They left the factory, and walked along a road that was enclosed between the walls of silent gardens. The bronze-like laurels were touched with gold at the tops by the setting sun. The air was filled with sparkling gold-dust. "How sweet and terrible was the fate of Gaspara Stampa," said Stelio. "Do you know her Sonnets? Yes, I saw them one day on your table. She was a strange mingling of ice and fire. Sometimes her mortal passion, above the Petrarchism of Aretino, lifted a glorious cry. I remember a magnificent verse of hers:
Vivere ardendo e non sentire il male!"
"Do you remember, Stelio," said La Foscarina, with that peculiar slight smile of hers which gave her face the look of one walking in her sleep, "do you remember the sonnet that begins:
Signore, io so che in me non son più viva,
E veggo omai ch'ancor in voi son morta?"
"I don't remember, Fosca."
"Do you remember your beautiful fancy about the dead Summer? Summer was lying on a funeral barge, dressed in gold like a dogaressa, and the procession was bearing her toward the Island of Murano, where a master of the flame was to enclose her in a shroud of opalescent glass, so that when she should be submerged in the depths of the lagoon, she could at least watch the waving seaweed. Do you remember?"
"It was an evening in September."
"The last night of September, the night of the Allegory. There was a great light on the water. You were in an exalted mood, and talked and talked. What things you said! You had come from solitude, and your overcharged soul broke forth. You poured a sparkling wave of poetry over your companion. A bark passed, laden with pomegranates. I called myself Perdita. Do you remember?"
As she walked she felt the extreme lightness of her step and felt that something in her was vanishing, as if her body were on the point of being changed to an empty chrysalis.
"My name was still Perdita. Stelio, do you recall another sonnet of Gaspara's beginning:
Io vorrei pur che Amor dicesse come
Debbo seguirlo....
And the madrigal beginning:
Se tu credi piacere al mio signore?"
"I did not know you were so familiar with the unhappy Anasilla, my dear."
"Ah, I will tell you. I was hardly fourteen years old when I played in an old romantic tragedy called Gaspara Stampa. I played the leading part. It was at Dolo, where we passed the other day on our way to Strà. We played in a small rustic theater—a kind of tent. It was the year before my mother died. I remember it very well. I can remember the sound of my own voice, which was weak then, when I forced it in the tirades because some one in the wings kept whispering to me to speak louder, louder!... Well, Gaspara was despairing; she wept and raved for her cruel Count. There were many things about it all that my small, profaned soul did not know or understand, and I know not what instinct and comprehension of sorrow led me to find the accent and the cries that could stir the miserable crowd from which we expected to gain our daily bread. Ten hungry persons used me as a breadwinner; brutal necessity cut and tore away from me all the dream-flowers born of my trembling precocity. Oh, it was a time of weeping and suffocation, of terror, of unthinking weariness, of mute horror. Those that martyrized me knew not what they were doing, poor creatures, made stupid by poverty and work. God pardon them and give them peace! Only my mother—she, too, who 'for having loved too well and been too little loved, unhappy lived and died'—only my mother had pity on my pain, and knew how to take me in her arms, how to calm my horrible trembling, to weep when I wept, to console me. My blessed mother!"
Her voice changed. Her mother's eyes once again looked upon her, kind and firm and infinite as a peaceful horizon.—Tell me, tell me what I must do! Guide me, teach me, you who know!—Her heart felt again the clasp of those arms, and from the distance of years the old pain came back, but not harshly; it was almost sweet. The memory of her struggles and her sufferings seemed to bathe her soul in a warm wave, to sustain and comfort it. The test had been hard and the victory difficult, obtained at the price of persistent labor, against brutal and hostile forces. She had witnessed the deepest misery and ruin, she had known heroic efforts, pity, horror, and the face of Death.
"I know what hunger is, Stelio, and what the approach of night seems like when a place of rest is uncertain," she said softly.
She stopped between the high walls, and lifted her little veil, looking deep into her friend's eyes. He grew pale under that look, so sudden was his emotion and surprise at her words. He felt confused, as if in the incoherence of a dream, incapable of applying the true significance of those words to the woman who was smiling at him, holding the delicate glass in her ungloved hand. Yet he had heard what she said, and she stood there before him in her rich fur cape, looking at him with beautiful soft eyes, misty with unshed tears.
"And I have known other things."
It relieved her heart to speak like this; his humility gave her strength, as if she had accomplished some proud and daring deed. She never had felt conscious of her power and worldly glory in the presence of her beloved, but now the memory of her obscure martyrdom, her poverty and hunger, created in her heart a feeling of real superiority over him she believed invincible.
"But I have no fear of suffering," she said, remembering the words he had spoken once: "Tell me you do not fear to suffer.... I believe your soul capable of bearing all the sorrow of the world." And her hand stole up to his cheek and caressed it, and he understood that she had answered those words spoken long ago.
He was silent, as intoxicated as if she had presented to his lips the very essence of her heart pressed out into that crystal cup like the blood of the grape. He waited for her to go on.
They reached a crossroads where stood a miserable hut, falling into ruin. La Foscarina stopped to look at it. The rude, unhinged windows were held open by a stick laid across them. The low sun struck the smoked walls within, and revealed the furniture—a table, a bench, a cradle.
"Do you remember, Stelio," said La Foscarina, "that inn at Dolo where we waited for the train. Vampa's inn, I mean. A great fire burned on the hearth, the dishes glittered on the shelves, and slices of polenta were toasting on the gridiron. Twenty years ago everything was exactly the same—the same fire, the same dishes, the same polenta. My mother and I used to go in there after the performance, and sit on the bench before a table. I had wept, cried, raved, and had died of poison or by the sword, on the stage. I still heard in my ears the resonance of the verses I had uttered, in a voice that was not my own, and a strange will still possessed my soul, and I could not shake it off—it was as if another person, struggling with my inertness, persisted in performing over again those movements and actions. The simulation of an outside life remained in the muscles of my face, and some evenings I could not calm them. Already, even then, the mask, the sensation of the living mask, was beginning to grow. My eyes would remain fixed, and a chill crept at the roots of my hair. I had difficulty in recovering full consciousness of myself and my surroundings.
"The odors from the kitchen sickened me; the food on our plates seemed too coarse, heavy as a stone, impossible to swallow. My disgust at everything sprang from something indescribably delicate and precious, of which I was conscious under all my weariness—a vague feeling of nobility beneath my humiliation. I hardly know how to express it. Perhaps it was the obscure presence of that power which later developed in me, of that election, of that difference wherewith Nature has marked me. Sometimes the consciousness of that difference from others became so strong that it almost raised a barrier between my mother and myself—God forgive me!—almost separated me from her. A great loneliness possessed me; nothing around me had power to touch me any more. I was alone with my destiny. My mother, even though she was with me, gradually receded into an infinite distance. Ah, she was to die soon, and was already preparing to leave me, and perhaps this withdrawal was the forerunner. She used to urge me to eat, with the words only she knew how to say. I answered: 'Wait! Wait!' I could only drink; I had a great craving for cold water. At times, when I was more tired and trembling than usual, I smiled a long-continued smile. And even that dear woman herself, with her deep heart, could not understand whence came my smile!
"Incomparable hours, wherein it seemed that the bodily prison was being broken through by the soul that wandered to the extremest limits of life! What must your youth have been, Stelio! Who can imagine it? We have all felt the weight of sleep that descends upon us after fatigue or intoxication, heavy and sudden as a stroke from a hammer, and it seems to annihilate us. But the power of dreams sometimes seizes upon us in waking hours with the same force; it holds us and we cannot resist it, though the whole thread of our existence seems on the point of being destroyed. Ah, some of the beautiful things you said that night in Venice come back to my mind, when you spoke of her marvelous hands weaving her own lights and shadows in a continuous work of beauty. You alone know how to describe the indescribable.
"Well, ... on that bench, in front of that rustic table, in Vampa's inn at Dolo, where destiny led me again with you, I had the most extraordinary visions that dreams ever have called up in my brain. I saw that which is unforgettable; I saw the real forms around me obliterated by the dream-figures born of my instinct and my thoughts. Under my fixed eyes, dazzled and scorched by the smoky petroleum lamps of the improvised stage, the world of my expression began to throb with life. The first lines of my art were developed in that state of anguish, of weariness, fever, disgust, in which my sensibility became, so to speak, plastic, after the manner of the incandescent material we saw the workmen holding at the end of the tube. In it was a natural aspiration to be modeled, to receive breath, to fill a mold. On certain evenings, in that wall covered with copper utensils, I could see myself reflected as in a mirror, in attitudes of grief or rage; with an unrecognizable face; and, in order to escape from this hallucination, to break the fixity of my gaze, I opened and shut my eyes rapidly. My mother would say, over and over: 'Eat, my daughter, at least eat this.' But what were bread, wine, meat, fruits, all those heavy things, in comparison with what I had within me? I said to her: 'Wait!' and when we rose to go, I used to take only a large piece of bread with me. I liked to eat it in the country the next morning, under a tree, or sitting on the bank of the Brenta.... Oh, those statues! They did not recognize me the other day, Stelio, but I recognized them!
"It was in the month of March, I remember. I went out into the country very early with my bread. I walked at random, though I meant to go to the statues. I went from one to another, and stopped before every one, as if I were paying a visit. Some appeared very beautiful to me, and I tried to imitate their poses. But I remained longer with the mutilated ones, as if to console them. In the evening, on the stage, I remembered some of them while I was acting, and with so deep a feeling of their distance and their solitude that I felt as if I could not speak any more. The audience would grow impatient at these pauses too prolonged. At times, when I had to wait for my companion in the scene to finish his tirade, I used to stand in the attitude of one of those statues, and remain as motionless as if I had been made of stone. I was already beginning to carve my own destiny.
"I loved one of them tenderly; it had lost its arms, which once balanced a basket of fruit on its head. But the hands still remained attached to the basket, and the sight of them always aroused my pity. This statue stood on its pedestal in a flax-field; a little canal of stagnant water was near it, in which the reflected sky repeated the tender blue of the flowers. And always, since that time, in my most glowing moments on the stage, visions of some landscape rise in my memory, particularly when by the mere force of silence I succeed in producing a thrill in the listening throng."
Her cheeks had flushed a little, and as the sun wrapped her in a radiant garment, drawing sparkles from her furs and from the crystal cup, her animation seemed like an increase of light.
"What a spring that was! In one of my wandering journeys I saw a great river for the first time. It appeared to me suddenly, swollen, and flowing rapidly between two wild banks. I felt then how much of divinity there is in a great stream running through the earth. It was the Adige, flowing down from Verona, from the city of Juliet."
An ambiguous emotion filled her heart while she recalled the poverty and poetry of her youth. She was impelled to continue, though she did not know how she had arrived at these confidences, when she had intended to speak to her friend of another young life, not belonging to the past, but to the present. By what surprise of love had she been turned from an effort of her will, from her firm decision to face the painful truth, from the concentration of her slumbering energy to linger in the memory of the past, and to cover with the image of her own lost virgin self that other image which was so different?
"We reached Verona one evening in May. I was devoured by anxiety. I clasped close to my heart the book in which I had copied the lines of Juliet, and continually repeated to myself the words of my first entrance: 'How now? Who calls? I am here. What is your will?' My imagination was excited by a strange coincidence: on that very day I was fourteen years old—the age of Juliet. The Nurse's gossip sounded in my ears; and, little by little, my own destiny seemed mingled with that of the Veronese. At the corner of every street I thought I could see a throng approaching me, accompanying a coffin covered with white roses. When I saw the Arche degli Scaligeri behind its iron bars, I cried to my mother, 'Here is Juliet's tomb!' And I burst into sobs, and had a desperate desire to love and to die. 'O thou too early seen unknown, and known too late!'"
Her voice, repeating the immortal words, penetrated the heart of her lover like a heart-rending melody. She paused a moment, then repeated:
"Too late!"
They were the ominous words spoken by her lover, which she herself had repeated in the garden, when both were on the brink of being swept away on the flood of their passion: "It is late; too late!" The woman that was no longer young now faced the former image of herself, in her maidenhood, throbbing in the form of Juliet before her first dream of love. Having reached the limit of experience, had she not at the same time preserved the dream intact—but to what purpose? If to-day she looked at the image of her far-distant youth, it was only to trample upon it in leading her beloved to the other woman, to her who lived and waited.
With her smile of inimitable sadness, she said:
"I was Juliet! One Sunday in May, in the immense arena in the amphithea............