For several days they see each other thus, each morning. Giuseppe shares his time between his sorellina and the sphinx-like English girl.
Antoine skimmed the pages rapidly. Then one day when Giuseppe has come to take Sybil for a boating expedition in the Bay, a scene, seemingly decisive, takes place between them. Overcoming his distaste for the insufferable lushness of the writing, Antoine read almost every word of it.
Sybil under the pergola, on the edge of the sunlight. Lost in dreams. Her hand resting on a white pillar, in the light. Waiting for him? “I expected you yesterday.” “I stayed with Annetta.” “Why don’t you bring her here?” Her tone displeased Giuseppe.
A few lines further on.
Giuseppe stops rowing. Round them the air grows still. Winged silence. The bay is all quicksilver. Sheen. Water-music. Ripples lapping against the boat. “What are you thinking about?” “And you?” Silence. A change in their voices. “I’m thinking of you, Sybil.” “And I am thinking of you, Giuseppe.” He is trembling. “For all our lives, Sybil?” Yes, her head droops. He sees her lips part with a painful effort, her hand dasp the gunwale. A silent pledge, almost a regret. The sea ablaze in the. flaming noon. Dazzling effulgence. Heat. Immobility. Time and life halted, in suspense. Unbearable oppression. Then a sudden flight of gulls brings life back to the listless air. They soar and dive and skim the sea, dip their beaks, and soar again. Gleams of sun-bright wings, clash of swords. “We are thinking about the same things, Sybil.”
Actually Jacques had seen a great deal of the Fontanins that summer. Antoine began to wonder if the explanation of his flight might not be the failure of his love-affair with Jenny.
Some pages further on, the action began, it seemed, to move more quickly.
Among descriptions of everyday events that recalled to Antoine the life Jacques and Gise had led at Maisons, he followed the disturbing trend of the affection between Giuseppe and Annetta. Did the young people realize the nature of their intimacy? As for Annetta, all she knew was that the whole set of her being drew her towards Giuseppe; but so simple was her faith, so entire her innocence, that she lent her feelings the colour of a harmless, sisterly devotion. For Giuseppe, the love he confessedly had for Sybil seemed at first to absorb his thoughts, blinding him to the nature of the physical attraction Annetta exercised on him. The question was, how long would he be able to keep up this self-deception?
Late one afternoon Giuseppe made a suggestion to the sorellina.
“What do you say to a stroll, now it’s getting cooler, then dinner at a country inn, and a good long tramp afterwards, till it’s dark?” She claps her hands. “Oh, Beppino, I do love you so when you’re cheerful!”
Had Giuseppe laid his plans in advance? After a makeshift meal in a fishing village, he led the girl along paths she did not know.
He is walking quickly. Along the stony paths between the lemon-groves which he had trod a hundred times with Sybil. Annetta grows anxious. “Sure you know the road?” He turns left. The path slopes down. An old well, a low, curved gateway. Giuseppe stops. “Now come and see,” he laughs. She moves forward, unsuspecting. He pushes the door open, a bell tinkles. “What on earth are you doing?” Laughing, he draws her into the black garden. Under the firs. She is frightened, puzzled.
She steps into Villa Lunadoro.
That low, curved gateway, the tinkling bell, the fir-grove; Antoine recognized each detail, unmistakably.
Mrs. Powell and Sybil are in the pergola. “May I introduce my sister Annetta?” They give her a seat, question her, make much of her. Annetta fancies she is dreaming. The white-haired lady’s welcome, her smile. “Come with me, my dear; I want to give you some of our roses.” Vaulted shadows of the rose-garden, drenching the air with heady fragrance.
Sybil and Giuseppe are alone now. Should he take her hand? She would only shrink away. That steely reserve of hers is stronger than her will, than her love. He thinks: How hard it is for her to let herself be loved!
Mrs. Powell has picked the roses for Annetta. Small, close-set crimson roses, without spines; crimson petals with black hearts. “You must come again, dear; Sybil has so few friends, you know.” Annetta fancies she is dreaming. Are these people the “gang of heretics”? Is it possible she once feared them like the plague?
Antoine skipped a page and came to the description of Annetta and Giuseppe’s walk home.
The moon is veiled. The darkness deeper. Annetta feels light, buoyed on wings. She lets the full weight of her young body hang on Giuseppe’s arm; Giuseppe guides her through the darkness, his head high, heart far away, lost in a dream. Shall he tell her his secret? Why not? He bends over her. “It’s not only for Will’s sake, you know, that I go to see them.”
His face is hidden in shadows, but she hears the low intensity of his tone. “Not only for Will’s sake!” Wildfire racing through her veins. She had never dreamt „ . . Sybil, then? Sybil and Giuseppe …? Choking, she breaks loose, tries to escape, stricken, barbed death in her flanks. No strength. A few steps more. Her teeth are chattering. She goes limp, stumbles, drops back onto the grass under the tall lime-trees.
Uncomprehending, he kneels beside her. What is wrong? But then her arms shoot up like tentacles. And now—-he understands. She winds her arms around him, clings desperately, sobs. “Giuseppe! Oh, Giuseppe!”
The love-cry. He has never heard it. Never before. Sybil, cloistered in her secrecy. Her alien blood. And pressed to him now a young, sensuous body, aching with regret, yielding, yearning. Thoughts dance through his brain, memories of childhood, the love they bore each other, the trust and tenderness; how can he not love her? She is of his own kind; he must comfort her, make her well. Flowing round him, clinging, the soft warmth of a living body, fluent limbs. Then a sudden wave sweeping all before it, drowning consciousness. In his nostrils a new, yet familiar fragrance of loosened hair; under his lips a tear-drenched face, throbbing mouth. All love’s accomplices: darkness, perfumes, ungovernable ecstasy, a fever of the blood. On the moist lips he presses his mouth’s kiss; on the half-parted lips, awaiting they know not what, a lover’s kiss. She gives herself to his caress, does not return it yet, but only yields, surrenders, offers her mouth again and again. Floods of longing surge up from their hearts, meet and clash as the wet lips cling together. Bitter yearning … sweetness. Mingled breaths, limbs, desires. Overhead the green darkness eddies, the stars go out. Clothes scattered, disarrayed, all resistance gone, all barriers falling, close, closer, flesh to flesh surrendering, a thrill of sweet pain, consummate, ah, consummate joy… .
Ah! A single sigh, and time stands still.
The silence throbs with echoes, blurred sounds. Elemental fear. Arrested movement. The man’s face, panting, pillowed on the young breast; thud of racing heart-beats, two separate rhythms, unconsonant, irreconcilable.
Then suddenly a questing moonray, a prying, callous eye, flicks them like a whiplash, tears them apart.
Abruptly they stand up. Bewildered, lost. Tormented lips. Shuddering, but not with shame; with joy, with joy and wonder. With joy and new desire. In a litde grassy hollow the bunch of crimson roses sheds its petals under the moon. Annetta makes a romantic gesture, picks up the roses, shakes them. A cloud of petals flutters down over the crushed grass, which bears the imprint of a single body.
Antoine was profoundly shocked, quivering with disgust. Unthinkable that Gise should have acted thus!
And yet—! Everything rang so precisely true—not only such details as the old wall, the rose-garden, the gate-bell. At the moment when they sank onto the grass, locked in an embrace, the mask of fiction fell. That was no stony path in Italy, nor were the shadows those of lemon-trees. No, that was unmistakably the rank grass of Maisons, which Antoine was recalling now only too clearly; and the trees were the centenarian lime-trees of the green avenue. Yes, Jacques must have taken Gisèle to the Fontanins’, and on such a summer night, on the way back … Simpleton—to have lived beside them, so close to Gisèle, and to have gu
essed nothing or: it all! … And yet—no, Antoine did not believe; in his inmost heart he could not bring himself to admit that that chaste, elusive little Gise could shelter such a secret.
Still, there were so many pointers, the crimson roses for instance. Now he understood Gisèle’s emotion when she received that anoaymous box from a London florist and why, on the strength of what seemed so slender a clue, she had pressed him to have inquiries made immediately in England. Obviously she alone had read the message of those crimson roses sent a year, to the very day perhaps, after the love-scene under the lime-trees.
So Jacques must have stayed in London. Perhaps in Italy, too. And Switzerland. Could he be still in England? He might very easily contribute to a Genevan review, while living there.
Then, of a sudden, other facts that had baffled him grew clear, as if screening shadows were withdrawing from a nucleus of light. Gisèle’s departure, her insistence on being sent to that English convent. Obviously it had been in order to trace Jacques. And now Antoine reproached himself for not having followed up, after his first failure, the clue provided by the London florist.
He tried to set his data in order, but in vain; too many theories— too many memories, as well—kept cropping up. He was coming to see the whole past in a new light. How easy now it was to understand Gise’s despair when Jacques disappeared! He had never suspected all the implications of her grief, though he had done his best to allay it. He remembered how sorry he had been for her then; indeed it was out of his sympathy that another feeling for her had been born.
In those days he had found it impossible to talk about Jacques to his father, who obstinately clung to his theory of the boy’s suicide; or to Mademoiselle, immersed day in, day out, in her prayers and religious exercises. But Gise had been different; her fervour for the quest had brought her very near him. Daily after dinner she had come down to hear the latest news. He had enjoyed imparting to her his hopes, and the steps he was taking. And it was in the course of those long, intimate talks that he had began to feel drawn towards the high-strung little girl, whose secret love was the keynote of her existence. Unknowingly, perhaps, he had yielded to the heady lure of the young body already bespoken to another. He recalled her sudden outbursts of affection, the little coaxing ways that reminded him of a suffering child’s. Annetta! Yes, she had tricked him well! Of course, in his utter sentimental isolation after Rachel’s eclipse, he had been only too ready to imagine—things. He shrugged his shoulders angrily. Damned fool! He had been taken with Gise, only because his emotions had been at a loose end. And he had fancied Gise was drawn to him, merely because, in the throes of her frustrated passion, she had clung to him as the one person capable of finding her lost lover.
Distasteful ideas! Antoine tried to brush them aside. He reminded himself that he had found nothing so far to explain Jacques’s hasty flight from home.
With an effort he turned back to “La Sorellina.”
Leaving the roses scattered on the grass, the young people walked back to the Palazzo.
Homewards. Giuseppe helps Annetta on her way. What lies before them? That brief ecstasy can have been but a prelude. The long night towards which they are walking, their night together in the big, lonely house— what will it bring?
Antoine could hardly bear to read further. Again he felt the blood rising to his cheeks.
Yet of moral disapproval there was little in his mood. When confronted with a passion running its course, he gave short shrift to moral codes. But he was unable to repress a feeling of outraged surprise, touched with rancour; he could not forget the day when Gise had so indignantly repulsed his timid advances. Almost “La Sorellina” rekindled his desire for her—a purely physical, unequivocal craving. So much so that, to fix his attention on what he was reading, he had deliberately to banish from his mind the haunting picture of a young, lithe, nut-brown body.
… that night together in the big, lonely house—what will it bring?
Love bows them to its yoke. Silent, possessed, in an enchanted dream, they walk, escorted by the intermittent moon. Moonlight is playing on the Palazzo, picking out of the shadow the stuccoed pillars. They cross the first terrace. As they walk, cheek brushes cheek. Annetta’s cheeks are burning. Already, in that childish body, what natural hardihood for sin!
Abruptly they draw apart. A shadow has loomed up between the pillars.
The father is there. Awaiting them. He has returned unexpectedly. “Where can the children be?” He has dined alone in the great hall; ever since then paced to and fro on the marble terrace. “Where can the children be?”
His voice jars the silence.
“Where have you been?”
No time to think out a lie. A brief flash of revolt. Giuseppe cries:
“With the Powells.”
Antoine gave a start. Then had his father known …?
“With the Powells.”
Annetta slips away between the pillars, crosses the vestibule, runs up the stairs to her bedroom, locks herself in, and flings herself, in the dark, upon her narrow, virginal bed.
Downstairs, for the first time, the son confronts his father. And—strangest thing of all—for the sheer joy of bravado he affirms that other, wraithlike love in which he believes no more. “I took Annetta to see Mrs. Powell.” He pauses, then adds in a clear, emphatic tone: “I am engaged to Sybil.”
The father bursts out laughing. A terrifying laugh. Extended by the shadow that prolongs it, the massive form looks more imposing still, of more than human stature, a Titan haloed with moonlight. Laughing. Giuseppe wrings his hands. The laugh ends. Silence. “You shall come back with me to Naples, both of you, tomorrow.” “No!” “Giuseppe!” “I do not belong to you. I am engaged to Sybil Powell.”
Never yet has the father met a resistance that he has not crushed. He feigns calmness. “Be silent, boy! They come here to eat our bread, to buy our land. To take our sons as well—that’s too much. Did you imagine a heretic could ever bear our name?” “My name.” “Fool! Never. A Huguenot intrigue … The salvation of a soul … Honour of the Seregnos. But they reckoned without me. I can defend my own.” “Father!” “I’ll break your will. I’ll cut you off. I’ll have you enlisted in the Piedmont regiment.” “Father!” “Yes, I’ll break you. Go to your room. You shall leave this place tomorrow.”
Giuseppe clenches his fists. He wants his father to …
Antoine drew a deep breath.
… to die.
Somehow he brings himself to laugh: the last affront. “You’re comic!”
He walks past his father. His head high, mouth twisted in a mocking laugh, he goes down the steps.
“Where are you going?”
The boy stops. What poisoned barb shall he launch before he disappears for ever? Instinct gives him the words that will tell most. “I am going to kill myself.”
With a quick movement he is down the steps. The father has raised his arm. “Go away, you shameless son.” For the last time the father’s voice is heard, shouting in imprecation. “My curse on you!”
Giuseppe runs across the terrace, out into the night.
Antoine had half a mind to pause again, and ponder; but only a few pages remained and impatience got the better of him.
Giuseppe runs blindly forward. Then stops, breathless, perplexed, all at sea. In the distance a thin, plaintive melody rising, falling; mandolins on some hotel veranda. Melting languor. How blissful death, veins opened, in the soft warmth of a bath!
Sybil does not like the music of Neapolitan mandolins. Sybil, a foreigner. Remote, unreal as the heroine one has loved madly—in a book.
Annetta. The memory of a bare arm nestling in his hand, enough! A buzzing in the ears. Dry lips.
Giuseppe has planned it all. Fie will come back at daybreak, carry off Annetta, flee with her. He will steal into ber room; she will jump out of bed, bare-limbed, welcoming. Ah, sweetness of her embrace, smooth, yielding sinews, the warm fragrance of her body! Almost he feels her now, straining
to him, with lightly parted lips, moist lips, Annetta!
Giuseppe plunges into a side-path. His heart beats wildly. At a bound he crosses a ridge of rock. Bracing airs, the countryside under the moon.
At the edge of a thicket he lies on his back, arms outspread. Passes his fingers through his open shirt-neck, strokes his heaving breast. Overhead, a milk-white sky, star-spangled. Peace, purity.
And Sybil?
Giuseppe jumps up. Strides hotfoot down the hillside. Sybil. For the last time; before daybreak.
Lunadoro. The wall, the curving gateway. On that newly whitewashed wall, the exact place of his shadow-kiss. His first avowal, here. On such a night, moon-enchanted. Sybil had come to see him off. Her shadow clean-cut on the white wall. He had taken courage, bent and kissed the shadow of her face. She had run away. On such a night as this.
Why have I come back to the little gate, Annetta? Sybil’s pale face, wilful, unyielding. Remote? No, near, and real, yet still all unknown. Can he give Sybil up? No, rather unlock that fast-shut heart, with love the key. Release her stifled soul. What is the secret sealing it? Ah, dream of purity, unsoiled by instinct, real love! His love of Sybil, real love.
Why those meek eyes and too submissive lips, Annetta! No flame leaps in your all-too-docile flesh. Short-lived desire. Love without mystery, depth, horizons. With no tomorrow.
The Thibaults Page 72