A strong, fresh wind was coming from the deep, raising the waters of the Adriatic in long waves of incomparable light green, to hurl them, as they curved, rolled, and almost curled in greenish white with a crown of the whitest foam, and fragrant with the sharp smell of the sea, on the long, straight shore of the Lido. The waves broke one after the other, almost on top of each other, on the soft, yellow sand of the beach, which became dark with ever-increasing dark weals, and stained by the swelling water as the waves gained ground. Here and there the little mounds of seaweed and marine refuse on the sand were invaded, covered, and demolished, as they became higher and lower with the suction of the waves: here and there holes and little ditches full of water were being formed. The strong, fresh wind whirled round the fashionable huts that stretched numerously in a line far along the straight beach, and whirled around the vast bathing establishment of the Lido, causing the doors of the little cabins to rattle, and the linen to flutter, which here and there had been exposed to dry: it whirled round the immense covered terrace of the café, causing the awnings to flap which were still lowered against the sun. Although it was one of the last days of September and the afternoon was advancing, the sea was thronged here and there with heads of bathers, whilst the beach was full of people coming and going to and from the sea, from the cabins and the little wooden staircases and gangways. Down below on the shore, by the huts, were children of various ages, watched over by nurses and governesses, who were entering and leaving the water, flying with little cries of joy from the tallest waves, rolling on the sand, and jumping up again in a laughing, delightful group. Rather nearer, black dots, with brightly coloured coifs, large straw hats, sailing and swimming on the pale green waves, indicated men and women who were enjoying one of the last days of summer, who were enjoying the sea with its clear waters and disturbed waves, with perfumes so exhilarating, and wind so fresh, and the great beach and soft shore. From the horizon, on the incomparable green of the Adriatic, two vessels approached in fraternal movement, following, catching up, and passing each other, but pursuing the same course. One had three sails, all yellow, of a yellow-ochre, with certain strange signs of darker yellow on their background; the other had sails of red-bronze, with designs of deep red. When they were nearer, one could see that on the yellow sails were designed a cross, nails, a crown of thorns, to wit, a reminder of the Passion of Jesus Christ; on the other was a little Madonna of the Carmine—the Ave Maria Stella.
Towards four o'clock the terrace of the café, bathed by the sun, was empty, with its hundred little tables round which the flies buzzed; some of the awnings were lowered, others were half raised. Slowly the scene changed. The wind became stronger and fresher from the depths; the children decided to enter the huts to dress, as they continued their happy cries; one by one the other bathers re-entered their cabins. The sea became deserted, only on the shore the number of persons who were promenading slowly increased, as they tried to walk on the deep sand where the feet sank. Now and then they halted to watch the sea, whose waves became higher and whiter with their rounded crests, as if the better to breathe the grand fresh air, full of saline aroma. Now other great vessels appeared, more or less in the offing, with yellow, coppery, and maroon sails, rendered darker by sun and brine.
The scene changed on the terrace as the sun declined. All the awnings were raised, some frequenters appeared to sit by the balustrade that gives on to the beach, to take a place at the little tables along this balustrade, whence all the vastness and beauty of that admirable Lido seascape is to be viewed. The little steamers that perform the small crossing—less than a crossing, a ferry—between Venice and the island of the Lido half an hour ago had arrived almost empty, but now they were sending people continually towards the shore, people who left the motionless waters of the shining, grey lagoon, crossed the island still green with little trees, still flourishing with growing flowers and plants, and came to gaze at the free, resonant Adriatic, with its wonderful green and white waves, with a sigh of relief and a smile of greeting for the magnificent Italian sea.
Two or three tables were at first occupied; other people arrived. Then the waiters began to glide from table to table, a little bored, carrying large trays with the necessaries for tea, pink and yellow sorbettes, drinks piled with little pieces of ice, wherein was fixed a straw. It was not a large crowd, like that of strangers of all nations in April, when they are mysteriously attired in voluptuous flattery of the Venetian spring, not the great, indigenous, Italian crowd of the month of August, that chatters and laughs at the top of its voice, the ladies dressed in white, fanning themselves, as they drink large glasses of iced beer, far too much in the German manner! It was the crowd of the end of September, a little curious and strange, mingled with foreigners who had come from Switzerland and the Italian lakes, mingled with the Italians who had come from the Alps to the plains at the end of the summer season. The crowd round the tables was small and not chatty or noisy. To the charming, languid, sweet Venetian dialect issuing from the beautiful lips of women, here and there was united a French word, but above all was mingled the rough German talk—in the majority everywhere, as usual. The wind was now very fresh, and dull the breaking of the waves down below on the soft sand: a few promenaders went on the shore, watching the warm tints of the sunset on the horizon, while large vessels filed past with yellow-ochre sails, from which the Virgin Mary gave her blessing.
For some time Vittorio Lante remained alone at a small table in a far corner of the terrace: before him was a tall glass full of a greenish drink, exhaling a smell of peppermint, but he forgot to sip it. The keen expression of life, which had distinguished him in the Engadine, had vanished from the young man's graceful but virile face. He seemed calm, but without thoughts, and all his features appeared grosser in that thoughtless calm. His eyes glanced without vivacity, as they fixed themselves indifferently on the people and things around him; he was not sad or happy, but indifferent. He smoked a cigarette and lit another, which remained between his fingers without his bringing it to his mouth, while a thread of smoke issued from it. Suddenly someone stopped at his table, bent over him, and called him, as he greeted him in a low voice. He raised his eyes and was amazed to see Lucio Sabini standing before him.
"Dear Vittorio, you here!"
"Dear Sabini, welcome!"
They shook hands and looked at each other for a long moment, as if each wished to read in the other's face the story of the two years in which they had not seen each other. Certainly Lucio Sabini was the more deeply changed. His black hair, where up to thirty-five not a single silver thread had appeared, now was quite streaked with white round the temples; his face from being thin had become fleshless; his black eyes that had been so proud seemed extinguished; the shoulders of the tall, slender figure were a little bent, and all his physiognomy had an expression of weariness, of failing strength, of vanished energy.
"Are you alone, Vittorio?"
"I am here alone, Sabini."
"Disengaged?"
"Yes."
"Then I will sit a little with you."
He sat down opposite him, and became silent, as he watched the sea.
"Won't you take something, dear friend?" asked Vittorio, with careful courtesy.
"If I must, I will take some sort of coloured water," murmured Lucio Sabini, and his long, brown, very thin hand brushed his black moustache in a familiar gesture. Again they looked at each other intensely. Lucio seemed to make an effort to begin an ordinary conversation.
"Have you been long in Venice, Vittorio?"
"No, just a week. We have come from Vallombrosa, where we stayed till September was advanced."
"Is Vallombrosa amusing?"
"No; boring."
"Your wife, Donna Livia, likes it?"
"Exactly. She likes forests with their large trees. She lived there from morning till evening."
"Is Donna Livia here?"
"I left her for tea with some friends in Venice, and came here to pass an hour alone."
"Is she willing to leave you alone?"
"She lets me. She knows I like my freedom ... to do nothing with it. So she herself lets me go free, to please me."
They spoke in a low voice, bending a little over the table, looking distractedly, now at the beverages from which they had not sipped a drop, now a little to their right at the shore and the sea; but their glances seemed to be aware of nothing. Suddenly Lucio Sabini, fixing his worn-out eyes on those of Vittorio, questioned him more brightly, with his dull voice from which all timbre seemed extinguished.
"Are you happy, Vittorio?"
"I am not happy, but I am not unhappy," he replied, turning his head away, as if to hide the sudden expression of his face.
"Are you contented with that?"
"I have no choice of anything else," replied Vittorio, with a wan smile.
"And is Donna Livia happy?"
"She asks nothing else of life than to have me. She has me."
"Then all is well, Vittorio?"
"Yes, for Livia."
"And for you?"
"Oh, for me nothing can go well or ill, Sabini."
This he said with such an accent of indifference, of detachment, that it amounted more to sadness. After a slight hesitation Lucio resumed:
"Vittorio, you were ardently in love with that American girl."
"Ardently is the word," agreed Vittorio Lante, in a rather louder voice.
"How did you let her escape you?"
"I gave her up."
"Although you loved her?"
"Yes, although I adored her, I gave her up."
"But why?"
"So as not to be dishonoured, Lucio. Had I married her I should have been dishonoured."
"Because of her money."
"Exactly; because of her superfluity of money, her immense amount of money; because of my immense poverty."
A soft veil passed before Vittorio's eyes. The other looked at him, and said:
"It hurts you, then, to talk of this?"
"Yes, now and then it hurts me; but the pain is always less, and always at greater intervals, Sabini. I am almost cured."
"Did you suffer much?"
"Very much, as if I should die of it. However, I am not dead; it seems one doesn't die of that."
"Do you think so?" asked Lucio, waving a hand.
"I don't know," he murmured; "I had my mother, whom I ought not to make more unhappy; perhaps I was unworthy to conceive a lofty sorrow. Who knows? I haven't been given either a great soul or great will. It is not my fault if I am not dead, if I am almost healed."
This time a sense of irony against himself and his own mediocrity escaped from his indifference.
"Poor Vittorio!" said Lucio, pressing his hand across the table, "tell me everything. You can tell me everything, I can understand."
"Oh, mine isn't such an interesting story!" exclaimed Vittorio, with a pale smile of irony; "if you like, it is rather a stupid story. I was such a fool in the Engadine! I went there to find a girl, neither too beautiful nor too ugly, and not very rich, who could drag my mother and myself out of our difficulties; I went with a definite programme, a vulgar but definite programme, unromantic but definite, that of a dowry-hunter. Instead of looking for a mediocre girl, with a dowry of six or seven hundred thousand lire, like a child, like an idiot, I make straight for Mabel Clarke, who has fifty millions. I put forward my candidature as a flirt to good purpose, and conquered all rivals. Fool, thrice a fool that I was! Instead of keeping my presence of mind, and all my wits, I fall in love with her because she is beautiful, fresh, young, new, and of another race; because we were free, and left free, as is the American custom, as you know quite well, so that at last the girl of fifty millions falls in love with me."
"She did love you, then?"
"Yes, she loved me in her way," answered Vittorio, shortly.
"She suffered through you."
"She suffered less intensely, but longer, perhaps. Even in this she beat me, Lucio! What a common story, is it not? How could I have thought that the world and my destiny would have permitted me to marry Mabel Clarke with her fifty millions, to be the son-in-law of John Clarke, who, at his death, would have left other two hundred millions? I? I? And why? Who was I, more than another, of my country or another, of my set or another, who was I to reach to such power? I was neither a true pleasure-seeker, nor properly vicious, nor a cynic. Seriously, I was nothing but a—calculator. I was nothing serious, my friend. If I had been in earnest as a calculator I should not have fallen in love with Mabel Clarke. What a mistake, or rather, what a gaucherie!"
"You can't forget her, Vittorio," whispered Lucio, looking at him with tender eyes.
"You are wrong. I forget her more and more. Besides, have I not married Livia?"
"Why did you make that marriage?"
"Que faire?" he exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders. "I was so sad, so broken in bone and soul, as if I had fallen from a precipice, and had been dragged out half living. I was so bored. And poor little Livia was languishing in silence waiting for me. And did not my mother look at me with beseeching eyes every time I went to Terni? I married through sadness, fastidiousness, weakness, to make an end of everything, and, as you see, in spite of all my ardent love for Mabel Clarke I did not know how to be faithful to her for more than a year. The American girl had foreseen it—Mabel Clarke was stronger, wiser, more direct than I, and much better too. She humbled me in sending a rich gift to Livia on her wedding, and she invited us to America. Ah, how strange these women are!"
"She invited you to America? She writes to you?"
"Often, long letters. From the very first she wanted me to go to America to gain money with John Clarke, and she did not believe she would offend me by asking me."
They were both silent for a moment, absorbed and concentrated. Around them people began to leave the tables, as the shadows of dusk were falling from the sky on sea and beach and the flowered island; but they were unaware of it.
"Besides, dear Sabini," resumed Vittorio, with a degree of greater sarcasm, "I am less poor than I was formerly. Then I spent too much to find the heiress with the great fortune, to live grandly, and to travel. When I announced that I was marrying Livia, Uncle Costrucci, an old clerical, was moved, and let us have, for our natural lifetime, a beautiful suite of apartments in old Rome, in via Botheghe Oscure. Mamma has come to live with us, and her cousin, Farnese, made her a present of a carriage. Ours is a marriage which has been made by public subscription! We have our house and our carriage. Livia is so charming in her discreet toilettes, discreet in every fashion. I haven't to strive as I thought, I have not even been forced to work as I supposed. There is nothing of the heroic in me—a mediocre destiny, and a mediocre life!"
"Ah, Vittorio, you still suffer," said Lucio, in a deeply moved voice.
"In my amour-propre, I confess. Think, Lucio, how I have been treated—surrounded, knocked on the head like a lamb under calumnies, defamations and vituperations, in every land where international society gathers—and how I have been unable to cuff a single one of my adversaries. Think how rivers of ink have been poured out in the papers of two worlds to defame me, and how I have been unable to spit in the face of a single one of those journalists; think how I have been unable to defend myself or offer a fight, solely because I loved Mabel and Mabel loved me. And afterwards, Lucio, what an incurable offence to my amour-propre, this breaking off the marriage, which sanctions the calumnies, this breaking off ... and how everyone laughed at me afterwards, and if they do not laugh at Livia and me now it is because we are a quiet, modest ménage that lives in the shade—we are an insignificant couple now."
"Another man, Vittorio, would never have consented to breaking off the marriage."
"Another! I consented because I loved Mabel; I loved her like a child, like a Don Quixote, with such fire and devotion as to become a hero—and I so mediocre! Through love I renounced my every good, but of my own free will. Ah, if I had not loved her! If I had been a cold and interested man, even under the impulse of an amorous caprice; if I had kept my clearness of mind, even in flirting to extremes, how different everything would have been. If I had not loved her I could have fled with her ten times from the Engadine, and she would have been compromised and the marriage would have been inevitable. If I had not loved her I would not so ingenuously have allowed her to set out alone for America; if I had not loved her I would have provoked a duel at every defamation and reduced my defamers to silence. At the first injurious article of the American newspapers I would have gone over there to make them show cause in the law courts; if I had not loved her I should have been able to force her to keep her engagements, and I should have obtained her by force, her and her fortune; but I should have obtained her. I loved her, and I destroyed my happiness and my life."
With dreamy eyes, full of incurable sadness, he gazed at the Adriatic which was becoming intensely green, like an emerald, in the twilight. He added:
"Lucio, love has been my mistake; I committed suicide because of it. But what is more laughable and grotesque, I survive my suicide."
In spite of his cold delirium, as he turned to Lucio he perceived that he had become pale, as if he were about to die; he saw that Lucio's thin brown hand was pressing his cigarette-case convulsively. Vittorio composed himself, turned towards his friend, and touching his hand lightly, said:
"How I beg your pardon! I must have bored you so much with this tale of my woes."
Lucio Sabini bowed a denial with a vague and sad gesture of his hand, without replying; he bowed his denial with a vague smile that vanished immediately.
"Do not think that I tell everyone how it still torments me in the depths of my soul; no one knows anything of it; none must know. But you went up with me to the Engadine on a summer evening, do you remember? You were a witness of my joy up there."
"And also you, Vittorio, were my witness up there," murmured Lucio, grimly and gloomily.
Vittorio trembled and leant over the table to Lucio.
"Ah, that too is a sad story," he murmured.
"Sad do you call it, only sad?" exclaimed the other, with a great vibration of sorrow in his voice. Confused and disturbed, Vittorio in his turn stammered:
"I knew—I read."
"What did you know? What did you read?" asked Lucio Sabini in a strong, vibrant voice.
"In the papers ... a few lines ... I read of Miss Lilian Temple's accident," added Vittorio in a low voice.
"You mean to say Miss Lilian Temple's death, my friend," exclaimed Lucio, with a strange accent; "she is dead, my friend."
"I did not wish to pronounce the word death, my friend," Vittorio replied quietly.
Now they were alone on the terrace, on which the evening was descending. Everyone had left to take the little steamer back to Venice from the other side of the Lido. The terrace was quite deserted, and all the Lido shore, whose yellow sand remained bright beneath the evening shadows; and deserted the ample Adriatic, now of the deepest green in the evening gloom.
"She was twenty," said a weak, feeble voice, which Vittorio hardly recognised as Lucio's.
"It is very early to die."
"I ought to have died, I who am thirty-seven, and have lived double that time, I who am tired, old, and finished with everything. It was just that I should die, not she, who was twenty," said the weak voice.
"But how did the accident happen?" asked Vittorio.
"What accident?"
"The Alpine catastrophe in which the poor little girl perished."
Ah, what a horrible smile of torture contracted Lucio's livid lips!
"There was no accident, there was no Alpine catastrophe. Miss Lilian Temple killed herself."
"Killed herself?" cried Vittorio, stupefied.
"She killed herself."
"Are you sure of it?"
"As of my life and death. She killed herself."
"Ah, how cruel! how atrocious!" broke in Vittorio.
"And she was only twenty," replied the feeble voice again, like a lament.
A heavy, lugubrious silence fell upon the twain, in that solitary corner of the great deserted terrace before the Adriatic.
"Would you like to read her last words, Vittorio?" asked Lucio.
The other started and nodded. Lucio drew out from an inner pocket his pocket-book, took from it a long white envelope, and drew delicately from it a picture post card. The two friends bent forward together over that piece of paper to distinguish its design and read the words thereon. On one side the post card had the address written in slender, tall calligraphy and firm handwriting, "à Don Lucio Sabini, Lung' Arno Serristori, Firenze." The postage-stamp was of the 24th of April of the previous year, and came from the Hospice of the Bernina. On the other side was a great panorama of glaciers, of lofty, terrible peaks, and printed beneath the German words, "Gruss vom Diavolezza." The same slender, upright characters had written, in a c............