Dream Tales and Prose Poems eBook

The husband and wife took up their old life again.  Muzzio vanished for them as though he had never existed.  Fabio and Valeria were agreed, as it seemed, not to utter a syllable referring to him, not to learn anything of his later days; his fate remained, however, a mystery for all.  Muzzio did actually disappear, as though he had sunk into the earth.  Fabio one day thought it his duty to tell Valeria exactly what had taken place on that fatal night ... but she probably divined his intention, and she held her breath, half-shutting her eyes, as though she were expecting a blow....  And Fabio understood her; he did not inflict that blow upon her.

One fine autumn day, Fabio was putting the last touches to his picture of his Cecilia; Valeria sat at the organ, her fingers straying at random over the keys....  Suddenly, without her knowing it, from under her hands came the first notes of that song of triumphant love which Muzzio had once played; and at the same instant, for the first time since her marriage, she felt within her the throb of a new palpitating life....  Valeria started, stopped....

What did it mean?  Could it be....

* * * * *

At this word the manuscript ended.

THE DREAM

I

I was living at that time with my mother in a little seaside town.  I was in my seventeenth year, while my mother was not quite five-and-thirty; she had married very young.  When my father died, I was only seven years old, but I remember him well.  My mother was a fair-haired woman, not very tall, with a charming, but always sad-looking face, a soft, tired voice and timid gestures.  In her youth she had been reputed a beauty, and to the end she remained attractive and pretty.  I have never seen deeper, tenderer, and sadder eyes, finer and softer hair; I never saw hands so exquisite.  I adored her, and she loved me....  But our life was not a bright one; a secret, hopeless, undeserved sorrow seemed for ever gnawing at the very root of her being.  This sorrow could not be accounted for by the loss of my father simply, great as that loss was to her, passionately as my mother had loved him, and devoutly as she had cherished his memory....  No! something more lay hidden in it, which I did not understand, but of which I was aware, dimly and yet intensely aware, whenever I looked into those soft and unchanging eyes, at those lips, unchanging too, not compressed in bitterness, but, as it were, for ever set in one expression.

I have said that my mother loved me; but there were moments when she repulsed me, when my presence was oppressive to her, unendurable.  At such times she felt a sort of involuntary aversion for me, and was horrified afterwards, blamed herself with tears, pressed me to her heart.  I used to ascribe these momentary outbreaks of dislike to the derangement of her health, to her unhappiness....  These antagonistic feelings might indeed, to some extent, have been evoked by certain strange outbursts of wicked and criminal passions, which arose from time to time in me, though I could not myself account for them....