There was little time. Then they must use what there was to the full.
They must not let one single moment find them lazy, indifferent.
Under the cover of the flood of talk Maurice turned to Maddalena. She was
taking no part in it, but was eating her macaroni gently, as if it
were a new and wonderful food. So Maurice thought as he looked at her.
To-day there was something strange, almost pathetic, to him in Maddalena,
a softness, an innocent refinement that made him imagine her in another
life than hers, and with other companions, in a life as free but less
hard, with companions as natural but less ruthless to women.
"Maddalena," he said to her. "They all want to buy things at the
auction."
"Si, signore."
"And you?"
"I, signorino?"
"Yes, don't you want to buy something?"
He was testing her, testing her memory. She looked at him above her fork,
from which the macaroni streamed down.
"I am content without anything, signorino," she said.
"Without the blue dress and the ear-rings, longer than that?" He measured
imaginary ear-rings in the air. "Have you forgotten, Maddalena?"
She blushed and bent over her plate. She had not forgotten. All the day
since she rose at dawn she had been thinking of Maurice's old promise.
But she did not know that he remembered it, and his remembrance of it
came to her now as a lovely surprise. He bent his head down nearer to
her.
"When they are all at the auction, we will go to buy the blue dress and
the ear-rings," he almost whispered. "We will go by ourselves. Shall we?"
"Si, signore."
Her voice was very small and her cheeks still held their flush. She
glanced, with eyes that were unusually conscious, to right and left of
her, to see if the neighbors had noticed their colloquy. And that look of
consciousness made Maurice suddenly understand that this limit which he
had put to his sinning--so he had called it with a sort of angry mental
sincerity, summoned, perhaps, to match the tremendous sincerity of his
wife which he was meeting with a lie to-day--his sinning against Hermione
was also a limit to something else. Had he not sinned against Maddalena,
sinned when he had kissed her, when he had shown her that he delighted to
be with her? Was he not sinning now when he promised to buy for her the
most beautiful things of the fair? For a moment he thought to himself
that his fault against Maddalena was more grave, more unforgivable than
his fault against Hermione. But then a sudden anger that was like a
storm, against his own condemnation of himself, swept through him. He had
come out to-day to be recklessly happy, and here he was giving himself up
to gloom, to absurd self-torture. Where was his natural careless
temperament? To-day his soul was full of shadows, like the soul of a man
going to meet a doom.