“... A sedere, con le dita delle mani insieme tessute, tenendovi dentro il ginocchio stanco.”
LEONARDO DA VINCI
“Dov è più sentimento, li è più martirio.”
Ibid
And I led them among the flowers.
They listened with visible emotion to the infinite melodies of springtime, bending or turning sometimes towards their own shadows, which preceded or followed them like blue figures prostrated to kiss the earth. A confused feeling of the joy of liberty and hope shone at times in their dazzled eyes; a voiceless word at times unclosed their lips, and likened them to the brims of overflowing goblets. And when they paused, I thought with inward intoxication of the fulness of life which was suffocating them.
The things that we said to each other from time to time must have seemed futile to them also; but they were enough to make us feel the depth of our true life. A passing glance, a bend of the head, a short pause, sufficed to stir to their depths those abysses which the faint light of ordinary consciousness rarely penetrates, while that which we were saying seemed as far away to us as the deepest roots of trees are far from the murmur of the uppermost branches.
Nothing could have equalled the strange beauty of that stern country in full blossom. On the tawny ground, shaggy as a lion’s mane, the pink-and-white flowers suggested pictures of maidens lying trembling on the vast hairy bosoms of legendary giants. The rays of the sun played round the transparent petals and gave them the dancing splendour of precious stones. Here and there the polished ploughshares with which the land had been turned up glittered in dual radiance.
We realised the depth of our real life. And little by little, by common consent, we forbore to utter those empty words which had only served to break the solemnity of the silence, and to disperse the heavy cloud of dreams and thoughts which hung over us. We were united by a clearer and more intimate communion; an atmosphere of divination such as the mystics breathe sprang up around us, and without speaking we exchanged the profoundest secrets. Sometimes we were so steeped in delight that it surged from our eyes in a glance, and our slightest gestures expressed, without actual contact, all that is conveyed by the most lingering caress. The petals which fell at our feet from the almost motionless boughs, moved us strangely, like a confession of languor on the part of the trees, and of a delight in relieving themselves. The vines, all ready to bud, bending over the earth in contorted, struggling shapes, stimulated us with the example of a painful effort about to be changed into an intoxicating gift. And in the frail petal and slight tendril we felt the ideal virtue of the fragrant almond-oil and the flame of oblivion given by the grape.
A sudden agitation seized me one day when I saw a drop of blood on Violante’s hand, which had been pricked by a thorn among the flowers of a snowy hedge. Smiling, she withdrew the beautiful hand on which the drop was rising; and as we chanced to be at some distance from her sisters, and perhaps unobserved, I felt a wild desire to press my lips upon the blood and taste its sweetness. And the effort I made to restrain myself was so great that I trembled.
“Do you dislike the sight of blood?” she asked me in a voice which dissimulation was not able to steady or to make playful.
And as her eyes looked into mine I felt myself turning pale, for I had an indefinable feeling within me which can only be vaguely compared to an immense wheel revolving with lightning-like speed and suddenly brought to a standstill. Something great was being resolved upon in that moment by each of us; and although we preserved a composed attitude with regard to each other, our inward attitude was one of extreme tension preceding an irrepressible outburst. Our two lives yearned towards each other with their whole force.
Ah, shall I ever forget that burning silence trembling with the invisible flight of a messenger bearing the unspoken word? What power of oblivion will ever be able to efface from my memory that hand beaded with blood, and that hill slope covered with blossom?
Anatolia’s voice called to us in the distance, and we moved on side by side. A sudden bodily weariness and sadness had fallen upon us, as if we had just passed from a long night of pleasure.
But there were moments also when my soul inclined rather towards her who had called us, and towards her who was about to depart. I rejoiced in these changes of love, which did not dissipate my energies, but stimulated them as wind fans the flame. I seemed to have discovered a new set of perceptions; the strangest and most diverse ones seemed to combine spontaneously within me. Sometimes they gave birth to such novel and beautiful music that I felt on the point of being transfigured, and I thought that my desire to become like unto the gods was about to be realised.
I thought: “If ever there was a god who loved to sit in the springtime beneath the flowering trees and entice the hamadryads from their hiding-places to caress them in his arms, he certainly never experienced greater enjoyment than I feel in gathering up the essential beauty of these delicious beings, and mingling it together with the same ease with which he might weave the diverse obedient locks of his tree nymphs into a golden harmony.”
Thus at times I felt as though I were living in a myth which the youth of the human soul created under the skies of Hellas. The ancient spirit of deity was abroad upon the earth, as it was when the daughter of Rhea gave to Triptolemus the gift of ears of corn that he might sow them in the furrows, and that all men by him might enjoy the divine benefit. The immortal energies which flowed through visible things seemed always conscious of the old transfiguring spirit that used to convert them into great symbols of beauty for the enjoyment of men. Three in number, like the Graces, the Gorgons, and the Fates, were the maidens who moved with me through this mysterious springtime. And I loved to compare myself to the youth pictured on the vase of Ruvo, who is enticing a winged genius across the threshold of a myrtle grove. Over his head is written the name Happiness, and three maidens surround him; one bears in her hands a dish heaped up with fruit, another is wrapped in a starry mantle, and the third has the thread of Lachesis in her nimble fingers.
One day we came by chance on a piece of enclosed ground, which the peasant cultivators had, according to the old heathen custom, dedicated to an oak-tree struck by lightning.
“What a beautiful death!” exclaimed Violante, as she leant over the oblong wooden fence which protected it.
The lonely place was full of almost terrible solemnity. The aspect of the altar which the Latin priests consecrated with the sacrifice of a white lamb must have been something like this.
“You are committing sacrilege,” I said to Violante. “This sacred enclosure cannot be touched without profanation. Heaven punishes the transgressor with madness....”
“With madness?...” she said, and drew away with a kind of instinctive superstition; her action gave an unexpected seriousness to my allusion to the pagan belief.
In one flash I saw the pale, swollen face of her mad mother, and Antonello’s wandering eyes, and I heard again the tragic cry: “We are breathing her madness”; and an icy sensation of fatality ran through me.
“No, no, don’t be afraid!” I said involuntarily, only deepening the shadow, perhaps, by thus clearly expressing my regret for the remark which must have seemed like a gloomy omen or a cruel presentiment.
“I am not afraid,” she replied, without smiling, as she leant over the fence again.
Thus from an idle word was born a great shadow.
The stricken tree rose before us, hard and black as basalt, its stony trunk torn open to the roots by a rent which testified to the awfulness of vindictive force. Its torn side was bare of branches, but there were a few left at the top of the other side, flinging the implacable despair of their gestures up to the sun. At each corner of the enclosure was fixed a ram’s skull with curved horns, bleached by the sun and rain of numberless seasons. Everything was motionless, dead, and sacred, and primeval in appearance.
From time to time the cries of the hawks pierced the blue sky.
The days passed by rapidly; they were days of farewell to her who was about to depart.
“Gaze at the springtime with the whole strength of your eyes,” I used to say to her, “for you will never see it again, never again!”
I said also to her—
“Warm your hands in the sun, bathe them in the sun, poor hands, for soon you will have to keep them crossed on your breast, or hidden in the shade under the brown woollen habit.” I would say as I showed her a flower—
“Here is a miracle for which you ought to thank Heaven. Think of the thousand legends contained in the silver network of this blossom, of the hidden relation between the number of petals and stamens, of the slender threads which support the lobes of the pistils, of this transparent robe, this web, these valves and membranes covered with almost invisible down, which enclose the mysterious agitation of the seed vessels. Think of all the divine art revealed in the structure of this living creation, gifted in its fragility with infinite powers of love and fertility. See the moving tracery of shadow which the trembling leaves cast on the earth, and the same tracery painted on the wall, to cheer your melancholy, in rays now blue and now golden; and the little, white fingers at the tips of the pine branches; and the drops of dew hanging from the beard of the oats; and the delicate veins in the wings of the bee; and the dazzling green of the dragon-fly; and the iridescent colours on the dove’s neck; and the strange shapes of lichen stains; and the holes in tree-trunks; and the composition of crystals.... Store away all these marvels under those eyelids of yours, which will have to be lowered for so long before Christ crucified. I don’t think there are any gardens in the old monastery of Queen Sancia, only stone cloisters.”
“Why do you tempt me?” she used to ask. “Why do you enjoy disturbing my weak will? Have you been sent by God to try me?”
“I don’t wish to disturb your will,” I replied, “but only to give you brotherly advice, which may help you to suffer less. I think that after you are buried, when you cannot look out of the grated windows without hurting your cheek against the bars—I think that you who have grown up in a garden will have to pass through a few weeks of furious impatience, when all the visions of the open air will pass before your memory. Then it will be inexpressible torture to you if you cannot recall the exact details of the tiny black and yellow speckles on the lizard’s back, or the tender downy leaf which buds on the branch of an apple-tree. I know the madness of such belated curiosity. Once I was passionately fond of a great Scotch deerhound my father had given me. He was a magnificent beast, very graceful, and extraordinarily well bred. When he died I was in the greatest misery; and it used to torment me strangely that I could not exactly recall the precise shape of the specks of gold in his brown eyes, and the grey marks in his beautiful rosy mouth when one caught a glimpse of it in a yawn or a bark. We ought, therefore, to look with attentive eyes at everything, especially at the creatures we love. Do you not love the things I was speaking to you about just now? and are you not about to leave them? Are you not about to place a kind of death between them and you?”
She sat, the fingers of her hands clasped together, holding within them the weary knee. Her delicate grace was a little disturbed by the trouble she felt at the ambiguity of my words, half serious and half playful, half deceptive and half sincere. And speaking in this way gave me the same pleasure as I should have felt in ruffling the smooth bands of that hair over which the silver scissors of the tonsure were hanging. “Tondeantur in rotundum....” Still clear in my memory was the fresh ring of the youthful laugh rippling from her mouth at the closing hour of that first day, and filling me with wonder. And it pleased my fancy to group the pictures of all these slight, many-coloured things around the novice, who, in that already far-away February afternoon, had showed me as a secret miracle the nightly blossoming of her white hawthorn.
I used to seek her as one seeks some good thing which one knows to be ephemeral. She attracted me like a pure figure of youth, turning to me with a tearful smile on the threshold of a gloomy door, through which she was about to pass, and be lost to sight. I should like to have said to her sisters: “Let me love her as long as she is of this world; let me pour spices over her little feet!” During my long visits it often happened that I was alone with her, and could enter into spiritual converse with her docile soul, ever anxious to obey. From time to time Anatolia would disappear, when one or other of the two grey maids came to summon her with a look. There were some days when Violante scarcely appeared at all. She seemed to avoid my society, to look upon me with indifference, to have fallen back into her usual apathy. The two brothers could not stand the full light of the open air for very long, and so I often found myself alone with the little novice, sitting on a marble seat beneath the statue of Summer in the outer court, or in the shadow of the already verdant trellises over the steps, or on the edge of the dried-up fish pond. I would say to her—
“Perhaps you may have deceived yourself in the choice of your Bridegroom, sweet sister. When you hear the bishop saying, 'Ecce sponsus venit,’ you will tremble in your secret heart, and will expect a fair, strong hand to be stretched out to you, and to gather you up entirely, like water in the hollow of a palm; for this is the sweet, powerful attitude which you expect of your conqueror, and which is best suited to your flexibility, sweet sister. But perhaps you may be deluded at the very foot of the altar. And if you dare to lift your eyes, you will see, amid the burning candles, the promised Bridegroom motionless, with His pierced hands, and His head crowned with thorns. You will feel obliged, sweet sister, to draw out those cruel nails, driven in so deep. And terrible strength will seem to be required to fulfil such an action. And then the wounds will have to be dressed with infinite patience, and with balsams made of herbs only to be gathered on certain giddy heights, where the air is too rarefied to breathe. And the wounds once closed, the blood bursting from the veins will have to be forced back into its proper channels. And after the toilsome work has been completed, perhaps the newly-healed hands will withdraw altogether. To very few brides is it granted to see them perfectly restored again; and even among the elect there is scarcely one to whom on some mystic evening is vouchsafed the supreme joy of feeling herself altogether possessed, altogether folded within the constraining clasp, as you desire to be....”
The submissive maiden murmured—
“God grant that I may be that one!”
“Ah, sweet sister,” I said to her, “only think what immense strength that one must possess to revive a dead hand and to draw it so ardently to herself!”
“I have not any strength, but I will ask it of the Lord.”
“The Lord can only give you back the strength you have given to Him, Massimilla.”
“Be silent, please!” she implored. “I am afraid your words are impious.”
“They are not impious; you need not fear listening to them. Do you not remember the first lines of the Commentary of St. Theresa? She speaks there of a God imprisoned. Think what power is required to enchain the Lord! You see, Sister Water, what unceasing acts of strength are required of the Bride who is sung in the Antiphons and Responses. That is why, as I have a brotherly anxiety for you, I want at least to prepare your soul for the bitterness of disillusion. Do not lull it too much with the promises of the Psalms! There is, I think, some magnificent joyous promise in the verses you have learned, 'Veni, Electa mea....’ 'Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo! the winter is past ... the voice of the turtle is heard in our land ... the vines with the tender grapes give a good smell.’ Ah, the Latin of the Psalms is incomparable in producing a picture of the intoxication of love sinking under suffocating wealth. Some of the verses seem to drop with fragrant oil like the hair of slaves, or to be heavy and glittering as nuggets of gold. When the bishop places the crown of virginal merit on your head, your lips will have to pronounce wonderful words—words in which I see and feel some mysterious weight and splendour. 'Et immensis monilibus ornavit me.’ Wonderful words! Are they not?”
She was looking at me now with such passion that all her little soul trembled like a tear on her eyelashes, and by merely bending forward I could have drunk it.
“Perhaps I may be hurting you a little,” I went on. “But I see such dreams burning in the depths of your eyes that I am afraid for you, sweet sister; for the life for which you are preparing yourself cannot be in accordance with your dreams or with your nature. What is awaiting you is a monotonous life, always the same, almost torpid, all mapped out by the unchangeable Rule, in the old convent of Queen Sancia, which has been the grave of more than one Montaga, and of more than one Cantelma. There is a picture in my memory of those Poor Clares one Ash Wednesday. When I was in Naples, the Angevin Church of Santa Chiara had an attraction for me, not only because some of my ancestors lie there, not only because there one may envy the Duke of Rodi his sleep in the pagan sarcophagus of Protesilaus and Laodamia, but also because there with closed eyes one can absorb the poetry diffused by the beautiful names of dead women. There is Maria, Duchess of Durazzo and Empress of Constantinople, there is the Princess Clemenza, there is Isotta d’Altamura, and Isabella di Soleto, and Beatrice di Caserta, and that delicious Antonia Gaudino, who is very like you, as she softly sleeps in marble under a veil which Giovanni da Nola must have borrowed from the youngest of the Graces. I have a picture in my memory of the Poor Clares on Ash Wednesday. Behind the high altar there is a great black grating, all covered with spikes, enclosing the convent choir; and through it one can see the rows of stalls where the sisters sit, while on this side of the barrier the bishop, served by a Capuchin, is seated with a silver basin full of ashes in his hands. A shutter is opened in the grating, and one by one the Clares come and kneel at it. The bishop thrusts his feeble arm through the hole and marks their foreheads one by one with the sign of the cross. As each has been signed she rises and returns to her stall like a ghost, brushing the pavement with silent feet shod in felt. It all goes on in silence, and it is all icy like the ashes. Ah, sweet sister, when you too have been frozen like that, who will there be to warm your little soul?”
“Who warmed the soul of St. Clara and made it glow?” objected the novice, rousing herself to escape defeat, while the colour rose in her cheeks.
“A man: St. Francis of Assisi. You cannot think of the Sister of St. Damian except on her knees at the feet of Francis. A religious painter has pictured her in the act of exchanging a kiss with the seraphic father. And think of the long idyll woven between the hermitage of St. Damian and the Portiuncula; think of that week of passion, sorrow, and pity passed in the convent garden, under the shadow of the olives, during a summer of great drought, when Clara used to drink the tears from the almost blind eyes of Francis; think of the converse between the two mystical lovers which preceded that ecstasy whence the Song of the Creatures burst like a flash of light. You have the Fioretti beside you. Very well, read over the chapter in which it tells 'How St. Clara ate with St. Francis.’ Never was wedding banquet lit up by more radiant torches of love. Here it is: 'The men of Assisi and Beltona, and of all the country round about, saw that Santa Maria degli Angeli, and the whole place, and the forest round about it, were burning brightly, and it seemed as if a great fire were devouring the church and the place and the forest together; whereupon the men of Assisi ran thither with great haste to put out the fire, believing that in very truth everything was burning. But when they reached the place and found no fire at all, they entered in and found St. Francis with St. Clara.’ You see now, sweet sister, how the patroness of your order was able to take shelter from the frost. You must admit that between the sunny hermitage of St. Damian and the gloom of your Angevin convent the difference is great. There will be no fire there, only a uniform grey shadow where humility is powerless. What sort of humility is yours, Massimilla? I think your desire for slavery is a very lofty one.”
She sat in silence, discouraged and gasping; and she was so sweet and so miserable in her distress, that I should like to have taken her on my knees.
“When you appeared to me the first day on the steps, you reminded me directly of an ermine. Well, somehow it seems as if in our imagination the whiteness of ermine could not be separated from the pride of the purple, so much accustomed are we to see them together on royal mantles. Perhaps you wear your mantle inside out, Massimilla, so that the purple is invisible underneath. That is often the way with a Montaga.”
“I don’t know,” she answered vaguely. “It seems as if everything you say must be true.”
It was as if she was making a confession—
“I will be what you wish me to be.”
“If I were your husband, Massimilla,” I added, to soothe her little trembling soul, “I would give you a house where the light should enter through slabs of honey-coloured alabaster, or through windows painted with legends; you should be served by ladies-in-waiting and mutes shod with felt and dressed in quiet colours, who would pass by you like great night-moths; and some of the rooms should have crystal walls looking over immense pools of water, hidden from sight by curtains which your hand could easily draw back whenever you felt the desire of a dream voyage with open eyes over an ocean valley full of strange rich forms of life; and round the house I would make you a garden of trees which should strew flowers and weep spices, and it should be peopled with gentle, graceful animals, such as gazelles, doves, swans, peacocks. And there in harmony with everything around you, you should live for me alone. And every day, after satisfying my desire of rulership over men by some worthy act, I would come and breathe the rarefied air of your silent love, I would come and live by your side the pure life of my thoughts. And sometimes I would inspire you with a vehement fever; and sometimes I would make you weep inexplicable tears; and sometimes I would make you die and come to life again, so that I might appear more than man in your eyes.”
Was she in the meantime preparing herself for departure, or was she lingering, impatiently expecting that which for her henceforth was not to be?
As I walked up the alley of old box-trees where Violante had first appeared to me under the great archway, she came to meet me almost at the same place, smiling a new smile.
“You look like an angel bringing good tidings to-day,” I said. “The whole spirit of April is in you.”
She gave me her hand, which I took and held for a moment in my own.
“What have you got to tell me?” I asked, for I read in her eyes the presence of something new which transfigured her.
My look embarrassed her; and once more her colour rose, seeming almost violent in contrast to her pallor.
“Nothing,” she said.
“And yet,” I said, “your whole figure seems to express annunciation. You shall tell me about it without speaking, if you will allow me to walk beside you for a little. I have never felt your harmony so perfect, Massimilla, as just now.”
She certainly thought I was speaking to her of love, she was so confused. And there shone from her whole figure such a bright spirit of gentleness, that I thought once more of those gentle ladies assembled in the imagination of young Dante; from whose lips from time to time fell words mingled with sighs, as falls “water mingled with beautiful snow.” And because I loved her in a superhuman way, some of those ancient words came back to my memory: “To what purpose dost thou love thus? Tell us, for certain it is that the purpose of such love must be quite new.”
We had left the central alley, and were now penetrating into the grassy labyrinth. The bird guests of the cloister were singing, bright insects buzzed around; but my ear was listening to the rustle of the hem of her skirt as it bent down the heads of the long grass. At last Massimilla confessed, in a shy voice—
“My departure has been put off.”
She added, as if to justify herself—
“So I shall be able to keep the last Easter with my own people.”
But to me it seemed as if she had suddenly fallen into my arms, and as if her cheek were clinging to my breast so closely that to unclasp her from me would be to hurt her.
Nevertheless I exclaimed—
“That is good news!”
And I said nothing else, for my emotion at the contact with that throbbing life was so fierce that it prevented any pitiful feigning. It was clear that she expected words of love and joy from me; that I should take her hand and ask: “Will you renounce your vows for ever and be mine entirely?” That was what she expected. And feeling her anguish so close to me, feeling her longing to surrender herself and be happy fanning my face almost like a flame, a shudder ran through me, such as a man would feel if he were suddenly shown a great wound where the most hidden intricacies of the living flesh were laid bare. There was something of that horror in my suffering. Up to that time I had played with the gentle soul, treating it like soft locks of hair through which it was sweet to run one’s fingers with the knowledge that next day it would be cut off. And now this soul was clinging to mine with its whole anguish.
“I could make thee a creature of joy!” It was like a promise, it was almost passion. Both promise and passion too had rung in my last words; and indeed at that very hour my attentive ear had been able at times, as I bent over that sweet soul, to discern some trace of the hidden vein whence the beautiful sudden laughter had sprung one day. Ah, why was I doomed to deceive such sorrowful hope, and to renounce crowning my powers with that silent adoration?
We were alone, and it was a strange solitude in which I could almost feel the emptiness of the airy space that the two other figures would have occupied had they been beside us. And the restlessness which their absence produced in my spirit was as painful as the stress of waiting.
“Where were Anatolia and Violante, what were they doing just then? Were they also in the garden?” I saw them appearing at the turn of every path, and imagined the expression of their first look as they met us. And I thought of the strangeness of the behaviour of both during the past few days, and sought to discover its true meaning. Anatolia rose before me with her kind, heroic, martyr’s smile, resigned to pour out her heart’s strength to the last drop that she might soothe incurable ills; she rose before me with those pure eyes of hers, which at times flashed invitingly like the waters of legendary lakes when a sudden glitter reveals the existence of hidden treasures. Wrapped in her apathy and disdain, Violante rose before me in an enigmatic attitude which might almost be hostile, and inspired me with a kind of discomfort such as gloomy presentiments are wont to produce; for behind her in my imagination was her fatal rock, and the mystery of her distant apartments clouded with deadly perfumes.
I should like to have asked her who was at my side: “Is there any change in your beloved sisters’ voices when they speak to you or to each other? Is there anything that hurts you sometimes in their voices and their looks? And at times when you are sitting side by side breathing the same air, does a heavy silence fall upon you, like the silence before a storm? And then do you feel all your tenderness dry up, and a bitterness like venom rise within you? And, tell me, do your sisters weep apart? Or does it sometimes happen that you all weep together?”
Thus would I fain have questioned the silent maiden, and with her have suffered the pain of loving.
I looked at her. She was suffering and rejoicing. “You always carry a book,” I said, for the sake of breaking the charm, “like a sibyl.”
She showed me the volume.
“It is the book I had that first day,” she said, with the indefinable tone in her voice which betrays the moisture of tears.
“And the blade of grass?”
“Is burnt up.”
“Put in a red rose instead.”
But there was such humble grace in her emotion, she let her inward ardour appear so ingenuously, that I could not leave her, nor resist the sweetness of seeing her melt little by little.
“Let us sit down,” I said. “Let us read a few pages together. Do you like this place?”
It was a little mound in the meadow, starred with anemones, and peaceful; some pointed yew-trees near gave it something of the look of a cemetery. In the centre, a caryatid, bent double so that her breast touched her knees, supported the marble slab of a sundial. And there, like seats at a table, were two benches for a couple of lovers who might wish as they looked on the shadow of the dial to experience the melancholy delight of perishing slowly and harmoniously together. Carved in the marble under the figures of the hours, this legend was still traceable—
ME LUMEN, VOS UMBRA REGIT.
“Let us sit down here,” I said. “It is a delicious place to enjoy the April sunshine and feel life flowing on.”
A green lizard lying on the slab looked at us out of its small glittering eyes quite fearlessly like a familiar spirit. When we sat down, it disappeared. Then I laid my hand on the marble, which was very hot.
“It is almost burning. Feel!”
Massimilla laid both her hands on it, white upon white, and kept them there. The point of the shadow reached the tip of her ring-finger, and the number of the hour was covered by her palm.
“See how the hand points to you as the hour of beatitude,” I said, for I profoundly enjoyed the harmonious grace of her action, and I loved her thus.
She half closed her eyes, and once more her little soul trembled on her eyelashes like a tear, and I could have drunk it by merely bending forward.
“The saint,” I added, touching the book, “has a divine verse for you in the waves of her prose, a verse supremely sweet, sweeter than those which rose in Dante’s mind before his exile. 'Stava quasi beata dolorosa!’”
She felt surrounded by light and love, as perhaps she may have felt before in her secret dreams; and she drank from my words and my presence, and from her own illusions and the fresh springtime, an intoxication of which the memory would perhaps fill her whole life. She did not speak, she sat motionless in the attitude I had praised; but I understood the ineffable things spoken by the eloquent blood in the veins of her beautiful bare hands.
“Let me love her as long as she is of this world!” I repeated to her sisters, while their sad eyes seemed to gaze at me through the branches of the yew-trees. “Let me gather these anemones and strew them on the hair which is so soon to be shaven!”
She sat there almost beatified, and her unconsciousness touched me, for I loved her, and was saying to her: “I love thee, but on condition that to-morrow thou diest. I give thee this flame that thou mayest carry it with thee into thy grave. Such is the necessity which compels us.”
She sat up and pressed her hands over her face, and murmured—
“This sun is stupefying.”
“Would you like to go?” I asked.
“No,” she replied, with a faint smile. “According to your advice, I ought to bathe myself in sunshine. Let us stay here a little longer. You said you wanted to read a few pages.”
She seemed as exhausted as if she had just come out of a swoon.
“Read, there!” she begged, pushing the book towards me.
I took it, opened it, and turned over the leaves here and there, running my eyes over a few lines. The flying shadow of a swallow passed over the pages, and we heard the rustle of wings close by.
“How astonished I was,” she added, “when you repeated St. Catherine’s exhortation to me that day! I was still full of her spirit, and you were magician enough to speak to me of her.”
There was such perfect confidence and abandonment in her voice, that she could not have signified to me more plainly: “Here am I, I am thine; I belong entirely to thee as no other living creature can, as no inanimate thing can belong to thee. I am thy slave and thy chattel.”
She really seemed to possess a supernatural quality, to abolish in herself that law in love which denies to man the privilege of being the giver and the perpetual and perfect possession of the other. She really seemed in the full sunlight to be transfigured by my imagination into some crystal fluid, to become a liquid essence for me to absorb, and bathe myself in like a perfume.
“I think,” I said, “that sometimes when you read this book you must feel your soul evaporate like a drop of water on burning iron. Do you not? 'Fire and abyss of charity dissolve for ever the cloud of my body!’ cries the Saint. And you have marked these words in the margin. You have a continual aspiration to fade away.”
Her pale face smiled at me in the sunshine, looking almost transparent against the whiteness of the marble.
“Here is another place marked: 'Soul intoxicated, tormented, and burning with love.’ And here is another: 'Be thou a tree of love, grafted into the tree of life.’ What eloquence of passion the virgin has! She fascinates all the silent, because she speaks and cries aloud for them. But that which makes the book precious to whoever loves life is the abundance of life-blood flowing through it, for ever boiling and flaming like a sacrificial altar on the day of great sacrifices. This Dominican nun seems to have had a crimson view of the world. She sees everything through a veil of burning blood. 'The memory is filled with blood,’ she says. 'I shall find the blood and the living creatures, and I shall drink their love and affection in blood.’ A kind of ruddy madness assails her at times. 'Drown yourselves in blood,’ she cries; 'bathe yourselves in blood, intoxicate yourselves in blood, clothe yourselves in blood, mourn for yourselves in blood, rejoice in blood, grow and strengthen yourselves in blood!’ She knows the full value of that sweet and terrible liquid, for she sees it not only in the chalice, but bursting from the veins of mankind, she who has been caught in the whirlwind of life, who has worn her veil in the midst of the fierce hatred and violent passions which have made her century beautiful. Here is that marvellous letter of hers to Brother Raimondo of Capua. Have you ever been able to read it without trembling to your very marrow? 'And his head lay on my breast. Then I felt a great joy within me, and the odour of his blood rose up.’ What I perceive here is not only the eucharistic ecstasy, but also real voluptuousness. I can almost see the young woman’s delicate nostrils tremble and dilate. Hers too is that sentence I admire so much: 'Arming oneself with one’s own sensuality.’ Her senses must have been very acute, for her whole writings glow with lively images, strong in colour and movement, and almost Dantesque in their vigour and audacity. Ah, sweet sister, she is not the guide to lead you peacefully to the door of the cloister! Her Dominican robe is full not only of the odour of blood, but of all the odours of the proud life through which she moved unconquered. A vast multitude clothed in sackcloth and in purple, in iron and in gold, have swept her away like a whirlwind, with 'the fire of anger and hatred,’ which burns just as fiercely as the fire of love. Friars, nuns, hermits, light women, soldiers of fortune, princes, cardinals, queens, popes, all the different temperaments of a hard and magnificent century she deals with by her indefatigable will. She is powerful in contemplation and in action. She calls Alberico of Balbiano her 'beloved brother,’ and the knights of the company of St. George her 'beloved sons.’ And she dares to write to Queen Joanna of Naples: 'Alas, one must weep over you as over one dead!’ And to Gregory XI.: 'Be a brave man and not a coward.’ And to the King of France she says: 'I will.’ That is why I admire her, Massimilla, and also because she possesses a Garden, a House, and a Cell of self-knowledge; and because this saying is hers: 'To eat and taste souls’; and lastly, because it was she who wrote, before da Vinci: 'The intellect nourishes the affections. Who knows most, loves most; and loving most, enjoys most.’ Lofty words, which are the rule of all beautiful inward life.”
As I was speaking, I could follow in Massimilla’s wide open, steady eyes the slow rhythm of a wave which seemed to have some mysterious musical relation with the sound of my voice; and this sensation was so new and strange to me, that I prolonged what I was saying for fear of interrupting it.
Indeed, hardly had I ceased speaking, when she bowed her head, and in silence let two rivers of tears flow from her limpid eyes.
I did not ask her why she wept; but I took her hands, which were like soft leaves burning with the midday heat. And under that glowing April sky, beside that dazzling marble on which the shadow of the hand of the dial seemed to have lain motionless for an indefinite time, amidst those funereal yews and wreaths of anemones, I tasted a few moments of unspeakable exultation. I saw a spirit, not my own, suddenly reach that part of life—and for a few seconds rest there—beyond which, according to Dante’s words, none can pass with intent to return.
And it seemed to me that afterwards the rest of love and life could not have any value for that spirit.
After this the blessed maiden seemed to resume the aspect of a figure of Prayer, in which she had appeared to me the first day, as she sat between her two brothers. Lifting her veil to look into the depth of her eyes, I had seen a swift miracle worked under my gaze. The memory of it dazzled me still, but the veil had fallen again, and for ever.
Once more she seemed to me like one who has “departed from this present age.”
So much so, that when Oddo, one day, told me the pitiful story of her engagement broken off by death, I listened as one listens to a legend of ancient times, and felt then how strong and genuine my intellectual detachment was.
She had been loved and asked in marriage by Simonetto Belprato two years before; and, like Iphanea, had lost her betrothed almost on the eve of the wedding.
“Già vicino alle sue nozze, beata
Le ghirlande apprestava; e le fu spento.”
Oddo recalled to my mind the faint memory of Simonetto, and described to me the gentle youthful figure of the student, last heir of a noble family of Trigento, living a retired life with his widowed mother in the country, where he studied botany and died.
“Poor Simonetto!” said Oddo with brotherly regret, “I can see him still in his botanising dress, his tin case slung over one shoulder, his iron-shod stick and his green morocco pocket-book. He used to spend almost his whole time botanising, or preparing and drying the plants he had collected. His house was full of herbariums, and he might well stamp his floreated coat-of-arms as an emblem on their covers. You know what the Belprato arms are?—a shield divided by a bar of gold, the upper half red with a silver lily, the lower green, strewn with red flowers and golden leaves. Is it not a strange coincidence, Claudio? That the last of the Belprato should be a botanist! I used to prophesy to Massimilla in fun: 'You will end between two leaves of grey paper.’ They were betrothed to each other in the garden over his collecting, and they seemed made for each other. We were pleased too, for Massimilla would have entered a good family, and would not have lived very far away from us. (The Belprato, as you know, are of very ancient nobility, though during the last few centuries they have decayed. They came over from Spain to Naples with Alphonso of Aragon.) Everything was ready for the wedding. I remember so well the day that the wedding-dress, the kind gift of our aunt Sabrano, arrived from Naples with its wreath of orange blossom. Massimilla tried it on; it was delicious. Antonello and I wanted Anatolia and Violante to try it on for luck; poor dear creatures! The wreath, I remember, got twisted among Violante’s hair in such a strange way that it was impossible to take it off without tearing out a few hairs clinging to the flowers. One of the servants muttered that it was a bad omen. She was right. Simonetto was, indeed, to fall a victim to his mania. It was autumn, and he used often to go to Linturno to gather the water plants on the stagnant river. There it was that he contracted the germs of the poisonous fever which carried him off in two days. We had a funeral instead of a wedding. Our usual bad fortune!”
We were in Antonello’s rooms; the blinds were drawn, and the place was half dark, for outside the day was clouding over. I could not see the sky out of the windows, yet I could feel the sensation of the gentle, rather enervating, heat outside, and I felt sure that out of doors a few drops of rain had begun to fall, some of those warm tears that are so soft when they fall on face or hands. Antonello was lying motionless on his bed without speaking. Every now and then a swallow could be heard chattering.
“Perhaps,” I asked Oddo, “that is why Massimilla is going into the convent?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think so,” he replied. “It is a long time ago now. But certainly life in this house must be more wearisome for her than for the others. I always think she must feel as dried up and extinguished as the plants in the herbariums Simonetto left her in his will. Ah, that wedding-dress laid by in a cupboard like a relic! Think of it! That white robe which by this time must be full of the odour of dried plants! Think of it! Do you think that death can have any museum in the world sadder than that of which Massimilla is the guardian? Sometimes I am unjust; sometimes I cannot conceal the bitterness that rises in my heart when I think that Massimilla is going away, is going to forsake us. I feel as if her departure would bring about the final dissolution. I feel as though a whirlwind would come to scatter and destroy us all, like a heap of useless rags. And she in the meantime is seeking to save herself. But I am unjust. She is perhaps the most unhappy of all us here. What I used to say to her in jest has come true. She believes herself to have become like the leaves and flowers in a herbarium. To revive herself, to call up the illusion of living, she forces herself into contact with living things. Have you not seen her plunge her hands in the grass and hold them there, so as to feel the caterpillars and insects among it run over her skin? Don’t you know the hours and hours she spends in the garden looking for animals, and making friends with them? In all this she is, as you said, a pattern of Franciscan perfection. But what would you say if you knew that it is really nothing but an anxious desire to realise life? I understand it; I am perhaps the only one who understands....”
He said the last words in a low voice, almost as if he were talking to himself; then he paused, possibly to contemplate within himself the creation of his disturbed fancy. Was it only the dream of a sick man? Or did the living Massimilla really correspond to this forsaken guardian of dead plants? I did not linger over such doubts; for I wished to absorb all the poetry which the strange fancies diffused through the shadow of the room, where now the faint patter of the rain reached us, and awakened in my nostrils the desire to inspire the savour of the moist earth. I rose and opened the nearest window a little; the smell of the earth floated in.
“During the first few months after Simonetto’s death,” Oddo resumed, “she took great care of the herbariums. She used to pass long hours in the room where they were kept, examining the plants and reading the labels. And I used often to keep her company, for I was very sorry for her. One day, I remember, I came upon her opening the cupboard in the same room where her wedding-dress was kept. Another day, I remember, in the springtime I saw her quite agitated because one of the narcissus bulbs had flowered.... It was strange, wasn’t it, Claudio? I saw that bulb come up again last spring. And this year? I have not asked Massimilla.... Shall we go and see?”
He rose to his feet, seized with a feverish impatience, and took a few steps towards the door. But Antonello, who was still lying on his pillows, rose also with the same look—how well I remembered it!—as had passed over his face when he warned us of the coming of the gloomy sedan chair; and raising a finger to his lips to bid us keep silence, he leant against the wall which formed a side of the loggia and listened. Nothing was to be heard in the silence save the gentle monotonous patter of the soft spring shower in the enclosed garden.
“Don’t go out!” whispered Antonello.
We did not ask why, for the cause of his terror was evident in his thin contracted face. And as the sound of steps and voices reached us, Oddo went up to the door, opened it a little, and peeped out. I went up to it too, and, standing at his shoulder, I could see through the chink Anatolia leading her mother along the covered loggia, with her arm in hers, and one of the grey woman servants following. Princess Aldoina walked with difficulty, leaning her whole weight upon her daughter. She was strangely dressed in a grand gown with a long train, and was decked out with false jewellery. She looked pale and enormous, with her head raised and a little thrown back, her eyes half closed, and an indescribable smile playing on her lips, as if the sound of the rain on the pavement of the quadrangle had been a murmur of homage from courtiers, through whose ranks she was passing, a queen on the way to her throne. And the full light of sorrowful pity shone in the daughter’s face as she leant over the mad woman.
As the apparition vanished, our souls for a few moments were full of affectionate anguish. And while the echo of the sad footfalls was still audible, the maiden’s figure in that attitude of pity and sorrow which had revealed her to me in her true and supreme light rose before me with extraordinary clearness. And my inmost soul felt an almost religious awe, such as one feels in presence of a holy mystery; for none of the previous actions wrought before my eyes by this pure spirit of consolation seemed equal in value and significance to this action performed by her, all unconscious of my hidden gaze. She rose suddenly to a sublime height in my soul; she shone with the whole glory of her moral beauty, supported by the whole force of her heroic will. Contemplated thus, apart from any affinity to myself, in the secret of her own life to which I was a stranger, in the absolute sincerity of her feeling, she seemed to me a being of an ideal race; and my spirit linked her with those noble creatures immortalised by the poets, divine victims of a voluntary sacrifice. Antigone leading her blind father by the hand, or prostrating herself to strew dust over her brother’s corpse, was not more tender or stronger than she, had not a purer brow nor a larger heart. In the midst of that sort of languid monotony, in that enervating shadow where a sick man was sounding the depth of his own ills, and a restless voice was calling up a vision of empty misery from withered flowers, the consoler appeared suddenly bringing refreshment to my soul; and as a sudden light piercing a dark wall makes the motionless sword glitter among the hanging trophies, so did she strike a great flash out of my dormant will. There was strength in her to produce miraculous fruit. Her substance might have nourished a superhuman germ. She was indeed the “nourisher,” but such a one as the virgin Antigone appeared to the blind Œdipus when he was exiled and erring. Did not she alone, like the ancient heroine, keep alive in the depths of her great heart the genial flame which had been extinguished on the hearth of her failing race? Was not she alone the life of the gloomy house? Massimilla in her barren garden, Violante in her cloud of perfumes, paled before their sister as she walked along the path of self-sacrifice with so firm a step, so sweet a smile.
And I thought of Him who was to come.
We were sitting, Prince Luzio and I, near an open balcony about the hour in the afternoon when the fierce heat of that dying May was beginning to be tempered, and the pilgrim clouds were throwing a few deep blue shadows over the burning valley. The anniversary of King Ferdinand’s death was approaching, so the loyal Prince, who always celebrated it with mourning, was relating to me all the sorrows and horrors of the long agony of the King; and against a background of perfumes rising from the walled garden, the gloomy phantoms awakened by the aged voice followed each other in long succession. The silent journey over the heights of Ariano, and through the valley of Bovino amid snowstorms; the fatal omens which occurred at every step; the first signs of illness appearing one frosty evening when the King, numb with cold, was toiling over the ice which covered the slope; his anxious desire to continue on his road without any delays, as if an inexorable destiny were urging him on; the fearful pallor which suddenly came over him in presence of the crowd, amongst honours which he felt to be the last he would receive; the cries which the attack drew from him, but which were drowned by the clamour of the wedding feast; the distress of the doctors who assembled round his bed to consult under the hostile and suspicious eyes of the Queen; his burst of tears when the Duchess of Calabria, a fresh, youthful figure, entered the infected room where he lay aged and almost stupefied by suffering; then his tragic good-bye to his own statue as the nurses were carrying him into another room; then the embarcation on board ship, a ceremony as sad as a funeral, and his mournful words as the litter was carried down under the hatchways, which had been enlarged by the strokes of hatchets; then the arrival at Caserta, the rapid change for the worse, the putrid decay of his body on the great bed surrounded by sacred images, miraculous relics, crucifixes, lamps, and tapers; at the last the pomp of the Viaticum, the King sitting up among the pillows quite unrecognisable, to the terror of those present; the last words, the Christian serenity of his death, the dispute between the Queen and the doctors about the embalming of the body, the band of soldiers round the bier told off to cleanse incessantly the innumerable terrible sores;—all these sorrows and all these horrors passed through his recollection. And I listened and thought of the Duke of Calabria sobbing in a corner like a girl. “Ah, what grand and beautiful ambitions the odours of death might have nourished in his youthful soul through those terrible spring weeks! In what proud intoxicating meditations my soul would have been wrapped beneath the shadow of the great trees, and how petty the eager agitation caused by the stirring of the sap in their powerful trunks would have seemed in comparison with mine!”
Prince Luzio told me how one day the Duke of Calabria, trembling and aghast, suddenly entered his sick father’s room to tell him of the expulsion of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and with what violent words the King had condemned his relation’s timidity.
“Ah, if Ferdinand had not died!” exclaimed the old man, with an almost threatening gesture. “A few hours before he expired he said: 'The crown of Italy has been offered me....’ Don’t you think, Claudio, that a Bourbon might have been wearing it now?”
“Perhaps,” I replied, very respectfully. “And if it were so, the highest honours in the kingdom ought to be bestowed upon the Prince of Castromitrano. Let me tell you how much I admire your dignity and faith! You are one of the very few among our equals who have maintained the sentiment of the virtue of race intact and intense. Rather than renounce your privileges and take up an attitude unsuited to your legitimate pride, rather than appear only a survival of yourself, you retired from the world, but not until you had startled it with the supreme splendour of your magnificence; and you have sought in solitude to await the fortune which Fate may be reserving for your house. Misfortune has treated you as a great man, for sorrow also has its privileges, and yours have been fully acknowledged.”
The Prince’s fatherly face had become grave and attentive. The veneration I felt in my soul for his beautiful white head was far deeper than that expressed in my words; and added to it was a tender feeling so pure that only a feminine presence could have inspired it. The fact was that I felt the presence of Anatolia’s spirit. She had appeared on the threshold of the door at the end of the room, had passed silently along the wall, and had sat down in a shadowy corner, looking white, mysterious, and propitious as a family genius.
“Far away from the world though you are,” I added, “and wrapped in such a thick cloud of sadness, you have yet been able to nourish to this day hope of the resurrection of that which is dead; and the prophecy of your faith still rings in my ears. No doubt that which is dead shall rise again, but it shall be changed. If you were to turn your eyes for a single moment upon the spectacle which the world presents to-day, you would feel your dream fall from your soul like a dry leaf, and you would see that the recovery of his little state, and even the acquisition of Italy, would be useless to Francis of Bourbon. Whether a Bourbon or a Sabaudo be on the throne, the King is equally absent; for that man cannot be called a king who has submitted to the will of the many in accepting a prescribed and narrow office, and who then humbles himself to fill it with all the diligence and modesty of a public clerk who is perpetually spurred on by the fear of being dismissed. Do I not speak truly? Nor would Francis be able to reign in any other way. Directly after his father’s death he wrote out with his own hand an edict to re-establish the results of the abolished constitution. And it was Alessandro Nunziante who prevented its being published. Just think of the lamentable proclamation of the 8th December, dated from the guard-house at Gaeta. Was that the language of a king, and of a vanquished king?”
Prince Luzio had listened in silence, with knitted brows, and now he said, not without a shade of severity—
“One can see that you have the blood of Gian Paolo Cantelmo in your veins.”
“The blood of all my ancestors is in my veins. Ah, dear father (let me call you by that name!), I well know how painful it must be to you to renounce an ideal of justice before which the flame of your loyalty has burned for so many, many years; but I must tell you that for us and our like there is no salvation unless we substitute energetic purpose for empty hopes. Allow me to speak to you plainly and without circumlocution. It is useless to hope that any heroic fire will suddenly arise from the stagnant blood of Saint Louis. I have seen the exile quite recently; he is full of placid resignation, given up to good works and prayer; he remembers his short reign as a far-away, painful dream. Your prophecy would call up a mild, incredulous smile on his lips—that is all. If his spirit sometimes flies towards the bay, not Capodimonte but the height of Camaldoli is its goal. He has grown used to a quiet, pious life; the glitter of the crown no longer disturbs his nights. Let us leave him to sleep peacefully!”
The head of the loyal prince had fallen on his breast, and I saw the lines deepen on his bent brow like furrows full of thoughts.
“It is not for him alone that fate is dark. The twilight of kings is ashy, blinded of all glory. Look even beyond the Latin countries. Under the shadow of artificial thrones you will see false monarchs fulfilling their public duties with the accuracy of automatons, or giving their attention to the cultivation of their childish manias and their petty vices. The most powerful of all, the lord of the hugest multitudes, consumes away alone in his dark misanthropy, his herculean muscles corroded by the moth of suspicion. He has not even the taste for quenching the petty chemical formulas of his rebel subjects in some magnificent massacre by the naked sword, such as might water and fatten his barren lands. He has a truly royal soul, however, which perhaps you may have been able to study near at hand, for he is of the race of Maria Sophia. Wittelsbach attracts me by the immensity of his pride and his melancholy. His efforts to make his life conformable to his ideal are desperate in their violence. All human intercourse makes him shudder with disgust and anger; all pleasure seems nauseous to him unless it is what he himself has planned. Exempt from the venom of love, hostile to all intruders, for years he has held intercourse with no one, save the resplendent heroes which a creator of beauty has given him as companions in super-terrestrial regions. In the depths of rivers of music he slakes his anguished thirst for the divine, and then he ascends to his solitary haunts, where, amidst the mystery of mountains and lakes, his spirit creates the inviolable kingdom over which alone he desires to reign. This profound feeling for solitude, this power of breathing on the highest and loneliest summits, this consciousness of being unique and unapproachable in life, makes Louis of Bavaria truly a king, but king of himself and of his dreams. He is incapable of stamping his will upon the multitude, and of bending it under the yoke of his idea; he is incapable of reducing his inward power to action. At the same moment he appears sublime and childish. When his Bavarian troops were fighting the Prussians, he was far away from the battlefield, hidden in one of his lake islands, where he forgot his shame under one of those ridiculous disguises which he wears to favour his visionary illusions. It would be better for him if, instead of placing a screen between his majesty and his ministers, he could attain to the marvellous nocturnal empire sung by his poet! It seems incredible that he should not have left the world before now, carried away by his flights of fancy....”
The Prince’s head was still bent in such a solemn attitude, that even in the heat of speaking my heart smote me with the fear of having wounded him; and a filial desire came over me to comfort him, to lift up his grand white head, and to see the unwonted light of joy in his eyes. Anatolia’s presence kindled a sort of generous fire in my soul, and made me feel a great desire to reveal what was noblest and strongest within me. She sat motionless and silent in the shadow like a statue, but her attention shone on my soul like a flood of light.
“You see, my dear father,” I resumed, unable to control the tremor throbbing in my voice—“you see how old legitimate monarchies are everywhere declining, and how the Multitude stands by ready to swallow them down its miry throat. Truly they deserve no other fate! And not monarchies alone, but all great, and noble, and beautiful things, all the sovereign ideals which once were the glory of struggling and conquering Man, all are about to disappear under the immense flood of corruption which is rising and swaying onwards. I will not tell you how far the shame has gone, for I should have to use words which would offend your ear; and afterwards it would seem as though the air had to be purified with grains of incense. I came away from the city choking with disgust, but now I think almost with rejoicing of the general dissolution. When everything shall have been profaned, when all the Altars of Thought and Beauty shall have been cast down, when all the vessels containing ideal essences shall have been broken, when ordinary life shall have reached such a pitch of degradation as seems unsurpassable, when the last smoking torch shall have gone out in the great darkness, then the Multitude will stop, suddenly seized by a panic far exceeding any that has ever before shaken its miserable soul; and, suddenly deprived of the frenzy which blinded it, will feel itself astray in the desert strewn with ruins, without any path or light to guide it. Then will the law of the need of heroes descend upon it; and it will pray for the iron rod by which it must be disciplined anew. And I believe, dear father, that these heroes, these new kings of the earth, shall arise from our race, and that from this day all our energies ought to be directed towards preparation for their earlier or later advent. That is my faith.”
The Prince had lifted his head, and was looking at me with intent and rather astonished eyes, as if I had appeared to him in an unexpected light. But an unusual vivacity animating his whole person told me how much he had been touched by my eagerness.
“I have lived for several years in Rome,” I continued, with greater confidence, “that third Rome which was to have represented 'the unconquerable love of the Latin race for the Latin soil,’ and whose hills were to have shone with the marvellous light of a new ideal. I have witnessed there the most shameful violations and the most obscene connections which ever defiled a sacred spot. And I can understand the lofty symbolism hidden in the act of the Asiatic conqueror, who cast five myriads of human heads into the foundations of Samarkand, when he wished to make it his capital. Don’t you think that the wise tyrant meant to signify the necessity of severe pruning on the part of those who are about to institute a really new order of things? It was necessary to sacrifice and cast into the foundations of the third Rome the men who were called liberators, and, according to the funeral custom of the ancients, to place at their feet, at their sides, and in the hands which freed their country the objects which they knew and loved best, and then to dig out and drag down the heaviest granite boulders from the mountain tops to close the deep sepulchre for all eternity. But never were lives so tenacious and so pestiferous laid in the earth! Quite lately, dear father, I heard the following in Rome: 'The fleet of the Thousand only sailed from Quarto to obtain state protection for the right of barter!’ And yet amidst the clatter of traders I caught the sound of that remote mysterious voice which lingers in every stone, and murmurs in every sea-shell; and the sublime view of the Campagna consoled me for all my disgust. Ah, father, who can ever despair of the fate of the world while Rome is still under the heavens? When I think of her and worship her, I only see her as she is figured on Nerva’s medal—with the rudder in her hand. When I think of her and worship her, I can only describe her strength in the words of Dante: 'In every generation of things, that is best which is most perfectly One.’ And her principle of unity, as of old, shall once more be the concentrating, ordering, and preserving force of everything in the world that is good and amenable to order. The Dantesque similes of the soil and the flames are well adapted to her, because one can conceive the former as making a single base, and the latter as united in a single and identical apex. I firmly believe that the greatest height of power in the future will be that which shall have its base and its apex in Rome; for I, a Latin, glory in having set at the head of my faith the mystical truth expressed by the poet: 'It is certain that Nature disposed one place in the world to be suitable for universal empire, and that that place is Rome.’ Now from what mysterious union of races, what vast experience of culture, what auspicious harmony of circumstances, shall the new King of Rome arise?”
The fine fever which had warmed my thoughts to intoxication in the Latian desert again kindled in my veins; and the great phantoms created by the sacred soil again took tumultuous possession of my spirit; and all the hopes begotten by my violent pride in those solitudes haunted by memories of the most bloody of human tragedies, rose again and stirred vaguely, giving me a feeling of excitement which I could scarcely endure. The venerable old man’s appearance assumed a graver solemnity, for at that moment I looked upon him as the embodiment of all those varied qualities which had expanded like flowers along the stem of his ancient race under the warmth of the light of glory, and had been manifested to the world in many magnificent characters; and I was about to justify my ambitious dream to this man who was already declining towards the grave, treating him as a judge to whom sorrow had given insight; I was going to ask his good auspices as an omen, and to propose to him as my equal the alliance which I desired.
My anxiety was heightened by the presence of the silent maiden in the shadow, for she appeared to me in truth to be the one destined to become through love “her who propagates and perpetuates the idealism of a race favoured by Heaven.” I did not dare to turn towards her, so sacred did the mystery of her virginity seem to me at that moment; but I remembered the vague idea of hidden treasures, which the wonderful light that shone in flashes from her transparent eyes had sometimes awakened in me; and even without turning round I could feel a kind of animated wealth throbbing in that strip of shadow, a living form containing an inestimable prize, something infinitely grand and mysterious, like the divine treasures guarded under veils in the holy of holies of temples.
“You, as well as I, are convinced,” I added, “that every form of excellence of the human type is the effect of an initial effort, which by one selection after another reaches its highest intensity, and is manifested in the race, modified by temporary circumstance. It is not only our patrician pride which vaunts the virtue of Race, but it is acknowledged also by the most exact science. The highest examples of human conscience can only appear at the summit of a race which has sprung up in time out of the continual accumulation of energies and work; of a race in which during long periods of centuries the fairest dreams, the most vigorous sentiments, the noblest thoughts, the most lordly wills have been born and nourished. Now, take the case of a race of remote royal origin, which is springing up under the Latin sun in a happy land furrowed with the rivulets of a new poetry. Transplanted into Italy, it flourishes with such vigour that in a short time no other race can compare with it. 'Worthless is the disciple who cannot outdo his master,’ da Vinci has pronounced. And that race seems to have inscribed its greatness on an even bolder motto: 'Worthless is the son who cannot outdo his father.’ Through united and uninterrupted energies it goes on from one generation to another, raising itself up to the higher manifestations of life. In times of blind anger, when reason can trust to nothing but arms, it seems already to understand 'that those men who above all others possess strength of intellect are by nature lords over others.’ And from the very beginning its discipline is of an intellectual nature, and seems to have been dictated by Dante; for it consists in always reducing to action the whole available power of intellect, first of all by laying down theories, and then by working them out. In the most important offices, as truly as on the bloodiest battle-fields and at the most liberal banquets, this race excels: equally admirable whether leading armies, governing states, conducting embassies, protecting artists and sages, erecting palaces or churches. It mingles with Italian life in all its most varied forms; it bathes itself in every fresh fountain of culture. Living is to it the perpetual assertion and increase of itself: living to it is ruling. The formidable instinct of rulership is always driving it forward, while clear and steady thought directs this lasting impulse. And always—like those careful archers whom Machiavelli cites as examples—always it aims higher than the mark. Its deeds are so illustrious that the greatest poets have sung their renown, and the writers of history compare them to those of the ancient generals, and quote them as the examples for the future. Yet it seems that the strength of this race has not yet been fully manifested, has not yet reached the unsurpassable height: it seems that its accumulated energies must, either to-morrow, or in the course of a century, or at some indefinite time, expand themselves in one supreme manifestation....”
“Cave, adsum!” interrupted the Prince, with a grand smile. “Is not that the motto of the race you are speaking of?”
“It might also bear the motto of the Montaga,” I replied readily, “Sub se omnia!”
The Prince bowed with a gesture that served of itself to show that my reply had not been a simple courtesy, but was indeed due to the dignity of his great name. I saw him again before me with the figure I remembered in my boyhood: a fine example of superior humanity, every action revealing his distinction, his absolute separation from the multitude, from common duties, and common virtues. It seemed to me as if he had shaken the weight of sorrow that was crushing him off his shoulders, and had risen up in all his manly strength, his whole frame assuming that marvellous quality possessed by his hands—those beautiful pure hands preserved unchanged as if they had been embalmed—surviving ministers of a liberality which can only be compared to the ancient “who for small services loved to reward greatly.”
The last hour of daylight was fading away, and from the burning sky the annunciation of summer came down on the patrician garden, where amid the austere odour of centenarian box-trees, the statues—pale and yet watchful, like memories in a faithful soul—called up by their gestures the phantoms of past grandeur. But outside the cloister rose the immense crown of rock fashioned by primeval fires, looking so harsh and proud that it seemed worthy of supporting on each peak a Prometheus Bound.
I had seen those same peaks on the first evening of my arrival, flaming in the sky like rockets, shining with incredible radiance, the highest of them standing out like a tongue of flame against the background of general shadow, and cleaving the sky like a cry of hopeless passion. I was alone then in that remote twilight, and the three mysterious princesses were at hand in their walled garden, and my fate was still apart from their fate. But now in the same conjunction of circumstances the fate prophesied by that first agitation of my feelings was about to be fulfilled: I was about to utter solemn and irrevocable words. Was I indeed quite freed from perplexity? Had I at last chosen from those three blessed ones, whom I had seen in fancy on that far away evening receiving my spring gift with open arms, had I at last chosen out one for the necessary union? And was I about to pronounce her name in her father’s presence? Fresh uneasiness crept over me, and it seemed to me as if Anatolia were no longer alone in the shadow, but as if her sisters had come in silently and taken their places beside her, and as if their eyes were fixed anxiously upon me.
As I turned round I saw the white motionless figure in the corner, and everything else vanished, and all my vain restlessness was calmed.
She was the living symbol of security, the watcher and the guardian. With her strength and her patience, lit up by her own smile, she had turned sorrow into an adamantine armour which made her invincible. She was made to guard, nourish, and defend to the death that which was committed to her charge. And once again I saw her, in my dream, watching, her pure brow radiant with prophecy over the son of my blood and of my soul.
Then from the very roots of my being, where sleeps the indestructible virtue of ancestors, there arose and went forth towards the Elect the will to create that one to whom all the ideal riches of my race and my own conquests and the maternal perfections were to be transmitted. And deeper than ever grew the feeling of primary dependence which bound my actual being to my remotest ancestors; and just as the summit of the tree comprises in itself the whole life of the branching trunk down to the deepest roots, so I felt the life of the whole race living within me, that life which death could only destroy through its bodily manifestations in the transitory forms taken by succeeding generations. And the fulness and vehemence of that life seemed to overthrow the limits of my natural powers.
“Not long ago you recognised in me, not without a shade of severity, the descendant of Gian Paolo Cantelmo,” I said to the Prince, smiling. “I must confess that in my house the examples of disobedience and rebellion against kings are not rare. But the red Lion justifies them; and you cannot be unaware of the patent which the Cantelmi received from Charles II. of England. Being themselves of ancient royal blood, they have never easily resigned themselves to treating the king as other than their equal. It appears, too, that they never fight any other adversary with such zeal as they fight the king. And while Gian Paolo disturbed the slumbers of Ferdinand of Aragon, and humbled Alphonso, James I. and Menappo defeated Manfred at Benevento, James VIII. warred successfully against Ladislaus side by side with Braccio di Montone and the Sforza, while Antonio opposed René of Anjou. There is a natural tendency in every Cantelmo to form his own party, to separate himself, and to define his own person and power very clearly. It seems as if each of them founded his conception of his own dignity upon the firm conviction 'that being one is the root of being good, and that what is good is such, because it is one.’ I joyfully acknowledge in this, one of the essential characteristics of the ruler to come: of the Monarch, the Despot. But there is another peculiarity which strengthens my faith, and that is the great number of rulerships which have fallen into the hands of the Cantelmi on Latin soil. It may be said that at different times and separately they have held the government of all Italy. James I. is Ambassador for Peace to the Republic of Genoa, Vicar in Lombardy, Captain-General in the March of Ancona, Viceroy of the Abruzzi; James II. is Vicar and Podestà of Florence; Bonaventura VIII., Viceroy of Sicily; Rostaino VII., Captain-General of the Serenissima, Senator of Rome.... Everywhere they hold rule, and their experience of different peoples teaches them to 'know well how men are to be gained or lost.’ Everywhere they fight and lose their lives in the act of performing some prodigy of valour: the 'good Cantelmo,’ immortalised in Tasso’s verse, stains the walls of Jerusalem with his royal blood; James II. dies fighting for the Florentines against Castruccio Castracane; Nicholas, first Duke of Sora, dies with Constantine Paleologus in the defence of Constantinople; Ascanio dies in the waters of Lepanto beside the Archduke John of Austria; Bonaventura VIII. is deemed worthy by Charles V. of the defence of the whole empire; and it is of him the Emperor says that he would choose him for his champion had he to risk his crown in a joust. The great Andrea is an extraordinary example of a life spent entirely in ceaseless fighting from his earliest youth to his latest breath.... He is indeed the most finished type which my race has produced to this day. Andrea is one of the finest heroes of will and strength. We need not reckon up the number of his exploits. In Italy, Germany, Flanders, France, and Spain, innumerable are the cities and fortresses acquired by him and added to the Catholic empire, innumerable are the sieges he laid and sustained. He is the Poliorcetus par excellence, a more fertile master of stratagem than any other, at once eager and prudent; 'for in him we discover,’ says one of his biographers, 'the union of all those gifts and qualities which in other captains may be noticed separately.’ But what in my eyes raises him above the heads of all others is the unheard-of severity of the discipline he enforced on himself and his troops. Certain traits of this rigour fill me with more enthusiasm than the sight of the banners he took from the enemy. Though the troops he commanded are unpaid and badly armed, he manages to have them as ready and obedient to his hand as his own sword. No one ever understood better how to impress his own personality on the conduct of others. Eloquent and nervous in speech he yet always prefers the direct force of example to the power of words. He always moves at the head of his troops, on foot when he leads the infantry; he always sleeps in his clothes, eats and drinks nothing but what his soldiers eat and drink, is always the first in assault, the last in retreat; though covered with wounds, he refuses to take off his armour; on the field of victory or in the conquered city he never touches the booty. And in the war in Flanders he wins such terrible renown, that mothers use his name to frighten their children into obedience. Could any man determine his own likeness in clearer and more vigorous outline? Was ever coined metal stamped with a prouder effigy? In his time Andrea was surnamed the new Epaminondas. Well, even in this indefatigable warrior, the intellectual character of his race comes out. He is not only learned in speech, a distinguished mathematician, a master of military architecture, a writer on the science of war, but also a good connoisseur and splendid patron of the liberal arts. Eritio Puteano, in dedicating a Latin work to him, calls him Armorum gloria, Litterarum tutela. Cornelius Schult of Antwerp, presenting him with a book of fantastic designs, represents him as Eros cultivating elegance in the midst of arms, Heros inter arma elegantias colens. Andrea in this carries on the family tradition, the origin of which shines in the wreathed figure of Fanetta Cantelmo, Lady of Romanino, who composed poetry 'with a certain divine fury,’ among the laurels of Provence, in one of the courts of love. And does not some of the wonderful aptitude which raised Alessandro above the other disciples of Da Vinci at Milan seem to have been transmitted to him? He thinks out new methods of fortification, constructs the celebrated fort on the Meuse, named in honour of its inventor Fort Cantelmo, makes strange weapons which seem almost magical to his contemporaries.... Is there not something Leonardesque in these inventions, something which recalls Alessandro?”
I had uttered the name of him who lived in continual communion with my spirit, and whom I held to be the genius of the race, destined some day to reappear higher up the surviving family tree in some manifestation of sublime life. 'Oh thou, be what thou oughtest to be.’ My task had been developed along definite lines under his gaze and his teaching; and now at the moment when I was about to take a great resolve, he stood by my side. I saw him alive before my eyes, as if his white tyrannical hand were resting on the corner of the table beside me, and as if the statuette of Pallas and the pomegranate with its pointed leaf and flaming flower were there too. 'Oh thou, be what thou oughtest to be.’ And another youthful figure, apparently his younger brother, clung to him as closely as his shadow.
“Alessandro and Hercules! These were the two purple flowers so early cut off, which Leonardo and Ludovico gathered up and transmuted into imperishable essences. Andrea Cantelmo when he died had already displayed all the energies he possessed, and death overtook him on the verge of old age, covered with glory after that siege of Balaguer, which was the greatest of his heroic enterprises. But these two, facing life with their hands full of all the seeds of hope, had every great possibility open to them. Their youthful heads seemed made to wear the royal crown, that ancient crown which their fathers had already worn. In one of them Da Vinci divined the future founder of a new principality, the triumphant tyrant who was to lay upon the multitude the yoke of that science and beauty into which the great master had initiated his favourite disciple. But fate interfered with the fulfilment of his prophecy. Both of them threw away their lives in the first burst of their ardour, for they were devoured by too vehement enthusiasm. Hercules perished in the sands of the Po, fighting against the Sclavonians; Alessandro on the banks of the Taro in the battle of Fornovo. Do you remember the verses in which Ariosto celebrates the beautiful son of Sigismond Cantelmo?
'Il più ardilo garzon che di sua etade
Fosse da un polo a l’altro e da l’estremo
Lito de gli Indi a quello ove il Sole cade....’
“His death was too cruel! He was made prisoner in a rash inroad, and his head was cut off before his father’s eyes on the ship’s deck, which was used as a block. I can imagine the blood spurting from the wound like a flame and scorching the side of the galley. Indeed, I do not only imagine it, I see it. What a wonderful and terrible storm of youthful courage it must have been which provoked him to set spurs to his horse and rush furiously against the enemy’s entrenchments! Ah, dear father, I have known those storms myself, and my horse knows them, and so do the ruins of the Roman Campagna....
“No doubt at that moment Hercules felt worthy of bestriding the winged horse born of the blood of Medusa. Cave, adsum! Ariosto, as he sings his praises, uses an expression which of itself lights him up with glory, showing how the bold youth died to maintain the resolution which every Cantelmo makes—that of remaining at the post he has taken, and has thought to be the best, even in the face of the worst forms of death. He had a companion at his side during the assault. When both had rushed upon the enemy,
'Salvossi il Ferrufin, resto il Cantelmo.’
“He stayed, one against a thousand. And the divine Ludovico places his beautiful bleeding figure at the beginning of a song telling how Bradamante performed prodigies with his golden lance. But the death of Alessandro is like that of a demi-god. At Fornovo in the hottest of the battle a hurricane arises, and the Taro overflows its banks with terrible violence. Alessandro suddenly disappears, like one of those ancient Greek heroes, carried away from the earth in a whirlwind, and supposed to be transported to heaven. His body was never found on the field or anywhere else. But he lives, lives on through the ages, with life more intense than our own. Not only his portrait has been transmitted to me by da Vinci, but his life, his true life. Ah, dear father, if you had once seen that picture, you would never be able to forget it. It is impossible to forget. Nothing in the world is of such value to me, and no treasure was ever guarded with such passionate jealousy. Who gave me strength to bear such long solitude and such hard discipline? Who poured into my spirit in the midst of the harshest rigour of discipline that kind of sober intoxication which makes all effort seem light? Who but Alessandro? He represents to me the mysteriously significant power of style, inviolable in my own person by any one, even by myself. All my life develops beneath his steady gaze; and in truth, dear father, he who can stand the searching trial of that fire is not degenerate. 'Oh thou, be what thou oughtest to be!’ that is his daily precept. But while he thus urges me to keep my personality entire, he also places before my eyes the vision of an existence superior to my own in dignity and power. And I am always thinking of Him who is to come.”
I stopped, for I felt my voice change, and I feared that the blood filling my heart might of a sudden overflow. And the old man’s soul was in such deep communication with mine, that at that moment he involuntarily stretched out both hands to me.
“Since a double will is necessary for the creation of that one who is to outstrip his creators,” I added in a low voice, bending towards him, “I could aspire to no higher union than that which would give me the right to call you father, as I am doing now....”
And overcome by emotion, I sat leaning forward with his trembling hands in mine, while his lips touched my brow without a word being spoken. But in the silence, between the throbbing of my heart and her father’s quick breathing, I heard the light step of Anatolia gliding out of the room. Was she going to weep by herself? Her form, which I had seen motionless and white in the shadow, shone on my inner heaven like a constellation of tears. Was she going to weep alone? Perhaps she would meet her sisters on the way.... This doubt suddenly made me uneasy. My eyes fell on the cameo that shone on the father’s hand.
And as the perfume of evening rose up from the walled garden, a dim sentiment spread through my soul, like a spell deepening round me with the slow falling of the twilight.
How in the meantime fared the heart of her who was about to depart? In what manner was her mystical life disposing itself round the memory of that supreme hour marked by the hand on the luminous dial?
“ME LUMEN, VOS UMBRA REGIT.”
Perhaps she may have returned more than once to the little cemetery with the yew-trees and anemones, and may perhaps again have laid her slender hands on the dial to feel its heat, and she may have remembered my exhortation: “Warm your hands in the sun, bathe them in the sun, poor hands, for soon you will carry them crossed on your breast or hidden under the coarse brown woollen habit in the shadow....” And more than once perhaps, with her palm laid over the figures indicating the divine moment, she may have waited, quivering in the great silence, to see the shadow of the hand reach the extremity of her ring-finger, as it did on that day of dreams; and perhaps she may have wept that the miracle of love had not been renewed.
“SINE SOLE SILEO.”
I connected the picture of the guardian of dried plants sketched for me by Oddo with the picture of that sad soul wandering round the sundial which had pointed out the hour of blessedness for her in vain. And I thought: “If only I had power to fashion for thee a beautiful fate, as the artist fashions the obedient wax, O thou who earnest towards me out of a barren garden where a funereal vow had imprisoned thee Massimilla, thus should I complete thy ideal figure with death, with timely death I should complete thy perfection; for no other hour awaits thee in which thou canst hope to find any value, now that thou hast once penetrated into that part of life, beyond which none can go who intend to return. Guided by that divine memory, I would have thee return to the place where in dreams I gathered crown-like anemones, to strew them on thy head; and there I would have thee fall again into the harmonious attitude that once I praised, close to the marble sundial. And the moment the point of the shadow reached the tip of thy ring-finger should be the moment of thy death. Then beneath the stony gaze of the crouching caryatid I should myself dig the grave for thy frail remains; and I should lay thee out as the gentle ladies laid out Beatrice in Dante’s vision, and should spread their veil over thy head. But I should not set a cross over thy grave, nor any other pious symbol; rather I should call upon the youngest of the sons of the Graces, a native of Palestine, like thy celestial Spouse; I should call upon Meleager of Gadara, the hyacinth-garlanded, the sweet flute-player, the poet who sings the early death of maidens; and he should carve an epitaph worthy of thy gentle grace. Oh Earth, universal Mother, all hail to thee; be gentle to this maiden, who weighs so lightly upon thee.”
Thus it pleased me to adorn the sentiment with which she inspired me, and turn her sadness into poetry.
“Has the narcissus bulb in the herbarium sprouted for the third time?” I asked her suddenly one day, as we were boating on the Saurgo near the dead city.
She was quite disturbed, and looked at me with startled eyes.
“How do you know?”
I smiled and repeated—
“But has it sprouted?”
“No, not again!” she replied, looking down.
We were alone in a little skiff, which I was paddling myself with one oar. Violante, Anatolia, and Oddo were in other boats rowed by the boatmen. The river here was so wide and sluggish that it was almost like a pond, and a dense flock of water-lilies covered it. The great white flowers, shaped like roses, floated among their shining leaves, diffusing a moist fragrance, which seemed to have the property of slaking thirst.
It was here that Simonetto’s botanising had come to an end that fatal autumn. I imagined the figure of the young botanist leaning over the water exploring its slimy depths at the season when the water-lilies are nearly over. His hortus siccus, no doubt, contained lifeless specimens of all that aquatic flora which surrounded the ruins.
Massimilla’s eyes followed the movement of my oar as from time to time it crushed a leaf or broke a stalk, and I said softly—
“Are you thinking of Simonetto?”
She started.
“How do you know?” she asked me again, much agitated, with flushing cheeks.
“I know from Oddo....”
“Ah!” she said, without concealing her regret at this knowledge of mine, which seemed to wound her. “Oddo told you....”
She relapsed into a silence which I felt to be a very painful one for her. I stopped rowing for a few seconds, and the light boat rested motionless amidst the wide extent of white blossoms.
“Did you love him very much?” I asked the silent maiden, with a gentleness that reminded her perhaps of our earlier interviews.
“As I love Oddo, as I love Antonello,” she replied, with a tremble in her voice, without raising her eyelids.
After a pause I asked her—
“Are you going into the convent to sacrifice yourself to his memory?”
“No, not for that. It would be too late now....”
“Why, then?”
She did not answer. But I looked at her hands, which she was clenching as if she wanted to wring them, and I understood all the involuntary cruelty of my useless question.
“Is it true that you have decided to go in a few days?” I added almost timidly.
“It is true.”
Her lips trembled; they had turned white.
“Will Oddo and Anatolia go with you?”
She nodded her head in answer, and pressed her lips together to force back a sob.
“Forgive me, Massimilla, if I have hurt you,” I said with deep emotion, for I felt a weight of sadness suddenly fall on me.
“Be quiet, please!” she implored, in a voice I scarcely recognised. “Don’t make me cry! What would my sisters think? I should not be able to hide my tears.... And I am choking.”
Oddo’s voice was heard calling to us from the ruins. Anatolia and Violante had already set foot in the dead city. One of the boatmen came towards us with his skiff, thinking perhaps that our delay was caused by my inexperience in guiding the boat through the tangle of water-lilies.
“Ah, I shall always bear within me the regret of having lost thee!” I said in silence to her who was about to depart. “I should rather behold thee laid out in the perfection of death than know thy soul to be straitened in a life alien to that which my love and my art had promised thee. And perhaps thou wouldest have led me to explore some far-away region of my inner world, which without thee will remain neglected and uncultivated....”
The boat was gliding lightly over the snowy flock; in its track the leaves and blossoms rippled apart, and through the crystalline clearness of the water the pale forest of stems was visible, pale and languid, as if fed by the mud of Lethe. The ruins of Linturno embraced by the water and the flowers looked, in their secular, stony apathy, like a great collection of broken skeletons. Even the eyeballs of a human skull are not so lifelessly empty as were the hollows of those worn-out stones, bleached white like bones by the mists and the heat. And I imagined that I was ferrying a dead maiden.
Everything after that bore the impress of my sadness on that cloudless afternoon. For a long time we wandered about the ruins searching out the traces of vanished life.
They were uncertain traces, which gave rise to all sorts of different conjectures. Was the theory true of the band of youths crowned with garlands descending to the parent river singing and dedicating their unshorn, growing locks to him? Or was it rather a white procession of catechumens like little children, fed on milk and honey, who descended there to receive baptism? A dim legend of martyrs cast a sort of mournful sanctity over the pagan remains. “Martyris ossa jacent....” we read on the fragment of a sarcophagus; and here and there among the few sculptured stones lying about we found emblems and symbols of double meaning; Jove’s eagle and Cybele’s lion subdued to the Evangelists; the vines of Dionysius twisted to express the parable of the Saviour; Diana’s stag representing the thirsty soul. Now and then a snake darted out from among the stones and roots, and vanished quickly as an arrow. An invisible bird was making a strange imitation of the rattles which announce the hours of silence on Good Friday.
“And where is your great Madonna?” asked Anatolia, recalling my words of long ago. We sought among the fallen masonry for a path to lead us to the ruined basilica, which stood at the extreme end of the island, on the branch of the Saurgo nearest the rocks.
“Perhaps the water will prevent our getting there,” I said, as I perceived the glittering reflections close to the wall.
The river had indeed flooded part of the sacred ruin, and a forest of water weeds was growing there undisturbed. But we found a gap by which we were able to enter the apse. Each of the three sisters as she entered made the sign of the cross, amid a great whirring of wings.
Inside all was cool and damp, and the palpitating light took a greenish hue. The apse and a few pillars of the central nave were left, and formed a kind of cave, which the waters had invaded almost up to the deserted altar steps; and a multitude of water-lilies, larger and whiter even than those through which we had rowed, clustered as if in adoration at the feet of the great Madonna in mosaic, who occupied alone the concave heaven of gold which formed the apse. She did not hold the Infant in her arms, but stood alone, wrapped in a mantle of leaden hue like a shadow of mourning, and a deep mystery of sorrow lay in her large, fixed eyes. High above the curve of the arch the swallows had made a charming crown of nests, following the order of the words written round it—
“QUASI PLATANUS EXALTATA SUM JUXTA AQUAS.”
And then the three maidens knelt down together and prayed.
“If we were to leave thee in this refuge with the water-lilies and the swallows!” I thought, looking at Massimilla, who was bending lower and lower as she prayed. “Thou wouldest live here like a hermit Naiad who has forsaken Artemis to worship the new sorrowful divinity.” And I pictured her metamorphosis: after completing her solitary rites amid the choir of swallows, she would plunge into the water and descend to the roots of the flowers....
But to my eyes nothing here surpassed the whiteness of a neck burdened with a weight of hair thicker than the marble clusters of grapes that decorated the front of the altar. For the first time I saw Violante on her knees, and the attitude was so unsuited to the quality of her beauty that it pained me like a discord; and I waited with strange restlessness for her to rise from the place between the two symbolical peacocks, who were spreading their feathers among the clusters of grapes.
She rose before the others, with one of those magnificent movements in which her beauty seemed to surpass itself, as a steady light seems to wax larger before it suddenly breaks into sparks. Exaltata juxta aquas!
When we returned she came with me on the river, sitting in the little prow opposite me while I stood and paddled. I was overcome by uncontrollable emotion as I remembered the hand beaded with blood and the hill-slope covered with blossom. It was the first time since that far-away hour that I had found myself alone with Violante face to face.
“I am so thirsty,” she said, leaning over the water with a movement which, while expressive of her desire, seemed to identify her with the liquid voluptuous element.
“Don’t drink that water!” I begged her, seeing that she bared her hands.
“Why?”
“Don’t drink it!”
Then she plunged in her bare hands, picked a water-lily, and bent over it to breathe its fragrant moisture. It seemed as if a vague shiver passed over the flowery covering around us. The sun had sunk behind the rocks, and an almost imperceptible rosy reflection fell from the evening sky on the innumerable white flowers.
“Look at the water-lilies!” I exclaimed, resting on my oar. “Don’t you think they look marvellously alive just now?”
She plunged in her hands again up to the wrists, and held them in the water like rosy floating flowers; and as her eyes wandered over the trembling multitude, the smile on her lips was so divine that in my soul I invested it with miraculous powers.
Truly she was worthy to work wonders, and to subdue the very soul of things to her beauty. I dared not utter a word, so speaking was the silence by her side. But as we bent over the water, the same spell seemed to bind us to each other as had united us that first day in the presence of the volcanic rock. The hawks were not screaming over our heads, but round us the swallows were twittering as they flew by, and something like a ray of light flashed from their white breasts as they passed.
“Well; aren’t we going on? Have you no strength left?” she said, turning round with an indefinable tone of derision in her voice, and reading the very depths of my eyes. “Don’t you see that the other boats are far ahead?”
I gazed at the little flotilla for a few moments with knitted brows.
“Anatolia is calling us,” she added. “Make haste!”
The Saurgo seemed to grow broader in the twilight, to vanish away into infinite distance, then to regain the strength of its current, to give promise of carrying us on into fairer lands. And that royal creature, bending over the great soft, rosy stream in the eagerness of her thirst, of her fierce desire for a liquid suited to her voluptuous being, was full of such mystery, of beauty, and poetry that my soul went out to her in the most fervent act of worship.
“Look!” then said the enchantress, pointing to the scene which she seemed to have called up with a wave of her hand. “Look!”
All around us on the water, over which a slight shiver was passing, the living calyxes were closing with a slow lip-like motion, hesitating a few moments, withdrawing, sinking, disappearing under the leaves one by one or in groups, as if some power of slumber were calling them below. Wide spaces were left deserted, but here and there in the midst of them a single belated lily would display the utmost of her grace in this delay. A vague melancholy hovered over the water on each spot where one of the lingerers disappeared. And then it seemed as if the dreams of the submerged multitude rose up like a mist from the great soft rosy stream.
But it was on the summit of Corace that the unexpected revelation took place which finally decided our fate.
We had stopped at Scultro to visit the ancient abbey, where the remains still exist of a sumptuous mausoleum, the work of Maestro Gualtiero of Germany, built as a memorial of herself and her three sons by a lady of the Cantelmo family—that magnificent Domina Rita, who as the wife of Giovanni Antonio Caldora was mother of the great condottiere Jacopo. And Anatolia and I had lingered behind in the mouldy chapel to gaze at the recumbent figure of the young hero, clad to the throat in heavy armour, with only the curly head uncovered, reposing so royally on the marble pillow.
Then after a long climb on foot up a steep narrow path—for we had left the mules behind on the level—we had reached the northern brow of the extinct crater, now transformed into the lake to which Secli gives its name. At our feet we had, on the one hand, the tawny valley of the Saurgo; on the other, two high spurs sent out of the main range into the plains below, beyond which lies the distant sea. Above our heads a few clouds hung almost motionless in the vast expanse of crystalline blue, and seemed compact and dazzling as heaps of snow.
Seated on some boulders, we gazed in silence. Violante and Massimilla seemed tired, and Oddo had not yet succeeded in controlling his nervousness. But Anatolia was moving about, gathering little flowers in the crevices of the rocks.
A vague, confused restlessness stole over me, intensified at times to the point of acute pain. I felt that at last the inevitable moment of choice was hanging over me; that I dared linger no more among the tormenting, delicious alternations of passion and perplexity, nor any more strive to resolve the three noble rhythms into one harmony. That day, for the last time, the three givers of happiness appeared to me in unison beneath the light of the same heaven. How long a time had passed since that first hour when, as I ascended the ancient steps, in the voices and virginal shadows moving like forms of magic, surrounded by the traces of neglect and decay, I had discovered the first music, and wrought the first transformation? On the morrow the short-lived spell would be broken, and for ever.
Now I felt compelled to say aloud to Anatolia the words I had already silently addressed to the pure, mysterious shadow which had witnessed my interview with her father. As we stood together shortly before in the deserted chapel, looking on that tomb erected by the loyalty of a brave woman, had we not both partaken of the same sentiment and the same idea? Had I not said to her even then, without words: “Thou too mightest become a mother of heroes, oh thou who sharest my consciousness. I know that thou hast gathered up my wish, and hast laid it within thy true heart, where it sparkles like a diamond. I know that in a dream thou hast watched a whole night mysteriously over the sleep of a child. While his body slept, breathing deeply, thou didst hold his soul, tangible as a crystal ball, in thy hands, and thy bosom swelled with marvellous intuitions.”
Now I felt the need of exchanging a binding promise with her before she started off on her mournful journey with the novice and her brother. But my anxiety was deepening into pain, as if some real danger were hanging over me. And I could not fail to acknowledge the cause of the emotion which Violante was perpetually stirring in me by her every action.
The ruins of Linturno lay beneath us in the valley like a heap of white stones, like a strip of dry shore, in the midst of the sweet dead waters, where only yesterday by a double miracle she had cast a spell over the water-lilies and over my soul. The spell was still upon me whenever I looked at her. Seated on a boulder in the same attitude as when seated that first day on the plinth, she looked like one of the immortal statues. Once again I gazed at her, and noticed how, although present, she was yet far away, as she had been that day; and I thought again: “It is right she should remain untouched. Only by a god could she be possessed without shame. Never shall her body bear the disfiguring weight; never shall the flood of milk mar the pure outline of her bosom....”
An inward impulse made me start to my feet as if to free myself from a restraint, and turning to her who was gathering the little flowers in the crevices of the rocks, I said: “As you are not tired, Anatolia, will you come up to the top with me?”
“I am quite ready,” she assented in her clear cordial voice; and she went up to Massimilla and laid the flowers in her lap.
Violante sat still in the same attitude, holding her veil between her fingers—impassive as though she had not heard. But I felt that her eyes were not looking at outward things, and I was troubled, as though a ray of the fascination flowing from the mysterious depths on which her gaze was fixed had penetrated me.
“Don’t be long in coming down!” Oddo begged in his imploring tones, his pale face betraying the discomfort, the perpetual fear of giddiness which he felt on those heights. “We shall wait for you.”
The peak of Corace rose up against the sky as bare and sharp as a helmet, leaning over a little towards the west; and the path ascending it ran along a steep rib as narrow as the edge of a precipice, dividing the two slopes. The passage was so difficult and dangerous that I offered Anatolia my hand for support, and, smiling, she laid hers in mine as she stumbled over the rough rocks. We were out of sight already, free and alone, monarchs of the vast space. Every breath seemed to purify the blood in our veins and to lighten the weight of the flesh. And the aromatic essences which the heat of the sun, like a powerful chemical, pressed out of the rare Alpine plants, quickened the rhythm of our life.
We stopped, both suddenly out of breath, and our hands, which had been too tightly clasped, unloosed themselves. I looked in my companion’s eyes, but she was no longer smiling. Her face became grave, almost sad, as if overshadowed by a regret.
“Let us stop here,” she murmured, lowering her eyelids. “I cannot go any further....”
“A little further,” I said, for a vehement desire to reach the summit was spurring me on, “only a few steps more, and we shall be at the top!”
“I cannot go any further,” she repeated in an exhausted voice unlike her own, and she passed her hands over her face as if to brush away something that distressed her.
Then she tried to smile at me.
“What a strange illusion!” she added. “The top is a long way off yet. We always seem about to reach it, and the higher one goes, the further off it seems to be.”
Then after a pause, in which she seemed to be listening to her own deep heart—
“And there are souls suffering down below!”
She turned her face, on which the shadow of some thought had fallen, towards the place where her sisters were waiting.
“Let us go back, Claudio,” she added, in a tone that I cannot forget, for never did human voice express so many wonderful things so briefly.
“Dear, dear Anatolia!” I broke out, seizing her hands, overcome by the extraordinary feeling aroused in me by those simple words of hers, which I took to be the unmistakable indication of an inward emotion that was almost divine. “Let me first say to you what my silence has told you more than once.... Where can I offer my love more worthily than here on this height, to you who are the highest of created beings, Anatolia?”
She turned very pale, not like one who hears tidings of joy long waited and prayed for, but like one who receives an invisible blow in a vital part; and though apparently motionless, in spirit she was shaken towards me by some strange fearful shudder, by some instinctive movement of horror; and this I saw, not with my eyes, but with one of those unknown senses that sometimes manifest themselves in a momentary vibration on the surface of the human nerves, and then disappear again for ever, leaving the consciousness amazed.
She cast a look of indefinable anxiety around her.
“You speak as if we were alone,” she said vaguely, “as if I were alone ... as if I were alone....”
“Anatolia, what is the matter with you?” I asked, troubled by her inexplicable distress, by the deep change in her face, the incoherence of her words.
And a thought flashed across my uncertainty. Had she not been suddenly assailed, she accustomed for so many years to her gloomy prison, she the resigned martyr within the ancient walls, had she not perhaps been suddenly assailed by that mysterious terror, that kind of panic which reigns among the solitudes of stern and silent mountains? Yes; no doubt she was a prey to this terrible fascination, and her spirit had gone astray under it.
A savage scene lay at our feet on every side in the glaring light. The chain of rocks, bare and clear in their desolate barrenness to their remotest passes, stretched away like a mass of gigantic and monstrous relics, left for the amazement of mankind as traces of some primeval battle of the Titans. Ruined towers, broken walls, fallen citadels, crumbled domes, tottering porches, mutilated colossi, prows of vessels, backbones of monsters, bones of Titans, every kind of monstrosity was simulated by the jutting peaks and dark ravines of this formidable range. The distance was so transparent that I could distinguish every outline as clearly as if my eyes were beholding, on an infinitely larger scale, the rock which Violante had shown me from the window-sill with that creative sweep of her hand. The most distant peaks were engraved on the sky with the same precise sharpness of outline which the sloping sides of the crater close at hand assumed in the reflected rays of the sun. The vast mouth of the spherical crater gaped with a kind of eddying vehemence in the expression of its curves; it was like a whirlpool, although inert. In part grey like ashes, elsewhere red like rust, it was crossed here and there by long white streaks that sparkled like salt, and were reflected in the metallic calm of the water which had gathered at the bottom. And opposite us, overhanging the edge of the precipice like a petrified flock of sheep, was Secli, the solitary hermit-like village, where from time immemorial a small industrious population has busied itself in making strings for musical instruments.
“You are tired,” I said to my dear companion, trying to draw her under the shadow of a boulder, which I thought might screen her on one side at least from the sight of the space below, and give her back a sense of security. “You are tired, Anatolia; you are not used to such fatigue, and perhaps this view is rather terrible.... Lean back here and close your eyes for a little. I will stand beside you. Here is my arm. I can take you back without any danger. Now close your eyes for a little....”
Again she tried to smile at me.
“No, no,” she said; “don’t trouble, Claudio.”
Then after a pause, in a changed voice, and very low—
“It is not that.... If I closed my eyes, perhaps I should see....”
My heart was trembling like a leaf beneath a sudden breath of wind. And though Anatolia’s face was composed again into an expression of deep but calm sadness, and though a feeling of power over evil seemed diffused through her whole person, vague analogies led me to think of Antonello’s sudden attacks of distress, of that restlessness of his, which was an infallible warning, and of the visions of the future which lit up his pale eyes.
“Do you understand, Anatolia?” I asked, taking one of her hands, for we stood side by side leaning against the rock. “Do you understand that you, you alone, are the companion whose name my heart pronounced that evening when your father kissed my forehead in sign of consent? You rose and left the room softly like a spirit; and I, I don’t know why, imagined that your face was bathed in tears.... Tell me if you are weeping, Anatolia, and if my dream was dear to you!” She did not answer; but as I held her hand, it seemed to me that her purest heart’s blood flowed magnetically to the tips of her fingers.
“That evening,” I added, striving to intoxicate her with hope, “as I went back to Rebursa, I saw a star shining over one of my old towers; and your presence had filled my heart so full of faith, that what was mere chance seemed to me like a divine omen! From that time two figures have shone for me in that radiance.... You know whose the other is. I can hear the first words you spoke to me there on the steps, words which evoked the memory of 'immense kindness.’ All that day the figure your words had called up clung to your side to show me whom she had elected. She herself, on some future evening, will come with me into the dwelling which once was full of her smile, and now is deserted.... Look, down there!”
She looked at the distant towers of Rebursa down in the deep hollow where the hanging clouds were casting great circles of shadow; but her gaze passed on to Trigento, and during the interval marks of an inexpressible inward conflict passed over her face. She shook her head, and drew her hand out of mine.
“Happiness is forbidden me,” she said in a firm but sorrowful voice, keeping her eyes fixed on the garden of her agony, on the house of her martyrdom. “I, like Massimilla, am dedicated; and my vow also is irrevocable. And it is not only the action of my own will, Claudio. I feel now that the sacrifice is necessary, that I cannot escape from it. You heard the tone in my answer just now when you asked me to go up to the top with you. You saw how easy it was for me to climb with you, with the support of your hand. But now ... I have not been able to go any further; we did not reach the top. See: here I am, nailed to a rock. You make me an offer, the value of which you yourself cannot know as I know it; and here I am, weighed down by grief so heavy that I am afraid of being unable to bear it, I, who have never been afraid of suffering!”
I dared not interrupt her nor touch her. A sort of religious awe filled my soul. Overmastered by even stronger emotion than had overcome me on that solemn evening, I could feel, without turning round, the throbbing of something infinitely noble and mysterious at my side, something resembling the divine mysteries guarded under veils in the Holy of Holies in temples. Her voice was sounding close to my ear, yet it came from an infinite distance. Her words were simple, but they came from the summit of life, that pinnacle which the human soul can only reach when about to be transfigured into Ideal Beauty.
“Look, down there! Look at the house where from the first day we received you as a brother, where our father received you as a son, where you found the memory of your beloved dead kept fresh. Look how far away it seems! And yet I feel it bound to me by a thousand invisible ties stronger than any chain. I feel that even here my life mingles with the faint life suffering down there. Ah, perhaps you cannot understand! But think, Claudio, of the atrocity of the fate that hangs over us; think of that poor raving mother, of that broken-down feeble old man, of that victim always hovering on the border of madness, of that other, too, who is under the same sentence, and of the horror of contagion, and the solitude, and the grief.... Ah, you cannot understand! From the first day I feared to sadden you; I always tried to put myself between you and our misfortune. Very seldom, perhaps never, have you breathed the real sadness of our house. We met you in the open air, among the flowers which we learned, for your sake only, to love again; and in our neglected garden you have been able to bring some things to life.... But think of the hidden anguish! You cannot see; but I can see from here everything that goes on in there, as much as if the walls were made of glass, and I were touching them with my forehead. Life seems suspended; the father and son are shut up in one room and dare not go out, and dare not breathe; they listen to every sound, one increases the suffering of the other, and both are helplessly waiting for my return, and listening eagerly, hoping to catch the sound of my voice and my step. And she is raving, searching for me in all the passages, all the rooms, calling me aloud, stopping before a closed door and listening or knocking, and my two poor souls inside hear her breathing, and start at every knock, and can do nothing but look in each other’s eyes, my God!”
She pressed her hands to her temples with an instinctive movement, as if to force back some rebound of sorrow; and her whole body, leaving the support of the boulder, leant over towards the distant scene of her martyrdom. And for a few seconds, with the anguish she had communicated to me clutching at my throat, I bent over in the same attitude, I hung over the edge of the precipice, with my gaze fixed on the distant home where those souls were suffering.
“Think,” she continued, in a broken voice now, “think, Claudio, what would happen to them if I were not there, if I forsook them! Even when I leave them for a short time, I feel such regret, such remorse as I cannot describe to you. Every time I cross the threshold to go out, a gloomy presentiment weighs on my heart; and it seems to me as if on my return I should find the house full of shrieks and lamentations....”
An uncontrollable shudder was now shaking her whole figure, and her eyes were dilated as if some cruel vision were filling her with horror.
“Antonello,” she stammered; and for a few seconds she could not utter another word.
I looked at her with inexpressible anguish; and my soul suffered with hers in each contraction of her dear lips. And the vision in her eyes passed into mine; and I saw Antonello’s wasted, white face, and the rapid quiver of his eyelids, and his painful smile and disordered movements, and the waves of terror which used suddenly to sweep over his long thin body, shaking it like a fragile reed.
“Antonello ... tried to kill himself.... Only I know of it.... Nobody else knows it; not even Oddo. Alas!”
She trembled so much that she could not control herself as she leant against the rock. “One evening God warned me, God sent me.... His name be praised for ever!... I went into his room ... and I found him....”
She was choking, and her fingers wandered distractedly to her throat, as if the noose were strangling her; she was trembling, overcome, losing all courage at the recollection, she who had been able to repress her cries of horror at the sight of the half-dead man, she who had been able to call up the strength of a man in her wrists, to finish her work without asking for help, to hide the horrible secret in her own bosom, and then to live on from one fear to another, from one anxiety to another, with this tragic vision haunting her soul! Thus she revealed herself to me in her sublime truth, desperately devoted to an affection which had its roots in the deepest and most sacred instincts of her being. The voice of blood seemed to cry aloud in all her veins: the ties of blood bound every fibre together. She was born to wear the sweet powerful fetters till death. She was ready to burn herself as a sacrifice that she might nourish the faint flame that flickered on the household hearth. And therefore with what unspeakable love would she have loved the child of her womb!
“You speak of forsaking,” I said, making a painful effort to speak, for any expressions of mine seemed untimely and feeble after the grandeur and beauty of the sentiment just revealed; “you speak of forsaking, Anatolia; and you forget that from the very first day I found my father, my sisters, and my brothers in your house; and you do not know how full my heart is of filial and fraternal piety, not comparable to yours, which is superhuman, but still worthy of serving it by actions....”
She shook her head.
“Ah, Claudio,” she replied, with a sorrowful smile on her dry lips, “your generosity deceives you. My soul is still dazzled by the flames of your dream, and troubled by a sort of repressed violence and dangerous ardour which from time to time flashes from you. You are stirred by the longing for strife and power; and you are determined by every means to force life to fulfil her promises to you. You are young and proud of your lineage, and lord of your own powers, and confident in your faith. Who shall set a limit to your conquests?”
As if suddenly inspired, she had thrown the whole virtue of her clear, warm voice into these last words; and I understood by the thrill they sent through me what a powerful stimulator of energy she would have been, she who with all her kindness and patience possessed the fundamental instincts of her imperious race.
“But imagine, Claudio, a conqueror dragging after him a cart full of sick folk, and seeing their wasted faces and hearing their lamentations as he prepared himself for battle! Can you imagine such a thing? If life is cruel, he who is resolved to combat her must of necessity take into account the strength of the enemy; and every hindrance will sooner or later arouse his annoyance and his anger....”
She had succeeded in mastering the excess of her emotion; and once more I beheld her brave firmness as she spoke on without a quiver in her voice.
“And I, my very self, should I not at last be forgotten? Should I not be carried away altogether on the stream of new affections, new cares, by the intoxication of your hopes? The task you would assign to the companion of your efforts is too great, Claudio.... Your words are still in my memory.... Alas, it is not possible to feed two flames at the same time! The new one would in a short time become so voracious that I should have to sacrifice all the riches of my soul to it; and the old one so feeble, that if I turned my head away it would go out.”
She was silent, and her head sank again. But with a sudden movement, as if her former anxiety had returned, she looked up and around her, and the working of her parched lips betrayed her thirst to me. Then she turned upon me, and fixing her eyes on mine with a kind of impetuous force, she asked—
“Is it true that your heart has chosen me? Have you examined your heart to the depths? Or does some illusion hang over you like a veil?”
I was so much disturbed by her look, and these sudden doubts of hers, that I felt myself turn pale as if she had accused me of falsehood.
“Anatolia, what do you mean?”
She left the support of the rock, and made a few faltering steps forward; then she paused as if to listen, anxious and agitated.
“There is some soul suffering here on these paths,” she repeated, in the same tone as before; for a few moments she stood perplexed, and her hand went up to her brow with a vague gesture.
Then turning to me, rapidly, anxiously, as if she were being driven on, and was afraid of not having time to say the words—
“To-morrow I am going away. I must go with Massimilla. I have not the courage to let her start alone with Oddo. I must go with her to the very door of her retreat. She is going to pray for us.... I know she is not going there for consolation, but as to death; and so I must help her. I shall stay away for several days. For several days one of us will be alone at Trigento.... She is the eldest; she has almost the right.... She is worthy.... I don’t know; your heart will tell you something, perhaps the truth.... I swear to you, Claudio, that I will pray with all the fervour I have in my soul that on coming back I may find that everything has fallen out for the good of all.... Who knows? Perhaps there is some great good in store for you. I believe in your star, Claudio. But I am under a prohibition.... I can’t explain, I can’t explain.... There is a shadow over my will.... Just now a strange fear came over me, and then a sadness, a sadness I had never known before....”
She stopped, gasping, confused, miserable, as if the feeling of the infinite desolation spreading round us under the burning heat had swept over her again.
“And you too, how you are suffering!” she murmured, without looking at me.
And stretching out both her hands to me in one supreme effort—
“Now, good-bye! we must go back. Thank you, Claudio. Remember me always as a devoted sister. You will never find my tenderness wanting....”
She turned away her face, for her eyes were filling with tears, and I kissed both her hands.
“Good-bye,” she repeated, trying to get up and begin the descent; but she tottered on the rock.
“I entreat you, Anatolia, stay a little longer!” I implored, as I held her up. “Just stay a few minutes longer here in the shade, that you may get back your strength.... The descent is very steep.”
“They are waiting for us! They are waiting for us!” she stammered, almost beside herself, and her frenzied anxiety communicated itself to me. “Let us go, Claudio! I will lean on you. If we stayed any longer, I should feel worse, I should not be able to go one step.... Ah, this horrible thirst!”
I could see well enough that her poor mouth was burning with thirst, and such anguish of pity was I enduring that I would have opened a vein to slake it. There was not a trace of water anywhere around. Nothing but the waters of the lake looking like molten lead at the bottom of the extinct crater. Rapid visions crossed my brain, as they do in the delirium of fever; the great, rosy river covered with water-lilies, Violante leaning over the edge of the boat, her face bending to breathe the moisture of the flowers, the hardness of a sharp glance from under her knitted brows....
But we both started, as a sudden wave of sound came rolling towards us, we knew not whence. The silence in these lofty solitudes was so intense as to seem inviolable, and the rough, sudden breaking of it struck us, in the confused state of our senses, as an extraordinary event. Anatolia clung to my arm, and questioned me with startled eyes.
“Secli,” I said, as I recognised the nature of the sound. “The bells of Secli.”
And we listened, side by side, leaning towards the echoing crater, in the shadow thrown over our heads by the boulder.
The empty crater, resonant as a gigantic drum, echoed back the waves of sound sent by the quivering bells, and mingled them into one long hollow rumble that repeated itself indefinitely through the solitudes of light. All through those solitudes, where primary matter, petrified into a thousand expressions of rage and sorrow, shone in its grandeur, down the tawny valley furrowed by the winding river, through the Alpine vegetation sloping away to the distant sea, everywhere the voice of bronze, modulated by the terrible fiery mouth, went proclaiming its mysterious message. Further and further it penetrated, and further still again, through limitless space, away to shores beyond the mountains and the sea, away to where my weary sight failed me, away to where my thoughts, still unformed and uncontrolled, but instinct with mysterious creative power, wandered like winds laden with pollen. A grand, vague feeling, in which innumerable things of sorrow and joy, past and future, of death and life, were mingled, troubled my consciousness, and seemed tossing it to and fro as the storm tosses the ocean.
Amazed, I looked down at the Tartarean lake, thick and stagnant like the blind eye of a subterranean world; and I looked at the greedy crater where the impetus of the primeval fire had been arrested, just as the contracted expression of the last agony sometimes lingers on the lips of corpses. And my gaze rested on the humble cottages of Secli, on that fragile nest, hardly distinguishable from the rock on which it hung. And I had a fantastic vision of that unconscious taciturn race, busied from time immemorial in turning the entrails of lambs into musical strings destined to express through the language of art the highest inspirations of life, and to intoxicate myriads of unknown souls in the world.
On and on rolled the sound, rumbling ceaselessly, monotonously, through the scorching air. And seeing my companion motionless at my side, I dared not speak, nor break the spell. But suddenly she turned round and broke into sobs, as if she had just witnessed the end of a death agony. Leaning against the rock with her face in her hands, she sobbed on despairingly.
“Anatolia, Anatolia, what is the matter with you? Answer me, Anatolia! Say one word to me.”
And unable to resist the pain, I was just going to take her wrists and uncover her face.
I heard close by the sound of a swift step on the stones, the sound of painful breathing; I saw a shadow.
“You, Violante?”
She came up the steep rock with something of the elastic stride of a wild animal, something hostile and malevolent expressed in her whole person. Her thick blue veil was wrapped round her head in such a way that her whole face was hidden down to the chin, as if by a mask, and her eyes glittered through the gauze.
She stopped near the boulder in a hostile attitude throwing back her head like one who is suffocating, yet she did not loosen her veil. The vehemence of her breathing made her bosom rise and fall, and the veil flutter; an uncontrollable tremor shook her hands within the torn gloves she wore, torn probably on the sharp rocks in some perilous fall.
“We waited for you,” she said at last in a broken voice that almost hissed; “we waited for you a long time.... As you did not seem to be coming back, I came up ... to meet you....”
I could trace the convulsive motion of her lips through her veil; I could guess at the change in her face behind that suffocating blue mask that she would not lift up. And I felt my inward emotion increase so violently every minute, that it was impossible for me to open my lips. But I felt that not on me alone the necessity for silence had fallen.
The rumble of the bronze bells reverberating in the crater passed ceaselessly over our heads.
Anatolia had stopped sobbing, but the traces of tears were still on her face, and the eyelids that she kept lowered were red. “Let us go,” she said softly, without looking either at me or at her sister.
And in silence, under the desolation of the sunshine, we began the descent, accompanied by the rumbling sound.
Miserable descent, which seemed as if it would never end! They walked on, or lingered behind, according to the necessities of the path; and I supported sometimes the one, and sometimes the other, when their steps faltered. Every now and then my heart failed me with the fear of seeing them succumb. When the bells of Secli ceased ringing we felt a momentary relief; but we discovered immediately that the oppressive irregularity of our breathing in the stillness of the air increased our suffering, and we felt as though we could hear only too distinctly the murmur of the blood in our veins.
With a savage pertinacity Violante persisted in braving suffocation under her blue mask. No doubt her throat must be parched with a horrible thirst, like mine, like her sister’s. When I took her hand to help her down, I saw a little blood where the skin had been grazed through the rents in her glove; and with deep emotion I remembered the hill-slope covered with flowers.
Later on, when we reached the level ground, where my men were waiting with the mules, and where we rested awhile parched with thirst and exhausted by fatigue, I composed the beauty and the sorrow of the three princesses, for the last time, into a harmony of infinite beauty and pain.
They were not in their cloistered garden, yet a rocky cloister worthy of their souls and their fate was surrounding them, for strange and grand was the aspect of the scenery around. The rocks, standing round in a circle of varying height, made one think of some amphitheatre built by Cyclopean hands, worn away, indeed, by centuries and storms without number, yet still remaining like stupendous ruins. Fragments of unknown writing were traceable there, incomprehensible riddles of Life and Death; the twisted veins of the stone were channels for the essence of a divine thought; and the lines of the shapeless masses were as full of meaning as the attitudes of perfect statues.
There we rested, there I caught their final harmony.
A field labourer—very like the one who had cut the branches of almond blossom for us with his bill-hook—showed us the way to a spring hidden in the hollow of a rock. The clear, icy water spurted out with a gentle murmur, and on the pool beneath floated a rustic cup made of bark, cracked and bottomless, like the useless husk of some fruit.
I offered Anatolia another cup, which the man had brought with him. But Violante, without waiting, raised her veil, and bending over the sparkling spring, drank in long draughts like a wild animal.
I saw the drops glistening on her mouth and chin when she rose, but she turned away suddenly and drew down the edge of her veil. Thus veiled, she sat down on the stone nearest to the mountain spring, whose song was too gentle for her taste; and her attitude awakened in my soul all the magic spell of her own fountains. Even in fatigue she did not let her figure relax; for now she sat almost rigidly erect, sustained by her silent angry pride. Once again everything around her seemed to acknowledge the sovereignty of her presence; secret analogies bound up the surrounding mysteries with her mystery. Once again she seemed to drive back my spirit into the furthest distances of time, towards the ancient ideas of Beauty and Sorrow. She was present, and yet far away. And in the silence she seemed to be informing me, like the Princess Dejanira: “I possess an ancient gift from an old centaur, hidden in a vessel of bronze.”
Anatolia had sat down beside her pensive brother; she had thrown one arm round his neck, and her brow seemed gradually to clear as if some inner light were rising. Massimilla seemed to be listening to the faint, unquenchable voice of the spring; sitting with the fingers of her hands clasped together, holding within them the weary knee.
Over our heads the sky bore no traces of clouds, save a slight shadow like the ashes of a burnt-out funeral pyre. The sun was scorching the peaks all around, outlining their solemn features on the blue sky. A great sadness and a great sweetness fell from above into the lonely circle, like a magic draught into a rough goblet.
There the three sisters rested, there I caught their final harmony.
HERE ENDETH THE BOOK OF THE VIRGINS AND BEGINNETH
THE BOOK OF GRACE.
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Nov 2024
Some of the biggest things come in small packages. This is a tale that starts after I was adrift in space in an escape pod. I land on a planet that seems to b...
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82
Published:
Nov 2024
Billy Barker, since the age of 12, has been on his own. Travel rules are to find a hide two hours before sunset and don't come out until an hour after sunrise...
Formats: PDF, Epub, Kindle, TXT
Reads:
33
Pages:
49
Published:
Oct 2024
A dystopian view of political selfishness.
Formats: PDF, Epub, Kindle, TXT
Reads:
18
Pages:
70
Published:
Oct 2024
A prequel to My two cats take me to the next world book 1. This takes you through King Draco's dragon ancestors from Kron's son to Draco's daughter. Sorra. Lo...
Formats: PDF, Epub, Kindle, TXT