from the task! Once more I will seek the Son of Light.
. …
Yes; Adon-Ai, long deaf to my call, at last has descended to my vision, and left behind him the glory of his presence in the shape of Hope. Oh, not impossible, Viola—not impossible, that we yet may be united, soul with soul!
Extract from Letter V.—(Many months after the last.)
Mejnour, awake from thine apathy—rejoice! A new soul will be born to the world—a new soul that shall call me father. Ah, if they for whom exist all the occupations and resources of human life—if they can thrill with exquisite emotion at the thought of hailing again their own childhood in the faces of their children; if in that birth they are born once more into the holy Innocence which is the first state of existence; if they can feel that on man devolves almost an angel’s duty, when he has a life to guide from the cradle, and a soul to nurture for the heaven—what to me must be the rapture to welcome an inheritor of all the gifts which double themselves in being shared! How sweet the power to watch, and to guard—to instil the knowledge, to avert the evil, and to guide back the river of life in a richer and broader and deeper stream to the paradise from which it flows! And beside that river our souls shall meet, sweet mother. Our child shall supply the sympathy that fails as yet; and what shape shall haunt thee, what terror shall dismay, when thy initiation is beside the cradle of thy child!
CHAPTER 4.XI.
They thus beguile the way
Untill the blustring storme is overblowne,
When weening to returne whence they did stray,
They cannot finde that path which first was showne,
But wander to and fro in waies unknowne.
—Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” book i. canto i. st. x.
Yes, Viola, thou art another being than when, by the threshold of thy Italian home, thou didst follow thy dim fancies through the Land of Shadow; or when thou didst vainly seek to give voice to an ideal beauty, on the boards where illusion counterfeits earth and heaven for an hour, till the weary sense, awaking, sees but the tinsel and the scene-shifter. Thy spirit reposes in its own happiness. Its wanderings have found a goal. In a moment there often dwells the sense of eternity; for when profoundly happy, we know that it is impossible to die. Whenever the soul feels itself, it feels everlasting life.
The initiation is deferred—thy days and nights are left to no other visions than those with which a contented heart enchants a guileless fancy. Glendoveers and Sylphs, pardon me if I question whether those visions are not lovelier than yourselves.
They stand by the beach, and see the sun sinking into the sea. How long now have they dwelt on that island? What matters!—it may be months, or years—what matters! Why should I, or they, keep account of that happy time? As in the dream of a moment ages may seem to pass, so shall we measure transport or woe—by the length of the dream, or the number of emotions that the dream involves?
The sun sinks slowly down; the air is arid and oppressive; on the sea, the stately vessel lies motionless; on the shore, no leaf trembles on the trees.
Viola drew nearer to Zanoni. A presentiment she could not define made her heart beat more quickly; and, looking into his face, she was struck with its expression: it was anxious, abstracted, perturbed. “This stillness awes me,” she whispered.
Zanoni did not seem to hear her. He muttered to himself, and his eyes gazed round restlessly. She knew not why, but that gaze, which seemed to pierce into space—that muttered voice in some foreign language—revived dimly her earlier superstitions. She was more fearful since the hour when she knew that she was to be a mother. Strange crisis in the life of woman, and in her love! Something yet unborn begins already to divide her heart with that which had been before its only monarch.
“Look on me, Zanoni,” she said, pressing his hand.
He turned: “Thou art pale, Viola; thy hand trembles!”
“It is true. I feel as if some enemy were creeping near us.”
“And the instinct deceives thee not. An enemy is indeed at hand. I see it through the heavy air; I hear it through the silence: the Ghostly One—the Destroyer, the pestilence! Ah, seest thou how the leaves swarm with insects, only by an effort visible to the eye. They follow the breath of the plague!” As he spoke, a bird fell from the boughs at Viola’s feet; it fluttered, it writhed an instant, and was dead.
“Oh, Viola!” cried Zanoni, passionately, “that is death. Dost thou not fear to die?”
“To leave thee? Ah, yes!”
“And if I could teach thee how Death may be defied; if I could arrest for thy youth the course of time; if I could—”
He paused abruptly, for Viola’s eyes spoke only terror; her cheek and lips were pale.
“Speak not thus—look not thus,” she said, recoiling from him. “You dismay me. Ah, speak not thus, or I should tremble—no, not for myself, but for thy child.”
“Thy child! But wouldst thou reject for thy child the same glorious boon?”
“Zanoni!”
“Well!”
“The sun has sunk from our eyes, but to rise on those of others. To disappear from this world is to live in the world afar. Oh, lover—oh, husband!” she continued, with sudden energy, “tell me that thou didst but jest—that thou didst but trifle with my folly! There is less terror in the pestilence than in thy words.”
Zanoni’s brow darkened; he looked at her in silence for some moments, and then said, almost severely—
“What hast thou known of me to distrust?”
“Oh, pardon, pardon!—nothing!” cried Viola, throwing herself on his breast, and bursting into tears. “I will not believe even thine own words, if they seem to wrong thee!” He kissed the tears from her eyes, but made no answer.
“And ah!” she resumed, with an enchanting and child-like smile, “if thou wouldst give me a charm against the pestilence! see, I will take it from thee.” And she laid her hand on a small, antique amulet that he wore on his breast.
“Thou knowest how often this has made me jealous of the past; surely some love-gift, Zanoni? But no, thou didst not love the giver as thou dost me. Shall I steal thine amulet?”
“Infant!” said Zanoni, tenderly; “she who placed this round my neck deemed it indeed a charm, for she had superstitions like thyself; but to me it is more than the wizard’s spell—it is the relic of a sweet vanished time when none who loved me could distrust.”
He said these words in a tone of such melancholy reproach that it went to the heart of Viola; but the tone changed into a solemnity which chilled back the gush of her feelings as he resumed: “And this, Viola, one day, perhaps, I will transfer from my breast to thine; yes, whenever thou shalt comprehend me better—Whenever the laws of our being shall be the same!”
He
