XXIX
For days after the visit of Hagios Johannes, Caterina scarcely spoke, or noticed what was passing around her; and the Lady of the Bernardini and Dama Margherita, with hearts aching from the burden of their pity, were helpless before such desolation.
But at last the young Queen turned to them with mournful eyes of comprehension, holding out her hands to clasp theirs in a convulsive pressure, rousing herself heroically from her absorption and nerving her dormant will to meet the unwelcome stress of life again.
"The Holy Mother hath left you for me to love," she said in a tremulous voice. "Life is not all a blank."
They could not answer her for tears; but her own eyes were dry.
"I thought," she said, "if it might but have been the will of Christ that death should come to me—also"—she paused a moment to steady her voice, "it would have been sweet—I was so weary. And when it did not come to lift me out of the shadow, I longed to carry my broken heart into some holy Sisterhood and be at rest—I felt no strength to live. I thought it might have been the will of the Madre Sanctissima, for she hath suffered; and I know not how to live without my figlio dilettissimo."
Then suddenly she clasped her hands crying out with the passion of prayer:
"My God! I would have trained him for thee! He should have been a noble man and a Christian King. Why hast Thou stricken me!"
She turned to them wide-eyed with her question but the Lady Beata, for answer, could only fold compassionate arms about her—soothing her silently; so young and so bereft.