As she walked she felt the extreme lightness of her step and felt that something in her was vanishing, as if her body were on the point of being changed to an empty chrysalis.
"My name was still Perdita. Stelio, do you recall another sonnet of Gaspara's beginning:
Io vorrei pur che Amor dicesse come
Debbo seguirlo....
And the madrigal beginning:
Se tu credi piacere al mio signore?"
"I did not know you were so familiar with the unhappy Anasilla, my dear."
"Ah, I will tell you. I was hardly fourteen years old when I played in an old romantic tragedy called Gaspara Stampa. I played the leading part. It was at Dolo, where we passed the other day on our way to Strà. We played in a small rustic theater—a kind of tent. It was the year before my mother died. I remember it very well. I can remember the sound of my own voice, which was weak then, when I forced it in the tirades because some one in the wings kept whispering to me to speak louder, louder!... Well, Gaspara was despairing; she wept and raved for her cruel Count. There were many things about it all that my small, profaned soul did not know or understand, and I know not what instinct and comprehension of sorrow led me to find the accent and the cries that could stir the miserable crowd from which we expected to gain our daily bread. Ten hungry persons used me as a breadwinner; brutal necessity cut and tore away from me all the dream-flowers born of my trembling precocity. Oh, it was a time of weeping and suffocation, of terror, of unthinking weariness, of mute horror. Those that martyrized me knew not what they were doing, poor creatures, made stupid by poverty and work. God pardon them and give them peace! Only my mother—she, too, who 'for having loved too well and been too little loved, unhappy lived and died'—only my mother had pity on my pain, and knew how to take me in her arms, how to calm my horrible trembling, to weep when I wept, to console me. My blessed mother!"
Her voice changed. Her mother's eyes once again looked upon her, kind and firm and infinite as a peaceful horizon.—Tell me, tell me what I must do! Guide me, teach me, you who know!—Her heart felt again the clasp of those arms, and from the distance of years the old pain came back, but not harshly; it was almost sweet. The memory of her struggles and her sufferings seemed to bathe her soul in a warm wave, to sustain and comfort it. The test had been hard and the victory difficult, obtained at the price of persistent labor, against brutal and hostile forces. She had witnessed the deepest misery and ruin, she had known heroic efforts, pity, horror, and the face of Death.
"I know what hunger is, Stelio, and what the approach of night seems like when a place of rest is uncertain," she said softly.
She stopped between the high walls, and lifted her little veil, looking deep into her friend's eyes. He grew pale under that look, so sudden was his emotion and surprise at her words. He felt confused, as if in the incoherence of a dream, incapable of applying the true significance of those words to the woman who was smiling at him, holding the delicate glass in her ungloved hand. Yet he had heard what she said, and she stood there before him in her rich fur cape, looking at him with beautiful soft eyes, misty with unshed tears.