He indulged long in pleasurable meditation on this episode. What particularly took his fancy was the arch and graceful touch Elena had given to her caprice. The thought of the boa evoked the image of Donna Maria's coils, and so, confusedly, all the amorous fancies he had woven round that virginal mass of hair by which, once on a time, the very school-girls of the Florentine convent had been enthralled. And again he let his two loves melt into one and form the third--the Ideal.
The musing mood still upon him while he dressed for dinner, he thought to himself--'Yesterday, a grand scene of passion almost ending in tears; to-day, a little episode of mute sensuality--and I seemed to myself as sincere in my sentiment yesterday as I was in my sensations to-day. Added to which, scarcely an hour before Elena's kiss, I had a moment of lofty lyrical emotion at Donna Maria's side. Of all this not one vestige remains. To-morrow, most assuredly I shall begin the same game over again. I am unstable as water; incoherent, inconsistent, a very chameleon! All my efforts towards unity of purpose are for ever vain. I must resign myself to my fate. The law of my being is comprised in the one word--_Nunc_--the will of the Law be done!'
He laughed at himself, and from that moment began a new phase of his moral degradation.
Without mercy, without remorse, without restraint, he set all his faculties to work to compass the realisation of his impure imaginings. To vanquish Maria Ferrès he had recourse to the most subtle artifices, the most delicate machinations; taking care to deceive her in matters of the soul, of the spiritual, the ideal, the inmost life of the heart. In carrying on the two campaigns--the conquest of the new and the re-conquest of the old love--with equal adroitness, and in turning to the best advantage the chance circumstances of each enterprise, he was led into an infinity of annoying, embarrassing, and ridiculous situations, to extricate himself from which he was obliged to descend to a series of lies and deceptions, of paltry evasions, ignoble subterfuges and equivocal expedients. All Donna Maria's goodness and faith and single mindedness were powerless to disarm him. As the foundation of his work of seduction with her he had taken a verse from one of the Psalms:--_Asperges me hyssopo et mundabor--lavabis me et super nirem dealbabor_. And she, poor, hapless, devoted creature, imagined that she was saving a soul alive, redeeming an intellect, washing away by her own purity the stains that sin had left on him. She still believed implicitly in the ever-remembered words he had spoken to her in the park, on that Epiphany of Love, within sight of the sea; and it was just in this belief that she found comfort and support in the midst of the religious conflict that rent her conscience; this belief that blinded her to all suspicion and filled her with a soil of mystic intoxication wherein she opened the secret floodgates of her heart and let loose all her pent-up tenderness, and let the sweetest flowers of her womanhood blossom out resplendently.