In the meantime Bruno had taken his bride to a small cottage he owned on the borders of a wide and gloomy forest. Here they passed the few days which, by the indulgence of his royal master, Bruno was enabled to spare from the affairs of state. When they were alone together, his wife expressed to him her conviction that some ill-disposed person had tampered with the holy water, so as to affect that which was sprinkled over them. She had also felt during the ceremony the near presence of an anti-pathetic and malign influence. Alcyone furthermore explained to her husband that the gem on her forehead was a talisman, which paled and grew dim on the approach of danger, or when exposed to poison. The Baron at once remembered the dull appearance presented by the jewel when the holy water fell near it, but he also became unreasonably vexed when his bride refused to loosen it, even for one moment, from her hair, to permit him to examine it in his hand.
He gradually grew to regard its brilliance with a certain amount of suspicion, and more than once, when the gentle Alcyone laid her head upon his shoulder, he felt as if a fiery eye shone guardian over her and watched unsleepingly his every movement. When in his vexation Bruno allowed himself to speak harshly for the first time to his young wife, Alcyone tearfully deprecated his displeasure. She assured him her life was bound up in her talisman, and that if she parted with it, for ever so brief a space, she must at once return to the regions whence she came. After this explanation Bruno rarely referred to the disputed point, but it is not too much to say that the lurid ray of the strange gem often in their happiest moments sent a sudden thrill to his heart's core, and gave a feeling of insecurity to his most private hours of retirement.
"It is the little rift within the lute
That by and by will make the music mute,
And, ever widening, slowly silence all.
"The little rift within the lover's lute,
Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit,
That rotting inwards slowly moulders all."
I have already hinted that Bruno was of a sceptical turn of mind. Possessed of rare intellectual powers, he had studied metaphysics to such an extent, and become so thoroughly master of the strange theories propounded by the deep-thinking German philosophers of the day, that he could not bend himself to the simplicity of that religion which only demands the faith of a little child; he disbelieved the immortality of the soul, and professed to doubt the existence of a future state.
But though he and his bride widely differed in faith, yet day by day she became more and more endeared to him, by the lovely nature of her mind no less than by the graces of her person. Her exceeding humility and true-hearted simplicity showed to him in a new light those religious duties at which in less peaceful days he was wont to cavil. Well would it have been for both could their lives have been thus spent far from the busy world, in the calm retreat, where for the first time the gray-haired man recalled soft prayers which a mother's lips (long since silent and cold) had murmured over his infant head.