Until it shall attain to greatest fortune.
'It resulted from my being so transported in my endless imaginings that I did not take heed to sing these verses I have repeated, in a voice as low as I ought, nor was the place where I was so secret as to prevent their being listened to by Timbrio; and when he heard them, it came into his mind that mine was not free from love, and that if I felt any, it was for Nisida, as could be gathered from my song; and though he discovered the true state of my thoughts, he did not discover that of my wishes, but rather understanding them to be contrary to what I did think, he decided to depart that very night and go to where he might be found by nobody, only to leave me the opportunity of alone serving Nisida. All this I learnt from a page of his, who was acquainted with all his secrets, who came to me in great distress and said to me: "Help, Señor Silerio, for Timbrio, my master and your friend, wishes to leave us and go away this night. He has not told me where, but only that I should get for him I do not know how much money, and that I should tell no one he is going, especially telling me not to tell you: and this thought came to him after he had been listening to some verse or other you were singing just now. To judge from the excessive grief I have seen him display, I think he is on the verge of despair; and as it seems to me that I ought rather to assist in his cure than to obey his command, I come to tell it to you, as to one who can intervene to prevent him putting into practice so fatal a purpose." With strange dread I listened to what the page told me, and went straightway to see Timbrio in his apartment, and, before I went in, I stopped to see what he was doing. He was stretched on his bed, face downwards, shedding countless tears accompanied by deep sighs, and with a low voice and broken words, it seemed to me that he was saying this: "Seek, my true friend Silerio, to win the fruit your solicitude and toil has well deserved, and do not seek, by what you think you owe to friendship for me, to fail to gratify your desire, for I will restrain mine, though it be with the extreme means of death; for, since you freed me from it, when with such love and fortitude you offered yourself to the fierceness of a thousand swords, it is not much that I should now repay you in part for so good a deed by giving you the opportunity to enjoy her in whom Heaven summed up all its beauty, and love set all my happiness, without the hindrance my presence can cause you. One thing only grieves me, sweet friend, and it is that I cannot bid you farewell at this bitter parting, but accept for excuse that you are the cause of it. Oh, Nisida, Nisida! how true is it of your beauty, that he who dares to look upon it must needs atone for his fault by the penalty of dying for it! Silerio saw it, and if he had not been so struck with it as I believe he has been, he would have lost with me much of the reputation he had for discretion. But since my fortune has so willed it, let Heaven know that I am no less Silerio's friend than he is mine; and, as tokens of this truth, let Timbrio part himself from his glory, exile himself from his bliss, and go wandering from land to land, away from Silerio and Nisida, the two true and better halves of his soul." And straightway, with much passion, he rose from the bed, opened the door, and finding me there said to me: "What do you want, friend, at such an hour? Is there perchance any news?" "Such news there is," I answered him, "that I had not been sorry though it were less." In a word, not to weary you, I got so far with him, that I persuaded him and gave him to understand that his fancy was false, not as to the fact of my being in love, but as to the person with whom, for it was not with Nisida, but with her sister Blanca; and I knew how to tell him this in such a way that he counted it true. And that he might credit it the more, memory offered me some stanzas which I myself had made many days before, to another lady of the same name, which I told him I had composed for Nisida's sister. And they were so much to the purpose, that though it be outside the purpose to repeat them now, I cannot pass them by in silence. They were these:
SILERIO.
Oh Blanca, whiter than the snow so white,
Whose heart is harder yet than frozen snow,
My sorrow deem thou not to be so light
That thou to heal it mayst neglect. For, lo,
If thy soul is not softened by this plight—
That soul that doth conspire to bring me woe—
As black will turn my fortune to my shame