His wife was a very ordinary woman, and why should her ideas differ from his own? No one realized that more than personalities were engaged;that the struggle was national; that generations of ancestors, good, bad, or indifferent, forbad the Latin man to be chivalrous to the northern woman, the northern woman to forgive the Latin man.All this might have been foreseen: Mrs.Herriton foresaw it from the first.
Meanwhile Lilia prided herself on her high personal standard, and Gino simply wondered why she did not come round.He hated discomfort and yearned for sympathy, but shrank from mentioning his difficulties in the town in case they were put down to his own incompetence.
Spiridione was told, and replied in a philosophical but not very helpful letter.His other great friend, whom he trusted more, was still serving in Eritrea or some other desolate outpost.And, besides, what was the good of letters? Friends cannot travel through the post.
Lilia, so similar to her husband in many ways, yearned for comfort and sympathy too.The night he laughed at her she wildly took up paper and pen and wrote page after page, analysing his character, enumerating his iniquities, reporting whole conversations, tracing all the causes and the growth of her misery.She was beside herself with passion, and though she could hardly think or see, she suddenly attained to magnificence and pathos which a practised stylist might have envied.
It was written like a diary, and not till its conclusion did she realize for whom it was meant.
"Irma, darling Irma, this letter is for you.
I almost forgot I have a daughter.It will make you unhappy, but I want you to know everything, and you cannot learn things too soon.
God bless you, my dearest, and save you.God bless your miserable mother."Fortunately Mrs.Herriton was in when the letter arrived.She seized it and opened it in her bedroom.Another moment, and Irma's placid childhood would have been destroyed for ever.
Lilia received a brief note from Harriet, again forbidding direct communication between mother and daughter, and concluding with formal condolences.It nearly drove her mad.
"Gently! gently!" said her husband.
They were sitting together on the loggia when the letter arrived.
He often sat with her now, watching her for hours, puzzled and anxious, but not contrite.
"It's nothing." She went in and tore it up, and then began to write--a very short letter, whose gist was "Come and save me."It is not good to see your wife crying when she writes--especially if you are conscious that, on the whole, your treatment of her has been reasonable and kind.It is not good, when you accidentally look over her shoulder, to see that she is writing to a man.Nor should she shake her fist at you when she leaves the room, under the impression that you are engaged in lighting a cigar and cannot see her.
Lilia went to the post herself.But in Italy so many things can be arranged.The postman was a friend of Gino's, and Mr.Kingcroft never got his letter.
So she gave up hope, became ill, and all through the autumn lay in bed.Gino was distracted.She knew why; he wanted a son.He could talk and think of nothing else.His one desire was to become the father of a man like himself, and it held him with a grip he only partially understood, for it was the first great desire, the first great passion of his life.Falling in love was a mere physical triviality, like warm sun or cool water, beside this divine hope of immortality: "I continue." He gave candles to Santa Deodata, for he was always religious at a crisis, and sometimes he went to her himself and prayed the crude uncouth demands of the simple.Impetuously he summoned all his relatives back to bear him company in his time of need, and Lilia saw strange faces flitting past her in the darkened room.
"My love!" he would say, "my dearest Lilia!
Be calm.I have never loved any one but you."She, knowing everything, would only smile gently, too broken by suffering to make sarcastic repartees.
Before the child was born he gave her a kiss, and said, "I have prayed all night for a boy."Some strangely tender impulse moved her, and she said faintly, "You are a boy yourself, Gino."He answered, "Then we shall be brothers."He lay outside the room with his head against the door like a dog.When they came to tell him the glad news they found him half unconscious, and his face was wet with tears.
As for Lilia, some one said to her, "It is a beautiful boy!" But she had died in giving birth to him.
