Browning's Heroines Part 5

". . . the devil take such cant!

Say, once and always, Luca was a wittol, I am his cut-throat, you are . . ."

With extraordinary patience, though she there, wearily as it were, interrupts him, Ottima again puts the question by, and offers him wine.

In doing this, she says something which sends a s.h.i.+ver down the reader's back--

". . . Here's wine!

_I brought it when we left the house above, And gla.s.ses too--wine of both sorts . . ._"

He takes no notice; he reiterates--

"But am I not his cut-throat? What are you?"

Still with that amazing, that almost beautiful, patience--the quality of her defect of callousness--Ottima leaves this also without comment. She gazes now from the closed window, sees a Capuchin monk go by, and makes some trivial remarks on his immobility at church; then once more offers Sebald the flask--the "black" (or, as we should say, the "red") wine.

Melodramatic and obvious in all he does and says, Sebald refuses the red wine: "No, the white--the white!"--then drinks ironically to Ottima's black eyes. He reminds her how he had sworn that the new year should not rise on them "the ancient shameful way," nor does it.

"Do you remember last d.a.m.ned New Year's Day?"

The characters now are poised for us--in their national, as well as their individual, traits. Ottima, an Italian, has the racial matter-of-factness, callousness, and patience; Sebald, a German, the no less characteristic sentimentality and emotionalism. Her att.i.tude remains unchanged until the critical moment; his s.h.i.+fts and sways with every word and action. No sooner has he drunk the white wine than he can brutally, for an instant, exult in the thought that Luca is not alive to fondle Ottima before his face; but with her instant answer (rejoicing as she does to retrieve the atmosphere which alone is native to her sense)--

". . . Do you Fondle me, then! Who means to take your life?"

--a new mood seizes on him. They have "one thing to guard against." They must not make much of one another; there must be no more parade of love than there was yesterday; for then it would seem as if he supposed she needed proofs that he loves her--

". . . yes, still love you, love you, In spite of Luca and what's come to him."

That would be a sure sign that Luca's "white sneering old reproachful face" was ever in their thoughts. Yes; they must even quarrel at times, as if they

". . . still could lose each other, were not tied By this . . ."

but on her responding cry of "Love!" he shudders back again: _Is_ he so surely for ever hers?

She, in her stubborn patience, answers by a reminiscence of their early days of love--

". . . That May morning we two stole Under the green ascent of sycamores"

--and, thinking to reason with him, asks if, that morning, they had

". . . come upon a thing like that, Suddenly--"

but he interrupts with his old demand for the true word: she shall not say "a thing" . . . and at last that marvellous patience gives way, and in a superb flash of ironic rage she answers him--

"Then, Venus' body! had we come upon My husband Luca Gaddi's murdered corpse Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close"

--flinging him the "words" he has whimpered for in full measure, that so at last she may attain to asking if, that morning, he would have "pored upon it?" She knows he would not; then why pore upon it now? For him, it is here, as much as in the deserted house; it is everywhere.

". . . For me

(she goes on),

Now he is dead, I hate him worse: I hate . . .

Dare you stay here? I would go back and hold His two dead hands, and say, 'I hate you worse, Luca, than----'"

And in her frenzy of reminiscent hatred and loathing for the murdered man, she goes to Sebald and takes _his_ hands, as if to feign that other taking.

With the hysteria that has all along been growing in him, Sebald flings her back--

". . . Take your hands off mine; 'Tis the hot evening--off! oh, morning, is it?"

--and she, restored to her cooler state by this repulse, and with a perhaps unconscious moving to some revenge for it, points out, with a profounder depth of callousness than she has yet displayed, that the body at the house will have to be taken away and buried--

"Come in and help to carry"--

and with ghastly glee she adds--

". . . We may sleep Anywhere in the whole wide house to-night."

Now the dialogue sways between her deliberate sensuous allurement of the man and his deepening horror at what they have done. She winds and unwinds her hair--was it so that he once liked it? But he cannot look; he would give her neck and her splendid shoulders, "both those b.r.e.a.s.t.s of yours," if this thing could be undone. It is not the mere killing--though he would "kill the world so Luca lives again," even to fondle her as before--but the thought that he has eaten the dead man's bread, worn his clothes, "felt his money swell my purse." . . . _This_ is the intolerable; "there's a recompense in guilt"--

"One must be venturous and fortunate:-- What is one young for else?"

and thus their pa.s.sion is justified; but to have killed the man who rescued him from starvation by letting him teach music to his wife . . .

why--

". . . He gave me Life, nothing less"--

and if he did reproach the perfidy, "and threaten and do more," had he no right after all--what was there to wonder at?

"He sat by us at table quietly: _Why must you lean across till our cheeks touched?_"

In that base blaming of her alone we get the measure of Sebald as at this hour he is. He turns upon her with a demand to know how she now "feels for him." Her answer, wherein the whole of her nature (as, again, at this hour it is) reveals itself--callous but courageous, proud and pa.s.sionate, cruel in its utter sensuality, yet with the force and honesty which attend on all simplicity, good or evil--her answer strikes a truer note than does anything which Sebald yet has said, or is to say.

She replies that she loves him better now than ever--

"And best (_look at me while I speak to you_) Best for the crime."

She is glad that the "affectation of simplicity" has fallen off--

". . . this naked crime of ours May not now be looked over: look it down."

And were not the joys worth it, great as it is? Would he give up the past?

"Give up that noon I owned my love for you?"

--and as, in her impa.s.sioned revocation of the sultry summer's day, she brings back to him the very sense of the sun-drenched garden, the man at last is conquered back to memory. The antiphon of sensual love begins, goes on--the places, aspects, things, sounds, scents, that waited on their ecstasy, the fire and consuming force of hers, the pa.s.sive, no less l.u.s.tful, receptivity of his--and culminates in a chant to that "crowning night" in July (and "the day of it too, Sebald!") when all life seemed smothered up except their life, and, "buried in woods,"