Matilde Serao - The Land of Cockayne

'O Lamb of God, forgive me! I am ungrateful and ignorant, a miserable sinner. Forgive me, forgive! Do not make me suffer for my sins. Do me this grace for the sake of my languishing, dying daughter. I am unworthy, but bless me for her sake. O sorrowful Virgin, who hast suffered so much, understand and help me! Send a vision to Sister Maria degli Angioli. O blessed spirit, Beatrice Cavalcanti, my saintly wife, if I caused you sorrow, forgive me! Forgive me if I shortened your life! Do it for your daughter's sake: save your family. Appear to your daughter—she is innocent and good; tell her the words to save us, blessed spirit! blessed spirit!'

The girl, who beard it all, was so frightened she fled with her eyes shut, holding her head. When she got to her room, she thought she heard a deep, sad sigh behind her, and felt a light hand on her shoulder. Mad with terror, she could not cry out; she fell her whole length on the ground, and lay as if she were dead.

Not once for a month past had Dr. Antonio Amati seen that thoughtful, delicate girl's face between the yellowish old curtains in the balcony opposite his study window, which looked into the big court of Rossi Palace, formerly Cavalcanti. Two years had passed from the day that one of the youngest, though one of the most distinguished, Naples doctors had come to take up his abode there alone, with one man-servant and a housekeeper, but bringing a crowd of old and new patients after him, filling the spacious, but rather dark, stairs with a going and coming of busy, preoccupied people. From the very first day he had noticed opposite his study window in passing that pure oval, the faintly pink, delicate complexion, those proud, soft eyes, that touched the heart from their gentleness. He saw all that at once, in spite of the windows opposite being dull from old age and her appearing for a short time only. He was a quick observer; in fact, a great part of his medical skill was owing to his quick glance, his lively, true, deep intuition.

'A heart with no sun,' he said to himself, turning round to put his heavy scientific volumes into his carved oak shelves. Nor was he surprised when the Rossi Palace door-keeper, humbly consulting him under the portico, as he got into his carriage for his round of afternoon visits, about a feverish illness that had inflamed her spleen, told him, amongst a flood of other gossip, that that angel opposite his balcony was Lady Bianca Maria Cavalcanti, a lady of high birth, but reduced in circumstances, poor girl, not by her own fault.... 'But perhaps she will become a nun,' the woman ended up. 'A heart with no sun,' Dr. Antonio Amati thought again as he went away, after prescribing for the sickly, talkative door-keeper.

But he had no time to remark or think of aristocratic ladies come down by bad luck, or their parents' sins, to obscurity and wretchedness; he could not let his fancy linger long on that melancholy life alongside of his, but so different from it. He was a silent, energetic man of action; a Southerner not fond of words, who put into his daily work all the strength other Southerners put into dreams, talk, and long speeches, accustoming himself to this self-government, calling up every day the violence of his fiery temper to conquer it by strength of will, and make use of it for scientific practical work, keeping always in touch with life, books, and suffering humanity, which at thirty-five had made him famous. He was proud of his great reputation, but not conceited, though lucky fortune had not made him mean or lowered him. No, he could not dream about Bianca Maria's lily face; too many around him were ill of typhus, smallpox, consumption, and a hundred other severe, almost incurable, illnesses that required his daily help and energies. Too many people called to him, implored him, stretched out their hands for help, besieging his waiting-room and the hospital door, watching for him at the University and other sick people's doors patiently and submissively, as if waiting for a saviour. Too many were suffering, sick and dying, for him to dream about that slight apparition, and admire the pale, thoughtful face bending under the weight of black tresses.

Still, through that life of useful work for himself and others, through the seeming hardness, hurry, even scientific brutality of his constant activity, which was made up for by his noble daily sacrifices, that silently attractive figure pleased Dr. Antonio Amati's fancy. Gradually it took its place each morning among the things he admired and liked to find in their places every day: his books, old leather note-books, some mementos of childhood and youth, a wax model of his dead sister's little hand, an old photograph of his mother, who lived in Campobasso province, a local accent he had not lost, in spite of living eighteen years in Naples and his travels in France and Germany.

Bianca Maria came into this harmonious atmosphere, that gently satisfied this strong man's eyes and heart. Antonio Amati did not try to see her oftener, nor to know and speak to her; it was enough to see her in the early morning, behind her balcony windows, look down vaguely into the dull, damp court, then disappear as slowly as she came—a quiet, solitary figure, not sorrowful, but not smiling. Between one patient going and another coming, Dr. Amati got up from his desk, and went as far as the balcony; in one or other of these little walks, that seemed to serve him as a pause, a rest, a distraction between one bit of work finished and another begun, he caught sight of Bianca Maria's pale, thoughtful face; and for two years that satisfied him. It is true that sometimes in these two years he had met her on the stairs, or in the Rossi Palace dark entrance, with her father or Margherita; he took off his hat, and she acknowledged his bow unsmilingly. She, too, knew him well, seeing him every day; but she looked him in the face frankly, with none of that extreme reserve, half smile, half sham indifference, or any of the little coquetries of commonplace girls. Frankly and innocently she looked at him a minute, returned his bow, and then her proud, gentle eyes took their vague thoughtful expression again.

They did not make daily appointments to see each other—he was too serious, too engrossed in duty to do so, and she was a simple creature, living too solitary an inward life to think of it—only they saw each other every day, and got accustomed to it.

'But perhaps she is to be a nun,' the door-keeper repeated sometimes. She had got over her illness, and employed herself over other people's ailments, moral and physical.

But the doctor walked on without replying, thinking of the sad chorus of lamentations that went on around him, from rich and poor, for real, present, imminent sorrows, almost hopeless to cure, but worthy of his courage and talent to attempt. Still, in that damp, south-east wind this autumn morning, whilst bad coughs, heart complaints, fevers came by turns dolefully in his list of cases, this sickly atmosphere of bad weather in Naples making them worse, he had, as usual, filled up his leisure by going to the balcony; and not seeing Bianca Maria, he felt annoyance of a latent, indefinite kind, which every new country or suburban patient made him forget; but it came back when the patient left. The forenoon passed in the gloom of the great writing-table, covered with maroon; of these colourless, anxious faces held up to him; these weak, complaining voices; lean breasts, or flabby with unhealthy fat, that were bared for him to find traces of consumption or atrophy, with wheezing, funereal coughs. Never had he felt the disagreeables of his profession so much as that day. Bianca Maria did not appear.

'She is ill,' he thought momentarily. Having thought of this, he felt as sure as if someone had told him or if he had seen her ill himself. She was sick. He at once thought of helping her, with that instinct to save life all great doctors have. He thought it over a minute; but his mind came back to the realities of life at once. It was folly to be taken up about a person he did not know, and who probably did not care to have him. If they needed his skill, they would have called him. For all that, he was sure Bianca Maria was ill.