In love. Why not? In the humblest, meanest, most obscure lives, that warm, bright hour comes—an hour of such vast capacity that it includes all time and space. So, in lives outwardly successful, when the pomp of earthly things opens out, the warm, deep hour comes, inward and intense; all is gathered up in the heart, the soul trembles with passionate strength. Being intensely in love, with all the greater force and violence from any expression of feeling having been rare in past years, a heart like Antonio Amati's gathers up all the friendships missed or neglected: affection for relatives and congenial people; poetic admiration for women that was kept down, never shown, conquered sometimes at the very beginning, and almost always quickly forgotten; all the thousand attachments, petty and great, the human heart fritters itself away on. He was in love knowingly, willingly, tasting all the sweetness of this late fruit of his soul. He found in his retarded passion the thousand and one characteristics and feelings of the love affairs and attachments he had never had. He was done with the great renunciation; he was in love knowingly.
Bianca Maria was in love without knowing it. She was simple and right-minded; she had lived a solitary life, with no conflicts, thinking and praying a great deal; her soul was refined by solitary musing, not by the rough, sore pounding down of a struggling life. From her mother, who had led a sad life, she got a keen, but silent, sensitiveness; from her father she had taken a headstrong loyalty, pride without haughtiness, and uncalculating generosity that delights in giving without interested motives. Over it all was a deep, inbred faith that seemed to be rooted in her, the food of her spiritual life, just as the lamps lighted before the saints are fed on the purest oil, and draw the prayers of the faithful from a distance by their constant, feeble light. She loved unconsciously. Who could have told her anything about it? Her mother had passed away seven or eight years before from a lingering, fatal illness, suffering no pain or sharp spasms; but her heart was pierced with agony for her almost mad husband, who was hacking down the poor feeble stem of the House of Cavalcanti and throwing its branches into an abyss—agony for the poor daughter she left behind to her mad father's guidance, who was going forward to wretchedness, perhaps dishonour.
Bianca Maria remembered; she recalled her mother's face when she was dying, the colour of clay from agonizing thoughts, inconsolable at having to die so soon. These ineffaceable recollections left her grave, made her youth austere, and took away from her all the longings, ambitions, and coquettishness of her age. What did she know of love? Nothing. She lived in a dull way, with no enjoyments, beside a father she respected; but alarmed by his fatal passion, she felt threatened by something obscure, but imminent, and already pinched by poverty, she took to heart the necessary doleful shifts to keep up appearances. She felt an unknown danger in herself like the seeds of death; and now, a wise, strong, good man—an ark of safety in danger, formed to overcome obstacles, to give help; a giver out of consolation, whose presence and voice brought security and hope, strong to lean against; a name never associated with anything foolish; a vanquisher of sickness, pure of any stain—this man held out his hand to save her. Well, she took his hand; it was natural; she could not think of doing anything else but take it and love him.
Unconsciously she loved him, because she must. From her age, temperament, and surroundings, her whole existence, she felt that innocent sort of love that weak natures, beaten down by tempests, have for strong ones.
When Bianca Maria was alone in the dreary suite of rooms where the sparse furniture had got to have a still older, more wretched look, with these old servants always in low spirits, busied in hiding their poverty, in giving it an air of respectable ease, she felt chilled to the heart; she seemed to be old, poor, and neglected like the house and furniture, doomed to languish on in want of everything. And when her father came in, uneasy always, led by his violent passions, his one idea, credulous over vain dreams, giving in to mystic alarms, calling around him a terrifying world of phantoms, she lost her tranquillity at once; her brain whirled, and she saw curious ghostly things with fatal effects. She could not get rid of the nightmare; she felt so weak, so unfit to defend herself from the assaults of that cabalistic madness; she shook all over from the jar to her nerves, from the fever going up to the brain and making it reel.
She always felt very wretched when she was alone or with her father; helpless, without a guide, knocked about by a rushing wind, drawn in by a whirlpool. But if Antonio Amati showed his manly face, his genial strength; if she heard his firm, rather rough voice, that was smooth for her; if his hand just touched hers, so that she felt a magnetic influence, warmth, youthful vivacity, go through her nerves, she knew she was guided, protected, started on the way of life and happiness. The black clouds moved off with one breath; she saw the blue sky; the fever grew milder, went off altogether, and the sombre ghosts, the fears that blanched her lips, went off at the same time; she quieted down as if a heavenly benediction enfolded her in its sphere of help. She felt like a child again when he was there: Amati was the firmest, safest, strongest.
So she loved him, innocently, unconsciously. This kind of love allows of great humility, great tenderness; it was pure and fervent, it refreshed her. With their different ground-work, the two sorts of love understood each other, melted into and completed one another. That spiritual harmony that is the soul's finest, but also rarest and shortest, experience began the first day she from her dull balcony, he from his stern study, that saw so much agony, beheld each other. Wherever the two minds, feelings, personalities met, the harmony got greater. When she raised her great thoughtful eyes to his, asking in all simplicity for help and affection, he felt his heart bound with a longing for sacrifice. They understood each other perfectly without speaking.
He came from the land, from a small, out-of-the-way provincial town that had little communication with Naples; he had made his name and fortune by struggling with life and death, with men's indifference and hatred, thus getting a formidable idea of his own powers, and only believing in himself. He had plebeian blood and a powerful mind; none of the refinement that comes from breeding and surroundings, the triumph of ideals.
How different from her! She was the daughter of a noble house, refined by instinct, breeding, and surroundings; used to live in meditation and prayer, without a particle of self-reliance to stand out against the ruin of her family, or withstand her father's ruling passion, to save her name or herself. She lived amid privations and discomforts; she had set out too early on the sorrowful stages of the Via Crucis; an unhappy future was before her. How different and far off these two were!
Still, they understood each other, as the secret, mysterious law of love decrees. It mingles everything—feelings, tradition, origin; puts force next to weakness, and binds two persons together irrevocably by their very differences. She did not consider she lowered herself by loving the obscure Southern peasant become a great doctor; he did not consider he stooped to this decaying family, impoverished in blood, means, and courage. The two souls that had to love one another had set out far apart, had had to run through infinite spiritual space to meet, know, join together. It is Plato's grand love theory, that only fools and heartless folk dare to laugh at; the grand theory of falling in love, once more, after a million instances, was to be realized. Did it not seem arranged purposely, that this unknown, common man should reach to fame and riches by his own efforts, getting to know science and life so that he could console the high-born girl's cold, faded, sorrowful youth, languishing in solitude and secret poverty?