Zanoni Part 39

BOOK VI. -- SUPERSt.i.tION DESERTING FAITH.

Why do I yield to that suggestion, Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair.--Shakespeare

CHAPTER 6.I.

Therefore the Genii were painted with a platter full of garlands and flowers in one hand, and a whip in the other.--Alexander Ross, "Mystag. Poet."

According to the order of the events related in this narrative, the departure of Zanoni and Viola from the Greek isle, in which two happy years appear to have been pa.s.sed, must have been somewhat later in date than the arrival of Glyndon at Ma.r.s.eilles. It must have been in the course of the year 1791 when Viola fled from Naples with her mysterious lover, and when Glyndon sought Mejnour in the fatal castle. It is now towards the close of 1793, when our story again returns to Zanoni. The stars of winter shone down on the lagunes of Venice. The hum of the Rialto was hushed,--the last loiterers had deserted the Place of St.

Mark's, and only at distant intervals might be heard the oars of the rapid gondolas, bearing reveller or lover to his home. But lights still flitted to and fro across the windows of one of the Palladian palaces, whose shadow slept in the great ca.n.a.l; and within the palace watched the twin Eumenides that never sleep for Man,--Fear and Pain.

"I will make thee the richest man in all Venice, if thou savest her."

"Signor," said the leech; "your gold cannot control death, and the will of Heaven, signor, unless within the next hour there is some blessed change, prepare your courage."

Ho--ho, Zanoni! man of mystery and might, who hast walked amidst the pa.s.sions of the world, with no changes on thy brow, art thou tossed at last upon the billows of tempestuous fear? Does thy spirit reel to and fro?--knowest thou at last the strength and the majesty of Death?

He fled, trembling, from the pale-faced man of art,--fled through stately hall and long-drawn corridor, and gained a remote chamber in the palace, which other step than his was not permitted to profane. Out with thy herbs and vessels. Break from the enchanted elements, O silvery-azure flame! Why comes he not,--the Son of the Starbeam! Why is Adon-Ai deaf to thy solemn call? It comes not,--the luminous and delightsome Presence! Cabalist! are thy charms in vain? Has thy throne vanished from the realms of s.p.a.ce? Thou standest pale and trembling.

Pale trembler! not thus didst thou look when the things of glory gathered at thy spell. Never to the pale trembler bow the things of glory: the soul, and not the herbs, nor the silvery-azure flame, nor the spells of the Cabala, commands the children of the air; and THY soul, by Love and Death, is made sceptreless and discrowned!

At length the flame quivers,--the air grows cold as the wind in charnels. A thing not of earth is present,--a mistlike, formless thing.

It cowers in the distance,--a silent Horror! it rises; it creeps; it nears thee--dark in its mantle of dusky haze; and under its veil it looks on thee with its livid, malignant eyes,--the thing of malignant eyes!

"Ha, young Chaldean! young in thy countless ages,--young as when, cold to pleasure and to beauty, thou stoodest on the old Firetower, and heardest the starry silence whisper to thee the last mystery that baffles Death,--fearest thou Death at length? Is thy knowledge but a circle that brings thee back whence thy wanderings began! Generations on generations have withered since we two met! Lo! thou beholdest me now!"

"But I behold thee without fear! Though beneath thine eyes thousands have perished; though, where they burn, spring up the foul poisons of the human heart, and to those whom thou canst subject to thy will, thy presence glares in the dreams of the raving maniac, or blackens the dungeon of despairing crime, thou art not my vanquisher, but my slave!"

"And as a slave will I serve thee! Command thy slave, O beautiful Chaldean! Hark, the wail of women!--hark, the sharp shriek of thy beloved one! Death is in thy palace! Adon-Ai comes not to thy call. Only where no cloud of the pa.s.sion and the flesh veils the eye of the Serene Intelligence can the Sons of the Starbeam glide to man. But _I_ can aid thee!--hark!" And Zanoni heard distinctly in his heart, even at that distance from the chamber, the voice of Viola calling in delirium on her beloved one.

"Oh, Viola, I can save thee not!" exclaimed the seer, pa.s.sionately; "my love for thee has made me powerless!"

"Not powerless; I can gift thee with the art to save her,--I can place healing in thy hand!"

"For both?--child and mother,--for both?"

"Both!"

A convulsion shook the limbs of the seer,--a mighty struggle shook him as a child: the Humanity and the Hour conquered the repugnant spirit.

"I yield! Mother and child--save both!"

In the dark chamber lay Viola, in the sharpest agonies of travail; life seemed rending itself away in the groans and cries that spoke of pain in the midst of frenzy; and still, in groan and cry, she called on Zanoni, her beloved. The physician looked to the clock; on it beat: the Heart of Time,--regularly and slowly,--Heart that never sympathised with Life, and never flagged for Death! "The cries are fainter," said the leech; "in ten minutes more all will be past."

Fool! the minutes laugh at thee; Nature, even now, like a blue sky through a shattered temple, is smiling through the tortured frame. The breathing grows more calm and hushed; the voice of delirium is dumb,--a sweet dream has come to Viola. Is it a dream, or is it the soul that sees? She thinks suddenly that she is with Zanoni, that her burning head is pillowed on his bosom; she thinks, as he gazes on her, that his eyes dispel the tortures that prey upon her,--the touch of his hand cools the fever on her brow; she hears his voice in murmurs,--it is a music from which the fiends fly. Where is the mountain that seemed to press upon her temples? Like a vapour, it rolls away. In the frosts of the winter night, she sees the sun laughing in luxurious heaven,--she hears the whisper of green leaves; the beautiful world, valley and stream and woodland, lie before, and with a common voice speak to her, "We are not yet past for thee!" Fool of drugs and formula, look to thy dial-plate!--the hand has moved on; the minutes are with Eternity; the soul thy sentence would have dismissed, still dwells on the sh.o.r.es of Time. She sleeps: the fever abates; the convulsions are gone; the living rose blooms upon her cheek; the crisis is past! Husband, thy wife lives; lover, thy universe is no solitude! Heart of Time, beat on! A while, a little while,--joy! joy! joy!--father, embrace thy child!

CHAPTER 6.II.

Tristis Erinnys Praetulit infaustas sanguinolenta faces.

Ovid.

(Erinnys, doleful and b.l.o.o.d.y, extends the unblessed torches.)

And they placed the child in the father's arms! As silently he bent over it, tears--tears, how human!--fell from his eyes like rain! And the little one smiled through the tears that bathed its cheeks! Ah, with what happy tears we welcome the stranger into our sorrowing world!

With what agonising tears we dismiss the stranger back to the angels!

Unselfish joy; but how selfish is the sorrow!

And now through the silent chamber a faint sweet voice is heard,--the young mother's voice.

"I am here: I am by thy side!" murmured Zanoni.

The mother smiled, and clasped his hand, and asked no more; she was contented.

Viola recovered with a rapidity that startled the physician; and the young stranger thrived as if it already loved the world to which it had descended. From that hour Zanoni seemed to live in the infant's life, and in that life the souls of mother and father met as in a new bond.

Nothing more beautiful than this infant had eye ever dwelt upon. It was strange to the nurses that it came not wailing to the light, but smiled to the light as a thing familiar to it before. It never uttered one cry of childish pain. In its very repose it seemed to be listening to some happy voice within its heart: it seemed itself so happy. In its eyes you would have thought intellect already kindled, though it had not yet found a language. Already it seemed to recognise its parents; already it stretched forth its arms when Zanoni bent over the bed, in which it breathed and bloomed,--the budding flower! And from that bed he was rarely absent: gazing upon it with his serene, delighted eyes, his soul seemed to feed its own. At night and in utter darkness he was still there; and Viola often heard him murmuring over it as she lay in a half-sleep. But the murmur was in a language strange to her; and sometimes when she heard she feared, and vague, undefined superst.i.tions came back to her,--the superst.i.tions of earlier youth. A mother fears everything, even the G.o.ds, for her new-born. The mortals shrieked aloud when of old they saw the great Demeter seeking to make their child immortal.

But Zanoni, wrapped in the sublime designs that animated the human love to which he was now awakened, forgot all, even all he had forfeited or incurred, in the love that blinded him.

But the dark, formless thing, though he nor invoked nor saw it, crept, often, round and round him, and often sat by the infant's couch, with its hateful eyes.

CHAPTER 6.III.

Fuscis tellurem amplect.i.tur alis.

Virgil.

(Embraces the Earth with gloomy wings.)

Letter from Zanoni to Mejnour.

Mejnour, Humanity, with all its sorrows and its joys, is mine once more.

Day by day, I am forging my own fetters. I live in other lives than my own, and in them I have lost more than half my empire. Not lifting them aloft, they drag me by the strong bands of the affections to their own earth. Exiled from the beings only visible to the most abstract sense, the grim Enemy that guards the Threshold has entangled me in its web.

Canst thou credit me, when I tell thee that I have accepted its gifts, and endure the forfeit? Ages must pa.s.s ere the brighter beings can again obey the spirit that has bowed to the ghastly one! And--

In this hope, then, Mejnour, I triumph still; I yet have supreme power over this young life. Insensibly and inaudibly my soul speaks to its own, and prepares it even now. Thou knowest that for the pure and unsullied infant spirit, the ordeal has no terror and no peril. Thus unceasingly I nourish it with no unholy light; and ere it yet be conscious of the gift, it will gain the privileges it has been mine to attain: the child, by slow and scarce-seen degrees, will communicate its own attributes to the mother; and content to see Youth forever radiant on the brows of the two that now suffice to fill up my whole infinity of thought, shall I regret the airier kingdom that vanishes hourly from my grasp? But thou, whose vision is still clear and serene, look into the far deeps shut from my gaze, and counsel me, or forewarn! I know that the gifts of the Being whose race is so hostile to our own are, to the common seeker, fatal and perfidious as itself. And hence, when, at the outskirts of knowledge, which in earlier ages men called Magic, they encountered the things of the hostile tribes, they believed the apparitions to be fiends, and, by fancied compacts, imagined they had signed away their souls; as if man could give for an eternity that over which he has control but while he lives! Dark, and shrouded forever from human sight, dwell the demon rebels, in their impenetrable realm; in them is no breath of the Divine One. In every human creature the Divine One breathes; and He alone can judge His own hereafter, and allot its new career and home. Could man sell himself to the fiend, man could prejudge himself, and arrogate the disposal of eternity! But these creatures, modifications as they are of matter, and some with more than the malignanty of man, may well seem, to fear and unreasoning superst.i.tion, the representatives of fiends. And from the darkest and mightiest of them I have accepted a boon,--the secret that startled Death from those so dear to me. Can I not trust that enough of power yet remains to me to baffle or to daunt the Phantom, if it seek to pervert the gift? Answer me, Mejnour, for in the darkness that veils me, I see only the pure eyes of the new-born; I hear only the low beating of my heart. Answer me, thou whose wisdom is without love!

Mejnour to Zanoni.

Rome.