Chapter VIII: Part 8

Mystery and rhythm were scattered everywhere. Near by, on the foaming beach, the sea breathed at equal intervals; but during the pauses one heard, more and more feebly, the cadences of the waves, which touched the shore at constantly increasing periods. Reverberated, doubtless by the echo of some sonorous hollow, the chant of the pilgrims was heard once more, then died away. Over the Vasto d' Aimone the sky was lit up by frequent flashes of lightning, and in the calm moonlight the flashes appeared red. Hippolyte was dreaming, leaning against the trunk of a tree, her eyes watching the silent flashes.

She had not made a single movement. Her prolonged immobility in the same attitude was frequent enough; and, at times, it took on a cataleptic appearance which was almost alarming. She had then no longer the young and kind aspect which the plants and beasts knew so well, but the appearance of a taciturn and indomptable creature in whom were concentrated all the isolated, exclusive, and destructive virtues of the passion of love. The three divine elements of her beauty--her brow, her eyes, her mouth--had perhaps never attained such a degree of symbolic intensity to illustrate the principle of the eternal feminine fascination. It seemed that the serene night favored this sublimation of her form, that it liberated the true, ideal essence of her being, that it permitted her lover to know her entirely, not by the acuteness of view but by that of thought. The summer night, full of lunary brilliancy and of dreams, and of pale or invisible stars, and of the most melodious marine voices, seemed the natural field of that sovereign image. The same as the shadow grew at times out of entire proportion to the body that caused it, the same as against the infinity of that background, the fatality of love rendered the person of Hippolyte higher and more tragic for the spectators whose prescience became every instant more lucid and more terrible.

Was it not, in the same immobility, the same woman who, from the height of the loggia, had contemplated the single white sail on the dead waters? It was she; and now again, in spite of the night which despoiled her person of all brutal reality, the same hatred moved under the sentiment excited by her--that mortal hatred of the sexes which is at the bottom of love, and which, occult or openly, subsists at the bottom of every effect, from the first glance up to extreme disgust.

"So," he thought, "she is the Enemy. As long as she lives, as long as she can exercise her empire over me, she will prevent me from putting foot on the threshold I perceive. And how can I recover my substance, if a great portion of myself is in the hands of this woman? Vain is the aspiration towards the new world, towards a new life. As long as love endures, the axis of the world rests on a single being, and life is shut in by a narrow circle. To revive and conquer, I must free myself from love; I must deliver myself from the Enemy."

Once more he imagined her dead.

"Dead, she would become an object for thought, a pure ideality. From a precarious and imperfect existence, she would enter into an integral and definite one, freed forever from her weak flesh, so frail and sensual. Destroy to possess! He who seeks the absolute in love has no other means."

Suddenly, Hippolyte started violently, as if an extraordinary shudder had shaken her. She said, alluding to the common superstition:

"Death has just passed."

And she smiled. But her lover, struck by the strange coincidence, could not repress an instinctive movement of stupor and fright.

"Could she have _felt_ my thought?"

The dog began to bark with sudden fury, and they both rose at the same time.

"Who is it?" said Hippolyte, uneasy.

The dog barked with renewed energy, still turned in the direction of the olive-groves. Candia and the old man came out of the house.

"What is it?" repeated Hippolyte, uneasy.

"Who can it be?" said the old man, gazing into the darkness.

The sound of a human voice came from the olive-trees, an imploring, sobbing voice. Then appeared an indistinct form, which Candia immediately recognized.

"Liberata!"

The mother carried on her head the cradle, covered with a dark cloth. She walked erect, almost rigid, without turning, without deviating from her path, absorbed in herself, mute like a sinister somnambulist, blindly impelled towards an unknown goal. And a man followed her bareheaded, beside himself, sobbing, imploring, calling her by her name, bending, beating his sides or burying his hands in his hair with gestures of atrocious despair. Grotesque and miserable, following the steps of the deaf woman, he howled, amidst his sobs:

"Liberata! Liberata! Listen! Listen! Come back to the house! Oh, my God, my God! where are you going? What are you going to do? Liberata! Listen! Listen! Oh, my God, my God!"

He implored to retain her, to stop her; but he did not touch her. He held his hands out to her with gestures frantic with pain; but he did not touch her, as if some mysterious cause prevented him, as if a charm had rendered that person intangible.

Candia neither went to meet her, nor did she bar her way. She simply asked the man:

"What's the matter? What's happened?"

The man, with a gesture, signified her dementia. And that recalled to the memory of George and Hippolyte the words of the gossips: "She is mad. She has become mute, signora. She has not spoken for three days."

"She is mad. She is mad."

Candia pointed to the covered cradle, asking again in a low voice:

"Is he dead?"

The man sobbed louder. And that recalled to the memory of George and Hippolyte the words of the gossips: "He's stopped crying. Poor creature! Is he asleep? He looks like a little corpse. He doesn't move. He's asleep, he's asleep.... He's not in pain now."

"Liberata!" cried Candia, with all the strength of her lungs, as if to rouse the impassive creature. "Liberata! Where are you going?"

But she did not move her, did not prevent her from going her way.

Then, all were silent, and watched.

The mother continued to advance, tall and erect, almost rigid, without turning, fixing before her her dilated and dry eyes, her mouth tightly closed, a mouth which seemed closed as by a seal, as if already vowed to perpetual silence and deprived of breath. On her head she balanced the cradle, changed into a coffin; and the lamentation of the man assumed the continuous rhythm of a monody.

The tragic couple crossed the court in this way, descended the path recently beaten by the steps of the pilgrims, and on which still floated the religious soul that the hymn had left there.

And the lovers, their hearts oppressed by pity and horror, followed with their eyes the figure of the funereal mother, who disappeared in the night, in the direction of the flashing lightning.

*CHAPTER IV.*

Now it was no longer Hippolyte, but George, who proposed long excursions, long explorations. Condemned to "be always waiting for life," he believed in going to meet it, to find and gather it in the visible realities.

His factitious curiosity was attracted now to those things which, scarcely capable of effectively moving the surface of the soul, could not penetrate it and stir it to its depth. He tried to discover, between his soul and certain things, connections which did not exist; he tried to shake the indifference of his inmost being, that inert indifference that had rendered him so long a stranger to all external agitation. Collecting all the perspicuous faculties he possessed, he applied himself to find some living resemblance between himself and the surrounding nature that he might reconcile himself in a filial way with that nature, and vow to it eternal fidelity.

But there was not awakened in him the extraordinary emotion which had several times exalted and astounded him in the first days of his stay at the Hermitage, before the arrival of the loved one. He could resuscitate neither the panicky intoxication of the first day, when he had believed he truly felt the sun in his heart, nor the melancholy charm of the first solitary walk, nor the unexpected and divine joy which had been communicated to him on that May morning by the song of Favetta and the perfume of the furze, freshened by the dew. On the earth and on the sea, men cast a tragic shadow. Poverty, disease, dementia, terror, and death lay in wait, or were exhibited everywhere on his path. A wave of fierce fanaticism was sweeping from one end of the country to the other. Night and day, far and near, religious hymns resounded, monotonous and interminable. The Messiah was expected, and the poppies in the wheat recalled the image of his red tunic.

Around him, faith consecrated every vegetable form. The Christian legend twined itself around the trunks of the trees, blossomed amid the branches. On the knees of the Madonna, a fugitive, and pursued by the Pharisees, the Infant Jesus was changed into wheat that overflowed. Hidden in the bin, he made the dough rise and rendered it inexhaustible. Over the dry and thorny lupines which had wounded the Virgin's gentle feet was suspended a curse; but the flax was blessed, because their hulls had dazzled the Pharisees. Blessed also the olive-tree for having given shelter to the Holy Family in its open trunk, in the form of a cabin, and for having lighted it with its pure oil; blessed the juniper for having held the Infant enclosed in its tufts; and blessed the holly for the same courteous service; and blessed the laurel because it springs from the soil sprinkled by the water in which had been washed the Son of God.

How could he escape the fascination of the mystery which spread over all created things and transfigured them into signs and emblems of another life?

George, troubled by these suggestions, which provoked in him the confused rising of all his mystic tendencies, said to himself: "Oh! if I possessed the true faith, that faith which enabled Saint Theresa to _actually_ see God in the host." And this was not a vague or passing desire: it was a profound and fervent aspiration of his entire soul, and it was also an extraordinary anguish, which distressed all the elements of his substance; because he felt that this was the secret of his unhappiness and weakness. Like Demetrius Aurispa, George was an ascetic without a God.

And he reappeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full of a virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the centre of his forehead, among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.

Demetrius was his real father. By a singular coincidence of names, that spiritual paternity seemed consecrated in the legend inscribed around the marvellous ostensory given by the ancestors, and preserved in the cathedral at Guardiagrele.

[Double dagger symbol] EGO DEMETRIUS AURISPA ET UNICUS GEORGIUS FILIUS MEUS DONAMUS ISTUD TABERNACULUM ECCLESIAE S. M. DE GUARDIA, QUOD FACTUM EST PER MANUS ABBATIS JOANNIS CASTORII DE GUARDIA, ARCHIPRESBYTERI, AD USUM EUCHARISTIAE.

[Double dagger symbol] NICOLAUS ANDRAE DE GUARDIA ME FECIT A.D. MCCCCXIII.

Both, in fact, beings of intelligence and sentiment, bore the mystic heredity of the house of Aurispa; both had the religious soul, inclined to mystery, apt to live in a forest of symbols or in a heaven of pure abstractions; both loved the ceremonies of the Latin Church, sacred music, the perfume of incense, all the sensualities of worship, the most violent and the most delicate. But they had lost faith. They knelt before an altar deserted by God. Their misery arose therefore from a metaphysical need, which implacable doubt prohibited to blossom, to satisfy, to repose on the divine lap. As they had not conformed themselves in such a manner that they could accept and sustain the battle for vulgar existence, they had learned the necessity of seclusion. But how could the man exiled from life rest in a cell which lacked the sign of the Eternal? Solitude is the supreme proof of the humility or the sovereignty of a soul; because it is only borne on the condition of having renounced all for God, or on the condition of having a soul so strong that it might serve as an immovable foundation for a world.

All at once, one of them, feeling perhaps that the violence of his pain began to exceed the resistance of his organs, had wished to transform himself by death into a higher being; and he launched into the mystery, from which he contemplated the survivor with undimmed eyes.--_Ego Demetrius Aurispa et unicus Georgius filius meus_.

Now, in his lucid moments, the survivor comprehended that he would in no way succeed in realizing the type of exuberant life, the "Dionysiac" ideal seen as in a lightning flash beneath the great oak, when he had tasted the bread freshly broken by the young and joyous woman. He realized that his intellectual and moral faculties, too disproportioned, would never succeed in finding their equilibrium and their model. He realized, finally, that, instead of striving to reconquer himself for himself, it was himself he should renounce, and that two ways only could lead him to it: either to follow the example of Demetrius, or to give himself to heaven.

The second alternative fascinated him. In considering it, he made an abstraction of the unfavorable circumstances and immediate obstacles, impelled by his irresistible desire to completely construct all his illusions and to inhabit them for a few hours. On this natal earth, did he not feel himself enveloped by the ardor of faith much more than by the fire of the sun? Had he not in his veins the purest Christian blood? Did not the ascetic ideal circulate in the branches of his race, from the noble donor Demetrius down to the pitiful creature named Joconda? Was it, therefore, impossible that this ideal should be regenerated in him, should be elevated to its supreme heights, should attain the limit of human ecstasy in God? In him, all was ready to magnify the event. He possessed every quality of the ascetic; the contemplative mind, the taste for symbols and allegories, the faculty of abstraction, an extreme sensibility for visual and aural suggestions, an organic tendency towards dominating images and hallucinations. He lacked but one thing, a great thing, but which perhaps was not dead in him, and only slumbered: the faith, the ancient faith of the donor, the ancient faith of his race, that which came down from the mountain and chanted praises on the seashore.

How to awaken it? How to resuscitate it? No artifice would be efficacious. He must wait for a sudden spark, an unexpected shock. He must, perhaps, like the followers of Oreste, see the lightning flash and hear the Word in the midst of a field, at the turn of a road.

And, once more, he recalled the figure of Oreste, attired in his red tunic, advancing along the side of a little, sinuous river, where, beneath the shivering of the poplars, a stream of water coursed over a bed of polished sand. He imagined a meeting, a conversation with Oreste. It was at noon, on the coast, close to a field of wheat. The Messiah spoke like a simple, humble man, smiling with virginal candor; and his teeth were as white as jasmine. In the great silence of the sea, the continuous murmur of the breakers at the foot of the promontory imitated the distant chords of an organ. But, behind this mild person, in the gold of the ripe harvest, waved the poppies, violent symbols of desire.

"Desire!" thought George, thus recalling his mistress and the corporeal sorrow of his love. "Who will kill desire?" The admonitions of Ecclesiastes recurred to him. _Non des mulieri potestatem animae tuae. A muliere initium factum est peccati, et per illam omnes morimur_. He saw, at the sacred dawn of the ages, in a delicious garden, the first man, solitary and sad, attracted by the first companion; and he saw this companion become the scourge of the world, spread everywhere pain and death. But voluptuousness, contemplated as a sin, appeared to him prouder, more disturbing; it seemed to him that no other intoxication equalled the frantic intoxication of the embraces to which the martyrs of the early church surrendered themselves, in the prisons where they awaited punishment. He evoked pictures of women who, mad with terror and love, presented for kisses their faces bathed in silent tears.

In aspiring to faith and redemption, what did he, therefore, but aspire to new thrills and spasms, to unknown voluptuous sensations? Infringe on duty and obtain pardon; commit a fault and confess it tearfully; confess the slightest miseries while exaggerating them, and accuse oneself of mediocre vices while magnifying them almost to enormity; incessantly place one's sick soul and ailing flesh in the hands of a merciful physician--had not these things an entirely sensual fascination?

From the beginning, his passion had been impregnated with a pious odor of incense and violets. He recalled the Epiphany of Love, in the deserted oratory of the Via Belsiana: the little, mysterious chapel was plunged in a bluish penumbra; a choir of young girls garlanded the rostrum, curved like a balcony; below, an orchestra of string instruments stood up before the music stands of white pine; roundabout, in the oaken stalls, were seated the few auditors, almost all gray or bald; the chapel-master beat time; a religious odor of evaporated incense and of violets mingled with the music of Sebastian Bach.

He recalled also the dream of Orvieto, conjured up once more the vision of the silent city of the Guelphs: windows closed; grayish alleys in which the grasses grew; a capuchin monk crossing a square; a bishop all in black, descending from a carriage which has stopped in front of a hospital, with a decrepit servant at the carriage door; a tower rising against a white and rainy sky; a clock slowly chiming the hour; and all of a sudden, at the bottom of a street, a miracle--the Duomo.

Had he not dreamt of taking refuge at the summit of that rock of tufa, crowned by monasteries? Had he not, more than once, sincerely aspired to that silence, that peace? And now this dream also returned to his soul, suggested by an effeminate languor on this warm and ashy April day. To have a mistress, or, to express it better, a sister-lover, who would be very devoted; to go away yonder and stay there.... To spend hours and hours in the cathedral, in front of it, around it; to go and gather roses in the gardens of the convents; to visit the sisters and eat preserves.... To love a great deal and sleep a great deal, in a soft bed, all veiled in virginal white, between two praying-stools....

He was seized once more by the languid nostalgia of the darkness, of the silence, of the closed and isolated retreat in which could blossom the most frail flowers, the most subtle thoughts, the most disturbing sensualities. All that dazzling sunlight on those lines, too distinct and too strong, appeared almost offensive to him. And the same as the image of the murmuring spring fascinates the brain of him who is thirsty, so he was haunted by the cool and meditative shadow of a Roman nave.

The summons of the bells did not reach as far as the Hermitage, or, at least, it only arrived at rare intervals on the swells of a light breeze. The church of the market town was too far away, commonplace perhaps, certainly without any reputation for beauty or ancient tradition. George wanted a retreat nearer at hand, and one worthy of him, where his mysticism might flower aesthetically as in that deep marble urn which enclosed the Dantesque visions of Luca Signorelli.

He recalled the abbey of Saint Clement at Casauria, seen in one of the distant days of his adolescence, and he remembered that he had visited it in the company of Demetrius. The recollection, like all recollections connected with his kinsman, was as distinct and precise as if it had dated only from the day before.

He and Demetrius were descending the highroad towards the abbey, still hidden by the trees. An infinite calm reigned in the neighborhood of the solitary and magnificent spot, over the wide road of grasses and stones, deserted, uneven, as if marked with gigantic and silent vestiges, and the beginning of which was lost in the mystery of the distant and sacred mountains. One felt still floating there a primordial holiness, as if the grasses and stones had just been trodden by a long migration of biblical bands in search of a maritime horizon. Below, on the plain, the basilica appeared--almost a ruin. All around, the ground was encumbered with debris and brambles; fragments of sculptured stone were heaped against the pillars; wild grasses hung from every crevice; recent constructions, of brick and lime, closed up large openings in the lateral arcades; the doors were off their hinges. A band of pilgrims were taking a siesta in the court, brutishly, under the very noble portal erected by Leonato the Magnificent. But the three intact arched windows, above the several capitals, looked so graceful and proud, and the September sun gave to the light and soft stone such a precious appearance, that both of them, Demetrius and himself, had felt they were in the presence of a sovereign beauty.

Fascinated by the remembrance, the survivor had only one wish, a chimerical one--to return to the spot, to see the basilica again, to take up his dwelling there so as to protect it from ruin, to restore it to its primitive beauty, to reestablish there the great worship, and, after so long a period of desertion and oblivion, renew the Chronicon Casaurienne.

He said to Hippolyte:

"Perhaps we'll change our quarters. Do you remember the dream of Orvieto?"

"Oh, yes," she cried; "the city of convents, where you wanted to take me!"

"I want to take you to a deserted abbey, more lonely than our Hermitage, beautiful as a cathedral, full of very old memories, where there is a great candelabra of white marble, a marvellous work of art by some unknown artist. Erect on the candelabra, in the silence, you will illuminate with your face the meditations of my soul."

He smiled at this lyric phrase, while contemplating at the same time the beautiful image evoked. And she, in the ingenuousness of her egotism, with that tenacious animalism which is the basis of the feminine being, was intoxicated by nothing more than by this passing poesy. Her happiness was to appear in her lover's eyes idealized, like the first evening in the bluish street, or again in the secret oratory amid the religious music and the faded perfumes, or like on the wild path strewn with furze.

In her most chaste voice, she asked:

"When do we go?"

"Will you go to-morrow?"

"Very well--to-morrow."

"Take care! If you rise, you won't be able to come down."

"What does it matter? I'll watch you."

"You will burn, you'll be consumed like a candle."

"I will light you."

"You will also light my funeral."

He spoke lightly; but at heart, with his ordinary intensity for imaginary life, he composed a mystic fable. After long years of error on the abyss of sensuality, repentance had come to him. Initiated by this woman in all the mysteries which his concupiscence excited, he now implored from the All Merciful the grace which would dissipate the unbearable sadness of this carnal love. "Pity for my pleasures in the past, and for my suffering in the present! Grant, O God! that I may have the strength to accomplish the Sacrifice in your name!" And he fled, followed by his mistress in search of the refuge. And, finally, on the threshold of the refuge the miracle was accomplished; for the impure, the corrupt, the implacable Enemy, the Rose of Hell, was now suddenly cleansed of all sin, and stood, chaste and immaculate, ready to follow her loved one to the altar. On the summit of the high marble candelabra, which had not heard the voice of the light for centuries, she burned in the inextinguishable and silent flame of her love. "Erect on the candelabra, in the silence, you will illuminate the meditations of my soul, until death." She was burning with an inner fire, without ever claiming any food for the flames, without ever asking anything from the loved one in return. She renounced forever all possession: higher in her purity than God himself, since God loves his creatures but exacts from them a reciprocity of love, and becomes terrible against those who refuse to love him. Her love was Stylite love, sublime and solitary, nourishing itself with one blood and one soul. She had felt fall around her that part of her substance which was opposed to an entire offering. Nothing disquieting or impure remained in her. Her body had been metamorphosed into a subtle, agile, diaphanous, incorruptible element; her senses had dissolved into one supreme and only voluptuousness. Set up on the summit of the marvellous stela, she burned up from and enjoyed her ardor and her splendor like a flame conscious of its own enflamed existence.

Hippolyte listened intently, and said:

"Don't you hear? Another procession! To-morrow is the Vigil."

The dawns, the noons, the twilights and the nights rang with the religious chants. One procession followed the other, in the hot glare of the sun, in the silvery rays of the moon. All were emigrating to the same land and were celebrating the same name, animated by the vehemence of a similar passion, terrible and wretched in appearance, deserting on the highroads the sick and the dying, without stopping, prompt to throw down no matter what obstacle to reach the place where awaited them the balm for all their ills, the promise of all their hopes. They marched, marched ceaselessly, obliterating with their own sweat their footprints in the endless dust.

What an immense irradiation of strength that simple image must possess, to move and allure all these masses of heavy flesh! Almost four centuries before, an old septuagenarian, in a plain devastated by the hail, thought he perceived the Virgin of Mercy in the tops of a tree; and since then, each year, on the anniversary of the apparition, all the peoples of the mountains and the coast have gone on a pilgrimage to the holy place to beseech mercy for its sufferings.

Hippolyte had already heard the legend from Candie; and for the past few days she had nourished a secret desire to visit the Sanctuary. The predominance of love and the habit of sensual pleasure had banished all religious sentiment in her; but, a Roman of good family, and, what is more, born in the Trastevere, brought up in one of those _bourgeois_ families in which, according to immemorial tradition, the key of the conscience is always in the hands of a priest, she was a strict Catholic, devoted to all the external practices of the Church, subject to periodical returns of exalted fervor.

"Meanwhile, why should we not go to Casalbordino, too? To-morrow is the Vigil. Let us go there--shall we? It will be a great sight for you. We'll take the old man with us."

George consented. Hippolyte's desire corresponded with his own. He thought it necessary to him to follow this deep current, to form part of this wild conglomeration of men, to experience material contact with the inferior classes of his race, those dense and immutable layers on which the primitive impressions had perhaps been preserved intact.

"We'll start to-morrow," he added, seized by a kind of anxiety as he heard the chant approaching.

Hippolyte told him, as related by Candie, some of the atrocious tests to which the pilgrims had vowed to submit. She shuddered with horror. And, while the chant grew louder, both felt a tragic breath pass over their souls.

They were on the hill, at night. The moon was high in the sky. A cool humidity extended over the vast vegetable masses, still vibrating from the storm of the afternoon.

All the leaves were weeping, and these myriads of tears, scintillating like diamonds in the moonlight, transfigured the forest. As George had accidentally stumbled over the trunk of a tree, the luminous drops of the shaken branches fell on Hippolyte, covering her with constellations. She gave a little cry, and began to laugh.

"Ah, traitor!" she murmured, convinced that George had done it intentionally.

And she took measures for reprisals.

Thus shaken, the trees and bushes threw off their liquid gems with a lively crepitation, while Hippolyte's laughs resounded at intervals, on the slope of the hill. George also laughed, suddenly forgetful of his nightmare, permitting himself to be won by the seduction of youth, permitting himself to be penetrated by this bracing nocturnal coolness in which was distilled all the fragrance of the earth. He tried to reach first the tree whose foliage seemed most heavily laden with water; and she tried to reach it before him, running courageously on the slippery declivity. They almost always reached the tree at the same time, and they shook it together, both remaining under the shower. In the unsteady shadow of the foliage the whiteness of Hippolyte's eyes and teeth assumed extraordinary lustre; and the tiny drops, like diamond dust, glittered on the pretty curls on her temples, on her cheeks, on her lips, even on her eyelashes, trembling from her laughter.

"Ah, you magician!" cried George, letting go of the tree and seizing the woman, who once more appeared to him in a mysterious flash of nocturnal beauty.

He began to kiss her all over her face; and to his lips she was cool and wet with dew, like fruit just plucked from the tree.

"There! there! there!"

He imprinted hearty, resounding kisses on her mouth, her cheeks, her eyes, her temples, her neck, as insatiable as if the flesh were a novelty to him. And, as she felt the kisses, Hippolyte took that almost ecstatic attitude usual with her when she felt that her lover was in one of his moments of true intoxication. At those times, she seemed anxious to release from the depths of her own substance the sweetest and most powerful perfume of love, to excite George's intoxication to the point of anguish.

"There!"

He stopped, seized by anguish. He had reached the extreme limit of sensation, and could not go beyond.

They said no more; they took each other's hand; they continued on their way to the Hermitage, cutting across the fields because, in their thoughtless frolic, they had wandered from the road. They felt now indefinable lassitude and melancholy. George seemed astonished. So Life, unexpectedly, like a furtive gesture in the shadow, had offered him a new savour--a new sensation, real and profound, at the close of a day full of anxiety, spent in a cloister of flitting phantoms! But was that Life? Was it not rather Dreamland? "The one is always the shadow of the other," he thought. There where is Life, there is Dreamland; there where is Dreamland, there is Life.

"Look!" interrupted Hippolyte, with a start of admiration.

It was as if she illustrated with a picture the thought he had not revealed.

In the moonlight, a vine was there, silent. The upright vine-stocks were twined around the reeds like around agile thyrses; and the streaming branches, diaphanous against the luminous horizon with a thousand intertwinings of their subtle ribs, in the perfect immobility of mineral things, and with an appearance of indescribably fragile and ephemeral crystal, had neither terrestrial reality nor any communion with the environing forms, but seemed to be the last visible fragment of an allegorical world conceived by a theurgy and about to fade away.

Spontaneously arose in George's memory the verse of the hymn: "_Vinea mea coram me est._"

*CHAPTER V.[*]*

[*] It should, perhaps, be mentioned here that the publication of "The Triumph of Death" began in the Mattino, of Naples, on February 12, 1893, while the publication of Emile Zola's work "Lourdes" only began in the _Gil Blas_, of Paris, on April 15, 1894.--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

Since dawn, train after train had vomited immense waves of humanity on the platforms of the Casalbordino Station. People from the villages and market towns mingled with fraternities from the most distant hamlets who had not wished, or been able, to make the pilgrimage on foot. They precipitated themselves in a tumult from the carriages, shouting, gesticulating, and pushing each other to storm the wagons and coaches, amid the cracking of whips and the tinkling of bells; or, again, they fell into line, in long files, behind a crucifix, and, when their procession started on the dusty road, they struck up the hymn.

Already frightened by the size of the crowd, George and Hippolyte turned instinctively toward the sea close by, to wait until the crowd dispersed. A field of hemp undulated peacefully before the blue background of the waters. The sails shone like flames on the clear horizon.

George said to his companion:

"Aren't you afraid? I fear the fatigue will hurt you."

She replied:

"Do not be alarmed; I am strong. Besides, to deserve a favor, must one not suffer a little?"

He replied, smiling:

"Are you going to ask a favor?"

"Yes, only one."

"But are we not in the state of mortal sin?"

"That is true."

"Well, then?"

"I shall ask, just the same."

They had brought with them old Colas, who, acquainted with the localities and usages, served them as a guide. As soon as the door of their compartment was disencumbered they descended, and got into a coach which started off at a gallop, with a great tinkling of bells. The horses were decorated and plumed like _barberi_. The drivers wore peacocks' feathers in their hats, and did not cease flourishing their whips, accompanying the deafening cracks with hoarse cries.

Hippolyte, tormented by impatience and extraordinary uneasiness, as if this day were to realize some great event for her, asked the old man:

"How long will it take to get there?"

"Half an hour at the most."

"Is the church very old?"

"No, signora. I can still remember the time when it didn't exist. Fifty years ago, there was only a small chapel."

He drew from his pocket a sheet of paper folded in four, unfolded it, and showed it to George.

"You can read it. It's the history of the church."

It was a picture, with the legend at the bottom. The Virgin, in a cloud of angels, was seated on an olive-tree, and an old man was adoring her, prostrated at the foot of the trunk. This old man was named Alexander Muzio: and this is the story as told by the legend:

"In the year of Our Lord 1527, during the evening of the 10th of June, the Sunday of the Pentecost, a storm broke over the district of Casalbordino and devastated the vines, the corn, and the olive-groves. The following morning, an old septuagenarian of Pollutro, Alexander Muzio, proprietor of a wheat field at Pinno del Lago, started on his way to visit it. His heart sank at the sight of the damaged crops; but, in his profound humility, he praised the justice of God. Very devoted to the Holy Virgin, he was telling his beads while walking, when, at the end of the valley, he heard the bell ringing at the elevation of the Mass. He immediately kneeled down and concentrated all his fervor for the prayer. But while he prayed he saw himself surrounded by a brilliancy which eclipsed that of the sun, and in this brilliancy appeared to him the Mother of Mercy, robed in azure; and she spoke to him sweetly: 'Go and carry the news. Let a temple be raised on this spot, and I will distribute my favors here. Go to thy field, and thou wilt find thy wheat intact.' She disappeared with her crown of angels. And the old man rose, went as far as his field, found his wheat intact. Then he hastened to Pollutro, saw the curate Mariano d' Iddone, related to him the prodigy. In a few seconds the news had spread all over the Casalbordino district. The entire population ran to the holy spot, saw the dry soil around the tree, saw undulate the prosperous harvest, recognized the miracle, and shed tears of penitence and feeling. Soon afterwards the Vicar of Arabona laid the first stone of a chapel, and the proxies for the edification were Geronimo di Geronimo and Giovanni Fatalone, Casalesians. On the altar they painted the Virgin, with the old Alexander prostrated in the act of adoration."

The legend was simple, commonplace, similar to a hundred others founded on miracle. Since that first act of mercy, it was in the name of the Virgin that ships were saved from the tempest, lands from the hail, travellers from robbers, sick people from death. Placed amidst an unfortunate people, the Image was an inexhaustible source of salvation.

"Of all the Madonnas in the world, ours is the one who does most good," said Colas di Sciampagne, kissing the sacred sheet before replacing it in his bosom. "They say that another vision has been seen in the kingdom. But ours is the best. Don't be afraid. She's worth all the others----"

His tone and his attitude displayed that sectarian fanaticism which fires the blood of all idolaters, and which, at times, in the region of the Abruzzi, impels populations to ferocious wars for the supremacy of an idol. The old man, like all his brothers in belief, did not conceive the Divine Being outside of the painted image; it was in the image that he saw and adored the real presence of the celestial personage. The Image upon the altar, for him, was a creature of flesh and bones; she breathed, smiled, winked, bowed her head, made gestures with her hand. And everywhere it was the same thing: all the sacred statues, in wood, wax, bronze, or silver, lived a real life in their vile substance or precious metal. When they became old, when they broke, or were destroyed in the course of the years, they did not give way to new statues without giving savage signs of their anger. One day a fragment of a bust, become unrecognizable and confounded with firewood, had splurted blood under the axe and uttered threatening words. Another fragment, planed and arranged among the staves of a vat, had manifested its supernatural character by causing the apparition in the water of its primitive and integral form.

"Hey, there!" cried the old man to a pedestrian, who was painfully walking in the suffocating dust along the curbstone. "Hey, there, Aligi!"

He turned towards his guests, adding with commiseration:

"He's a good Christian, a man of hereabouts. He's going to carry his vow. He is convalescent. Do you see, signora, how winded he is? Will you let him ride on the front seat?"

"Yes, yes. Stop, stop!" said Hippolyte, affected.

The carriage stopped.

"Run, Aligi! The gentlefolk are kind to you. Come, get up!"

The good Christian approached. He was gasping, bent over his stick, covered with dust, bathed in perspiration, dazed by the sun. A collar of reddish beard surrounded his chin from one ear to the other, and framed his face dotted with freckles; locks of reddish hair emerged from under his hat, sticking to the forehead and temples; his hollow eyes, converging towards the base of the nose, of no precise color, recalled those of epileptics. Gasping and hoarsely, he said:

"Thanks! God will reward you. May the Madonna protect you! But I can't ride."

He held in his right hand an object wrapped in a white handkerchief.

"Is that your offering?" asked Colas. "Let us see."

The man opened the corners of the handkerchief, and showed a waxen leg as livid as the leg of a cadaver and on it was painted a festering sore. The heat had softened it and made it shiny, as if moist with sweat.

"Don't you see it's melting?"

And Colas stretched out his hand to feel it.

"It's soft. If you go on walking, it'll drip on to the road."

Aligi repeated:

"I can't ride. I made a vow to go on foot."

And, not without anxiety, he examined the leg by raising it to the level of his oblique eyes.

On this scorching road, amid this dust, under this great strong light, nothing sadder could be imagined than this emaciated man and that livid thing, repugnant as an amputated limb, which was to perpetuate the memory of a sore on walls already covered by silent and motionless effigies of so many infirmities visited upon human flesh through all the centuries.

"Hey, there!"

And the horses resumed their trot.

After the small hills were left behind, the road crossed a plain rich in harvests, almost ripe. The old man, with his senile loquaciousness, related the episodes of Aligi's malady, spoke of the gangrenous sore cured by the Virgin's finger. To the right and left of the road the sweet ears of corn surpassed the hedges, suggesting a beautiful overflowing cup.

"There's the Sanctuary!" exclaimed Hippolyte.

And she pointed to a red brick edifice which rose in the centre of a great, encumbered plain.

A few moments later, the carriage rejoined the crowd.

*CHAPTER VI.*

It was a marvellous and terrible spectacle, unheard of, without resemblance to any conglomeration ever seen before, whether of men or things; a pell-mell so strange, so violent and incongruous, that it exceeded the most troubled dreams of nightmare. All the ugliness of the eternal islet, all the shameful vices, all the stupors; all the spasms and all the deformities of the baptized flesh, all the tears of repentance, all the mockery of the debauchee; insanity, cupidity, cunning, lewdness, stupidity, fear, mortal fatigue, stony indifference, silent despair; sacred choirs, demoniacal shrieks, acrobatic performances, the chiming of bells, the blasts of trumpets, discordant cries, roars, sighs; the crackling of fires beneath cauldrons, heaps of fruits and sugared delicacies, shop windows full of utensils, draperies, arms, jewels, rosaries; the obscene contortions of dancing girls, the convulsions of epileptics, the blows exchanged in angry brawls, the flight of the hunted thief through the surging mob; the scum of the worst corruptions vomited from out the filthy alleys of distant towns and cast upon an ignorant and amazed multitude; clouds of parasites, like gadflies about cattle, falling upon the compact crowd, incapable of self-defence; every base temptation for the brutal appetite, every fraud, every immodesty was exhibited in broad daylight--a pell-mell of everything was there, seething and fermenting around the House of the Virgin.

This House was a massive red brick structure, of vulgar architecture, devoid of ornamentation. Against the exterior walls, against the pillars of the portal, peddlers of sacred objects had established their tents, arranged their stalls, and sold their wares. Close by were erected canvas booths, conical in shape, ornamented with large pictures representing bloody battles and cannibal feasts. At the entrance, sinister-looking men, of ignoble and equivocal appearance, trumpeted and vociferated. Shameless women, with enormous legs, swollen abdomens, flabby breasts, clad in dirty tights and bespangled rags, glorified, in extravagant jargon, the marvels hidden by the red curtain behind them. One of these tattered ribalds, who looked like a monster engendered by a dwarf and a sow, gave kisses from her sticky lips to a lascivious monkey, while near her a clown, covered with powder and carmine, struck an ear-splitting bell with frantic fury.

The processions arrived in long files, preceded by their cross-bearers, chanting the hymn. The women held each other by a corner of their dresses and walked like ecstatics, stupefied, their eyes wide open and fixed. Those of Trigno wore robes of scarlet plush with a thousand folds, caught up in the middle of the back, almost under the shoulders, and crossed at the hips by a multicolored scarf which raised the dress, tightened it, and formed a swelling like a hump. And as, broken by fatigue, they wended their way--bent, their limbs staggering, dragging shoes heavy as lead, they had the appearance of strange, gibbous animals. Many had goitres; and their golden necklaces glistened beneath the sunburnt swellings.

_Viva Maria!_

Above the crowd appeared the soothsayers, seated in front, opposite each other, on a small, raised platform. Their head-bandage permitted a view only of the loquacious mouth, tireless, full of saliva. They spoke in a sing-song tone, raising and lowering their voices, their nodding heads keeping time with the music. At intervals they reswallowed the superabundant saliva, with a light, whistling sound. One of them displayed a greasy playing-card, crying, "This is the anchor of good hope!" Another, from whose enormous mouth darted in and out, between decayed teeth, a tongue covered with a yellowish ecuma, leaned her whole person towards the auditors, having on her knees her large varicose hands and in the hollow of her lap a heap of copper coins. The auditors, very attentive, did not lose a word, did not wink, did not make a single gesture. But, from time to time, they moistened their parched lips with their tongues.

Viva Maria!

New bands of pilgrims arrived, passed, disappeared. Here and there, in the shadow of the booths, under big blue parasols, or even in the sun, old women, broken by fatigue, lay on the dry grass, sleeping, their bodies bent forward, their faces between their hands. Others, seated in a ring, their legs wide apart, painfully and silently chewing carrots and bread, caring for naught, indifferent to the surrounding tumult; and one saw the too large mouthfuls pass with effort down their gullets as yellow and wrinkled as the membrane of a tortoise. Several were covered with sores, scabs or scars, without teeth, without eyelashes, without hair; they did not sleep, did not eat; they lay motionless and resigned, as if they awaited death; and upon their poor carcasses whirled a cloud of thick and eager flies as over carrion in a ditch.

But in the booths, beneath the tents heated by the mid-day sun, around the posts driven in the earth and ornamented with branches, was exercised the voracity of those who had laboriously scraped together until this day a few savings so as to accomplish the sacred vow, and also to satisfy an enormous desire to indulge in the feast, long anticipated during the meagre meals and rude toil. One saw their faces bent over their porringers, the movements of their grinding jaws, the gestures of their hands which rend, all their brutish actions in a desperate struggle with the unaccustomed aliments. Large saucepans full of a violet-colored mass were smoking in circular holes in the ground, transformed into furnaces; and the appetizing vapors spread all around. One young girl, lank and greenish as a locust, offered long rows of cheese, shaped like little horses, birds, or flowers. A man who had a face as smooth and soft as a woman's, with gold rings in his ears, with hands and arms colored by aniline like dyers', offered for sale sorbets which looked like poison.

_Viva Maria!_

New bands arrived, passed by. The mob surged about the portal, unable to penetrate into the church, already invaded and jammed. Jugglers, sharpers, sharks, gamesters, thieves, charlatans of all kinds, called them, misled them, cajoled them. This brotherhood of plunder scented its prey from afar, struck it like a thunderbolt, never missed its aim. They allured the simpleton in a thousand ways, raising in him the hope of rapid and sure gains; with infinite artifice, they persuaded him to take chances--they excited in him an almost feverish cupidity. Then, when he had lost all prudence and all clearsightedness, they robbed him of his last penny, merciless, by the easiest and quickest frauds; and they left him stupefied and miserable, laughing in his face and sneaking away. But the example did not prevent the others from falling into the trap. Each, deeming himself more clever and less gullible, offered to avenge his ridiculed comrade, and plunged furiously to his ruin. Incalculable privations, supported without respite in order to make a little money, amounting to the savings of an entire year scraped together penny by penny from the vital necessities--those inexpressible privations which make the avarice of the countryman as sordid and as greedy as that of mendicants--were all revealed in the trembling, callous hand which drew the money from the bottom of the pocket to expose it to chance.

_Viva Maria!_

New bands arrived, passed by. A constantly renewed torrent persisted in cleaving the confused and surging mob; a cadence, always the same, rose above the medley of all the acclamations. Gradually, against this rumbling background of discordant sounds, the ear no longer discerned anything but the distinct name of Mary. The hymn triumphed over the uproar. The continuous and unchained tide battered the walls of the Sanctuary heated by the sun.

_Viva Maria!_
_Viva Maria!_

For a few minutes longer George and Hippolyte, dismayed, afflicted, contemplated this formidable crowd, from which arose a nauseating stench, from which emerged here and there the painted faces of mimes and the hooded faces of the fortune-tellers. Disgust arose in their throats, impelled them to flee; and yet the attraction of this human spectacle was stronger, retained them in this heaped-up horde, led them to the spots where the worst misery was exhibited, where the worst excesses of cruelty, ignorance, and fraud were revealed, where voices howled or tears streamed.

"Let us get nearer the church," said Hippolyte, who, forgetting herself, seemed to be invaded by the flame of insanity diffused by the passing bands, whose wild fanaticism seemed to increase in fury as the sun beat down more furiously on their heads.

"Are you not tired?" asked George, taking her hands. "If you like, we'll go away. We'll look for some place where we can rest. I'm afraid it may hurt you. We will go if you like."

"No, no; I am strong. I can stand it. Let us get nearer. Let us enter the church. You see, everybody is going there. Do you hear how they are shouting?" She was visibly suffering. Her mouth was convulsed, the muscles of her face contracted; and her hand constantly tormented George's arm. But her gaze never left the door of the Sanctuary, nor that veil of bluish smoke through which, by turns, scintillated and disappeared the little flames of the wax tapers.

"Do you hear how they are shouting?"

She staggered. The cries resembled those of a massacre, as if men and women were cutting each other's throats, were struggling in oceans of blood.

Colas said:

"They are asking favors."

The old man had not left his guests for an instant; he had taken a thousand pains to open a passage for them in the crowd, to make a little space about them.

"Do you want to go there?" he asked.

Hippolyte made up her mind.

"Yes, let us go."

Colas preceded them, pushing right and left with his elbows in order to get near the portals. Hippolyte no longer touched the ground, almost carried in the arms of George, who summoned all his strength in order to support her and himself. A female beggar pursued them, kept at their heels, pleading for charity in a lamentable tone, stretching out her hand, at times advancing it so far as to touch them. And they saw nothing but this senile hand, deformed by large knots at the joints, of a bluish yellow, with long violet-hued nails, with the skin peeling between the fingers--such a hand as might belong to a sick and decrepit monkey.

Finally they arrived at the portal; and they leaned back against one of the pillars, near the stand of a vender of rosaries.