Then Violante led us through a labyrinth.
We walked among evergreens, among ancient box-trees, laurels, myrtles, whose wild old age had forgotten its early discipline. In a few places here and there there was some trace of the symmetrical shapes carved once upon a time by the gardener’s shears; and with a melancholy not unlike his who searches on marble tombstones for the effigies of the forgotten dead, I noted carefully among the silent plants those traces of humanity not altogether obliterated. A bitter-sweet odour hung round our path, and from time to time one of us, as if wishing to weave afresh an unravelled web, would reconstruct some memory of our far-off childhood. And now the shadow of my mother rose pure and clear before me, and seemed to feed upon all the things which our hearts exhaled in the broken silences, and she never left Anatolia’s side, thus showing me her preference. And a bitter-sweet odour hung over our melancholy.
Violante stopped and asked me, almost with the same look and in the same tone as when she spoke to me at the window—
“Do you hear?”
“Now we are in your kingdom,” I said to her, “because you are the queen of the fountains.”
The hoarse song of the water came to us through a high myrtle hedge as we stood in a little meadow strewn with daffodils, and guarded by a statue of Pan green with moss. A delicious softness seemed to spring in my veins from the soft turf my feet pressed, and once again the sudden joy of living took away my breath. At the same time, the presence of the two brothers oppressed me, and pity for them grew stronger. “Ah, how I could stir your sealed-up souls to the very depths!” I thought, as I looked at the three prisoners. “How I could quicken into anguish the troubled feelings within you!” And I pictured the delight of enjoying these fresh souls full of the sap of life, rare fruits which had slowly ripened in the garden of self-knowledge, and were here still intact to slake my thirst. And my regret was the greater, because I knew that never again could I renew that unique charm of first acquaintance between beings whose destinies are fated to be united; that unique and fleeting charm, in which are mingled marvel, and expectation, and presentiment, and hope, and a thousand indefinable things which partake of the nature of dreams, vain things indeed, yet issuing from the most sacred depths of life.
Everything looked soft and rich through the transparency of the amber air, and everywhere thoughts of beauty worthy of being gathered sprang into flower, and the noblest flowered at the feet of the desolate princesses, where I imagined myself stooping to gather them. And I imagined the delight of caressing and troubling those souls while wandering through the cloistered garden, over whom the phantoms of the ancient seasons seemed to be weaving a veil of poetry—a veil into which were woven with almost invisible threads strange figures of unknown beings laughing and weeping in the alternations of joy and sorrow.
In every one of these fountains was there not a Pantea singing, the pure victim of a wicked and sublime passion? Certainly an extraordinary feeling came over me when Violante led me beyond the myrtles into the long alley enclosed between the shrubbery and the eastern wall. Here reigned that mysterious spirit which fills such lonely spots as tradition tells us were wont to be the meeting-place of lovers, celebrated for the tragic splendour of their fate. The statues, the pillars, the very trunks of the trees wore the aspect of things which have been witnesses and accomplices of a great human passion, and perpetuate the memory of it to all time. The deep injuries of devouring time and the inclement seasons had given to the outlines of the stone that expression, I might almost say that eloquence, which ruins alone possess. Noble thoughts seem to rise from the broken lines.
And I imagined the delight of disclosing my magnificent dream here to the three blessed ones who alone could transform it into living harmony; I imagined the delight of talking of love in that very place where the virtue of so many symbols united to raise the soul above the common griefs of humanity and expand it in the supreme heaven of beauty.