A strange odour of honey from the almond blossom filled the warm air. Sometimes a petal, rosier than the others, dropped down the mirror and fell as into silent water. And I remembered our stay in the orchard.
Ah, indeed, how could those wretched eyes, tormented by phantoms, perceive pure and beautifulthings? What was I doing there myself except holding a commemoration of the dead? Everything round me grew dim like the walls, and seemed to recede into a distant past; everything assumed an antiquated and faded look, and appeared to be covered with dust. The two servants moved slowly and dreamily about in their blue liveries and long white stockings; they looked as if they had come out of an old wardrobe of the last century;—melancholy ruins of former luxury. When they withdrew they seemed to vanish like shadows into the delusive distance of the mirrors, and to re-enter their inanimate world.
But the spell was broken by the voice of the prince, a voice which called up old memories. Every one kept a respectful silence while he was speaking; and no sound was heard but that of his deep aged voice, which at times became hoarse with repressed anger, or trembled with heartfelt sorrow and regret.
It chanced to be a disastrous day for the old man; it was the anniversary of the king’s flight to Gaeta; it completed the twenty-first year of exile.
“Well,” he said, as he turned to me with a glance kindling with faith, looking, with his white beard, almost like one of the ancient prophets, “well, Claudio, when a king falls as Francis of Bourbon fell at Gaeta, that is to say, like a martyr and a hero, itis impossible not to believe that God will raise him up again and restore his kingdom. Mark my words, son of Massenzio Cantelmo, and do not forget them. And God grant that this come to pass before my eyes are closed! That is my only desire.”
He was preparing an apotheosis of fire and blood on the ruins of the strong city for the pale ghost of royalty.
“Wonderful faith!” I thought, as I saw what sparks could still glow in the ashy blue of those feeble eyes. “Wonderful and vain faith! The power of the Bourbons slumbers at San Dionigi.” And as the old man’s words called up the gleaming vision of the Bavarian heroine, my contempt increased for that king of twenty-three, on whom Fortune had bestowed the very horse which carried Henry of Navarre to Paris, and who was cowardly enough, like the miserable PhilipV., to have no ambition to ride anything more substantial than the imaginary horses of the tapestries that lined his walls.
“What a magnificent enterprise lay before that Bourbon prince when he departed from the palace at Caserta, where the doctors were busy embalming the corpse of his murdered father as it lay pierced with innumerable wounds!” I thought, in the eager spirit which the warlike images evoked by the venerable old man had kindled in me. “Nothing was wanting to incite him, not even the corruption and odour of corpses, which are powerful to inspire thoughts of greatness. In very truth, everything was his: the lordly power of an ancient name, youth, whichattracts and carries men away, kingship over three fair seas accustomed to tyranny, a rich kingdom in sight of a curved bay sonorous as a lyre, a passionate companion, who seemed to draw in through her delicate nostrils the atmosphere of heroic ambitions, a temperament capable of trembling with the voluptuousness of power, and full of the electric current which directs the hurricane. All these were his to enjoy and to defend; and still, as exiled husband on the farthest shore of another sea, his ear was filled with the clamour of his faithful people, although another kind of clamour reached him also; and the opportunity was offered to him of a splendid struggle beyond the limits of his dominions, on fields already watered with blood, and smoking with the strength of their fermentation—fields open to the strongest thought, the noblest word, the swiftest sword. In very truth, everything was his, save the lion’s nature. Why was it Fortune’s will to heap the burden of such favours upon a feeble, lamb-like nature? Never did blood so cowardly flow in youthful veins, never was there a more torpid sensuality. The very beauty of his lawful kingdom, the divine outlines of the shore, the balmy air, the mystery of the nights, all the enchantments of the dying summer, ought at least to have touched the senses of the youth, to have awaked in him the deep desire for possession, to have communicated to him the savage rage for living. Ah, that last evening in the almost deserted palace, forsaken by the courtiers, with the strong breath of the sea wind blowing through the emptyhalls, and bringing with it September perfumes, and the supreme sweetness of the gulf, while the closed curtains waved mysteriously and spread a vague terror, while the lights flickered and went out on the tables, still strewn with the shameful letters announcing the flight of those the prince had counted as most devoted. And the desolation of that departure in the twilight, in the small ship commanded by a man of the people, one of the few who remained faithful; and the silent encounter with the warships, already gone over to the enemy, and full of treachery; and the long, sleepless night passed on deck in vain regrets, while the weary queen slept under the stars, exposed to the chill night air; and at last, at sunrise, the rock of Gaeta, the final refuge, fated to be the final ruin, where the royal dignity was to be forced to come to terms with a bragging soldier!”
“Treason was everywhere, like the smoke and smell of gunpowder,” continued the prince. He grew more and more troubled by these sanguinary recollections, and from time to time a gesture from the white hand on which the cameo gleamed gave animation to his words. “The most terrible day of the siege was the fifth of February; and the powder magazine of the Sant’ Antonio battery was blown up by treachery.”
“Ah! what an atrocious thing it was!” exclaimed Violante, with a shudder and an instinctive movement as if to cover her ears with her hands. “How terrible!”
“You can still remember it,” her father said, looking at her with softer eyes.
“I always shall.”
“Violante was with us at Gaeta,” he added, turning to me. “She was scarcely five years old, and was a great pet of the queen’s. The others had started for Civita Vecchia on theVolcanowith the Contessa di Trapani. We were staying in the artillery quarters beneath the shore batteries....”
“I can remember it all!” interrupted Violante, seized by a sudden emotion, which seemed to sweep over her from that great purple light which lit up her far-off infancy. “Everything—everything seems as distinct as if it had happened yesterday! The room was divided by two partitions, made of flags sewn together. I can see the colours quite clearly; they were signalling flags, blue, yellow, and red. It was three or four in the afternoon when the explosion happened. Nina Rizzo, the queen’s lady-in-waiting, had just gone out. I was holding in my hand a cup of milk which the sisters at the hospital had sent me....”
She spoke on thus, in short sentences, in a somewhat muffled voice, with a fixed look, describing all these little details, one after the other, as if she were seeing them in a series of flashes. And the scenes called up by her words, as she sat looking into the past, stood out with an extraordinary force against the confused background of the actual scene.
The old man and the maiden, as each in turn they commemorated the ruin and slaughter of other days, seemed to annihilate all the vague, colourless surroundings,and create a kind of fiery atmosphere, in which my soul for a moment gasped painfully. The siege went on with all its horrors, in the city crowded with soldiers, horses, and mules, short of provisions and money, badly or insufficiently armed, scourged with typhus and villainy. Rain came down in torrents, filling the streets with black mire, in the midst of which the starving horses wandering about sank down and perished. The iron hailstones riddled the city, dismantled it, laid it low, set fire to it, and grew ever thicker and noisier, never ceasing save for the brief intervals appointed for the burial of the decaying corpses. In the churches divine service was celebrated, the Invincible Patroness was invoked, and all the while the stones were being torn from the walls, the windows were crashing in, and out of the distance came the groans of the wounded as they were carried away on stretchers. The sick men in the hospital raised themselves in their beds when a shell pierced through the passage walls, and expecting death, cried as the shell burst, “Long live the King!” All on a sudden a powder magazine exploded, shaking the city to its very foundations, and leaving it suffocated with smoke and with terror, while in the open cavity bastions, cannons, palisades, batteries, houses, and hundreds and hundreds of men were engulfed. But from time to time, on very sunny days, a kind of heroic madness seized the besieged, a kind of intoxication of death drove them into danger, and made them seek out the batteries where the fire was fiercest. In sight of the enemy the artillerymensang and danced in a kind of frenzy to the sound of the bugles. A great shout of joy and affection greeted the queen’s appearance under the hail of bullets on the esplanades. She moved with a bold step, in the easy grace of her nineteen years, dressed in a shining bodice like a breastplate, her face smiling under the plumes of her felt hat. Without moving an eyelash as the bullets whistled by, she turned her encouraging eyes on the soldiers; they inspired them like the waving of banners, and beneath that gaze pride seemed to magnify its wounds, while those who were unscathed seemed to long for the glory of a crimson stain. From time to time men with eyes burning fiercely in blackened faces, with their clothes torn to tatters, as though the jaws of a wild beast had rent them—men covered with blood and powder rushed up to her from the cannons, called her by name, and kissed the hem of her skirt.
“Ah, how beautiful she was, and how worthy of her throne!” exclaimed the prince, and his voice assumed its manliest tones to celebrate her prowess. “Her presence had a magnetic power over the soldiers. When she was there, they all fought like lions. The twenty-second of January was the most glorious day of the siege, because she remained on the batteries till nightfall.”
A pause followed, a moment of meditation, in which each of us seemed to be contemplating the ideal figure of the heroine on a field of ruin and corpses.
“Tears were strange to her eyes!” said Violanteslowly, absorbed in her far-away memories. “When at the last hour I saw her weep, I was overcome with terror and surprise, as if some unexpected and almost incredible thing had occurred. As she kissed me, she watered my face with her tears.” After another pause, she added—
“She wore a little green feather in her hat.”
She added again—
“She had a great emerald at her throat.”
She was sitting at my side, and a new emotion swept over me as with an involuntary movement I leant slightly towards her, and breathed the perfume which I thought was growing stronger, and overpowering the honeyed fragrance of the flowers. A sudden aversion for all the people and things present came over me; they gave me a feeling of impatience and annoyance that was almost an aversion; they seemed at that moment to be weighing on me and oppressing me in quite a peculiar way. I looked across with instinctive hostility at the prince’s cousin, Ottavio Montaga, who sat at one end of the table, a taciturn individual with something of the sinister look of a mask, the symbol of a mysterious prohibition not to be transgressed. I felt all the health, strength, and passion in me rise in hatred against the sickness, the sadness, against the mortal dulness by which this wonderful creature was being consumed without a chance of escape. The uneasiness which had troubled my spirit after the successive apparitions of the three different figures was now subdued, and I believed myself to have set my choice on herwhom all the glory and solemnity of the past seemed uniting to ennoble. Once more, it was she alone who stirred my being as she had stirred it before when she lifted her head at the cry of the hawk.
The prince said to me—
“It is singular, is it not, Claudio, that Violante should be able to remember that time so clearly? Don’t you think it very strange?”
Then, smiling with his previous gentle smile—
“Maria Sophia has never ceased to show partiality for her. Knowing that she is passionately fond of scent, she sends her quantities of essences every year for her birthday. And she has never missed once, all the time we have been here!”
He turned tenderly to his daughter—
“And now you could not get on without them, could you?”
And to me he said, with a shade of sadness—
“She lives on them. You see, Claudio, how white she is!”
I fancied that Anatolia whispered—
“She is dying of them.”
When we rose from table, Anatolia proposed going down to the garden.
“Let us go and bask in the sun a little more!” she suggested, pointing to a shaft of sunbeams which shot down from the highest pane of a window where the faded curtains were not drawn. “Who will come?”
By the movement her hand was lit up, turned golden down to her wrist, and the rays slid through her fingers like docile hair. “We will all come,” I replied.
Don Ottavio begged to be excused, and retired (he seemed like an intruder among us); but the prince laid his arm in Anatolia’s, as Antonello had done before on the steps, and said—
“I will come down to the quadrangle with you.”
As we passed through the vast reception hall, now reduced to a disused anteroom, I noticed an old sedan chair with the two poles still in it, as if a lady had just descended from it, or was about to enter.
“Who uses the sedan chair?” I asked, as I stopped to look at it.
“None of us,” answered Anatolia after a moment’s hesitation, during which a shade of agitation passed over every face.
“It is of the time of CharlesIII.,” said the prince, concealing his melancholy thoughts under a smile. “It belonged to the Duchess of Cublana, Donna Raimondetta Montaga, who was the most beautiful lady of the court, and was praised as the greatest beauty of the kingdom.”
“The design is excellent,” I remarked, approaching it, for I was attracted by this piece of antiquity, which seemed hardly yet dead, and to which the memory of Donna Raimondetta gave a tender interest and grace, so that I almost imagined as I looked that she was alive again within it. “It is an exquisite work of art, and wonderfully preserved.”
But I noticed a strange feeling of uneasinessamong my hosts, and that this uneasiness was caused by the object I was looking at. And by virtue of this mystery, I felt more strongly than before the imaginary life dwelling within the precious wood.
“Perhaps the soul of Donna Raimondetta lives inside,” I said lightly, and I could not resist the desire to open the pane of glass. “It could not have a more delicate casket. Let us see.”
As I opened it, a subtle odour reached my nostrils, and I put my head inside, so as to breathe it better.
“What a scent!” I exclaimed, delighted with the unexpected sensation. “Is it the Duchess of Cublana’s perfume?”
And for a few seconds my imagination hovered in the soft atmosphere created by the enchantment of the ancient dame, picturing a little round mouth like a strawberry, a powdered head-dress, and a brocade dress stiffened by a hoop.
The sedan chair was scented like a bridal chest; it was lined inside with willow-green velvet, and decorated with a little oval mirror on each side; without, it was all gilded and painted in the most refined taste, the ceiling and jointings were enriched with delicate carving, all the more harmonious and pleasing to the eye from the veil thrown over them by the hand of time; the whole was the work of a graceful imagination and a skilled hand.
“Or perhaps it is you, Donna Violante,” I added, “who have poured out one of your phials on this soft velvet, as a homage to your famous ancestress?”
“No, it is not I,” she said, almost indifferently, asif she had fallen back into her usual apathy, and was again far away.
“Let us go now,” begged Anatolia, drawing on her father, whose arm still rested in hers. “It is always so cold in this room.”
“Let us go,” repeated Antonello, shivering.
From the top of the staircase we could already hear the sound of the water; at first it sounded hoarse, then gradually clearer and louder.
“Has the fountain been turned on?” asked the prince.
“We turned it on just now,” said Anatolia, “in honour of our guest.”
“Did you notice the play of the echo in the quadrangle, Claudio?” Don Luzio inquired. “It is extraordinary.”
“Truly extraordinary,” I replied. “It is a wonderful effect of sound. It is like a musician’s trick. I think an attentive harmonist might discover the secret of unknown chords and discords in it. It would be an incomparable training for a delicate ear. Is it not true, Donna Violante? You are on the fountain’s side, against Antonello.”
“Yes,” she said simply, “I love and understand water.”
“Laudato si, mi Signore, per sor acqua.” (Praised be Thou, O Lord, for sister water.) “Do you remember the canticle of St. Francis, Donna Massimilla?”
“Certainly,” replied the betrothed of Christ, with her faint smile, colouring slightly. “I belong to the Poor Clares.”
Her father’s look was a melancholy caress.
“Suor Acqua” (Sister Water), Anatolia called her, caressing the soft bands of hair on her forehead with her fingers. “Take that name.”
“It would be presumptuous,” replied the Poor Clare with laughing humility.
She recalled to me with only a slight variation the saying of the saint:Symphonialis est aqua.
We were all there close to the rushing fountain. Each of the mouths was pouring out its voice through a glass pipe like a curved flute. The lower shell was quite full already, and the four sea-horses were up to their bellies in water.
“The design is by Algardi, the Bolognese,” said the prince, “the architect of InnocentX.; but the sculpture was done by the Neapolitan Domenico Guidi, the same who executed the greater part of the relief of Attila at St. Peter’s.”
Violante had drawn near the edge of the basin again, and I gazed at the reflection of her figure in the liquid element, whose continual tremor melted the features as it rippled away round the horses’ hoofs.
“There is a tragic story in connection with this fountain,” added the prince, “a story which has become the source of some superstitious ideas. Don’t you know it?”
“No, I don’t,” I replied, “but tell it me, if you will.”
And I looked at Antonello, thinking of the lost soul which tormented and terrified him at night. He also was now looking intently at Violante’s reflection as it trembled in the depths of the water.
“Here in this fountain Pantea Montaga was drowned,” began Don Luzio. “In the time of the Viceroy Peter of Aragon——”
But he interrupted himself—
“I will tell you the story another time.”
I saw that he shrank from calling up these memories in presence of his daughters, and I did not press him.
But shortly after, in the outer portico, as we paced slowly up and down with his arm in mine, he returned to the story; and all the time the sun blazed on the series of terraces from which the tall white statues of the Seasons looked over the tawny valley of the Saurgo.
It was a mysterious secret drama of passion and death, worthy of the weird stone cloister which had fostered and exalted its violence in rapid alternation. To me it signified the power which the genius of places can exercise over the responsive soul, a power by which every genuine feeling of the soul must concentrate itself to the utmost degree of intensity possible to human nature, in order to express its whole force in a definite act with a certain result.
As I listened to the prince’s imperfect account, I mentally reconstructed that hour of intense life which produced the death of Pantea; and the midnight crime appeared to me clothed in a beauty which was the harbinger of profound thoughts.
At the close of the story Prince Luzio took leave of me, saying: “I hope from this day you will treat this house as your own. Whenever you like to come,you will be welcome, dear boy. So do not stay away too long.”
It made me sad to see him enter the desolate palace alone, so I went back a little way with him, talking affectionately. We stopped again before the fountain; and he made a motion of his hand towards the basin, and in the chill, clear water I saw the fatal beauty of Pantea and her curved white hands floating in the water, like two magnolia petals, and her soft hair fluttering under the horses’ hoofs.
“A legend grew up years afterwards,” said the prince, smiling. “On moonless nights Pantea’s soul sings on the summit of the fountain, while that of her lover groans within the jaws of the stone beasts until the dawn breaks.”
The troublous joy of spring rose up in our faces as we leant over the balustrade towards the sloping garden. A kind of quivering atmosphere enveloped us with the swiftness of a fever poison, and the sensation was so strong as to paralyse the nerves. The pupils of our eyes became fixed, our eyelids were lowered as if sleep were gliding over us. My soul within me was heavy like a cloud.
Anatolia remarked upon our mutual silence—
“Happiness is passing by.”
These sudden words of hers revealed to us the secret of the anguish within us; she had expressed the spirit of intense melancholy which pervaded theearth awaiting the renewal of spring. “Happiness is passing by!”
“Whose hands may arrest her?” I asked myself sharply, in the blind agitation of my longing for love, in the confused revolt of my deepest instincts.
The three sisters were leaning their elbows on the stone parapet, their bare hands without rings stretched out in the sun as in a golden bath: Massimilla with fingers interlaced; Anatolia with one hand crossed in the other so that her thumbs were uppermost; Violante, pressing in hers some of the fading violets out of her belt, and then letting them fall into space.
“Whose hands may arrest her?”
Anatolia’s looked the strongest and the most sensitive. The firm outlines of the muscles and tendons supporting the thumbs were clearly visible beneath the skin. The tips of the thumbs wore rosy nails for gems, with a half moon of white at the root like a double onyx.
Had they not communicated a sense of their generous power and practical kindness when first I touched them? Had I not already felt a reviving warmth in the hollow of her palm?
But Massimilla’s hands were like uncreated things, like dream-shapes rather, so slender were they; and so white, that the golden sunbeams failed to gild them; and so symbolically familiar, that in the broad daylight I could see again the dim shadows of the dusky apse where first they appeared to me, and see them hovering around the altar, last relics of a form sunk back again into mystery,and yet fitted—they alone—to enchant and caress souls. Now with the interlacing of the clasped fingers they symbolised the fetters of voluntary slavery. “Here am I, thine own, bound by a tie stronger than any chain. I will open my arms only when it shall be thy good pleasure to release me. Mine be it only to worship and obey, to obey and worship,” was the confession which by these tokens the devout maiden made to her ideal lord. And I imagined her hands loosed and long scrolls of living silence floating from them; just as from the hands of the angels painted above and around altars there float long streamers eloquently inscribed with verses, and containing history within the mystic sense of the written words. “Thus, oh Worshipper, mayest thou encircle my wandering spirit within the living silence of thy love! And I shall become unfaithful to earth’s solitudes, to the solemn mountains, the musical woods, the peaceful rivers, even to the starry skies; for no sight on earth can elevate a man’s spirit like the presence of a beautiful and submissive soul. It is this which gives to the walls of a narrow room the feeling of boundless space, like the votive lamp which only increases the vast darkness of a cathedral. And for this, I should desire to have thee with me, sweet slave. He who meditates, surrounded by silent adoration, feels the divinity of his own thoughts and the creative power of a god.”
But the sublime hands of Violante, as they pressed the essence out of the tender flowers and let them fall crushed to the ground, were fulfilling an actwhich corresponded most perfectly, as a symbol, to the characteristics of my ideal style: they extracted the supreme flavour of life out of things, took from them the utmost they could give, and then left them exhausted. Was not this one of the most important elements in my art of living?
And so Violante appeared to me as a divine and incomparable instrument of my art. “Relation with her is necessary to me that I may know and exhaust the innumerable things which lie hidden in the depths of the human senses, those things of which eternal desire is the only revelation. The tangible body encloses infinite mysteries which only the touch of another body can reveal to him that is gifted by Nature to understand them and religiously celebrate them. And has not her body the sanctity and magnificence of a temple? Does not her beauty promise the highest revelations to my senses?”
Thus as before, when we ascended the steps, I felt within me the attraction of the three complete types, which promised to all my energies the joy of manifesting themselves and of satisfying themselves to the uttermost in perfect harmony. One of them—in my dream—watched, her pure brow radiant with prophecy, over the son of my soul and my body; another, like the salamander in the alchemist’s furnace, lived within the fiery circle of my thoughts; and the third called me back to the devout worship of the body and invited me to learn in mysterious ceremonies how to live again the life of the ancient gods. They all three seemed bornto serve my ideal of perfection on earth. And the duty of separating one from the other was as distasteful to me as destroying some symmetry; it irritated me, it seemed an injustice done by prejudice and habit. “Why may I not take them all to my home on a single day and adorn my solitude with their threefold grace? My love and my art should weave a different spell round each, build a throne for each, and offer to each the sceptre of an ideal kingdom peopled with shadows, where she would find her immortal characteristics transfigured in their different aspects. And since brevity is the most fitting attribute of ambitious dreams and beautiful life, my love and my art will be able to bring to these blessed ones (but not to thee, Anatolia, who art fated to watch for a long time) a harmonious death at the seasonable hour——”
These thoughts of mine, burning like a soft delirium in the early heat of the spring sun, were raining down without ceasing on the hands of the maidens, when Violante let the last of her crushed flowers fall, and leant over to catch hold of the tips of the long creepers which grew from the terrace below up to the balustrade, and wreathed themselves round it. She managed to break off a twig, and examined its fibres to see if the spring sap had reached it yet.
“They are still asleep,” she said.
And so we bent over the sleep transparent already of those pale sheaths, in which one of the greatest of earth’s miracles was about to be worked, called up before us by a word.
“You will see in a few months,” said Anatolia to me, “they will all be covered with a green mantle; all the trellises will throw shade.”
These plants were not the mothers of the grape, but a kind of leafy vine with innumerable flying tendrils, which spread like a piece of netting over the wide surface of the wall and the trellises down the steps. They looked more like worn-out ropes than plants, torn as they were by the rain, shrivelled by the sun, fragile as gossamer to behold. And yet the approaching change made them appear as mystical as the huge trunks of mountain forest trees. Myriads of young leaves were about to burst miraculously from the fibres of that lifeless rope.
“In autumn,” said Violante, “everything turns red, a glorious red, and sometimes on sunny October days the walls and steps seem to be hung with purple. Then, indeed, the garden has its hour of beauty. If you are here then, you will see——”
“He won’t be here,” interrupted Antonello, shaking his head.
“Why do you always say that?” I asked him with gentle reproof; “who knows?”
“No one ever knows anything,” murmured Oddo in that muffled voice of his, which I could only distinguish from his brother’s by the movement of the lips. “Who knows what may happen to us between this and the autumn? Massimilla is the only one who is safe; she has found her refuge.”
Perhaps there was a tiny drop of bitterness in the last words.
“Massimilla is going to pray for us,” said Anatolia gravely.
The novice bent her head over her clasped hands, and we were silent for a space, while a flood of vague but overpowering feeling swept over us.
The clearness of the early spring afternoon paled before that illuminating vision of the autumn purple as we went down the steps, where a few hours before the three princesses had appeared, as at the beginning of a fairy tale, with a new-born smile on their lips after a night of interminable anguish. That morning hour already seemed as far away as the autumn was near, to which—a dim presentiment told me—a fate was leading me swift as lightning. And when I pictured the purple foliage on the bare branches, I also foresaw a shadow of deep mourning fall on the faces of the three sisters.
And once more the sentiment of death impassioned and elevated my soul till all things were reflected in it transfigured by poetry. And in the splendour of the spring air these frail beings seemed to me “marvellously sad,” like the women in the vision of the Vita Nuova, which Massimilla had recalled to my memory among the almond blossom and the ancient mirrors. And I felt as if the ardent spirit possessed me that burns in the pages of that book, where the youthful Dante shows how his soul could be shaken to its very foundations, and exalted to the height of sorrowful madness by imagining the death of Beatrice, and gazing on her face through the funeral shroud. “Weeping,” I said within myself. “Certainly it mustsometime come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die.... And a great fear fell upon me, and I imagined that some friend should come to me and say: 'Dost thou not know? Thy marvellous lady has departed from this world....’ Then my heart that was so full of love said unto me: 'It is true that our lady lieth dead’ ... and so strong was this idle imagining that it made me to behold my lady in death....” Did not the force of this ineffable inner beauty come to me from a similar fancy?
A splendid nobility flowed from every action of these maidens, doomed to die. It lit up the outward things among which they moved. And never again perhaps did I see them in so much light and shade.
When we had reached the foot of the steps, and entered a glade surrounded by the green ruins of a box-wood bower, Anatolia paused and asked me—
“Would you like to see the whole garden? Perhaps you might find some memories in it.”
As if she wanted to proclaim her power, Violante said—
“As you enjoy the music of the water, I will take you to see my seven fountains.”
And Massimilla, with her shy gentleness—
“In return for the almond blossom, I will show you a white hawthorn which came out last night over there.”
I felt as though they were speaking of their mostintimate possessions, and, like the virgin of Fontebranda, intended to say: “We are ourselves a garden.”
As I could not express what I felt, I said only empty words.
“Show me the way, then,” I said; “I am sure to come across some memories, at any rate of my early reading, which used to be fairy tales.”
“Poor fairies without wands!” observed Oddo, taking Anatolia’s hand with a caressing gesture.
And in the eyes of the maidens were smiles full of despair.
Then Violante led us through a labyrinth.
We walked among evergreens, among ancient box-trees, laurels, myrtles, whose wild old age had forgotten its early discipline. In a few places here and there there was some trace of the symmetrical shapes carved once upon a time by the gardener’s shears; and with a melancholy not unlike his who searches on marble tombstones for the effigies of the forgotten dead, I noted carefully among the silent plants those traces of humanity not altogether obliterated. A bitter-sweet odour hung round our path, and from time to time one of us, as if wishing to weave afresh an unravelled web, would reconstruct some memory of our far-off childhood. And now the shadow of my mother rose pure and clear before me, and seemed to feed upon all the things which our hearts exhaled in the broken silences, and she never left Anatolia’s side, thus showing me her preference. And a bitter-sweet odour hung over our melancholy.
Violante stopped and asked me, almost with thesame look and in the same tone as when she spoke to me at the window—
“Do you hear?”
“Now we are in your kingdom,” I said to her, “because you are the queen of the fountains.”
The hoarse song of the water came to us through a high myrtle hedge as we stood in a little meadow strewn with daffodils, and guarded by a statue of Pan green with moss. A delicious softness seemed to spring in my veins from the soft turf my feet pressed, and once again the sudden joy of living took away my breath. At the same time, the presence of the two brothers oppressed me, and pity for them grew stronger. “Ah, how I could stir your sealed-up souls to the very depths!” I thought, as I looked at the three prisoners. “How I could quicken into anguish the troubled feelings within you!” And I pictured the delight of enjoying these fresh souls full of the sap of life, rare fruits which had slowly ripened in the garden of self-knowledge, and were here still intact to slake my thirst. And my regret was the greater, because I knew that never again could I renew that unique charm of first acquaintance between beings whose destinies are fated to be united; that unique and fleeting charm, in which are mingled marvel, and expectation, and presentiment, and hope, and a thousand indefinable things which partake of the nature of dreams, vain things indeed, yet issuing from the most sacred depths of life.
Everything looked soft and rich through the transparency of the amber air, and everywhere thoughtsof beauty worthy of being gathered sprang into flower, and the noblest flowered at the feet of the desolate princesses, where I imagined myself stooping to gather them. And I imagined the delight of caressing and troubling those souls while wandering through the cloistered garden, over whom the phantoms of the ancient seasons seemed to be weaving a veil of poetry—a veil into which were woven with almost invisible threads strange figures of unknown beings laughing and weeping in the alternations of joy and sorrow.
In every one of these fountains was there not a Pantea singing, the pure victim of a wicked and sublime passion? Certainly an extraordinary feeling came over me when Violante led me beyond the myrtles into the long alley enclosed between the shrubbery and the eastern wall. Here reigned that mysterious spirit which fills such lonely spots as tradition tells us were wont to be the meeting-place of lovers, celebrated for the tragic splendour of their fate. The statues, the pillars, the very trunks of the trees wore the aspect of things which have been witnesses and accomplices of a great human passion, and perpetuate the memory of it to all time. The deep injuries of devouring time and the inclement seasons had given to the outlines of the stone that expression, I might almost say that eloquence, which ruins alone possess. Noble thoughts seem to rise from the broken lines.
And I imagined the delight of disclosing my magnificent dream here to the threeblessed oneswho alone could transform it into living harmony; Iimagined the delight of talking of love in that very place where the virtue of so many symbols united to raise the soul above the common griefs of humanity and expand it in the supreme heaven of beauty.
We were walking slowly, pausing from time to time, and speaking to hide the uneasiness which troubled us; Oddo and Antonello seemed tired, they lingered a few steps behind and were gloomily silent. And I felt as though the shadows of sickness and death were behind me.
My fervour had cooled. I felt the crudeness of the contrast between my impetuous eagerness and the miserable necessity which clung fast to my side, and was around me everywhere in that great cloister full of forgotten and perishing things. I felt that each one of those beings who in that very same hour had been so often illuminated by my intellect and transfigured by my passion, still kept her secret intact, and that the language of her form could not reveal it to me. As I looked at them, I saw each far away from the other, each a stranger to the other, each with an unfathomed thought between her brows, each with an unfathomed sentiment in her heart. I was about to go away and return to my solitude; our day was near its end. What new things had that first intercourse aroused in their souls, weary with the long monotony of sorrow, which had ceased perhaps to be brightened by anyray of hope in the unforeseen? Under what aspect had I appeared to each? Had their longing for love and happiness yearned towards me with an uncontrollable impulse, or did a suspicious incredulity like that of their two brothers hinder them from trusting me?
They were walking thoughtfully by my side, and even when they spoke they seemed so deeply absorbed, that more than once I was on the point of asking: “What are you thinking about?” And a violent desire arose in me to extort from them the secret they were holding so close; and the bold words which can suddenly unlock a closed heart, and surprise the most secret pain and force it to confession, rose to my lips. But at the same time a pitiful tenderness moved me almost to ask their pardon for the pain they might be suffering at my hand, and for a sharper pain which they were to suffer in the future. The necessity of choice presented itself to me as a cruel trial, a cause of sorrow and inevitable sacrifices. Did I not feel a vehement anxiety filling up the pauses in our restless conversation?
“Oh, when summer comes!” sighed Violante, lifting up her eyes to the spreading umbrella pines. “In summer I spend the whole day here alone with my fountains. And it is the time of the tuberoses!”
Gigantic pines with straight round stems like the masts of a vessel grew at equal distances in a row along the wall of the cloister and protected it with their thick cupolas. Between stem and stem, like the spaces between columns, were niches hollowedin the wall and inhabited by nude statues or robed figures in calm attitudes, their blind divinity calling up visions of the past. At equal distances the seven fountains projected in the shape of little temples; each one composed of a wide basin in which deities sitting on the brink or leaning on the urn of water gazed at their own reflection framed between the two pairs of columns which supported a pediment carved with a couplet. Opposite them rose the great myrtle hedge, a mass of green only broken by the white pensive statues. And the damp ground was almost entirely covered with moss as soft as velvet, which rendered our steps noiseless and heightened the sweetness of the mystery.
“Can you read the verses?” asked Violante, as she saw me intent on deciphering the letters cut in the stone, and effaced here and there by mould and cracks. “I once knew what they meant.”
They said: “Hasten, hasten! Weave garlands of fair roses to girdle the passing hours.”
PRÆCIPITATE MORAS, VOLUCRES CINGATIS UT HORASNECTITE FORMOSAS, MOLLIA SERTA, ROSAS.
It was only the ancient precept, sweetened by rhyme, which for centuries has incited men to enjoy the pleasures of our brief life, has kindled the kisses on lovers’ lips, and multiplied the number of goblets at the banquet. It was the old voluptuous melody, modulated on the new instrument which an industrious monk had fashioned in the shape of a dove’s wing out of the various reeds left in the forsaken garden ofPan, and bound together with the wax of votive lights and the threads of old altar linen.
“The fountain gleams and babbles; and saith to thee in its splendour: 'Rejoice!’ and in its murmur speaks of Love.”
FONS LUCET, PLAUDE, ELOQUITUR FONS LUMINE: GAUDE.FONS SONAT, ADCLAMA, MURMURE DICIT: AMA.
The rugged rhymes with their eternal commentary of running water threw a vague spell over my spirit. I could hear in those echoes the veiled accents of the melancholy which adds an indefinable grace to pleasure, and by troubling it gives it greater depth. No less soft and sad were the divine youthful figures that stretched their bare limbs over the margin in curves as graceful as those of the mirror into which they had so long been gazing.
“Weep here, ye lovers who come to slake your thirst. Too sweet is the water. Season it with the salt of your tears.”
FLETE HIC OPTANTES, NIMIS EST AQUA DULCIS, AMANTESSALSUS, UT APTA VEHAM, TEMPERET HUMOR EAM.
Thus the gentle fountain, envying the savour of tears, pointed out to the joyous the subtle art of imparting a touch of bitterness to the fullest enjoyment. “It is well to mix among the roses some dewy flower of the deadly hellebore, scarcely distinguishable from the rest of the garland, so that thus redeemed the head may from time to time be bent.” Itseemed as if step by step, on that long Way of Love, enjoyment became more collected, wiser, and yet more passionate. The liquid mirrors invited lovers to lay down heads heavy with dreams, and to gaze at their own reflections, until, having at last attained to perceiving in them only symbols of unknown beings risen into the light from an inaccessible world, they may better realise the presence of the unspeakably strange and remote in their own lives. “Lean over to your reflections that your kisses may be doubled by the mirror.”
OSCULA JUCUNDA UT DUPLICENTUR IMAGINE IN UNDAVULTUS HIC VERO CERNITE FONTE MERO.
Was not that simple action a token revealing a hidden thing? The two lovers bending over the reflection of their caress unconsciously figured the mystic power of voluptuous enjoyment, which consists in banishing for a few moments from our souls the unknown man whom we all carry hidden within us, and thus rendering him as remote and strange as a phantom. Does not the dim vagueness of such a sentiment perhaps increase the delirium and produce the terror of lovers who in the mirrors of deep alcoves admire the reflection of their mutual caresses repeated by figures in their own likeness, yet immeasurably unlike and remote in their supernatural silence? With a confused consciousness of the extraordinary alienation taking place within them, they think they have found an enlightening symbol of it in those outward images, which analogy leads them no longerto consider as visible objects, but as inexplicable forms of life, and finally as visions of death.
This was the vision called up by the last of the musical fountains, as Violante’s face bent over it and the shadow of the pines fell slowly like a dark blue veil. “Here did Pleasure and Death admire their united reflection, and their two faces were fused into one.”
SPECTARUNT NUPTAS HIC SE MORS ATQUE VOLUPTASUNUS [FAMA FERAT] QUUM DUO, VULTUS ERAT.