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.'