Part 9
But shortly after, in the outer portico, as we paced slowly up and down with his arm in mine, he returned to the story; and all the time the sun blazed on the series of terraces from which the tall white statues of the Seasons looked over the tawny valley of the Saurgo.
It was a mysterious secret drama of passion and death, worthy of the weird stone cloister which had fostered and exalted its violence in rapid alternation. To me it signified the power which the genius of places can exercise over the responsive soul, a power by which every genuine feeling of the soul must concentrate itself to the utmost degree of intensity possible to human nature, in order to express its whole force in a definite act with a certain result.
As I listened to the prince’s imperfect account, I mentally reconstructed that hour of intense life which produced the death of Pantea; and the midnight crime appeared to me clothed in a beauty which was the harbinger of profound thoughts.
At the close of the story Prince Luzio took leave of me, saying: “I hope from this day you will treat this house as your own. Whenever you like to come, you will be welcome, dear boy. So do not stay away too long.”
It made me sad to see him enter the desolate palace alone, so I went back a little way with him, talking affectionately. We stopped again before the fountain; and he made a motion of his hand towards the basin, and in the chill, clear water I saw the fatal beauty of Pantea and her curved white hands floating in the water, like two magnolia petals, and her soft hair fluttering under the horses’ hoofs.
“A legend grew up years afterwards,” said the prince, smiling. “On moonless nights Pantea’s soul sings on the summit of the fountain, while that of her lover groans within the jaws of the stone beasts until the dawn breaks.”
* * * * *
The troublous joy of spring rose up in our faces as we leant over the balustrade towards the sloping garden. A kind of quivering atmosphere enveloped us with the swiftness of a fever poison, and the sensation was so strong as to paralyse the nerves. The pupils of our eyes became fixed, our eyelids were lowered as if sleep were gliding over us. My soul within me was heavy like a cloud.
Anatolia remarked upon our mutual silence--
“Happiness is passing by.”
These sudden words of hers revealed to us the secret of the anguish within us; she had expressed the spirit of intense melancholy which pervaded the earth awaiting the renewal of spring. “Happiness is passing by!”
“Whose hands may arrest her?” I asked myself sharply, in the blind agitation of my longing for love, in the confused revolt of my deepest instincts.
The three sisters were leaning their elbows on the stone parapet, their bare hands without rings stretched out in the sun as in a golden bath: Massimilla with fingers interlaced; Anatolia with one hand crossed in the other so that her thumbs were uppermost; Violante, pressing in hers some of the fading violets out of her belt, and then letting them fall into space.
“Whose hands may arrest her?”
Anatolia’s looked the strongest and the most sensitive. The firm outlines of the muscles and tendons supporting the thumbs were clearly visible beneath the skin. The tips of the thumbs wore rosy nails for gems, with a half moon of white at the root like a double onyx.
Had they not communicated a sense of their generous power and practical kindness when first I touched them? Had I not already felt a reviving warmth in the hollow of her palm?
But Massimilla’s hands were like uncreated things, like dream-shapes rather, so slender were they; and so white, that the golden sunbeams failed to gild them; and so symbolically familiar, that in the broad daylight I could see again the dim shadows of the dusky apse where first they appeared to me, and see them hovering around the altar, last relics of a form sunk back again into mystery, and yet fitted--they alone--to enchant and caress souls. Now with the interlacing of the clasped fingers they symbolised the fetters of voluntary slavery. “Here am I, thine own, bound by a tie stronger than any chain. I will open my arms only when it shall be thy good pleasure to release me. Mine be it only to worship and obey, to obey and worship,” was the confession which by these tokens the devout maiden made to her ideal lord. And I imagined her hands loosed and long scrolls of living silence floating from them; just as from the hands of the angels painted above and around altars there float long streamers eloquently inscribed with verses, and containing history within the mystic sense of the written words. “Thus, oh Worshipper, mayest thou encircle my wandering spirit within the living silence of thy love! And I shall become unfaithful to earth’s solitudes, to the solemn mountains, the musical woods, the peaceful rivers, even to the starry skies; for no sight on earth can elevate a man’s spirit like the presence of a beautiful and submissive soul. It is this which gives to the walls of a narrow room the feeling of boundless space, like the votive lamp which only increases the vast darkness of a cathedral. And for this, I should desire to have thee with me, sweet slave. He who meditates, surrounded by silent adoration, feels the divinity of his own thoughts and the creative power of a god.”
But the sublime hands of Violante, as they pressed the essence out of the tender flowers and let them fall crushed to the ground, were fulfilling an act which corresponded most perfectly, as a symbol, to the characteristics of my ideal style: they extracted the supreme flavour of life out of things, took from them the utmost they could give, and then left them exhausted. Was not this one of the most important elements in my art of living?
And so Violante appeared to me as a divine and incomparable instrument of my art. “Relation with her is necessary to me that I may know and exhaust the innumerable things which lie hidden in the depths of the human senses, those things of which eternal desire is the only revelation. The tangible body encloses infinite mysteries which only the touch of another body can reveal to him that is gifted by Nature to understand them and religiously celebrate them. And has not her body the sanctity and magnificence of a temple? Does not her beauty promise the highest revelations to my senses?”
Thus as before, when we ascended the steps, I felt within me the attraction of the three complete types, which promised to all my energies the joy of manifesting themselves and of satisfying themselves to the uttermost in perfect harmony. One of them--in my dream--watched, her pure brow radiant with prophecy, over the son of my soul and my body; another, like the salamander in the alchemist’s furnace, lived within the fiery circle of my thoughts; and the third called me back to the devout worship of the body and invited me to learn in mysterious ceremonies how to live again the life of the ancient gods. They all three seemed born to serve my ideal of perfection on earth. And the duty of separating one from the other was as distasteful to me as destroying some symmetry; it irritated me, it seemed an injustice done by prejudice and habit. “Why may I not take them all to my home on a single day and adorn my solitude with their threefold grace? My love and my art should weave a different spell round each, build a throne for each, and offer to each the sceptre of an ideal kingdom peopled with shadows, where she would find her immortal characteristics transfigured in their different aspects. And since brevity is the most fitting attribute of ambitious dreams and beautiful life, my love and my art will be able to bring to these blessed ones (but not to thee, Anatolia, who art fated to watch for a long time) a harmonious death at the seasonable hour----”
These thoughts of mine, burning like a soft delirium in the early heat of the spring sun, were raining down without ceasing on the hands of the maidens, when Violante let the last of her crushed flowers fall, and leant over to catch hold of the tips of the long creepers which grew from the terrace below up to the balustrade, and wreathed themselves round it. She managed to break off a twig, and examined its fibres to see if the spring sap had reached it yet.
“They are still asleep,” she said.
And so we bent over the sleep transparent already of those pale sheaths, in which one of the greatest of earth’s miracles was about to be worked, called up before us by a word.
“You will see in a few months,” said Anatolia to me, “they will all be covered with a green mantle; all the trellises will throw shade.”
These plants were not the mothers of the grape, but a kind of leafy vine with innumerable flying tendrils, which spread like a piece of netting over the wide surface of the wall and the trellises down the steps. They looked more like worn-out ropes than plants, torn as they were by the rain, shrivelled by the sun, fragile as gossamer to behold. And yet the approaching change made them appear as mystical as the huge trunks of mountain forest trees. Myriads of young leaves were about to burst miraculously from the fibres of that lifeless rope.
“In autumn,” said Violante, “everything turns red, a glorious red, and sometimes on sunny October days the walls and steps seem to be hung with purple. Then, indeed, the garden has its hour of beauty. If you are here then, you will see----”
“He won’t be here,” interrupted Antonello, shaking his head.
“Why do you always say that?” I asked him with gentle reproof; “who knows?”
“No one ever knows anything,” murmured Oddo in that muffled voice of his, which I could only distinguish from his brother’s by the movement of the lips. “Who knows what may happen to us between this and the autumn? Massimilla is the only one who is safe; she has found her refuge.”
Perhaps there was a tiny drop of bitterness in the last words.
“Massimilla is going to pray for us,” said Anatolia gravely.
The novice bent her head over her clasped hands, and we were silent for a space, while a flood of vague but overpowering feeling swept over us.
The clearness of the early spring afternoon paled before that illuminating vision of the autumn purple as we went down the steps, where a few hours before the three princesses had appeared, as at the beginning of a fairy tale, with a new-born smile on their lips after a night of interminable anguish. That morning hour already seemed as far away as the autumn was near, to which--a dim presentiment told me--a fate was leading me swift as lightning. And when I pictured the purple foliage on the bare branches, I also foresaw a shadow of deep mourning fall on the faces of the three sisters.
And once more the sentiment of death impassioned and elevated my soul till all things were reflected in it transfigured by poetry. And in the splendour of the spring air these frail beings seemed to me “marvellously sad,” like the women in the vision of the Vita Nuova, which Massimilla had recalled to my memory among the almond blossom and the ancient mirrors. And I felt as if the ardent spirit possessed me that burns in the pages of that book, where the youthful Dante shows how his soul could be shaken to its very foundations, and exalted to the height of sorrowful madness by imagining the death of Beatrice, and gazing on her face through the funeral shroud. “Weeping,” I said within myself. “Certainly it must sometime come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die.... And a great fear fell upon me, and I imagined that some friend should come to me and say: 'Dost thou not know? Thy marvellous lady has departed from this world....’ Then my heart that was so full of love said unto me: 'It is true that our lady lieth dead’ ... and so strong was this idle imagining that it made me to behold my lady in death....” Did not the force of this ineffable inner beauty come to me from a similar fancy?
A splendid nobility flowed from every action of these maidens, doomed to die. It lit up the outward things among which they moved. And never again perhaps did I see them in so much light and shade.
* * * * *
When we had reached the foot of the steps, and entered a glade surrounded by the green ruins of a box-wood bower, Anatolia paused and asked me--
“Would you like to see the whole garden? Perhaps you might find some memories in it.”
As if she wanted to proclaim her power, Violante said--
“As you enjoy the music of the water, I will take you to see my seven fountains.”
And Massimilla, with her shy gentleness--
“In return for the almond blossom, I will show you a white hawthorn which came out last night over there.”
I felt as though they were speaking of their most intimate possessions, and, like the virgin of Fontebranda, intended to say: “We are ourselves a garden.”
As I could not express what I felt, I said only empty words.
“Show me the way, then,” I said; “I am sure to come across some memories, at any rate of my early reading, which used to be fairy tales.”
“Poor fairies without wands!” observed Oddo, taking Anatolia’s hand with a caressing gesture.
And in the eyes of the maidens were smiles full of despair.
Then Violante led us through a labyrinth.
We walked among evergreens, among ancient box-trees, laurels, myrtles, whose wild old age had forgotten its early discipline. In a few places here and there there was some trace of the symmetrical shapes carved once upon a time by the gardener’s shears; and with a melancholy not unlike his who searches on marble tombstones for the effigies of the forgotten dead, I noted carefully among the silent plants those traces of humanity not altogether obliterated. A bitter-sweet odour hung round our path, and from time to time one of us, as if wishing to weave afresh an unravelled web, would reconstruct some memory of our far-off childhood. And now the shadow of my mother rose pure and clear before me, and seemed to feed upon all the things which our hearts exhaled in the broken silences, and she never left Anatolia’s side, thus showing me her preference. And a bitter-sweet odour hung over our melancholy.
Violante stopped and asked me, almost with the same look and in the same tone as when she spoke to me at the window--
“Do you hear?”
“Now we are in your kingdom,” I said to her, “because you are the queen of the fountains.”
The hoarse song of the water came to us through a high myrtle hedge as we stood in a little meadow strewn with daffodils, and guarded by a statue of Pan green with moss. A delicious softness seemed to spring in my veins from the soft turf my feet pressed, and once again the sudden joy of living took away my breath. At the same time, the presence of the two brothers oppressed me, and pity for them grew stronger. “Ah, how I could stir your sealed-up souls to the very depths!” I thought, as I looked at the three prisoners. “How I could quicken into anguish the troubled feelings within you!” And I pictured the delight of enjoying these fresh souls full of the sap of life, rare fruits which had slowly ripened in the garden of self-knowledge, and were here still intact to slake my thirst. And my regret was the greater, because I knew that never again could I renew that unique charm of first acquaintance between beings whose destinies are fated to be united; that unique and fleeting charm, in which are mingled marvel, and expectation, and presentiment, and hope, and a thousand indefinable things which partake of the nature of dreams, vain things indeed, yet issuing from the most sacred depths of life.
Everything looked soft and rich through the transparency of the amber air, and everywhere thoughts of beauty worthy of being gathered sprang into flower, and the noblest flowered at the feet of the desolate princesses, where I imagined myself stooping to gather them. And I imagined the delight of caressing and troubling those souls while wandering through the cloistered garden, over whom the phantoms of the ancient seasons seemed to be weaving a veil of poetry--a veil into which were woven with almost invisible threads strange figures of unknown beings laughing and weeping in the alternations of joy and sorrow.
In every one of these fountains was there not a Pantea singing, the pure victim of a wicked and sublime passion? Certainly an extraordinary feeling came over me when Violante led me beyond the myrtles into the long alley enclosed between the shrubbery and the eastern wall. Here reigned that mysterious spirit which fills such lonely spots as tradition tells us were wont to be the meeting-place of lovers, celebrated for the tragic splendour of their fate. The statues, the pillars, the very trunks of the trees wore the aspect of things which have been witnesses and accomplices of a great human passion, and perpetuate the memory of it to all time. The deep injuries of devouring time and the inclement seasons had given to the outlines of the stone that expression, I might almost say that eloquence, which ruins alone possess. Noble thoughts seem to rise from the broken lines.
And I imagined the delight of disclosing my magnificent dream here to the three _blessed ones_ who alone could transform it into living harmony; I imagined the delight of talking of love in that very place where the virtue of so many symbols united to raise the soul above the common griefs of humanity and expand it in the supreme heaven of beauty.
* * * * *
We were walking slowly, pausing from time to time, and speaking to hide the uneasiness which troubled us; Oddo and Antonello seemed tired, they lingered a few steps behind and were gloomily silent. And I felt as though the shadows of sickness and death were behind me.
My fervour had cooled. I felt the crudeness of the contrast between my impetuous eagerness and the miserable necessity which clung fast to my side, and was around me everywhere in that great cloister full of forgotten and perishing things. I felt that each one of those beings who in that very same hour had been so often illuminated by my intellect and transfigured by my passion, still kept her secret intact, and that the language of her form could not reveal it to me. As I looked at them, I saw each far away from the other, each a stranger to the other, each with an unfathomed thought between her brows, each with an unfathomed sentiment in her heart. I was about to go away and return to my solitude; our day was near its end. What new things had that first intercourse aroused in their souls, weary with the long monotony of sorrow, which had ceased perhaps to be brightened by any ray of hope in the unforeseen? Under what aspect had I appeared to each? Had their longing for love and happiness yearned towards me with an uncontrollable impulse, or did a suspicious incredulity like that of their two brothers hinder them from trusting me?
They were walking thoughtfully by my side, and even when they spoke they seemed so deeply absorbed, that more than once I was on the point of asking: “What are you thinking about?” And a violent desire arose in me to extort from them the secret they were holding so close; and the bold words which can suddenly unlock a closed heart, and surprise the most secret pain and force it to confession, rose to my lips. But at the same time a pitiful tenderness moved me almost to ask their pardon for the pain they might be suffering at my hand, and for a sharper pain which they were to suffer in the future. The necessity of choice presented itself to me as a cruel trial, a cause of sorrow and inevitable sacrifices. Did I not feel a vehement anxiety filling up the pauses in our restless conversation?
“Oh, when summer comes!” sighed Violante, lifting up her eyes to the spreading umbrella pines. “In summer I spend the whole day here alone with my fountains. And it is the time of the tuberoses!”
Gigantic pines with straight round stems like the masts of a vessel grew at equal distances in a row along the wall of the cloister and protected it with their thick cupolas. Between stem and stem, like the spaces between columns, were niches hollowed in the wall and inhabited by nude statues or robed figures in calm attitudes, their blind divinity calling up visions of the past. At equal distances the seven fountains projected in the shape of little temples; each one composed of a wide basin in which deities sitting on the brink or leaning on the urn of water gazed at their own reflection framed between the two pairs of columns which supported a pediment carved with a couplet. Opposite them rose the great myrtle hedge, a mass of green only broken by the white pensive statues. And the damp ground was almost entirely covered with moss as soft as velvet, which rendered our steps noiseless and heightened the sweetness of the mystery.
“Can you read the verses?” asked Violante, as she saw me intent on deciphering the letters cut in the stone, and effaced here and there by mould and cracks. “I once knew what they meant.”
They said: “Hasten, hasten! Weave garlands of fair roses to girdle the passing hours.”
PRÆCIPITATE MORAS, VOLUCRES CINGATIS UT HORAS NECTITE FORMOSAS, MOLLIA SERTA, ROSAS.
It was only the ancient precept, sweetened by rhyme, which for centuries has incited men to enjoy the pleasures of our brief life, has kindled the kisses on lovers’ lips, and multiplied the number of goblets at the banquet. It was the old voluptuous melody, modulated on the new instrument which an industrious monk had fashioned in the shape of a dove’s wing out of the various reeds left in the forsaken garden of Pan, and bound together with the wax of votive lights and the threads of old altar linen.
“The fountain gleams and babbles; and saith to thee in its splendour: 'Rejoice!’ and in its murmur speaks of Love.”
FONS LUCET, PLAUDE, ELOQUITUR FONS LUMINE: GAUDE. FONS SONAT, ADCLAMA, MURMURE DICIT: AMA.
The rugged rhymes with their eternal commentary of running water threw a vague spell over my spirit. I could hear in those echoes the veiled accents of the melancholy which adds an indefinable grace to pleasure, and by troubling it gives it greater depth. No less soft and sad were the divine youthful figures that stretched their bare limbs over the margin in curves as graceful as those of the mirror into which they had so long been gazing.