The Greatest Works of Edith Wharton - 31 Books in One Edition. Edith Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars. Ralph said to himself that no one who had not seen Italy thus prostrate beneath the sun knew what secret treasures she could yield.

      As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one’s self a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie.

      He stared up at the pattern they made till his eyes ached with excess of light; then he changed his position and looked at his wife.

      Undine, near by, leaned against a gnarled tree with the slightly constrained air of a person unused to sylvan abandonments. Her beautiful back could not adapt itself to the irregularities of the tree-trunk, and she moved a little now and then in the effort to find an easier position. But her expression was serene, and Ralph, looking up at her through drowsy lids, thought her face had never been more exquisite.

      “You look as cool as a wave,” he said, reaching out for the hand on her knee. She let him have it, and he drew it closer, scrutinizing it as if it had been a bit of precious porcelain or ivory. It was small and soft, a mere featherweight, a puff-ball of a hand—not quick and thrilling, not a speaking hand, but one to be fondled and dressed in rings, and to leave a rosy blur in the brain. The fingers were short and tapering, dimpled at the base, with nails as smooth as rose-leaves. Ralph lifted them one by one, like a child playing with piano-keys, but they were inelastic and did not spring back far—only far enough to show the dimples.

      He turned the hand over and traced the course of its blue veins from the wrist to the rounding of the palm below the fingers; then he put a kiss in the warm hollow between. The upper world had vanished: his universe had shrunk to the palm of a hand. But there was no sense of diminution. In the mystic depths whence his passion sprang, earthly dimensions were ignored and the curve of beauty was boundless enough to hold whatever the imagination could pour into it. Ralph had never felt more convinced of his power to write a great poem; but now it was Undine’s hand which held the magic wand of expression.

      She stirred again uneasily, answering his last words with a faint accent of reproach.

      “I don’t FEEL cool. You said there’d be a breeze up here.”.

      He laughed.

      “You poor darling! Wasn’t it ever as hot as this in Apex?”

      She withdrew her hand with a slight grimace.

      “Yes—but I didn’t marry you to go back to Apex!”

      Ralph laughed again; then he lifted himself on his elbow and regained the hand. “I wonder what you DID marry me for?”

      “Mercy! It’s too hot for conundrums.” She spoke without impatience, but with a lassitude less joyous than his.

      He roused himself. “Do you really mind the heat so much? We’ll go, if you do.”

      She sat up eagerly. “Go to Switzerland, you mean?”

      “Well, I hadn’t taken quite as long a leap. I only meant we might drive back to Siena.”

      She relapsed listlessly against her tree-trunk. “Oh, Siena’s hotter than this.”

      “We could go and sit in the cathedral—it’s always cool there at sunset.”

      “We’ve sat in the cathedral at sunset every day for a week.”

      “Well, what do you say to stopping at Lecceto on the way? I haven’t shown you Lecceto yet; and the drive back by moonlight would be glorious.”

      This woke her to a slight show of interest. “It might be nice—but where could we get anything to eat?”

      Ralph laughed again. “I don’t believe we could. You’re too practical.”

      “Well, somebody’s got to be. And the food in the hotel is too disgusting if we’re not on time.”

      “I admit that the best of it has usually been appropriated by the extremely good-looking cavalry-officer who’s so keen to know you.”

      Undine’s face brightened. “You know he’s not a Count; he’s a Marquis. His name’s Roviano; his palace in Rome is in the guidebooks, and he speaks English beautifully. Celeste found out about him from the headwaiter,” she said, with the security of one who treats of recognized values.

      Marvell, sitting upright, reached lazily across the grass for his hat. “Then there’s all the more reason for rushing back to defend our share.” He spoke in the bantering tone which had become the habitual expression of his tenderness; but his eyes softened as they absorbed in a last glance the glimmering submarine light of the ancient grove, through which Undine’s figure wavered nereid-like above him.

      “You never looked your name more than you do now,” he said, kneeling at her side and putting his arm about her. She smiled back a little vaguely, as if not seizing his allusion, and being content to let it drop into the store of unexplained references which had once stimulated her curiosity but now merely gave her leisure to think of other things. But her smile was no less lovely for its vagueness, and indeed, to Ralph, the loveliness was enhanced by the latent doubt. He remembered afterward that at that moment the cup of life seemed to brim over.

      “Come, dear—here or there—it’s all divine!”

      In the carriage, however, she remained insensible to the soft spell of the evening, noticing only the heat and dust, and saying, as they passed under the wooded cliff of Lecceto, that they might as well have stopped there after all, since with such a headache as she felt coming on she didn’t care if she dined or not. Ralph looked up yearningly at the long walls overhead; but Undine’s mood was hardly favourable to communion with such scenes, and he made no attempt to stop the carriage. Instead he presently said: “If you’re tired of Italy, we’ve got the world to choose from.”

      She did not speak for a moment; then she said: “It’s the heat I’m tired of. Don’t people generally come here earlier?”

      “Yes. That’s why I chose the summer: so that we could have it all to ourselves.”

      She tried to put a note of reasonableness into her voice. “If you’d told me we were going everywhere at the wrong time, of course I could have arranged about my clothes.”

      “You poor darling! Let us, by all means, go to the place where the clothes will be right: they’re too beautiful to be left out of our scheme of life.”

      Her lips hardened. “I know you don’t care how I look. But you didn’t give me time to order anything before we were married, and I’ve got nothing but my last winter’s things to wear.”

      Ralph smiled. Even his subjugated mind perceived the inconsistency СКАЧАТЬ