When this happened he instinctively sought some place of refuge from the phantoms that beset him, and it was the maternal arms of Madame Floriani which were to surround him as if they were a rampart, and her bosom on which to rest his aching head. Then, when he opened his eyes and gazed wild and distraught around him, he would see the beautiful, loving faces of Celio and Stella smiling at him. He returned their smile mechanically, as if he were making an effort to please them, but meanwhile his nightmare had faded and his panic was forgotten. His brain, which was still weak, also developed strange fancies. They would bring little Salvator’s rosy face close to his and when he looked at the child it seemed to him that he had wings like a cherub and fluttered round his head so as to cool him. Beatrice’s voice was unusually sweet and when she chattered quietly with her brothers, he thought he could hear her singing. In the fresh, soothing tone of her voice he could hear musical notes discernible to him alone, and one day when the little one was quietly arguing about a toy with her sister, Madame Floriani was surprised to hear the prince tell her that the child sang Mozart better than anyone else alive. “She has a beautiful nature,” he added, making a great effort to convey his thought “She has probably heard a lot of music, but she can only remember Mozart, never anything from the other masters.”

“And doesn’t Stella sing too?” asked Lucrezia, who was trying to penetrate to the meaning behind his words.

“She sometimes sings Beethoven, but it is less consistent, less sustained, less uniform.”

“And what about Celio? He never sings.”

“I can only hear Celio when he walks. There is so much grace and harmony in his person and his movements that the ground echoes beneath his footsteps and the room is filled with long, vibrating sounds.”

“And the little one?” asked Lucrezia, offering him the cheek of her bambino. “He is the noisiest one, he sometimes shouts. Doesn’t he hurt you?”

“He never hurts me. I can’t hear him. I think I have become deaf to noise. But melody and rhythm still affect me. When that cherub,” he added, pointing to little Salvator, “is before me, I see a kind of shower of bright colours dancing around my bed, which are shapeless, but dispel the evil visions. Ah! Do not remove the children. I shall be free of pain, as long as the children are there.”

Hitherto Karol had lived with the thought of death. He had grown up so accustomed to it that, before he had been stricken with this illness, he had reached the stage when he believed that he belonged to death and that every day of respite which he had been granted was by mere chance. He even went so far as to joke about it; but when we form that kind of idea when we are well, we can accept it with philosophical calm, whereas it is rare not to be driven to panic when it invades a mind weakened by illness. In my opinion the only sad thing about death is that it comes to us when we are so prostrated and demoralised that we can no longer see it for what it is and that it even terrifies souls which are in themselves calm and resolute. Thus, what happens to most sick people happened to the prince. When he had to pit himself at close quarters against the idea of dying in the spring time of life, the sweet melancholy on which he had fed hitherto degenerated into black despair.

If his mother had been his nurse in the present situation, she would have raised his spirits in a way entirely different from that used by Madame Floriani She would have spoken to him of the life hereafter, she would have surrounded him with the austere external succour of religion. The priest would have come to his aid and Karol, prepared by ritual pomp, would have accepted and endured his fate. But Lucrezia proceeded otherwise. She thrust aside from him the idea of death and when he gave her the impression that he thought it imminent and inevitable, she teased him tenderly and pretended to a calmness of mind she did not always have.

She applied so much prudence and apparent serenity to the matter that she succeeded in winning his confidence. She soothed him, not by telling him what it is too late to tell the sick, namely to despise life (that is a form of courage which is not to be relied upon, because this courage can very often kill,) but she cheered him by making him believe in life, and she quickly realised that he still loved, and fiercely loved, this physical life which he had scorned so much at the time when it was not menaced.

Salvator was afraid, because he thought that his friend would not have the moral strength to resist the disease. “How do you hope to save him?” he would say to Madame Floriani, “when he has been weary of life so long and especially since his mother’s death, and when he is slowly and gently yielding to consumption? From the almost pleasure which this idea gave him I had the feeling that he was already stricken and that when he fell he would never rise again.”

“You were wrong then and are wrong now,” answered Lucrezia. “No one has a taste for dying unless he is a monomaniac and your friend is certainly not that. He is well balanced and this nervous perturbation which was making him so gloomy will vanish when the present crisis passes. I assure you, he wishes to live and he will live.”

Karol did indeed wish to live, he wished to live for Lucrezia Floriani.