The Virgins of the Rocks

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

Then after a pause, in which she seemed to be listening to her own deep heart—

“And there are souls suffering down below!”

She turned her face, on which the shadow of some thought had fallen, towards the place where her sisters were waiting.

“Let us go back, Claudio,” she added, in a tone that I cannot forget, for never did human voice express so many wonderful things so briefly.

“Dear, dear Anatolia!” I broke out, seizing her hands, overcome by the extraordinary feeling aroused in me by those simple words of hers, which I took to be the unmistakable indication of an inward emotion that was almost divine. “Let me first say to you what my silence has told you more than once.... Where can I offer my love more worthily than here on this height, to you who are the highest of created beings, Anatolia?”

She turned very pale, not like one who hears tidings of joy long waited and prayed for, but like one who receives an invisible blow in a vital part; and though apparently motionless, in spirit she was shaken towards me by some strange fearful shudder, by some instinctive movement of horror; and this I saw, not with my eyes, but with one of those unknown senses that sometimes manifest themselves in a momentary vibration on the surface of the human nerves, and then disappear again for ever, leaving the consciousness amazed.

She cast a look of indefinable anxiety around her.

“You speak as if we were alone,” she said vaguely, “as if I were alone ... as if I were alone....”

“Anatolia, what is the matter with you?” I asked, troubled by her inexplicable distress, by the deep change in her face, the incoherence of her words.

And a thought flashed across my uncertainty. Had she not been suddenly assailed, she accustomed for so many years to her gloomy prison, she the resigned martyr within the ancient walls, had she not perhaps been suddenly assailed by that mysterious terror, that kind of panic which reigns among the solitudes of stern and silent mountains? Yes; no doubt she was a prey to this terrible fascination, and her spirit had gone astray under it.