacity of his intelligence which rendered life insupportable? He bore his destiny within himself, as I bear mine in myself."

He looked at the little silver emblem still suspended on the wall at the head of the bed, a symbol of religion, a maternal pious souvenir. It was a fine piece of workmanship by an old master goldsmith of Guardiagrele, Andrea Gallucci--a sort of hereditary jewel. "He loved religious emblems, sacred music, the odor of incense, crucifixes, the hymns of the Latin Church. He was a mystic, an ascetic, the most passionate contemplator of the inner life; but he did not believe in God."

He looked at the pistol-case; and a thought, latent in the deepest recesses of his brain, was revealed to him as by a lightning flash. "I, too, will kill myself with one of these pistols--_with the same, on the same bed_." After a short appeasement, his exaltation took hold of him again; again he felt his flesh creep. Once more he felt the actual and profound sensation of the shudder already experienced on the tragic day, when he had wished to raise, with his own hands, the black veil spread over the dead man's face, and when, through the linen wrappings, he believed he could see the ravages of the wound, the horrible ravage made by the explosion of the firearm, by the impact of the ball against the bone of the skull, against that brow so delicate and so pure. In reality, he had seen only a portion of the nose, the mouth, and the chin. The rest was hidden by the bandages several times folded, perhaps because the eyes had started from their sockets. But the mouth, intact, permitted a view of the beard, silky and thin--the mouth, pale and withered, which, living, opened so softly for the unexpected smile--the mouth had received from the seal of death an expression of superhuman calmness, rendered more extraordinary by the bloody havoc hidden by the bandages.

This image, fixed in an ineffaceable imprint, was graven in the soul of the inheritor, in the centre of his soul; and after five years it still preserved the same evidence, preserved by a fatal power.

In thinking that he also would stretch himself on the same bed, and that he would kill himself with the same weapon, George did not feel that tumultuous and vibrant emotion which sudden resolutions impart; it was rather an indefinable feeling, as if it concerned a project formed a long time ago, and approved in a rather indefinite fashion, and that the time had come to decide about it and to accomplish it. He opened the case, examined the pistols.

They were fine weapons, rifled duelling pistols, of old English make, with a stock perfectly fitted to the hand. They reposed on a light-green velvet, a little frayed at the edges of the compartments which contained everything necessary for loading them. As the barrels were of large calibre, the balls were large; those which, when they touch their object, always produce a decisive effect.

George took one and weighed it in the palm of his hand. "In less than five minutes I could be dead. Demetrius has left on this bed the hollow where I shall lie." And by an imaginary transposition it was himself whom he saw stretched on the couch. But that wood-tick! That wood-tick! He had a perception of being gnawed by the insects, as distinctly and as frightfully as if the animals were in his brain. This implacable gnawing came from the bed, and he perceived it. Then he understood the sadness of the man who, before dying, hears beneath him the gnawing of the wood-tick. When he pictured himself in the act of pressing the trigger, he felt an agonized and repulsive contraction of all his nerves. When he came to the conclusion that nothing forced him to kill himself, and that he could wait, he felt at the deepest recesses of his substance the spontaneous expansion of intense relief. A thousand invisible ties still bound him to life. "Hippolyte!"

He went towards the balcony, towards the light, with a sort of impetuosity. A background of an immense landscape, bluish and mysterious, melted in the languor of the day. The sun was slowly setting on the mountain, which it flooded with gold, like the couch of a mistress who awaited. The Majella, enormous and white, all bathed in this liquid gold, reared its huge mass in the sky.

*III.*

*THE HERMITAGE.*

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