"I thought--eh! I know not WHAT I have thought. But do not weep: I shall be well now,--quite well. She will come to me when she wakes,--will she?"
Viola could not speak; but she busied herself in pouring forth an anodyne, which she had been directed to give the sufferer as soon as the delirium should cease. The doctor had told her, too, to send for him the instant so important a change should occur.
She went to the door and called to the woman who, during Gionetta"s pretended illness, had been induced to supply her place; but the hireling answered not. She flew through the chambers to search for her in vain,--the hireling had caught Gionetta"s fears, and vanished. What was to be done? The case was urgent,--the doctor had declared not a moment should be lost in obtaining his attendance; she must leave her father,--she must go herself! She crept back into the room,--the anodyne seemed already to have taken benign effect; the patient"s eyes were closed, and he breathed regularly, as in sleep. She stole away, threw her veil over her face, and hurried from the house.
Now the anodyne had not produced the effect which it appeared to have done; instead of healthful sleep, it had brought on a kind of light-headed somnolence, in which the mind, preternaturally restless, wandered about its accustomed haunts, waking up its old familiar instincts and inclinations. It was not sleep,--it was not delirium; it was the dream-wakefulness which opium sometimes induces, when every nerve grows tremulously alive, and creates a corresponding activity in the frame, to which it gives a false and hectic vigour. Pisani missed something,--what, he scarcely knew; it was a combination of the two wants most essential to his mental life,--the voice of his wife, the touch of his Familiar. He rose,--he left his bed, he leisurely put on his old dressing-robe, in which he had been wont to compose. He smiled complacently as the a.s.sociations connected with the garment came over his memory; he walked tremulously across the room, and entered the small cabinet next to his chamber, in which his wife had been accustomed more often to watch than sleep, when illness separated her from his side. The room was desolate and void. He looked round wistfully, and muttered to himself, and then proceeded regularly, and with a noiseless step, through the chambers of the silent house, one by one.
He came at last to that in which old Gionetta--faithful to her own safety, if nothing else--nursed herself, in the remotest corner of the house, from the danger of infection. As he glided in,--wan, emaciated, with an uneasy, anxious, searching look in his haggard eyes,--the old woman shrieked aloud, and fell at his feet. He bent over her, pa.s.sed his thin hands along her averted face, shook his head, and said in a hollow voice,--
"I cannot find them; where are they?"
"Who, dear master? Oh, have compa.s.sion on yourself; they are not here.
Blessed saints! this is terrible; he has touched me; I am dead!"
"Dead! who is dead? Is any one dead?"
"Ah! don"t talk so; you must know it well: my poor mistress,--she caught the fever from you; it is infectious enough to kill a whole city. San Gennaro protect me! My poor mistress, she is dead,--buried, too; and I, your faithful Gionetta, woe is me! Go, go--to--to bed again, dearest master,--go!"
The poor musician stood for one moment mute and unmoving, then a slight shiver ran through his frame; he turned and glided back, silent and spectre-like, as he had entered. He came into the room where he had been accustomed to compose,--where his wife, in her sweet patience, had so often sat by his side, and praised and flattered when the world had but jeered and scorned. In one corner he found the laurel-wreath she had placed on his brows that happy night of fame and triumph; and near it, half hid by her mantilla, lay in its case the neglected instrument.
Viola was not long gone: she had found the physician; she returned with him; and as they gained the threshold, they heard a strain of music from within,--a strain of piercing, heart-rending anguish. It was not like some senseless instrument, mechanical in its obedience to a human hand,--it was as some spirit calling, in wail and agony from the forlorn shades, to the angels it beheld afar beyond the Eternal Gulf. They exchanged glances of dismay. They hurried into the house; they hastened into the room. Pisani turned, and his look, full of ghastly intelligence and stern command, awed them back. The black mantilla, the faded laurel-leaf, lay there before him. Viola"s heart guessed all at a single glance; she sprung to his knees; she clasped them,--"Father, father, _I_ am left thee still!"
The wail ceased,--the note changed; with a confused a.s.sociation--half of the man, half of the artist--the anguish, still a melody, was connected with sweeter sounds and thoughts. The nightingale had escaped the pursuit,--soft, airy, bird-like, thrilled the delicious notes a moment, and then died away. The instrument fell to the floor, and its chords snapped. You heard that sound through the silence. The artist looked on his kneeling child, and then on the broken chords... "Bury me by her side," he said, in a very calm, low voice; "and THAT by mine." And with these words his whole frame became rigid, as if turned to stone. The last change pa.s.sed over his face. He fell to the ground, sudden and heavy. The chords THERE, too,--the chords of the human instrument were snapped asunder. As he fell, his robe brushed the laurel-wreath, and that fell also, near but not in reach of the dead man"s nerveless hand.
Broken instrument, broken heart, withered laurel-wreath!--the setting sun through the vine-clad lattice streamed on all! So smiles the eternal Nature on the wrecks of all that make life glorious! And not a sun that sets not somewhere on the silenced music,--on the faded laurel!
CHAPTER 1.X.
Che difesa miglior ch" usbergo e scudo, E la santa innocenza al petto ignudo!
"Ger. Lib.," c. viii. xli.
(Better defence than shield or breastplate is holy innocence to the naked breast.)
And they buried the musician and his barbiton together, in the same coffin. That famous Steiner--primeval t.i.tan of the great Tyrolese race--often hast thou sought to scale the heavens, and therefore must thou, like the meaner children of men, descend to the dismal Hades!
Harder fate for thee than thy mortal master. For THY soul sleeps with thee in the coffin. And the music that belongs to HIS, separate from the instrument, ascends on high, to be heard often by a daughter"s pious ears when the heaven is serene and the earth sad. For there is a sense of hearing that the vulgar know not. And the voices of the dead breathe soft and frequent to those who can unite the memory with the faith.
And now Viola is alone in the world,--alone in the home where loneliness had seemed from the cradle a thing that was not of nature. And at first the solitude and the stillness were insupportable. Have you, ye mourners, to whom these sibyl leaves, weird with many a dark enigma, shall be borne, have you not felt that when the death of some best-loved one has made the hearth desolate,--have you not felt as if the gloom of the altered home was too heavy for thought to bear?--you would leave it, though a palace, even for a cabin. And yet,--sad to say,--when you obey the impulse, when you fly from the walls, when in the strange place in which you seek your refuge nothing speaks to you of the lost, have ye not felt again a yearning for that very food to memory which was just before but bitterness and gall? Is it not almost impious and profane to abandon that dear hearth to strangers? And the desertion of the home where your parents dwelt, and blessed you, upbraids your conscience as if you had sold their tombs.
Beautiful was the Etruscan superst.i.tion that the ancestors become the household G.o.ds. Deaf is the heart to which the Lares call from the desolate floors in vain. At first Viola had, in her intolerable anguish, gratefully welcomed the refuge which the house and family of a kindly neighbour, much attached to her father, and who was one of the orchestra that Pisani shall perplex no more, had proffered to the orphan. But the company of the unfamiliar in our grief, the consolation of the stranger, how it irritates the wound! And then, to hear elsewhere the name of father, mother, child,--as if death came alone to you,--to see elsewhere the calm regularity of those lives united in love and order, keeping account of happy hours, the unbroken timepiece of home, as if nowhere else the wheels were arrested, the chain shattered, the hands motionless, the chime still! No, the grave itself does not remind us of our loss like the company of those who have no loss to mourn. Go back to thy solitude, young orphan,--go back to thy home: the sorrow that meets thee on the threshold can greet thee, even in its sadness, like the smile upon the face of the dead. And there, from thy cas.e.m.e.nt, and there, from without thy door, thou seest still the tree, solitary as thyself, and springing from the clefts of the rock, but forcing its way to light,--as, through all sorrow, while the seasons yet can renew the verdure and bloom of youth, strives the instinct of the human heart!
Only when the sap is dried up, only when age comes on, does the sun shine in vain for man and for the tree.
Weeks and months--months sad and many--again pa.s.sed, and Naples will not longer suffer its idol to seclude itself from homage. The world ever plucks us back from ourselves with a thousand arms. And again Viola"s voice is heard upon the stage, which, mystically faithful to life, is in nought more faithful than this, that it is the appearances that fill the scene; and we pause not to ask of what realities they are the proxies.
When the actor of Athens moved all hearts as he clasped the burial urn, and burst into broken sobs; how few, there, knew that it held the ashes of his son! Gold, as well as fame, was showered upon the young actress; but she still kept to her simple mode of life, to her lowly home, to the one servant whose faults, selfish as they were, Viola was too inexperienced to perceive. And it was Gionetta who had placed her when first born in her father"s arms! She was surrounded by every snare, wooed by every solicitation that could beset her unguarded beauty and her dangerous calling. But her modest virtue pa.s.sed unsullied through them all. It is true that she had been taught by lips now mute the maiden duties enjoined by honour and religion. And all love that spoke not of the altar only shocked and repelled her. But besides that, as grief and solitude ripened her heart, and made her tremble at times to think how deeply it could feel, her vague and early visions shaped themselves into an ideal of love. And till the ideal is found, how the shadow that it throws before it chills us to the actual! With that ideal, ever and ever, unconsciously, and with a certain awe and shrinking, came the shape and voice of the warning stranger. Nearly two years had pa.s.sed since he had appeared at Naples. Nothing had been heard of him, save that his vessel had been directed, some months after his departure, to sail for Leghorn. By the gossips of Naples, his existence, supposed so extraordinary, was wellnigh forgotten; but the heart of Viola was more faithful. Often he glided through her dreams, and when the wind sighed through that fantastic tree, a.s.sociated with his remembrance, she started with a tremor and a blush, as if she had heard him speak.
But amongst the train of her suitors was one to whom she listened more gently than to the rest; partly because, perhaps, he spoke in her mother"s native tongue; partly because in his diffidence there was little to alarm and displease; partly because his rank, nearer to her own than that of lordlier wooers, prevented his admiration from appearing insult; partly because he himself, eloquent and a dreamer, often uttered thoughts that were kindred to those buried deepest in her mind. She began to like, perhaps to love him, but as a sister loves; a sort of privileged familiarity sprung up between them. If in the Englishman"s breast arose wild and unworthy hopes, he had not yet expressed them. Is there danger to thee here, lone Viola, or is the danger greater in thy unfound ideal?
And now, as the overture to some strange and wizard spectacle, closes this opening prelude. Wilt thou hear more? Come with thy faith prepared.
I ask not the blinded eyes, but the awakened sense. As the enchanted Isle, remote from the homes of men,--
"Ove alcun legno Rado, o non mai va dalle nostre sponde,"--"Ger.Lib.,"
cant. xiv. 69.
(Where ship seldom or never comes from our coasts.)
is the s.p.a.ce in the weary ocean of actual life to which the Muse or Sibyl (ancient in years, but ever young in aspect), offers thee no unhallowed sail,--
"Quinci ella in cima a una montagna ascende Disabitata, e d" ombre oscura e bruna; E par incanto a lei nevose rende Le spalle e i fianchi; e sensa neve alcuna Gli lascia il capo verdeggiante e vago; E vi fonda un palagio appresso un lago."
(There, she a mountain"s lofty peak ascends, Unpeopled, shady, s.h.a.gg"d with forests brown, Whose sides, by power of magic, half-way down She heaps with slippery ice and frost and snow, But sunshiny and verdant leaves the crown With orange-woods and myrtles,--speaks, and lo! Rich from the bordering lake a palace rises slow. Wiffin"s "Translation.")
BOOK II. -- ART, LOVE, AND WONDER.
Diversi aspetti in un confusi e misti.
"Ger. Lib," cant. iv. 7.
Different appearances, confused and mixt in one.
CHAPTER 2.I.
Centauri, e Sfingi, e pallide Gorgoni.
"Ger. Lib.," c. iv. v.
(Centaurs and Sphinxes and pallid Gorgons.)
One moonlit night, in the Gardens at Naples, some four or five gentleman were seated under a tree, drinking their sherbet, and listening, in the intervals of conversation, to the music which enlivened that gay and favourite resort of an indolent population. One of this little party was a young Englishman, who had been the life of the whole group, but who, for the last few moments, had sunk into a gloomy and abstracted reverie.
One of his countrymen observed this sudden gloom, and, tapping him on the back, said, "What ails you, Glyndon? Are you ill? You have grown quite pale,--you tremble. Is it a sudden chill? You had better go home: these Italian nights are often dangerous to our English const.i.tutions."
"No, I am well now; it was a pa.s.sing shudder. I cannot account for it myself."
A man, apparently of about thirty years of age, and of a mien and countenance strikingly superior to those around him, turned abruptly, and looked steadfastly at Glyndon.
"I think I understand what you mean," said he; "and perhaps," he added, with a grave smile, "I could explain it better than yourself." Here, turning to the others, he added, "You must often have felt, gentlemen, each and all of you, especially when sitting alone at night, a strange and unaccountable sensation of coldness and awe creep over you; your blood curdles, and the heart stands still; the limbs shiver; the hair bristles; you are afraid to look up, to turn your eyes to the darker corners of the room; you have a horrible fancy that something unearthly is at hand; presently the whole spell, if I may so call it, pa.s.ses away, and you are ready to laugh at your own weakness. Have you not often felt what I have thus imperfectly described?--if so, you can understand what our young friend has just experienced, even amidst the delights of this magical scene, and amidst the balmy whispers of a July night."
"Sir," replied Glyndon, evidently much surprised, "you have defined exactly the nature of that shudder which came over me. But how could my manner be so faithful an index to my impressions?"
"I know the signs of the visitation," returned the stranger, gravely; "they are not to be mistaken by one of my experience."
All the gentleman present then declared that they could comprehend, and had felt, what the stranger had described.
"According to one of our national superst.i.tions," said Mervale, the Englishman who had first addressed Glyndon, "the moment you so feel your blood creep, and your hair stand on end, some one is walking over the spot which shall be your grave."