embroidery! Did you do it yourself? Listen——"
But Regina could listen no longer. Rage possessed her, while the old lady rummaged in the portmanteau, examining everything with the greatest curiosity. Antonio was waltzing round the arm-chair; he suddenly seized Regina, and whirled her away with him.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, with a cry of suffering protest, "it's time now to leave me in peace!"
The hint was lost upon the old lady. She put everything straight in the portmanteau, then came to Regina and embraced her lengthily.
At last she did take herself off, and at last Regina was really alone with her husband, but it was too late for her to feel great comfort in the fact. She undressed and got into bed; into the huge, solid bed, hard, and wide and cold as the bed of a river! She felt shipwrecked; around her floated gaping trunks, boxes, curtains, unpleasing furniture; above beetled the grey ceiling, overwhelming as a rainy sky. Confused noises, vibrations in the silence of night, penetrated from the distance, from some unknown and mysterious place. Arduina's foolish laughter, Claretta's hysterical shrieks, echoed on in the next room. And above these, above all voices far and near, sounded a melancholy whistle, the sibilant lament of some nocturnal train, which seemed to Regina a voice out of other times from a distant place, a cry which called, invited, implored her to—what? She did not know, did not remember; but she was sure she knew that cry, that it had once told her something wonderful, that it was sounding now only for her, having sought her out in the night of the vast, unknown city;—that it was repeating to her things wild, sweet, lacerating——
"At last!" said Antonio, embracing her. "This bed is a limitless desert! Where are you? Oh, what little cold hands! You're trembling! Are you cold?"
"No."
"Then why do you tremble?" he asked, in another tone; "are you not happy, Regina?"
She made no answer.
"Are you not happy?"
"I'm tired," she said, her eyes shut; "I still feel the shake of the train. Do you hear that whistle?"
"Ah!" she went on, as if speaking in a dream, "I know it now! It's the whistle of the little steamer on the Po! Ah! let us start!"
"We have hardly arrived, and already you want to go?" he said, his voice half jesting, half bitter.
She made no response. He thought she slept, and kept motionless for fear of waking her. But presently he heard her laugh and felt quite cheered.
"What's the matter?" he asked, fondling her hand, which was beginning to grow warm.
"That official—was a gravedigger!" she murmured, still dreaming; "if my sister Toscana had been here how she would have laughed!"
"She's still in that old home of hers!" thought Antonio jealously.
Long afterwards he confided to Regina that that night he had been unable to sleep. He wanted to ask how she liked his mother and the rest, but dared not put the question, guessing intuitively that she would not answer him sincerely.
He, too, heard the whistle which had reached the half-slumbering Regina, and had lulled her in memories and hope.
"Go? Is she already dreaming of going?" he thought, bitterly; and remembered, not without resentment, her cold, sad, now and then contemptuous manner during those first hours of communion with her new relatives. Yet he could not but feel the measureless distance which divided those relatives from the thoughtful, delicate creature of a superior race whom he had dared to marry.
"But she knew all about it!" he reflected; "I had told her everything. I said to her: We're a family of working people, descended from working people. My mother is just the housewife, my sister-in-law is a harmless lunatic. She said she did not care—she loved me, and that was enough. Then what more does she want?"
He had a foolish desire to push her away, to distance her from himself in that great, limitless bed; but she was so fragile, so slight, so cold, lying like a dead thing on his warm, pulsing breast!
"I've been wrong in bringing her here! I ought to have prepared our own nest, and taken her there at once. She's like an uprooted flower which must be planted at once in an adapted soil."
He looked at her with profound tenderness, and remained motionless, lest he should disturb the slumber which had descended on her homesickness and fatigue.
CHAPTER II
On waking next morning Regina found herself alone in the big hard bed.
It was raining; the room was oppressed by a grey, melancholy twilight which seemed thrown from the ceiling. Vehicles were already rolling in the street; screaming trams passed by; there was continued howling of tempestuous wind, the whole making on Regina an impression of unutterable dreariness. The luminous city of her dreams seemed pervaded by this howling wind through which resounded a thousand other voices; a ceaseless booming of toilsome life, dismal under eternal rain.
Presently she looked at the room, screwing up her eyes to distinguish the various objects. The grey ceiling, the three grey windows, especially that one at the foot of the bed, were positively funereal; the rough linen of the sheets and pillow-case, the coarse embroidery of their adornment filled her with horror.
And Antonio, where was he? In her ill-humour Regina resented his having risen silently so as not to wake her, his having left her alone in the immensity of that strange bed; but almost immediately the door was gently pushed open and Antonio looked in.
"There they are, her big eyes!" he said gaily, and came over hurriedly to kiss her lips; "so you've come to, little one, have you? Are you awake?"
"I think so," she murmured rather hoarsely, and threw her arm round his neck. "Is it raining?"
"Yes; it's raining needlessly hard!" he said, heaving an exaggerated sigh, "but it will soon leave off."
"Let us hope so! Open the shutters!"
He moved to obey. "This is Sunday; don't you know that in Rome it always rains on Sunday?—result of the Papal curse! Never mind. It will leave off. I assure you it will! Stay in bed a little longer. I'll ring for your coffee."
"No, no!" she cried, terrified lest the summons should bring her mother-in-law; "I'll get up at once! I'm anxious to write home."
"We'll go out the moment the rain stops," said Antonio. "If you don't mind we'll take Gaspare with us. He knows all about archæology. We'll go to the Forum."
"To the Forum!" she echoed, her eyes sparkling with revival of joy.
"Yes, my dear—to the Forum. Think of that! To the Forum! Have you realised where you are?"
She smiled at him without answering. He had changed his costume, was wearing a shining collar, a beautiful green tie, had curled his moustache. He was fresh, fragrant, very handsome. Light had come in with him, love, joy. Regina pulled him down to her, kissed his hair, which she said smelt of "burnt flowers," pretended to whisper something in his ear, and made instead a childish shout. He jumped in feigned terror, threatened her and shook her. They laughed, they played,
