The courtyard resounded like the nave of a church, and the echoes were quick to catch up even the words spoken lowest. As I looked at the silent fountain, I thought of the mysterious music with which the water might have invited those attentive and favourable echoes.
“Why is the fountain dumb?” I asked, wishing to take every opportunity of supporting the cause of life in that cloister filled with forgotten or dead things. “Further down on the steps, I heard the sound of water.”
“You must apply to Antonello,” said Violante. “It is he who imposed silence on it.”
The face of the unfortunate invalid coloured slightly, and his eyes grew troubled, as though he were going to yield to an impulse of anger. It seemed almost as if Violante’s harmless accusation had made him ashamed and sorrowful, or as if a dispute already closed had been reopened. He contained himself, but annoyance altered his voice.
“Fancy, Claudio, my rooms are up there,” he said, pointing to one side of the loggia, “and from there one can hear the fountain roaring like a waterfall. Just think! The noise is distracting, something incredible. Don’t you hear what an echo the voice has here? And in the daytime too!”
His whole tall, thin body quivered with aversion to noise, with the nervous horror, the uncontrollable abhorrence of which he had shown signs the day before when he started at the shots from the carbine and the shouts of the men.
“But I wish you could hear it at night,” he continued excitedly. “I wish you could hear it! The water is water no longer; it is a lost soul, howling, laughing, sobbing, stammering, jeering, calling, commanding. It is something incredible! Sometimes as I have lain awake listening, I have forgotten that it was water; and I have not been able to remember.... Do you understand?”
He stopped suddenly, evidently trying to control himself, and he looked distractedly at Anatolia. The pain in her face disappeared under that look; it was hidden and controlled. And she, as if to disperse the uneasiness we all felt, said almost gaily: “Indeed, Antonello is not exaggerating. Shall we call up the lost soul? Nothing is easier.”
We were all there round the dry fountain. The unexpected halt, the words and the look of the unhappy man, the solemnity of the enclosed court, the silvery coldness of the light that rained down from above, and the approaching metamorphosis, seemed to confer something of the mystery of a work of magic on that ancient, lifeless thing. The mass of marble—a pompous composition of Neptune’s horses, tritons, dolphins, and shells in triple order—rose before our eyes, covered with a greyish crust of dried-up lichens, glittering white here and there like an aspen stem; and all the human and animal mouths seemed still in their silence to preserve the same attitudes in which but lately liquid voices had flowed from their lips.
“Stand back,” added Anatolia, as she stooped down over a bronze disc that covered a round aperture in the pavement near the edge of the lower basin. “I am going to turn on the water.”