“And then,” she continued playfully, “she alludes every now and then to some small wonder known to herself alone, but she does it cautiously, keeping her secret to herself, without giving in the least bit to our curiosity. To-day with her white hawthorn she has made you the object of special favour.”
The novice kept her eyes turned downwards, but laughter quivered on her eyelashes and lit up her whole face.
“Some day,” the kind sister went on, pleased to have called up the unwonted ray, “some day I will tell you the story of the hedgehog and the four little blind hedgehogs.”
Then Massimilla burst into such clear youthful laughter, which clothed her in such unusual freshness, that I stood amazed as if a miracle of grace had taken place.
“Ah, don’t listen to Anatolia!” she said, without looking at me. “She is laughing at me.”
“The story of the hedgehog and the four little blind hedgehogs!” I said, drinking in with delight this sudden vein of gaiety which crossed our melancholy. “But you are a very pattern of Franciscan perfection! We must add another little flower to the Fioretti: 'How Sister Water tamed the wild hedgehog and gave it a nest that it might multiply, according to the command of our Creator!’ Tell me, tell me the story.”
The Clare laughed with her dear Anatolia, and the subtle feeling of joy spread to Violante also and to the two brothers, and for the first time that day we were conscious of our youth.
What words can express the sweet strangeness of sudden laughter unlocking the lips and shining in the eyes of the sorrow-stricken? The first amazement of it lingered in my soul and seemed to cover all the rest with a veil. The unusual emotion which had stirred Massimilla’s slender breast took possession of me and disturbed the outlines of previous impressions or melted them away altogether. The half-closed mouth of the ecstatic saint was suddenly filled with a silvery rush of sound, just as she was about to let scrolls of silence fall from the motionless palms of her hands.
Nothing save the sound of that laughter could have conveyed to me the depth of the unapproachable mystery which each of the virgins bore within herself. Was it not a chance sign of that instinctive life lying dormant like a heaped-up treasure in the very roots of their physical existence? And did not that hidden tenacious life, weighed down and yet not crushed by the knowledge of so much sorrow, contain within it the germs of numberless energies? As a spring pours on the dry rock the tokens of secret moisture underground, even so the beautiful sudden laugh seemed to rise from that fount of natural joy which the most miserable being still preserves in the depths of his own unconsciousness. And thus above my emotion rose a proud and loving thought: “I could make thee a creature of joy.”
And then my eyes armed themselves with new curiosity; and I was assailed by an anxious desire to look, to gaze at, and observe the three princesses more attentively, as if I had not seen them truly before. And once more it struck me what a complicated enigma of lines every feminine form is, and how difficult it is to see, not only the soul but the body. Those hands, for instance, on whose long, slender fingers I had placed my subtlest dreams like invisible rings, already seemed different to me, and appeared as the receptacles of infinite nameless forces from which marvellous generations of new things might arise. And some strange analogy led me to imagine the anxiety and horror which filled that young prince, who, imprisoned in a dark place and obliged to choose his own destiny at the hands of silent messengers, passed the whole night in feeling the fatal hands which were stretched out to him in the darkness. Hands in the darkness—what more fearful image of mystery can there be?