for even now, while I feel how ungrateful I was to believe, suspect, aught injurious and false to my preserver, my tears flow from happiness, not remorse. Oh!” she continued, with a simple fervour, unconscious, in her innocence and her generous emotions, of all the secrets she betrayed—“thou knowest not how bitter it was to believe thee not more good, more pure, more sacred than all the world. And when I saw thee—the wealthy, the noble, coming from thy palace to minister to the sufferings of the hovel—when I heard those blessings of the poor breathed upon thy parting footsteps, I felt my very self exalted—good in thy goodness, noble at least in those thoughts that did not wrong thee.”
“And thinkest thou, Viola, that in a mere act of science there is so much virtue? The commonest leech will tend the sick for his fee. Are prayers and blessings a less reward than gold?”
“And mine, then, are not worthless? Thou wilt accept of mine?”
“Ah, Viola!” exclaimed Zanoni, with a sudden passion, that covered her face with blushes, “thou only, methinks, on all the earth, hast the power to wound or delight me!” He checked himself, and his face became grave and sad. “And this,” he added, in an altered tone, “because, if thou wouldst heed my counsels, methinks I could guide a guileless heart to a happy fate.”
“Thy counsels! I will obey them all. Mould me to what thou wilt. In thine absence, I am as a child that fears every shadow in the dark; in thy presence, my soul expands, and the whole world seems calm with a celestial noonday. Do not deny to me that presence. I am fatherless and ignorant and alone!”
Zanoni averted his face, and, after a moment’s silence, replied calmly—
“Be it so. Sister, I will visit thee again!”
CHAPTER 3.II.
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.
Shakespeare.
Who so happy as Viola now! A dark load was lifted from her heart: her step seemed to tread on air; she would have sung for very delight as she went gayly home. It is such happiness to the pure to love—but oh, such more than happiness to believe in the worth of the one beloved. Between them there might be human obstacles—wealth, rank, man’s little world. But there was no longer that dark gulf which the imagination recoils to dwell on, and which separates forever soul from soul. He did not love her in return. Love her! But did she ask for love? Did she herself love? No; or she would never have been at once so humble and so bold. How merrily the ocean murmured in her ear; how radiant an aspect the commonest passer-by seemed to wear! She gained her home—she looked upon the tree, glancing, with fantastic branches, in the sun. “Yes, brother mine!” she said, laughing in her joy, “like thee, I have struggled to the light!”
She had never hitherto, like the more instructed Daughters of the North, accustomed herself to that delicious Confessional, the transfusion of thought to writing. Now, suddenly, her heart felt an impulse; a new-born instinct, that bade it commune with itself, bade it disentangle its web of golden fancies—made her wish to look upon her inmost self as in a glass. Upsprung from the embrace of Love and Soul—the Eros and the Psyche—their beautiful offspring, Genius! She blushed, she sighed, she trembled as she wrote. And from the fresh world that she had built for herself, she was awakened to prepare for the glittering stage. How dull became the music, how dim the scene, so exquisite and so bright of old. Stage, thou art the Fairy Land to the vision of the worldly. Fancy, whose music is not heard by men, whose scenes shift not by mortal hand, as the stage to the present world, art thou to the future and the past!
CHAPTER 3.III.
In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes.
Shakespeare.
The next day, at noon, Zanoni visited Viola; and the next day and the next and again the next—days that to her seemed like a special time set apart from the rest of life. And yet he never spoke to her in the language of flattery, and almost of adoration, to which she had been accustomed. Perhaps his very coldness, so gentle as it was, assisted to this mysterious charm. He talked to her much of her past life, and she was scarcely surprised (she now never thought of terror) to perceive how much of that past seemed known to him.
He made her speak to him of her father; he made her recall some of the airs of Pisani’s wild music. And those airs seemed to charm and lull him into reverie.
“As music was to the musician,” said he, “may science be to the wise. Your father looked abroad in the world; all was discord to the fine sympathies that he felt with the harmonies that daily and nightly float to the throne of Heaven. Life, with its noisy ambition and its mean passions, is so poor and base! Out of his soul he created the life and the world for which his soul was fitted. Viola, thou art the daughter of that life, and wilt be the denizen of that world.”
In his earlier visits he did not speak of Glyndon. The day soon came on which he renewed the subject. And so trustful, obedient, and entire was the allegiance that Viola now owned to his dominion, that, unwelcome as that subject was, she restrained her heart, and listened to him in silence.
At last he said, “Thou hast promised thou wilt obey my counsels, and if, Viola, I should ask thee, nay adjure, to accept this stranger’s hand, and share his fate, should he offer to thee such a lot—wouldst thou refuse?”
And then she pressed back the tears that gushed to her eyes; and with a strange pleasure in the midst of pain—the pleasure of one who sacrifices heart itself to the one who commands that heart—she answered falteringly, “If thou canst ordain it, why—”
“Speak on.”
“Dispose of me as thou wilt!”
Zanoni stood in silence for some moments: he saw the struggle which the girl thought she concealed so well; he made an involuntary movement towards her, and pressed her hand to his lips; it was the first time he had ever departed even so far from a certain austerity which perhaps made her fear him and her own thoughts the less.
“Viola,” said he, and his voice trembled, “the danger that I can avert no more, if thou linger still in Naples, comes hourly near and near to thee! On the third day from this thy fate must be decided. I accept thy promise. Before the last hour of that day, come what may, I shall see thee again, HERE, at thine own house. Till then, farewell!”
CHAPTER 3.IV.
Between two worlds life hovers like a star
’Twixt night and morn.
—Byron.
When Glyndon left Viola, as recorded in the concluding chapter of the second division of this work, he was absorbed again in those mystical desires and conjectures which the haunting recollection of Zanoni always served to create. And as he wandered through the streets, he was scarcely conscious of his own movements till, in the mechanism of custom, he found himself in the midst of one of the noble collections of pictures which form the boast of those Italian cities whose glory is in the past. Thither he had been wont, almost daily, to repair, for the gallery contained some of the finest specimens of a master especially the object of his enthusiasm and study. There, before the works of Salvator, he had often paused in deep and earnest reverence. The striking characteristic of that artist is the “Vigour of Will;” void of the elevated idea of abstract beauty, which furnishes a model and archetype to the genius of more illustrious order, the singular energy of the man hews out of the rock a dignity of his own. His images have the majesty, not of the god, but the savage; utterly free, like the sublimer schools,