“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?”