“Let us sit down here,” I said. “It is a delicious place to enjoy the
April sunshine and feel life flowing on.”
A green lizard lying on the slab looked at us out of its small
glittering eyes quite fearlessly like a familiar spirit. When we sat
down, it disappeared. Then I laid my hand on the marble, which was very
hot.
“It is almost burning. Feel!”
Massimilla laid both her hands on it, white upon white, and kept them
there. The point of the shadow reached the tip of her ring-finger, and
the number of the hour was covered by her palm.
“See how the hand points to you as the hour of beatitude,” I said, for
I profoundly enjoyed the harmonious grace of her action, and I loved
her thus.
She half closed her eyes, and once more her little soul trembled on
her eyelashes like a tear, and I could have drunk it by merely bending
forward.
“The saint,” I added, touching the book, “has a divine verse for you
in the waves of her prose, a verse supremely sweet, sweeter than
those which rose in Dante’s mind before his exile. 'Stava quasi beata
dolorosa!’”
She felt surrounded by light and love, as perhaps she may have felt
before in her secret dreams; and she drank from my words and my
presence, and from her own illusions and the fresh springtime, an
intoxication of which the memory would perhaps fill her whole life. She
did not speak, she sat motionless in the attitude I had praised; but
I understood the ineffable things spoken by the eloquent blood in the
veins of her beautiful bare hands.
“Let me love her as long as she is of this world!” I repeated to
her sisters, while their sad eyes seemed to gaze at me through the
branches of the yew-trees. “Let me gather these anemones and strew them
on the hair which is so soon to be shaven!”
She sat there almost beatified, and her unconsciousness touched me, for
I loved her, and was saying to her: “I love thee, but on condition that
to-morrow thou diest. I give thee this flame that thou mayest carry it
with thee into thy grave. Such is the necessity which compels us.”