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"What?" exclaimed Noemi. "Was there really a wedding dance?" Carlino shrugged his shoulders and clenched his fists, gasping with impatience. After a deep sigh he continued: "The girl asks, 'But is there a heavenly love? It was then I told you to stop under the trees of Saint-Sauveur, and you, instead, stopped at the entrance to the square.
But she had not been aware of Professor Mayda's sad opinion. Partly from kindness, but partly also that her own emotion might not be revealed, Noemi had hidden it from her, Carlino received her unkindly. The doctor, who had found his pulse rather frequent, concluded at once that it was an angry pulse. He jested a few minutes about the serious nature of the illness, and then took his departure.
While sojourning in that city, he became acquainted with Carlo Dolci, then advanced in years, who is said to have been so affected at seeing the rapid Neapolitan execute in a few hours what would have required him months to perform, in his own slow and laborious manner, that he fell into a profound melancholy, of which he soon after died: This circumstance Dominici assures us, Giordano long afterwards remembered with tears, on being shown at Naples "a picture painted by poor Carlino."
Always seeking and never finding, Carlino at last reached the end of the world. There was nothing more before him but the ocean and the sky. His hopes were at an end; his dream had vanished. As he was walking despairingly up and down the seashore, he spied an old man warming himself in the sun.
"This absence of the moon is perfect for me," said Carlino. "But now I would give half my future glory if a little window could be opened in the clouds with a tiny star shining in the middle and reflected in the water. You cannot imagine what a success this last chapter is going to be. Listen, on the Quai de Rosaire you looked at the swans."
When Carlino at last disappeared in the distance, the poor monarch thought that his heart was breaking. He buried his face in his hands and wept, not like a child, but like a father. The tears of a child are like the summer rain, large drops that are soon dried up; the tears of a father are like the autumnal rain, which falls slowly and soaks into the ground.
I remember, however, having heard the old men among us say, when I was a child," he added, "that their fathers had told them that yonder, a long, long way off, far beyond the horizon, was the Island of the Fates; but woe to the imprudent man who approaches these merciless fairies: he is struck with death at their sight." "What does that matter?" cried Carlino.
When the negress was dressed like a princess, and covered with lace and diamonds that adorned her as the stars adorn the night, by rendering the darkness still more visible, Carlino seated her at his right hand, in a magnificent carriage lined with plate-glass and drawn by six white horses, and took his way to the palace, as happy as a criminal with the rope about his neck.
Well, Carlino had said from the first that the fig and the bee could neither get up nor down. One consolation, however, there was the idea that a book must have a fitting end was a mere vulgar prejudice. What is there in the world that really has an end? That is all very well, said the girls, but the book must certainly have some ending.
The most subtle, the most exquisite part of his book was the analysis of this recondite influence of sex operating alike on the old priest and the girl. "Carlino," exclaimed Jeanne, "what are you thinking of? An old man of eighty!" Carlino looked up as though he would exclaim to some superior, invisible friend, "How dense they are!"
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