Chapter II (2)

And there was a moment of anxious expectation, as if the mouths of the monsters were about to give answer. Involuntarily I pictured the joy of the stone as the fresh liquid life invaded it, and imagined to myself the impossible shudders it must feel.

The tritons were blowing their trumpets, the dolphins’ throats were gurgling. From the top a jet of water sprang up hissing, clear and quick as a sword-thrust sent into the blue; it broke, retired, hesitated, rose again straighter and stronger than ever; it hung in the air, turned adamant, shot up like a stalk, and seemed to burst into flower. First a short, sharp sound like the crack of a whip echoed through the court, then came something like a burst of Homeric laughter, then a thunder of applause, then a shower of rain. Every mouth sent out a jet of water, and each jet curved into an arch to fill the shell beneath. Here and there the stone was sprinkled with dark stains, and the smooth parts shone, and the rivulets grew more and more numerous; at last every part of it rejoiced at the touch of the water; it seemed to open all its pores to the countless drops, and revive like a tree refreshed by a cloud. Rapidly the slightest hollows filled up, overflowed, and took the shape of silver crowns, continually destroyed and as continually renewed. Every instant as the play was multiplied by the variety of the sculpture, the continuous sounds grew louder and formed a deeper and deeper music in the great echo of the walls. Above the voluble symphony of water falling into water rose the mighty bubbling and gushing of the central jet, as it dashed the marvellous flowers that came out from moment to moment at the top of its stalk against the necks of the Tritons.

“Do you hear?” exclaimed Antonello, as he looked at this triumph with eyes of enmity. “Do you think this racket would be tolerable for long?”

“Ah, I could stay here for hours and days listening to it,” I thought I heard Violante saying, in a voice more veiled than ever. “There is no music I love so well.”

She had stayed so near the fountain that she was sprinkled all over with drops, and her hair was strewn with sparkling dust. The power of her beauty again excluded any other thought, any discordant image from my mind. Again she seemed to me isolated and unapproachable, outside of the sphere of ordinary life, more like a vision of art than a creature of our own species. Everything round her acknowledged the sovereignty of her presence, for everything referred to, and submitted to, and harmonised with, her beauty. Like the great arch of green that bent over her when first she appeared to me, like the ancient plinth on which she had rested, this musical fountain open to the sky seemed created for her alone; it seemed to correspond perfectly with that ideal harmony expressed in her simple attitude. Secret and inexplicable affinities united the most diverse things to her being, and brought back all surrounding mysteries to the mystery of herself. Since nature in this human form had revealed one of her supreme ideas of perfection, it seemed to me that all other ideas in all other mortal shapes should by nature serve to lead the spirit of the beholder to contemplate that one supreme idea.

And so it came about, that as I watched the maiden by the fountain I discovered and treasured up a pure truth: “When Beauty reveals herself, all the elements of life converge towards her as towards a centre, and so she has for her tribute the entire Universe.”

“One of our troubles,” said Oddo, as we walked up the wide balustraded staircase, upon whose silent walls the sixteenth century decorations of streamers and clouds imitated the fury of a tempest, “one of our troubles is the vastness of the house; it gives us a feeling of being astray, a humiliating feeling of our own littleness.”

The building was, in fact, a great deal too spacious and too empty. It had been restored in the seventeenth century, and transformed from a feudal fortress into a country villa, and all the formidable hugeness of its walls and vaults remained, although successive epochs had left the impress of art and of luxury, sometimes on their surface, and sometimes in contrast to them. The enormous number of mirrors with which whole walls were covered multiplied the space into infinity. And nothing was more mournful than those pale, delusive abysses, which seemed to open into a supernatural world, and to promise at every moment to show the living beholder visions of the dead.

“Claudio, my boy!” exclaimed Prince Luzio in a voice full of emotion, coming forward as soon as he saw me. “Dear, dear boy!”

I felt his old worn body tremble as he embraced me and kissed me on the forehead in a fatherly way. With his hand still on my shoulder, he gazed long into my face as if in a dream, while a wave of memories, sorrows, and complaints passed across the ashy blue of his feeble eyes.

“How like you are to your father!” he added, in a still more affectionate voice, and his emotion took possession of me also. “It is a marvellous likeness. I feel as though I beheld Massenzio again in his youth, when we were companions in the Life Guards.... He seems to have come to life again. How like him you are, my boy!”

He took me by the hand and led me to the window, as if he wished to withdraw with me into the contemplation of long past things.

“How like him you are!” he repeated when he saw my face in the full light. “Oh, if that blessed soul were only living still. He ought not to have died, my God, he ought not to have died.”

He shook his head in token of regret over the phantom of that beautiful life so early cut off. And the sincerity of his affection was so great, that I was touched to the bottom of my soul, and I could no longer feel a stranger in that house where the memory of my dead was kept so reverently fresh. “Look,” added the Prince, stroking the point of his white beard, and smiling a smile in which I caught glimpses of Anatolia’s noble sweetness; “look how old I have grown!”

His whole figure betrayed a painful feebleness, but the radiance of his premature white hair gave his head a look of venerable majesty, and his brow still bore the hereditary stamp of his lordly race. His hands had escaped almost by a miracle from any injury by sickness and old age; there was no aged deformity about them. They were still strong and fair as if embalmed; those liberal hands of the munificent noble who had lavished his riches on the path of the exile, only that the eyes of his king might shine awhile longer with the reflection of fallen royalty. And as a kind of memorial of the treasures so prodigally spent there shone a cameo in his signet ring.

Those hands with their slow movements seemed, as the sluggish blood revived with the heat of memories, to be drawing some remnant of a vanished world out of a sphere of shadow, and this faculty gave them a singular meaning in my eyes. When the old man sat down and laid his hands on the arms of the chair, they seemed to me like relics, and I looked at them with a strange feeling of almost superstitious respect. They made me feel, very strongly, as if I were living at that moment in my own world of poetry, and not in the world of fact.

Seeing my eyes fixed on the carved gem, the prince smiled and said: “It is Violante’s portrait.”

He took off the ring and handed it to me.

The delicate work was by some ancient artist not unworthy of Pirgotelus or Dioscuridas; but the divine features of the Medusa, relieved against the blood-red background of sardonyx, corresponded so perfectly to the likeness of the proud creature, that I thought: “Truly then did she illuminate the art of bygone days, and from time immemorial bestowed upon durable matter the privilege of perpetuating the Idea of which she is to-day the Incarnation.”

“Her mother used to wear this ring just before she was born,” added the prince with the same gentle smile, “and she was always looking at it.”

* * * * *

In such a manner, and at every moment, the conformity of things raised my spirit into an ideal state, which resembled a state of reverie and second-sight without actually attaining to it, and this same conformity furnished harmonious material to my sensibility and imagination. And I watched the continuous generation of a higher life within myself, which transfigured everything as if by the virtue of a magic glass.

The three elect beings seemed mutually to throw light and shade on each other, and the lights and shades had the significance of a language which I was already able to interpret as clearly as if it had been familiar to me for long. And so I stood not only bewildered by the reflection of the rock, but struck by the lightning flashes of my thoughts, when Violante went up to an open window, pointed out a view which she seemed to have called up with a wave of her hand, and said--

“Look.”

It was a window facing north, on the opposite side of the palace from the garden, and it looked out over a precipice. As I leant out an impetuous shudder ran through me, and raised me suddenly to a sentiment of appreciation of this silent and terrible grandeur.

“Is this your secret?” I asked the enchantress, but I did not put my question into words, for at her side silence itself seemed eloquent. The rock descended abruptly from the massive buttresses which supported the northern wall, till at the bottom it ended in a hard white river bed, whose very dryness seemed ominous of the ruinous anger of a torrent. With that same atrocious, desperate violence which the lava streams have as they rush down to the Sicilian Sea, and rebound and rise up and twist themselves into black and red masses, screaming, roaring, hissing at the first contact with the water; with that same violence the rock at the bottom of the river-bed rose and flung itself heavenwards, and towered opposite the great wall built by man, with a kind of dumb fury animating its gigantic mass. All the wildest convulsions and contortions of bodies possessed by demoniac power or deadly spasms seemed petrified for ever in that terrible form, terrible as the cliff whence Dante caught sight of fresh horrors on his way to the river of blood guarded by the Centaurs. All the shapes of which pliable metal and scoriæ are capable were there contrasted with the hard stone; ringlets of rebellious hair, coils of angry serpents, intricacies of roots laid bare, sheaves of muscles, circles of the whirlpool, folds of draperies, twists of rope. This vision of frenzied turbulence rose perfectly motionless in the blaze of the midday sun, without a line of shadow. The throbbing of a high fever seemed hidden beneath the lifeless crust.

“Is this your secret?” I repeated to the enchantress, still without words, for my inward agitation would not allow me to select or control the accents of my voice.

She stood beside me, silent also; and I did not look at her, nor did she look at me. But as we leant out towards the many shaped rock, we were united to each other by the same fascination which draws together those who read out of the same book. We were both reading out of the same fascinating, dangerous book.

She said, as she raised her head with a slight start--

“Do you hear the hawks?”

And we both searched the summits with dazzled eyes.

“Listen.”

The rock rose to heaven bristling with points and stained a reddish colour like rust or clotted blood; and the screams of the birds of prey heightened the impression of its savage pride.

Then a sudden giddiness overwhelmed me--a sort of horror of too vast ambitions and desires. Perhaps in the very depths of my being the primitive feelings of early forefathers awoke; for my indescribable agitation took the form of a lightning-like succession of flashing visions, in which I saw men like myself pouring into vanquished cities, leaping over heaps of corpses and ruins, with untiring gestures, thrusting their swords into men’s bodies, carrying half-naked women on their saddle-bows through the innumerable flames of a conflagration, while their horses, lithe cruel animals like leopards, waded up to their bellies in blood.

“Ah, I should have known how to possess thee in the midst of slaughter under a canopy of fire, overshadowed by the wing of death!” said the soul of my ancestors to her who stood by my side. “My will would have urged my body to the performance of prodigies of valour; and though I had had to clamber up the smooth sides of this wall, defended by a thousand bowmen, yet I should have borne thee away alive.”

Filled with the glow from this magnificent and tremendous desolation reaching to the heavens, my eyes fell on the maiden’s face, and saw it so strongly lit up by the reflection, that an almost painful joy swept over me. And I felt a mad desire to take that head in my hands, turn it back, bring it close to my lips, gaze on it more closely, impress every line of it in my thought--a feeling not unlike his who finds under the barren soil some sublime fragment which will reveal to the world the glory of an idea for long nearly extinct.

She was like a statue placed in full view of the rising sun; her perfection did not fear the light. In her bodily form I saw the impress of the eternal type, and at the same moment I recognised the fragility of the flesh, which bore no immunity from human fate. She was like a delicious fruit at the highest point of its maturity, beyond which point corruption sets in. The skin of her face had the wonderful transparency of the blossom which to-morrow will fade.

“Who shall deliver thee from the sacrilege of Time the destroyer? Who shall slay thee with a mortal dart at the summit of thy perfection when the miserable signs of decay begin to appear?” The dark saying of her brother came back to my mind: “Violante is killing herself with perfumes.” ... And silently I worshipped her, with a religious desire to praise her in her every movement. “Oh sovereign being, feeling thou art perfect, thou dost also feel the necessity of death; thou dost know that only death can preserve thee from all base injury; and since everything in thee is noble, thou dost purpose to offer to that solemn custody a body royally embalmed in perfumes.”

* * * * *

After such draughts of balmy wine, how could the meal to which we sat down have any savour?

Yet the vague and colourless things that surrounded my musings composed themselves into a kind of quiet harmony, which little by little soothed the passion that had been kindled in my soul by the volcanic rock.

The walls were covered with mirrors, symmetrically divided all round into compartments by little gilt pillars, while the surface of each compartment was painted with festoons and clusters of roses alternately, and the mirrors were tarnished and green as the waters of lonely pools, and the little pillars were delicately twisted like the fair locks of girls, and the roses were faint and languid as the garlands which crown the waxen martyrs in sanctuaries. But in honour perhaps of the guest who was the donor, the long branches of almond blossom had been ingeniously wreathed among the sconces of the candelabra. They spread their still fresh and living blossoms over the ancient mirrors, and multiplied reflections in the green pallor seemed to create the semblance of a far-off watery springtime.

There was a kind of quiet charm about all these things which seemed to descend and mingle with Massimilla’s grace; so much so, that I felt as if the maiden already promised to Jesus shared their nature. She seemed already to wear the appearance of a being “who has departed from this present age,” like Beatrice in the vision of the Vita Nuova, as if, with her meek air, she were saying also: “I am about to behold the beginning of peace.”

She sat opposite me, and I looked at her, till this fancy of mine grew so strong that I began to imagine her absent and her place empty for a few moments. And immediately the empty space was filled with a deep shadow resembling the mouth of a pit into which all the kindred were to be cast, one after another. And thus I was able to attain a unique and tragic vision of all these living beings, in the extraordinarily clear relief afforded by that background of shadow.

They were eating a meal round the accustomed table; they made the ordinary movements demanded by natural necessity; from time to time they said a few simple words. But their tones and actions seemed accompanied by a mystery which at times endowed them with an almost terrible significance or again at times made them almost as laughable as the play of automatons. One contrast was cruelly clear, that between the manner of vital functions they were fulfilling and the signs of inevitable destruction which were being fulfilled in them. Seated on the right of Massimilla, Antonello displayed in his whole behaviour a sort of repressed impatience, as if he were compelled to use his hands to feed, not himself, but a stranger. And as I gazed at him, an intuition flashed through me of the horror that strangled him as he realised the presence of a stranger within him, a presence dimly felt as yet, but still certain. And my eyes, passing instinctively to Oddo, who sat on Massimilla’s left, noticed in his attitude something like a feeble reflection of his brother’s discomfort. Nothing seemed to me sweeter than that virginal figure sitting calm amidst their restlessness, like a statue of prayer.

A strange odour of honey from the almond blossom filled the warm air. Sometimes a petal, rosier than the others, dropped down the mirror and fell as into silent water. And I remembered our stay in the orchard.

Ah, indeed, how could those wretched eyes, tormented by phantoms, perceive pure and beautiful things? What was I doing there myself except holding a commemoration of the dead? Everything round me grew dim like the walls, and seemed to recede into a distant past; everything assumed an antiquated and faded look, and appeared to be covered with dust. The two servants moved slowly and dreamily about in their blue liveries and long white stockings; they looked as if they had come out of an old wardrobe of the last century;--melancholy ruins of former luxury. When they withdrew they seemed to vanish like shadows into the delusive distance of the mirrors, and to re-enter their inanimate world.

* * * * *

But the spell was broken by the voice of the prince, a voice which called up old memories. Every one kept a respectful silence while he was speaking; and no sound was heard but that of his deep aged voice, which at times became hoarse with repressed anger, or trembled with heartfelt sorrow and regret.

It chanced to be a disastrous day for the old man; it was the anniversary of the king’s flight to Gaeta; it completed the twenty-first year of exile.

“Well,” he said, as he turned to me with a glance kindling with faith, looking, with his white beard, almost like one of the ancient prophets, “well, Claudio, when a king falls as Francis of Bourbon fell at Gaeta, that is to say, like a martyr and a hero, it is impossible not to believe that God will raise him up again and restore his kingdom. Mark my words, son of Massenzio Cantelmo, and do not forget them. And God grant that this come to pass before my eyes are closed! That is my only desire.”

He was preparing an apotheosis of fire and blood on the ruins of the strong city for the pale ghost of royalty.

“Wonderful faith!” I thought, as I saw what sparks could still glow in the ashy blue of those feeble eyes. “Wonderful and vain faith! The power of the Bourbons slumbers at San Dionigi.” And as the old man’s words called up the gleaming vision of the Bavarian heroine, my contempt increased for that king of twenty-three, on whom Fortune had bestowed the very horse which carried Henry of Navarre to Paris, and who was cowardly enough, like the miserable Philip V., to have no ambition to ride anything more substantial than the imaginary horses of the tapestries that lined his walls.

“What a magnificent enterprise lay before that Bourbon prince when he departed from the palace at Caserta, where the doctors were busy embalming the corpse of his murdered father as it lay pierced with innumerable wounds!” I thought, in the eager spirit which the warlike images evoked by the venerable old man had kindled in me. “Nothing was wanting to incite him, not even the corruption and odour of corpses, which are powerful to inspire thoughts of greatness. In very truth, everything was his: the lordly power of an ancient name, youth, which attracts and carries men away, kingship over three fair seas accustomed to tyranny, a rich kingdom in sight of a curved bay sonorous as a lyre, a passionate companion, who seemed to draw in through her delicate nostrils the atmosphere of heroic ambitions, a temperament capable of trembling with the voluptuousness of power, and full of the electric current which directs the hurricane. All these were his to enjoy and to defend; and still, as exiled husband on the farthest shore of another sea, his ear was filled with the clamour of his faithful people, although another kind of clamour reached him also; and the opportunity was offered to him of a splendid struggle beyond the limits of his dominions, on fields already watered with blood, and smoking with the strength of their fermentation--fields open to the strongest thought, the noblest word, the swiftest sword. In very truth, everything was his, save the lion’s nature. Why was it Fortune’s will to heap the burden of such favours upon a feeble, lamb-like nature? Never did blood so cowardly flow in youthful veins, never was there a more torpid sensuality. The very beauty of his lawful kingdom, the divine outlines of the shore, the balmy air, the mystery of the nights, all the enchantments of the dying summer, ought at least to have touched the senses of the youth, to have awaked in him the deep desire for possession, to have communicated to him the savage rage for living. Ah, that last evening in the almost deserted palace, forsaken by the courtiers, with the strong breath of the sea wind blowing through the empty halls, and bringing with it September perfumes, and the supreme sweetness of the gulf, while the closed curtains waved mysteriously and spread a vague terror, while the lights flickered and went out on the tables, still strewn with the shameful letters announcing the flight of those the prince had counted as most devoted. And the desolation of that departure in the twilight, in the small ship commanded by a man of the people, one of the few who remained faithful; and the silent encounter with the warships, already gone over to the enemy, and full of treachery; and the long, sleepless night passed on deck in vain regrets, while the weary queen slept under the stars, exposed to the chill night air; and at last, at sunrise, the rock of Gaeta, the final refuge, fated to be the final ruin, where the royal dignity was to be forced to come to terms with a bragging soldier!”

“Treason was everywhere, like the smoke and smell of gunpowder,” continued the prince. He grew more and more troubled by these sanguinary recollections, and from time to time a gesture from the white hand on which the cameo gleamed gave animation to his words. “The most terrible day of the siege was the fifth of February; and the powder magazine of the Sant’ Antonio battery was blown up by treachery.”

“Ah! what an atrocious thing it was!” exclaimed Violante, with a shudder and an instinctive movement as if to cover her ears with her hands. “How terrible!”

“You can still remember it,” her father said, looking at her with softer eyes.

“I always shall.”

“Violante was with us at Gaeta,” he added, turning to me. “She was scarcely five years old, and was a great pet of the queen’s. The others had started for Civita Vecchia on the _Volcano_ with the Contessa di Trapani. We were staying in the artillery quarters beneath the shore batteries....”

“I can remember it all!” interrupted Violante, seized by a sudden emotion, which seemed to sweep over her from that great purple light which lit up her far-off infancy. “Everything--everything seems as distinct as if it had happened yesterday! The room was divided by two partitions, made of flags sewn together. I can see the colours quite clearly; they were signalling flags, blue, yellow, and red. It was three or four in the afternoon when the explosion happened. Nina Rizzo, the queen’s lady-in-waiting, had just gone out. I was holding in my hand a cup of milk which the sisters at the hospital had sent me....”

She spoke on thus, in short sentences, in a somewhat muffled voice, with a fixed look, describing all these little details, one after the other, as if she were seeing them in a series of flashes. And the scenes called up by her words, as she sat looking into the past, stood out with an extraordinary force against the confused background of the actual scene.

The old man and the maiden, as each in turn they commemorated the ruin and slaughter of other days, seemed to annihilate all the vague, colourless surroundings, and create a kind of fiery atmosphere, in which my soul for a moment gasped painfully. The siege went on with all its horrors, in the city crowded with soldiers, horses, and mules, short of provisions and money, badly or insufficiently armed, scourged with typhus and villainy. Rain came down in torrents, filling the streets with black mire, in the midst of which the starving horses wandering about sank down and perished. The iron hailstones riddled the city, dismantled it, laid it low, set fire to it, and grew ever thicker and noisier, never ceasing save for the brief intervals appointed for the burial of the decaying corpses. In the churches divine service was celebrated, the Invincible Patroness was invoked, and all the while the stones were being torn from the walls, the windows were crashing in, and out of the distance came the groans of the wounded as they were carried away on stretchers. The sick men in the hospital raised themselves in their beds when a shell pierced through the passage walls, and expecting death, cried as the shell burst, “Long live the King!” All on a sudden a powder magazine exploded, shaking the city to its very foundations, and leaving it suffocated with smoke and with terror, while in the open cavity bastions, cannons, palisades, batteries, houses, and hundreds and hundreds of men were engulfed. But from time to time, on very sunny days, a kind of heroic madness seized the besieged, a kind of intoxication of death drove them into danger, and made them seek out the batteries where the fire was fiercest. In sight of the enemy the artillerymen sang and danced in a kind of frenzy to the sound of the bugles. A great shout of joy and affection greeted the queen’s appearance under the hail of bullets on the esplanades. She moved with a bold step, in the easy grace of her nineteen years, dressed in a shining bodice like a breastplate, her face smiling under the plumes of her felt hat. Without moving an eyelash as the bullets whistled by, she turned her encouraging eyes on the soldiers; they inspired them like the waving of banners, and beneath that gaze pride seemed to magnify its wounds, while those who were unscathed seemed to long for the glory of a crimson stain. From time to time men with eyes burning fiercely in blackened faces, with their clothes torn to tatters, as though the jaws of a wild beast had rent them--men covered with blood and powder rushed up to her from the cannons, called her by name, and kissed the hem of her skirt.

“Ah, how beautiful she was, and how worthy of her throne!” exclaimed the prince, and his voice assumed its manliest tones to celebrate her prowess. “Her presence had a magnetic power over the soldiers. When she was there, they all fought like lions. The twenty-second of January was the most glorious day of the siege, because she remained on the batteries till nightfall.”

A pause followed, a moment of meditation, in which each of us seemed to be contemplating the ideal figure of the heroine on a field of ruin and corpses.

“Tears were strange to her eyes!” said Violante slowly, absorbed in her far-away memories. “When at the last hour I saw her weep, I was overcome with terror and surprise, as if some unexpected and almost incredible thing had occurred. As she kissed me, she watered my face with her tears.” After another pause, she added--

“She wore a little green feather in her hat.”

She added again--

“She had a great emerald at her throat.”

She was sitting at my side, and a new emotion swept over me as with an involuntary movement I leant slightly towards her, and breathed the perfume which I thought was growing stronger, and overpowering the honeyed fragrance of the flowers. A sudden aversion for all the people and things present came over me; they gave me a feeling of impatience and annoyance that was almost an aversion; they seemed at that moment to be weighing on me and oppressing me in quite a peculiar way. I looked across with instinctive hostility at the prince’s cousin, Ottavio Montaga, who sat at one end of the table, a taciturn individual with something of the sinister look of a mask, the symbol of a mysterious prohibition not to be transgressed. I felt all the health, strength, and passion in me rise in hatred against the sickness, the sadness, against the mortal dulness by which this wonderful creature was being consumed without a chance of escape. The uneasiness which had troubled my spirit after the successive apparitions of the three different figures was now subdued, and I believed myself to have set my choice on her whom all the glory and solemnity of the past seemed uniting to ennoble. Once more, it was she alone who stirred my being as she had stirred it before when she lifted her head at the cry of the hawk.

The prince said to me--

“It is singular, is it not, Claudio, that Violante should be able to remember that time so clearly? Don’t you think it very strange?”

Then, smiling with his previous gentle smile--

“Maria Sophia has never ceased to show partiality for her. Knowing that she is passionately fond of scent, she sends her quantities of essences every year for her birthday. And she has never missed once, all the time we have been here!”

He turned tenderly to his daughter--

“And now you could not get on without them, could you?”

And to me he said, with a shade of sadness--

“She lives on them. You see, Claudio, how white she is!”

I fancied that Anatolia whispered--

“She is dying of them.”

* * * * *

When we rose from table, Anatolia proposed going down to the garden.

“Let us go and bask in the sun a little more!” she suggested, pointing to a shaft of sunbeams which shot down from the highest pane of a window where the faded curtains were not drawn. “Who will come?”

By the movement her hand was lit up, turned golden down to her wrist, and the rays slid through her fingers like docile hair. “We will all come,” I replied.

Don Ottavio begged to be excused, and retired (he seemed like an intruder among us); but the prince laid his arm in Anatolia’s, as Antonello had done before on the steps, and said--

“I will come down to the quadrangle with you.”

As we passed through the vast reception hall, now reduced to a disused anteroom, I noticed an old sedan chair with the two poles still in it, as if a lady had just descended from it, or was about to enter.

“Who uses the sedan chair?” I asked, as I stopped to look at it.

“None of us,” answered Anatolia after a moment’s hesitation, during which a shade of agitation passed over every face.

“It is of the time of Charles III.,” said the prince, concealing his melancholy thoughts under a smile. “It belonged to the Duchess of Cublana, Donna Raimondetta Montaga, who was the most beautiful lady of the court, and was praised as the greatest beauty of the kingdom.”

“The design is excellent,” I remarked, approaching it, for I was attracted by this piece of antiquity, which seemed hardly yet dead, and to which the memory of Donna Raimondetta gave a tender interest and grace, so that I almost imagined as I looked that she was alive again within it. “It is an exquisite work of art, and wonderfully preserved.”

But I noticed a strange feeling of uneasiness among my hosts, and that this uneasiness was caused by the object I was looking at. And by virtue of this mystery, I felt more strongly than before the imaginary life dwelling within the precious wood.

“Perhaps the soul of Donna Raimondetta lives inside,” I said lightly, and I could not resist the desire to open the pane of glass. “It could not have a more delicate casket. Let us see.”

As I opened it, a subtle odour reached my nostrils, and I put my head inside, so as to breathe it better.

“What a scent!” I exclaimed, delighted with the unexpected sensation. “Is it the Duchess of Cublana’s perfume?”

And for a few seconds my imagination hovered in the soft atmosphere created by the enchantment of the ancient dame, picturing a little round mouth like a strawberry, a powdered head-dress, and a brocade dress stiffened by a hoop.

The sedan chair was scented like a bridal chest; it was lined inside with willow-green velvet, and decorated with a little oval mirror on each side; without, it was all gilded and painted in the most refined taste, the ceiling and jointings were enriched with delicate carving, all the more harmonious and pleasing to the eye from the veil thrown over them by the hand of time; the whole was the work of a graceful imagination and a skilled hand.

“Or perhaps it is you, Donna Violante,” I added, “who have poured out one of your phials on this soft velvet, as a homage to your famous ancestress?”

“No, it is not I,” she said, almost indifferently, as if she had fallen back into her usual apathy, and was again far away.

“Let us go now,” begged Anatolia, drawing on her father, whose arm still rested in hers. “It is always so cold in this room.”

“Let us go,” repeated Antonello, shivering.

From the top of the staircase we could already hear the sound of the water; at first it sounded hoarse, then gradually clearer and louder.

“Has the fountain been turned on?” asked the prince.

“We turned it on just now,” said Anatolia, “in honour of our guest.”

“Did you notice the play of the echo in the quadrangle, Claudio?” Don Luzio inquired. “It is extraordinary.”

“Truly extraordinary,” I replied. “It is a wonderful effect of sound. It is like a musician’s trick. I think an attentive harmonist might discover the secret of unknown chords and discords in it. It would be an incomparable training for a delicate ear. Is it not true, Donna Violante? You are on the fountain’s side, against Antonello.”

“Yes,” she said simply, “I love and understand water.”

“_Laudato si, mi Signore, per sor acqua._” (Praised be Thou, O Lord, for sister water.) “Do you remember the canticle of St. Francis, Donna Massimilla?”

“Certainly,” replied the betrothed of Christ, with her faint smile, colouring slightly. “I belong to the Poor Clares.”

Her father’s look was a melancholy caress.

“_Suor Acqua_” (Sister Water), Anatolia called her, caressing the soft bands of hair on her forehead with her fingers. “Take that name.”

“It would be presumptuous,” replied the Poor Clare with laughing humility.

She recalled to me with only a slight variation the saying of the saint: _Symphonialis est aqua_.

We were all there close to the rushing fountain. Each of the mouths was pouring out its voice through a glass pipe like a curved flute. The lower shell was quite full already, and the four sea-horses were up to their bellies in water.

“The design is by Algardi, the Bolognese,” said the prince, “the architect of Innocent X.; but the sculpture was done by the Neapolitan Domenico Guidi, the same who executed the greater part of the relief of Attila at St. Peter’s.”

Violante had drawn near the edge of the basin again, and I gazed at the reflection of her figure in the liquid element, whose continual tremor melted the features as it rippled away round the horses’ hoofs.

“There is a tragic story in connection with this fountain,” added the prince, “a story which has become the source of some superstitious ideas. Don’t you know it?”

“No, I don’t,” I replied, “but tell it me, if you will.”

And I looked at Antonello, thinking of the lost soul which tormented and terrified him at night. He also was now looking intently at Violante’s reflection as it trembled in the depths of the water.

“Here in this fountain Pantea Montaga was drowned,” began Don Luzio. “In the time of the Viceroy Peter of Aragon----”

But he interrupted himself--

“I will tell you the story another time.”

I saw that he shrank from calling up these memories in presence of his daughters, and I did not press him.

But shortly after, in the outer portico, as we paced slowly up and down with his arm in mine, he returned to the story; and all the time the sun blazed on the series of terraces from which the tall white statues of the Seasons looked over the tawny valley of the Saurgo.

It was a mysterious secret drama of passion and death, worthy of the weird stone cloister which had fostered and exalted its violence in rapid alternation. To me it signified the power which the genius of places can exercise over the responsive soul, a power by which every genuine feeling of the soul must concentrate itself to the utmost degree of intensity possible to human nature, in order to express its whole force in a definite act with a certain result.

As I listened to the prince’s imperfect account, I mentally reconstructed that hour of intense life which produced the death of Pantea; and the midnight crime appeared to me clothed in a beauty which was the harbinger of profound thoughts.

At the close of the story Prince Luzio took leave of me, saying: “I hope from this day you will treat this house as your own. Whenever you like to come, you will be welcome, dear boy. So do not stay away too long.”

It made me sad to see him enter the desolate palace alone, so I went back a little way with him, talking affectionately. We stopped again before the fountain; and he made a motion of his hand towards the basin, and in the chill, clear water I saw the fatal beauty of Pantea and her curved white hands floating in the water, like two magnolia petals, and her soft hair fluttering under the horses’ hoofs.

“A legend grew up years afterwards,” said the prince, smiling. “On moonless nights Pantea’s soul sings on the summit of the fountain, while that of her lover groans within the jaws of the stone beasts until the dawn breaks.”

* * * * *

The troublous joy of spring rose up in our faces as we leant over the balustrade towards the sloping garden. A kind of quivering atmosphere enveloped us with the swiftness of a fever poison, and the sensation was so strong as to paralyse the nerves. The pupils of our eyes became fixed, our eyelids were lowered as if sleep were gliding over us. My soul within me was heavy like a cloud.

Anatolia remarked upon our mutual silence--

“Happiness is passing by.”

These sudden words of hers revealed to us the secret of the anguish within us; she had expressed the spirit of intense melancholy which pervaded the earth awaiting the renewal of spring. “Happiness is passing by!”

“Whose hands may arrest her?” I asked myself sharply, in the blind agitation of my longing for love, in the confused revolt of my deepest instincts.

The three sisters were leaning their elbows on the stone parapet, their bare hands without rings stretched out in the sun as in a golden bath: Massimilla with fingers interlaced; Anatolia with one hand crossed in the other so that her thumbs were uppermost; Violante, pressing in hers some of the fading violets out of her belt, and then letting them fall into space.

“Whose hands may arrest her?”

Anatolia’s looked the strongest and the most sensitive. The firm outlines of the muscles and tendons supporting the thumbs were clearly visible beneath the skin. The tips of the thumbs wore rosy nails for gems, with a half moon of white at the root like a double onyx.

Had they not communicated a sense of their generous power and practical kindness when first I touched them? Had I not already felt a reviving warmth in the hollow of her palm?

But Massimilla’s hands were like uncreated things, like dream-shapes rather, so slender were they; and so white, that the golden sunbeams failed to gild them; and so symbolically familiar, that in the broad daylight I could see again the dim shadows of the dusky apse where first they appeared to me, and see them hovering around the altar, last relics of a form sunk back again into mystery, and yet fitted--they alone--to enchant and caress souls. Now with the interlacing of the clasped fingers they symbolised the fetters of voluntary slavery. “Here am I, thine own, bound by a tie stronger than any chain. I will open my arms only when it shall be thy good pleasure to release me. Mine be it only to worship and obey, to obey and worship,” was the confession which by these tokens the devout maiden made to her ideal lord. And I imagined her hands loosed and long scrolls of living silence floating from them; just as from the hands of the angels painted above and around altars there float long streamers eloquently inscribed with verses, and containing history within the mystic sense of the written words. “Thus, oh Worshipper, mayest thou encircle my wandering spirit within the living silence of thy love! And I shall become unfaithful to earth’s solitudes, to the solemn mountains, the musical woods, the peaceful rivers, even to the starry skies; for no sight on earth can elevate a man’s spirit like the presence of a beautiful and submissive soul. It is this which gives to the walls of a narrow room the feeling of boundless space, like the votive lamp which only increases the vast darkness of a cathedral. And for this, I should desire to have thee with me, sweet slave. He who meditates, surrounded by silent adoration, feels the divinity of his own thoughts and the creative power of a god.”

But the sublime hands of Violante, as they pressed the essence out of the tender flowers and let them fall crushed to the ground, were fulfilling an act which corresponded most perfectly, as a symbol, to the characteristics of my ideal style: they extracted the supreme flavour of life out of things, took from them the utmost they could give, and then left them exhausted. Was not this one of the most important elements in my art of living?

And so Violante appeared to me as a divine and incomparable instrument of my art. “Relation with her is necessary to me that I may know and exhaust the innumerable things which lie hidden in the depths of the human senses, those things of which eternal desire is the only revelation. The tangible body encloses infinite mysteries which only the touch of another body can reveal to him that is gifted by Nature to understand them and religiously celebrate them. And has not her body the sanctity and magnificence of a temple? Does not her beauty promise the highest revelations to my senses?”

Thus as before, when we ascended the steps, I felt within me the attraction of the three complete types, which promised to all my energies the joy of manifesting themselves and of satisfying themselves to the uttermost in perfect harmony. One of them--in my dream--watched, her pure brow radiant with prophecy, over the son of my soul and my body; another, like the salamander in the alchemist’s furnace, lived within the fiery circle of my thoughts; and the third called me back to the devout worship of the body and invited me to learn in mysterious ceremonies how to live again the life of the ancient gods. They all three seemed born to serve my ideal of perfection on earth. And the duty of separating one from the other was as distasteful to me as destroying some symmetry; it irritated me, it seemed an injustice done by prejudice and habit. “Why may I not take them all to my home on a single day and adorn my solitude with their threefold grace? My love and my art should weave a different spell round each, build a throne for each, and offer to each the sceptre of an ideal kingdom peopled with shadows, where she would find her immortal characteristics transfigured in their different aspects. And since brevity is the most fitting attribute of ambitious dreams and beautiful life, my love and my art will be able to bring to these blessed ones (but not to thee, Anatolia, who art fated to watch for a long time) a harmonious death at the seasonable hour----”

These thoughts of mine, burning like a soft delirium in the early heat of the spring sun, were raining down without ceasing on the hands of the maidens, when Violante let the last of her crushed flowers fall, and leant over to catch hold of the tips of the long creepers which grew from the terrace below up to the balustrade, and wreathed themselves round it. She managed to break off a twig, and examined its fibres to see if the spring sap had reached it yet.

“They are still asleep,” she said.

And so we bent over the sleep transparent already of those pale sheaths, in which one of the greatest of earth’s miracles was about to be worked, called up before us by a word.

“You will see in a few months,” said Anatolia to me, “they will all be covered with a green mantle; all the trellises will throw shade.”

These plants were not the mothers of the grape, but a kind of leafy vine with innumerable flying tendrils, which spread like a piece of netting over the wide surface of the wall and the trellises down the steps. They looked more like worn-out ropes than plants, torn as they were by the rain, shrivelled by the sun, fragile as gossamer to behold. And yet the approaching change made them appear as mystical as the huge trunks of mountain forest trees. Myriads of young leaves were about to burst miraculously from the fibres of that lifeless rope.

“In autumn,” said Violante, “everything turns red, a glorious red, and sometimes on sunny October days the walls and steps seem to be hung with purple. Then, indeed, the garden has its hour of beauty. If you are here then, you will see----”

“He won’t be here,” interrupted Antonello, shaking his head.

“Why do you always say that?” I asked him with gentle reproof; “who knows?”

“No one ever knows anything,” murmured Oddo in that muffled voice of his, which I could only distinguish from his brother’s by the movement of the lips. “Who knows what may happen to us between this and the autumn? Massimilla is the only one who is safe; she has found her refuge.”

Perhaps there was a tiny drop of bitterness in the last words.

“Massimilla is going to pray for us,” said Anatolia gravely.

The novice bent her head over her clasped hands, and we were silent for a space, while a flood of vague but overpowering feeling swept over us.

The clearness of the early spring afternoon paled before that illuminating vision of the autumn purple as we went down the steps, where a few hours before the three princesses had appeared, as at the beginning of a fairy tale, with a new-born smile on their lips after a night of interminable anguish. That morning hour already seemed as far away as the autumn was near, to which--a dim presentiment told me--a fate was leading me swift as lightning. And when I pictured the purple foliage on the bare branches, I also foresaw a shadow of deep mourning fall on the faces of the three sisters.

And once more the sentiment of death impassioned and elevated my soul till all things were reflected in it transfigured by poetry. And in the splendour of the spring air these frail beings seemed to me “marvellously sad,” like the women in the vision of the Vita Nuova, which Massimilla had recalled to my memory among the almond blossom and the ancient mirrors. And I felt as if the ardent spirit possessed me that burns in the pages of that book, where the youthful Dante shows how his soul could be shaken to its very foundations, and exalted to the height of sorrowful madness by imagining the death of Beatrice, and gazing on her face through the funeral shroud. “Weeping,” I said within myself. “Certainly it must sometime come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die.... And a great fear fell upon me, and I imagined that some friend should come to me and say: 'Dost thou not know? Thy marvellous lady has departed from this world....’ Then my heart that was so full of love said unto me: 'It is true that our lady lieth dead’ ... and so strong was this idle imagining that it made me to behold my lady in death....” Did not the force of this ineffable inner beauty come to me from a similar fancy?

A splendid nobility flowed from every action of these maidens, doomed to die. It lit up the outward things among which they moved. And never again perhaps did I see them in so much light and shade.

* * * * *

When we had reached the foot of the steps, and entered a glade surrounded by the green ruins of a box-wood bower, Anatolia paused and asked me--

“Would you like to see the whole garden? Perhaps you might find some memories in it.”

As if she wanted to proclaim her power, Violante said--

“As you enjoy the music of the water, I will take you to see my seven fountains.”

And Massimilla, with her shy gentleness--

“In return for the almond blossom, I will show you a white hawthorn which came out last night over there.”

I felt as though they were speaking of their most intimate possessions, and, like the virgin of Fontebranda, intended to say: “We are ourselves a garden.”

As I could not express what I felt, I said only empty words.

“Show me the way, then,” I said; “I am sure to come across some memories, at any rate of my early reading, which used to be fairy tales.”

“Poor fairies without wands!” observed Oddo, taking Anatolia’s hand with a caressing gesture.

And in the eyes of the maidens were smiles full of despair.

Then Violante led us through a labyrinth.