“Why do you always say that?” I asked him with gentle reproof; “who knows?”
“No one ever knows anything,” murmured Oddo in that muffled voice of his, which I could only distinguish from his brother’s by the movement of the lips. “Who knows what may happen to us between this and the autumn? Massimilla is the only one who is safe; she has found her refuge.”
Perhaps there was a tiny drop of bitterness in the last words.
“Massimilla is going to pray for us,” said Anatolia gravely.
The novice bent her head over her clasped hands, and we were silent for a space, while a flood of vague but overpowering feeling swept over us.
The clearness of the early spring afternoon paled before that illuminating vision of the autumn purple as we went down the steps, where a few hours before the three princesses had appeared, as at the beginning of a fairy tale, with a new-born smile on their lips after a night of interminable anguish. That morning hour already seemed as far away as the autumn was near, to which—a dim presentiment told me—a fate was leading me swift as lightning. And when I pictured the purple foliage on the bare branches, I also foresaw a shadow of deep mourning fall on the faces of the three sisters.
And once more the sentiment of death impassioned and elevated my soul till all things were reflected in it transfigured by poetry. And in the splendour of the spring air these frail beings seemed to me “marvellously sad,” like the women in the vision of the Vita Nuova, which Massimilla had recalled to my memory among the almond blossom and the ancient mirrors. And I felt as if the ardent spirit possessed me that burns in the pages of that book, where the youthful Dante shows how his soul could be shaken to its very foundations, and exalted to the height of sorrowful madness by imagining the death of Beatrice, and gazing on her face through the funeral shroud. “Weeping,” I said within myself. “Certainly it must sometime come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die.... And a great fear fell upon me, and I imagined that some friend should come to me and say: 'Dost thou not know? Thy marvellous lady has departed from this world....’ Then my heart that was so full of love said unto me: 'It is true that our lady lieth dead’ ... and so strong was this idle imagining that it made me to behold my lady in death....” Did not the force of this ineffable inner beauty come to me from a similar fancy?
A splendid nobility flowed from every action of these maidens, doomed to die. It lit up the outward things among which they moved. And never again perhaps did I see them in so much light and shade.
When we had reached the foot of the steps, and entered a glade surrounded by the green ruins of a box-wood bower, Anatolia paused and asked me—