CHAPTER I

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The table, laid in the loggia, presented a gay appearance, with its transparent porcelain, its bluish glassware, its crimson pinks, under the golden light of a fixed, large lamp, which attracted the nocturnal moths scattered in the twilight.

"Look, George, look! A devil moth! It has the eyes of a demon. Do you see them shine?"

Hippolyte pointed to a moth larger than the others, strange in appearance, covered with a thick red flush, with projecting eyes which, under the light, glittered like two carbuncles.

"It's coming on you! It's coming on you! Take care!"

She laughed heartily, making fun of the instinctive alarm that George exhibited, in spite of himself, when one of these insects threatened to alight on him. "I must have it!" she cried, with the rapture of a childish caprice.

And she tried to capture the diabolical moth, which, without settling, flew around the lamp. Her attempts, abrupt and violent, were unsuccessful. She upset a glass, knocked over a pyramid of fruit, almost smashed the lamp-shade.

"What fury!" said George, who wanted to excite her. "But you won't succeed."

"I shall succeed," replied Hippolyte obstinately, and looking fixedly at him. "Will you make a bet?"

"What shall we bet?"

"Anything you like."

"Well, then, a love game."

"Very well, a love game."

In the warm light her face was colored with its softest and richest tints, that ideal coloring, "a compound of pale amber and dull gold in which were mingled, perhaps, a few tints of faded roses," in which formerly George had thought he had found all the mystery and all the beauty of the antique Venetian soul emigrated to the kingdom of Cyprus. She wore in her hair a pink, ardent as desire. And her eyes, shaded by the lashes, shone like lakes between the willows in the twilight.

At that instant she appeared the woman of delights, the strong and delicate instrument of pleasure, the voluptuous and magnificent animal destined to ornament a banquet, to enliven a bed, to provoke equivocal phantasies of an aesthetic sensuality. She appeared in the supreme splendor of her animalism--joyous, active, supple, lascivious, cruel.

George observed her with attentive curiosity, and he thought: "What different appearances she assumes in my eyes! Her form is sketched by my desire; her shadows are produced by my thought. Such as she appears to me each instant, she is only the effect of my continual inner creation. She exists only in me. Her appearances change like the dreams of an invalid. _Gravis dum suavis_! When was that?" He retained but a very confused recollection of the time when he had kissed her brow and decorated her with this title of ideal nobility. Now, this glorification of the loved one had become almost inconceivable to him. He remembered vaguely certain words that she had uttered and that seemed to reveal a depth of soul. "What spoke in her then? Was it not my own soul? It was one of my ambitions to offer to my sad soul those sinuous lips, so she might exhale her sorrow from an instrument of signal beauty."

He looked at those lips. They were slightly contracted, not ungracefully, participating in the intense attention with which Hippolyte waited for an opportunity to seize the night-moth.

She watched for it with sly prudence; she wanted, with one killing blow, to shut up in the palm of her hand the winged prey that was whirling restlessly around the light. She contracted her eyebrows and seemed to be prepared for a spring, ready to jump. She leaped forward two or three times, but without success. The moth was unseizable.

"Confess that you've lost," said George. "I won't abuse my privilege."

"No."

"Confess that you've lost."

"No! Woe to him and to you, if I catch him."

And she resumed her hunt with trembling impatience.

"Oh, he's gone," cried George, who had lost the agile flame-worshipper from sight. "He's flown away!"

Hippolyte was really vexed; the wager had excited her.

She rose and cast a keen glance around the room, to discover the fugitive.

"Here it is!" she cried, triumphant. "There, on the wall! Do you see?"

And she made a sign that she regretted she had cried out.

"Don't stir," she went on in a low tone, turning towards her friend.

The moth had alighted on the luminous wall and stayed there motionless, similar to a little brown spot. With infinite precaution, Hippolyte approached, and her beautiful body, slender and flexible, cast a shadow on the white wall. Quickly her hand was raised, descended, closed.

"I have it! I have it!"

And she exulted with childish joy.

"What forfeit shall I impose? I'll put it down your neck. You are in my power, too."

And she pretended she was about to execute her threat, as on the day she ran after him on the hill.

George laughed, conquered by the spontaneity of that joy, which awoke in him all that still remained to him of his youth. He said:

"Come! now sit down and eat your fruit, quietly."

"Wait, wait!"

"What are you going to do?"

"Wait!"

She drew out the pin which held the pink in her hair, and put it between her lips. Then, gently, she opened her fist, took the moth by the wings, got ready to transfix it.

"How cruel you are!" said George. "How cruel you are!"

She smiled, attentive to her work, while the little victim beat its wings, already despoiled.

"How cruel you are!" repeated George, in a lower but graver voice, noticing on Hippolyte's physiognomy an ambiguous expression, mingled with complacency and repugnance, which seemed to signify that she found a special pleasure in artificially exciting and tormenting her own feelings.

He recalled that in several circumstances she had already shown a morbid taste for this kind of excitation. No pure sentiment of pity had entered her heart, either in presence of the tears and blood of the pilgrims at the Sanctuary or in the presence of the child in its death agony. And he saw her again quickening her step towards the group of curious passers-by leaning against the parapet of the Pincio to distinguish the traces left on the pavement by the suicide.

"Cruelty is latent at the bottom of her love," he thought. "There is something destructive in her, and this shows itself all the stronger as the ardor of her caresses becomes more intense."

And he saw once more the frightful and almost Gorgonian image of this woman, just as she had often appeared to his half-closed eyes in the spasm of voluptuousness or in the inertia of the supreme exhaustion.

"Look!" she said, showing him the moth squirming on the pin. "Look how its eyes shine!"

She presented it in different ways to the light, as when one wishes to cause the scintillation of a gem. She added:

"What a beautiful jewel!"

And, with an easy gesture, she stuck it in her hair. Then, fixing George with her gray eyes:

"You do nothing but think, think, think! What are you thinking of? At least, you used to talk--more perhaps than was necessary. Now you have grown taciturn, you have an air of mystery and conspiracy.... Are you angry with me? Speak, even if it will grieve me."

The tone of her voice, which had suddenly changed, expressed impatience and reproach. Once more she perceived that her lover had been only a meditative and solitary spectator, a vigilant and maybe hostile witness.

"Do speak! I prefer the cruel words of the old days to this mysterious silence. What's the matter? Doesn't it please you to be here? Are you unhappy? Are you tired of me? Are you disappointed in me?"

To be thus suddenly and unexpectedly taken to task exasperated George, but he repressed his anger--he even tried to smile.

"Why these strange questions?" he said calmly. "Does it worry you? I am always thinking of you and the things that concern you."

And quickly, with an amiable smile, fearing that she might suspect a shade of irony in his words, he added:

"You fecundate my brain. When I am in your presence my inner life is so full that the sound of my own voice displeases me."

She was pleased with this affected phrase, which seemed to elevate her to a spiritual function, to proclaim her the creator of a superior life. The expression of her face became serious, while, in her hair, the nocturnal moth squirmed continuously.

"Permit me to remain silent without being suspected," he continued, appreciating the change produced by his artifice in this feminine soul, which the idealities of love fascinated and exalted. "Permit me to remain silent. Do you ask me to speak when you see me dying under your kisses? Well, it is not your mouth alone which has the power to give me sensations surpassing all known limits. Every moment you give me an excess of sentiment and an excess of thought. You will never imagine what agitations are aroused in my mind by a single one of your gestures. When you stir, when you speak, I see a series of prodigies. At times you give me, as it were, a reminiscence of a life I have never lived. Immensities of darkness are suddenly illumined and live in my memory like unlooked-for conquests. What, then, are the bread, the viands, the fruit--all those material things that make an impression on my senses? What are the very operations of my organs, the external manifestations of my corporeal existence? When my mouth speaks, it seems almost as if the sound of my voice cannot reach the depths in which I live. It seems to me that, not to disturb my vision, I should rest motionless and mute, while you pass, perpetually transformed, across the worlds which you have revealed."

He spoke slowly, his eyes fixed on Hippolyte, fascinated by this extraordinarily luminous face crowned by hair dark and deep as the night and in which a living and dying thing caused a continual palpitation. This face, so near and yet which seemed to him intangible, and these scattered objects on the table, and these high, purple flowers, and this whirl of light-winged forms around the source of the light, and the pure serenity which descended from the stars, and the musical breath which rose from the sea, and all the images reflected by his feelings--all seemed to him as in a dream. His very person, his very voice, seemed fictitious to him. Her thoughts and words were associated in an easy and vague manner. As on the moonlit night in front of the marvellous vine, the substance of his life and of the universal life was dissolved in the mists of the dream.

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