"Admitted that this has happened elsewhere, to a certain degree. In
Victorian England there lived a woman whose love-affair was wrecked and
whose mind automatically closed itself against everything associated
with her tragedy, or subsequent to it. In her madness she, too,
protected herself against pain by living in expectation of the lover's
return. Because that expectation was restricted to her girlhood, she
remained a girl in appearance for over fifty years. Fifty years, that is
comprehensible!"
"The principle is the same," said Antonio, wearily. "Every mental
phenomenon has minor and major examples. But I will tell you the rest.
"The Foscone, also, finally moved to Florence. Their castle was left in
the care of hereditary servants, devoted and discreet. On that isolated
hilltop no chance was afforded strangers to solve the mystery of the
woman who paced the high platform in the attire of another age. Was
there, in the Foscone's concealment of the awesome fact, a medieval
impulse, the ancient instinct of noble houses to defend themselves
against all forms of aggression, including curiosity? Or was it merely
the usual aversion to being identified with abnormality? Some
abnormality is so terrifying that it seals the loosest lips.
"Now and then, to be sure, some servant's tongue was set wagging by
wine, or some heir of the Foscone confided in his sweetheart. But the
rumor, if it went farther, soon became distorted and incredible, amid
the ghost-stories of a hundred Italian castles, palaces, and villas. I
myself found hints in the archives of my family, yet saw in them only a
pretty tale, such as results when romantic invention is combined with
pride of race.
"But I was destined to sing another tune.
"Not long ago, the last of the Foscone's modern generation passed away.
There came to me an old woman-servant from the castle. It was Nuta, whom
you saw below as we entered.
"Why had she sought me out? Because, if you please, in the year fifteen
hundred one of my family had brought this thing to pass. It seemed to
Nuta, the fact now being subject to discovery by the executors of the
estate, that the care of her charge devolved upon me.
"At first I believed that old Nuta was the mad one. In the end, however,
I accompanied her to the castle. At dusk, concealed by the cypresses, I
discerned on the platform a face that seemed to have been transported
from another epoch just in order to pierce my heart with an intolerable
longing. I fell in love as one slips into a vortex, and instantly the
rational world was lost beyond a whorl of ecstasy and fright.
"I regained Florence with but one thought: how could she be restored to
sanity, yet be maintained in that beauty which had triumphed over
centuries? As I entered my apartment I saw before me the portrait of
that other Antonio di Manzecca, whom I so closely resembled, whom she
had loved, whose return she still awaited. I stood there blinded by a
flash of inspiration.
"At midnight my plan was complete."
* * * * *
As he paused, and the conclusion became clear to me, I was taken with a
kind of stupor.
"A few days later," he said, "as she stood gazing down through the
twilight, a man emerged from the forest, in face and dress the image of
that other Antonio di Manzecca. At his signal, servants in the old-time
livery of the Manzecca appeared with a ladder, which they leaned against
the ramparts. He set foot upon the platform. Her pallor turned
deathlike; her eyes became blank; she fainted in his arms. When she
recovered she was in the Castle of Manzecca.
"That shock had restored her reason.
"Now everything around her very artfully suggested the sixteenth
century--the furniture, the most trivial utensils, the costume of the
humblest person in the castle. Nuta attended her. The convalescent was
told that she had been ill in consequence of the attack on her lover,
but that he, instead of succumbing, had been spirited away and
stealthily nursed back to health. Again whole, he had returned to avenge
himself on his brother, whom he had killed. Meanwhile her father had
died. Therefore she had been brought from the Castle of Foscone to the
Castle of Manzecca to enjoy the protection of her Antonio, whom she was
now free to marry.
"All this was what she wanted to believe, so she believed it."
But Antonio's face was filled with a new distress. He rose, to pace the
floor with the gestures of a man who realizes that he is locked in a
cell to which there is no key.
"In the restoration of her mind," he groaned, "my own peace of mind has
been destroyed. Even this love, the strangest and most thrilling in the
world, will never allay the heartquakes that I have brought upon myself.
"With her perception of time restored, she will now be subject to time
like other mortals. As year follows year, her youthfulness will merge
into maturity, her maturity into old age, here in this castle, where
nothing must ever suggest that she has attained a century other than her
own. For me that means a ceaseless vigilance and fear. My devotion will
always be mingled with forebodings of some blunder, some unforeseen
intrusion of the present, some lightning-like revelation of the truth to
her."
At that he broke down.
"Ah, if that happened, what horror should I witness?"
The gale sounded like the hooting of a thousand demons who were
preparing for this man a frightful retribution. Yet even in that moment
I envied him.
To her beauty, which had bewitched me at my first sight of her, was
added another allurement--the thought of a magical flight far beyond
the boundaries imprisoning other men. If romance is a striving toward
something at once unique and sympathetic, here was romance attained.
Moreover, in embracing that exquisite personification of the
Renaissance, one might add to love the glamour of a terrible audacity.
And the addition of glamour to love has always been one of the most
assiduously practised arts.
* * * * *
At the bottom of the winding tower staircase, in the doorway of the hall
where she had greeted us, we paused to compose ourselves.
"At least," Antonio besought me, "when in doubt, remain silent."
We entered the hall. Under a wooden gallery adorned with carved and
tinted shields the supper-table was laid.
They awaited us, shimmering in their fantastic finery--the ladies Laura
and Lina, my old friends Leonardo and Leonello, and the ineffable
Fiammetta di Foscone. The visitors' cheeks seemed hectic from the
excitement of the hour; but her face was flushed, her eyes shone, for
her own reasons. As I approached her my heartbeats suffocated me. Yes, I
would have taken Antonio's place and shouldered all his terrors! Before
me the fair conqueror of time disappeared in a haze, out of which her
voice emerged like a sweet utterance from beyond the tomb.
"You are pleased with the castle, messere?"
As I was striving to respond, Antonio said to her, half aside, in that
quaint species of Italian which he had used before:
"He speaks our language with difficulty, Madonna, and in a dialect. This
disability will embarrass him till he finds himself more at home."
"Then let us sup," she exclaimed. "For since this new custom of a third
meal has become fashionable in Florence, no doubt you are all expiring
of hunger. So quickly does habit become tyrannous, especially when it
involves a pleasure."
In some manner or other I seated myself at the table.
The servants bore in, on silver platters, small chickens garnished with
sugar and rose-water, a sort of galantine, tarts of almonds and honey,
caramels of pine-seed. From the gallery overhead came the tinkle of a
rota, a kind of guitar. The musician produced a whimsical tune
suggesting a picnic of lords and ladies in the garden of an antique
villa, where trick fountains, masked by blossoms, drenched the unwary
with streams of water. But in the chimney of the great, cold fireplace
behind my back the wind still growled its threats; the voice of Nature
still menaced these audacious mortals, who were celebrating the
humiliation of her laws.
Beyond the candle-light the beauty of Fiammetta di Foscone became
blinding. In her there was no sign of an unnatural preservation, as, for
example, in a flower that has been sustained, yet subtly altered, by
imprisonment in ice. Nor did her countenance show in the least that
glaze of time which changes, without abating, the fairness of marble
goddesses surviving for us from remote ages of esthetic victory. But
wait; she was not an animated statue, nor any product of nature other
than flesh and blood! And the flesh, the glance, the whole person of
this creature from another era, expressed a glorious young womanhood. I
was lost in admiration, pity, and dread. For over this shining miracle
hovered the shadow of disaster. One could not forget the countless
menaces surrounding her.
If she should grasp the truth, if all of a sudden she should realize her
disaccordance with the world of mortals, what would happen to her before
our eyes? Would she succumb instantly? Or would she first shrivel into
some appalling monstrosity? This deception could not last forever. Might
it not end to-night?
Did the others have similar premonitions?
Their smiles seemed tremulous and wan, their movements constrained and
timorous. All their efforts at gaiety were impeded by the inertia of
fear. At every speech the lips of Lina and Laura quivered, the hands of
Leonello and Leonardo were clenched in a nervous spasm. Antonio
controlled himself only by the most heroic efforts.
What a price to pay for an illusion of happiness that was destined to a
ghastly end! Yet I would still have paid that heavy price exacted from
Antonio.
Fiammetta di Foscone became infected by our nervousness. At one moment
her mirth was feverish; at another, a look of vague uneasiness crossed
her face. Was our secret gradually penetrating to her subconscious mind?
Was she to learn the fact, and perish of it, not because of bungling
word or action on our part, but merely from the unwitting transmission
of our thoughts?
The others redoubled their travesty of merriment. They voiced the gossip
of a vanished society; the politics, fashions, and scandals of old
Florence. One heard the names of noble families long since extinct,
accounts of historic escapades related as if they had happened
yesterday. Fiammetta recovered her animation.
Her dewy eyes turned to Antonio. Her fingers caressed her
betrothal-ring, which was like the wedding-ring of the twentieth
century. And in this hall tricked out with lies, amid these guests and
servants who were the embodiment of falsehood, an oppressing atmosphere
of dread was clarified, for a moment, by the strength and delicacy of
her love.
They discussed the virtues of the Muses, the plagiarisms of Petrarch,
the wonders of astrology. Her uneasiness revived. In a voice more
musical than the rota in the gallery, she asked:
"My dear friends, would you attribute to some planetary influence a
feeling of strangeness that I receive at times, even from the air? I
demand of you whether the air does not have an unfamiliar smell
to-night?"
There was a freezing moment of silence.
"It is this great wind," muttered Leonardo, "that has brought us new air
from afar."
"Every place has its smell," was Leonello's contribution. "It is natural
that the Castle of Manzecca should smell differently from the Castle of
Foscone."
Antonio thanked his friends with an eloquent look.
"True," she assented, pensively, "every spot, every person, is
surrounded by its especial ether, produced by its peculiar activity.
This house, not only in its smell, but in its tenor of life, and even in
its food, differs vastly from my own house, which, nevertheless, is just
across the hills."
Antonio drained his goblet at a gulp. He got out the words:
"We are provincial, we Manzecca. Like a race apart."
"All old families, jealous of their integrity, are the same," ventured
Laura, who looked, nevertheless, as if she were about to faint.
"Or maybe," mused Fiammetta, "it is because I have been ill that things
perplex me, and sometimes startle me by an effect of strangeness. There
are moments when even the stars look odd to me, and when the
countryside, viewed from the tower above us, is bewildering. In one
direction I see woods where I should have expected meadows; in another
direction, fields where I should have expected woods. But then, I now
view the countryside from a tower other than my own, and see in a new
aspect that landscape with which I thought myself so well acquainted.
Does that explain it?"
How touching, how pitiable, was her expression, half arch, half
pleading, and so beautiful! "Oh, lovely and terrible prodigy!" I
thought, "draw back; banish those thoughts; or, rather, no longer think
at all--for you are on the edge of the abyss!"
Antonio spoke with difficulty:
"Dearest one, do not pain me by mentioning that illness of yours. Do not
pain yourself by dwelling on it in your mind. The past with all its
misfortunes is gone forever. Let us live in the present and contemplate
a future full of bliss."
A quivering sigh of assent and relief went round the supper-table. But
Fiammetta protested:
"I should not care to forget the past. It contained too much happiness.
The hours at twilight, when I waited on the platform of the Castle of
Foscone, and you clambered up the wall, are not for oblivion! Do you
remember, Antonio, how you once brought with you a bunch of little
damask roses, which you tossed up to me while clinging to the masonry?
Those roses became my treasure. The sweetest one of them I locked in a
tiny silver box which I kept always by me. That box came with me from
the Castle of Foscone. The key is lost; but you shall open it with your
dagger, and learn how I have cherished an emblem of that past which you
ask me to forget."
With a rare smile, she drew from the bosom of her gown a very small
coffer of silver, its chiseling worn smooth by innumerable caresses.
Poor soul! it was in her bosom that she had cherished this pretty little
box, more cruelly fatal than a viper.
Antonio, his jaws sagging, rose half-way out of his chair, then sank
back, speechless and livid. Unaware, eager, and imperious, Fiammetta
demanded:
"A dagger!"
Too late Antonio managed to put out a shaking hand in protest. Already a
fool of a servant had presented his dirk to her. In a twinkling--before
we could stop her--Fiammetta had pried back the lid.
The silver box, its oxidized interior as black as ink, contained, in
place of the damask rose that had bloomed in the year fifteen hundred,
only a few grains of dust.
* * * * *
There was no sound except from the wind, which yelled its devilish glee
round the castle and in the chimney of the fireplace.
She had risen to her feet. In her eyes, peering at the little coffer,
bewilderment gave place to dismay. But in our faces she found a
consternation far surpassing hers.
"Only dust?"
Antonio distorted his mouth in a vain effort to speak. At last, with a
frantic oath, he swept the silver box into the fireplace, where it fell
amid the brush-wood and inflammable rubbish piled ready for lighting
under the big logs.
Fiammetta had tried to stop him. Under her clutching hand, his
fur-trimmed sleeve had slipped up, exposing his forearm. She was staring
at his forearm.
"The scar?" she whispered. "Was it not here, when you raised your arm to
shield yourself against them, that you caught the first knife-thrust?
How long does it take for such a scar to pass entirely away?"
Lina and Laura sank back in their chairs. Leonello averted his face.
Leonardo turned away. Again Antonio tried to speak. The terror that held
us in its grip was communicated to Fiammetta di Foscone.
Her countenance became bloodless. Her teeth chattered. She murmured:
"What is happening to me? I am so cold!"
She sank down, amid billows of violet-colored silk, between Antonio's
arms, before the fireplace. Her veil, confined by the band of pearls and
amethysts, did not seem as white as her skin.
There was a hysterical babble of voices:
"She is dead! No, she has swooned! Bring vinegar! Rub her hands! Light
the fire!"
Then ensued a jostling of guests and servants, who crowded forward to
poke a dozen lighted candles at the brush-wood. In the midst of this
confusion Fiammetta sat before the hearth, her eyes half closed, her
head rolling against Antonio's shoulder, her throat, framed by the
little ruff, palpitating like the breast of an expiring dove. She was in
the throes of the emotions that had been at last transferred from our
minds to hers and that she was doubtless on the point of comprehending.
The brush-wood caught fire. At that flicker her eyelids opened. She
leaned forward. Under the brush-wood, already writhing in flames, was
the fragment of a modern Italian newspaper. One plainly saw the title,
part of a head-line, and the date.
Fiammetta di Foscone read the date.
As Antonio and I, between us, lifted her into a chair, she kept
repeating to herself, in a soft, incredulous voice, the date. And so
badly had our wits been paralyzed by this catastrophe, that none of us
could find one lying word to utter.
Antonio knelt before her, his arms clasping her knees, his head bowed.
He was weeping as if she were already dead. Her hands slowly stole forth
to close around his face and lift it up.
"Whatever it is," she breathed, "I still have you."
As she gazed, half lifeless, but still fairer than an untinted statue,
at his face, all at once her eyes became enormous. Pushing him from her,
she stood bolt-upright at one movement, with a heart-rending scream:
"A stranger!"
That scream was still resounding from the rafters when we saw her
fleeing across the hall, her head thrown back, her arms outspread, her
white veil and violet draperies floating behind her. Her jewels
glittered like the last sparkle of a splendid dream that has been doomed
to swift extinction. She vanished through the doorway leading to the
tower staircase.
"After her!" some one shouted.
Antonio was first; but at the doorway he stumbled, and Leonello, who was
second, fell over him. Vaulting their bodies, I gained the circular
staircase that ascended to the tower. I heard Antonio bawling after me:
"She will throw herself from the roof!"
The staircase was black, and the wind whistled down its well. At each
landing the heavy doors on either side banged open and shut. From
overhead there descended a long wail, maybe her voice, or maybe one of
the countless voices of the storm. As I neared the top, a door through
which I had just passed blew shut with a deafening report. I emerged
upon the roof of the tower in a torrent of rain. The roof was empty.
I peered over the low battlements. Close below me swayed the tops of
cypress-trees; beneath them everything was lost in the obscurity of the
night. Soon, however, the darkness was lighted by torches which began to
dart to and fro among the trees. By those fitful gleams I made out the
crouching backs of men, the livery of the Manzecca with its black and
vermilion device, helmets and sword-hilts, and finally upturned faces
that appeared ruddy in the torch-light, though I knew that in reality
they must be pallid. They called up to me, but the wind whipped their
voices away. I made signs that she was not on the tower. The faces
disappeared; again the torches wandered among the trees. Now and then I
heard a shout, the barking of the greyhound, and a woman--perhaps old
Nuta--in hysterics.
I began to descend the staircase. The last door through which I had
passed was so tightly wedged, from its slamming, that I could not open
it. I sat down on the steps to wait till the others should miss me.
What thoughts!
"Can it be true? Yes, it has happened, and I have seen the end of it!
This will kill Antonio. But then, none of us will ever be the same
again."