A nervous condition, which culminated in a long-enduring cramp of the heart, befell her; the cramp was followed by an hour-long swoon which could not be lifted.
When she could again leave her bed, a great change had taken place in her. She no longer evaded the recollection of Lensky; the old love was dead, but a new love had risen from the ruins of the old, a new enlightened love, which was nothing more than a warm, compassionate pardon.
* * * * * *
With the restlessness of those mortally ill, who in vain seek relief, she was again driven to leave Geneva, where at first she had intended to pass the whole winter. She longed for Rome.
The physicians laid no difficulties in the way. In the end, a dying person has the right to seek out the place where she will lay down her weary head for the last time.
* * * * * *
In Rome, it seemed at first as if she would be better again. At the end of March, Nikolas came to visit her. He was now a young man, tall, slender, with great dreamy eyes in an aristocratically cut face, and with pretty, still somewhat embarrassed manners.
Already he had twice come to foreign countries to visit his mother, but never had she been so glad to see him.
As the day was beautiful, and she felt better than usual, she proposed a drive. "To the Via Giulia," she ordered the coachman. "I will show you the Palazzo Morsini, in which we lived when your father was betrothed to me," she said to her children. Mascha looked at her mother in astonishment; it was the first time in quite three years that she had mentioned her father before her.
So they drove in the Via Giulia, on a bright March afternoon they drove there. But Natalie in vain sought the Palazzo Morsini; she did not find it. A pile of rubbish stood in its place, surrounded by a board fence. Disappointed almost to tears, with that childish, foolish disappointment such as only those mortally ill know, she turned away. On the way, it occurred to her to order the coachman to stop at the Trevi fountain. She quite started with delight when she saw the irregular collection of statues again. "Here I met your father for the first time in Rome; it is just twenty years ago," said she, and rested a strange, brilliant, dreamy glance on the old wall. The sculpturing was still blacker and more weather-worn than twenty years before, but the silver cascade rushed down more arrogantly than ever in the gray stone basin, and the sky, which arched over the time-blackened walls, was as blue as formerly. "Ah, how much beauty, nobility, and immortality there still is in the world, together with the bad that passes away," murmured Natalie, softly; then passing her hand over her eyes, and as if speaking to herself, she added: "It is thus with great men, and therefore I think, considerately overlooking their earthly failings, one should rejoice over that which is immortal in them!"