“I can remember it all!” interrupted Violante, seized by a sudden emotion, which seemed to sweep over her from that great purple light which lit up her far-off infancy. “Everything—everything seems as distinct as if it had happened yesterday! The room was divided by two partitions, made of flags sewn together. I can see the colours quite clearly; they were signalling flags, blue, yellow, and red. It was three or four in the afternoon when the explosion happened. Nina Rizzo, the queen’s lady-in-waiting, had just gone out. I was holding in my hand a cup of milk which the sisters at the hospital had sent me....”
She spoke on thus, in short sentences, in a somewhat muffled voice, with a fixed look, describing all these little details, one after the other, as if she were seeing them in a series of flashes. And the scenes called up by her words, as she sat looking into the past, stood out with an extraordinary force against the confused background of the actual scene.
The old man and the maiden, as each in turn they commemorated the ruin and slaughter of other days, seemed to annihilate all the vague, colourless surroundings, and create a kind of fiery atmosphere, in which my soul for a moment gasped painfully. The siege went on with all its horrors, in the city crowded with soldiers, horses, and mules, short of provisions and money, badly or insufficiently armed, scourged with typhus and villainy. Rain came down in torrents, filling the streets with black mire, in the midst of which the starving horses wandering about sank down and perished. The iron hailstones riddled the city, dismantled it, laid it low, set fire to it, and grew ever thicker and noisier, never ceasing save for the brief intervals appointed for the burial of the decaying corpses. In the churches divine service was celebrated, the Invincible Patroness was invoked, and all the while the stones were being torn from the walls, the windows were crashing in, and out of the distance came the groans of the wounded as they were carried away on stretchers. The sick men in the hospital raised themselves in their beds when a shell pierced through the passage walls, and expecting death, cried as the shell burst, “Long live the King!” All on a sudden a powder magazine exploded, shaking the city to its very foundations, and leaving it suffocated with smoke and with terror, while in the open cavity bastions, cannons, palisades, batteries, houses, and hundreds and hundreds of men were engulfed. But from time to time, on very sunny days, a kind of heroic madness seized the besieged, a kind of intoxication of death drove them into danger, and made them seek out the batteries where the fire was fiercest. In sight of the enemy the artillerymen sang and danced in a kind of frenzy to the sound of the bugles. A great shout of joy and affection greeted the queen’s appearance under the hail of bullets on the esplanades. She moved with a bold step, in the easy grace of her nineteen years, dressed in a shining bodice like a breastplate, her face smiling under the plumes of her felt hat. Without moving an eyelash as the bullets whistled by, she turned her encouraging eyes on the soldiers; they inspired them like the waving of banners, and beneath that gaze pride seemed to magnify its wounds, while those who were unscathed seemed to long for the glory of a crimson stain. From time to time men with eyes burning fiercely in blackened faces, with their clothes torn to tatters, as though the jaws of a wild beast had rent them—men covered with blood and powder rushed up to her from the cannons, called her by name, and kissed the hem of her skirt.
“Ah, how beautiful she was, and how worthy of her throne!” exclaimed the prince, and his voice assumed its manliest tones to celebrate her prowess. “Her presence had a magnetic power over the soldiers. When she was there, they all fought like lions. The twenty-second of January was the most glorious day of the siege, because she remained on the batteries till nightfall.”
A pause followed, a moment of meditation, in which each of us seemed to be contemplating the ideal figure of the heroine on a field of ruin and corpses.
“Tears were strange to her eyes!” said Violante slowly, absorbed in her far-away memories. “When at the last hour I saw her weep, I was overcome with terror and surprise, as if some unexpected and almost incredible thing had occurred. As she kissed me, she watered my face with her tears.” After another pause, she added—
“She wore a little green feather in her hat.”
She added again—
“She had a great emerald at her throat.”
She was sitting at my side, and a new emotion swept over me as with an involuntary movement I leant slightly towards her, and breathed the perfume which I thought was growing stronger, and overpowering the honeyed fragrance of the flowers. A sudden aversion for all the people and things present came over me; they gave me a feeling of impatience and annoyance that was almost an aversion; they seemed at that moment to be weighing on me and oppressing me in quite a peculiar way. I looked across with instinctive hostility at the prince’s cousin, Ottavio Montaga, who sat at one end of the table, a taciturn individual with something of the sinister look of a mask, the symbol of a mysterious prohibition not to be transgressed. I felt all the health, strength, and passion in me rise in hatred against the sickness, the sadness, against the mortal dulness by which this wonderful creature was being consumed without a chance of escape. The uneasiness which had troubled my spirit after the successive apparitions of the three different figures was now subdued, and I believed myself to have set my choice on her whom all the glory and solemnity of the past seemed uniting to ennoble. Once more, it was she alone who stirred my being as she had stirred it before when she lifted her head at the cry of the hawk.