42
CHAKDOS.
In one of the chambers of a magnificent hotel he
stood in the dusky red glow of the sunset that burned
through the smoke-laden atmosphere and fell about his
feet as though it too were eager to seek him out and
smile on Mm—this man, omnipotent to all he under-
took. A crowd of friends were about him, breathless
in congratulation on what was but a repeated triumph,
waiting in delighted warmth of welcome on one in
whom they saw a deity more potent than all the gocts
of Semitic or Achaean creeds—the deity of a supreme
Success. Throngs had been about him from earliest
days—throngs of friends, of flatterers, of men who
believed in him honestly and would have fought for"
him to the death had need been- -of men who believed
in nothing except the divinity of success, and followed
that idolatrously in him because they saw his acumen
never fail, his fortune never change. The city would
give him its banquet to-night; his partv brought him
devoted gratitude and ecstatic pride, the country be-
stowed on him scarce less admiration; young men
looked to him as their leader, elder looked to him to
reap the harvest of the seed they had sown in the
future; the aristocracy dreaded, the plutocracy bribed,
the multitude adored him. He was a great man
already; later on he would be a greater—popular be-
yond all conception, triumphant in whatever he
essayed.
The shouts and the cheers of the populace swelled
louder and louder; the clamor was hoarse, Titantic,
almost terrible in its imperative power, as the voice of
the People always is when once it thunders through the
land—imperative for murder as imperative for bread,
mighty and resistless alike in both. Here it rose with
one accord, with one word—his own name. They had
brought him in; those men with their horny, supple
hands, aird their blackened, resolute brows; and their
limbs like the limbs of the old Bersaerkers, those men
of the Black Country, who grasped so doggedly at
truths sharp as steel, yet grasped but at half-truths,
and, so blinded, reached but hatred of an Order
when they thought they grasped at liberty for Man-
kind, The shouts swelled louder and louder, more and
more full of peremptory demand; they had brought
him through, or thought they had, and clamored for
their idol.
He humored them ever, as a lion-tamer humors his
cubs, that he may cut the claws and grind smooth the
teeth and make the brave beast lie down passive as a
spaniel at his beck, and turn to profit the world's terror
when he shows how docilely he guides the wild, tawny
desert king that at his bidding would leap forth and
tear and slay.
He went out on the balcony, and the din of the ac-
clamations rolled up to the red evening skies like thun-
der. In the large square before the building, and in
the transverse streets that crossed and met, the dense
multitudes were gathered, wave on wave of human
life, surging in in swift succession, and stretching far
and wide away beyond the sight, like a stormy and
restless sea. The dark faces, swarthy and begrimed,
shrewd and stern, weue turned upward to the balcony
with an eager pride and pleasure, while from the
brawny chest of the iron workers that tremendous
welcome rang. The sun shone more burnished red in
the crimson, heavy west, and, slanting in broad, glow-
ing, dusky streams of light athwart the misty gloom,
fell on the ocean of upraised faces, and across the eyes
of the man they honored—eyes so keen, so mirthful,
so unerring, so full of sagacious life, of triumphant vic-
tory.
"He is the man for the future," said one stalwart
worker, with the breath of the furnace-blasts and the
blackness of the iron foundry upon him, yet who read
Bentham, and Fourier, and Mill.
One, less book wise and more world-wise, pierced
nearer to the secret of success, to the root of popu-
larity, as he answered:
" He's more: he's the man for the Present."
"And the man for the People!" shouted a third, be-
hind them. The words were caught up and echoed on
all sides, till they ran through the packed thousands
like electric fluid, till from the whole of the swaying
gigantic mass the words broke unanimously, rising
high above the pealing of the bells and the strife of the
streets, hurling Ms name out in that grim, passionate,
furious love of a multitude which has ever iu it some-
thing, and wellnigh as much, of menace as of caress.
He nodded to them with a pleasant, familiar smile-
such a smile as a boy gives to his favorite and unruly
dogs: then he stood more forward against the iron
scroll-work of the balcony, looking down on that
.movement beneath him, and spoke.
Not for the first time, here, in Darshampton, by
nany, the ringing, metallic clarion-roll of the voice
they knew so well stilled them like magic, thrilled them
as hounds thrill at the notes of a horn, and held them
m check as the horn holds the pack. He spoke as only
those can speak who have been long trained to the
public arena, who have studied every technicality of
their science and every weakness of their audience
who have brought to it not only the talent of native
skill, but the polish of long usuage, the power of as-
sured practice. He spoke well—keen, trenchant, vig-
orous, humorous oratory, English to the backbone
coarse in its pungency, withal, here as it could be
scholarly elsewhere, striking to the heart of its subject
as surely and as straightly as the arrow of Tell to the
core of the apple. There was a breathless silence
while-he spoke, the trumpet-like tones of his ringing
voice penetrating without effort to the farthermost of
the listening throngs, the Swift-like humor and «it
shaking sardonic laughter from the brawny chests of
his hearers, the biting and incisive reasoning drawn in
by them as eagerly as town-dusted lungs draw in the
salt, fresh breezes of the sea. He was their master
though they thought themselves his electors and crea-
tors; and he played at will on them, as a strong, skilled
hand plays on a stringed instrument, moving it to what
cadence he chooses. They listened in devoted silence
only broken by tumultuous cheering, or by the hoarse'
gaunt laughter that was ominous as any curses raised
against what they hated. He spoke long, though so
succinctly, so pungently, that the minutes of his speech
seemed moments; then ceased, while the red sun-glow
still strayed to his feet, and the chimes of the bells
swung wild delight, and the shouts of the populace
teeming below deafened the air with his name.
He toughed to himself as he bowed many times his
thanks and hrs farewell, then sauntered from the bal-
7 "t^w ° the 'ighted and crowded room, glancing back
422 t, fiT 5ng, s1a °/ «Praised, earnest, hard-lined
faces to the dusky heat of the fading sun
i  rmiht r,,sfA' fYerJ one,ot you, my friends," he
i  ought,   'or out-ana-out fools;  God knows which.
Rave about oppression and the wrongs of Capital to
Labor, while you send your children to sweat, at five
years old, in furnaces, and threaten to kill your
brother if he don't join your trade-union and strike
when he's told; clamor for the rights of man, and
worry your brains after political economics, while you
think all the ' rights ' centre in scribbling your name in
a poll-book and talking mild sedition in a tap-room !
Oh, you precious fools ! how we use you, and how we
laugh at you!"
For he was not even wholly true to those who were
so true to him; and he had no belief even in their
thorough, heartfelt earnesness, erring from imperfect
vision, and distorted from imperfect education, but
sincere and true in its widest errors.
They thought they had made him what he was; he
knew that they were his tools, his wax, his weapons.
He glanced back once on to the vast, oscillating
crowd in the reddening angry sunset mist, and the
laugh of a consummated victory, the insolence of a
secure triumph, was in the backward flash of his eyes,
mingled, too, with a certain proud power, a certain
exultation of self-achieved distinction. His name was
still echoing to the skies from the lungs of the close-
packed throngs.
" Who dare sneer at that name nowf" he thought;
and there was in that thought the glow which Themis-
tocles felt when they who had exiled him as a nameless
thing of the people, to wrestle with the base-born in
the King of Cynosarges, welcomed him in the city of
the Violet Crown as the victor of Salamis, the slayer of
Persia.
Then he went within from the stormy clangor and
the scarlet flush of evening, and was feasted through
that night by the men of the mighty town, nobles who
hated him bearing their part in his honor, rivers of
wine flowing to his toast, the crowds of the streets
knowing no theme but his present and his future, the
nation on the morrow saying, as the city said to-night,
" He is a great man, he will be a still greater."
BOOK. THE   SIXTH.
From the world as it is Man's, into the worhl as it is God's.
COWLKY.
Sie ist volkoimnen mitl wiefehlet
Darin allein «ass sie rnich liobt.
G JETHE.
CHAPTER I.
Down at the foot of the mountain-slopes reaching to
Vallombrosa, hidden away in the deep belt of the
chestnut-forests, was a little Tuscan village. Sheltered
high above by the pines of the hills, and veiled from
every glance by the thick masses of the chestnut-
leaves, no strange foot ever scarcely wandered to it.
It was out of the route of travellers; it had slumbered
here for ages; it had been here when Milton looked on
the Val d'Arno ; it had been here when Totila thundered
at the gates of Rome; it had been here when Plautus
caught in the color of his words the laughter, the
mirth, the tavern-wit, the girls à libre allure, the wine-
brawls, and the Bacchan feasts of the Latin life ; it had
been here through all changes, but it had never
changed. Belike, it had been sacked by Cœsar, razed
by Theodorie, visited by Stilicho, plundered by the
Franks of Carl; but it was still the same, surviving all
ruin, and covered in the spring-time with so' dense a
leafy shade that the gray tint of its stone, the red
brown of its few roofs, showed no more than the
oriole's nest through the boughs. The purple plums
of the olives ripened and were gathered, the red osiers
changed to tender green, the grapes were garnered
with the vintage-tide, the cattle came down the hill-
sides when the sun sank low, the chestnuts turned to
ruddy brown and broke their husks and fell upon the
moss; a few lives were born, a few lives were buried.
These were all the changes known there, the changes
of the night and day, of the seasons of the year, and of
the coming of life and of death. The light of the after-
glow shone on it, the scorch of the later summer
parched its fields and woods, the snows of winter lay
upon its hill-top and gleamed between the darkness
of its pines, the breath of the spring breathed the
.flower-glory over its land, and uncurled the white spiral
blossom of its arums in the water-bed; but through
wars and rumors of wars, through the Campaign of
Italy as through the wars of the Great Captain,
through the ravages of the Cinque Cento as through
the raids of the Goths and the Gauls, the little wood-
land nook of Fontane Amorose remained unaltered, as
though the foot of Dionysus when it had pressed its
sward had bidden its blossoms keep an eternal bloom,
and the Dryads and the Satyrs, driven from every other
ancient haunt, still lived beneath the green fronds of
its trailing plants and laughed amidst the bronzed gold
of its autumn vines.
Itwas in the "Mezza notte d'Aprile," beloved, of
painters, hymned of poets, which makes of all the
Southern tend one fresh and laughing garden. Upward
yonder, higher still on the hills, there was some little
chillness lingering still, and the air blew keener through
the aisles of pines; but here, midway in the sloping of
rich mossy greensward, deeply sheltered by its beeches
and chestnuts and bj the slopes of its fir-woods, the
delicious spring of Italy was in its fairest, with the
purple orchid glowing in the noon and the delicate
wind-flower fanned by the breeze, and the young buds
of the vine opening in the clear and perfect light. A
few miles from the clustering dwellings of Fontane was
a grove of beech-trees, always, save at the height of
noon, dark as twilight; for the branches were dense,
and the trees towered massive and many. Yet in the
heart of them was a nook fit for the couch of a Naiad
—fit to have had laid down in it the fair lifeless limbs
of Adonis. In the shade of the leaves the moss and
grass were ever fresh; the sun-tan of midsummer
never brought drought there; anemones and violets,
and all wild flowers that bloom in Tuscan woods, filled
it with odor and color, and through it welled the bright
Clearwater of a broken fountain, so old that under-
neath its moss might still be traced the half-effaced
Latin inscription. By it perhaps Virgil once had
leaned, or Claudian rhymed his epic; at its spring the
beautiful evil lips of Antonina might have drunk, or
lying beside them, Lucretius might have thought of the
Etrurian shades, looking far down into those deep,
ice, and the shedding its ripe gold on the hair of tr
young girl leaning motionless there.
The birds, fearless of her presence, paused in their
flight to glance at her; the nightingales, thinking ii
night in the beech-shadows yonder, sung her their
softest songs; the butterflies alighted on tbe flowesss
her hands held; they knew- her well, they loved her;
they were her only playmates in the long Italian day.
Arum lilies, and the pale-green blossoms of ivy, and
anemones glowing crimson, and the emerald coils of
moss, were in a loose sheaf on her lap; shesat in a day-
dream, watching the mystical flow of tlie water as
though its patient music could sing her the hymn of
her future.
She was very young, but on her beauty was the Tus-
can glow; and she had already the tall, slender, yield-
ing, voluptuous form of the South. In the hair, like a
chestnut that has the fleck of the sunlight upon it, in
the deep eyes with their blue black lustre and their
dreamy passionate lids, in the lips so soft, so proud, so
mournful, in the brow, broad and thoughtful like an
antique, in the brilliance and the light upon the face,
were all the Southern types: it was only in the fairnese-
of the skin that something more Northern might have
been fancied; in all else it was the rich and sunlit love
liness of Italy.   -
Her hand rested on the stone that bore the Latin
words, all covered now with the wild growth of ivy;
her gaze rested on the water sparkling so bright in sun.
shine here, flowing so dark beneath the grasses there;
the sheaf of woodland wealth rested listlessly on her
lap. She leaned there, in her childhood's carelessness,
in the classic solitude, against the black shades of the
beech-woods that closed her in as in a temple, and only
let the flood of sun pour down across the ruined Roman
fountain and the countless flowers at her feet.
She was fair as Sappho while yet love was unknown
and a child's laughter amidst the roses of Ionia was
only hushed now and then by the vague and prescient
dreams; she was fair as Heloïse while yet only the
grand serenity of the Greek scroll lay opened before
her eyes and no voice beside her had taught a lore more
fatal and a mystery more mournful than the wise
words of Hellas.
She was very lovely, motionless here where no sound
came except the lulling of the water and the gliding
noise of a bird's wing, where the tender green of blos-
soming vines hung coiled above her head, and where
the deep bronze of the beech-belt drew round her the
gloom of the night.
Where she leaned thus, one passing through the
denseness of that gloom saw her, unseen himself, and
paused ; he thought of Proserpine among the flower»
ere the cruelty of fate fell on her. The young life and
the grass-grown ruin, the aisle of color and sunlight,
and the mass of enclosing shade were a picture and a
poem in one—the gladness of a Greek idyl, with the
mystic darkness of a Northern Saga.
Once he would have lingered there, drawn the ivy-
wreaths from the hands, wooed the eyes from their
musing gaze, paused beside her in the leafv peace—
once, in the days of his youth. Now he looted an in-
stant, thought how fair she was, and passed onward
down his lonely path far into the beechen shadows.
CHAPTER II.
Suddenly, without a warning, the radiance of the
late day clouded, the stormy cirri whirled together in
angry turbulent masses, the clouds swept up with in-
stantaneous movement, like the ranks cf an army
hunying to battle ; one of the tempests of the South
broke over the springtide peace of hill and valley-
rainless, furious, driving down the hill-sides, flashing
in flame through the depths of the woods, rending off
the shoots of the vine and the buds of the olive, blind-
ing the trembling cattle, breaking the fast-rooted pines
like reeds, roUinsrits thunder down the mountain and
over the plain till;the earth shook and the end of the
world seemed come to the peasants crouching beneath
their roofs, well used though they were to the sweep of
the hurricane, to the blaze of the skies. Before the
mules could patter along tho stony roads, before the
cantadine could reach homeward as they came from
antique Pelago, before the workers could leave the
olive-fields and vineyards, before the mild-eyed oxen
of the Apennine could be driven through the rank hill-
grass, without warning, the mighty clouds gathered,
the night fell, the fires ran down the heavens, the storm
broke !
Through it, as best he might, he who had an hour or
two before passed through the moss-grown path of the
beech-woods made his backward way. He had seen it
gather as he crossed the broad stretch where the cross
stands, and the view of the Val d'Arno lies unfolded in
all its beauty ; but before he could retrace many steps
of his road, the full force of the tempest was down. It
was now peril to life and limb to be out in its fury; the
melon-plants were torn up by the roots, the twisted
olives writhed into tenfold contortion, the peaceful
bubbling waters turned into angry torrents, the young
trees were uprooted and hurled down the steep de-
scents; the da,rkness was impenetrable, except when
the lightning lit the whole land in its glare, and the
rushing of stones and of boughs and of saplings, as the
winds tore them up and whirled them on its blast,
roared with a thunder only drowned in the peals that
shook from hill to hill and echoed through the solitudes
of the forests.
He eould not even tell his road ; he had lost its cer-
tainty in the blackness around ; ihe woodland paths
were all so similar, the tracks ran all so much alike
under the pines, and stretching towards Vallombrosa,
that he told with difficulty how near or how far he was
from the refuge of Fontane Amorose, or from the shel-
ter of his own house-roof. All that he could do was to-
retain his footing against the fury of the hurricane,
and to make head as best he might against the force
that drove him back at every step, and the deafening
din that rioted around. Unknown to himself, he had
wandered back once more into the beech-glades, and
was lost in their impenetrable shades, instead of hold
ing on his upward road, along the hill-side through the
pines. As he went, feeling his way slowly through the
dense hot gloom that was like the gloom over earfâ and
sky when the lava-torrent of Vesuvius bursts, he trod
on some fallen thing that his foot crushed ere he felt it.
He stopped and stooped to it; he thought it might be
some frightened hare or some large bird struck in the
storm and entangled in the yielding clinging moss.
The darkness was dark as that of a moonless midnight;
rayless aisles of beech, sublime and sad as his own    .
genius.   Where the water rippled, losing itself among   he had no sense to guide him but the sense of touch'
the mosses and the orchids, a glory of sunlight came,   The grasses and the flowers, all braised and beaten'
touching to silver the wing of a wood-pigeon poised to   met his hand; then as it moved farther, it wandered to
drink, lending a warmer blush to the white wild rose   the loose trail of  some floating air, and passed ove»
as the rifling bee hummed far down vu its violated chal-   the warmth of human lips and the outline ofa votutti/