He uttered these words with a kind of loftiness that invested a countenance already so gentle with a singularly severe expression.
“Yes, you are too late,” he continued with enthusiasm. “You would have liked to prevent my wedding. Well, know that this wedding is no more than a pretense staged for society, a justification for what love has already given spontaneously. Silvia was mine! What does it matter that she must die? And what is dying? Did love ever have a different aspiration? Did it ever have any other recompense than this? Whether I am too early or too late, I now invoke this death you wanted to arrange for me.”
“Oh, not I!” I exclaimed. “Heaven is my witness if I desired or planned your death. You forget that I am here at this very moment to warn you of a danger, certainly not to threaten you with it.”
“It is true,” he answered softly. “Forgive me.” And he placed a hand on me, but withdrew it immediately, as if he were afraid of offending or harming me with that contact.
I looked into his face to examine it. It was so handsome, so peaceful; it had again become so nobly calm. There was something so virile in his childlike face and so strong in his very weakness that I understood how a woman could accept his love even at the cost of her life. I was unaware of whether Silvia knew the young man’s secret, but I felt that even if she did know it, the sacrifice of her existence must have appeared to her an extremely paltry thing compared to the sweetness of that love.
He may have known the power of his beauty or read it in my heart, since he offered me his hand a second time and told me, “Go, go, I beseech you. You are kind, perhaps you can feel some sympathy for me, whereas I am likely to reward with ingratitude the service you wanted to render me with your visit. It is my destiny!—”
“It may still be such,” I interrupted, “I am not afraid.” And I seized his hand and clasped it to my heart. “I judged you different; I wanted to prevent a misfortune. It was all my fault.”
“Do not torment yourself with this thought,” he said. “I am not a man who can believe in the freedom of human actions—free will is a lie—the will is only the foreknowledge of an act that is already preordained; it does not have any weight on the scale where everything in life is weighed—the scale of destiny.”
I shook my head doubtfully. He observed that gesture and resumed. “No, I shall not attempt to avert that danger in any way; it would be pointless. I thank you, in any case.”
“Will I see you again?” I asked, almost uncertain of whether to leave him so firm in his resolve.
He smiled with an expression of gratitude and said, “When would you like—tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
I omit the account of my relations with Baron Saternez during those seven days that preceded his wedding. It was due to them that I could develop a less imprecise idea of his character, although he never allowed me to fathom the mystery of his life any more than was possible during our first meeting. Nonetheless, I learned enough to be able to form an opinion concerning him. He was undoubtedly honest, undoubtedly good. I have known few men who presented a more singular mixture of weakness and strength in their temperament—I mean that weakness which resides in sensitivity, in the disposition to receive impressions powerfully, not in feebleness of character. He had a skeptical mind and a believing heart; misfortune did not debilitate him, but it made him old before his time, so that he appeared young or old at intervals, according to the internal impulse he received from his passions. And although he seemed naturally demonstrative like all good people, he actually was not. Perhaps the sad power with which he believed himself endowed taught him to hide and dissimulate. From that day onward, in any case, no matter how much fondness he showed for me, he never again lifted the veil which spread over his past, and which he had partly lifted in that first effusive moment.
In those days, it seemed to me that his temperament was not as melancholy as I had first judged, yet later I easily noticed that his joy possessed something violent, forced, convulsive, and he lived under the apprehension of a thought that filled him with terror. He passed from excesses of hilarity to excesses of sadness; he often seemed calm and feigned a peace of mind he did not feel. But that was for Silvia’s benefit. She loved him with that species of blindness which sees nothing at all.
He took long walks with me in those days, and in the countryside he pointed out several prospects and effects of light and snow that would have escaped a mind neither poetic nor observant. He showed no fear of the danger about which I had spoken to him, and he made no allusion to it with me, yet he visibly paled whenever he heard the count’s name mentioned. One night—only two days remained before the nuptials—I was surprised to meet him in the company of Count Sagrezwitch on a dark, remote path. I followed them but did not manage to comprehend a single word of their lively, animated dialogue. They spoke a language I did not know; and it seemed to me from the count’s gestures and imperious tone that he was insisting on a request with which the baron obstinately refused to comply.
After that night, it became obvious that the baron was trying to anesthetize himself from some great anxiety with any means possible. He turned to wine to forget his secret pain, and on the following day I myself led him back to his house in a very serious state of intoxication.
But I shall abbreviate my narrative.
The wedding day arrived, and the wedding itself was completed without the emergence of any obstacle to stop it. An informal family party took place that evening; a great many of the bride’s relatives and friends were present.
Silvia was radiant; Baron Saternez was so youthfully happy that I privately rejoiced at the vanity of Davide’s threats and perhaps also of the young man’s alleged influence, in which I tried to stop believing. It seemed to me that the prospect of such great happiness had to restore the girl’s health and destroy in him that terrible, mysterious power with which he believed himself endowed.
Midnight had already passed, and I was thinking, seated in a corner of the room, that these possibilities might lie in the newlyweds’ future, when I heard the Duke of Nevers mentioned near me. I immediately remembered that this was the name which Count Sagrezwitch often used in America. I was startled and turned around. A servant entered the room and presented to the bridegroom a calling card which bore that name surmounted by a ducal crown. The strange visitor had to speak to Baron Saternez at once and was waiting for him in the vestibule.
“It is a pressing matter,” the young man said without manifesting even the slightest emotion. “In fact…I needed to speak to that man. I shall return in a few minutes.”
He squeezed Silvia’s hand and went down. When the door was opened, I seemed to glimpse Count Sagrezwitch at the rear of the vestibule, but I could not affirm it. The servant who saw him said afterwards, however, that the person who had himself announced as the Duke of Nevers wore a very large fur hat and kid gloves of an immaculate whiteness.
We waited for the baron all night—a cold, rainy March night—but in vain. I forego describing the family’s distress; it would be a task greater than words. The next day the reports in the newspapers read: “A young foreigner who resided for some time in our city, where he arrived with a false passport in the name of Baron Saternez, a Bohemian, but whose real name is Gustav of the counts of Sagrezwitch, a Pole, was found dead this morning behind the walls of Porta Tenaglia, with a knife plunged in his heart. The circumstances and the agents of this murder remain unknown.”
Now, what were the bonds that linked those two men and those two names? What were their real names? Had one of them usurped the other’s name, or did they both use it? And the Duke of Nevers! Was this truly the surname of Sagrezwitch who asserted that he knew the young man and with whom the latter said he had some relations he could not reveal? It is an enigma that neither I nor any of the people to whom I have told this story could ever resolve.
Silvia, however, recovered—whether by chance o
r because of the nature of the illness, she recovered, although her wounded heart never healed. Her family sold their gray, musty house and settled in the small village of Brianza. The man known by the name of Count Sagrezwitch was never seen again in Milan. I have not heard anything more of Davide.
Two years have passed from the date of this incident, and no light has been shed on the crime.
[1869]
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Fantastic Tales Page 14
