Part 15

“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!”

All around us on the water, over which a slight shiver was passing, the living calyxes were closing with a slow lip-like motion, hesitating a few moments, withdrawing, sinking, disappearing under the leaves one by one or in groups, as if some power of slumber were calling them below. Wide spaces were left deserted, but here and there in the midst of them a single belated lily would display the utmost of her grace in this delay. A vague melancholy hovered over the water on each spot where one of the lingerers disappeared. And then it seemed as if the dreams of the submerged multitude rose up like a mist from the great soft rosy stream.

* * * * *

But it was on the summit of Corace that the unexpected revelation took place which finally decided our fate.

We had stopped at Scultro to visit the ancient abbey, where the remains still exist of a sumptuous mausoleum, the work of Maestro Gualtiero of Germany, built as a memorial of herself and her three sons by a lady of the Cantelmo family--that magnificent _Domina Rita_, who as the wife of Giovanni Antonio Caldora was mother of the great condottiere Jacopo. And Anatolia and I had lingered behind in the mouldy chapel to gaze at the recumbent figure of the young hero, clad to the throat in heavy armour, with only the curly head uncovered, reposing so royally on the marble pillow.

Then after a long climb on foot up a steep narrow path--for we had left the mules behind on the level--we had reached the northern brow of the extinct crater, now transformed into the lake to which Secli gives its name. At our feet we had, on the one hand, the tawny valley of the Saurgo; on the other, two high spurs sent out of the main range into the plains below, beyond which lies the distant sea. Above our heads a few clouds hung almost motionless in the vast expanse of crystalline blue, and seemed compact and dazzling as heaps of snow.

Seated on some boulders, we gazed in silence. Violante and Massimilla seemed tired, and Oddo had not yet succeeded in controlling his nervousness. But Anatolia was moving about, gathering little flowers in the crevices of the rocks.

A vague, confused restlessness stole over me, intensified at times to the point of acute pain. I felt that at last the inevitable moment of choice was hanging over me; that I dared linger no more among the tormenting, delicious alternations of passion and perplexity, nor any more strive to resolve the three noble rhythms into one harmony. That day, for the last time, the three givers of happiness appeared to me in unison beneath the light of the same heaven. How long a time had passed since that first hour when, as I ascended the ancient steps, in the voices and virginal shadows moving like forms of magic, surrounded by the traces of neglect and decay, I had discovered the first music, and wrought the first transformation? On the morrow the short-lived spell would be broken, and for ever.

Now I felt compelled to say aloud to Anatolia the words I had already silently addressed to the pure, mysterious shadow which had witnessed my interview with her father. As we stood together shortly before in the deserted chapel, looking on that tomb erected by the loyalty of a brave woman, had we not both partaken of the same sentiment and the same idea? Had I not said to her even then, without words: “Thou too mightest become a mother of heroes, oh thou who sharest my consciousness. I know that thou hast gathered up my wish, and hast laid it within thy true heart, where it sparkles like a diamond. I know that in a dream thou hast watched a whole night mysteriously over the sleep of a child. While his body slept, breathing deeply, thou didst hold his soul, tangible as a crystal ball, in thy hands, and thy bosom swelled with marvellous intuitions.”

Now I felt the need of exchanging a binding promise with her before she started off on her mournful journey with the novice and her brother. But my anxiety was deepening into pain, as if some real danger were hanging over me. And I could not fail to acknowledge the cause of the emotion which Violante was perpetually stirring in me by her every

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