He recognised Mayda. Then he asked him where he was, why he was not in his little old room? Before the Professor could answer, Benedetto was assailed by a painful doubt. The Crucifix? The dear Crucifix? Had it been left at the Senator’s house? The Crucifix was standing on the table by his side. The Professor showed it to him.
“Do you not remember,” he said, using the affectionate “thou”, “that we brought it with us?”
Benedetto looked at him, pleased at the new word of affection, and stretched out his hand in search of Mayda’s; the Professor took it tenderly between his own.
At the same time he felt humiliated by his own forgetfulness. Was he about to lose his reason? All the previous day he had thought about the words he should speak to his friends, and to the person who had made her invisible presence so keenly felt. But if he lost his reason? The Professor began to saturate him with quinine. At first Benedetto accepted these painful injections and bitter doses willingly, in his desire to grow a little stronger, and thus to ward off the darkening of his spirit, and also because he wished to suffer. Oh yes! to suffer, to suffer! During the preceding days he had suffered greatly, not from any local pain, not from any acute pain, but his was an inexpressible suffering, which extended from the roots of his hair to the soles of his feet. It had been a beatitude for his soul to be able, in such moments, to associate his own will with the Divine Will, to accept from this Love all the pain which he was destined to suffer, without revealing to him the mysterious reason, a reason hidden in the designs of the Universe, certainly a reason bringing good; bringing good not only to him who suffered, but universal good; a good radiating from his poor body, and without known limits, like the movement of a vibrating atom of the world. Oh! to suffer great things, like Christ, humbly, to continue the redemption, as a sinner may, making amends by his own pain for the ills of others. There on that lonely path leading to the Sacro Speco, In the roaring of the Anio, among the everlasting hills, Don Clemente had spoken thus to him.
And now that mortal suffering was past. When the quinine began to ring in his head, he felt discouraged. These remedies were stupefying him. He called the Professor; a sister answered him. He begged that a priest might be sent for from Bocca della Verità.
The Professor, who had gone to rest for an hour, came to reassure him, and judged it best to tell him what he had before concealed. Don Clemente had telegraphed to Selva that he would reach Rome the next morning at ten o’clock. This was a great joy to Benedetto.
“But will it not be too late?” he said. “Will it not be too late?”
No, it would not be too late. At present he was not in immediate danger. It would be a question of life and death if the fever should return, but even in the worst event many hours would elapse. Mayda feared he had spoken too plainly, and whispered to him.
“But you will recover.”
He left the room. Benedetto, thinking of Don Clemente, passed from the quiet of his contentment into a light sleep, into dreams, whither the spirits of evil descended, and conjured up for him a deceitful vision, suggested by the Professor’s last words. He saw himself confronted by a colossal marble wall, crowned with rich balustrades, which shone white in the moonlight. Up there, behind the balustrades, a dense forest swayed in the wind. Six flights of stairs, these also flanked by balustrades, slanted down, across the face of the great wall, three on the left, and three on the right, and terminated upon six landings, jutting out from the wall. The upper balustrades were divided by small pilasters, supporting urns. And now, between the urns, six beautiful maidens appeared; they seemed to be dancing and all came forward at the same time, with the same graceful motion of the head. They were all dressed alike, in pale blue robes, which left their shoulders bare. With the same harmonious movement of their bare arms, bending their bodies forward, they offered him from their elevation, six shining silver goblets. Then, at the same moment, all withdrew from the balustrade, to reappear again simultaneously, on the six flights of stairs, down which they came with uniform swiftness, and reaching the landings they again offered him the six shining goblets, bending their bodies forward gracefully, and gazing at him with a strange gravity. No word fell from their lips, but nevertheless he knew that the six maidens were offering him, in those six silver goblets, an elixir of life, of health, of pleasure.