The longest years cannot efface the memory of such an hour, and time, which at last subdues all grief, never gave me the courage to dwell on this. Mothers who have been pierced by such a sword cannot speak of it; others dare not. The woman who has no child, in the presence of one who has just lost hers, can only bend in silence and respect before the sovereign majesty of grief!
I will merely state, with respect to what preceded, that the drowsiness of the child the night before was a symptom of the violent malady which suddenly attacked her in the middle of the night. After abating towards day, it came on again an hour later, and kept increasing without any relaxation to the end.
As for me, who had given Angiolina the place that had remained vacant in my heart, the excess of my grief enabled me to form an estimate of hers whose heart was filled with far greater anguish at being so suddenly robbed of her all by death. I shuddered at the thought of a sorrow greater than mine, and did not dare dwell on my own troubles in the presence of a grief that cast into the shade all the sufferings I had ever witnessed before. What a remedy for the imaginary or exaggerated woes of life it is to suddenly be brought to witness the reality of the most terrible of misfortunes!
What a price was I now to pay for the journey I had so long looked forward to—the reunion I had longed for with so many prayers and obtained by so many efforts!
To leave Stella in her affliction was a trial I had not anticipated, and one which the most imperious duty alone could have induced me to consent to. I had to do it, however, but not till I had succeeded in gratifying the only remaining wish of her broken heart—“to leave the world for a few months, that she might be alone, free to abandon herself entirely to the dear, angelic memory of her lost joy....”
Stella uttered no complaint. Her grief was mute. But she had expressed this desire, and it was granted. Livia obtained a place of retreat for her in a part of her convent that [pg 781] was not cloistered. It was there I left her, in the shadow of that sweet sanctuary, near the tenderest, strongest heart she could have to lean on, in presence of the magnificent prospect before her, and beneath the brilliant canopy of that glorious sky, beyond which she could follow in spirit the treasure she had been deprived of, but which she felt sure of some day finding again!
XLIII.
I was filled with solemn emotion when, having taken leave of my brother and all the friends who had accompanied me on board, I at length found myself alone with Ottavia on the deck of the boat, gazing at the receding mountains, hills, villas, and the smiling, flowery shores of the Bay of Naples as they vanished away. Two years had scarcely flown since the day when this prospect met my eyes for the first time. But during this short period so many different feelings had agitated my heart, and so many events had crossed my path, that the time seemed as long as a whole life.
Joys and sorrows, ardent hopes and bitter deceptions, severe trials, dangerous temptations, a deadly struggle, grace—to crown all! grace luminous and wonderful—had all succeeded each other in my soul. And to all these remembrances was now added the new sorrow which set on these last days a mournful, heartrending seal! The death of a child, it is true, would seem to the indifferent to seriously wound no heart but its mother's. Mine, however, bled profusely, and the sudden death of the angelic little creature I had so much loved, as well as the separation that so soon took place, cast an inexpressible gloom over the hour of departure I had so eagerly longed for, and which I had obtained at the price of sacrifices which till now had not seemed worthy of being counted. Truly, the words already quoted do not apply less to earthly affections than to the divine love that overrules them and includes them all: “There is no living in love without some pain or sorrow.” This is indubitable. The more tender the affection, the more exquisite the suffering it entails. But by way of recompense, in proportion as these cruel wounds are multiplied, the never-failing supreme love affords a remedy by revealing itself more and more fully, and thereby supplying the place of all these vanished joys. This love alone assures the promise, the pledge, of their restoration and immortal duration!
Therefore, whatever the sadness of this hour; whatever the desolation of heart with which I gazed at the convent on yonder height where I had just parted from Stella and my sister with so many tears—in short, whatever the emotions of all kinds that seemed combined to overwhelm me, I felt, in spite of them, I lived a truer, freer life than when for the first time, surrounded with illusions and deceitful hopes, I crossed this bay in all the intoxication of radiant happiness!