What a hideous thing it is! Can any bugle's screaming cover those anguished cries, or any scarlet stripes soak up the spreading blood? Bullets are merciful, my brothers, beside the cruel holes they pierce in hearts they never touched.
Roger laid the papers and letter reverently to one side, and I, who had been reading over his shoulder, brushed impatiently at my eyes. (I was not entirely a well man yet, remember!) Below the newspaper lay a signed deed, formally conveying a parcel of twenty acres of land, carefully measured and described, to Lockwood Lee Prynne, his heirs and assigns, and all the rest of the legal jargon. This was hardly burned at all.
Of the two slim packets of letters one was badly charred: parts of it fell away in Roger's hands, as he carefully opened it. I cannot transcribe them literally, or even to any great length, for they are too sad, and no good end would be served by commemorating to what extent that fierce furnace of the Civil War burned away the natural ties of kindred and neighbour and home. Enough that the few remaining members spared out of what must have been a small family cut Margarita's father definitely off from them, in terms no man could have tried with any self-respect to modify. His father, a Northerner, who had identified himself since his Southern marriage with his wife's interests and kinsfolk, had lost touch with his own people, and a few death notices, slipped in among the letters, seemed to point to an almost complete loneliness, which Roger afterward verified. The other packet held two letters only, one in Italian (which language I learned, after a fashion, in order to read it) the other in French. The Italian letter was not only scorched badly, but so blistered—one did not need to ask how—that parts were quite illegible. The writer, a man, evidently, a young man, probably, conveyed in satire so keen, a contempt so bitter, a hatred so remorseless, that it was difficult to believe it a letter from a brother to his sister. Beneath the polished, scornful sentences—vitriol to a tender young heart—surged a tempest of primitive rage that thrust one back into the Renaissance, with its daggers and its smiles. "Let me tell you, then, once and for all," ran one sentence, breaking out fiercely, "that there is but one country on earth which can shelter you and that villain—his own! There I scorn to put my foot or allow the foot of any member of your family, but let him or his victim leave it—and so long as I live my vengeance shall search you out and wipe out this insult to my house, my country and my church!" The opening page was missing and the last one was badly burned, so we had absolutely no clue as to the family name.
Roger and I puzzled out enough of it to gather vaguely what the situation must have been, and when we read the second letter it was all clear. This second letter was burned and blistered, too, but its simple, naïve repetitions, its tender terror, its brave, affectionate persistence, left little, even in their fragmentary condition, for us to guess. I will give only a page here and there.
"I have tried for four months not to write, but what you told me last has proved too strong for me and I must.... Oh, my dear one, my more than sister in this world, how could you have been permitted this deadly sin? It may be I shall be damned for even this one letter—my only one, for you must not write again. Sister Lisabetta suspects me already, and asked me last week why I should talk with the baker's daughter so secretly? So if she brings another letter I shall tell her to destroy it. Write to me no more."
Ah, now we knew! Strange indeed was the blood that ran in Margarita's blue-veined wrist! No light and fleeting passion had brought her into this world.
".... When I remember that it was I who brought you the first letter, I weep for hours. God forgive me, and Our Lady, but I thought it was only some idle nonsense of Sister Dolores—she was always so light, Dolores! They have sent her back to Spain—I know you loved her best! Sister Lisabetta found a bit of your gown caught on the cypress tree. How dared you risk your life so? I swore I knew nothing, nor did I, about what she asked me. The Archbishop came...."
I think I see the little figure slipping from bough to bough under the stars, the odour of all the vineyards is in my nostrils, the splashing of the Convent fountain sounds in my ears!
".... I could not sleep at night after that wicked letter of how you love him—how dare you, a vowed nun, write such sinful words? It must be, as they say, wrong to pray for you! Do not try to excuse yourself because your brother devoted you against your will—you were happy till he climbed the tree and saw you! Only Satan can make it so that one wicked look between the eyes should make a man and woman mad for—I will not remember that sinful letter, I will not! Maria, thou art lost!"
And so, even as she and Roger looked and could not look away and never after lost each other's eyes, even so, her mother looked at her lover and looking, lost (or so she thought) her soul! The wheel turns ever, as Alif taught me.