We were walking slowly, pausing from time to time, and speaking to hide the uneasiness which troubled us; Oddo and Antonello seemed tired, they lingered a few steps behind and were gloomily silent. And I felt as though the shadows of sickness and death were behind me.
My fervour had cooled. I felt the crudeness of the contrast between my impetuous eagerness and the miserable necessity which clung fast to my side, and was around me everywhere in that great cloister full of forgotten and perishing things. I felt that each one of those beings who in that very same hour had been so often illuminated by my intellect and transfigured by my passion, still kept her secret intact, and that the language of her form could not reveal it to me. As I looked at them, I saw each far away from the other, each a stranger to the other, each with an unfathomed thought between her brows, each with an unfathomed sentiment in her heart. I was about to go away and return to my solitude; our day was near its end. What new things had that first intercourse aroused in their souls, weary with the long monotony of sorrow, which had ceased perhaps to be brightened by any ray of hope in the unforeseen? Under what aspect had I appeared to each? Had their longing for love and happiness yearned towards me with an uncontrollable impulse, or did a suspicious incredulity like that of their two brothers hinder them from trusting me?
They were walking thoughtfully by my side, and even when they spoke they seemed so deeply absorbed, that more than once I was on the point of asking: “What are you thinking about?” And a violent desire arose in me to extort from them the secret they were holding so close; and the bold words which can suddenly unlock a closed heart, and surprise the most secret pain and force it to confession, rose to my lips. But at the same time a pitiful tenderness moved me almost to ask their pardon for the pain they might be suffering at my hand, and for a sharper pain which they were to suffer in the future. The necessity of choice presented itself to me as a cruel trial, a cause of sorrow and inevitable sacrifices. Did I not feel a vehement anxiety filling up the pauses in our restless conversation?
“Oh, when summer comes!” sighed Violante, lifting up her eyes to the spreading umbrella pines. “In summer I spend the whole day here alone with my fountains. And it is the time of the tuberoses!”
Gigantic pines with straight round stems like the masts of a vessel grew at equal distances in a row along the wall of the cloister and protected it with their thick cupolas. Between stem and stem, like the spaces between columns, were niches hollowed in the wall and inhabited by nude statues or robed figures in calm attitudes, their blind divinity calling up visions of the past. At equal distances the seven fountains projected in the shape of little temples; each one composed of a wide basin in which deities sitting on the brink or leaning on the urn of water gazed at their own reflection framed between the two pairs of columns which supported a pediment carved with a couplet. Opposite them rose the great myrtle hedge, a mass of green only broken by the white pensive statues. And the damp ground was almost entirely covered with moss as soft as velvet, which rendered our steps noiseless and heightened the sweetness of the mystery.
“Can you read the verses?” asked Violante, as she saw me intent on deciphering the letters cut in the stone, and effaced here and there by mould and cracks. “I once knew what they meant.”
They said: “Hasten, hasten! Weave garlands of fair roses to girdle the passing hours.”
PRÆCIPITATE MORAS, VOLUCRES CINGATIS UT HORAS
NECTITE FORMOSAS, MOLLIA SERTA, ROSAS.
It was only the ancient precept, sweetened by rhyme, which for centuries has incited men to enjoy the pleasures of our brief life, has kindled the kisses on lovers’ lips, and multiplied the number of goblets at the banquet. It was the old voluptuous melody, modulated on the new instrument which an industrious monk had fashioned in the shape of a dove’s wing out of the various reeds left in the forsaken garden of Pan, and bound together with the wax of votive lights and the threads of old altar linen.
“The fountain gleams and babbles; and saith to thee in its splendour: 'Rejoice!’ and in its murmur speaks of Love.”