NEW TRAVEL
Again I am upon the sea; but not alone. She whom I first met upon the wastes of ocean is there beside me. Again I steady her tottering step upon the deck; once it was a drifting, careless pleasure; now the pleasure is holy.
Once the fear I felt, as the storms gathered, and night came, and the ship tossed madly, and great waves gathering swift and high, came down like slipping mountains, and spent their force upon the quivering vessel, was a selfish fear. But it is so no longer. Indeed, I hardly know fear; for how can the tempests harm her? Is she not too good to suffer any of the wrath of heaven?
And in nights of calm—holy nights, we lean over the ship’s side, looking down, as once before, into the dark depths, and murmur again snatches of ocean song, and talk of those we love; and we peer among the stars, which seem neighborly, and as if they were the homes of friends. And as the great ocean swells come rocking under us, and carry us up and down along the valleys and the hills of water, they seem like deep pulsations of the great heart of nature, heaving us forward toward the goal of life, and to the gates of heaven.
We watch the ships as they come upon the horizon, and sweep toward us, like false friends, with the sun glittering on their sails; and then shift their course, and bear away—with their bright sails, turned to spots of shadow. We watch the long-winged birds skimming the waves hour after hour—like pleasant thoughts—now dashing before our bows, and then sweeping behind, until they are lost in the hollows of the water.
Again life lies open, as it did once before; but the regrets, disappointments, and fruitless resolves do not come to trouble me now. It is the future, which has become as level as the sea; and she is beside me—the sharer in that future—to look out with me upon the joyous sparkle of water, and to count with me the dazzling ripples that lie between us and the shore. A thousand pleasant plans come up, and are abandoned, like the waves we leave behind us; a thousand other joyous plans dawn upon our fancy, like the waves that glitter before us. We talk of Laurence and his bride, whom we are to meet; we talk of her mother, who is even now watching the winds that waft her child over the ocean; we talk of the kindly old man, her god-father, who gave her a father’s blessing; we talk low, and in the twilight hours, of Isabel—who sleeps.
At length, as the sun goes down upon a fair night, over the western waters which we have passed, we see before us the low blue line of the shores of Cornwall and Devon. In the night shadowy ships glide past us with gleaming lanterns; and in the morning we see the yellow cliffs of the Isle of Wight; and standing out from the land is the dingy sail of our pilot. London with its fog, roar, and crowds, has not the same charms that it once had; that roar and crowd is good to make a man forget his griefs—forget himself, and stupefy him with amazement. We are in no need of such forgetfulness.
We roll along the banks of the sylvan river that glides by Hampton Court; and we toil up Richmond Hill, to look together upon that scene of water and meadow—of leafy copses and glistening villas, of brown cottages and clustered hamlets—of solitary oaks and loitering herds—all spread like a veil of beauty upon the bosom of the Thames. But we can not linger here, nor even under the glorious old boles of Windsor Forest; but we hurry on to that sweet county of Devon, made green with its white skeins of water.
Again we loiter under the oaks, where we have loitered before; and the sleek deer gaze on us with their liquid eyes as they gazed before. The squirrels sport among the boughs as fearless as ever; and some wandering puss pricks her long ears at our steps and bounds off along the hedgerows to her burrow. Again I see Carry in her velvet riding-cap, with the white plume; and I meet, as I met her before, under the princely trees that skirt the northern avenue. I recall the evening when I sauntered out at the park gates, and gained a blessing from the porter’s wife, and dreamed that strange dream—now, the dream seems more real than my life. “God bless you!” said the woman again.
—“Ay, old lady, God has blessed me!”—and I fling her a guinea, not as a gift, but as a debt.
The bland farmer lives yet; he scarce knows me, until I tell him of my bout around his oat field at the tail of his long stilted plow. I find the old pew in the parish church. Other holly sprigs are hung now; and I do not doze, for Carry is beside me. The curate drawls the service; but it is pleasant to listen; and I make the responses with an emphasis that tells more, I fear, for my joy than for my religion. The old groom at the mansion in the park has not forgotten the hard riding of other days, and tells long stories (to which I love to listen) of the old visit of Mistress Carry, when she followed the hounds with the best of the English lasses.
—“Yer honor may well be proud; for not a prettier face, or a kinder heart, has been in Devon since Mistress Carry left us.”
But pleasant as are the old woods, full of memories, and pleasant as are the twilight evenings upon the terrace—we must pass over to the mountains of Switzerland. There we are to meet Laurence.
Carry has never seen the magnificence of the Juras; and as we journey over the hills between Dole and the border line, looking upon the rolling heights shrouded with pine trees, and down thousands of feet, at the very roadside, upon the cottage roofs and emerald valleys, where the dun herds are feeding quietly, she is lost in admiration. At length we come to that point above the little town of Gex, from which you see spread out before you the meadows that skirt Geneva, the placid surface of Lake Leman, and the rough, shaggy mountains of Savoy—and far behind them, breaking the horizon with snowy cap, and with dark pinnacles—Mont Blanc, and the Needles of Chamouni.
I point out to her in the valley below the little town of Ferney, where stands the deserted château of Voltaire; and beyond, upon the shores of the lake, the old home of De Staël; and across, with its white walls reflected upon the bosom of the water, the house where Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon. Among the grouping roofs of Geneva we trace the dark cathedral and the tall hotels shining on the edge of the lake. And I tell of the time when I tramped down through yonder valley, with my future all visionary and broken, and drank the splendor of the scene, only as a quick relief to the monotony of my solitary life.
—“And now, Carry, with your hand locked in mine, and your heart mine—yonder lake sleeping in the sun, and the snowy mountains with their rosy hue seem like the smile of nature, bidding us be glad!”
Laurence is at Geneva; he welcomes Carry, as he would welcome a sister. He is a noble fellow, and tells me much of his sweet Italian wife; and presents me to the smiling, blushing—Enrica! She has learned English now; she has found, she says, a better teacher, than ever I was. Yet she welcomes me warmly, as a sister might; and we talk of those old evenings by the blazing fire, and of the one-eyed maestro, as children long separated might talk of their school tasks and of their teachers. She can not tell me enough of her praises of Laurence, and of his noble heart. “You were good,” she says, “but Laurence is better.”
Carry admires her soft brown hair, and her deep liquid eye, and wonders how I could ever have left Rome?
—Do you indeed wonder—Carry?
And together we go down into Savoy, to that marvelous valley, which lies under the shoulder of Mont Blanc; and we wander over the Mer De Glace, and pick alpine roses from the edge of the frowning glacier. We toil at nightfall up to the monastery of the Great St. Bernard, where the new forming ice crackles in the narrow foot-way, and the cold moon glistens over wastes of snow, and upon the windows of the dark Hospice. Again, we are among the granite heights, whose ledges are filled with ice, upon the Grimsel. The pond is dark and cold; the paths are slippery; the great glacier of the Aar sends down icy breezes, and the echoes ring from rock to rock, as if the ice-god answered. And yet we neither suffer nor fear.
In the sweet valley of Meyringen, we part from Laurence: he goes northward, by Grindenwald, and Thun—thence to journey westward, and to make for the Roman girl a home beyond the ocean. Enrica bids me go on to Rome: she knows that Carry will love its soft warm air, its ruins, its pictures and temples, better than these cold valleys of Switzerland. And she gives me kind messages for her mother, and for Cesare; and should we be in Rome at the Easter season, she bids us remember her, when we listen to the Miserere, and when we see the great Chiesa on fire, and when we saunter upon the Pincian hill—and remember, that it is her home.
We follow them with our eyes, as they go up the steep height over which falls the white foam of the clattering Reichenbach; and they wave their hands toward us and disappear upon the little plateau which stretches toward the crystal Rosenlaui and the tall, still Engel-Horner.
May the mountain angels guard them.
As we journey on toward that wonderful pass of Splugen I recall, by the way, upon the heights and in the valleys, the spots where I lingered years before—here, I plucked a flower; there, I drank from that cold, yellow, glacier water; and here, upon some rock overlooking a stretch of broken mountains, hoary with their eternal frosts, I sat musing upon that very Future, which is with me now. But never, even when the ice-genii were most prodigal of their fancies to the wanderer, did I look for more joy, or a better angel.
Afterward, when all our trembling upon the Alpine paths has gone by, we are rolling along under the chestnuts and lindens that skirt the banks of Como. We recall that sweet story of Manzoni, and I point out, as well as I may, the loitering place of the bravi, and the track of poor Don Abbondio. We follow in the path of the discomfited Rienzi, to where the dainty spire, and pinnacles of the Duomo of Milan, glisten against the violet sky.
Carry longs to see Venice; its water-streets, and palaces have long floated in her visions. In the bustling activity of our own country, and in the quiet fields of England, that strange, half-deserted capital lying in the Adriatic, has taken the strongest hold upon her fancy.
So we leave Padua and Verona behind us, and find ourselves, upon a soft spring noon, upon the end of the iron road which stretches across the lagoon toward Venice. With the hissing of steam in the ear it is hard to think of the wonderful city we are approaching. But as we escape from the carriage, and set our feet down into one of those strange, hearse-like, ancient boats, with its sharp iron prow, and listen to the melodious rolling tongue of the Venetian gondolier; as we see rising over the watery plain before us, all glittering in the sun, tall square towers with pyramidal tops, and clustered domes, and minarets; and sparkling roofs lifting from marble walls—all so like the old paintings—and as we glide nearer and nearer to the floating wonder, under the silent working oar of our now silent gondolier—as we ride up swiftly under the deep, broad shadows of palaces and see plainly the play of the sea water in the crevices of the masonry—and turn into narrow rivers shaded darkly by overhanging walls, hearing no sound, but of voices, or the swaying of the water against the houses—we feel the presence of the place. And the mistic fingers of the Past, grappling our spirits, lead them away—willing and rejoicing captives, through the long vista of the ages that are gone.
Carry is in a trance—rapt by the witchery of the scene, into dream. This is her Venice, nor have all the visions that played upon her fancy been equal to the enchanting presence of this hour of approach.
Afterward it becomes a living thing—stealing upon the affections, and upon the imagination by a thousand coy advances. We wander under the warm Italian sunlight to the steps from which rolled the white head of poor Marino Faliero. The gentle Carry can now thrust her ungloved hand into the terrible lion’s mouth. We enter the salon of the fearful Ten, and peep through the half-opened door into the cabinet of the more fearful Three. We go through the deep dungeons of Carmagnola and of Carrara; and we instruct the willing gondolier to push his dark boat under the Bridge of Sighs; and with Rogers’ poem in our hand, glide up to the prison door and read of—
——that fearful closet at the foot
Lurking for prey, which, when a victim came,
Grew less and less; contracting to a span
An iron door, urged onward by a screw,
Forcing out life!
I sail, listening to nothing but the dip of the gondolier’s oar, or to her gentle words, fast under the palace door, which closed that fearful morning on the guilt and shame of Bianca Capello. Or, with souls lit up by the scene, into a buoyancy that can scarce distinguish between what is real and what is merely written—we chase the anxious step of the forsaken Corinna; or seek among the veteran palaces the casement of the old Brabantio—the chamber of Desdemona—the house of Jessica, and trace among the strange Jew money-changers, who yet haunt the Rialto, the likeness of the bearded Shylock. We wander into stately churches, brushing over grass, or tell-tale flowers that grow in the court, and find them damp and cheerless; the incense rises murkily and rests in a thick cloud over the altars, and over the paintings; the music, if so be that the organ notes are swelling under the roof, is mournfully plaintive.
Of an afternoon we sail over to the Lido, to gladden our eyes with a sight of land and green things, and we pass none upon the way, save silent oarsmen, with barges piled high with the produce of their gardens—pushing their way down toward the floating city. And upon the narrow island, we find Jewish graves, half covered by drifted sand; and from among them, watch the sunset glimmering over a desolate level of water. As we glide back, lights lift over the lagoon, and double along the Guideca and the Grand Canal. The little neighbor isles will have their company of lights dancing in the water; and from among them will rise up against the mellow evening sky of Italy gaunt, unlighted houses.
After the nightfall, which brings no harmful dew with it, I stroll, with her hand within my arm—as once upon the sea, and in the English park, and in the home-land—over that great square which lies before the palace of St. Marks. The white moon is riding in the middle heaven, like a globe of silver; the gondoliers stride over the echoing stones; and their long black shadows, stretching over the pavement, or shaking upon the moving water, seem like great funereal plumes, waving over the bier of Venice.
Carrying thence whole treasures of thought and fancy, to feed upon in the after years, we wander to Rome.
I find the old one-eyed maestro, and am met with cordial welcome by the mother of the pretty Enrica. The count has gone to the marshes of Ancona. Lame Pietro still shuffles around the boards at the Leprè, and the flower sellers at the corner bind me a more brilliant bouquet than ever for a new beauty at Rome. As we ramble under the broken arches of the great aqueduct stretching toward Frascati, I tell Carry the story of my trip in the Appenines, and we search for the pretty Carlotta. But she is married, they tell us, to a Neapolitan guardsman. In the spring twilight we wander upon those heights which lie between Frascati and Albano, and looking westward, see that glorious view of the Campagna, which can never be forgotten. But beyond the Campagna, and beyond the huge hulk of St. Peter’s, heaving into the sky from the middle waste, we see, or fancy we see, a glimpse of the sea, which stretches out and on to the land we love, better than Rome. And in fancy we build up that home, which shall belong to us on the return—a home that has slumbered long in the future, and which, now that the future has come, lies fairly before me.
