Part 5 (1/2)
”But what are my perils to thine? Oh, Heaven! if my father found thee here thou wouldst die!”
”He would think it then so great a humiliation, that thou, beautiful Nina, who mightst match with the haughtiest names of Rome, shouldst waste thy love on a plebeian-even though the grandson of an emperor!”
The proud heart of Nina could sympathize well with the wounded pride of her lover: she detected the soreness which lurked beneath his answer, carelessly as it was uttered.
”Hast thou not told me,” she said, ”of that great Marius, who was no n.o.ble, but from whom the loftiest Colonna would rejoice to claim his descent? and do I not know in thee one who shall yet eclipse the power of Marius, unsullied by his vices?”
”Delicious flattery! sweet prophet!” said Rienzi, with a melancholy smile; ”never were thy supporting promises of the future more welcome to me than now; for to thee I will say what I would utter to none else-my soul half sinks beneath the mighty burthen I have heaped upon it. I want new courage as the dread hour approaches; and from thy words and looks I drink it.”
”Oh!” answered Nina, blus.h.i.+ng as she spoke, ”glorious is indeed the lot which I have bought by my love for thee: glorious to share thy schemes, to cheer thee in doubt, to whisper hope to thee in danger.”
”And give grace to me in triumph!” added Rienzi, pa.s.sionately. ”Ah! should the future ever place upon these brows the laurel-wreath due to one who has saved his country, what joy, what recompence, to lay it at thy feet! Perhaps, in those long and solitary hours of languor and exhaustion which fill up the interstices of time,-the dull s.p.a.ce for sober thought between the epochs of exciting action,-perhaps I should have failed and flagged, and renounced even my dreams for Rome, had they not been linked also with my dreams for thee!-had I not pictured to myself the hour when my fate should elevate me beyond my birth; when thy sire would deem it no disgrace to give thee to my arms; when thou, too, shouldst stand amidst the dames of Rome, more honoured, as more beautiful, than all; and when I should see that pomp, which my own soul disdains, ('Quem semper abhorrui sicut cenum' is the expression used by Rienzi, in his letter to his friend at Avignon, and which was probably sincere. Men rarely act according to the bias of their own tastes.) made dear and grateful to me because a.s.sociated with thee! Yes, it is these thoughts that have inspired me, when sterner ones have shrunk back appalled from the spectres that surround their goal. And oh! my Nina, sacred, strong, enduring must be, indeed, the love which lives in the same pure and elevated air as that which sustains my hopes of liberty and fame!”
This was the language which, more even than the vows of fidelity and the dear adulation which springs from the heart's exuberance, had bound the proud and vain soul of Nina to the chains that it so willingly wore. Perhaps, indeed, in the absence of Rienzi, her weaker nature pictured to herself the triumph of humbling the highborn signoras, and eclipsing the barbarous magnificence of the chiefs of Rome; but in his presence, and listening to his more elevated and generous ambition, as yet all unsullied by one private feeling save the hope of her, her higher sympathies were enlisted with his schemes, her mind aspired to raise itself to the height of his, and she thought less of her own rise than of his glory. It was sweet to her pride to be the sole confidante of his most secret thoughts, as of his most hardy undertakings; to see bared before her that intricate and plotting spirit; to be admitted even to the knowledge of its doubts and weakness, as of its heroism and power.
Nothing could be more contrasted than the loves of Rienzi and Nina, and those of Adrian and Irene: in the latter, all were the dreams, the phantasies, the extravagance, of youth; they never talked of the future; they mingled no other aspirations with those of love. Ambition, glory, the world's high objects, were nothing to them when together; their love had swallowed up the world, and left nothing visible beneath the sun, save itself. But the pa.s.sion of Nina and her lover was that of more complicated natures and more mature years: it was made up of a thousand feelings, each naturally severed from each, but compelled into one focus by the mighty concentration of love; their talk was of the world; it was from the world that they drew the aliment which sustained it; it was of the future they spoke and thought; of its dreams and imagined glories they made themselves a home and altar; their love had in it more of the Intellectual than that of Adrian and Irene; it was more fitted for this hard earth; it had in it, also, more of the leaven of the later and iron days, and less of poetry and the first golden age.
”And must thou leave me now?” said Nina, her cheek no more averted from his lips, nor her form from his parting embrace. ”The moon is high yet; it is but a little hour thou hast given me.”
”An hour! Alas!” said Rienzi, ”it is near upon midnight-our friends await me.”
”Go, then, my soul's best half! Go; Nina shall not detain thee one moment from those higher objects which make thee so dear to Nina. When-when shall we meet again!”
”Not,” said Rienzi, proudly, and with all his soul upon his brow, ”not thus, by stealth! no! nor as I thus have met thee, the obscure and contemned bondsman! When next thou seest me, it shall be at the head of the sons of Rome! her champion! her restorer! or-” said he, sinking his voice- ”There is no or!” interrupted Nina, weaving her arms round him, and catching his enthusiasm; ”thou hast uttered thine own destiny!”
”One kiss more!-farewell!-the tenth day from the morrow s.h.i.+nes upon the restoration of Rome!”
Chapter 1.XII. The Strange Adventures that Befel Walter de Montreal.
It was upon that same evening, and while the earlier stars yet shone over the city, that Walter de Montreal, returning, alone, to the convent then a.s.sociated with the church of Santa Maria del Priorata (both of which belonged to the Knights of the Hospital, and in the first of which Montreal had taken his lodgment), paused amidst the ruins and desolation which lay around his path. Thou little skilled in the cla.s.sic memories and a.s.sociations of the spot, he could not but be impressed with the surrounding witnesses of departed empire; the vast skeleton, as it were, of the dead giantess.
”Now,” thought he, as he gazed around upon the roofless columns and shattered walls, everywhere visible, over which the starlight shone, ghastly and transparent, backed by the frowning and embattled fortresses of the Frangipani, half hid by the dark foliage that sprung up amidst the very fanes and palaces of old-Nature exulting over the frailer Art; ”now,” thought he, ”bookmen would be inspired, by this scene, with fantastic and dreaming visions of the past. But to me these monuments of high ambition and royal splendour create only images of the future. Rome may yet be, with her seven-hilled diadem, as Rome has been before, the prize of the strongest hand and the boldest warrior,-revived, not by her own degenerate sons, but the infused blood of a new race. William the b.a.s.t.a.r.d could scarce have found the hardy Englishers so easy a conquest as Walter the Well-born may find these eunuch Romans. And which conquest were the more glorious,-the barbarous Isle, or the Metropolis of the World? Short step from the general to the podesta-shorter step from the podesta to the king!”
While thus revolving his wild, yet not altogether chimerical ambition, a quick light step was heard amidst the long herbage, and, looking up, Montreal perceived the figure of a tall female descending from that part of the hill then covered by many convents, towards the base of the Aventine. She supported her steps with a long staff, and moved with such elasticity and erectness, that now, as her face became visible by the starlight, it was surprising to perceive that it was the face of one advanced in years,-a harsh, proud countenance, withered, and deeply wrinkled, but not without a certain regularity of outline.
”Merciful Virgin!” cried Montreal, starting back as that face gleamed upon him: ”is it possible? It is she:-it is-”
He sprung forward, and stood right before the old woman, who seemed equally surprised, though more dismayed, at the sight of Montreal.
”I have sought thee for years,” said the Knight, first breaking the silence; ”years, long years,-thy conscience can tell thee why.”
”Mine, man of blood!” cried the female, trembling with rage or fear; ”darest thou talk of conscience? Thou, the dishonourer-the robber-the professed homicide! Thou, disgrace to knighthood and to birth! Thou, with the cross of chast.i.ty and of peace upon thy breast! Thou talk of conscience, hypocrite!-thou?”
”Lady-lady!” said Montreal, deprecatingly, and almost quailing beneath the fiery pa.s.sion of that feeble woman, ”I have sinned against thee and thine. But remember all my excuses!-early love-fatal obstacles-rash vow-irresistible temptation! Perhaps,” he added, in a more haughty tone, ”perhaps, yet, I may have the power to atone my error, and wring, with mailed hand, from the successor of St Peter, who hath power to loose as to bind-”
”Perjured and abandoned!” interrupted the female; ”dost thou dream that violence can purchase absolution, or that thou canst ever atone the past?-a n.o.ble name disgraced, a father's broken heart and dying curse! Yes, that curse, I hear it now! it rings upon me thrillingly, as when I watched the expiring clay! it cleaves to thee-it pursues thee-it shall pierce thee through thy corselet-it shall smite thee in the meridian of thy power! Genius wasted-ambition blasted-penitence deferred-a life of brawls, and a death of shame-thy destruction the offspring of thy crime!-To this, to this, an old man's curse hath doomed thee!-AND THOU ART DOOMED!”
These words were rather shrieked than spoken: and the flas.h.i.+ng eye, the lifted hand, the dilated form of the speaker-the hour-the solitude of the ruins around-all conspired to give to the fearful execration the character of prophecy. The warrior, against whose undaunted breast a hundred spears had s.h.i.+vered in vain, fell appalled and humbled to the ground. He seized the hem of his fierce denouncer's robe, and cried, in a choked and hollow voice, ”Spare me! spare me!”
”Spare thee!” said the unrelenting crone; ”hast thou ever spared man in thy hatred, or woman in thy l.u.s.t? Ah, grovel in the dust!-crouch-crouch!-wild beast as thou art! whose sleek skin and beautiful hues have taught the unwary to be blind to the talons that rend, and the grinders that devour;-crouch, that the foot of the old and impotent may spurn thee!”
”Hag!” cried Montreal, in the reaction of sudden fury and maddened pride, springing up to the full height of his stature. ”Hag! thou hast pa.s.sed the limits to which, remembering who thou art, my forbearance gave thee licence. I had well-nigh forgot that thou hadst a.s.sumed my part-I am the Accuser! Woman!-the boy!-shrink not! equivocate not! lie not!-thou wert the thief!”
”I was. Thou taughtest me the lesson how to steal a-”
”Render-restore him!” interrupted Montreal, stamping on the ground with such force that the splinters of the marble fragments on which he stood s.h.i.+vered under his armed heel.
The woman little heeded a violence at which the fiercest warrior of Italy might have trembled; but she did not make an immediate answer. The character of her countenance altered from pa.s.sion into an expression of grave, intent, and melancholy thought. At length she replied to Montreal; whose hand had wandered to his dagger-hilt, with the instinct of long habit, whenever enraged or thwarted, rather than from any design of blood; which, stern and vindictive as he was, he would have been incapable of forming against any woman,-much less against the one then before him.
”Walter de Montreal,” said she, in a voice so calm that it almost sounded like that of compa.s.sion, ”the boy, I think, has never known brother or sister: the only child of a once haughty and lordly race, on both sides, though now on both dishonoured-nay, why so impatient? thou wilt soon learn the worst-the boy is dead!”
”Dead!” repeated Montreal, recoiling and growing pale; ”dead!-no, no-say not that! He has a mother,-you know he has!-a fond, meekhearted, anxious, hoping mother!-no!-no, he is not dead!”
”Thou canst feel, then, for a mother?” said the old woman, seemingly touched by the tone of the Provencal. ”Yet, bethink thee; is it not better that the grave should save him from a life of riot, of bloodshed, and of crime? Better to sleep with G.o.d than to wake with the fiends!”
”Dead!” echoed Montreal; ”dead!-the pretty one!-so young!-those eyes-the mother's eyes-closed so soon?”
”Hast thou aught else to say? Thy sight scares my very womanhood from my soul!-let me be gone.”
”Dead!-may I believe thee? or dost thou mock me? Thou hast uttered thy curse, hearken to my warning:-If thou hast lied in this, thy last hour shall dismay thee, and thy death-bed shall be the death-bed of despair!”
”Thy lips,” replied the female, with a scornful smile, ”are better adapted for lewd vows to unhappy maidens, than for the denunciations which sound solemn only when coming from the good. Farewell!”
”Stay! inexorable woman! stay!-where sleeps he? Ma.s.ses shall be sung! priests shall pray!-the sins of the father shall not be visited on that young head!”
”At Florence!” returned the woman, hastily. ”But no stone records the departed one!-The dead boy had no name!”
Waiting for no further questionings, the woman now pa.s.sed on,-pursued her way;-and the long herbage, and the winding descent, soon s.n.a.t.c.hed her ill-omened apparition from the desolate landscape.
Montreal, thus alone, sunk with a deep and heavy sigh upon the ground, covered his face with his hands, and burst into an agony of grief; his chest heaved, his whole frame trembled, and he wept and sobbed aloud, with all the fearful vehemence of a man whose pa.s.sions are strong and fierce, but to whom the violence of grief alone is novel and unfamiliar.
He remained thus, prostrate and unmanned, for a considerable time, growing slowly and gradually more calm as tears relieved his emotion; and, at length, rather indulging a gloomy reverie than a pa.s.sionate grief. The moon was high and the hour late when he arose, and then few traces of the past excitement remained upon his countenance; for Walter de Montreal was not of that mould in which woe can force a settlement, or to which any affliction can bring the continued and habitual melancholy that darkens those who feel more enduringly, though with emotions less stormy. His were the elements of the true Franc character, though carried to excess: his sternest and his deepest qualities were mingled with fickleness and caprice; his profound sagacity often frustrated by a whim; his towering ambition deserted for some frivolous temptation; and his elastic, sanguine, and high-spirited nature, faithful only to the desire of military glory, to the poetry of a daring and stormy life, and to the susceptibilities of that tender pa.s.sion without whose colourings no portrait of chivalry is complete, and in which he was capable of a sentiment, a tenderness, and a loyal devotion, which could hardly have been supposed compatible with his reckless levity and his undisciplined career.
”Well,” said he, as he rose slowly, folded his mantle round him, and resumed his way, ”it was not for myself I grieved thus. But the pang is past, and the worst is known. Now, then, back to those things that never die-restless projects and daring schemes. That hag's curse keeps my blood cold still, and this solitude has something in it weird and awful. Ha!-what sudden light is that?”