Zanoni

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.The black mantilla, the faded laurel-leaf, lay there before him.Viola's heart guessed allat a single glance; she sprung to his knees; she clasped them,-- "Father, father, _I_ am left theestill!"The wail ceased,--the note changed; with a confused association-- half of the man, half of the artist--the anguish, still a melody, was connected with sweeter sounds and thoughts.The nightingale hadescaped the pursuit,--soft, airy, bird-like, thrilled the delicious notes a moment, and then died away.The instrument fell to the floor, and its chords snapped.You heard that sound through the silence.The artist looked on his kneeling child, and then on the broken chords."Bury me by her side," hesaid, in a very calm, low voice; "and THAT by mine." And with these words his whole frame becamerigid, as if turned to stone.The last change passed over his face.He fell to the ground, sudden andheavy.The chords THERE, too,--the chords of the human instrument were snapped asunder.As hefell, his robe brushed the laurel-wreath, and that fell also, near but not in reach of the dead man'snerveless hand.Broken instrument, broken heart, withered laurel-wreath!--the setting sun through the vine-cladlattice streamed on all! So smiles the eternal Nature on the wrecks of all that make life glorious! Andnot a sun that sets not somewhere on the silenced music,--on the faded laurel!CHAPTER 1.X.Che difesa miglior ch' usbergo e scudo,E la santa innocenza al petto ignudo!"Ger.Lib.," c.viii.xli.(Better defence than shield or breastplate is holy innocence to the naked breast.)And they buried the musician and his barbiton together, in the same coffin.That famous Steiner--primeval Titan of the great Tyrolese race--often hast thou sought to scale the heavens, andtherefore must thou, like the meaner children of men, descend to the dismal Hades! Harder fate forthee than thy mortal master.For THY soul sleeps with thee in the coffin.And the music that belongsto HIS, separate from the instrument, ascends on high, to be heard often by a daughter's pious earswhen the heaven is serene and the earth sad.For there is a sense of hearing that the vulgar knownot.And the voices of the dead breathe soft and frequent to those who can unite the memory withthe faith.And now Viola is alone in the world,--alone in the home where loneliness had seemed from thecradle a thing that was not of nature.And at first the solitude and the stillness were insupportable.Have you, ye mourners, to whom these sibyl leaves, weird with many a dark enigma, shall beborne, have you not felt that when the death of some best-loved one has made the hearthdesolate,--have you not felt as if the gloom of the altered home was too heavy for thought to bear?--you would leave it, though a palace, even for a cabin.And yet,--sad to say,-- when you obey theimpulse, when you fly from the walls, when in the strange place in which you seek your refugenothing speaks to you of the lost, have ye not felt again a yearning for that very food to memorywhich was just before but bitterness and gall? Is it not almost impious and profane to abandon thatdear hearth to strangers? And the desertion of the home where your parents dwelt, and blessedyou, upbraids your conscience as if you had sold their tombs.Beautiful was the Etruscan superstition that the ancestors become the household gods.Deaf is theheart to which the Lares call from the desolate floors in vain.At first Viola had, in her intolerableanguish, gratefully welcomed the refuge which the house and family of a kindly neighbour, muchattached to her father, and who was one of the orchestra that Pisani shall perplex no more, hadproffered to the orphan.But the company of the unfamiliar in our grief, the consolation of thestranger, how it irritates the wound! And then, to hear elsewhere the name of father, mother, child,--as if death came alone to you,--to see elsewhere the calm regularity of those lives united in love andorder, keeping account of happy hours, the unbroken timepiece of home, as if nowhere else thewheels were arrested, the chain shattered, the hands motionless, the chime still! No, the grave itselfdoes not remind us of our loss like the company of those who have no loss to mourn.Go back to thysolitude, young orphan,--go back to thy home: the sorrow that meets thee on the threshold cangreet thee, even in its sadness, like the smile upon the face of the dead.And there, from thycasement, and there, from without thy door, thou seest still the tree, solitary as thyself, andspringing from the clefts of the rock, but forcing its way to light,--as, through all sorrow, while theseasons yet can renew the verdure and bloom of youth, strives the instinct of the human heart! Onlywhen the sap is dried up, only when age comes on, does the sun shine in vain for man and for thetree.Weeks and months--months sad and many--again passed, and Naples will not longer suffer its idolto seclude itself from homage.The world ever plucks us back from ourselves with a thousand arms [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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