III
“...A sedere, con le dita delle mani insieme tessute, tenendovi dentro il ginocchio stanco.”
Leonardo da Vinci
“Dov è più sentimento, li è più martirio.”
Ibid
And I led them among the flowers.
They listened with visible emotion to the infinite melodies of springtime, bending or turning sometimes towards their own shadows, which preceded or followed them like blue figures prostrated to kiss the earth. A confused feeling of the joy of liberty and hope shone at times in their dazzled eyes; a voiceless word at times unclosed their lips, and likened them to the brims of overflowing goblets. And when they paused, I thought with inward intoxication of the fulness of life which was suffocating them.
The things that we said to each other from time to time must have seemed futile to them also; but they were enough to make us feel the depth of our true life. A passing glance, a bend of the head, a short pause, sufficed to stir to their depths those abysses which the faint light of ordinary consciousness rarely penetrates, while that which we were saying seemed as far away to us as the deepestroots of trees are far from the murmur of the uppermost branches.
Nothing could have equalled the strange beauty of that stern country in full blossom. On the tawny ground, shaggy as a lion’s mane, the pink-and-white flowers suggested pictures of maidens lying trembling on the vast hairy bosoms of legendary giants. The rays of the sun played round the transparent petals and gave them the dancing splendour of precious stones. Here and there the polished ploughshares with which the land had been turned up glittered in dual radiance.
We realised the depth of our real life. And little by little, by common consent, we forbore to utter those empty words which had only served to break the solemnity of the silence, and to disperse the heavy cloud of dreams and thoughts which hung over us. We were united by a clearer and more intimate communion; an atmosphere of divination such as the mystics breathe sprang up around us, and without speaking we exchanged the profoundest secrets. Sometimes we were so steeped in delight that it surged from our eyes in a glance, and our slightest gestures expressed, without actual contact, all that is conveyed by the most lingering caress. The petals which fell at our feet from the almost motionless boughs, moved us strangely, like a confession of languor on the part of the trees, and of a delight in relieving themselves. The vines, all ready to bud, bending over the earth in contorted, struggling shapes, stimulated us with the example of a painfuleffort about to be changed into an intoxicating gift. And in the frail petal and slight tendril we felt the ideal virtue of the fragrant almond-oil and the flame of oblivion given by the grape.
A sudden agitation seized me one day when I saw a drop of blood on Violante’s hand, which had been pricked by a thorn among the flowers of a snowy hedge. Smiling, she withdrew the beautiful hand on which the drop was rising; and as we chanced to be at some distance from her sisters, and perhaps unobserved, I felt a wild desire to press my lips upon the blood and taste its sweetness. And the effort I made to restrain myself was so great that I trembled.
“Do you dislike the sight of blood?” she asked me in a voice which dissimulation was not able to steady or to make playful.
And as her eyes looked into mine I felt myself turning pale, for I had an indefinable feeling within me which can only be vaguely compared to an immense wheel revolving with lightning-like speed and suddenly brought to a standstill. Something great was being resolved upon in that moment by each of us; and although we preserved a composed attitude with regard to each other, our inward attitude was one of extreme tension preceding an irrepressible outburst. Our two lives yearned towards each other with their whole force.
Ah, shall I ever forget that burning silence trembling with the invisible flight of a messenger bearing the unspoken word? What power of oblivion willever be able to efface from my memory that hand beaded with blood, and that hill slope covered with blossom?
Anatolia’s voice called to us in the distance, and we moved on side by side. A sudden bodily weariness and sadness had fallen upon us, as if we had just passed from a long night of pleasure.
But there were moments also when my soul inclined rather towards her who had called us, and towards her who was about to depart. I rejoiced in these changes of love, which did not dissipate my energies, but stimulated them as wind fans the flame. I seemed to have discovered a new set of perceptions; the strangest and most diverse ones seemed to combine spontaneously within me. Sometimes they gave birth to such novel and beautiful music that I felt on the point of being transfigured, and I thought that my desire to become like unto the gods was about to be realised.
I thought: “If ever there was a god who loved to sit in the springtime beneath the flowering trees and entice the hamadryads from their hiding-places to caress them in his arms, he certainly never experienced greater enjoyment than I feel in gathering up the essential beauty of these delicious beings, and mingling it together with the same ease with which he might weave the diverse obedient locks of his tree nymphs into a golden harmony.”
Thus at times I felt as though I were living in a myth which the youth of the human soul created under the skies of Hellas. The ancient spirit ofdeity was abroad upon the earth, as it was when the daughter of Rhea gave to Triptolemus the gift of ears of corn that he might sow them in the furrows, and that all men by him might enjoy the divine benefit. The immortal energies which flowed through visible things seemed always conscious of the old transfiguring spirit that used to convert them into great symbols of beauty for the enjoyment of men. Three in number, like the Graces, the Gorgons, and the Fates, were the maidens who moved with me through this mysterious springtime. And I loved to compare myself to the youth pictured on the vase of Ruvo, who is enticing a winged genius across the threshold of a myrtle grove. Over his head is written the name Happiness, and three maidens surround him; one bears in her hands a dish heaped up with fruit, another is wrapped in a starry mantle, and the third has the thread of Lachesis in her nimble fingers.
One day we came by chance on a piece of enclosed ground, which the peasant cultivators had, according to the old heathen custom, dedicated to an oak-tree struck by lightning.
“What a beautiful death!” exclaimed Violante, as she leant over the oblong wooden fence which protected it.
The lonely place was full of almost terrible solemnity. The aspect of the altar which the Latin priests consecrated with the sacrifice of a white lamb must have been something like this.
“You are committing sacrilege,” I said to Violante.“This sacred enclosure cannot be touched without profanation. Heaven punishes the transgressor with madness....”
“With madness?...” she said, and drew away with a kind of instinctive superstition; her action gave an unexpected seriousness to my allusion to the pagan belief.
In one flash I saw the pale, swollen face of her mad mother, and Antonello’s wandering eyes, and I heard again the tragic cry: “We are breathing her madness”; and an icy sensation of fatality ran through me.
“No, no, don’t be afraid!” I said involuntarily, only deepening the shadow, perhaps, by thus clearly expressing my regret for the remark which must have seemed like a gloomy omen or a cruel presentiment.
“I am not afraid,” she replied, without smiling, as she leant over the fence again.
Thus from an idle word was born a great shadow.
The stricken tree rose before us, hard and black as basalt, its stony trunk torn open to the roots by a rent which testified to the awfulness of vindictive force. Its torn side was bare of branches, but there were a few left at the top of the other side, flinging the implacable despair of their gestures up to the sun. At each corner of the enclosure was fixed a ram’s skull with curved horns, bleached by the sun and rain of numberless seasons. Everything was motionless, dead, and sacred, and primeval in appearance.
From time to time the cries of the hawks pierced the blue sky.
The days passed by rapidly; they were days of farewell to her who was about to depart.
“Gaze at the springtime with the whole strength of your eyes,” I used to say to her, “for you will never see it again, never again!”
I said also to her—
“Warm your hands in the sun, bathe them in the sun, poor hands, for soon you will have to keep them crossed on your breast, or hidden in the shade under the brown woollen habit.” I would say as I showed her a flower—
“Here is a miracle for which you ought to thank Heaven. Think of the thousand legends contained in the silver network of this blossom, of the hidden relation between the number of petals and stamens, of the slender threads which support the lobes of the pistils, of this transparent robe, this web, these valves and membranes covered with almost invisible down, which enclose the mysterious agitation of the seed vessels. Think of all the divine art revealed in the structure of this living creation, gifted in its fragility with infinite powers of love and fertility. See the moving tracery of shadow which the trembling leaves cast on the earth, and the same tracery painted on the wall, to cheer your melancholy, in rays now blue and now golden; and the little, whitefingers at the tips of the pine branches; and the drops of dew hanging from the beard of the oats; and the delicate veins in the wings of the bee; and the dazzling green of the dragon-fly; and the iridescent colours on the dove’s neck; and the strange shapes of lichen stains; and the holes in tree-trunks; and the composition of crystals.... Store away all these marvels under those eyelids of yours, which will have to be lowered for so long before Christ crucified. I don’t think there are any gardens in the old monastery of Queen Sancia, only stone cloisters.”
“Why do you tempt me?” she used to ask. “Why do you enjoy disturbing my weak will? Have you been sent by God to try me?”
“I don’t wish to disturb your will,” I replied, “but only to give you brotherly advice, which may help you to suffer less. I think that after you are buried, when you cannot look out of the grated windows without hurting your cheek against the bars—I think that you who have grown up in a garden will have to pass through a few weeks of furious impatience, when all the visions of the open air will pass before your memory. Then it will be inexpressible torture to you if you cannot recall the exact details of the tiny black and yellow speckles on the lizard’s back, or the tender downy leaf which buds on the branch of an apple-tree. I know the madness of such belated curiosity. Once I was passionately fond of a great Scotch deerhound my father had given me. He was a magnificent beast, very graceful, and extraordinarily well bred. When he died I was in thegreatest misery; and it used to torment me strangely that I could not exactly recall the precise shape of the specks of gold in his brown eyes, and the grey marks in his beautiful rosy mouth when one caught a glimpse of it in a yawn or a bark. We ought, therefore, to look with attentive eyes at everything, especially at the creatures we love. Do you not love the things I was speaking to you about just now? and are you not about to leave them? Are you not about to place a kind of death between them and you?”
She sat, the fingers of her hands clasped together, holding within them the weary knee. Her delicate grace was a little disturbed by the trouble she felt at the ambiguity of my words, half serious and half playful, half deceptive and half sincere. And speaking in this way gave me the same pleasure as I should have felt in ruffling the smooth bands of that hair over which the silver scissors of the tonsure were hanging. “Tondeantur in rotundum....” Still clear in my memory was the fresh ring of the youthful laugh rippling from her mouth at the closing hour of that first day, and filling me with wonder. And it pleased my fancy to group the pictures of all these slight, many-coloured things around the novice, who, in that already far-away February afternoon, had showed me as a secret miracle the nightly blossoming of her white hawthorn.
I used to seek her as one seeks some good thingwhich one knows to be ephemeral. She attracted me like a pure figure of youth, turning to me with a tearful smile on the threshold of a gloomy door, through which she was about to pass, and be lost to sight. I should like to have said to her sisters: “Let me love her as long as she is of this world; let me pour spices over her little feet!” During my long visits it often happened that I was alone with her, and could enter into spiritual converse with her docile soul, ever anxious to obey. From time to time Anatolia would disappear, when one or other of the two grey maids came to summon her with a look. There were some days when Violante scarcely appeared at all. She seemed to avoid my society, to look upon me with indifference, to have fallen back into her usual apathy. The two brothers could not stand the full light of the open air for very long, and so I often found myself alone with the little novice, sitting on a marble seat beneath the statue of Summer in the outer court, or in the shadow of the already verdant trellises over the steps, or on the edge of the dried-up fish pond. I would say to her—
“Perhaps you may have deceived yourself in the choice of your Bridegroom, sweet sister. When you hear the bishop saying, 'Ecce sponsus venit,’ you will tremble in your secret heart, and will expect a fair, strong hand to be stretched out to you, and to gather you up entirely, like water in the hollow of a palm; for this is the sweet, powerful attitude which you expect of your conqueror, and which is best suited toyour flexibility, sweet sister. But perhaps you may be deluded at the very foot of the altar. And if you dare to lift your eyes, you will see, amid the burning candles, the promised Bridegroom motionless, with His pierced hands, and His head crowned with thorns. You will feel obliged, sweet sister, to draw out those cruel nails, driven in so deep. And terrible strength will seem to be required to fulfil such an action. And then the wounds will have to be dressed with infinite patience, and with balsams made of herbs only to be gathered on certain giddy heights, where the air is too rarefied to breathe. And the wounds once closed, the blood bursting from the veins will have to be forced back into its proper channels. And after the toilsome work has been completed, perhaps the newly-healed hands will withdraw altogether. To very few brides is it granted to see them perfectly restored again; and even among the elect there is scarcely one to whom on some mystic evening is vouchsafed the supreme joy of feeling herself altogether possessed, altogether folded within the constraining clasp, as you desire to be....”
The submissive maiden murmured—
“God grant that I may be that one!”
“Ah, sweet sister,” I said to her, “only think what immense strength that one must possess to revive a dead hand and to draw it so ardently to herself!”
“I have not any strength, but I will ask it of the Lord.”
“The Lord can only give you back the strength you have given to Him, Massimilla.”
“Be silent, please!” she implored. “I am afraid your words are impious.”
“They are not impious; you need not fear listening to them. Do you not remember the first lines of the Commentary of St. Theresa? She speaks there of a God imprisoned. Think what power is required to enchain the Lord! You see, Sister Water, what unceasing acts of strength are required of the Bride who is sung in the Antiphons and Responses. That is why, as I have a brotherly anxiety for you, I want at least to prepare your soul for the bitterness of disillusion. Do not lull it too much with the promises of the Psalms! There is, I think, some magnificent joyous promise in the verses you have learned, 'Veni, Electa mea....’ 'Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo! the winter is past ... the voice of the turtle is heard in our land ... the vines with the tender grapes give a good smell.’ Ah, the Latin of the Psalms is incomparable in producing a picture of the intoxication of love sinking under suffocating wealth. Some of the verses seem to drop with fragrant oil like the hair of slaves, or to be heavy and glittering as nuggets of gold. When the bishop places the crown of virginal merit on your head, your lips will have to pronounce wonderful words—words in which I see and feel some mysterious weight and splendour. 'Et immensis monilibus ornavit me.’ Wonderful words! Are they not?”
She was looking at me now with such passion that all her little soul trembled like a tear on her eyelashes, and by merely bending forward I could have drunk it.
“Perhaps I may be hurting you a little,” I went on. “But I see such dreams burning in the depths of your eyes that I am afraid for you, sweet sister; for the life for which you are preparing yourself cannot be in accordance with your dreams or with your nature. What is awaiting you is a monotonous life, always the same, almost torpid, all mapped out by the unchangeable Rule, in the old convent of Queen Sancia, which has been the grave of more than one Montaga, and of more than one Cantelma. There is a picture in my memory of those Poor Clares one Ash Wednesday. When I was in Naples, the Angevin Church of Santa Chiara had an attraction for me, not only because some of my ancestors lie there, not only because there one may envy the Duke of Rodi his sleep in the pagan sarcophagus of Protesilaus and Laodamia, but also because there with closed eyes one can absorb the poetry diffused by the beautiful names of dead women. There is Maria, Duchess of Durazzo and Empress of Constantinople, there is the Princess Clemenza, there is Isotta d’Altamura, and Isabella di Soleto, and Beatrice di Caserta, and that delicious Antonia Gaudino, who is very like you, as she softly sleeps in marble under a veil which Giovanni da Nola must have borrowed from the youngest of the Graces. I have a picture in my memory of the Poor Clares on Ash Wednesday. Behind the high altar there is a great black grating, all covered with spikes, enclosing the convent choir; and through it one can see the rows of stalls where the sisters sit, while on this side of the barrier thebishop, served by a Capuchin, is seated with a silver basin full of ashes in his hands. A shutter is opened in the grating, and one by one the Clares come and kneel at it. The bishop thrusts his feeble arm through the hole and marks their foreheads one by one with the sign of the cross. As each has been signed she rises and returns to her stall like a ghost, brushing the pavement with silent feet shod in felt. It all goes on in silence, and it is all icy like the ashes. Ah, sweet sister, when you too have been frozen like that, who will there be to warm your little soul?”
“Who warmed the soul of St. Clara and made it glow?” objected the novice, rousing herself to escape defeat, while the colour rose in her cheeks.
“A man: St. Francis of Assisi. You cannot think of the Sister of St. Damian except on her knees at the feet of Francis. A religious painter has pictured her in the act of exchanging a kiss with the seraphic father. And think of the long idyll woven between the hermitage of St. Damian and the Portiuncula; think of that week of passion, sorrow, and pity passed in the convent garden, under the shadow of the olives, during a summer of great drought, when Clara used to drink the tears from the almost blind eyes of Francis; think of the converse between the two mystical lovers which preceded that ecstasy whence the Song of the Creatures burst like a flash of light. You have theFiorettibeside you. Very well, read over the chapter in which it tells 'How St. Clara ate with St. Francis.’ Never was wedding banquet lit up by more radiant torches of love. Here it is: 'Themen of Assisi and Beltona, and of all the country round about, saw that Santa Maria degli Angeli, and the whole place, and the forest round about it, were burning brightly, and it seemed as if a great fire were devouring the church and the place and the forest together; whereupon the men of Assisi ran thither with great haste to put out the fire, believing that in very truth everything was burning. But when they reached the place and found no fire at all, they entered in and found St. Francis with St. Clara.’ You see now, sweet sister, how the patroness of your order was able to take shelter from the frost. You must admit that between the sunny hermitage of St. Damian and the gloom of your Angevin convent the difference is great. There will be no fire there, only a uniform grey shadow where humility is powerless. What sort of humility is yours, Massimilla? I think your desire for slavery is a very lofty one.”
She sat in silence, discouraged and gasping; and she was so sweet and so miserable in her distress, that I should like to have taken her on my knees.
“When you appeared to me the first day on the steps, you reminded me directly of an ermine. Well, somehow it seems as if in our imagination the whiteness of ermine could not be separated from the pride of the purple, so much accustomed are we to see them together on royal mantles. Perhaps you wear your mantle inside out, Massimilla, so that the purple is invisible underneath. That is often the way with a Montaga.”
“I don’t know,” she answered vaguely. “It seems as if everything you say must be true.”
It was as if she was making a confession—
“I will be what you wish me to be.”
“If I were your husband, Massimilla,” I added, to soothe her little trembling soul, “I would give you a house where the light should enter through slabs of honey-coloured alabaster, or through windows painted with legends; you should be served by ladies-in-waiting and mutes shod with felt and dressed in quiet colours, who would pass by you like great night-moths; and some of the rooms should have crystal walls looking over immense pools of water, hidden from sight by curtains which your hand could easily draw back whenever you felt the desire of a dream voyage with open eyes over an ocean valley full of strange rich forms of life; and round the house I would make you a garden of trees which should strew flowers and weep spices, and it should be peopled with gentle, graceful animals, such as gazelles, doves, swans, peacocks. And there in harmony with everything around you, you should live for me alone. And every day, after satisfying my desire of rulership over men by some worthy act, I would come and breathe the rarefied air of your silent love, I would come and live by your side the pure life of my thoughts. And sometimes I would inspire you with a vehement fever; and sometimes I would make you weep inexplicable tears; and sometimes I would make you die and come to life again, so that I might appear more than man in your eyes.”
Was she in the meantime preparing herself for departure, or was she lingering, impatiently expecting that which for her henceforth was not to be?
As I walked up the alley of old box-trees where Violante had first appeared to me under the great archway, she came to meet me almost at the same place, smiling a new smile.
“You look like an angel bringing good tidings to-day,” I said. “The whole spirit of April is in you.”
She gave me her hand, which I took and held for a moment in my own.
“What have you got to tell me?” I asked, for I read in her eyes the presence of something new which transfigured her.
My look embarrassed her; and once more her colour rose, seeming almost violent in contrast to her pallor.
“Nothing,” she said.
“And yet,” I said, “your whole figure seems to express annunciation. You shall tell me about it without speaking, if you will allow me to walk beside you for a little. I have never felt your harmony so perfect, Massimilla, as just now.”
She certainly thought I was speaking to her of love, she was so confused. And there shone from her whole figure such a bright spirit of gentleness, that I thought once more of those gentle ladies assembled in the imagination of young Dante; from whose lips from time to time fell words mingled with sighs, as falls “water mingled with beautiful snow.” And because I loved her in a superhuman way, someof those ancient words came back to my memory: “To what purpose dost thou love thus? Tell us, for certain it is that the purpose of such love must be quite new.”
We had left the central alley, and were now penetrating into the grassy labyrinth. The bird guests of the cloister were singing, bright insects buzzed around; but my ear was listening to the rustle of the hem of her skirt as it bent down the heads of the long grass. At last Massimilla confessed, in a shy voice—
“My departure has been put off.”
She added, as if to justify herself—
“So I shall be able to keep the last Easter with my own people.”
But to me it seemed as if she had suddenly fallen into my arms, and as if her cheek were clinging to my breast so closely that to unclasp her from me would be to hurt her.
Nevertheless I exclaimed—
“That is good news!”
And I said nothing else, for my emotion at the contact with that throbbing life was so fierce that it prevented any pitiful feigning. It was clear that she expected words of love and joy from me; that I should take her hand and ask: “Will you renounce your vows for ever and be mine entirely?” That was what she expected. And feeling her anguish so close to me, feeling her longing to surrender herself and be happy fanning my face almost like a flame, a shudder ran through me, such as a man would feel ifhe were suddenly shown a great wound where the most hidden intricacies of the living flesh were laid bare. There was something of that horror in my suffering. Up to that time I had played with the gentle soul, treating it like soft locks of hair through which it was sweet to run one’s fingers with the knowledge that next day it would be cut off. And now this soul was clinging to mine with its whole anguish.
“I could make thee a creature of joy!” It was like a promise, it was almost passion. Both promise and passion too had rung in my last words; and indeed at that very hour my attentive ear had been able at times, as I bent over that sweet soul, to discern some trace of the hidden vein whence the beautiful sudden laughter had sprung one day. Ah, why was I doomed to deceive such sorrowful hope, and to renounce crowning my powers with that silent adoration?
We were alone, and it was a strange solitude in which I could almost feel the emptiness of the airy space that the two other figures would have occupied had they been beside us. And the restlessness which their absence produced in my spirit was as painful as the stress of waiting.
“Where were Anatolia and Violante, what were they doing just then? Were they also in the garden?” I saw them appearing at the turn of every path, and imagined the expression of their first look as they met us. And I thought of the strangeness of the behaviour of both during the past few days, andsought to discover its true meaning. Anatolia rose before me with her kind, heroic, martyr’s smile, resigned to pour out her heart’s strength to the last drop that she might soothe incurable ills; she rose before me with those pure eyes of hers, which at times flashed invitingly like the waters of legendary lakes when a sudden glitter reveals the existence of hidden treasures. Wrapped in her apathy and disdain, Violante rose before me in an enigmatic attitude which might almost be hostile, and inspired me with a kind of discomfort such as gloomy presentiments are wont to produce; for behind her in my imagination was her fatal rock, and the mystery of her distant apartments clouded with deadly perfumes.
I should like to have asked her who was at my side: “Is there any change in your beloved sisters’ voices when they speak to you or to each other? Is there anything that hurts you sometimes in their voices and their looks? And at times when you are sitting side by side breathing the same air, does a heavy silence fall upon you, like the silence before a storm? And then do you feel all your tenderness dry up, and a bitterness like venom rise within you? And, tell me, do your sisters weep apart? Or does it sometimes happen that you all weep together?”
Thus would I fain have questioned the silent maiden, and with her have suffered the pain of loving.
I looked at her. She was suffering and rejoicing. “You always carry a book,” I said, for the sake of breaking the charm, “like a sibyl.”
She showed me the volume.
“It is the book I had that first day,” she said, with the indefinable tone in her voice which betrays the moisture of tears.
“And the blade of grass?”
“Is burnt up.”
“Put in a red rose instead.”
But there was such humble grace in her emotion, she let her inward ardour appear so ingenuously, that I could not leave her, nor resist the sweetness of seeing her melt little by little.
“Let us sit down,” I said. “Let us read a few pages together. Do you like this place?”
It was a little mound in the meadow, starred with anemones, and peaceful; some pointed yew-trees near gave it something of the look of a cemetery. In the centre, a caryatid, bent double so that her breast touched her knees, supported the marble slab of a sundial. And there, like seats at a table, were two benches for a couple of lovers who might wish as they looked on the shadow of the dial to experience the melancholy delight of perishing slowly and harmoniously together. Carved in the marble under the figures of the hours, this legend was still traceable—
ME LUMEN, VOS UMBRA REGIT.
“Let us sit down here,” I said. “It is a delicious place to enjoy the April sunshine and feel life flowing on.”
A green lizard lying on the slab looked at us outof its small glittering eyes quite fearlessly like a familiar spirit. When we sat down, it disappeared. Then I laid my hand on the marble, which was very hot.
“It is almost burning. Feel!”
Massimilla laid both her hands on it, white upon white, and kept them there. The point of the shadow reached the tip of her ring-finger, and the number of the hour was covered by her palm.
“See how the hand points to you as the hour of beatitude,” I said, for I profoundly enjoyed the harmonious grace of her action, and I loved her thus.
She half closed her eyes, and once more her little soul trembled on her eyelashes like a tear, and I could have drunk it by merely bending forward.
“The saint,” I added, touching the book, “has a divine verse for you in the waves of her prose, a verse supremely sweet, sweeter than those which rose in Dante’s mind before his exile. 'Stava quasi beata dolorosa!’”
She felt surrounded by light and love, as perhaps she may have felt before in her secret dreams; and she drank from my words and my presence, and from her own illusions and the fresh springtime, an intoxication of which the memory would perhaps fill her whole life. She did not speak, she sat motionless in the attitude I had praised; but I understood the ineffable things spoken by the eloquent blood in the veins of her beautiful bare hands.
“Let me love her as long as she is of this world!” I repeated to her sisters, while their sad eyes seemed togaze at me through the branches of the yew-trees. “Let me gather these anemones and strew them on the hair which is so soon to be shaven!”
She sat there almost beatified, and her unconsciousness touched me, for I loved her, and was saying to her: “I love thee, but on condition that to-morrow thou diest. I give thee this flame that thou mayest carry it with thee into thy grave. Such is the necessity which compels us.”
She sat up and pressed her hands over her face, and murmured—
“This sun is stupefying.”
“Would you like to go?” I asked.
“No,” she replied, with a faint smile. “According to your advice, I ought to bathe myself in sunshine. Let us stay here a little longer. You said you wanted to read a few pages.”
She seemed as exhausted as if she had just come out of a swoon.
“Read, there!” she begged, pushing the book towards me.
I took it, opened it, and turned over the leaves here and there, running my eyes over a few lines. The flying shadow of a swallow passed over the pages, and we heard the rustle of wings close by.
“How astonished I was,” she added, “when you repeated St. Catherine’s exhortation to me that day! I was still full of her spirit, and you were magician enough to speak to me of her.”
There was such perfect confidence and abandonment in her voice, that she could not have signified tome more plainly: “Here am I, I am thine; I belong entirely to thee as no other living creature can, as no inanimate thing can belong to thee. I am thy slave and thy chattel.”
She really seemed to possess a supernatural quality, to abolish in herself that law in love which denies to man the privilege of being the giver and the perpetual and perfect possession of the other. She really seemed in the full sunlight to be transfigured by my imagination into some crystal fluid, to become a liquid essence for me to absorb, and bathe myself in like a perfume.
“I think,” I said, “that sometimes when you read this book you must feel your soul evaporate like a drop of water on burning iron. Do you not? 'Fire and abyss of charity dissolve for ever the cloud of my body!’ cries the Saint. And you have marked these words in the margin. You have a continual aspiration to fade away.”
Her pale face smiled at me in the sunshine, looking almost transparent against the whiteness of the marble.
“Here is another place marked: 'Soul intoxicated, tormented, and burning with love.’ And here is another: 'Be thou a tree of love, grafted into the tree of life.’ What eloquence of passion the virgin has! She fascinates all the silent, because she speaks and cries aloud for them. But that which makes the book precious to whoever loves life is the abundance of life-blood flowing through it, for ever boiling and flaming like a sacrificial altar on the day of greatsacrifices. This Dominican nun seems to have had a crimson view of the world. She sees everything through a veil of burning blood. 'The memory is filled with blood,’ she says. 'I shall find the blood and the livingcreatures, and I shall drink their love and affection in blood.’ A kind of ruddy madness assails her at times. 'Drown yourselves in blood,’ she cries; 'bathe yourselves in blood, intoxicate yourselves in blood, clothe yourselves in blood, mourn for yourselves in blood, rejoice in blood, grow and strengthen yourselves in blood!’ She knows the full value of that sweet and terrible liquid, for she sees it not only in the chalice, but bursting from the veins of mankind, she who has been caught in the whirlwind of life, who has worn her veil in the midst of the fierce hatred and violent passions which have made her century beautiful. Here is that marvellous letter of hers to Brother Raimondo of Capua. Have you ever been able to read it without trembling to your very marrow? 'And his head lay on my breast. Then I felt a great joy within me, and the odour of his blood rose up.’ What I perceive here is not only the eucharistic ecstasy, but also real voluptuousness. I can almost see the young woman’s delicate nostrils tremble and dilate. Hers too is that sentence I admire so much: 'Arming oneself with one’s own sensuality.’ Her senses must have been very acute, for her whole writings glow with lively images, strong in colour and movement, and almost Dantesque in their vigour and audacity. Ah, sweet sister, she is not the guide to lead you peacefullyto the door of the cloister! Her Dominican robe is full not only of the odour of blood, but of all the odours of the proud life through which she moved unconquered. A vast multitude clothed in sackcloth and in purple, in iron and in gold, have swept her away like a whirlwind, with 'the fire of anger and hatred,’ which burns just as fiercely as the fire of love. Friars, nuns, hermits, light women, soldiers of fortune, princes, cardinals, queens, popes, all the different temperaments of a hard and magnificent century she deals with by her indefatigable will. She is powerful in contemplation and in action. She calls Alberico of Balbiano her 'beloved brother,’ and the knights of the company of St. George her 'beloved sons.’ And she dares to write to Queen Joanna of Naples: 'Alas, one must weep over you as over one dead!’ And to GregoryXI.: 'Be a brave man and not a coward.’ And to the King of France she says: 'I will.’ That is why I admire her, Massimilla, and also because she possesses a Garden, a House, and a Cell of self-knowledge; and because this saying is hers: 'To eat and taste souls’; and lastly, because it was she who wrote, before da Vinci: 'The intellect nourishes the affections. Who knows most, loves most; and loving most, enjoys most.’ Lofty words, which are the rule of all beautiful inward life.”
As I was speaking, I could follow in Massimilla’s wide open, steady eyes the slow rhythm of a wave which seemed to have some mysterious musical relation with the sound of my voice; and this sensationwas so new and strange to me, that I prolonged what I was saying for fear of interrupting it.
Indeed, hardly had I ceased speaking, when she bowed her head, and in silence let two rivers of tears flow from her limpid eyes.
I did not ask her why she wept; but I took her hands, which were like soft leaves burning with the midday heat. And under that glowing April sky, beside that dazzling marble on which the shadow of the hand of the dial seemed to have lain motionless for an indefinite time, amidst those funereal yews and wreaths of anemones, I tasted a few moments of unspeakable exultation. Isawa spirit, not my own, suddenly reach that part of life—and for a few seconds rest there—beyond which, according to Dante’s words, none can pass with intent to return.
And it seemed to me that afterwards the rest of love and life could not have any value for that spirit.