Was it I who dreamt the rest?
I saw a lady moving towards him across the flowers as lightly as a butterfly upon the wing. Fair of face and form was she, fashioned very lightly, full of airy grace; with child-like laughter on her lips and a half-defiant, wholly-alluring challenge in her tender eyes. Her dress was blue and of so light a texture that it rippled from her rosy limbs like water, and scarce bruised the flowers. As she ventured near she laughed, and wantoned with some golden fruit. The sunshine and the breeze, greatly daring, played in her filmy yellow hair and fashioned the tender blue of her robe into little wings. Half a child was she, and half a woman, full of the joy of living and the joy of beautiful things; the very spirit of an azure butterfly who flutters through a summer day, dancing from sheer delight.
Who could have dreamt that I should find her here, on this bleak hillside, in this austere old house? These baked clay cliffs and desolations should have driven her away to gay Siena long ago, even if she outstayed the bitter winds which thrash the stone-pines round the forsaken monastery in winter.
She was standing by the poet now, and smiling down at him, pouting a little because he did not wake. Who could resist her, this happy butterfly fashioned so beautifully for love on a golden summer day?
A pine-cone fell into my lap and startled me. I moved. And in a flash the spell was broken. They had vanished, the beauteous lady and the sleeping boy whose dreams had conjured her. The yellow sunlight was slanting in between the cypresses, and from the stables came the sound of horses being harnessed. It was already time to go.
And yet they say that Benedict sent her away with harsh words and admonitions.
And the youth who dreamed was not a poet but a painter; his name was Sodoma. You may see her picture in the cloister, and his own as well, in the gay clothes of which he was so proud, for they were part-payment for his work, and had belonged to a gentleman of Lombardy who took the monastic habit.
But it is still a miracle to me that I should have met her on this bare hillside.