I murmured something about his getting well.
I know more about it than the doctor, he replied, staring at me with stem fury. I studied to be a doctor. And I watched my mother and brother die, just as I am dying now.
There was no answer for that. We sat silent. Then in a gentler voice he said:
Will you promise me something? My things weren't good enough; they were just beginning to be better. When I am dead I want you to make sure that Francis does what he promised. There must be no name on my grave. Just write: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
There was a noise in the next room. Blair had returned with the water-colourist. We withdrew. The poet was too sick to see us again and when I came back from the country he had died and his fame had begun to spread over the whole world.
[BOOK TWO: MARCANTONIO]
La Duchessa D'Aquilanera was a Colonna and came from the conservative wing of a family that cannot forget its cardinalitial, royal and papal traditions. Her husband had come of a Tuscan house that had received its illustration by the thirteenth century, was praised in the histories of Machiavelli and execrated in Dante. Neither family had counted a misalliance in twenty-two generations, and even in the twenty-third incurred only such stigma as attaches to marriage with an illegitimate Medici or a Pope's "niece". The Duchess could never forget—among a thousand similar honors—that her grandfather's grandfather, Timoleo Nerone Colonna, Prince of Velletri, had carried many an insulting message to the ancestors of the present King of Italy, the old but apologetic house of Savoy; and that her father had refused a Grandeeship at the court of Spain because it had been withheld from his father; and that through herself she carried to her son the titles of Chamberlain of the Court of Naples (if there were one). Prince of the Holy Roman Empire (if that superb organization had only survived) and Duke of Brabant, a title which unfortunately reappears among the pretensions of the royal families of Spain, Belgium and France. She had the best of claims to an Altesse, and even to an Altesse Royale; at least to the Sérénissime, for her mother had been the last member of the royal family of Craburg-Hottenlingen. She had the largest cousinage outside the Buddhist priesthood. The heralds of the European courts bowed to her with a particular distinction realizing that by some accident many diverse and lofty lines converged in her odd person.
She was fifty when I met her, a short, black-faced woman with two aristocratic wens on the left slope of her nose, yellow, dirty hands, covered with paste emeralds (an allusion to her Portuguese claims; she was Archduchess of Brazil, if Brazil had only remained Portuguese), lame with the limp that pursues the Della Quercia, just as her aunt had been epileptic with the epilepsy of the true Vani. She lived in a tiny apartment in the Palazzo Aquilanera, Piazza Aracœli, from the windows of which she watched the sumptuous weddings of her rivals, ceremonies to which she had been invited, but dared not attend, foreseeing that she would be assigned to places that fell below her pretensions; to accept a humble seat would be to admit that one had relinquished the whole bundle of vast historic claims. She had left many a great function abruptly on discovering that her chair was behind some of those Colonna cousins who had cast away all right to aristocratic distinction by marrying theatre women or Americans. She refused to be seated behind pillars among dubious Neapolitan titles—in the shadow of her own family tombs; to be left among the footmen at the door of a musicale; to be invited at the eleventh hour; and to be kept waiting in antechambers. For the most part she clung to her ugly stuffy rooms, brooding on the disregarded glories of her line and envying the splendors of her richer relatives. The fact is that from the point of view of a middle-class Italian she was not really poor; but she was too poor to afford the limousine and livery and great entertainments; to be without these and yet invested with her pretensions was to be poorer than the last nameless body fished out of the Tiber.
Recently however she had begun to receive unexpected and thrilling recognitions. Little though she went out, when she did appear in society, her austere face, her majestic limp, and her strange jewels carried conviction. People were afraid of her. The arbiters of precedence in Rome dared at last to intimate to the Odescalchi and Colonna and Sermoneta that this almost shabby little woman whom they snubbed and shoved like some half-wit poor relation, had every right to precede them at a formal function. French circles, such as had not lost all seigneurial deferences under the sponge of republicanism recognized her ultramontane alliances. She was the first to notice the improvement in her reception, and if a bit bewildered it did not take her long to set her sails to the unexpected breeze. She had a son and daughter to advance and it was for them that she now resolved to immolate her pride. From the earliest signs of her rehabilitation she forced herself to sally out into the world, and finding that her stock was higher in the international colony she stooped distastefully to call upon the American peeresses and on the South American representatives. Eventually she found herself at Miss Grier's midnight suppers. The reflection of the consideration she received in such places finally reached her own people and she was gradually spared the more obvious humiliations.
It became necessary for her now to drop her former friends, the dull soured old women, more plaintive than herself, and with less reason, with whom she had been accustomed to fret away the long afternoons and evenings behind the drawn blinds of the Piazza Aracœli. She was obliged likewise to abandon a sordid habit that linked her no less surely to the previous centuries, namely that of rushing into law-suits. The innate capacity for affairs which abounded in this woman had found during the days of her obscurity this extraordinary outlet. She went about scenting out old claims and deeds, the slips of tradesmen and the subtle omissions of lawyers. She was always protecting her shyer friends from imposition, and she was always successful and often made a good deal of money. She employed obscure boy-lawyers and when she was called upon as a witness, relying on her distinctions to prevent her being interrupted, she used the occasion as an opportunity to sum up the whole case. The middle classes seeing in the morning paper that S. A. Leda Matilda Colonna duchessa d'Aquilanera was attacking the City of Rome over the valuation of property near a railroad, or contesting the bill of some popular stationer or fruiterer on the Corso, suffered willingly the inconvenience of holding a seat in court for hours in order to see the malignant resourceful woman and to hear her trenchant sarcasms and her irresistible accumulation of evidence. Yet her relatives had always sneered at this passion, failing to see that she represented more clearly than themselves the qualities that had always gone to characterize the aristocracy.