Part 8

“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.