"Ah, "Giorno, Herr!" said the gentleman, looking up from his book; "what is that?"
He came towards us as he spoke, and opening the topmost volume of the pile which the old man had deposited on the table, examined the t.i.tle-page.
"Sancta Maria! " cried he, his whole manner changing in a moment from easy indifference to earnest interest: "what, you will part with this after all? Why, it is the same book I offered you two hundred pistoles for at Rome! You wouldn"t sell it then at any price, you said!"
"No, Signor, but I will now."
Ah, it was a generous martyrdom, but the pangs of it were very grievous; what wonder that the martyr sighed a little!
"The same price, then, Herr? Don"t let us bargain about it. The Eminenza is liberal in these things, you know; and you"re poor, my friend, I know."
He nodded at the old German with a sort of familiar patronage, as though he would have said, "Don"t be modest, I"ll stand by you!"
But the Herr seemed to notice neither words nor manner, though I thought the heart beneath the shabby coat recoiled at that instant somewhat unusually.
"The same price, if you please, Signor."
The Cardinal"s agent, for such I guessed this tender-hearted individual before us to be, flashed a keen sudden glance of mingled scrutiny and surprise at the calm dignified face of the philosopher, whistled pleasantly a short aria of two notes, apparently with some design of a.s.sisting his mental digestion to victory over a tough morsel; and then turning to an iron-bound cashbox at his elbow, unlocked it, and produced therefrom the stipulated sum, which he counted out with much celerity, and forthwith handed to the old German. With tremulous fingers the Herr gathered up the money, as though it had been the price of a friend"s betrayal, and drooped his n.o.ble head upon his breast, like a war-horse smitten to the heart in the pa.s.sionate front of battle.
What he had done was registered in Heaven.
"Addio, Herr."
"Guten-tag, Signor."
Herr Ritter did not go back to his lodgings then. He went past the low house with its green verandah, blistering under the fierce noon-sun, and across the pastures to the cottage of "Lora Delcor.
She was sitting at the open door, her thin transparent palms pressed tightly together, as though she were praying, and her great fringed eyelids dark and heavy with their burden of pain. Ah! "Lora! "Lora!
"blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted!" Not in the world that men have made, daughter of earth, ah, not in that; but in the world that G.o.d shall make hereafter!
"Herr Ritter! you have been? O tell me what she said! "Tista is not here, he is gone into the woods to gather herbs."
"Have you told "Tista anything?"
"About this? Nothing. I thought I would wait until I knew--"
She had risen from her seat to greet him, with painful agitation; and now she staggered, and I think would have fallen, but that the old man timely caught and held her in his gentle grasp.
"Be comforted, dear "Lora," he whispered; " bring you good news."
She dropped into her wooden chair and covered her face with her bloodless hands, weeping and sobbing for joy, as only women can who have suffered much and long and alone.
Herr Ritter stood by, watching her kindly, and stroking his white flowing beard in silence, until she had wept her fill; and her dark blissful eyes, dreamy with the mist of fallen tears, were lifted again to his face, like caverned pools in summer refreshed with a happy rain.
"What did she say? she sent me a note? a message?"
Herr Ritter poured his pistoles into her lap.
"I bring you these," said he, simply.
"Jesu-Maria! She sent me all this! how good! how generous! but ought I to take it, Herr?"
"It is for "Tista; to pay his apprenticeship. But there is a condition, dear Frau; "Tista is not to know who sends him this gift.
He is to be told it comes from an unknown friend. When he is older he will know, perhaps."
"My kind dear "Lotta! Ah, she would have "Tista learn to love her, then, before she tells him of her goodness! For him I cannot refuse the money; can I, Herr? But I may go and thank her myself; I may go and thank her?"
"Not just yet, "Lora. Your sister is obliged to leave this place tomorrow morning; Signor Nero"s engagements compel him to proceed; and so for the present time she charged me to bear you with the gift, her greeting, and her farewell."
He was looking at her with grave mild eyes, while he leant against the cottage-wall and stroked his silver beard.
Daughter of earth, let G.o.d be judge; for He alone understands the heart of mortal man. As for me, I am only a flower of the dust of the ground, yet I confess I thought the deceit the old philosopher used, at least more graceful and gentle than the candour of Carlotta Nero.
""Lora: you are happy now?"
She looked up and smiled in his eyes.
In that smile the philosopher had his reward.
Soon afterwards Battista Delcor was apprenticed to a chemist in the town, and the cup of his content was filled to the brim; but as yet, neither his mother nor Herr Ritter told him the name of his unknown friend. Then it grew towards the end of summer, and the ferns and the brake began to tarnish in the woodlands, and Dolores Delcor sickened, and failed, and whitened more and more from day to day, till at last she could do no work at all, but lived only at the hands of "Tista and Herr Ritter.
As for me, I blossomed still in the balcony beneath the green verandah, looking always into the dark studio, and noting how, one by one, the tall musty books upon the old German"s shelves were bartered away for gold.
But one morning, just at dawn, the woman of that sorrowful name and dolorous life pa.s.sed away into her rest, while she slept. And when "Tista, with his heart almost breaking for grief, came at the hour of sunrise to tell Herr Ritter that she was dead, the old man looked out across the hazy blue of the eastern reaches at the sea of golden splendour breaking beyond them, and answered only in his quiet patient way, that he had known it could not be for long.
I heard the words and understood them, but to the boy they meant nothing.
Then there came a night when the shelves stood empty, save for the skull and the fossils, and Herr Ritter wore a strange luminous aspect upon his placid face, that was not of the shadows nor of the lights of earth. For five days he had broken no bread, and his strength had failed him for want and for age, and no friend had been to visit him. "Tista, I suppose, had his business now, and of late his presence in the dark studio had become more and more rare; not that he was unkind, but that he was full of youth, and the vigorous love of youth; and the old man"s talk was wearisome to ears that delighted in sounds of laughter and frolic. And besides all this, he did not know how much he owed to the old philosopher, for Herr Ritter still kept silence.
All the autumn day had been sultry, and the wind seemed to have fallen asleep in some remote corner of the sky, for there had scarce been air enough to stir the feathery ta.s.sels of the pasture gra.s.ses, and the stillness of drought and heat had been everywhere unbroken.
But when I looked towards the west at sundown, I saw that all the long low horizon was shrouded in twirling c.u.muli, with tops of lurid flame; and great shafts of red tempestuous light, shot upward from the dying sun, launched themselves over the heavens, and hung there like fiery swords above a city of doom.
Herr Ritter sat up late that night, reading a packet of old worn- looking letters, which he had taken out of a small wooden box beneath his bed; and as he read them, burning them to tinder one by one in the flame of his lamp. A little torn morsel of a note, yellow with age, and half charred with the smoke of the destruction it had escaped, fluttered down from the table through the open cas.e.m.e.nt, and fell in the balcony by my side. There were words on the paper, written in stiff German characters, orthodox and methodical in every turn and upstroke and formal pothook. They were these:--
"I distinctly refuse to give my daughter in marriage to a man who is so great a fool as to throw away his chances of wealth and fame for the sake of a mere whim. Yesterday you thought fit to decline a Professorship which was offered you, on account of a condition being attached to your acceptance of it. You fancied you could not honestly fulfil that condition, and you lost your promotion.
Very well: you have also lost my daughter. I see plainly that you will never be rich, for you will never get on in the world, and no child of mine shall be wife to you. Consider your engagement with her at an end."
Alas! In this, then, was the story of the crimson roses!
It was far into the night when the last letter dropped to powder upon the table, and the old German, not pausing to undress, laid himself wearily down upon the little bed in the dark corner to take his rest. The oil of the lamp was well-nigh spent then, and its languid flame quivered dimly upon the wan starved hands that were folded above the rusty coat, and on the n.o.ble face with its pale closed eyelids and patient lips, stedfast and calm as the face of a marble king. Over his head the beautiful woman and her crimson flowers ever and anon brightened in the fitful leaping light, and shone like a beacon of lost hope upon a life that had been wrecked and cast adrift in a night of storm. He died as he had lived, in silence; and his death was the sacrifice of a martyr, the fall of a warrior at his post.
Then the tempest broke over all the Piedmont lands, and the wind arose as a giant refreshed with his rest, and drove the dark thunder- clouds upward before the sounding pinions of his might like demon hounds upon the track of a flying world. Then came the sharp swift hiss of the stinging hail and rain, and the baying of the hurricane, and the awful roll of the storm that shook the whole broad heaven from end to end. Strange! that in the tumult of such a wild and terrible night as this, so gentle and so calm a soul should be destined to pa.s.s away!
Once again for a single instant I saw him, in the midst of a dazzling flash of lightning that showed me, clear and distinct as in a mirror, the whole of the silent chamber where the lamp had gone out, and the charred tinder of the burnt letters was scattered over the wooden table.
He lay motionless upon the white draped bed, a hero slain in the hour of his triumph, with broad chivalrous brows and tranquil lips, whence speech had fled for ever, grand and serene in the repose of a sleep that, like "Lora"s, had borne him away into peace.
For him there was no longer storm, nor darkness, nor conflict. He beheld his G.o.d face to face in the light of the Perfect Day.