Part 7

The three sisters went first, a little apart from each other, Anatolia first, Massimilla last. They said a few words now and then in turn, for the silence of things around demanded the sound of their voices, and perhaps they hoped to chase away the sadness of that silence from over the head of their guest. Those short sonorous cadences flowing from unseen lips grew fainter as I advanced; and I ascended with the voices and the shadows of the maidens round me, feeling as amazed and perplexed as if I were in enchantment. But though the three rhythms alternated in my ear, to my sight they appeared simultaneous and continuous, so that from time to time my spirit would listen attentively to seize the difference, or would take a concave form, so to speak, that therein they might melt into one deep harmony. And like those episodes which in a fugue fill up the silence of the theme, the aspect of the things we passed, or the peculiarities of the forms, entered into me, and enriched my musical sense without ruffling it. Marks of decay and neglect were strewn over the ancient steps, here and there still encumbered with the spoils of the previous autumn. There was the statue of a recumbent nymph, with the head bent in a painful position, for the moss-stained brow was deprived of the support of the arm. In a long vase of reddish clay, like a sarcophagus, common grass was growing, and in the midst of this hostile invasion a single plant of daffodils was flowering feebly and tremulously. Under a bit of broken parapet thrown down by the penetrating roots of the ivy appeared an inner channel like a broken artery; and one saw the sparkle and heard the murmur of the water as it flowed to fill the heart of the weeping fountain. Marks of decay and neglect were strewn on our path. The statue, the flower, and the water spoke to me of the same truth. And Violante, and Massimilla, and Anatolia were transfigured in my mind by means of mysterious analogies.

“Oh, beautiful souls,” I thought, as I measured the rhythm of their visible existence, “is not the perfection of human love perhaps to be found in your trinity? You are the triple form which appeared to my desire in the hour of the great harmony. In you all the highest needs of my flesh and spirit might be satisfied; and you might become the miraculous instruments of my will and of my fate in the fulfilment of the work I have to do. Are you not such as I myself would have created to adorn with sublime beauty and sorrow, the mysterious world of which I am the creator? To-day, I know nothing of you beyond the outward appearance and a few passing words; but I feel that ere long each one of you in her entire being will correspond to the image which breathes and throbs within me.”

Thus did the three sisters ascend in my aspirations and my prayers, each one obedient to the secret music that was guiding her life towards an unknown end. And their figures threw great shadows on the stone.

When I set foot on the threshold, the fantastic image of the mad woman took hold of my mind so vividly and fiercely that I gave a secret shudder. The whole place seemed to me to be under her sinister sway, saddened and cast down by her perpetual presence. I thought I read the same uneasiness in the faces of her children. And I felt as if we should find her awaiting us at the top of the stairs.

Anatolia guessed my thoughts, and softly said to reassure me--

“Don’t be afraid.... You won’t see her.... I have arranged that you should not see her, just now at any rate.... Try not to think of her, so that our hospitality may not seem too gloomy.”

Antonello was looking up through the glass of the loggia which surrounded the court, and watching with those anxious eyes and trembling eyelids of his.

“Do you see the grass?” exclaimed Oddo, pointing out to me the long blades of green growing along the walls and in the interstices of the paving-stones.

“It is the token and augury of peace,” I said, trying to shake off the oppression and be cheerful. “I was sorry not to find it yesterday in my own courtyard. They had taken it away, but I should have preferred it to all the festive leaves of myrtle and laurel. Grass ought to be allowed to grow, especially in very large houses. It is a living thing the more.”

The courtyard resounded like the nave of a church, and the echoes were quick to catch up even the words spoken lowest. As I looked at the silent fountain, I thought of the mysterious music with which the water might have invited those attentive and favourable echoes.

“Why is the fountain dumb?” I asked, wishing to take every opportunity of supporting the cause of life in that cloister filled with forgotten or dead things. “Further down on the steps, I heard the sound of water.”

“You must apply to Antonello,” said Violante. “It is he who imposed silence on it.”

The face of the unfortunate invalid coloured slightly, and his eyes grew troubled, as though he were going to yield to an impulse of anger. It seemed almost as if Violante’s harmless accusation had made him ashamed and sorrowful, or as if a dispute already closed had been reopened. He contained himself, but annoyance altered his voice.

“Fancy, Claudio, my rooms are up there,” he said, pointing to one side of the loggia, “and from there one can hear the fountain roaring like a waterfall. Just think! The noise is distracting, something incredible. Don’t you hear what an echo the voice has here? And in the daytime too!”

His whole tall, thin body quivered with aversion to noise, with the nervous horror, the uncontrollable abhorrence of which he had shown signs the day before when he started at the shots from the carbine and the shouts of the men.

“But I wish you could hear it at night,” he continued excitedly. “I wish you could hear it! The water is water no longer; it is a lost soul, howling, laughing, sobbing, stammering, jeering, calling, commanding. It is something incredible! Sometimes as I have lain awake listening, I have forgotten that it was water; and I have not been able to remember.... Do you understand?”

He stopped suddenly, evidently trying to control himself, and he looked distractedly at Anatolia. The pain in her face disappeared under that look; it was hidden and controlled. And she, as if to disperse the uneasiness we all felt, said almost gaily: “Indeed, Antonello is not exaggerating. Shall we call up the lost soul? Nothing is easier.”

We were all there round the dry fountain. The unexpected halt, the words and the look of the unhappy man, the solemnity of the enclosed court, the silvery coldness of the light that rained down from above, and the approaching metamorphosis, seemed to confer something of the mystery of a work of magic on that ancient, lifeless thing. The mass of marble--a pompous composition of Neptune’s horses, tritons, dolphins, and shells in triple order--rose before our eyes, covered with a greyish crust of dried-up lichens, glittering white here and there like an aspen stem; and all the human and animal mouths seemed still in their silence to preserve the same attitudes in which but lately liquid voices had flowed from their lips.

“Stand back,” added Anatolia, as she stooped down over a bronze disc that covered a round aperture in the pavement near the edge of the lower basin. “I am going to turn on the water.”

And she put her finger through the ring in the middle of the disc, and tried to lift its weight; but she could not, and rose up with her face scarlet from the exertion. I came to her assistance, and when it was open, she stooped again and found the secret spring with her hand. We both stood back in mutual agreement, and now the bubbling water was to be heard rising in the veins of the empty fountain.

And there was a moment of anxious expectation, as if the mouths of the monsters were about to give answer. Involuntarily I pictured the joy of the stone as the fresh liquid life invaded it, and imagined to myself the impossible shudders it must feel.

The tritons were blowing their trumpets, the dolphins’ throats were gurgling. From the top a jet of water sprang up hissing, clear and quick as a sword-thrust sent into the blue; it broke, retired, hesitated, rose again straighter and stronger than ever; it hung in the air, turned adamant, shot up like a stalk, and seemed to burst into flower. First a short, sharp sound like the crack of a whip echoed through the court, then came something like a burst of Homeric laughter, then a thunder of applause, then a shower of rain. Every mouth sent out a jet of water, and each jet curved into an arch to fill the shell beneath. Here and there the stone was sprinkled with dark stains, and the smooth parts shone, and the rivulets grew more and more numerous; at last every part of it rejoiced at the touch of the water; it seemed to open all its pores to the countless drops, and revive like a tree refreshed by a cloud. Rapidly the slightest hollows filled up, overflowed, and took the shape of silver crowns, continually destroyed and as continually renewed. Every instant as the play was multiplied by the variety of the sculpture, the continuous sounds grew louder and formed a deeper and deeper music in the great echo of the walls. Above the voluble symphony of water falling into water rose the mighty bubbling and gushing of the central jet, as it dashed the marvellous flowers that came out from moment to moment at the top of its stalk against the necks of the Tritons.

“Do you hear?” exclaimed Antonello, as he looked at this triumph with eyes of enmity. “Do you think this racket would be tolerable for long?”

“Ah, I could stay here for hours and days listening to it,” I thought I heard Violante saying, in a voice more veiled than ever. “There is no music I love so well.”

She had stayed so near the fountain that she was sprinkled all over with drops, and her hair was strewn with sparkling dust. The power of her beauty again excluded any other thought, any discordant image from my mind. Again she seemed to me isolated and unapproachable, outside of the sphere of ordinary life, more like a vision of art than a creature of our own species. Everything round her acknowledged the sovereignty of her presence, for everything referred to, and submitted to, and harmonised with, her beauty. Like the great arch of green that bent over her when first she appeared to me, like the ancient plinth on which she had rested, this musical fountain open to the sky seemed created for her alone; it seemed to correspond perfectly with that ideal harmony expressed in her simple attitude. Secret and inexplicable affinities united the most diverse things to her being, and brought back all surrounding mysteries to the mystery of herself. Since nature in this human form had revealed one of her supreme ideas of perfection, it seemed to me that all other ideas in all other mortal shapes should by nature serve to lead the spirit of the beholder to contemplate that one supreme idea.

And so it came about, that as I watched the maiden by the fountain I discovered and treasured up a pure truth: “When Beauty reveals herself, all the elements of life converge towards her as towards a centre, and so she has for her tribute the entire Universe.”

“One of our troubles,” said Oddo, as we walked up the wide balustraded staircase, upon whose silent walls the sixteenth century decorations of streamers and clouds imitated the fury of a tempest, “one of our troubles is the vastness of the house; it gives us a feeling of being astray, a humiliating feeling of our own littleness.”

The building was, in fact, a great deal too spacious and too empty. It had been restored in the seventeenth century, and transformed from a feudal fortress into a country villa, and all the formidable hugeness of its walls and vaults remained, although successive epochs had left the impress of art and of luxury, sometimes on their surface, and sometimes in contrast to them. The enormous number of mirrors with which whole walls were covered multiplied the space into infinity. And nothing was more mournful than those pale, delusive abysses, which seemed to open into a supernatural world, and to promise at every moment to show the living beholder visions of the dead.

“Claudio, my boy!” exclaimed Prince Luzio in a voice full of emotion, coming forward as soon as he saw me. “Dear, dear boy!”

I felt his old worn body tremble as he embraced me and kissed me on the forehead in a fatherly way. With his hand still on my shoulder, he gazed long into my face as if in a dream, while a wave of memories, sorrows, and complaints passed across the ashy blue of his feeble eyes.

“How like you are to your father!” he added, in a still more affectionate voice, and his emotion took possession of me also. “It is a marvellous likeness. I feel as though I beheld Massenzio again in his youth, when we were companions in the Life Guards.... He seems to have come to life again. How like him you are, my boy!”

He took me by the hand and led me to the window, as if he wished to withdraw with me into the contemplation of long past things.

“How like him you are!” he repeated when he saw my face in the full light. “Oh, if that blessed soul were only living still. He ought not to have died, my God, he ought not to have died.”

He shook his head in token of regret over the phantom of that beautiful life so early cut off. And the sincerity of his affection was so great, that I was touched to the bottom of my soul, and I could no longer feel a stranger in that house where the memory of my dead was kept so reverently fresh. “Look,” added the Prince, stroking the point of his white beard, and smiling a smile in which I caught glimpses of Anatolia’s noble sweetness; “look how old I have grown!”

His whole figure betrayed a painful feebleness, but the radiance of his premature white hair gave his head a look of venerable majesty, and his brow still bore the hereditary stamp of his lordly race. His hands had escaped almost by a miracle from any injury by sickness and old age; there was no aged deformity about them. They were still strong and fair as if embalmed; those liberal hands of the munificent noble who had lavished his riches on the path of the exile, only that the eyes of his king might shine awhile longer with the reflection of fallen royalty. And as a kind of memorial of the treasures so prodigally spent there shone a cameo in his signet ring.

Those hands with their slow movements seemed, as the sluggish blood revived with the heat of memories, to be drawing some remnant of a vanished world out of a sphere of shadow, and this faculty gave them a singular meaning in my eyes. When the old man sat down and laid his hands on the arms of the chair, they seemed to me like relics, and I looked at them with a strange feeling of almost superstitious respect. They made me feel, very strongly, as if I were living at that moment in my own world of poetry, and not in the world of fact.

Seeing my eyes fixed on the carved gem, the prince smiled and said: “It is Violante’s portrait.”

He took off the ring and handed it to me.

The delicate work was by some ancient artist not unworthy of Pirgotelus or Dioscuridas; but the divine features of the Medusa, relieved against the blood-red background of sardonyx, corresponded so perfectly to the likeness of the proud creature, that I thought: “Truly then did she illuminate the art of bygone days, and from time immemorial bestowed upon durable matter the privilege of perpetuating the Idea of which she is to-day the Incarnation.”

“Her mother used to wear this ring just before she was born,” added the prince with the same gentle smile, “and she was always looking at it.”

* * * * *

In such a manner, and at every moment, the conformity of things raised my spirit into an ideal state, which resembled a state of reverie and second-sight without actually attaining to it, and this same conformity furnished harmonious material to my sensibility and imagination. And I watched the continuous generation of a higher life within myself, which transfigured everything as if by the virtue of a magic glass.

The three elect beings seemed mutually to throw light and shade on each other, and the lights and shades had the significance of a language which I was already able to interpret as clearly as if it had been familiar to me for long. And so I stood not only bewildered by the reflection of the rock, but struck by the lightning flashes of my thoughts, when Violante went up to an open window, pointed out a view which she seemed to have called up with a wave of her hand, and said--

“Look.”

It was a window facing north, on the opposite side of the palace from the garden, and it looked out over a precipice. As I leant out an impetuous shudder ran through me, and raised me suddenly to a sentiment of appreciation of this silent and terrible grandeur.

“Is this your secret?” I asked the enchantress, but I did not put my question into words, for at her side silence itself seemed eloquent. The rock descended abruptly from the massive buttresses which supported the northern wall, till at the bottom it ended in a hard white river bed, whose very dryness seemed ominous of the ruinous anger of a torrent. With that same atrocious, desperate violence which the lava streams have as they rush down to the Sicilian Sea, and rebound and rise up and twist themselves into black and red masses, screaming, roaring, hissing at the first contact with the water; with that same violence the rock at the bottom of the river-bed rose and flung itself heavenwards, and towered opposite the great wall built by man, with a kind of dumb fury animating its gigantic mass. All the wildest convulsions and contortions of bodies possessed by demoniac power or deadly spasms seemed petrified for ever in that terrible form, terrible as the cliff whence Dante caught sight of fresh horrors on his way to the river of blood guarded by the Centaurs. All the shapes of which pliable metal and scoriæ are capable were there contrasted with the hard stone; ringlets of rebellious hair, coils of angry serpents, intricacies of roots laid bare, sheaves of muscles, circles of the whirlpool, folds of draperies, twists of rope. This vision of frenzied turbulence rose perfectly motionless in the blaze of the midday sun, without a line of shadow. The throbbing of a high fever seemed hidden beneath the lifeless crust.

“Is this your secret?” I repeated to the enchantress, still without words, for my inward agitation would not allow me to select or control the accents of my voice.

She stood beside me, silent also; and I did not look at her, nor did she look at me. But as we leant out towards the many shaped rock, we were united to each other by the same fascination which draws together those who read out of the same book. We were both reading out of the same fascinating, dangerous book.

She said, as she raised her head with a slight start--

“Do you hear the hawks?”

And we both searched the summits with dazzled eyes.

“Listen.”

The rock rose to heaven bristling with points and stained a reddish colour like rust or clotted blood; and the screams of the birds of prey heightened the impression of its savage pride.

Then a sudden giddiness overwhelmed me--a sort of horror of too vast ambitions and desires. Perhaps in the very depths of my being the primitive feelings of early forefathers awoke; for my indescribable agitation took the form of a lightning-like succession of flashing visions, in which I saw men like myself pouring into vanquished cities, leaping over heaps of corpses and ruins, with untiring gestures, thrusting their swords into men’s bodies, carrying half-naked women on their saddle-bows through the innumerable flames of a conflagration, while their horses, lithe cruel animals like leopards, waded up to their bellies in blood.

“Ah, I should have known how to possess thee in the midst of slaughter under a canopy of fire, overshadowed by the wing of death!” said the soul of my ancestors to her who stood by my side. “My will would have urged my body to the performance of prodigies of valour; and though I had had to clamber up the smooth sides of this wall, defended by a thousand bowmen, yet I should have borne thee away alive.”

Filled with the glow from this magnificent and tremendous desolation reaching to the heavens, my eyes fell on the maiden’s face, and saw it so strongly lit up by the reflection, that an almost painful joy swept over me. And I felt a mad desire to take that head in my hands, turn it back, bring it close to my lips, gaze on it more closely, impress every line of it in my thought--a feeling not unlike his who finds under the barren soil some sublime fragment which will reveal to the world the glory of an idea for long nearly extinct.

She was like a statue placed in full view of the rising sun; her perfection did not fear the light. In her bodily form I saw the impress of the eternal type, and at the same moment I recognised the fragility of the flesh, which bore no immunity from human fate. She was like a delicious fruit at the highest point of its maturity, beyond which point corruption sets in. The skin of her face had the wonderful transparency of the blossom which to-morrow will fade.

“Who shall deliver thee from the sacrilege of Time the destroyer? Who shall slay thee with a mortal dart at the summit of thy perfection when the miserable signs of decay begin to appear?” The dark saying of her brother came back to my mind: “Violante is killing herself with perfumes.” ... And silently I worshipped her, with a religious desire to praise her in her every movement. “Oh sovereign being, feeling thou art perfect, thou dost also feel the necessity of death; thou dost know that only death can preserve thee from all base injury; and since everything in thee is noble, thou dost purpose to offer to that solemn custody a body royally embalmed in perfumes.”

* * * * *

After such draughts of balmy wine, how could the meal to which we sat down have any savour?