CHAPTER IV.
The heart hath whispered in its bliss,
Who could be sad in scenes like this?
But, hist, a sound the night-wind bears,
A voice of love and sighs and tears!
MS. Poem.
AN instant, but a single instant, the lady remained upon his breast, and then Zanotti, removing her clinging arms, placed her upon the seat which he had himself just occupied. She looked upon him, her full dark eyes flowing with tears, and seemed struggling for utterance, but no words came! At length, with an averted face, he spoke—
"Your highness forgets our relative positions, and"—
"Forgets!" said she wildly, interrupting him; "forgets! Ay! I did indeed for a moment forget all but you; and you, Oh Carlo, is yours the voice to bring back reality? Is it for you to whom every pulsation of my heart has been dedicated; for whom in the long hours of night I have wept tears that seemed of blood—is it for you to restore me to a reality which contains no elements but those of despair, those that break hearts, those that frenzy the exhausted brain?"
Alfieri's voice was sepulchrally hollow when he replied, and the quivering of his manly frame showed the violence of the emotion within.
"Leonora," said he, "Leonora, four years ago we parted in Venice. I vowed never to see you more till I had won a name you could not shame to wear; and you swore never to betray my deep devotion. I was then unacquainted with life; I was young and trusting; I looked upon the flower and inhaled its perfume, nor sought to analyze what hidden poisons lurked within it; I looked not for a serpent or a viper in its folded leaves! I gazed upon the diamond-sheeted waters, nor thought upon the noxious elements that, uniting in malaria, might rise from their bosom to desolate many a neighboring home. I turned my eyes upon the moonlit sky without a thought of a possible hour when the same azure face of heaven would frown and the live thunder launch its bolts to ruin and destroy! Ay! I then looked but at the fair outside of all created things, and heeded not the motive or the soul within! Leonora, I looked on you, and I believed you! I went forth cheerfully to the hard fight I had before me; I kept my vow—I am a field-marshal of Austria. Have you kept yours?"
She cast upon him an imploring, a piteous glance. The moon was beaming through an interstice in the foliage and shone full upon his features, making their paleness ghastly, but showing no violent emotion—nothing but a hushed, cold, haughty sorrow.
She trembled perceptibly as she replied to his concluding question.
"Yes, as truly as I have my faith in God; Alfieri, they told me you were dead. Circumstances too complicated to explain placed my father in a position with the government that involved his life. Prince Carlos saved him, and, for the priceless service, asked but the poor repayment of my hand. I told him my heart could not accompany the gift. He still urged his suit. Could I refuse?"
"Ay, madam, the tale sounds well," was the bitter reply; "but your grief seemed of a strangely merry sort; but now your laugh was as light as any in the room, your jest as gay!"
"Zanotti!" said the lady, and there was something of indignation in her tone, "I am not what the world in its cold carelessness deems me, and you judge me as the greatest stranger of them all would do! The face may be wreathed in smiles, the lips may be musical with laughing jests, and yet, in its unrevealed depths, the heart may writhe in anguish, the soul sink with despair! But this recrimination is vain, all vain!"
She clasped her forehead as if in pain, and hot tears forced themselves through the tightly pressed fingers. Her lover maintained a cold and scornful silence. All the pride of his race had combined with a deep sense of injury in a trusting and betrayed nature to make him stern and apparently heartless in his resentment. Suddenly Leonora started to her feet, the woman's pride within her revolted at what seemed the silent sarcasm of his look. Her eyes, with the tears checked suddenly within them, emitted a wild, singular, startling light; there was something of the Medusa in her aspect. She gazed at him with a strange mingling of supplication and haughtiness in her look; her glance penetrated his soul and softened it; he heard the panting throb of her heart, and knew there could be no acting in that. Her breath came warm upon his cheek; he trembled at the recollections that were crowding upon him. And then, too, she spoke—
"You use me too cruelly," she said; "I do not deserve this silent scorn! I have wronged myself by giving way to emotions for which you but mock and despise me!"
He started—were not her words true? Had he not been unjust in his grief?
"Leonora," said he, abruptly, "hear me! From my earliest youth—ever since remembrance avails me to recall events—rash, impetuous feeling (my inheritance from a long line of hot-headed ancestors) made me in every feeling extreme and violent. I rushed to my studies as to a conflict with a foe, and rested not till I had conquered every difficulty. The same in pleasure, obstacles were but the stones that made the stream of life sparkle brightly in its sun, and I leaped over them, or cast them aside with an exulting sense of power. My love for you concentrated all this vagrant impetuosity into one earnest and undying passion. It subdued and soothed the sinuosities of my outward nature; it checked the headlong restlessness that was before apparent in all I did, and turned all the various bubbling springs within me into one noiseless, but deep, resistless stream. It made an ocean of the rivers of my being; that ocean rose and fell, tinted with the sun's glorious beams for a brief space! Oh! how brief! and then storms arose; and now, when I know the tempest is to last forever, is it strange if I am indignant when I look on her who wrought all this misery, this fearful misery?"
He had spoken without looking up at her. He now raised his eyes, and found her again weeping bitterly.
"And do I not share that misery, with all the aggravation of a fruitless remorse? Oh, you know not," she added, her voice assuming a tone of beseeching earnestness, "the days and nights of intense anguish that dragged their slow length along, when thinking you lay beneath the deep sea (for they said your grave was there). When tears would flow, I wept for you, and mourned in silent anguish when they were refused me! You know not how stronger than a woman's that heart must be that can resist the appeal, continued day after day, when it comes from the lips of 'all, whom we believe to be in the wide world, whom we would bless.' Words may be met and combated; but the mute lip and imploring eye—they cannot be resisted; the tenderness that veils its dearest wish for fear of grieving us; the grief unspoken, and the more bitter from concealment! Who can see this, and in a father, every day, every hour, every minute, and nerve their hearts to deny the relief they can bestow? But all this avails nothing; the tie is irrevocable that binds me to misery and severs us forever. For you, Zanotti, you will go forth into the world; excitement is an antidote provided for the grief of man. You will win admiration and applause; your fame as a scholar and a poet, your renown as a soldier, will secure you a high position among men, higher than your rank alone would give. You will be loved, you will love again, and our hours of rapture will linger in your mind but as the recollection of a dream! I ask but a kindly remembrance and forgiveness of my unintentional sin. Farewell!"
"And is it thus we part!" There was a proud repelling sorrow in the lover's tone as he thus replied: "Is this, then, the end of our golden dream!" He paused, and, suddenly advancing, bent his head close to her ear, "Leonora, do you love me still?" The question was in a whisper. She started, a singular, a terrified expression mounting into her face. She was about to speak, but even as the words seemed on the eve of utterance, a crashing sound, as of some one forcing his way through the thickly intertwined branches of the neighboring vines, caught the attention of both herself and her companion, and, with a stifled shriek, she looked round as if seeking an opposite path by which to escape. Her intention was frustrated, however, for in an instant after the intruder made his appearance.
"My husband!"
Leonora said but these two simple words, but there was a desperate impassibility in the tone in which they were spoken, that told of a heart whose terror was frozen into despair.
Zanotti, whose face had flushed crimson on the first appearance of the prince, was again as pale as death. The moon looked calmly down upon all, and God knows she had seldom shone on three persons whose hearts, in their agony, came nearer epitomes of hell than the group assembled there. Leonora seemed rooted to the spot, bound by a spell, a charm. Her small, beautiful hands were clenched convulsively together; her breath came with quick and labored gasps; her form seemed convulsed with a terrible and racking agony! She looked from her lover to her husband—a look beseeching their mutual forbearance—made a step forward, seemed struggling to articulate, and fell heavily to the earth.