And the soul writhed, like an animal stretched and strapped upon the board, to whom no anaesthetic, had been given.
Never before would it have been possible to Lady Holme to believe that the mere sound of a word could inflict such torment upon a heart as the sound of the word _amore_, coming from the boatman’s lips, now inflicted upon hers. Each time it came, with its soft beauty, its languor of sweetness--like a word reclining--it flayed her soul alive, and showed her red, raw bareness.
Yet she did not ask the man to stop singing. Few people in the hands of Fate ask Fate for favours. Instinct speaks in the soul and says, “Be silent.”
The boat rounded the point of Torno and came at once into a lonelier region of the lake. Autumn was more definite here. Its sadness spoke more plainly. Habitations on the shores were fewer. The mountains were more grim, though grander. And their greyness surely closed in a little upon the boat, the rowers, the veiled woman who was being taken to Casa Felice.
Perhaps to combat the gathering gloom of Nature the boatman sang more loudly, with the full force of his voice. But suddenly he seemed to be struck by the singular contrast opposed to his expansive energy by the silent figure opposite to him. A conscious look came into his face. His voice died away abruptly. After a pause he said,
“Perhaps the signora is not fond of music?”
Lady Holme wanted to speak, but she could not. She and this bright-eyed boy were not in the same world. That was what she felt. He did not know it, but she knew it. And one world cannot speak through infinite space with another.
She said nothing. The boy looked over his shoulder at his companion. Then, in silence, they both rowed on.
And now that the song had ceased she was again in the grey chaos of the dream, in the irrevocable emptiness, the intense, the enormous solitude that was like the solitude of an unpeopled eternity in which man had no lot.
Presently, with a stroke of his right oar, the boy who had sung turned the boat’s prow toward the shore, and Lady Holme saw a large, lonely house confronting them on the nearer bank of the lake. It stood apart. For a long distance on either side of it there was no other habitation. The flat, yellow facade rose out of the water. Behind was a dim tangle of densely-growing trees rising up on the steep mountain side towards the grey sky. Lady Holme could not yet see details. The boat was still too far out upon the lake. Nor would she have been able to note details if she had seen them. Only a sort of heavy impression that this house had a pale, haunted aspect forced itself dully upon her.