Kitabı oku: «The Hill of Venus», sayfa 14

"Are you not Queen of Phantoms, – Proserpina, – Lady of Shadows, you – as in the masque at Avellino?"

She shivered in his arms. He pressed her more closely to his heart.

"It was a long time ago!"

"And then as now you moved in a masque, in which I have no part."

A long silence enfolded them. She nestled close to him.

"I am tired, – very tired," she crooned, as a child about to fall asleep. "Francesco, help me to forget the years! I am afraid!"

"Afraid?"

"Of myself! Sometimes I dare not be alone at night! No, – no, – it is not that! The inner darkness! There is no weeping there, – only silence, – silence, – and the gathering gloom!"

She held his hands in her own.

"But for this," she cried with passionate pressure, "I should long have cursed God and died – "

Her voice died away in the empty stillness without response.

"It is peace I crave," she said wearily, "a peace, such as broods over a sunset world!"

"The peace of a dying day!" he replied. "The peace I seek is of a day that stoops not to evening."

"And this peace, – have you found it?"

Her eyes were fixed gravely on his own.

"I am as one who gropes in twilight by a path half seen, towards a goal he does not know. Not for me the peace of the goal! But there is peace also of the quest: a peace I would not forego!"

They had arisen and walked for a time in silence, seeking the remoter regions of the garden. The softened siesta lights gave to the distant hills an aspect of pearl and jasper.

It was drawing towards sunset; red banners streaked the amethyst of the western sky.

A saffron mist enveloped the curves of Vesuvius, shot with gold and crimson, merging in dusky purple. In the plains the fertile fields reclaimed round the base of Castiglioné gleamed russet with vines, gray with olives. Beyond the grim walls of distant Astura stretched the chalk-lands of Torre del Greco.

As they walked side by side, Francesco felt the rhythmic life in Dana's body. The wan, appealing face was close to his. An instant, and the passion of the sky leaped into it. Theirs was the calm of a still pool, which hovers till the wind breaks it into the myriad agitations of life. He drew her towards him; her head resting on his shoulder, as if there she had found a home.

The evening star shone out in the fading sky.

The dusk was travelling towards the night.

Creation shivered towards a deeper dream.

The summer moon had risen, shedding its magic light over the Gulf of Naples.

The very soul of Francesco was thrilled by the harmony around him; the harmony in the moon's golden trail, which fell upon the waters, a blazing path, reaching from Posilippo to the rim of the horizon, harmony in the soft murmur of the sea, and the light breeze which carried, together with the salt freshness of the sea-air, sweet perfumes from the shores of Sorento with their lemon and orange groves; harmony in the silvery curves of Vesuvius, wrapped in luminous mists, its rugged cone emitting a white smoke, which trailed along the upper zones of the air, the summit of the mountain flaring up from time to time, like dying embers consecrated to the gods, the gods who had died, had risen again, and had again expired.

"How wondrous lovely the night!" Francesco at last turned to his silent companion. "All nature seems as one magic blossom – "

"My blossom-season is past," she answered very lightly.

"It is always blossom-season where Proserpina treads," said Francesco, his eyes fixed on the face he loved so well.

"You look almost as you did, when we were both happy."

"Is it so long ago? Yes, I am old, Ilaria. Our youth seems far, far away!"

"Perhaps I too am not old enough, to be young! Our youth – " she paused with a sob.

Francesco gazed at her solicitously.

"Even here?"

She gave him a wan, small smile.

"Just now, one might forget!"

"It is a great art, to forget," said Francesco tenderly. "You need it, Ilaria! What sufferings have been yours!"

She returned his look.

He understood.

Ilaria saw the pain written on his brow, as he looked at her with tenderness undisguised. She felt his spirit lying openly before her, as when they were both at the Court of Avellino.

"From the look on your forehead," she said softly, "you have lived long in your cell, since last we met! So it was meant, I think, from the beginning!"

"Assuredly so it was meant," he replied. "But I am very sorrowful, for I see not what was meant for you!"

She smiled at him, as if to reassure.

"If Fate has guided my life ill, not yours the fault," she said soothingly.

In her, reserve still obtained, yet without a trace of her late perplexing defiance. Asperity had given way to a great gentleness.

"Yet," Francesco hesitated, – "I am tormented by one thought: that for you it had perchance been better, if – "

He paused with drooping eyes, then continued:

"I could not profit by the dispensation of Clement and remain a true man. But you – " and again he paused.

A flash of her old-time perverseness lighted up Ilaria's sad eyes.

"Why pause?" she asked, arching her brow. "You mean that which is moral disaster for one, might be salvation for the other? And that, since my salvation should be dearer to you than your own – "

She broke out into quizzical mirth. But she was swiftly grave again, though tremulous.

"I, too, have lost myself in the quest of happiness," she said, clasping and unclasping her white fingers. "Dread and desire have beaten me hither and thither! Great waves have tossed me! On the very day of your departure from Avellino the Viceroy asked me whom I would wed! Your name leaped to my lips. I told him I would have none other. Even as I spoke the dread seized me! I said to myself: this thing can never be! Then you went away – and I was engulfed in darkness. When we met at Rome I realized what I had done! Yet in the very effort to keep you far, I drew you near! Thus Fate had willed it! When we met at Fonté Gaia, I knew what in one sunset of Avellino I had merely dreamed: my love for you lived – in all my life the one abiding light. Longing and horror racked me! She is cold, and foul, and false, that White Lady – and the gifts she offers turn to poison in the grasp. But it was that other who conquered, – your White Lady, – not mine! She was ever a generous enemy, and in taking you from me, she has given me back my love!"

She had been looking at him with wide piteous eyes, even as a child might do. On a sudden she covered her face, dropped into a seat among the bays and myrtles, and broke into wild weeping.

The strong sense of bondage came back with a fuller force as though to menace her with the fateful realism of her lot. A hand seemed to sweep down and wave her back with a meaning so sinister that she had the feeling of standing on the brink of a mysterious sea, whose waves sang to her a song of peril, of misery and desire in the dim green twilight of some coral dungeon. The lure of the unknown beat upon her eyes, while love and hate, like attendant spirits, beckoned her onward with a weird, perpetual clamor.

Francesco tried in vain to soothe her, calling her by all the endearing names of the past, and pressing her closely to his heart.

"I do not understand," she cried, sobbing convulsively. "I have wished no one ill! Ever have I desired only fairness and love, and fullness of sweet life. And the beauty I seek is befouled by my seeking, my love has stained my beloved; and when I clutch at life, life crumbles within my grasp. Wherein has my quest been wrong?"

"Not wrong," he said unsteadily – "not wrong, – I trust!"

She looked at him bewildered.

"I, too, would turn from that agonizing God upon the Cross to paths where roses bloom," Francesco replied, heavy-hearted. "I have been walking amid shadows, and I have lost the way."

She caught at his hand and drew it piteously to her lips, but made no attempt to retain it.

"I am that Proserpina who has lost the spring," she said, raising her haunting eyes to his. "Yet one comfort is left me still, – one stay, that shall not fail!"

"And that?"

There was a strange expression about her face, but she was silent.

A shudder seized him with the swift suspicion of her meaning.

"You shall not!" he cried almost roughly. "You shall not! I, too, – did I give way to that fierce longing, – you shall not yield to that crawling weakness!"

But Ilaria interrupted him.

"Oh! my dear, I meant not that!" she said. "Of weakness I might reck little, of the hurt to you I should reck much. There is that in my heart for you which shall keep me safe henceforth from what would grieve you!"

"What is it then?" he asked relieved. "The comfort, – the stay, – of which you spoke?"

She smiled through her tears; the old-time smile.

"I do not see your life," he said anxiously. "What is it – what shall it be? Till that be known to me, Ilaria, I shall not know rest or peace. You are beautiful, – too beautiful for this licentious court! Here you cannot remain – alone!"

"I fear the twilight," she said, with a shudder. "There is but one goal for me, and, when the hour comes, you shall lead me there. Proserpina will turn Lady of Shadows in very truth, and move veiled through her rose garden."

"But why must this thing be?" he queried with a choking sensation. "I, too, have sinned – "

"Of sin I know nothing," said Ilaria mournfully, "I apprehend neither the word, nor the thing!"

"Then why this last extremity?"

"Will you not understand?" she interposed petulantly. "Your presence here has shown me once for all that I may not continue to walk in the old way; I may not walk in yours, and I would not have you walk in mine! You wavered towards it of late! Once upon a time I should have rejoiced; now my spirit is full of fear."

She crept close to him and looked up at him with tremulous lids.

He caught her to him with all the old-time love in his eyes. All fears, all misgivings, all doubts of the woman he loved, were utterly blotted out in their embrace, and over Ilaria's features there flitted the gleam of a long forgotten happiness.

Her look was far away. Of a sudden she turned to Francesco.

"Will you remain at Naples?"

He gave a shrug.

"Days – weeks – who can tell? A Ghibelline victory may turn the tide."

"I have something to say to you," she said, her face very close to his. "I have long wished to say it: beware of Raniero!"

"I have done him no wrong!"

She made a gesture as one throwing up a libation.

"Fonté Gaia!"

He felt her breath fanning his cheek.

Seized with a sudden madness he threw his arms about her, and kissed her.

Where the roads branched off they parted, after a long passionate embrace. Ilaria returned to the palace, while Francesco bent his footsteps towards the bay, shimmering in the light of the higher risen moon.

He heard her go singing through the garden, a soft chant d'amour that would have gone wondrously to flute and cithern. It died away slowly amid the trees like an elf's song coming from woodlands in the moonlight.

His soul was sobbing within him. He felt his purpose, his resolutions waver. The crisis of his life had come. Alone with Ilaria at Naples! Raniero away, – indulging his lusts!

He had feared this meeting, feared it above all things in heaven or earth!

Again they were abroad, the gods of yore. They rode the wind; they laughed in the far reaches of the sky; they whispered in his heart.

To love her! To possess her!

The thought had suddenly leaped into his brain, taking its first clearly defined form, recoiling upon him, dazzling his eyes.

For this he had lived; for this he had suffered!

And now?

A deeper question came, like a wind in a fog; a fearsome thing. Why should this love be sin? This love, – the one pure emotion in all his life?

In the spiritual darkness which encompassed Francesco, the fire of his old love for Ilaria had leaped high upon the altar of his sacrifice. For her he had kept himself pure, for her he had starved his soul, while his love smouldered in the dark chambers of his heart.

For hours Francesco was as a man possessed, moving through them drearily, as through crowding phantoms, struggling to suppress an imperious craving that tormented him for release.

It was late when he retraced his steps towards his inn.

Gigantic cypresses bordered the way, ranged like dark torch-bearers at a funeral. Their entwined tips, continually caught by the wind from the sea, remained bent like heads drooped in sorrow. White statues of gods gleamed spectre-like in the dark shades. In the laurel thickets glow-worms flickered like funeral tapers. The heavy scent of the magnolias recalled the odor of balsam used for anointing the dead. The waters of the fountain, trickling from an overhanging rock, fell into the sea, drop by drop, like silent tears, as though a nymph were weeping in the cave above, bewailing her sisters, some dark Elysium, the subterranean groves of shadows, the burial grounds of dead gods.

But even sleep brought only one persistent vision to Francesco: a reach of laughing waters, now turquoise, now sapphire, now upheaving into a mighty translucent wave, that curled swiftly towards him, and, quivering within, the face of Ilaria, upturned to his own.

CHAPTER III
AN INTERLUDE

MEANTIME, the atmosphere of this secular court was not distasteful to Francesco. The love of poetry and the arts which had made Naples in the twelfth century the literary centre of Europe, still lingered; and he found pleasant intercourse on lines along which he had long been lonely.

Of Ilaria he saw little. She carried herself with a strange, new dignity and seemed to avoid him even more sedulously than he had planned to avoid her. He heard her spoken of as among the chief beauties of the court. The Regent, it was said, had shown her marks of especial favor, the more noteworthy as the Frangipani were on the side of the empire, fighting against Clement and Charles of Anjou. But his only opportunity of seeing her was at the court functions, which it was his duty to attend. To men of Francesco's temperament the absent has a more constraining force than the present; the dream-Ilaria, with her wavering smile, had borne, it would seem, more intimate relations to his life than the woman he watched from afar. But his restlessness increased with the certainty that Ilaria avoided him; a circumstance their meeting had not led him to fear.

Thus a week dragged on.

The African wind, which carries with it clouds of hot sand from the depths of the Sahara, was raging in the upper regions of the air. On earth there was still absolute calm. The leaves of the palm and the branches of the mimosa hung motionless; the sea alone was agitated. Huge, formless ridges swelled up here and there, dashing themselves against the shore. The west was shrouded in dense gloom, and the sun, in the metallic, cloudless haze, was seen dimly, as through a smoked opal.

The Castello of Astura in the distant plains of Torre del Greco shone white against the black smoke that rose from Vesuvius as from some mighty furnace, spreading out in the shape of a long cloud from Castellamaré to Posilippo. For weeks the mountain had displayed a sinister activity, and at night the red fires were visible far away, over land and sea, like the glow of some great subterranean furnace. The peaceful altar of the gods had been transformed into the terrible torch of the Eumenides.

There were dire forebodings of coming disaster in the air and in the winds. At Torre del Greco penitential processions made the rounds of the sun-baked streets, with lighted candles, subdued chanting and loud sobbing. In Resina and Portici dull terror reigned. And the glare of the August sun had become almost insufferable, as it fell full over the waters to the pencilled line of the southern horizon, where a long circle divided the misty, shimmering dove-color of the Tyrrhene Sea from the hazy skies.

Then, like the knell of doom, the tidings of the fatal battle of Tagliacozzo were wafted to Naples. Conradino's army had been utterly routed. Charles of Anjou was the victor of the day.

The fate of the Swabian youth and that of his companions was still a matter of surmise. They had fled from the battle-field. No one knew the direction of their flight.

And for days Francesco went about as one dazed. The Neapolitans laughed his exhortations to scorn, and seemed to invite the interdict rather than to submit to the Vulture of Provence.

He was ruminating over the situation, wishing for some inspiration, wishing for Ilaria, and noting idly how the soft siesta lights played upon the sea, when Francesco perceived a little pleasure barque skirting the coast, and heading apparently for his favorite spot, – where he had met Ilaria on coming to Naples. As the breeze impelled it nearer, music floated over the waters. A few moments, and he descried within the boat three of the most charming of the younger women of the court, with their attendant cavaliers. He eyed the little boat longingly, as it approached like some swift sprite of the sea. It was at hand now, moored to the tiny wharf, and one of the women called out gaily:

"Messer Eremito, we have found your cell!"

"And like many hermits," laughed Stefano Maconi, "he appears to welcome the intrusion."

"To be welcomed by Messer Francesco," suggested another, "we should be on the barque which Charon is rowing across the Styx."

Francesco found his tongue at last.

"Beauty should always have precedence over departed souls," he said with a smile. "Is it your pleasure to land and to enliven this solitude?"

"No, but to lure you out upon the waters," said the woman who had spoken.

Francesco, carried away by the spirit of the moment, ran down the marble steps of the terrace and leaped lightly into the boat.

"Violetta made a wager that you would not come, – Petronella that you would," said a third. "As for myself – I was neutral. But my fears were with Violetta."

As the sun sank lower, the wind dropped, and the men bent singing to their oars.

"We were playing a game, Messeré," said the Countess Violetta. "We are trying to decide who is the fairest lady of this court, exclusive, of course, – of us three. If we can agree, we shall plan a surprise for that most lovely one!"

"My vote," said Messer Romano Vivaldi, "is for Madonna Ghisola. The dusk of her hair is as soft as that of the thickest smoke of Vesuvius, and, as in the smoke, there are red reflections in it!"

"Beware of the volcano," laughed Petronella. "A merry beauty for me," she improvised, speaking half verse, half prose like the others. "Rose-white as asphodel blossom, and fragrant as the cyclamen of the hills. What say you to the Contessa Leonora? Who can hear her laugh without remembering what some one has said: 'Laughter is the radiance of the soul?'"

"To my mind," said one of the cavaliers, who had not yet spoken, "the Countess Ilaria Frangipani is the fairest woman of the court."

The eyes of Stefano Maconi flashed emphatic assent.

"She is too sad," objected Violetta, who was the youngest of the party.

"So was the sea beneath the clouds of dawn," said the cavalier. "It sighed of sorrows without end. The clouds melted, and the gray waters brightened to turquoise, but whether under clouds or sun, the sea is a mystery."

"She has the grace of the swaying wave," assented Petronella.

"And its light in her eyes," added Camilla.

"The lady is fair," acknowledged Messer Romano, "but too unapproachable for me!"

Startled, Francesco saw, or fancied he saw, a complacent smile flit across the countenance of Stefano Maconi.

"What thinks Messer Francesco of her beauty?" asked

Violetta. "I believe that each new age sees men and women fairer than the last."

"I think, that cannot be," said the Countess Petronella, naively. "Was never woman so fair as Madama Elena of Troy, and she lived before the coming of our Saviour."

"I agree with Madonna Violetta," said Francesco dreamily. "Gazing at Madonna Ilaria I think there is come into the world something strange and new, revealed to us to our joy and our undoing!"

The sun had set. The boatmen were singing together.

 
"Non senti mai Achillé,
Per Pulisena bella,
Le cocenti favillé
Quant' io senti per quella.
 
 
"Udendo sua favella
Angelica é venozza,
Parlar si amorosa
In su la fresca erbetta."
 

"The beauty of this coast," said Francesco, speaking low, "is as the beauty of woman. It transcends all I have imagined, yet is it ever alien. I have felt it in Rome, but not so strongly. In Umbria, in Tuscany all is more pure, more distant, yet more clear. The eye is drawn afar to where earth meets sky; here it seeks to draw all to itself. It is a beauty unhallowed: The triumph of the Pagan World!"

"Is there a city in Italy more Catholic than Naples?" protested Violetta, while the others joined in a chorus of protestation.

"Where in Europe shall you find more priests?" asked Stefano Maconi, shrugging his shoulders. "Where shall you find more churches?"

Francesco had been musing. Now the spirit of contradiction was upon him.

"Even in your churches," he said suddenly, turning to Camilla, "I find something strange. They are sumptuous indeed; yet there steals over me a fearsome feeling, as if the worship were given not to the Deity that is, but to deities long dead, – or worse than dead!"

A slight shudder ran over one or two of the hearers; the boatmen were singing softly.

The stars were out, the boat was nearing the shore. And still the boatmen were singing, as the moon shed her spectral light over the crooning, murmuring waves.

"We are all agreed, are we not, that the Countess Ilaria Frangipani is the fairest?" asked Camilla, as they prepared to land.

"Allow me," said Stefano Maconi, "to be responsible for the proposed surprise. It shall, with your pleasure, take the form of a Festa in the groves of Circé!"

"It will be fair weather to-morrow!" said Violetta. "We shall all be there!"

After they had departed Francesco passed swiftly to and fro along the terrace.

Strange feelings were at work within him. Love, hatred, jealousy were contending for the mastery. He hated the oily cavalier with the smooth, pleasant temper; he hated the man who dared aspire to Ilaria's love. To Raniero he gave not even a thought. He had never felt jealous of the Frangipani. But now Ilaria's name was on the wind! The sea shouted it; the flowers exhaled it. It floated on the night-air; the moon and the stars seemed to whisper it. Ilaria! Ilaria! He was once more abandoned to the older gods!

"I shall not be there!" he murmured to himself, thinking of the Festa. Yet, when the morning came, he was among the first to arrive.