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 ofthat 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 epitaphworthy 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. Hishortus 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, asif 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 makinga 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 charmingcrown 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 tosubdue 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 closingwith 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 magnificentDomina 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—wehad 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 Anatoliathe 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. Seatedon 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 towardsthe 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 sharpnessof 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 suddenbreath 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 nobleand 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. Andsheis 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 presentimentweighs 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, tohide 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 becomeso 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, butas 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!” Iimplored, 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 theechoing 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, onthat 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 attitudethrowing 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 myheart 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 withoutnumber, 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 BEGINNETHTHE BOOK OF GRACE.