“They are not impious; you need not fear listening to them. Do you not remember the first lines of the Commentary of St. Theresa? She speaks there of a God imprisoned. Think what power is required to enchain the Lord! You see, Sister Water, what unceasing acts of strength are required of the Bride who is sung in the Antiphons and Responses. That is why, as I have a brotherly anxiety for you, I want at least to prepare your soul for the bitterness of disillusion. Do not lull it too much with the promises of the Psalms! There is, I think, some magnificent joyous promise in the verses you have learned, 'Veni, Electa mea....’ 'Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo! the winter is past ... the voice of the turtle is heard in our land ... the vines with the tender grapes give a good smell.’ Ah, the Latin of the Psalms is incomparable in producing a picture of the intoxication of love sinking under suffocating wealth. Some of the verses seem to drop with fragrant oil like the hair of slaves, or to be heavy and glittering as nuggets of gold. When the bishop places the crown of virginal merit on your head, your lips will have to pronounce wonderful words—words in which I see and feel some mysterious weight and splendour. 'Et immensis monilibus ornavit me.’ Wonderful words! Are they not?”
She was looking at me now with such passion that all her little soul trembled like a tear on her eyelashes, and by merely bending forward I could have drunk it.
“Perhaps I may be hurting you a little,” I went on. “But I see such dreams burning in the depths of your eyes that I am afraid for you, sweet sister; for the life for which you are preparing yourself cannot be in accordance with your dreams or with your nature. What is awaiting you is a monotonous life, always the same, almost torpid, all mapped out by the unchangeable Rule, in the old convent of Queen Sancia, which has been the grave of more than one Montaga, and of more than one Cantelma. There is a picture in my memory of those Poor Clares one Ash Wednesday. When I was in Naples, the Angevin Church of Santa Chiara had an attraction for me, not only because some of my ancestors lie there, not only because there one may envy the Duke of Rodi his sleep in the pagan sarcophagus of Protesilaus and Laodamia, but also because there with closed eyes one can absorb the poetry diffused by the beautiful names of dead women. There is Maria, Duchess of Durazzo and Empress of Constantinople, there is the Princess Clemenza, there is Isotta d’Altamura, and Isabella di Soleto, and Beatrice di Caserta, and that delicious Antonia Gaudino, who is very like you, as she softly sleeps in marble under a veil which Giovanni da Nola must have borrowed from the youngest of the Graces. I have a picture in my memory of the Poor Clares on Ash Wednesday. Behind the high altar there is a great black grating, all covered with spikes, enclosing the convent choir; and through it one can see the rows of stalls where the sisters sit, while on this side of the barrier the bishop, served by a Capuchin, is seated with a silver basin full of ashes in his hands. A shutter is opened in the grating, and one by one the Clares come and kneel at it. The bishop thrusts his feeble arm through the hole and marks their foreheads one by one with the sign of the cross. As each has been signed she rises and returns to her stall like a ghost, brushing the pavement with silent feet shod in felt. It all goes on in silence, and it is all icy like the ashes. Ah, sweet sister, when you too have been frozen like that, who will there be to warm your little soul?”
“Who warmed the soul of St. Clara and made it glow?” objected the novice, rousing herself to escape defeat, while the colour rose in her cheeks.
“A man: St. Francis of Assisi. You cannot think of the Sister of St. Damian except on her knees at the feet of Francis. A religious painter has pictured her in the act of exchanging a kiss with the seraphic father. And think of the long idyll woven between the hermitage of St. Damian and the Portiuncula; think of that week of passion, sorrow, and pity passed in the convent garden, under the shadow of the olives, during a summer of great drought, when Clara used to drink the tears from the almost blind eyes of Francis; think of the converse between the two mystical lovers which preceded that ecstasy whence the Song of the Creatures burst like a flash of light. You have the Fioretti beside you. Very well, read over the chapter in which it tells 'How St. Clara ate with St. Francis.’ Never was wedding banquet lit up by more radiant torches of love. Here it is: 'The men of Assisi and Beltona, and of all the country round about, saw that Santa Maria degli Angeli, and the whole place, and the forest round about it, were burning brightly, and it seemed as if a great fire were devouring the church and the place and the forest together; whereupon the men of Assisi ran thither with great haste to put out the fire, believing that in very truth everything was burning. But when they reached the place and found no fire at all, they entered in and found St. Francis with St. Clara.’ You see now, sweet sister, how the patroness of your order was able to take shelter from the frost. You must admit that between the sunny hermitage of St. Damian and the gloom of your Angevin convent the difference is great. There will be no fire there, only a uniform grey shadow where humility is powerless. What sort of humility is yours, Massimilla? I think your desire for slavery is a very lofty one.”
She sat in silence, discouraged and gasping; and she was so sweet and so miserable in her distress, that I should like to have taken her on my knees.
“When you appeared to me the first day on the steps, you reminded me directly of an ermine. Well, somehow it seems as if in our imagination the whiteness of ermine could not be separated from the pride of the purple, so much accustomed are we to see them together on royal mantles. Perhaps you wear your mantle inside out, Massimilla, so that the purple is invisible underneath. That is often the way with a Montaga.”
“I don’t know,” she answered vaguely. “It seems as if everything you say must be true.”
It was as if she was making a confession—
“I will be what you wish me to be.”