Emma Lazarus.
ORCO.
FROM THE FRENCH OF GEORGE SAND.
We were as usual assembled in the arbor. The evening was stormy, the air heavy and the sky charged with black clouds furrowed with frequent lightnings. We were keeping a melancholy silence, as if the gloom of the atmosphere had reached our hearts, disposing us involuntarily to tears. Beppa, particularly, seemed given up to sorrowful thoughts. In vain had the abbé, alarmed at the disposition of the company, tried several times and in every way to reanimate the gayety, usually so sparkling, of our friend. Neither questions, teasing nor entreaties succeeded in drawing her from her reverie: her eyes fixed on the sky, her fingers wandering carelessly over the trembling strings of her guitar, she seemed not to notice what was going on around her, and to be thinking of nothing but the plaintive sounds she caused her instrument to utter, and the capricious course of the clouds.
The good Panorio, disheartened by the ill success of his attempts, took the resolution of addressing himself to me. "Come, dear Zorze," said he, "try in thy turn the power of thy affection upon this capricious beauty. There exists between you two a sort of magnetic sympathy stronger than all my reasoning, and the sound of thy voice succeeds in drawing her from her deepest distraction."
"This magnetic sympathy of which thou speakest to me," I answered, "comes, dear abbé, from the identity of our feelings. We have suffered in the same way and thought the same things, and we know each other well enough, she and I, to know what sort of ideas external circumstances recall to each. I wager that I can guess, not the subject, but at least the nature, of her reverie." And turning toward Beppa, "Carissima," I said gently, "of which of our sisters art thou thinking?"
"Of the most beautiful," she answered without turning round, "of the proudest, the most unfortunate."
"When did she die?" I continued, already interested in her who lived in the memory of my noble friend, and desiring to associate myself by my regrets with a destiny which could not be strange to me.
"She died at the close of last winter, on the night of the ball at the palace Servilio. She had resisted many sorrows, she had come forth victorious from many dangers, had suffered, without succumbing, terrible agonies, and died suddenly without leaving any trace, as if carried off by a thunderbolt. Every one here knew her more or less, but no one so well as I, because none loved her so much, and she only let herself be known according as she was loved. Others do not believe in her death, although she has not appeared since the night of which I tell thee: they say it has often happened that she has disappeared thus for a long time, and returned again afterward. But I know that she will never come back any more, and that her part upon the earth is finished. If I wished to doubt it I could not: she took care to let me know the fatal truth through him who was the cause of her death. And what a misfortune was that! O God! the greatest misfortune of our unhappy age! Such a beautiful life was hers! so beautiful and so full of contrasts! so illustrious, so mysterious, so sad, so magnificent, so enthusiastic, so austere, so voluptuous, so complete in its resemblance to all human things! No: no life and no death were like hers. She had found means of suppressing all the pitiful realities of her existence, leaving only its poetry. Faithful to the old customs of the national aristocracy, she only showed herself after the close of the day, masked, but never followed by any one. There is not an inhabitant of the city who has not met her wandering in the squares or in the streets—not one who has not noticed her gondola moored in some canal, but no one ever saw it enter or go out. Although this gondola was watched by no one, it was never known to have been the object of an attempt at theft. It was painted and equipped like all other gondolas, yet every one knew it. Even the children said, on seeing it, 'There is the gondola of the Mask.' As to the way in which it moved, and the place from which it brought its mistress at night, and to which it carried her back in the morning, no one could even suspect it. The revenue-cruisers had, indeed, often seen a black shadow upon the lagoons, and, taking it for a contraband boat, had given chase to it as far as the open sea, but when morning came they never saw upon the waves anything resembling the object of their pursuit; and finally they fell into the way of not minding it, and of saying when they saw it, 'There is the gondola of the Mask again.'