Part 13

Once more she seemed to me like one who has “departed from this present age.”

So much so, that when Oddo, one day, told me the pitiful story of her engagement broken off by death, I listened as one listens to a legend of ancient times, and felt then how strong and genuine my intellectual detachment was.

She had been loved and asked in marriage by Simonetto Belprato two years before; and, like Iphanea, had lost her betrothed almost on the eve of the wedding.

“Già vicino alle sue nozze, beata Le ghirlande apprestava; e le fu spento.”

Oddo recalled to my mind the faint memory of Simonetto, and described to me the gentle youthful figure of the student, last heir of a noble family of Trigento, living a retired life with his widowed mother in the country, where he studied botany and died.

“Poor Simonetto!” said Oddo with brotherly regret, “I can see him still in his botanising dress, his tin case slung over one shoulder, his iron-shod stick and his green morocco pocket-book. He used to spend almost his whole time botanising, or preparing and drying the plants he had collected. His house was full of herbariums, and he might well stamp his floreated coat-of-arms as an emblem on their covers. You know what the Belprato arms are?--a shield divided by a bar of gold, the upper half red with a silver lily, the lower green, strewn with red flowers and golden leaves. Is it not a strange coincidence, Claudio? That the last of the Belprato should be a botanist! I used to prophesy to Massimilla in fun: 'You will end between two leaves of grey paper.’ They were betrothed to each other in the garden over his collecting, and they seemed made for each other. We were pleased too, for Massimilla would have entered a good family, and would not have lived very far away from us. (The Belprato, as you know, are of very ancient nobility, though during the last few centuries they have decayed. They came over from Spain to Naples with Alphonso of Aragon.) Everything was ready for the wedding. I remember so well the day that the wedding-dress, the kind gift of our aunt Sabrano, arrived from Naples with its wreath of orange blossom. Massimilla tried it on; it was delicious. Antonello and I wanted Anatolia and Violante to try it on for luck; poor dear creatures! The wreath, I remember, got twisted among Violante’s hair in such a strange way that it was impossible to take it off without tearing out a few hairs clinging to the flowers. One of the servants muttered that it was a bad omen. She was right. Simonetto was, indeed, to fall a victim to his mania. It was autumn, and he used often to go to Linturno to gather the water plants on the stagnant river. There it was that he contracted the germs of the poisonous fever which carried him off in two days. We had a funeral instead of a wedding. Our usual bad fortune!”

We were in Antonello’s rooms; the blinds were drawn, and the place was half dark, for outside the day was clouding over. I could not see the sky out of the windows, yet I could feel the sensation of the gentle, rather enervating, heat outside, and I felt sure that out of doors a few drops of rain had begun to fall, some of those warm tears that are so soft when they fall on face or hands. Antonello was lying motionless on his bed without speaking. Every now and then a swallow could be heard chattering.

“Perhaps,” I asked Oddo, “that is why Massimilla is going into the convent?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think so,” he replied. “It is a long time ago now. But certainly life in this house must be more wearisome for her than for the others. I always think she must feel as dried up and extinguished as the plants in the herbariums Simonetto left her in his will. Ah, that wedding-dress laid by in a cupboard like a relic! Think of it! That white robe which by this time must be full of the odour of dried plants! Think of it! Do you think that death can have any museum in the world sadder than that of which Massimilla is the guardian? Sometimes I am unjust; sometimes I cannot conceal the bitterness that rises in my heart when I think that Massimilla is going away, is going to forsake us. I feel as if her departure would bring about the final dissolution. I feel as though a whirlwind would come to scatter and destroy us all, like a heap of useless rags. And she in the meantime is seeking to save herself. But I am unjust. She is perhaps the most unhappy of all us here. What I used to say to her in jest has come true. She believes herself to have become like the leaves and flowers in a herbarium. To revive herself, to call up the illusion of living, she forces herself into contact with living things. Have you not seen her plunge her hands in the grass and hold them there, so as to feel the caterpillars and insects among it run over her skin? Don’t you know the hours and hours she spends in the garden looking for animals, and making friends with them? In all this she is, as you said, a pattern of Franciscan perfection. But what would you say if you knew that it is really nothing but an anxious desire to realise life? I understand it; I am perhaps the only one who understands....”

He said the last words in a low voice, almost as if he were talking to himself; then he paused, possibly to contemplate within himself the creation of his disturbed fancy. Was it only the dream of a sick man? Or did the living Massimilla really correspond to this forsaken guardian of dead plants? I did not linger over such doubts; for I wished to absorb all the poetry which the strange fancies diffused through the shadow of the room, where now the faint patter of the rain reached us, and awakened in my nostrils the desire to inspire the savour of the moist earth. I rose and opened the nearest window a little; the smell of the earth floated in.

“During the first few months after Simonetto’s death,” Oddo resumed, “she took great care of the herbariums. She used to pass long hours in the room where they were kept, examining the plants and reading the labels. And I used often to keep her company, for I was very sorry for her. One day, I remember, I came upon her opening the cupboard in the same room where her wedding-dress was kept. Another day, I remember, in the springtime I saw her quite agitated because one of the narcissus bulbs had flowered.... It was strange, wasn’t it, Claudio? I saw that bulb come up again last spring. And this year? I have not asked Massimilla.... Shall we go and see?”

He rose to his feet, seized with a feverish impatience, and took a few steps towards the door. But Antonello, who was still lying on his pillows, rose also with the same look--how well I remembered it!--as had passed over his face when he warned us of the coming of the gloomy sedan chair; and raising a finger to his lips to bid us keep silence, he leant against the wall which formed a side of the loggia and listened. Nothing was to be heard in the silence save the gentle monotonous patter of the soft spring shower in the enclosed garden.

“Don’t go out!” whispered Antonello.

We did not ask why, for the cause of his terror was evident in his thin contracted face. And as the sound of steps and voices reached us, Oddo went up to the door, opened it a little, and peeped out. I went up to it too, and, standing at his shoulder, I could see through the chink Anatolia leading her mother along the covered loggia, with her arm in hers, and one of the grey woman servants following. Princess Aldoina walked with difficulty, leaning her whole weight upon her daughter. She was strangely dressed in a grand gown with a long train, and was decked out with false jewellery. She looked pale and enormous, with her head raised and a little thrown back, her eyes half closed, and an indescribable smile playing on her lips, as if the sound of the rain on the pavement of the quadrangle had been a murmur of homage from courtiers, through whose ranks she was passing, a queen on the way to her throne. And the full light of sorrowful pity shone in the daughter’s face as she leant over the mad woman.

As the apparition vanished, our souls for a few moments were full of affectionate anguish. And while the echo of the sad footfalls was still audible, the maiden’s figure in that attitude of pity and sorrow which had revealed her to me in her true and supreme light rose before me with extraordinary clearness. And my inmost soul felt an almost religious awe, such as one feels in presence of a holy mystery; for none of the previous actions wrought before my eyes by this pure spirit of consolation seemed equal in value and significance to this action performed by her, all unconscious of my hidden gaze. She rose suddenly to a sublime height in my soul; she shone with the whole glory of her moral beauty, supported by the whole force of her heroic will. Contemplated thus, apart from any affinity to myself, in the secret of her own life to which I was a stranger, in the absolute sincerity of her feeling, she seemed to me a being of an ideal race; and my spirit linked her with those noble creatures immortalised by the poets, divine victims of a voluntary sacrifice. Antigone leading her blind father by the hand, or prostrating herself to strew dust over her brother’s corpse, was not more tender or stronger than she, had not a purer brow nor a larger heart. In the midst of that sort of languid monotony, in that enervating shadow where a sick man was sounding the depth of his own ills, and a restless voice was calling up a vision of empty misery from withered flowers, the _consoler_ appeared suddenly bringing refreshment to my soul; and as a sudden light piercing a dark wall makes the motionless sword glitter among the hanging trophies, so did she strike a great flash out of my dormant will. There was strength in her to produce miraculous fruit. Her substance might have nourished a superhuman germ. She was indeed the “nourisher,” but such a one as the virgin Antigone appeared to the blind Œdipus when he was exiled and erring. Did not she alone, like the ancient heroine, keep alive in the depths of her great heart the genial flame which had been extinguished on the hearth of her failing race? Was not she alone the life of the gloomy house? Massimilla in her barren garden, Violante in her cloud of perfumes, paled before their sister as she walked along the path of self-sacrifice with so firm a step, so sweet a smile.

And I thought of Him who was to come.

* * * * *

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.