He said the last words in a low voice, almost as if he were talking to himself; then he paused, possibly to contemplate within himself the creation of his disturbed fancy. Was it only the dream of a sick man? Or did the living Massimilla really correspond to this forsaken guardian of dead plants? I did not linger over such doubts; for I wished to absorb all the poetry which the strange fancies diffused through the shadow of the room, where now the faint patter of the rain reached us, and awakened in my nostrils the desire to inspire the savour of the moist earth. I rose and opened the nearest window a little; the smell of the earth floated in.
“During the first few months after Simonetto’s death,” Oddo resumed, “she took great care of the herbariums. She used to pass long hours in the room where they were kept, examining the plants and reading the labels. And I used often to keep her company, for I was very sorry for her. One day, I remember, I came upon her opening the cupboard in the same room where her wedding-dress was kept. Another day, I remember, in the springtime I saw her quite agitated because one of the narcissus bulbs had flowered.... It was strange, wasn’t it, Claudio? I saw that bulb come up again last spring. And this year? I have not asked Massimilla.... Shall we go and see?”
He rose to his feet, seized with a feverish impatience, and took a few steps towards the door. But Antonello, who was still lying on his pillows, rose also with the same look—how well I remembered it!—as had passed over his face when he warned us of the coming of the gloomy sedan chair; and raising a finger to his lips to bid us keep silence, he leant against the wall which formed a side of the loggia and listened. Nothing was to be heard in the silence save the gentle monotonous patter of the soft spring shower in the enclosed garden.
“Don’t go out!” whispered Antonello.
We did not ask why, for the cause of his terror was evident in his thin contracted face. And as the sound of steps and voices reached us, Oddo went up to the door, opened it a little, and peeped out. I went up to it too, and, standing at his shoulder, I could see through the chink Anatolia leading her mother along the covered loggia, with her arm in hers, and one of the grey woman servants following. Princess Aldoina walked with difficulty, leaning her whole weight upon her daughter. She was strangely dressed in a grand gown with a long train, and was decked out with false jewellery. She looked pale and enormous, with her head raised and a little thrown back, her eyes half closed, and an indescribable smile playing on her lips, as if the sound of the rain on the pavement of the quadrangle had been a murmur of homage from courtiers, through whose ranks she was passing, a queen on the way to her throne. And the full light of sorrowful pity shone in the daughter’s face as she leant over the mad woman.
As the apparition vanished, our souls for a few moments were full of affectionate anguish. And while the echo of the sad footfalls was still audible, the maiden’s figure in that attitude of pity and sorrow which had revealed her to me in her true and supreme light rose before me with extraordinary clearness. And my inmost soul felt an almost religious awe, such as one feels in presence of a holy mystery; for none of the previous actions wrought before my eyes by this pure spirit of consolation seemed equal in value and significance to this action performed by her, all unconscious of my hidden gaze. She rose suddenly to a sublime height in my soul; she shone with the whole glory of her moral beauty, supported by the whole force of her heroic will. Contemplated thus, apart from any affinity to myself, in the secret of her own life to which I was a stranger, in the absolute sincerity of her feeling, she seemed to me a being of an ideal race; and my spirit linked her with those noble creatures immortalised by the poets, divine victims of a voluntary sacrifice. Antigone leading her blind father by the hand, or prostrating herself to strew dust over her brother’s corpse, was not more tender or stronger than she, had not a purer brow nor a larger heart. In the midst of that sort of languid monotony, in that enervating shadow where a sick man was sounding the depth of his own ills, and a restless voice was calling up a vision of empty misery from withered flowers, the consoler appeared suddenly bringing refreshment to my soul; and as a sudden light piercing a dark wall makes the motionless sword glitter among the hanging trophies, so did she strike a great flash out of my dormant will. There was strength in her to produce miraculous fruit. Her substance might have nourished a superhuman germ. She was indeed the “nourisher,” but such a one as the virgin Antigone appeared to the blind Œdipus when he was exiled and erring. Did not she alone, like the ancient heroine, keep alive in the depths of her great heart the genial flame which had been extinguished on the hearth of her failing race? Was not she alone the life of the gloomy house? Massimilla in her barren garden, Violante in her cloud of perfumes, paled before their sister as she walked along the path of self-sacrifice with so firm a step, so sweet a smile.
And I thought of Him who was to come.
We were sitting, Prince Luzio and I, near an open balcony about the hour in the afternoon when the fierce heat of that dying May was beginning to be tempered, and the pilgrim clouds were throwing a few deep blue shadows over the burning valley. The anniversary of King Ferdinand’s death was approaching, so the loyal Prince, who always celebrated it with mourning, was relating to me all the sorrows and horrors of the long agony of the King; and against a background of perfumes rising from the walled garden, the gloomy phantoms awakened by the aged voice followed each other in long succession. The silent journey over the heights of Ariano, and through the valley of Bovino amid snowstorms; the fatal omens which occurred at every step; the first signs of illness appearing one frosty evening when the King, numb with cold, was toiling over the ice which covered the slope; his anxious desire to continue on his road without any delays, as if an inexorable destiny were urging him on; the fearful pallor which suddenly came over him in presence of the crowd, amongst honours which he felt to be the last he would receive; the cries which the attack drew from him, but which were drowned by the clamour of the wedding feast; the distress of the doctors who assembled round his bed to consult under the hostile and suspicious eyes of the Queen; his burst of tears when the Duchess of Calabria, a fresh, youthful figure, entered the infected room where he lay aged and almost stupefied by suffering; then his tragic good-bye to his own statue as the nurses were carrying him into another room; then the embarcation on board ship, a ceremony as sad as a funeral, and his mournful words as the litter was carried down under the hatchways, which had been enlarged by the strokes of hatchets; then the arrival at Caserta, the rapid change for the worse, the putrid decay of his body on the great bed surrounded by sacred images, miraculous relics, crucifixes, lamps, and tapers; at the last the pomp of the Viaticum, the King sitting up among the pillows quite unrecognisable, to the terror of those present; the last words, the Christian serenity of his death, the dispute between the Queen and the doctors about the embalming of the body, the band of soldiers round the bier told off to cleanse incessantly the innumerable terrible sores;—all these sorrows and all these horrors passed through his recollection. And I listened and thought of the Duke of Calabria sobbing in a corner like a girl. “Ah, what grand and beautiful ambitions the odours of death might have nourished in his youthful soul through those terrible spring weeks! In what proud intoxicating meditations my soul would have been wrapped beneath the shadow of the great trees, and how petty the eager agitation caused by the stirring of the sap in their powerful trunks would have seemed in comparison with mine!”
Prince Luzio told me how one day the Duke of Calabria, trembling and aghast, suddenly entered his sick father’s room to tell him of the expulsion of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and with what violent words the King had condemned his relation’s timidity.