"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.
CHAPTER V.
"Ah, 'mid this scene