Chapter XXXI: Witchcraft

Magnani tried to divert his thoughts by talking of the princess with Mila. The innocent girl lured him into it, and he accepted that subject of conversation as a preservative. It will be seen that a strange revolution had taken place in two days in the young man's mental condition, since he had already reached the point of looking upon his love for Agatha as a duty, or as what the doctors call a depurative.

If he had been certain that the princess loved Michel, of which fact he was persuaded at times, with a feeling of utter stupefaction, he would have been almost entirely cured of his own mad passion. For he had given it so exalted a place in his thoughts that, as he had lost hope, so he had almost reached the point where he desired nothing. His passion had become a sort of pious habit, so ideal that it no longer touched the earth, and that by returning it, Agatha might have destroyed it instantly. Assume that she loved any man on earth, even the man who cherished so exalted an adoration for her, and she became in his eyes simply a woman, whose influence he could combat. That was the result of five years' suffering without the slightest presumption, and without a moment's intermission. In a heart of such strength and purity, the utmost order had prevailed amid the effervescence of a passion which resembled a beginning of madness; and it was precisely that circumstance which might be Magnani's salvation. Efforts to deaden his pain would have served only to excite him more, and after indulging in vulgar pleasures, he would have returned to his chimera with more suffering and more weakness; whereas by abandoning himself without resistance, without desire for repose, and without terror, to a martyrdom which might be everlasting, he had allowed the flame to become concentrated in one spot, where it burned dully, not fanned from without, and deprived of any fresh sustenance.

Thus Magnani had reached that critical moment when a man must be cured or die, without any transition. He did not appreciate it, but it certainly was a fact, for his senses were awaking from a long period of numbness, and Agatha, far from contributing to the awakening, was the only woman to whom he would have blushed to attribute in his thoughts the perturbation that he felt.

Little by little, he leaned toward the girl in order not to lose a single one of her words, and he ended by sitting down beside her, and asking her why it had occurred to her to talk of him with Princess Agatha.

"Why, it is very simple," replied Mila; "she led me to do it by asking me which of the young mechanics of my acquaintance Michel had been most intimate with since he had arrived in the island; and as I hesitated between you and one or two of father's apprentices who assisted Michel, and whom he seemed to like, the princess herself said:

"'Perhaps you are not sure, Mila, but I would be willing to wager that it is a certain Magnani, who works for me, and of whom I think very highly. During the ball they sat in my garden together, and I was very near them--just behind the myrtle bush. I had gone there to rest, and was almost in hiding, in order to escape for an instant the torture of such a long performance. I overheard their conversation, which interested and touched me to the last degree. Your brother has a noble mind, Mila, but your neighbor Magnani has a great heart. They talked of art and work, of ambition and duty, of happiness and virtue. I admired the artist's ideas, but I fell in love with the artisan's sentiments. For your young brother's sake, I hope that Magnani will always be his best friend, the confidant of all his thoughts, and his adviser in the delicate emergencies of his life. You can advise him to that effect from me, if he happens to mention me to you; and if you tell either of them that I listened to the sincere outpouring of their thoughts, you will not fail to tell them also that I was a discreet listener, for there came a time when Magnani seemed on the point of disclosing to Michelangelo some personal matter which I did not choose to overhear. I retired hastily at the first word,'--Is all that accurate, Magnani? Do you remember the subject of your conversation with Michel in the garden of the Casino?"

"Yes, yes," sighed Magnani, "it is all true; indeed, I noticed when the princess retired, although it would never have occurred to me that it was she who was listening to us."

"At all events, you ought to be proud of it, Magnani, and very glad of it, since what you said made her feel so much friendship and esteem for you. I even thought that I could see that she preferred your way of thinking to my brother's, and that she looked upon you as the wiser and better of the two, although she says that she has felt the same motherly interest in the welfare of both of you from that moment. Couldn't you repeat to me all the beautiful words which the princess so enjoyed hearing? I should be very glad to have the benefit of them, for I am a poor little girl, with whom Michel himself hardly deigns to talk seriously."

"My dear Mila," said Magnani, taking her hand, "honor to the man whom you consider worthy to form your heart and your mind! But, even if I could remember all that Michel and I said to each other in that garden, I should not presume to think that it would benefit you in any way. Aren't you better than either of us? And as for wit, which of us can have more than you?"

"Oh! now you are laughing at me! Princess Agatha has more than all three of us together, nor do I think that even my father has any more than she has. Ah! if you knew her as well as I do, Magnani! Such a head and heart! such charm! such kindness! I could pass my whole life listening to her; and, if my father and she would allow it, I would like to be her servant, although obedience is not my leading characteristic."

Magnani was silent for a few moments. He could not succeed in disentangling his thoughts in his excitement. Hitherto Agatha had seemed to him so far above all praise that he was indignant and hurt when anyone ventured to say that she was lovely, charitable and sweet. He preferred to listen to those who said that she was ugly and mad, when they did not know her and had never seen her. They at all events said nothing about her in which there was the slightest sense, whereas the others praised her too feebly, and annoyed Magnani beyond words by their inability to comprehend her. But on Mila's lips Agatha lost nothing of the idea he had formed of her. Only Mila seemed to him pure enough to utter her name without profaning it, and because she shared his adoration, she was almost equal to his idol in his eyes.

"Dear Mila," he said at last, still holding her hand, which he had forgotten to give back to her, "to love and to understand as you do indicates a great mind. But what did you say about me to the princess? Ought I not to ask you?"

Mila blessed the darkness, which concealed her blushes, and she grew bolder as a timid woman gradually becomes intoxicated by the assured impunity of a masquerade.

"I am really afraid that it will be indiscreet in me to repeat it to you," she said, "and I should not dare to do it!"

"So you said unkind things about me, did you, naughty Mila?"

"No; for Princess Agatha had said so much good of you that it would have been impossible for me to think any evil of you. I cannot look at anything except through her eyes. But I let out something which Michel told me in confidence."

"Really? I don't know what you mean."

Mila noticed that Magnani's hand trembled. She ventured to strike a decisive blow.

"Well," she said, in an artless, almost indifferent tone, "I told the princess that you were really very kind, very pleasant and very learned; but that one had either to know you very well, or else guess at you in order to find it out!"

"Because ----?"

"Because you were in love, and that made you so melancholy that you lived almost entirely alone, buried in meditation."

Magnani trembled.

"It was Michel who told you that!" he said, in a changed tone that made Mila's heart bleed. "And doubtless he betrayed my confidence to the end," he added; "he told you the name----"

"Oh! Michel is incapable of betraying anybody's confidence," she replied, struggling to maintain her courage at the level of the crisis she had provoked; "and I, Magnani, am incapable of leading my brother on to such a base thing. Besides, why should I be at all interested, I should like to know?"

"Of course, it must be a matter of entire indifference to you," replied Magnani, completely crushed.

"Indifference is not the word," she said; "I have much esteem and friendship for you, Magnani, and I pray for your happiness. But I am interested in my own happiness, too, so that I have no time to be idle and pry into other people's secrets."

"Your happiness! At your age, Mila, happiness is love; so you are in love, too, are you?"

"In love? why not? Do you consider me too young to think about such things?"

"Ah! my dear child, you are at the age when one should think about such things, for at my age love is despair."

"Why, is your love not returned? I was not mistaken in thinking that you are unhappy?"

"No, my love is not returned," he replied, dejectedly, "and never will be; I have never even dreamed that it would."

A more romantic and more experienced woman than Mila might have looked upon that admission as a definitive obstacle to all hope; but her ideas of life were more simple and more logical: "If he has no hope, he will recover," she thought.

"I pity you deeply," she said to Magnani, "for it is such great happiness to feel that one is loved, and it must be so ghastly to love all by oneself!"

"You will never know such a misfortune," Magnani replied; "and the man you love should be the most grateful and the proudest of men!"

"I am satisfied with him," she said, gratified to feel that jealousy was beginning to make itself felt in the young man's perturbed heart; "but listen, Magnani! there is a noise in my brother's room."

Magnani ran to the other door; but, while he was making vain efforts to distinguish the nature of the noises Mila had heard, she heard other noises in the yard. She looked through the blind, and, beckoning to Magnani, pointed out to him Michel's mysterious guest, who was gliding toward the street so lightly and adroitly, that unless one had a delicate ear and keen eye and was on the alert, expecting to see him, it would have been impossible to detect his movements.

Even Michel had not been roused from the light doze into which he had fallen.

Mila was still very ill at ease, although Magnani urged her to take some rest, promising that he would remain in the yard or in the gallery, and that Michel should not leave the house without him. As soon as Magnani had left her, she fell upon a chair and drew her table noisily along the floor, so that she might hear Michel wake and move about in his turn.

The young man soon entered her room, after noticing with amazement that the Piccinino's light body had left little more impression on his bed than if he had been a spectre. He found little Mila still up, and reproved her for her wilful sleeplessness. But she explained her reasons for anxiety; and, without mentioning Magnani, for the princess had enjoined upon her not to let Michel know of his presence, she told him of the Piccinino's strange and impudent visit to her room. She also told him something of her experience with the monk, and made him promise that he would not leave her during the morning, and that, if he were summoned by the princess later in the day, he would not go out without letting her know, because she was determined to seek shelter with some friend and not remain alone in the house.

Michel readily agreed. He was utterly unable to understand the bandit's conduct on that occasion. But we can imagine that such an audacious performance, taken in connection with the impertinence of the pretended monk, left him in a decidedly uncomfortable frame of mind.

When he returned to his chamber, after barricading the door of the gallery with his own hands in order to protect his sister against any fresh attack, he looked about for the cyclamen upon which he had gazed so sorrowfully as he sat beside his table. But the cyclamen had disappeared. The Piccinino had noticed that the princess, as on the evening of the ball, had a bouquet of cyclamen in her hand or close at hand, and that she seemed to have contracted the habit of playing with that bouquet even more than with her fan, the inseparable companion of all the women of the South. He had also noticed that Michel treasured one of those flowers, and that he had drawn it toward his face several times, then hastily pushed it away, during the first agitated moments of his vigil. He had divined the mysterious charm attached to that plant, and before leaving the room he had maliciously taken it from the glass upon which Michel's inert hand still rested. He threw the little flower into the sheath of his dagger, saying to himself: "If I stab anyone to-day, perhaps this memento of the lady of my thoughts will remain in the wound."

Michel tried to follow the Piccinino's example, that is to say, to recover his lucidity of thought by enjoying an hour or two of real sleep. He had insisted that Mila should go to bed, and, in order to make surer that she was adequately guarded, he left the door open between their rooms. He slept heavily, as young men of his age do, but his sleep was disturbed by confused and distressing dreams, an inevitable consequence of his present position. When he woke, shortly after daylight, he tried to collect his thoughts, and first of all he looked to see if he had not dreamed of the abstraction of the precious cyclamen.

His surprise was unbounded when he saw that the glass, empty when he fell asleep, was filled with freshly gathered cyclamens.

"Mila," he said, seeing that his sister was already up and dressed, "you have cheerful and poetic ideas, I see, despite our anxieties and dangers. These flowers are almost as lovely as you; but they can never replace the one I have lost."

"You imagined," she said, "that I had taken it or tipped over the glass after your extraordinary friend went away; you almost scolded me, and you refused to remember that I had never so much as thought of putting my foot inside your _mysterious_ chamber! Now, you accuse me of replacing it with others, which is no less absurd; for where could I have got them? Am I not barricaded on the gallery side? Haven't you my key under your pillow? Unless, indeed, these pretty little flowers grow on my pillow, which is possible--in a dream."

"Mila, you persist in jesting on all subjects and at all seasons. You may have had this bouquet last night. Weren't you at Villa Palmarosa in the afternoon?"

"For heaven's sake, don't these flowers grow anywhere but in Princess Agatha's boudoir? I understand now why you are so fond of them. Where, pray, did you pick the one that you looked for so long this morning, instead of going straight to bed?"

"I picked it in my hair, little one, and I believe that my brains left my head with it."

"Ah! very good; now I understand why you talk nonsense."

Michel could find out nothing more. Mila was as calm and smiling when she woke as she had been disturbed and fearful when she fell asleep. He obtained nothing from her but quips of the sort in which she was proficient, always possessed of some metaphorical meaning, and instinct with a sort of childish charm.

She asked him for the key of her room, and while he was dressing, lost in thought, she attended to her household duties with her usual activity and lightness of heart. She flew about the corridors and stairways, singing like the morning lark. Michel, as melancholy as the winter sun on the ice-fields at the pole, heard the floors creaking under her agile feet, heard her merry laugh as she received her father's kiss on the floor below, heard her ascend the stairs to her room, like a well-aimed arrow, then go down again to the fountain to fill the graceful earthen jugs, which are made at Siacca, after Moorish models, and are commonly used by the people of those regions; heard her salute the neighbors with kindly pleasantries, and play with the half naked children who were already beginning to roll about on the flagstones in the yard.

Pier-Angelo was also dressing, more rapidly and in more cheerful mood than Michel. Like Mila, he sang, but in a deeper and more martial voice, as he shook his brown, red-lined jacket. He was interrupted at times by a lingering remnant of drowsiness, and yawned over the words of his ballads, then finished the refrain triumphantly. That was his way of waking, and he never sang better, in his own ears, than when his voice failed him.

"Happy heedlessness of truly popular natures!" said Michel to himself, as he leaned on his window-sill, half-dressed. "One would say that nothing unusual was taking place in my family, that we were not surrounded by enemies and snares; that my sister slept as usual last night, that she knows nothing of love without hope, of the danger of being beautiful and poor in view of the schemes of vicious minds, and of the other danger that she may be deprived at any moment of her natural protectors. My father, who must know everything, acts as if he suspected nothing. In this wretched climate everything is forgotten or takes on an entirely different aspect in the twinkling of an eye. The volcano, tyranny, persecution--nothing interrupts the songs and laughter. At noon, overwhelmed by the heat, they all sleep and seem like corpses. The cool evening air revives them like vigorous plants. Terror and rashness, grief and joy, succeed one another with them like the waves on the shore. Let one of the chords of the heart be relaxed, and twenty others wake to new life, just as the taking of a flower from a glass of water causes a whole bouquet to appear there! I alone, amid these incomprehensible transformations, am always on the alert, but always serious; my thoughts are always lucid, but always gloomy. Ah! would that I had remained the child of my caste and the man of my native land!"