“You can ride him whenever you like,” I said to him, “either this one or another.”
“I hardly think I could sit in the saddle now,” he answered; “I believe I should be nervous.... But come! Come! You are expected.”
And he led me up a path enclosed within walls of box-wood, feeble with age, and broken here and there by deep gaps, from which a fresh scent of invisible violets seemed to issue, strange as the breath of youth out of a decrepit mouth.
“Yesterday evening,” said Oddo rather uneasily, “yesterday evening we brought back joy with your almond blossom. You don’t know what we felt, alone in that carriage, buried under the flowers! Antonello was like a child. I never saw him like that before.”
At intervals the green walls opened out into archways, and I caught sight of grassy glades where some long slanting ray of sun pierced the shadow with a sharp outline.
“I never saw him like that before; I never heard him talk so much nonsense.”
Stone vases deep and round alternated with statues almost clothed with lichen, maimed or headless statues whose attitudes seemed eloquent to me. And a few daffodils were flowering round their pedestals.
“When we arrived here, we could not get out for the branches. The sisters came to set us free. How happy they were! They went away laden. We heard them laughing up the stairs. All such things are new to us, Claudio.”
A whispered splash reached my ear; the vague sound of a hidden fountain. An indefinable anxiety weighed upon my heart.
“We talked about you the whole evening, and remembered many things of long ago, and perhaps made some air-castles for the future. Who would ever have thought of your coming back? But none of us can believe yet that you will stay.... We feel as if after a few days you would escape us. It is not easy to bear this life of ours. Massimilla, you see, prefers a convent.... Did you not know that Massimilla is just going to leave us?”