“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.