‘How so?’ cried she eagerly. ‘You have ever told me that art was an ennobling and a glorious thing; that after those whose genius embodied grand conceptions, came he who gave them utterance. How often have you said, the poet lives but half in men’s hearts whose verses have not found some meet interpreter; with words like these have you stimulated me to study, and now——’
‘And now,’ said he, sighing drearily, ‘I wake to feel what a mere mockery it is:
‘"Tra l’ombra è bella L’istessa stella
Che in faccia del sole Non si mirô.”
Ah, Marietta mia, he who creates is alone an artist!’
The girl bent her head upon her bosom, and while her long waving curls fell loosely over him, she sobbed bitterly. Gerald clasped her closer to his heart, but never spoke a syllable.
‘I ever thought it would be so,’ murmured she at last: ‘I felt that in this sense of birth and blood you boasted of, would one day come a feeling of shame to be the companion of such as me. It is not from art itself you turn away, it is the company of the strolling actor that you shun.’
‘And who or what am I that I should do so?’ said Gerald boldly. ‘When, or where, have I known such happiness as with you, Marietta? Bethink you of the hours we have passed together, poring over these dear old books there, enriching our hearts with noble thoughts, and making the poet the interpreter between us? Telling, too, in the fervour we spoke his lines, how tenderly we felt them; as Metastasio says:
‘"And as we lisped the verse along,
Learning to love.”’
‘And now it is over,’ said she, with a sigh of deep despondency.
‘Why so? Shall I, in learning to know the great and the illustrious—to feel how their own high thoughts sway and rule them—be less worthy of your love? The poet told me, to-night, that I declaimed his lines well; but who taught me to feel them, Marietta mia!’ And he kissed her cheek, bathed as it was and seamed with, hot tears. Again he tried to bring back the dream of the past, and their oft-projected scheme of life; but he urged the theme no longer as of old; and even when describing the world they were about to fly from, his words trembled with the emotion that swelled in his heart. In the midst of all these would he break off suddenly with some recollection of Alfieri, who filled every avenue of his thoughts: his proud but graceful demeanour, his low, deep-toned voice, his smile so kind and yet so sad withal; a gentleness, too, in his manner that invited confidence, seemed to dwell in Gerald’s memory, and shed, as it were, a soft and pleasing light over all that had passed.