Part 10

“Weep here, ye lovers who come to slake your thirst. Too sweet is the water. Season it with the salt of your tears.”

FLETE HIC OPTANTES, NIMIS EST AQUA DULCIS, AMANTES SALSUS, UT APTA VEHAM, TEMPERET HUMOR EAM.

Thus the gentle fountain, envying the savour of tears, pointed out to the joyous the subtle art of imparting a touch of bitterness to the fullest enjoyment. “It is well to mix among the roses some dewy flower of the deadly hellebore, scarcely distinguishable from the rest of the garland, so that thus redeemed the head may from time to time be bent.” It seemed as if step by step, on that long Way of Love, enjoyment became more collected, wiser, and yet more passionate. The liquid mirrors invited lovers to lay down heads heavy with dreams, and to gaze at their own reflections, until, having at last attained to perceiving in them only symbols of unknown beings risen into the light from an inaccessible world, they may better realise the presence of the unspeakably strange and remote in their own lives. “Lean over to your reflections that your kisses may be doubled by the mirror.”

OSCULA JUCUNDA UT DUPLICENTUR IMAGINE IN UNDA VULTUS HIC VERO CERNITE FONTE MERO.

Was not that simple action a token revealing a hidden thing? The two lovers bending over the reflection of their caress unconsciously figured the mystic power of voluptuous enjoyment, which consists in banishing for a few moments from our souls the unknown man whom we all carry hidden within us, and thus rendering him as remote and strange as a phantom. Does not the dim vagueness of such a sentiment perhaps increase the delirium and produce the terror of lovers who in the mirrors of deep alcoves admire the reflection of their mutual caresses repeated by figures in their own likeness, yet immeasurably unlike and remote in their supernatural silence? With a confused consciousness of the extraordinary alienation taking place within them, they think they have found an enlightening symbol of it in those outward images, which analogy leads them no longer to consider as visible objects, but as inexplicable forms of life, and finally as visions of death.

This was the vision called up by the last of the musical fountains, as Violante’s face bent over it and the shadow of the pines fell slowly like a dark blue veil. “Here did Pleasure and Death admire their united reflection, and their two faces were fused into one.”

SPECTARUNT NUPTAS HIC SE MORS ATQUE VOLUPTAS UNUS [FAMA FERAT] QUUM DUO, VULTUS ERAT.

A soft white cloud passed by and veiled the sun, and the air became softer still; it was like transparent milk into which some perfume had been emptied. And the cadence of the Latin couplets rang in my ears as we walked through enclosed meadows yellow with daffodils, where one could imagine the scenes of a pastoral _fête_ held under tents wreathed with garlands. On the base of a statue of a nymph who had lost both her arms was carved the emblem of the Arcadian Academy: the fountain with seven pipes within a laurel wreath.

“Were you not here this morning?” I said to Violante, as I recognised her close by the box-wood arch under which she had first appeared to me.

She smiled, and I thought a momentary flash of colour passed over her cheeks. Only a few hours had passed, and I was amazed to find how the exact notion of time had escaped me. That short interval seemed full of confused events which gave it, to my consciousness, a deceptive length without any fixed limits. I was not yet able to sound the gravity of the life I had lived since the moment I had put foot in the cloister; but I felt that some dim change, fraught with incalculable results, was being worked within me quite apart from my own will; and I thought that, after all, the presentiment of the morning on the lonely road had not been vain.

“Why shouldn’t we sit down?” asked Antonello almost entreatingly. “Are you not tired yet?”

“Yes, let us sit down,” assented Anatolia, with her usual gentle condescension. “I am a little tired too. It is the spring air.... What a smell of violets!”

“But where is your white hawthorn?” I exclaimed, turning to Massimilla to show her that I had not forgotten her offer.

“It is a long way off still,” she replied.

“Where?”

“Down there.”

“Massimilla has her hiding-places,” said Anatolia, laughing. “When she hides no one can find her.”

“Like a little ferret,” I added.

“And then,” she continued playfully, “she alludes every now and then to some small wonder known to herself alone, but she does it cautiously, keeping her secret to herself, without giving in the least bit to our curiosity. To-day with her white hawthorn she has made you the object of special favour.”

The novice kept her eyes turned downwards, but laughter quivered on her eyelashes and lit up her whole face.

“Some day,” the kind sister went on, pleased to have called up the unwonted ray, “some day I will tell you the story of the hedgehog and the four little blind hedgehogs.”

Then Massimilla burst into such clear youthful laughter, which clothed her in such unusual freshness, that I stood amazed as if a miracle of grace had taken place.

“Ah, don’t listen to Anatolia!” she said, without looking at me. “She is laughing at me.”

“The story of the hedgehog and the four little blind hedgehogs!” I said, drinking in with delight this sudden vein of gaiety which crossed our melancholy. “But you are a very pattern of Franciscan perfection! We must add another little flower to the _Fioretti_: 'How Sister Water tamed the wild hedgehog and gave it a nest that it might multiply, according to the command of our Creator!’ Tell me, tell me the story.”

The Clare laughed with her dear Anatolia, and the subtle feeling of joy spread to Violante also and to the two brothers, and for the first time that day we were conscious of our youth.

What words can express the sweet strangeness of sudden laughter unlocking the lips and shining in the eyes of the sorrow-stricken? The first amazement of it lingered in my soul and seemed to cover all the rest with a veil. The unusual emotion which had stirred Massimilla’s slender breast took possession of me and disturbed the outlines of previous impressions or melted them away altogether. The half-closed mouth of the ecstatic saint was suddenly filled with a silvery rush of sound, just as she was about to let scrolls of silence fall from the motionless palms of her hands.

Nothing save the sound of that laughter could have conveyed to me the depth of the unapproachable mystery which each of the virgins bore within herself. Was it not a chance sign of that instinctive life lying dormant like a heaped-up treasure in the very roots of their physical existence? And did not that hidden tenacious life, weighed down and yet not crushed by the knowledge of so much sorrow, contain within it the germs of numberless energies? As a spring pours on the dry rock the tokens of secret moisture underground, even so the beautiful sudden laugh seemed to rise from that fount of natural joy which the most miserable being still preserves in the depths of his own unconsciousness. And thus above my emotion rose a proud and loving thought: “I could make thee a creature of joy.”

And then my eyes armed themselves with new curiosity; and I was assailed by an anxious desire to look, to gaze at, and observe the three princesses more attentively, as if I had not seen them truly before. And once more it struck me what a complicated enigma of lines every feminine form is, and how difficult it is _to see_, not only the soul but the body. Those hands, for instance, on whose long, slender fingers I had placed my subtlest dreams like invisible rings, already seemed different to me, and appeared as the receptacles of infinite nameless forces from which marvellous generations of new things might arise. And some strange analogy led me to imagine the anxiety and horror which filled that young prince, who, imprisoned in a dark place and obliged to choose his own destiny at the hands of silent messengers, passed the whole night in feeling the fatal hands which were stretched out to him in the darkness. Hands in the darkness--what more fearful image of mystery can there be?

The bare hands of the three princesses rested in the light; and looking at them, I thought of the infinite number of uncreated gestures contained in them, and of the myriads of leaves bursting out in the garden.

Anatolia smiled as she saw my intent look.

“Why are you looking so attentively at our hands? Are you a palmist?”

“Yes, I am a palmist,” I answered in jest.

“Then tell us our fortunes.”

“Show me your left hand.”

She held out her palm, and her sisters did the same. And I bent over them, pretending to explore the lines of life, of fate, and of happiness in each. “What are your fortunes?” I thought meanwhile as I looked at these three fair hands stretched out as if to receive or offer, and in the pause my trouble was fed by the thousand unexpressed and inexplicable things generated by the silence. “Possibly even the iron magnet of fate may be subject to those sudden changes which affect the pointing of the magnetic needle in the compass. Possibly all the energies of will that I feel within me, both clear and confused, are already exercising their transforming power; and the deviating fortunes may be tending towards a final event which shall work out my good. But possibly also I may be the sport of an illusion born of my pride and confidence, and my present state may be only that of a prisoner among prisoners.”

Great was the silence during this pause; it was such that the perception of the immensity of the voiceless things embraced by it terrified me. The sun was still under a veil. Suddenly Antonello started and turned quickly towards the palace as if some one had called him. We all looked at him anxiously, and he looked at us with a wandering gaze. The sisters laid down their hands.

“Well?” Anatolia asked me, with a shadow of preoccupation on her brow. “What have you read?”

“I have read,” I replied, “but I cannot reveal.”

“Why?” she said, recovering her smile. “Is what you know so terrible?”

“It is not terrible,” I said; “indeed, it is joyful.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“For all of us or only for one?”

I hesitated an instant. Did she not penetrate into my perplexity with her question and remind me of the necessary choice.

“You won’t answer!” she added.

“For all of you,” I replied.

“Even for me?” asked Massimilla dreamily.

“Even for you. Are you not going to take the veil by your own choice? And are you not sure of attaining the blessedness which compensates for total renunciation?”

As I looked straight into her eyes, she flushed with colour that seemed almost violent contrasted with her pallor.

“'Be thou, be thou that fragrant flower which thou oughtest to be, spreading its fragrance abroad in the sweet presence of God!’ Saint Catherine wrote that for you.”

“You know Saint Catherine!” said the little novice, her eyes shining with wonder through her blushes.

“She is my favourite saint,” I added, glad to see her astonishment, and tempted by the pleasure of disturbing and dazzling her soul, which seemed to me to be eager and easily shaken. “I love her for her purple hue. In the Garden of self-knowledge she is like a rose of fire.”

The betrothed of Jesus looked at me almost incredulously; but the desire of questioning and listening was painted in her face, and the line of attention cast already a faint shadow on her brow.

“The book I had with me this morning,” she said, with a little tremble in her voice as if she were revealing some intimate confidence, “was a volume of her letters.”

“I noticed that like a good Franciscan you put a blade of grass in your page for a mark. But that book contains another mark. The grass in it burns on the edge of a furnace. The essence of her soul is all in those words of hers: 'Fire and blood united by love!’ Do you remember them?”

“Oh, Massimilla,” interrupted Oddo, laughing, “you may dismiss your spiritual father. Now you have found the true guide to the way of perfection!”

We were sitting on the edge of an empty tank which had no doubt been an ancient fish-pond; now it was almost entirely filled with soil, and taken possession of by wild plants, among which violets were hidden--in great numbers, to judge by their great fragrance. Close by was the broken-down wall of box-wood, breathing out the same aroma from its depths as had met me on my first entrance into the garden. I could see the deserted alley with its mutilated statues and widowed urns through the thin parts of the shrubs and through the arches.

“Is the day yet fixed for you to enter the convent?” I asked Massimilla.

“Not yet,” she replied, “but it is almost sure to be before Easter.”

“Very soon then. Too soon!”

Antonello got up, suddenly seized by unbearable agitation. We all turned towards him. He looked at Anatolia with vague terror in his pale eyes. Then he sat down again. An indefinable anxiety crept over us; it seemed as if Antonello had imparted some of his distress to us.

“This time yesterday we were in the orchard among the almond blossom,” said Oddo, with a shade of regret for a past pleasure in his voice.

Antonello’s words rose spontaneously in my mind: “We must bring them here among the flowers.”

“We must all go back there some day,” I broke out cheerfully, to destroy that strange atmosphere of fear and anxiety which, for some unknown cause, was increasing over our minds. “We must make the most of this beautiful springtime. In a week the whole valley will be in flower. I propose to go all over it, up to Corace, to visit Scultro, Secli, Linturno.... How happy I should be if I might have your company! Would you not like to come? Won’t you set a good example, Donna Anatolia?”

“Certainly,” she said. “You offer us just what we wish.”

“And you too, Donna Massimilla, will be allowed the recreation. Saint Francis, as you know, composed the canticle of the Sun in the cell of boughs which Saint Clara had made for him in the monastery garden. According to the ancient rule, the woods, the rivers, the mountains, and the hills must be your brothers and sisters. Travelling among them is like making a votive pilgrimage.... And then in the deserted city at Linturno there is the nave of a church still standing; and a great Madonna in mosaic, standing solitary under the canopy of the apse.... I always remember it. It is a thing one cannot forget. Do you remember it, Antonello?”

Antonello started at the sound of his name.

“What did you say?” he stammered in a confused voice.

And his poor drawn face expressed such suffering that I could not speak.

“Yes, yes, let us go, let us go,” he added, pretending to have heard; and he rose, a prey to evident agitation. He had the air of a maniac, he was so pale and tottering. “Let us go away from here! Anatolia, get up....”

He spoke quite low, as if he feared to be overheard by some one in the neighbourhood. His tone filled us with dread.

“Get up, Claudio. Let us go.”

Anatolia ran to him and took his hands.

“Here she is, here she comes!” he stammered, quite beside himself, turning his pale eyes, diluted by the hallucination, towards the alley. “Here she is! Do you hear?”

Perplexed and troubled as I was, I thought at first that he was terrified by some phantom called up by his madness. But the sound of approaching steps reached my ears also; and all at once I understood as I saw the sedan chair appear between the walls of box.

There we stood, dumb, motionless, holding our breath as the strange convoy passed along. In the icy silence which had fallen on us, like that surrounding a bier, one could distinctly hear the poles carried by the two servants creaking slightly in their places.

Then through the open window of the chair, against the background of green velvet, I saw the face of the mad princess; it was unrecognisable, disfigured, and swollen and bloodless, like a mask of snow; the hair was piled on her brow like a diadem. Her great black eyes blazed out of the opaque whiteness of her skin from beneath the commanding arched eyebrows, their extraordinary splendour maintained perhaps by the continual hallucination of fantastic pomp and luxury. Her double chin hung down over the necklace round her throat. And this pale inert mass suggested to my imagination the dream-figure of some Byzantine empress of the time of a Nicephorus or a Basil, lying in her golden litter.

“There, she sees us; she is stopping, she is getting out, and coming towards us,” I fancied with growing uneasiness, half expecting some proof of the reality of what seemed to me an unreal apparition on the point of vanishing and of entering the void again like a dream when one wakes. “There, she is calling some one, speaking to them, asking who I am, questioning me....” In the silence I heard in imagination the sound of her voice, the dialogue between the children doomed to an inhuman sacrifice, and the mother whose madness had transported her into another world; a world into which she was inevitably drawing them all, one after the other. And in my horror I understood the deep shudder of instinctive repugnance that had passed over Antonello as she approached, something like the shudder which runs through the folded flock at the approach of the wild beast who is going to devour them.

But she passed by without noticing us, without moving an eyelid, and vanished among the ancient box-trees. Two maids, dressed in grey like Béguines, pale with weariness, silent and sad, walked close behind the sedan chair; their arms hung at their sides, and swung at every step like the rosaries hanging from their waists, cold and inanimate.

As I rode back to Rebursa alone, I could see before me the pale swollen face of the Princess Aldoina, and the gloomy fatigue of the servants, and the two grey shadows following the chair, and all the details of the strange procession. Some essential part of me had been left behind in the great cloister, but still I felt in my inmost being the joy of being alone again.

I recalled once more to my mind the gestures of farewell at the gate, the marvellous depth in the eyes of the prisoners, and the dreamlike view of the garden vanishing away behind the three beautiful forms. And at the same time all the other phantoms of the intense life I had lived in those few hours crowded into my soul like a store of varied and disordered riches, gathered up that they might be rearranged for the adornment of my secret kingdom.

“What opulence!” said the Dæmon, appearing to me, not without joy and pride. “What magnificence in a single day! Thou couldest not have better served thine end, which is to give life to everything, to extract life from the most barren things. Now, dost thou acknowledge the wisdom of my morning admonition? Dost thou not bless the sternness of thy long restraint, since it now yields thee this intoxicating fruit? Thy power of poetry, like thy will, has no limit. Everything that is born and exists around thee is born and exists by reason of the breath of thy will and thy poetry. And thou art nevertheless living in a very real order of things, because nothing is more true in the world than the things of poetry.”

The day was sinking over the undulating valley of the Saurgo, and the slanting rays turned the brown fields into gold, while the light clouds sat in a circle on peaks of rock resembling the highest seats in an amphitheatre. They sat there in feminine attitudes, waiting for the evening to robe them with purple.

“Now, thou couldest make even salt bear fruit,” said the Dæmon to me. “Wherever thy spirit turns, abundance springs up. But thou hast with thee also the favour of fortune; thou hast entered the unknown and unforeseen not as one feeling his way and exploring with hesitation, but as one who is expected and called to gather in the harvest on a field where the richest fruit awaits him--fruit still intact, and ready to fall into his hands whenever in sunshine or in shadow he pleases to stretch them out. Thou hast entered a cloistered garden, delicious and terrifying as the garden of the Hesperides. Happiness has smiled to thee in three shapes, standing between madness and death, like statues of pure white marble between two black columns. Is there not some meaning for thee in that symbol?”

“Oh despot,” I replied, “there is surely some hidden meaning in the symbol thou declarest to me, and I shall discover it. But since the perfection of that trinity attracts me, and since it is necessary for my purpose that I should choose, I am perplexed in spirit, and not without fear of being deluded like a common mortal.”

And the Dæmon: “Not thy fears of the morning alone, but those of the evening also are vain! Nor is that thy only error; for before now, in the presence of the blessed ones, after having composed beautiful music out of the beauty of their bare hands thou didst regret that thou couldest not carry them all away at once to thy home; thou didst rebel against the injuries of prejudice and custom. Now, in thus doing, thou didst humble thyself, not only to own the power of the laws of others, but also to disown the power of thy own ideal, which alone is sacred. Why dost thou aspire to the legitimate possession of the body when the ideal figures already adorn the house of thy dreams with their triple grace? Thou couldest not remove the three prisoners from their dungeon without breaking the enchantment which transfigures them. Countless mysterious waves of affinity flow between the depths of those lives and the silent places where they have suffered and awaited thee. Their grace, their desolation, and their pride draw the fascination which enthralled thee from the hidden virtue of innumerable elements. Even so, noble plants, with their long roots subdivided into myriads of fibres, absorb from the very bosom of the earth those immortal energies which are pressed towards the light by the rising force in the stalk, and are crowned in the miracle of the flower and the perfume. Canst thou, oh Poet, imagine Eglae, Arethusa, or Iperthusa chased from their garden? When Heracles, clothed with stars, penetrated into the western paradise to rob its golden apples, he forbore to carry away the daughters of Night, for even his brutal soul felt that he would have defaced, and perhaps destroyed, the heavenly mystery of their beauty.”

“Oh despot,” I said then, “I am thinking of Him who is to come.”