The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎658v] (207/239)

176
NOSTALGIA.
times, however, when he also felt irritated. Why had she refused
the apartment in the Via d’Azeglio? What more, what better did
she want?
They came in, worn out both of them and cross. Regina shrank
away into remote regions of the big, cold bed, and Antonio some
times heard smothered sobs which, instead of moving, vexed him
all the more. What was the matter with her? Well really now,
what was it? What was the matter? Surely a sensible girl like her
couldn’t be crying because rooms to her fancy were not discoverable
at the first go-off?
“No,” he told her later, “I thought you didn’t love me any
longer; I thought you repented having married me. I felt humiliated
and wretched like a whipped child.”
Regina, far away from him in the great cold bed, had a hopeless
feeling of abandonment. She seemed to have lost herself in a bound
less, frozen plain; the screaming breath of the tram reproduced the
drive of the rain, the roar of the wet wind. All around was cloud, and
only far, far, far away shone the crimson of a lighted hearth,
glimmered the silver of a river
“Why did I leave my home? ” she asked herself, dully; “ I’ve
let myself be rooted up like a poplar; and now like the poplar-wood
I’ve been carted here to make part of this odious construction which
is called a great city. I also shall warp and rot—get worm-eaten,
fall ”
Then she asked herself did she really love Antonio? There were
moments when she answered No; other moments when she melted
at the thought of him.
“I shall make him miserable! He told me what to expect in
Rome; a modest life, a middle-class family. Did I not accept it?
Well—well! we shall all die! We must be resigned to our destiny.
Every hour will come and the hour of death is the most certain of
all. To die! To have no more suffering from home sickness—never
again to see my mother-in-law, Arduina, Sor Gaspare, that maid
Marina; to wander no further in the rain seeking an apartment! No
—I don’t want to torment Antonio any more. Is it his fault that all
the miseries of civilisation interfere between him and me? He
didn’t know it, and neither did I know it. But we shall all die at
last! We must be resigned, and go and live in Via d Azeglio. The
days will pass there as they pass everywhere.”
She slept, pleased with her philosophy; and, of course, she dreamed
of the distant home, the woods, the blazing logs, the windows radiant
in the sunset, the kitten on the window-sill contemplating the stem
of the poplar tree. Next morning daylight met her in the detestable
Venutelli room; she lay under the incubus of the grey ceiling; she
must get up, endure the cold, the rain, the company of Signora
Anna! Resignation? It was very well in theory; in practice her
nerves revolted fiercely against the reality.
At last, after a month of vain search, more in the end from weari
ness than from goodwill, Regina consented to the suite in the Via