Chapter III (2)

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We were sitting, Prince Luzio and I, near an open balcony about the hour in the afternoon when the fierce heat of that dying May was beginning to be tempered, and the pilgrim clouds were throwing a few deep blue shadows over the burning valley. The anniversary of King Ferdinand’s death was approaching, so the loyal Prince, who always celebrated it with mourning, was relating to me all the sorrows and horrors of the long agony of the King; and against a background of perfumes rising from the walled garden, the gloomy phantoms awakened by the aged voice followed each other in long succession. The silent journey over the heights of Ariano, and through the valley of Bovino amid snowstorms; the fatal omens which occurred at every step; the first signs of illness appearing one frosty evening when the King, numb with cold, was toiling over the ice which covered the slope; his anxious desire to continue on his road without any delays, as if an inexorable destiny were urging him on; the fearful pallor which suddenly came over him in presence of the crowd, amongst honours which he felt to be the last he would receive; the cries which the attack drew from him, but which were drowned by the clamour of the wedding feast; the distress of the doctors who assembled round his bed to consult under the hostile and suspicious eyes of the Queen; his burst of tears when the Duchess of Calabria, a fresh, youthful figure, entered the infected room where he lay aged and almost stupefied by suffering; then his tragic good-bye to his own statue as the nurses were carrying him into another room; then the embarcation on board ship, a ceremony as sad as a funeral, and his mournful words as the litter was carried down under the hatchways, which had been enlarged by the strokes of hatchets; then the arrival at Caserta, the rapid change for the worse, the putrid decay of his body on the great bed surrounded by sacred images, miraculous relics, crucifixes, lamps, and tapers; at the last the pomp of the Viaticum, the King sitting up among the pillows quite unrecognisable, to the terror of those present; the last words, the Christian serenity of his death, the dispute between the Queen and the doctors about the embalming of the body, the band of soldiers round the bier told off to cleanse incessantly the innumerable terrible sores;--all these sorrows and all these horrors passed through his recollection. And I listened and thought of the Duke of Calabria sobbing in a corner like a girl. “Ah, what grand and beautiful ambitions the odours of death might have nourished in his youthful soul through those terrible spring weeks! In what proud intoxicating meditations my soul would have been wrapped beneath the shadow of the great trees, and how petty the eager agitation caused by the stirring of the sap in their powerful trunks would have seemed in comparison with mine!”

Prince Luzio told me how one day the Duke of Calabria, trembling and aghast, suddenly entered his sick father’s room to tell him of the expulsion of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and with what violent words the King had condemned his relation’s timidity.

“Ah, if Ferdinand had not died!” exclaimed the old man, with an almost threatening gesture. “A few hours before he expired he said: 'The crown of Italy has been offered me....’ Don’t you think, Claudio, that a Bourbon might have been wearing it now?”

“Perhaps,” I replied, very respectfully. “And if it were so, the highest honours in the kingdom ought to be bestowed upon the Prince of Castromitrano. Let me tell you how much I admire your dignity and faith! You are one of the very few among our equals who have maintained the sentiment of the virtue of race intact and intense. Rather than renounce your privileges and take up an attitude unsuited to your legitimate pride, rather than appear only a survival of yourself, you retired from the world, but not until you had startled it with the supreme splendour of your magnificence; and you have sought in solitude to await the fortune which Fate may be reserving for your house. Misfortune has treated you as a great man, for sorrow also has its privileges, and yours have been fully acknowledged.”

The Prince’s fatherly face had become grave and attentive. The veneration I felt in my soul for his beautiful white head was far deeper than that expressed in my words; and added to it was a tender feeling so pure that only a feminine presence could have inspired it. The fact was that I felt the presence of Anatolia’s spirit. She had appeared on the threshold of the door at the end of the room, had passed silently along the wall, and had sat down in a shadowy corner, looking white, mysterious, and propitious as a family genius.

“Far away from the world though you are,” I added, “and wrapped in such a thick cloud of sadness, you have yet been able to nourish to this day hope of the resurrection of that which is dead; and the prophecy of your faith still rings in my ears. No doubt that which is dead shall rise again, but it shall be changed. If you were to turn your eyes for a single moment upon the spectacle which the world presents to-day, you would feel your dream fall from your soul like a dry leaf, and you would see that the recovery of his little state, and even the acquisition of Italy, would be useless to Francis of Bourbon. Whether a Bourbon or a Sabaudo be on the throne, the King is equally absent; for that man cannot be called a king who has submitted to the will of the many in accepting a prescribed and narrow office, and who then humbles himself to fill it with all the diligence and modesty of a public clerk who is perpetually spurred on by the fear of being dismissed. Do I not speak truly? Nor would Francis be able to reign in any other way. Directly after his father’s death he wrote out with his own hand an edict to re-establish the results of the abolished constitution. And it was Alessandro Nunziante who prevented its being published. Just think of the lamentable proclamation of the 8th December, dated from the guard-house at Gaeta. Was that the language of a king, and of a vanquished king?”

Prince Luzio had listened in silence, with knitted brows, and now he said, not without a shade of severity--

“One can see that you have the blood of Gian Paolo Cantelmo in your veins.”

“The blood of all my ancestors is in my veins. Ah, dear father (let me call you by that name!), I well know how painful it must be to you to renounce an ideal of justice before which the flame of your loyalty has burned for so many, many years; but I must tell you that for us and our like there is no salvation unless we substitute energetic purpose for empty hopes. Allow me to speak to you plainly and without circumlocution. It is useless to hope that any heroic fire will suddenly arise from the stagnant blood of Saint Louis. I have seen the exile quite recently; he is full of placid resignation, given up to good works and prayer; he remembers his short reign as a far-away, painful dream. Your prophecy would call up a mild, incredulous smile on his lips--that is all. If his spirit sometimes flies towards the bay, not Capodimonte but the height of Camaldoli is its goal. He has grown used to a quiet, pious life; the glitter of the crown no longer disturbs his nights. Let us leave him to sleep peacefully!”

The head of the loyal prince had fallen on his breast, and I saw the lines deepen on his bent brow like furrows full of thoughts.

“It is not for him alone that fate is dark. The twilight of kings is ashy, blinded of all glory. Look even beyond the Latin countries. Under the shadow of artificial thrones you will see false monarchs fulfilling their public duties with the accuracy of automatons, or giving their attention to the cultivation of their childish manias and their petty vices. The most powerful of all, the lord of the hugest multitudes, consumes away alone in his dark misanthropy, his herculean muscles corroded by the moth of suspicion. He has not even the taste for quenching the petty chemical formulas of his rebel subjects in some magnificent massacre by the naked sword, such as might water and fatten his barren lands. He has a truly royal soul, however, which perhaps you may have been able to study near at hand, for he is of the race of Maria Sophia. Wittelsbach attracts me by the immensity of his pride and his melancholy. His efforts to make his life conformable to his ideal are desperate in their violence. All human intercourse makes him shudder with disgust and anger; all pleasure seems nauseous to him unless it is what he himself has planned. Exempt from the venom of love, hostile to all intruders, for years he has held intercourse with no one, save the resplendent heroes which a creator of beauty has given him as companions in super-terrestrial regions. In the depths of rivers of music he slakes his anguished thirst for the divine, and then he ascends to his solitary haunts, where, amidst the mystery of mountains and lakes, his spirit creates the inviolable kingdom over which alone he desires to reign. This profound feeling for solitude, this power of breathing on the highest and loneliest summits, this consciousness of being unique and unapproachable in life, makes Louis of Bavaria truly a king, but king of himself and of his dreams. He is incapable of stamping his will upon the multitude, and of bending it under the yoke of his idea; he is incapable of reducing his inward power to action. At the same moment he appears sublime and childish. When his Bavarian troops were fighting the Prussians, he was far away from the battlefield, hidden in one of his lake islands, where he forgot his shame under one of those ridiculous disguises which he wears to favour his visionary illusions. It would be better for him if, instead of placing a screen between his majesty and his ministers, he could attain to the marvellous nocturnal empire sung by his poet! It seems incredible that he should not have left the world before now, carried away by his flights of fancy....”

The Prince’s head was still bent in such a solemn attitude, that even in the heat of speaking my heart smote me with the fear of having wounded him; and a filial desire came over me to comfort him, to lift up his grand white head, and to see the unwonted light of joy in his eyes. Anatolia’s presence kindled a sort of generous fire in my soul, and made me feel a great desire to reveal what was noblest and strongest within me. She sat motionless and silent in the shadow like a statue, but her attention shone on my soul like a flood of light.

“You see, my dear father,” I resumed, unable to control the tremor throbbing in my voice--“you see how old legitimate monarchies are everywhere declining, and how the Multitude stands by ready to swallow them down its miry throat. Truly they deserve no other fate! And not monarchies alone, but all great, and noble, and beautiful things, all the sovereign ideals which once were the glory of struggling and conquering Man, all are about to disappear under the immense flood of corruption which is rising and swaying onwards. I will not tell you how far the shame has gone, for I should have to use words which would offend your ear; and afterwards it would seem as though the air had to be purified with grains of incense. I came away from the city choking with disgust, but now I think almost with rejoicing of the general dissolution. When everything shall have been profaned, when all the Altars of Thought and Beauty shall have been cast down, when all the vessels containing ideal essences shall have been broken, when ordinary life shall have reached such a pitch of degradation as seems unsurpassable, when the last smoking torch shall have gone out in the great darkness, then the Multitude will stop, suddenly seized by a panic far exceeding any that has ever before shaken its miserable soul; and, suddenly deprived of the frenzy which blinded it, will feel itself astray in the desert strewn with ruins, without any path or light to guide it. Then will the law of the need of heroes descend upon it; and it will pray for the iron rod by which it must be disciplined anew. And I believe, dear father, that these heroes, these new kings of the earth, shall arise from our race, and that from this day all our energies ought to be directed towards preparation for their earlier or later advent. That is my faith.”

The Prince had lifted his head, and was looking at me with intent and rather astonished eyes, as if I had appeared to him in an unexpected light. But an unusual vivacity animating his whole person told me how much he had been touched by my eagerness.

“I have lived for several years in Rome,” I continued, with greater confidence, “that third Rome which was to have represented 'the unconquerable love of the Latin race for the Latin soil,’ and whose hills were to have shone with the marvellous light of a new ideal. I have witnessed there the most shameful violations and the most obscene connections which ever defiled a sacred spot. And I can understand the lofty symbolism hidden in the act of the Asiatic conqueror, who cast five myriads of human heads into the foundations of Samarkand, when he wished to make it his capital. Don’t you think that the wise tyrant meant to signify the necessity of severe pruning on the part of those who are about to institute a really new order of things? It was necessary to sacrifice and cast into the foundations of the third Rome the men who were called liberators, and, according to the funeral custom of the ancients, to place at their feet, at their sides, and in the hands which freed their country the objects which they knew and loved best, and then to dig out and drag down the heaviest granite boulders from the mountain tops to close the deep sepulchre for all eternity. But never were lives so tenacious and so pestiferous laid in the earth! Quite lately, dear father, I heard the following in Rome: 'The fleet of the Thousand only sailed from Quarto to obtain state protection for the right of barter!’ And yet amidst the clatter of traders I caught the sound of that remote mysterious voice which lingers in every stone, and murmurs in every sea-shell; and the sublime view of the Campagna consoled me for all my disgust. Ah, father, who can ever despair of the fate of the world while Rome is still under the heavens? When I think of her and worship her, I only see her as she is figured on Nerva’s medal--with the rudder in her hand. When I think of her and worship her, I can only describe her strength in the words of Dante: 'In every generation of things, that is best which is most perfectly One.’ And her principle of unity, as of old, shall once more be the concentrating, ordering, and preserving force of everything in the world that is good and amenable to order. The Dantesque similes of the soil and the flames are well adapted to her, because one can conceive the former as making a single base, and the latter as united in a single and identical apex. I firmly believe that the greatest height of power in the future will be that which shall have its base and its apex in Rome; for I, a Latin, glory in having set at the head of my faith the mystical truth expressed by the poet: 'It is certain that Nature disposed one place in the world to be suitable for universal empire, and that that place is Rome.’ Now from what mysterious union of races, what vast experience of culture, what auspicious harmony of circumstances, shall the new King of Rome arise?”

The fine fever which had warmed my thoughts to intoxication in the Latian desert again kindled in my veins; and the great phantoms created by the sacred soil again took tumultuous possession of my spirit; and all the hopes begotten by my violent pride in those solitudes haunted by memories of the most bloody of human tragedies, rose again and stirred vaguely, giving me a feeling of excitement which I could scarcely endure. The venerable old man’s appearance assumed a graver solemnity, for at that moment I looked upon him as the embodiment of all those varied qualities which had expanded like flowers along the stem of his ancient race under the warmth of the light of glory, and had been manifested to the world in many magnificent characters; and I was about to justify my ambitious dream to this man who was already declining towards the grave, treating him as a judge to whom sorrow had given insight; I was going to ask his good auspices as an omen, and to propose to him as my equal the alliance which I desired.

My anxiety was heightened by the presence of the silent maiden in the shadow, for she appeared to me in truth to be the one destined to become through love “her who propagates and perpetuates the idealism of a race favoured by Heaven.” I did not dare to turn towards her, so sacred did the mystery of her virginity seem to me at that moment; but I remembered the vague idea of hidden treasures, which the wonderful light that shone in flashes from her transparent eyes had sometimes awakened in me; and even without turning round I could feel a kind of animated wealth throbbing in that strip of shadow, a living form containing an inestimable prize, something infinitely grand and mysterious, like the divine treasures guarded under veils in the holy of holies of temples.

“You, as well as I, are convinced,” I added, “that every form of excellence of the human type is the effect of an initial effort, which by one selection after another reaches its highest intensity, and is manifested in the race, modified by temporary circumstance. It is not only our patrician pride which vaunts the virtue of Race, but it is acknowledged also by the most exact science. The highest examples of human conscience can only appear at the summit of a race which has sprung up in time out of the continual accumulation of energies and work; of a race in which during long periods of centuries the fairest dreams, the most vigorous sentiments, the noblest thoughts, the most lordly wills have been born and nourished. Now, take the case of a race of remote royal origin, which is springing up under the Latin sun in a happy land furrowed with the rivulets of a new poetry. Transplanted into Italy, it flourishes with such vigour that in a short time no other race can compare with it. 'Worthless is the disciple who cannot outdo his master,’ da Vinci has pronounced. And that race seems to have inscribed its greatness on an even bolder motto: 'Worthless is the son who cannot outdo his father.’ Through united and uninterrupted energies it goes on from one generation to another, raising itself up to the higher manifestations of life. In times of blind anger, when reason can trust to nothing but arms, it seems already to understand 'that those men who above all others possess strength of intellect are by nature lords over others.’ And from the very beginning its discipline is of an intellectual nature, and seems to have been dictated by Dante; for it consists in always reducing to action the whole available power of intellect, first of all by laying down theories, and then by working them out. In the most important offices, as truly as on the bloodiest battle-fields and at the most liberal banquets, this race excels: equally admirable whether leading armies, governing states, conducting embassies, protecting artists and sages, erecting palaces or churches. It mingles with Italian life in all its most varied forms; it bathes itself in every fresh fountain of culture. Living is to it the perpetual assertion and increase of itself: living to it is ruling. The formidable instinct of rulership is always driving it forward, while clear and steady thought directs this lasting impulse. And always--like those careful archers whom Machiavelli cites as examples--always it aims higher than the mark. Its deeds are so illustrious that the greatest poets have sung their renown, and the writers of history compare them to those of the ancient generals, and quote them as the examples for the future. Yet it seems that the strength of this race has not yet been fully manifested, has not yet reached the unsurpassable height: it seems that its accumulated energies must, either to-morrow, or in the course of a century, or at some indefinite time, expand themselves in one supreme manifestation....”

“_Cave, adsum!_” interrupted the Prince, with a grand smile. “Is not that the motto of the race you are speaking of?”

“It might also bear the motto of the Montaga,” I replied readily, “_Sub se omnia!_”

The Prince bowed with a gesture that served of itself to show that my reply had not been a simple courtesy, but was indeed due to the dignity of his great name. I saw him again before me with the figure I remembered in my boyhood: a fine example of superior humanity, every action revealing his distinction, his absolute separation from the multitude, from common duties, and common virtues. It seemed to me as if he had shaken the weight of sorrow that was crushing him off his shoulders, and had risen up in all his manly strength, his whole frame assuming that marvellous quality possessed by his hands--those beautiful pure hands preserved unchanged as if they had been embalmed--surviving ministers of a liberality which can only be compared to the ancient “who for small services loved to reward greatly.”

The last hour of daylight was fading away, and from the burning sky the annunciation of summer came down on the patrician garden, where amid the austere odour of centenarian box-trees, the statues--pale and yet watchful, like memories in a faithful soul--called up by their gestures the phantoms of past grandeur. But outside the cloister rose the immense crown of rock fashioned by primeval fires, looking so harsh and proud that it seemed worthy of supporting on each peak a Prometheus Bound.

I had seen those same peaks on the first evening of my arrival, flaming in the sky like rockets, shining with incredible radiance, the highest of them standing out like a tongue of flame against the background of general shadow, and cleaving the sky like a cry of hopeless passion. I was alone then in that remote twilight, and the three mysterious princesses were at hand in their walled garden, and my fate was still apart from their fate. But now in the same conjunction of circumstances the fate prophesied by that first agitation of my feelings was about to be fulfilled: I was about to utter solemn and irrevocable words. Was I indeed quite freed from perplexity? Had I at last chosen from those three blessed ones, whom I had seen in fancy on that far away evening receiving my spring gift with open arms, had I at last chosen out one for the necessary union? And was I about to pronounce her name in her father’s presence? Fresh uneasiness crept over me, and it seemed to me as if Anatolia were no longer alone in the shadow, but as if her sisters had come in silently and taken their places beside her, and as if their eyes were fixed anxiously upon me.

As I turned round I saw the white motionless figure in the corner, and everything else vanished, and all my vain restlessness was calmed.

She was the living symbol of security, the watcher and the guardian. With her strength and her patience, lit up by her own smile, she had turned sorrow into an adamantine armour which made her invincible. She was made to guard, nourish, and defend to the death that which was committed to her charge. And once again I saw her, in my dream, watching, her pure brow radiant with prophecy over the son of my blood and of my soul.

Then from the very roots of my being, where sleeps the indestructible virtue of ancestors, there arose and went forth towards the Elect the will to create that one to whom all the ideal riches of my race and my own conquests and the maternal perfections were to be transmitted. And deeper than ever grew the feeling of primary dependence which bound my actual being to my remotest ancestors; and just as the summit of the tree comprises in itself the whole life of the branching trunk down to the deepest roots, so I felt the life of the whole race living within me, that life which death could only destroy through its bodily manifestations in the transitory forms taken by succeeding generations. And the fulness and vehemence of that life seemed to overthrow the limits of my natural powers.

“Not long ago you recognised in me, not without a shade of severity, the descendant of Gian Paolo Cantelmo,” I said to the Prince, smiling. “I must confess that in my house the examples of disobedience and rebellion against kings are not rare. But the red Lion justifies them; and you cannot be unaware of the patent which the Cantelmi received from Charles II. of England. Being themselves of ancient royal blood, they have never easily resigned themselves to treating the king as other than their equal. It appears, too, that they never fight any other adversary with such zeal as they fight the king. And while Gian Paolo disturbed the slumbers of Ferdinand of Aragon, and humbled Alphonso, James I. and Menappo defeated Manfred at Benevento, James VIII. warred successfully against Ladislaus side by side with Braccio di Montone and the Sforza, while Antonio opposed René of Anjou. There is a natural tendency in every Cantelmo to form his own party, to separate himself, and to define his own person and power very clearly. It seems as if each of them founded his conception of his own dignity upon the firm conviction 'that being one is the root of being good, and that what is good is such, because it is one.’ I joyfully acknowledge in this, one of the essential characteristics of the ruler to come: of the Monarch, the Despot. But there is another peculiarity which strengthens my faith, and that is the great number of rulerships which have fallen into the hands of the Cantelmi on Latin soil. It may be said that at different times and separately they have held the government of all Italy. James I. is Ambassador for Peace to the Republic of Genoa, Vicar in Lombardy, Captain-General in the March of Ancona, Viceroy of the Abruzzi; James II. is Vicar and Podestà of Florence; Bonaventura VIII., Viceroy of Sicily; Rostaino VII., Captain-General of the Serenissima, Senator of Rome.... Everywhere they hold rule, and their experience of different peoples teaches them to 'know well how men are to be gained or lost.’ Everywhere they fight and lose their lives in the act of performing some prodigy of valour: the 'good Cantelmo,’ immortalised in Tasso’s verse, stains the walls of Jerusalem with his royal blood; James II. dies fighting for the Florentines against Castruccio Castracane; Nicholas, first Duke of Sora, dies with Constantine Paleologus in the defence of Constantinople; Ascanio dies in the waters of Lepanto beside the Archduke John of Austria; Bonaventura VIII. is deemed worthy by Charles V. of the defence of the whole empire; and it is of him the Emperor says that he would choose him for his champion had he to risk his crown in a joust. The great Andrea is an extraordinary example of a life spent entirely in ceaseless fighting from his earliest youth to his latest breath.... He is indeed the most finished type which my race has produced to this day. Andrea is one of the finest heroes of will and strength. We need not reckon up the number of his exploits. In Italy, Germany, Flanders, France, and Spain, innumerable are the cities and fortresses acquired by him and added to the Catholic empire, innumerable are the sieges he laid and sustained. He is the Poliorcetus _par excellence_, a more fertile master of stratagem than any other, at once eager and prudent; 'for in him we discover,’ says one of his biographers, 'the union of all those gifts and qualities which in other captains may be noticed separately.’ But what in my eyes raises him above the heads of all others is the unheard-of severity of the discipline he enforced on himself and his troops. Certain traits of this rigour fill me with more enthusiasm than the sight of the banners he took from the enemy. Though the troops he commanded are unpaid and badly armed, he manages to have them as ready and obedient to his hand as his own sword. No one ever understood better how to impress his own personality on the conduct of others. Eloquent and nervous in speech he yet always prefers the direct force of example to the power of words. He always moves at the head of his troops, on foot when he leads the infantry; he always sleeps in his clothes, eats and drinks nothing but what his soldiers eat and drink, is always the first in assault, the last in retreat; though covered with wounds, he refuses to take off his armour; on the field of victory or in the conquered city he never touches the booty. And in the war in Flanders he wins such terrible renown, that mothers use his name to frighten their children into obedience. Could any man determine his own likeness in clearer and more vigorous outline? Was ever coined metal stamped with a prouder effigy? In his time Andrea was surnamed the new Epaminondas. Well, even in this indefatigable warrior, the intellectual character of his race comes out. He is not only learned in speech, a distinguished mathematician, a master of military architecture, a writer on the science of war, but also a good connoisseur and splendid patron of the liberal arts. Eritio Puteano, in dedicating a Latin work to him, calls him _Armorum gloria, Litterarum tutela_. Cornelius Schult of Antwerp, presenting him with a book of fantastic designs, represents him as Eros cultivating elegance in the midst of arms, _Heros inter arma elegantias colens_. Andrea in this carries on the family tradition, the origin of which shines in the wreathed figure of Fanetta Cantelmo, Lady of Romanino, who composed poetry 'with a certain divine fury,’ among the laurels of Provence, in one of the courts of love. And does not some of the wonderful aptitude which raised Alessandro above the other disciples of Da Vinci at Milan seem to have been transmitted to him? He thinks out new methods of fortification, constructs the celebrated fort on the Meuse, named in honour of its inventor Fort Cantelmo, makes strange weapons which seem almost magical to his contemporaries.... Is there not something Leonardesque in these inventions, something which recalls Alessandro?”

I had uttered the name of him who lived in continual communion with my spirit, and whom I held to be the genius of the race, destined some day to reappear higher up the surviving family tree in some manifestation of sublime life. 'Oh thou, be what thou oughtest to be.’ My task had been developed along definite lines under his gaze and his teaching; and now at the moment when I was about to take a great resolve, he stood by my side. I saw him alive before my eyes, as if his white tyrannical hand were resting on the corner of the table beside me, and as if the statuette of Pallas and the pomegranate with its pointed leaf and flaming flower were there too. 'Oh thou, be what thou oughtest to be.’ And another youthful figure, apparently his younger brother, clung to him as closely as his shadow.

“Alessandro and Hercules! These were the two purple flowers so early cut off, which Leonardo and Ludovico gathered up and transmuted into imperishable essences. Andrea Cantelmo when he died had already displayed all the energies he possessed, and death overtook him on the verge of old age, covered with glory after that siege of Balaguer, which was the greatest of his heroic enterprises. But these two, facing life with their hands full of all the seeds of hope, had every great possibility open to them. Their youthful heads seemed made to wear the royal crown, that ancient crown which their fathers had already worn. In one of them Da Vinci divined the future founder of a new principality, the triumphant tyrant who was to lay upon the multitude the yoke of that science and beauty into which the great master had initiated his favourite disciple. But fate interfered with the fulfilment of his prophecy. Both of them threw away their lives in the first burst of their ardour, for they were devoured by too vehement enthusiasm. Hercules perished in the sands of the Po, fighting against the Sclavonians; Alessandro on the banks of the Taro in the battle of Fornovo. Do you remember the verses in which Ariosto celebrates the beautiful son of Sigismond Cantelmo?

'Il più ardilo garzon che di sua etade
Fosse da un polo a l’altro e da l’estremo
Lito de gli Indi a quello ove il Sole cade....’

“His death was too cruel! He was made prisoner in a rash inroad, and his head was cut off before his father’s eyes on the ship’s deck, which was used as a block. I can imagine the blood spurting from the wound like a flame and scorching the side of the galley. Indeed, I do not only imagine it, I see it. What a wonderful and terrible storm of youthful courage it must have been which provoked him to set spurs to his horse and rush furiously against the enemy’s entrenchments! Ah, dear father, I have known those storms myself, and my horse knows them, and so do the ruins of the Roman Campagna....

“No doubt at that moment Hercules felt worthy of bestriding the winged horse born of the blood of Medusa. _Cave, adsum!_ Ariosto, as he sings his praises, uses an expression which of itself lights him up with glory, showing how the bold youth died to maintain the resolution which every Cantelmo makes--that of remaining at the post he has taken, and has thought to be the best, even in the face of the worst forms of death. He had a companion at his side during the assault. When both had rushed upon the enemy,

'Salvossi il Ferrufin, resto il Cantelmo.’

“He stayed, one against a thousand. And the divine Ludovico places his beautiful bleeding figure at the beginning of a song telling how Bradamante performed prodigies with his golden lance. But the death of Alessandro is like that of a demi-god. At Fornovo in the hottest of the battle a hurricane arises, and the Taro overflows its banks with terrible violence. Alessandro suddenly disappears, like one of those ancient Greek heroes, carried away from the earth in a whirlwind, and supposed to be transported to heaven. His body was never found on the field or anywhere else. But he lives, lives on through the ages, with life more intense than our own. Not only his portrait has been transmitted to me by da Vinci, but his life, his true life. Ah, dear father, if you had once seen that picture, you would never be able to forget it. It is impossible to forget. Nothing in the world is of such value to me, and no treasure was ever guarded with such passionate jealousy. Who gave me strength to bear such long solitude and such hard discipline? Who poured into my spirit in the midst of the harshest rigour of discipline that kind of sober intoxication which makes all effort seem light? Who but Alessandro? He represents to me the mysteriously significant power of style, inviolable in my own person by any one, even by myself. All my life develops beneath his steady gaze; and in truth, dear father, he who can stand the searching trial of that fire is not degenerate. 'Oh thou, be what thou oughtest to be!’ that is his daily precept. But while he thus urges me to keep my personality entire, he also places before my eyes the vision of an existence superior to my own in dignity and power. And I am always thinking of Him who is to come.”

I stopped, for I felt my voice change, and I feared that the blood filling my heart might of a sudden overflow. And the old man’s soul was in such deep communication with mine, that at that moment he involuntarily stretched out both hands to me.

“Since a double will is necessary for the creation of that one who is to outstrip his creators,” I added in a low voice, bending towards him, “I could aspire to no higher union than that which would give me the right to call you father, as I am doing now....”

And overcome by emotion, I sat leaning forward with his trembling hands in mine, while his lips touched my brow without a word being spoken. But in the silence, between the throbbing of my heart and her father’s quick breathing, I heard the light step of Anatolia gliding out of the room. Was she going to weep by herself? Her form, which I had seen motionless and white in the shadow, shone on my inner heaven like a constellation of tears. Was she going to weep alone? Perhaps she would meet her sisters on the way.... This doubt suddenly made me uneasy. My eyes fell on the cameo that shone on the father’s hand.

And as the perfume of evening rose up from the walled garden, a dim sentiment spread through my soul, like a spell deepening round me with the slow falling of the twilight.

How in the meantime fared the heart of her who was about to depart? In what manner was her mystical life disposing itself round the memory of that supreme hour marked by the hand on the luminous dial?

“ME LUMEN, VOS UMBRA REGIT.”

Perhaps she may have returned more than once to the little cemetery with the yew-trees and anemones, and may perhaps again have laid her slender hands on the dial to feel its heat, and she may have remembered my exhortation: “Warm your hands in the sun, bathe them in the sun, poor hands, for soon you will carry them crossed on your breast or hidden under the coarse brown woollen habit in the shadow....” And more than once perhaps, with her palm laid over the figures indicating the divine moment, she may have waited, quivering in the great silence, to see the shadow of the hand reach the extremity of her ring-finger, as it did on that day of dreams; and perhaps she may have wept that the miracle of love had not been renewed.

“SINE SOLE SILEO.”

I connected the picture of the guardian of dried plants sketched for me by Oddo with the picture of that sad soul wandering round the sundial which had pointed out the hour of blessedness for her in vain. And I thought: “If only I had power to fashion for thee a beautiful fate, as the artist fashions the obedient wax, O thou who earnest towards me out of a barren garden where a funereal vow had imprisoned thee Massimilla, thus should I complete thy ideal figure with death, with timely death I should complete thy perfection; for no other hour awaits thee in which thou canst hope to find any value, now that thou hast once penetrated into that part of life, beyond which none can go who intend to return. Guided by that divine memory, I would have thee return to the place where in dreams I gathered crown-like anemones, to strew them on thy head; and there I would have thee fall again into the harmonious attitude that once I praised, close to the marble sundial. And the moment the point of the shadow reached the tip of thy ring-finger should be the moment of thy death. Then beneath the stony gaze of the crouching caryatid I should myself dig the grave for thy frail remains; and I should lay thee out as the gentle ladies laid out Beatrice in Dante’s vision, and should spread their veil over thy head. But I should not set a cross over thy grave, nor any other pious symbol; rather I should call upon the youngest of the sons of the Graces, a native of Palestine, like thy celestial Spouse; I should call upon Meleager of Gadara, the hyacinth-garlanded, the sweet flute-player, the poet who sings the early death of maidens; and he should carve an epitaph worthy of thy gentle grace. Oh Earth, universal Mother, all hail to thee; be gentle to this maiden, who weighs so lightly upon thee.”

Thus it pleased me to adorn the sentiment with which she inspired me, and turn her sadness into poetry.

“Has the narcissus bulb in the herbarium sprouted for the third time?” I asked her suddenly one day, as we were boating on the Saurgo near the dead city.

She was quite disturbed, and looked at me with startled eyes.

“How do you know?”

I smiled and repeated--

“But has it sprouted?”

“No, not again!” she replied, looking down.

We were alone in a little skiff, which I was paddling myself with one oar. Violante, Anatolia, and Oddo were in other boats rowed by the boatmen. The river here was so wide and sluggish that it was almost like a pond, and a dense flock of water-lilies covered it. The great white flowers, shaped like roses, floated among their shining leaves, diffusing a moist fragrance, which seemed to have the property of slaking thirst.

It was here that Simonetto’s botanising had come to an end that fatal autumn. I imagined the figure of the young botanist leaning over the water exploring its slimy depths at the season when the water-lilies are nearly over. His _hortus siccus_, no doubt, contained lifeless specimens of all that aquatic flora which surrounded the ruins.

Massimilla’s eyes followed the movement of my oar as from time to time it crushed a leaf or broke a stalk, and I said softly--

“Are you thinking of Simonetto?”

She started.

“How do you know?” she asked me again, much agitated, with flushing cheeks.

“I know from Oddo....”

“Ah!” she said, without concealing her regret at this knowledge of mine, which seemed to wound her. “Oddo told you....”

She relapsed into a silence which I felt to be a very painful one for her. I stopped rowing for a few seconds, and the light boat rested motionless amidst the wide extent of white blossoms.

“Did you love him very much?” I asked the silent maiden, with a gentleness that reminded her perhaps of our earlier interviews.

“As I love Oddo, as I love Antonello,” she replied, with a tremble in her voice, without raising her eyelids.

After a pause I asked her--

“Are you going into the convent to sacrifice yourself to his memory?”

“No, not for that. It would be too late now....”

“Why, then?”

She did not answer. But I looked at her hands, which she was clenching as if she wanted to wring them, and I understood all the involuntary cruelty of my useless question.

“Is it true that you have decided to go in a few days?” I added almost timidly.

“It is true.”

Her lips trembled; they had turned white.

“Will Oddo and Anatolia go with you?”

She nodded her head in answer, and pressed her lips together to force back a sob.

“Forgive me, Massimilla, if I have hurt you,” I said with deep emotion, for I felt a weight of sadness suddenly fall on me.

“Be quiet, please!” she implored, in a voice I scarcely recognised. “Don’t make me cry! What would my sisters think? I should not be able to hide my tears.... And I am choking.”

Oddo’s voice was heard calling to us from the ruins. Anatolia and Violante had already set foot in the dead city. One of the boatmen came towards us with his skiff, thinking perhaps that our delay was caused by my inexperience in guiding the boat through the tangle of water-lilies.

“Ah, I shall always bear within me the regret of having lost thee!” I said in silence to her who was about to depart. “I should rather behold thee laid out in the perfection of death than know thy soul to be straitened in a life alien to that which my love and my art had promised thee. And perhaps thou wouldest have led me to explore some far-away region of my inner world, which without thee will remain neglected and uncultivated....”

The boat was gliding lightly over the snowy flock; in its track the leaves and blossoms rippled apart, and through the crystalline clearness of the water the pale forest of stems was visible, pale and languid, as if fed by the mud of Lethe. The ruins of Linturno embraced by the water and the flowers looked, in their secular, stony apathy, like a great collection of broken skeletons. Even the eyeballs of a human skull are not so lifelessly empty as were the hollows of those worn-out stones, bleached white like bones by the mists and the heat. And I imagined that I was ferrying a dead maiden.

Everything after that bore the impress of my sadness on that cloudless afternoon. For a long time we wandered about the ruins searching out the traces of vanished life.

They were uncertain traces, which gave rise to all sorts of different conjectures. Was the theory true of the band of youths crowned with garlands descending to the parent river singing and dedicating their unshorn, growing locks to him? Or was it rather a white procession of catechumens like little children, fed on milk and honey, who descended there to receive baptism? A dim legend of martyrs cast a sort of mournful sanctity over the pagan remains. “_Martyris ossa jacent...._” we read on the fragment of a sarcophagus; and here and there among the few sculptured stones lying about we found emblems and symbols of double meaning; Jove’s eagle and Cybele’s lion subdued to the Evangelists; the vines of Dionysius twisted to express the parable of the Saviour; Diana’s stag representing the thirsty soul. Now and then a snake darted out from among the stones and roots, and vanished quickly as an arrow. An invisible bird was making a strange imitation of the rattles which announce the hours of silence on Good Friday.

“And where is your great Madonna?” asked Anatolia, recalling my words of long ago. We sought among the fallen masonry for a path to lead us to the ruined basilica, which stood at the extreme end of the island, on the branch of the Saurgo nearest the rocks.

“Perhaps the water will prevent our getting there,” I said, as I perceived the glittering reflections close to the wall.

The river had indeed flooded part of the sacred ruin, and a forest of water weeds was growing there undisturbed. But we found a gap by which we were able to enter the apse. Each of the three sisters as she entered made the sign of the cross, amid a great whirring of wings.

Inside all was cool and damp, and the palpitating light took a greenish hue. The apse and a few pillars of the central nave were left, and formed a kind of cave, which the waters had invaded almost up to the deserted altar steps; and a multitude of water-lilies, larger and whiter even than those through which we had rowed, clustered as if in adoration at the feet of the great Madonna in mosaic, who occupied alone the concave heaven of gold which formed the apse. She did not hold the Infant in her arms, but stood alone, wrapped in a mantle of leaden hue like a shadow of mourning, and a deep mystery of sorrow lay in her large, fixed eyes. High above the curve of the arch the swallows had made a charming crown of nests, following the order of the words written round it--

“QUASI PLATANUS EXALTATA SUM JUXTA AQUAS.”

And then the three maidens knelt down together and prayed.

“If we were to leave thee in this refuge with the water-lilies and the swallows!” I thought, looking at Massimilla, who was bending lower and lower as she prayed. “Thou wouldest live here like a hermit Naiad who has forsaken Artemis to worship the new sorrowful divinity.” And I pictured her metamorphosis: after completing her solitary rites amid the choir of swallows, she would plunge into the water and descend to the roots of the flowers....

But to my eyes nothing here surpassed the whiteness of a neck burdened with a weight of hair thicker than the marble clusters of grapes that decorated the front of the altar. For the first time I saw Violante on her knees, and the attitude was so unsuited to the quality of her beauty that it pained me like a discord; and I waited with strange restlessness for her to rise from the place between the two symbolical peacocks, who were spreading their feathers among the clusters of grapes.

She rose before the others, with one of those magnificent movements in which her beauty seemed to surpass itself, as a steady light seems to wax larger before it suddenly breaks into sparks. _Exaltata juxta aquas!_

When we returned she came with me on the river, sitting in the little prow opposite me while I stood and paddled. I was overcome by uncontrollable emotion as I remembered the hand beaded with blood and the hill-slope covered with blossom. It was the first time since that far-away hour that I had found myself alone with Violante face to face.

“I am so thirsty,” she said, leaning over the water with a movement which, while expressive of her desire, seemed to identify her with the liquid voluptuous element.

“Don’t drink that water!” I begged her, seeing that she bared her hands.

“Why?”

“Don’t drink it!”

Then she plunged in her bare hands, picked a water-lily, and bent over it to breathe its fragrant moisture. It seemed as if a vague shiver passed over the flowery covering around us. The sun had sunk behind the rocks, and an almost imperceptible rosy reflection fell from the evening sky on the innumerable white flowers.

“Look at the water-lilies!” I exclaimed, resting on my oar. “Don’t you think they look marvellously alive just now?”

She plunged in her hands again up to the wrists, and held them in the water like rosy floating flowers; and as her eyes wandered over the trembling multitude, the smile on her lips was so divine that in my soul I invested it with miraculous powers.

Truly she was worthy to work wonders, and to subdue the very soul of things to her beauty. I dared not utter a word, so speaking was the silence by her side. But as we bent over the water, the same spell seemed to bind us to each other as had united us that first day in the presence of the volcanic rock. The hawks were not screaming over our heads, but round us the swallows were twittering as they flew by, and something like a ray of light flashed from their white breasts as they passed.

“Well; aren’t we going on? Have you no strength left?” she said, turning round with an indefinable tone of derision in her voice, and reading the very depths of my eyes. “Don’t you see that the other boats are far ahead?”

I gazed at the little flotilla for a few moments with knitted brows.

“Anatolia is calling us,” she added. “Make haste!”

The Saurgo seemed to grow broader in the twilight, to vanish away into infinite distance, then to regain the strength of its current, to give promise of carrying us on into fairer lands. And that royal creature, bending over the great soft, rosy stream in the eagerness of her thirst, of her fierce desire for a liquid suited to her voluptuous being, was full of such mystery, of beauty, and poetry that my soul went out to her in the most fervent act of worship.

“Look!” then said the enchantress, pointing to the scene which she seemed to have called up with a wave of her hand. “Look!”