Лучшие любовные истории / The Best Love Stories - стр. 9

As long as Giovanni had known Beatrice, he had had some doubts as to her character; yet she seemed to him such a simple and natural girl, that the image now held up by Professor Baglioni looked strange and incredible. True, he could not quite forget the bouquet that faded in her hands, and the insect killed in the air by the fragrance of her breath. These incidents, however, were now taken as mistaken fantasies. There is something truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger. On such better evidence had Giovanni built his faith in Beatrice. But now he was not able to stay at the height to which the early enthusiasm of passion had raised him; he fell down, suffering from doubts. Not that he gave her up; he did but distrust.[30] He decided to make a test that would satisfy him, once for all,[31] whether there was something dreadful in her physical nature and something monstrous in her soul. His eyes, gazing down afar, might have deceived him as to the lizard, the insect, and the flowers; but if he could witness, at the distance of a few steps, the sudden fading of one fresh flower in Beatrice’s hand, there would be room for no further question.[32] With this idea he bought a bouquet of fresh flowers cut only that morning.

It was now the usual hour of his daily interview with Beatrice. Before going down into the garden, Giovanni looked at his figure in the mirror, – only natural for a beautiful young man, yet this, probably, proved a certain shallowness of feeling and insincerity of character. He said to himself that his features had never before been so good, nor his eyes so bright.

“At least,” thought he, “her poison has not yet got into my system. I am no flower to die in her hands.”

With that thought he turned his eyes on the bouquet, which he had held in his hand for some time. A thrill of horror shot through him when he saw that those flowers were already beginning to fade. Giovanni grew white as marble, and stood motionless before the mirror, staring at his own reflection there as at something frightful. He remembered Baglioni’s remark about the fragrance that he felt in the room. It must have been the poison in his breath! Recovering from his stupor, he began to look for a spider in the corners of his room. He saw an active spider and breathed at it. The spider suddenly stopped moving; the web vibrated together with its body, and the spider hung dead in the web.

“Cursed! cursed!” murmured Giovanni, addressing himself. “Have you grown so poisonous that this deadly insect is killed by your breath?”

At that moment a rich, sweet voice came up from the garden.

“Giovanni! Giovanni! Come down!”

“Yes,” murmured Giovanni again. “She is the only being whom my breath may not kill! Would that it might![33]”

He rushed down, and in an instant was standing before the bright and loving eyes of Beatrice. A moment ago his rage and despair had been so fierce that he desired nothing so much as to kill her by a glance; but in her presence all this ugly mystery seemed an illusion, and he believed that the real Beatrice was an angel. He was not able to reach such high faith, still her presence had not lost its magic for him. Giovanni’s rage had left him, but the young man was gloomy. Beatrice immediately felt that there was blackness between them which neither he nor she could pass. They walked on together, sad and silent, and came to the marble fountain and to its pool of water on the ground, where grew the shrub with the purple blossoms. Giovanni was frightened by his delight – the appetite – with which he was inhaling the fragrance of the flowers.