The stricken tree rose before us, hard and black as basalt, its stony trunk torn open to the roots by a rent which testified to the awfulness of vindictive force. Its torn side was bare of branches, but there were a few left at the top of the other side, flinging the implacable despair of their gestures up to the sun. At each corner of the enclosure was fixed a ram’s skull with curved horns, bleached by the sun and rain of numberless seasons. Everything was motionless, dead, and sacred, and primeval in appearance.
From time to time the cries of the hawks pierced the blue sky.
The days passed by rapidly; they were days of farewell to her who was about to depart.
“Gaze at the springtime with the whole strength of your eyes,” I used to say to her, “for you will never see it again, never again!”
I said also to her—
“Warm your hands in the sun, bathe them in the sun, poor hands, for soon you will have to keep them crossed on your breast, or hidden in the shade under the brown woollen habit.” I would say as I showed her a flower—
“Here is a miracle for which you ought to thank Heaven. Think of the thousand legends contained in the silver network of this blossom, of the hidden relation between the number of petals and stamens, of the slender threads which support the lobes of the pistils, of this transparent robe, this web, these valves and membranes covered with almost invisible down, which enclose the mysterious agitation of the seed vessels. Think of all the divine art revealed in the structure of this living creation, gifted in its fragility with infinite powers of love and fertility. See the moving tracery of shadow which the trembling leaves cast on the earth, and the same tracery painted on the wall, to cheer your melancholy, in rays now blue and now golden; and the little, white fingers at the tips of the pine branches; and the drops of dew hanging from the beard of the oats; and the delicate veins in the wings of the bee; and the dazzling green of the dragon-fly; and the iridescent colours on the dove’s neck; and the strange shapes of lichen stains; and the holes in tree-trunks; and the composition of crystals.... Store away all these marvels under those eyelids of yours, which will have to be lowered for so long before Christ crucified. I don’t think there are any gardens in the old monastery of Queen Sancia, only stone cloisters.”
“Why do you tempt me?” she used to ask. “Why do you enjoy disturbing my weak will? Have you been sent by God to try me?”
“I don’t wish to disturb your will,” I replied, “but only to give you brotherly advice, which may help you to suffer less. I think that after you are buried, when you cannot look out of the grated windows without hurting your cheek against the bars—I think that you who have grown up in a garden will have to pass through a few weeks of furious impatience, when all the visions of the open air will pass before your memory. Then it will be inexpressible torture to you if you cannot recall the exact details of the tiny black and yellow speckles on the lizard’s back, or the tender downy leaf which buds on the branch of an apple-tree. I know the madness of such belated curiosity. Once I was passionately fond of a great Scotch deerhound my father had given me. He was a magnificent beast, very graceful, and extraordinarily well bred. When he died I was in the greatest misery; and it used to torment me strangely that I could not exactly recall the precise shape of the specks of gold in his brown eyes, and the grey marks in his beautiful rosy mouth when one caught a glimpse of it in a yawn or a bark. We ought, therefore, to look with attentive eyes at everything, especially at the creatures we love. Do you not love the things I was speaking to you about just now? and are you not about to leave them? Are you not about to place a kind of death between them and you?”