CHAPTER II.
"Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one."—INGOMAR.
AT the end of the long, gloomy day following the conclusion of the carnival, Zanotti accompanied his father to a midnight mass, and there for the first time saw Leonora D'Alvarez, the daughter of Spain's ambassador to the court of the winged Lion of St. Mark's. She was one of those beautiful creations that we so often dream of, and sigh for, and sometimes, but very seldom, see. Soul there shed its spiritual attributes over one from whose features even the bloom of youth seemed to catch a brighter hue. Like all Italians, Zanotti had dreamed of love—the love of the poet and the dreamer; and now he felt it in its strength—the love of a pure, unselfish, yet deep and ardent nature!
To shorten a long story (for we must leave much to be divined in this history), he felt the inspiration growing out of love impelling him to give him his feelings to the world in immortal song. He wrote, and he became famous! Then, when a nation bowed before his genius—when a world re-echoed his name with reverence—he sought the woman who had roused his soul to exertion; he told her that he loved her; he told her that all the bright thoughts and sparkling fancies the universe had claimed as its own were hers—all hers; that she, and she alone, had made his name as deathless as the ethereal essence the Almighty had endowed his body with—and that unless she gave still another gift—her heart—fame, fortune, name, genius—were but empty, and hollow, and useless!
The whispered reply was no denying one, and he seemed to have attained all of happiness the world can offer. Months flew by—months in which life seemed born, like Venus, "of a rosy sea and a drop from heaven;" months when each to-morrow hung an "arch of promise," a ladder of sunlight, each round of which seemed made to lead the feet through Ivan gardens—up—up towards the sky! The glorious sun, warming like a lover's glance the beautiful bosom of the "Doge's bride"—the swelling "Adriatic"—the churches, the palaces, the prisons, whose gloom was hallowed by romantic memories, the legends attached to the palatial home of his own proud sires—these were subjects upon which, all the livelong day, he could expatiate, and she delightedly listen; and when night stole like a dream through the soft atmosphere, the stars, with their Chaldaic interpretations, furnished a new page from whence he could cull prophecies of their fate! Then would he weave old superstitions with the fancies of the poet and the lover, till he grew amazed at his own strange eloquence!
She, too, on her part, had an exhaustless theme in telling how, by degrees, his soul had, as it were, become a part of hers; how every emotion in his own mind, by an imperceptible and view-less magnetism, awakened hers to action. The simplest speech had a charm for him; there was music in her voice; her thoughts were dimless mirrors reflecting the spirituality of her soul; to use his own language, "each word was the spray of her heart, which mirrored in its sparkling globule all the beauty and none of the defects of the world around it!" The days glided by upon the swift pinions lent by unclouded happiness.
They lived in an atmosphere where all was of the past, save their love and their hopes; the multitude of traffickers and idlers that crossed their daily path were as unheeded shadows; they mingled only with beings of other times. Their friends—for the friends of the scholar became those of the maiden—were Homer and Virgil, Tasso and Marino, the graceful Catullus, and the rough, but noble-tongued Lucretius! They strolled in imagination through Ilion's Scæn gate, along the luxuriant banks of her winding rivers, and lay down to repose beneath her wild and broad-leaved fig-tree. And then, when they had gathered around them the heroes and the poets of past and buried ages, unlike Alaric, they would weigh the myrtle crown against the laurel wreath, and see glory kick the beam!
Could year after year of their lives have rolled away with such feelings and amid such employments, they would have indeed been blessed! But no! Alas! that could not be! Love, and youth, and hope, are but the sun-fringe of the cloud of life, the flame that gilds the bark it consumes, the lightning flashes that foretell a rent and shattered heart! For love, if no outward influences assail (or assailing, are conquered and driven back), there is custom, that slow, insidious lullaby, singing in Morphean tones unceasingly, till, wearied and overcome, that passion, that would have repelled a visible foe, sinks at his post in quietness—asleep!
It came! It burst upon them without a warning! Fate had suspended a sword above their heads; but, unlike the tyrant's envious favorite, they saw it not ere it fell! It came—crushing and blighting the flowers that had blossomed for them, and, tearing their young hearts from the beautiful dream-world in which they revelled, brought them back to the harsh and dull and cold realities of this! The father of the lover was suddenly arrested by the myrmidons of the terrible Council of Ten. It was discovered he was the head of a wide-spread conspiracy against the state, and the expiration of the month of his arrest saw the noble and powerful family of Zanotti exiles—its lord sent forth with the boon of life, but with ruined fortunes and a tarnished name—its heir an outcast, though spotless of a single crime.
The parting of the lovers was brief and terrible. She swore to him that death only should take the bloom from her love, that, ruined in name and fortune as he was, he was, as ever, the high priest of her heart's temple, and that no other could ever approach its altar. He offered no vows, but said to her, that if five years sped by without his presence, to deem him dead, and know he had died in striving to win laurels worthy to lay before her father's daughter!