It wanted but a few days now to their parting. Miss Dorothy had taken
Delfina to Sienna, and then returned to help her mistress in the last
and most trying arrangements and to accompany her on the journey. In the
mother's house in Sienna the truth of the story was not known, and
Delfina of course knew nothing. Maria had merely written that Don Manuel
had been suddenly recalled by his government. And she made ready to
go--to leave these rooms, so full of cherished things, to the hands of
the public auctioneers who had already drawn up the inventory and fixed
the date of the sale for the 20th of June, at ten in the morning.
On the evening of the 9th, as she was leaving Andrea, she missed a
glove. While looking for it she came upon a volume of Shelley, the one
which Andrea had lent her in Schifanoja, the dear and affecting book in
which, before the excursion to Vicomile, she had underlined the words
'And forget me, for I can _never_
Be thine.'
She took up the book with visible emotion and turned over the pages till
she came to the one which bore the mark of her underlining.
'_Never!_' she murmured with a shake of the head. 'You remember? And
hardly eight months have passed since.'
She pensively turned over a few more leaves and read other verses.
'He is our poet,' she went on. 'How often you promised to take me to the
English Cemetery! You remember, we were to take flowers for his grave.
Shall we go? You might take me before I leave. It will be our last walk
together.'
'Let us go to-morrow,' he answered.
The next evening, when the sun was already declining, they went in a
closed carriage; on her knees lay a bunch of roses. They drove along the
foot of the leafy Aventino and caught a glimpse of the boats laden with
Sicilian wine anchored in the port of Ripa Grande.
In the neighbourhood of the cemetery they left the carriage and went the
rest of the way to the gates on foot and in silence. At the bottom of
her heart, Maria felt that not only was she here to lay flowers on the
tomb of a poet, but that in this place of death she would weep for
something of herself irreparably lost. A _Fragment_ of Shelley, read in
the sleepless watches of the night echoed through her spirit as she
gazed at the cypresses pointing to the sky on the other side of the
white wall.
'Death is here, and Death is there,
Death is busy everywhere;
All around, within, beneath,
Above, is death--and we are death.
Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear--
First our pleasures die, and then
Our hopes, and then our fears: and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust--and we die too.
All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves must fade and perish.
Such is our rude mortal lot:
Love itself would, did they not----'
As she passed through the gateway she put her arm through Andrea's and
shivered.
The cemetery was solitary and deserted. A few gardeners were engaged in
watering the plants along by the wall, swinging their watering-cans
from side to side with an even and continuous motion and in silence.
The funeral cypresses stood up straight and motionless in the air; only
their tops, gilded by the sun, trembled lightly. Between the rigid,
greenish-black trunks rose the white tombs--square slabs of stone,
broken pillars, urns, sarcophagi. From the sombre mass of the cypresses
fell a mysterious shadow, a religious peace, a sort of human kindness,
as limpid and beneficent waters gush from the hard rock. The unchanging
regularity of the trees and the chastened whiteness of the sepulchral
monuments affected the spirit with a sense of solemn and sweet repose.
But between the stiff ranks of the trees, standing in line like the deep
pipes of an organ, and interspersed among the tombs, graceful oleanders
swayed their tufts of pink blossom; roses dropped their petals at every
light touch of the breeze, strewing the ground with their fragrant snow;
the eucalyptus shook its pale tresses--now dark, now silvery white;
willows wept over the crosses and crowns; and, here and there, the
cactus displayed the glory of its white blooms like a swarm of sleeping
butterflies or an aigrette of wonderful feathers. The silence was
unbroken save by the cry, now and then, of some solitary bird.
Andrea pointed to the top of the hill.
'The poet's tomb is up there,' he said, 'near that ruin to the left,
just below the last tower.'
She dropped his arm and went on in front of him through the narrow paths
bordered with low myrtle hedges. She walked as if fatigued, turning
round every few minutes to smile back at her lover. She was dressed in
black and wore a black veil that cast over her faint and trembling smile
a shadow of mourning. Her oval chin was paler and purer than the roses
she carried in her hand.
Once, as she turned, one of the roses shed its petals on the path.
Andrea stooped to pick them up. She looked at him and he fell on his
knees before her.
'_Adorata!_' he exclaimed.
A scene rose up before her, vividly as a picture.
'You remember,' she said, 'that morning at Schifanoja when I threw a
handful of leaves down to you from the higher terrace? You bent your
knee to me while I descended the steps. I do not know how it is, but
that time seems to me so near and yet so far away! I feel as if it had
happened yesterday, and then again, a century ago. But perhaps, after
all it only happened in a dream.'
Passing along between the low myrtle hedges, they at last reached the
tower near which lies the tomb of the poet and of Trelawny. The jasmin
climbing over the old ruin was in flower, but of the violets nothing was
left but their thick carpet of leaves. The tops of the cypresses, which
here just reached the line of vision, were vividly illumined by the last
red gleams of the sun as it sank behind the black cross of the Monte
Testaccio. A great purple cloud edged with burning gold sailed across
the sky in the direction of the Aventino--
'These are two friends whose lives were undivided.
So let their memory be, now they have glided
Under their grave; let not their bones be parted
For their two hearts in life were single-hearted.'
Maria repeated the last line. Then, moved by a delicate
inspiration--'Please unfasten my veil,' she said to Andrea.
She leaned her head back slightly so that he might untie the knot, and
Andrea's fingers touched her hair--that magnificent hair, in the dense
shadow of which he had so often tasted all the delights of his
perfidious imagination, evoked the image of her rival.
'Thank you,' she said.
She then drew the veil from before her face and looked at Andrea with
eyes that were a little dazed. She looked very beautiful. The shadows
round her eyes were darker and deeper, but the eyes themselves burned
with a more intense light. Her hair clung to her temples in heavy
hyacinthine curls tinged with violet. The middle of her forehead, which
was left free, gleamed, by contrast, in moonlike purity. Her features
had fined down and lost something of their materiality through stress of
love and sorrow.
She wound the veil about the stems of the roses, tied the two ends
together with much care, and then buried her face in the flowers,
inhaling their perfume. Then she laid them on the simple stone that
bears the poet's name engraved upon it. There was an indefinable
expression in the gesture, which Andrea could not understand.
As they moved away, he suddenly stopped short, and looking back towards
the tower, 'How did you manage to get those roses?' he asked.
She smiled, but her eyes were wet.
'They are yours--those of that snowy night--they have bloomed again this
evening. Do you not believe it?'
The evening breeze was rising, and behind the hill the sky was
overspread with gold, in the midst of which the purple cloud dissolved,
as if consumed by fire. Against this field of light, the serried ranks
of the cypresses looked more imposing and mysterious than before. The
Psyche at the end of the middle avenue seemed to flush with pale tints
as of flesh. A crescent moon rose over the pyramid of Cestius, in a deep
and glassy sky, like the waters of a calm and sheltered bay.
They went through the centre avenue to the gates. The gardeners were
still watering the plants, and two other men held a velvet and silver
pall by the two ends, and were beating it vigorously, while the dust
rose high and glittered in the air.
From the Aventine came the sound of bells.
Maria clung to her lover's arm, unable to control her anguish, feeling
the ground give way beneath her feet, her life ebb from her at every
step. Once inside the carriage, she burst into a passion of tears,
sobbing despairingly on her lover's shoulder.
'I shall die!'
But she did not die. Better a thousand times for her that she had!