Part 30

We stepped into a limousine, which whirled us away through the twilight. The weather made one remember that even in Florence the merging of March and April could be violent. To-night masses of harsh-looking clouds sped across the sky before an icy wind from the mountains. A burial-party, assembled at a convent gate, had their black robes fluttering, their waxen torches blown out.

"Death!" muttered Antonio, with a sardonic grimace. "And they call it unconquerable!"

As we paused before a dwelling-house, two men emerged upon the pavement. They were Leonello, the artist, and another friend of the old days, named Leonardo. The unusual occasion constrained our greetings. The newcomers, after pressing my hand, devoted themselves with grave solicitude to Antonio.

He burst forth at them like a man whose nervous tension is nearly unendurable:

"Yes, hang it all! I am quite well. Why the devil will you persist in coddling me?"

Leonello and Leonardo gave me a mournful look.

We now stopped at another door, where there joined us two ladies unknown to me. Both were comely, with delicate features full of sensibility. Neither, I judged, had reached the age of thirty. In the moment of meeting--a moment notable for a stammering of incoherent phrases, a darting of sidelong looks at Antonio, a general effect of furtiveness and excitement--no one remembered to present me to these ladies. However, while we were arranging ourselves in the limousine I gathered that the name of one of them was Laura, and that the other's name was Lina. In their faces, on which the street-lights cast intermittent flashes, I seemed to discern a struggle between apprehension and avidity for this adventure.

The silence, and the tension of all forms, continued even when we left the city behind us and found ourselves speeding northward along a country road.

"Northward. To the Castle of Manzecca, then?" I asked myself.

The rays from our lamps revealed the trees all bending toward the south. The wind pressed against our car, as if to hold us back from the revelation awaiting us ahead, in the midst of the black night, whence this interminable whistling moan pervaded nature. Rain dashed against the glass. Through the blurred windows the lights of farms appeared, to be instantly engulfed by darkness. Then everything vanished except the illuminated streak of road. We seemed to be fleeing from the known world, across a span of radiance that trembled over an immeasurable void, into the supernatural.

The limousine glided to a standstill.

"Here we abandon the car."

We entered the kitchen of a humble farm-house. Strings of garlic hung from the ceiling, and on the floor lay some valises.

As the ladies departed into another room, Antonio mastered his emotion and addressed me.

"What we must do, and what I must ask you to promise, may at first seem to you ridiculous," he said. "Yet your acceptance of my conditions is a matter of life or death, not to any one here present, but to another, whom we are about to visit. What I require is this: you are to put on, as we shall, the costumes in these valises, which are after the fashion of the early sixteenth century. Indeed, when our journey is resumed, there must be about us nothing to suggest the present age. Moreover, I must have your most earnest promise that when we reach our destination you will refrain from giving the least hint, by word or action, that the sixteenth century has passed away. If you feel unable to carry out this deception, we must leave you here. The slightest blunder would be fatal."

No sooner had Antonio uttered these words than he turned in a panic to Leonello and Leonardo.

"Am I wrong to have brought him?" he demanded, distractedly. "Can I depend on him at every point? You two, and Laura and Lina, know what it would mean if he should make a slip."

Much disturbed, I declared that I wished for nothing better than to return to Florence at once. But Leonardo restrained me, while Leonello, patting Antonio's shoulder in reassurance, responded:

"Trust him. You do his quick wit an injustice."

Finally Antonio, with a heavy sigh, unlocked the valises.

Hitherto I had associated masquerade with festive expectations, but nothing could have been less festive than the atmosphere in which we donned those costumes. They were rich, accurate, and complete. The wigs of flowing hair were perfectly deceptive. The fur-trimmed surcoats and the long hose were in fabrics suggestive of lost weaving arts. Each dagger, buckle, hat-gem, and finger-ring, was a true antique. Even when the two ladies appeared, in sumptuous Renaissance dresses, their coiffures as closely in accordance with that period as their expanded silhouettes, no smile crossed any face.

"Are we all--" began Antonio. His voice failed him. Muffled in thick cloaks, we faced the blustery night again.

Behind the farm-house stood horses, saddled and bridled in an obsolete manner. Our small cavalcade wound up a hillside path, which, in the darkness, the beasts felt out for themselves. One became aware of cypress-trees on either hillside, immensely tall, to judge by the thickness of their trunks. More and more numerous became these trees, as was evident from the lamentation of their countless branches. In its groan, the forest voiced to the utmost that melancholy which the imaginative mind associates with cypresses in Italy, where they seemed always to raise their funereal grace around the sites of vanished splendors.

We were ascending one of the hills that lie scattered above Florence toward the mountains, and that were formerly all covered with these solemn trees.

But the wind grew even stronger as we neared the summit. Above us loomed a gray bulk. The Castle of Manzecca reluctantly unveiled itself, bleak, towering, impressive in its decay--a ruin that was still a fortress, and that time had not injured so much as had its mortal besiegers; the last of whom had died centuries ago. A gate swung open. Our horses clattered into a courtyard which abruptly blazed with torches.

In that dazzle all the omens of our journey were fulfilled. We found ourselves, as it appeared, not only in a place embodying another age, but in that other age itself.

The streaming torches revealed shock-headed servitors of the Renaissance, their black tunics stamped in vermilion, front and back, with a device of the Manzecca. By the steps glittered the spear-points of a clump of men-at-arms whose swarthy and rugged faces remained impassive under flattened helmets. But as we dismounted a grey-hound came leaping from the castle, and in the doorway hovered an old maid-servant. To her Antonio ran straightway, his cape whipping out behind him.

"Speak, Nuta! Is she well?" he demanded.

We followed him into the castle.

It was a spacious hall, paved with stone, its limits shadowy, its core illuminated brilliantly with candles. From the rafters dangled some banners, tattered and queerly designed. Below these, in the midst of the hall--in a mellow refulgence that she herself seemed to give forth--there awaited us a woman glorified by youth and happiness, who pressed her hand to her heart.

She wore a gown of violet-colored silk, the sleeves puffed at the shoulders, the bodice tight across the breast and swelling at the waist, the skirt voluminous. On either side of her bosom, sheer linen, puckered by golden rosettes, mounted to form behind her neck a little ruff. Over her golden hair, every strand of which had been drawn back strictly from her brow, a white veil was clasped, behind her ears, by a band of pearls and amethysts cut in cabuchon.

Still, she was remarkable less for her costume than for the singularity of her charms.

To what was this singularity due? To the intense emotions that she seemed to be harboring? Or to the arrangement of her lovely features, to-day unique, which made one think of backgrounds composed of brocade and armor, the freshly painted canvases of Titian and the dazzling newness of statues by Michael Angelo? As she approached that singularity of hers became still more disquieting, as though the fragrance that enveloped her were not a woman's chosen perfume, but the very aroma of the magnificent past.

Antonio regarded her with his soul in his eyes, then greedily kissed her hands. When the others had saluted her, each of them as much moved as though she were an image in a shrine, Antonio said in a hoarse voice to me:

"I present you to Madonna Fiammetta di Foscone, my affianced bride. Madonna, this gentleman comes from a distant country to pay you homage."

"He is welcome," she answered, in a voice that accorded with her peculiar beauty.

And my bewilderment deepened as I realized that they were speaking not modern Italian, but what I gathered to be the Italian of the sixteenth century.

* * * * *

I found myself with Antonio in a tower-room, whither he had brought me on the ladies' retirement to prepare themselves for supper.

The wind, howling round the tower, pressed against the narrow windows covered with oiled linen. The cypress forest, which on all sides descended from our peak into the valleys, gave forth a continuous moan. Every instant the candle-light threatened to go out. The very tower seemed to be trembling, like Antonio, in awe of the secret about to be revealed. For a while my poor friend could say nothing. Seated in his rich disguise on a bench worn smooth by men whose tombs were crumbling, he leaned forward beneath the burden of his thoughts, and the long locks of his wig hung down as if to veil the disorder of his features.

Finally he began:

"In the year fifteen hundred my family still called this place their home. There were only two of them left, two brothers, the older bearing the title Lord of Manzecca. The younger brother was that Antonio di Manzecca whose portrait you saw on the wall of my apartment in the city. It is to him, as you observed, that I bear so close a resemblance.

"In a hill-castle not far away lived another family, the Foscone.

"The Lord of Foscone, a widower, had only one child left, a daughter seventeen years old. Her name was Fiammetta. Even in Florence it was said that to the north, amid the wilderness of cypress-trees, there dwelt a maiden whose beauty surrounded her with golden rays like a nimbus."

I remembered our entrance into this castle, my first glimpse of the woman awaiting us in the middle of the hall, and the glow of light around her that appeared to be a radiance expanding from her person.

But my friend continued:

"Between the two castles there was friendly intercourse. It was presumed that the Lord of Foscone would presently give his daughter in marriage to the Lord of Manzecca. Fate, however, determined that Fiammetta and Antonio di Manzecca, the younger brother, should fall in love with each other.

"Need I describe to you the fervor of that passion in the Italian springtime, at a period of our history when all the emotions were terrific in their force?

"At night, Antonio di Manzecca would slip away to the Castle of Foscone. She would be waiting for him on the platform outside her chamber, above the ramparts, overlooking the path across the hills. It chanced that by the aid of vines and fissures in the masonry he could climb the castle wall almost to that platform--almost near enough, indeed, to touch her finger-tips. Unhappily, there was nothing there to which she could attach a twisted sheet. So thus they made love--she bending down toward him, he clutching with toes and hands at the wall, her whispers making him dizzier than his perilous posture, her tears falling upon his lips through a space so little, yet greater than the distance between two stars.

"But almost everything is discovered. Antonio's meetings with Fiammetta became known to his elder brother.

"One evening Fiammetta, from the high platform, saw Antonio approaching while it was still twilight. All at once he was surrounded by servants of his own house, who had been waiting for him in ambush. Before he could move, half a dozen daggers sank into his body. Amid the thorns and nettles he sprawled lifeless, under the eyes of his beloved. As the assassins dragged his body away, there burst from the platform a prolonged peal of laughter.

"Fiammetta di Foscone had gone mad."

* * * * *

At that tragedy, at least, I was not surprised. The Italy of the Renaissance was full of such episodes--the murderous jealousy of brothers, the obedient cruelty of retainers, the wreckage of women's sanity by the fall of horrors much more ingeniously contrived than this. What froze my blood was the anticipation gradually shaping in my mind. I felt that this was the prelude to something monstrous, incredible, which I should be forced to believe.

"She had gone mad," my friend repeated, staring before him. "She had, in other words, lost contact with what we call reality. To her that state of madness had become reality, its delusions truth, and everything beyond those delusions misty, unreal, or non-existent."

His voice died away as he looked at his hands with an expression of disbelief. He even reached forward to touch my knee, then sighed:

"You will soon understand why I am sometimes possessed with the idea that I am dreaming."

And he resumed his tale:

"Antonio di Manzecca was buried. His elder brother found a wife elsewhere. The Lord of Foscone married again, and by that marriage had other children. But still his daughter Fiammetta stood nightly on the platform of the Castle of Foscone, gazing down at the hill path, waiting for her Antonio to climb the wall and whisper his love.

"Now she only lived in that state of ardent expectancy. The days and weeks and months were but one hour, the hour preceding his last approach to her. Every moment, in her delusion, she expected him to end that hour by coming to her as young as ever, to find her as winsome as before. In consequence, time vanished from her thought. And in vanishing from her thought, time lost its power over her.

"Her father died; but Fiammetta still kept her vigil, in appearance the same as on the evening of that tragedy. A new generation of the Foscone grew old in their turn, but Fiammetta's loveliness was still perfect. In her madness there seemed to be a sanity surpassing the sanity of other mortals. For by becoming insensible to time she had attained an earthly immortality, an uncorrupted physical beauty, in which she constantly looked forward to the delight of loving.

"So she went on and on----"

The tower shook in terror of the gale, and we shook with it, in terror of this revelation. My thoughts turned toward the woman below, who had smiled at us from that aura of physical resplendency. I felt my hair rising, and heard a voice, my own, cry out: "No, no!"

"Yes!" Antonio shouted, fixing his hands upon my arms. We were both standing, and our leaping shadows on the wall resembled a combat in which one was struggling to force insanity upon the other. He went on speaking, but his words were drowned in a screaming of vast forces that clutched at the tower as if in fury because the normal processes of nature had been defied. Would those forces attain their revenge? Was the tower about to thunder down upon the Castle of Manzecca, annihilating her and us, the secret and its possessors? For a moment I would have welcomed even that escape from thinking.

"Yes," he repeated, releasing my arms and sitting down limply on the bench. "As you anticipate, so it turned out."

I was still able to protest:

"Admitted that this has happened elsewhere, to a certain degree. In Victorian England there lived a woman whose love-affair was wrecked and whose mind automatically closed itself against everything associated with her tragedy, or subsequent to it. In her madness she, too, protected herself against pain by living in expectation of the lover's return. Because that expectation was restricted to her girlhood, she remained a girl in appearance for over fifty years. Fifty years, that is comprehensible!"

"The principle is the same," said Antonio, wearily. "Every mental phenomenon has minor and major examples. But I will tell you the rest.

"The Foscone, also, finally moved to Florence. Their castle was left in the care of hereditary servants, devoted and discreet. On that isolated hilltop no chance was afforded strangers to solve the mystery of the woman who paced the high platform in the attire of another age. Was there, in the Foscone's concealment of the awesome fact, a medieval impulse, the ancient instinct of noble houses to defend themselves against all forms of aggression, including curiosity? Or was it merely the usual aversion to being identified with abnormality? Some abnormality is so terrifying that it seals the loosest lips.

"Now and then, to be sure, some servant's tongue was set wagging by wine, or some heir of the Foscone confided in his sweetheart. But the rumor, if it went farther, soon became distorted and incredible, amid the ghost-stories of a hundred Italian castles, palaces, and villas. I myself found hints in the archives of my family, yet saw in them only a pretty tale, such as results when romantic invention is combined with pride of race.

"But I was destined to sing another tune.

"Not long ago, the last of the Foscone's modern generation passed away. There came to me an old woman-servant from the castle. It was Nuta, whom you saw below as we entered.

"Why had she sought me out? Because, if you please, in the year fifteen hundred one of my family had brought this thing to pass. It seemed to Nuta, the fact now being subject to discovery by the executors of the estate, that the care of her charge devolved upon me.

"At first I believed that old Nuta was the mad one. In the end, however, I accompanied her to the castle. At dusk, concealed by the cypresses, I discerned on the platform a face that seemed to have been transported from another epoch just in order to pierce my heart with an intolerable longing. I fell in love as one slips into a vortex, and instantly the rational world was lost beyond a whorl of ecstasy and fright.

"I regained Florence with but one thought: how could she be restored to sanity, yet be maintained in that beauty which had triumphed over centuries? As I entered my apartment I saw before me the portrait of that other Antonio di Manzecca, whom I so closely resembled, whom she had loved, whose return she still awaited. I stood there blinded by a flash of inspiration.

"At midnight my plan was complete."

* * * * *

As he paused, and the conclusion became clear to me, I was taken with a kind of stupor.

"A few days later," he said, "as she stood gazing down through the twilight, a man emerged from the forest, in face and dress the image of that other Antonio di Manzecca. At his signal, servants in the old-time livery of the Manzecca appeared with a ladder, which they leaned against the ramparts. He set foot upon the platform. Her pallor turned deathlike; her eyes became blank; she fainted in his arms. When she recovered she was in the Castle of Manzecca.

"That shock had restored her reason.

"Now everything around her very artfully suggested the sixteenth century--the furniture, the most trivial utensils, the costume of the humblest person in the castle. Nuta attended her. The convalescent was told that she had been ill in consequence of the attack on her lover, but that he, instead of succumbing, had been spirited away and stealthily nursed back to health. Again whole, he had returned to avenge himself on his brother, whom he had killed. Meanwhile her father had died. Therefore she had been brought from the Castle of Foscone to the Castle of Manzecca to enjoy the protection of her Antonio, whom she was now free to marry.

"All this was what she wanted to believe, so she believed it."

But Antonio's face was filled with a new distress. He rose, to pace the floor with the gestures of a man who realizes that he is locked in a cell to which there is no key.

"In the restoration of her mind," he groaned, "my own peace of mind has been destroyed. Even this love, the strangest and most thrilling in the world, will never allay the heartquakes that I have brought upon myself.

"With her perception of time restored, she will now be subject to time like other mortals. As year follows year, her youthfulness will merge into maturity, her maturity into old age, here in this castle, where nothing must ever suggest that she has attained a century other than her own. For me that means a ceaseless vigilance and fear. My devotion will always be mingled with forebodings of some blunder, some unforeseen intrusion of the present, some lightning-like revelation of the truth to her."

At that he broke down.

"Ah, if that happened, what horror should I witness?"

The gale sounded like the hooting of a thousand demons who were preparing for this man a frightful retribution. Yet even in that moment I envied him.

To her beauty, which had bewitched me at my first sight of her, was added another allurement--the thought of a magical flight far beyond the boundaries imprisoning other men. If romance is a striving toward something at once unique and sympathetic, here was romance attained. Moreover, in embracing that exquisite personification of the Renaissance, one might add to love the glamour of a terrible audacity. And the addition of glamour to love has always been one of the most assiduously practised arts.

* * * * *

At the bottom of the winding tower staircase, in the doorway of the hall where she had greeted us, we paused to compose ourselves.

"At least," Antonio besought me, "when in doubt, remain silent."

We entered the hall. Under a wooden gallery adorned with carved and tinted shields the supper-table was laid.

They awaited us, shimmering in their fantastic finery--the ladies Laura and Lina, my old friends Leonardo and Leonello, and the ineffable Fiammetta di Foscone. The visitors' cheeks seemed hectic from the excitement of the hour; but her face was flushed, her eyes shone, for her own reasons. As I approached her my heartbeats suffocated me. Yes, I would have taken Antonio's place and shouldered all his terrors! Before me the fair conqueror of time disappeared in a haze, out of which her voice emerged like a sweet utterance from beyond the tomb.

"You are pleased with the castle, messere?"

As I was striving to respond, Antonio said to her, half aside, in that quaint species of Italian which he had used before:

"He speaks our language with difficulty, Madonna, and in a dialect. This disability will embarrass him till he finds himself more at home."

"Then let us sup," she exclaimed. "For since this new custom of a third meal has become fashionable in Florence, no doubt you are all expiring of hunger. So quickly does habit become tyrannous, especially when it involves a pleasure."

In some manner or other I seated myself at the table.