CHANDOS.
45
ter of emperors, mingled with a great softness of
regard.
B Then, I think, If I could once see the great world I
might reign there, and 1 might win some love, and not
be scomedas peasants scorn me here. Would it not be
so, eccellenza?"
He paused a moment; the words touched him to com-
passion. How little she knew that her nameless loveli-
ness would only bring her in the "greatworld " a sov-
ereignty and a love that would be but added shame !
Nor could he teU her.
"Would it not be so, eccellenza?" she asked him,
eagerly again.
¦'Yes," he answered, slowly; " doubtless it would.
But do not wish it, if you be wise. Your diadems
would not be so pure as the one that lies withered
there ; your brows would soon ache under them, and
for the'love-----"
"Ahl" she said, softly, whilst the glow faded, and
her eyes filled with tears as she spoke with the pathos
and the guilelessnessof a child, "I long to beloved!
All the children of Fontane have their mothers, who
look brighter when they see them near; but I am all
alone.   I have been alone so long !"
The words had an intense and touching piteousness
in them; a harder nature than her listener's was would
have been moved by them. How could he find the
cruelty to tell her that the chances were as a million to
one that the only love she would ever meet in this
world beyond the pine woods, to which she vaguely
looked as the redresser of the wrongs, would be one
less merciful to her even than the bitterness and lone-
liness which now visited on her innocence and her
youth the unproven error of her dead mother. Twenty
years before he would have heard her with little thought
save to let his lips linger on the brow whence the faded
ivy-buds had fallen, and murmur to her the tender-
ness which her awakened heart longed for, as an im-
prisoned bird longs for the shelter of summer leaves
and the whispers of summer rivers; now such a thought
as this was distant from him as the wide unknown
world was far from her.
But pity her he did, profoundly. This nameless,
mother! ss child, with her radiant grace and her proud
instincts, was as desolate as any chamois-fawn lost on
the hills and driven as an alien from every herd with
Which it seeks a refuge.
"Youwill have love, some day, poverina," he said,
gently, "and as much as you wul; you will hardly lift
such eyes as those to ask for it in vain."
She sighed and her head sank lower, while she looked
still at the painted likeness of herself. She was una-
ware of any tribute to her beauty in his words; she
thought he meant that some, one day, would pity her.
"Ah, eccellenza," she answ-ered, wearily, "where is
the worth of love, if with it is scorn?"
The thoughtless taunts and the careless jests which
among the peasantry had been cast at her from her
birth up as a foundling—rather in the mothers' jeal-
ousy of her face and the children's resentment of her
love of solitude, than from any cruelty or any real con-
tempt—had sunk deeply into her nature, rousing re-
bellion and disdain wellnigh as much as they caused
sorrow and a vague sense of shame.
He saw how great a shipwreck might be made of her
opening life, even from the very purest and loftiest
things in her, if this outlawry banned her long—if this
passion of mingled defiance and humiliation were fos-
tered by neglect!   He spoke on that.
"Scorn! Why dwell on scorn? It is unworthy of
you. It is a word that may bring a pang to those who
merit it by their own ill deeds; it need have no sting for
any other. Keep your life high and blameless, and you
will afford to treat scorn with scorn."
She did not reply to him with words, but she flashed
on him with an answering glance the night-like lustre
of her eyes, in an eloquence, in a comprehension, in a
promise, that accepted his meaning far more deeply
and more vividly than by speech. He saw that she
might be led by a cord of silk—that she would not be
driven by a scourge.
He stood a few minutes in the shadow of the collon-
nade, later, when she had left him, looking at the paint-
ing that had grown out of the deep, sombre hackwork
by the work of his own hand, the head alone luminous
from the veil of gloom around it, with its spiritual
radiance, crowned by that wealth of flowers; he
looked, then turned it aside towards the wall, so that
the richness of color no longer smiled out of the
opaque shadows, and went within to his solitude. That
face, gazing out from the darkness under the diadem
©f woven blossoms, seemed like the phantom of his
own dead youth.
CHAPTER IV.
Never in the rich days of the Cinque Cento, of the
Dandolo age, when the cities of Italy were filled with
pomp and mirth and music, when the mighty palaces
were wreathed with flowers that lent their 'bright
blush to the white stone and glowed over the black
marbles, when the dark arches framed hair like the
gold arras that draped the balconies, and lips ripe as
the scarlet heart of the rose that glowed in their
bosom, and eyes that sent men to far Byzantium, or to
the oaths of the Templar, with the riot of burning
thoughts which drove their steel with fiercer thrust
into the Paynim foe—never among those " dear dead
women," whose lost loveliness the poet mourns, was
any beauty rarer or more lustrous than that of the
young Tuscan who had grown up under the forest-
shadows below Vallombrosa, scarce more tended, not
more heeded, than one of the passion-flowers that
bursts into its glorious bud unseen by any eyes above
the broken stone of some ruined altar of Pan. Though
her years were so few that the fulness of her beauty
might yet be scarcely reached, she had already the
•plendor of a Titian picture on her, the superb grace,
wild as a deer, proud as the daughter of Caesars, that
here and there still lngers. as though to verify tradi-
iHon, in the women of Campagna or of Apenmne.
The loneliness of her childhood, the consciousness of
a ban placed on her, the haughty instincts which had
wakened in self-defence against the shafts of scorn,
the solitary and meditative life which she had led, had
lent her a certain patrician pride, a certain thoughtful
shadow; a wistful pain sometimes gazed out of the
'depths of her blue-black eyes; a lofty rebellion some-
times broke through the dreaming gladness of her
smile. 'She was happy, because she was young, be-
cause she was sinless, because she had the innocence
wMch finds its joy in the caress of a bird, in the radi-
ance of a sunset, in the mere breath and consciousness
of existence; but she had the pang of wounded pride,
the burden of a scarce-comprehended shame, and the
vague, bitter, impassioned longing of a mind too ar-
dent and too daring for its sphere ; and these gave their
character to her face, their hues to her youth; these
made her far more than a mere child, however lovely,
can be. She was like Heloïse ere her master had be-
come her lover, and while her eyes, as they gazed on
the Greek scroll or the vellum Evangeliarium, were
brilliant with the light of aspiration and dark with
the thoughts of a poet, but had never yet drooped,
heavy with the languor and burning with the knowl-
edge of love.
From the aged priest she had learned all his schol-
arly lore that plunged deep into the life of the past,
and drank deep of Latin and Helennic culture; he had
loved the rugged roads of wisdom, the unfathomed
sea-depths of knowledge, the bulled treasures of clois-
ter folios and of ci abbed copia—she had loved them
too. With no other in the obscure hill-side, to which
fate had condemned him, to give him sympathy or
understanding in these things, the stern old man had
taken eager pleasure in steeping with them the virgin
soil of a young and thirsty mind. In the bare, gray,
narrow chamber of his dwelling, with its single lancet
window, through which crept the mellow sunlight from
the cloudless skies, the fair head of the child Castalia,
with its weight of burnished tresses, had bent above
the huge tomes and the century-worn manuscriptum
for hour on hour, like H éloïse in the cell of the canonry.
She had a passionate love of those studies; and, whilst
they filled her mind with great and impersonal
thoughts, they did much to console her for her fate,
and much to enrich her intelligence far beyond her
years and her sex. They, and the beauties of the earth
and the seasons, were her sole pleasures. The priest's
mother, under whose roof she lived, was nearly ninety
years, decrepit and harsh, who, well as she loved her
foundling in her heart, could be no aid or associate to
her. With the peasantry, the people who maligned
her unknown parent, she wouid have r,o converse in
their flower-feasts and their vintage celebrations. She
lived alone with the learning of dead ages and the fra-
grance of a forest-world.                              *
Some, such an isolation would have maddened or
ruined ; Castalia, with a singular vividness of imagina-
tion, and a proud patience beneath the passionate
warmth of her nation, had received through it a higher
nature than any other and happier life could have
developed.
She was a poem, with her aristocracy of look that
might have sprung from some great race like the Me-
dici or the Medina-Sidonia, and with her slight, sad, all-
eloquent story, that needed no detail to fill it up ; with
her touching desolation of circumstance and of destiny,
and her brilliant youth that in its elasticity and its
enthusiasm broke aside all barriers of doom and pain
and found its careless joy God-given from a song-bird's
carol, from a cloister-scribe's story, from the tossing
of a sea of green rushes in the wind, from the dreams
of an outer world unknown and glorified in fancy into
paradise. She was a poem in the spring-time of her
life and in the spring-time of the year.
The smile of women's eyes had no beckoning light
for him, the whisper of women's allurement no sor-
cery for his ear; he had been a voluptuary in an earlier
time, but he had passed through bitterness and pov-
erty, and sensuous charms had ceased to hold him.
Yet there was enough of the poet lingering in him to
make him vaguely feel some memories of youth and
some tenderness of pity arise as he looked on the bright
head that he had painted with its diadem of flowers, on
the opening life that he had found in this beech-wood
nest. Had chance not thrown her on Mm, he would
never have sought her; brought to his protection, to
his compassion, she won her way to him in the spring
of the divine Tuscan year as some forest-fawn whom
he should havefound wounded and beaten in the storm
might have come to his hand in after-days, and been
caressed for the sake of its past peril and its present
gratitude.                                                               .„   .
He had sought the seclusion of the old Latin villa for
the isolation which he, a writer and a thinker of whom
the world spoke, often preferred to the life of cities,
under gray Alpine shadows, in still Danubian woods,
by olive-crested Southern seas, or amidst the Morrish
ruins of a Grenadine landscape. Wealth he had none;
he was poor; but as each young year awoke in its
renaissance, he liked to have around him the richness
of color and fragrance, the beauty of the earths
dower, that needed no purchase, but could be made
his own by each who loved it well enough to understand
its meaning.
In the monastic twilight and silence of the old classic
hall, the painting with the crown of flowers glowed
brightly and vividly like a living thing from out the
gloom; and with the deep studies and the solitary
thoughts which had heretofore usurped him, the
memory and the presence of this fair child mingled—
not without a charm, a charm which had in it some-
thing of recollection. The rememberance was fugitive,
and he could never bring it clearly before his knowl-
edge; but it was there, and strong enough to make
him seek more of her history. The search was futile:
there was no more to know; her mother had died,
mute and nameless, and whence she came there was no
record—there was not even a suggestion—to show or
to hint. One thing alone was certain; her mother had
worn no marriage-ring and the only word marked on
the child's linen was the single one Castalia.
The woman had been of great beauty, the peasants
said, though worn and haggard—a Southern beauty,
with eyes that burned like flame, and a terrible
wandering look; but she had been utterly exhausted
when she had reached Fontane, and had lain almost
speechless, until in the middle of the hot, heavy, tem-
pestuous night she had looked with a glance that all
could read from the face of the priest to the sleeping
form of the child, and then had sighed wearny and
restlessly, and died.                     . .   . .,
The blank in the history made it but the more mourn-
ful, the more suggestive. An exceeding pity moved in
him as he heard, for the life ushered in in such aban-
doned desolation, and for which there seemed no haven
open save the cloister—a fate as barbarous for her
radiant and impassioned loveliness which not even the
melancholy of her fate could dim, as to wring the glad
throat of a song-bird in the full rush of its forest
melody: With him, at least, she was happy—she who
had never known what happiness was, except such
forms of it as the sweet, irrepressible intoxication of
the mere sense of existence which youth gives, and the
ioys that a vivid imagination and a passionate, poetic
temperament confer. In his presence she was happy,
and he could not refuse it to her. Few days passed
without his seeing her, in the beech-grove where he had
first glanced at her bv the broken fountai.;. in the pine
woods sloping up towards Vallombrosa, in the deserted
gardens or in the rained hall of his own Latin villa. He
had no thought in it save that of compassion, even
whilst her lustrous eyes vaguely recalled him his past;
and in the untutored thoughts that had fed in these
hill-s ilitudes on the legacies of the Hellenic schools
and the literature of the Renaissance, he found the
wakening intellect of a Corimia, Love had long been
killed in him ; it was a thing of his youth, never, he be-
lieved, like that youth, to revive, and no touch of pas-
sion mingled with the pity she aroused in him: but that
pity was infinitely gentle, and to her the most precious-
mercy that her life had known.
In her home, silence and austerity reigned with the
stern simplicity of the primitive Church. From, the
peasants she met with at best a good-natured insolence
that was to her instinctively imperial nature worse than
all neglect; from him alone she met with what en-
nobled her in her own sight, and filled her towards him
with a passionate gratitude and veneration that was-
only not love because no knowledge of love had dawned
on her and because an absolute submission and aw©
were mingled with it. To her he was the incarnation
of ail sublime lives that she had dreamed of over the
histories of Plutarch, and Tacitus, and Claudius, of
Augustin, and Hildebrand, and Basil ; to her he was as an
emperor to his lieges, as an archangel to his devotees;
all grand and gracious things lo her seemed blended in
him, and all lofty and royal lives of poet, saint, or king
with which her memory was stored seemed to her met
in his. It was not love that she bore him ; it w as some-
thing infinitely more unconscious and more idealized;,
it was an absolute adoration.
She did not know why the hours were a dead worth-
less space unless they brought her to his presence, why
the mere distant sound of his voice filled her heart with
a joy intense as pain, why any suffering he had bidden
her would have teen sweeter than any gladness, why
the forest-world about her wore a light it had never had
before—she did not know; she only knew that all the
earth seemed changed and transfigured. He was not
blind to it; it touched him, it beguiled him, it pleased
him : it was very long since anything had loved him and
been the happier for his smile; it was very long since
these softer, slighter things had come into his life, and
they had a certain charm for him.
There had been a time when all women's eyes had
gained a brighter light at his approach, though thai
time lay far away in a deserted land; yet in some faint
measure revived for him, as he saw the silent welcome,
more eloquent than all words, of this young Tuscan's
glance; and to him she was but a beautiful child, tc be
caressed, without deeper thought.
"Eccellenza!" she said, hesitatingly, one day thath»
had paused by her beside her favorite haunt by the Ro-
man fountain in the black belt of the beech-woods,
• ' you tell me that I have talent ; you say that my voice,
when I sing the Latin chants that you love best, ia.
music the world would love too. Would they do nothing
for me in the world?"
That "world" was so vague, so far off, .so dim, so
glorious to herl She could not have told what she
thought lay beyond those chestnut-belts that she had
never passed; but her ideal of the unknown land was
divine as Dante's of the City of God.
He answered her slowly: he knew the fate te whic.i
her defenceless and nameless beauty would there b«
doomed, but he could not find the heart to break he»
fair illusion.                                                    .
"They might—they would; but you are better ane
safer in your mountain shelter."
A quick sigh escaped her.
"Oh, no!"
" No? How can you tell that? You do not know what
would await you. Be happy while you may, Castalia
the world would crush you I"
She looked at him wistfully, while a grander powe*
and aspiration than the mere longing of a child foi
"fresh fields and pastures new " gleamed in eyes that
with a little while would burn with passion as they now
glanced with light.
" It is only the weak who are crushed. They could
not scorn me for my birth and loneliness if 1 forced
them to say, ' See ! fate was harsh to her; but God gavt
her genius and endurance, and she conquered!' "
The words and the tone moved him deeply: the fear-
less youth, with its faith, its fervor, its courage, its
sublime blindness of belief, recalled to him his own.
"Ah, Castalia!" he answered, gently, "but the
world loves best to dwarf God and to deny genius. And
genius in a woman ! Cyril's envy stones Hypatia, and
casts her beauty to the howling crowds."
Her head drooped, but the look of resolve, though
shadowed, did not pass off her face.                    .
" Perhaps! Yet better Ilypatia's glory won with her
death than a long, obscure, ignoble, useless life ! You
say, be happy here, 'lustrissimo: happy! when all my
future is the convent?"
It was a great terror to her, that monastic doom to
which the priest inexorably condemned her future-
other provision he could make none for her. She was
so full of vivid, luxuriant, abundant, glowing life. Life
was to her an unread poem of such magical enchant-
ment, an ungathered flower of such sorceress-chanx
—and nothing opened to her except that living tomb 1
He gave an involuntary gesture of pam.
" God forbid 1 Some fairer fate will come to you than
that To condemn you to a convent-cell! it would be
as brutal as the captivity of Heloïse."
A brooding weariness passed over the beauty of hei
' ' But Heloïse was happier than I should be. She had
been loved once !"
There was no thought in her as she spoke, save the
longing for tenderness ever denied her, and an instinct-
ive comprehension of the passion and the sacrifice oi.
P&r&clefc©
Where he leaned against a beech-stem above her, hif
hand touched her hair lingeringly and tenderly, as it
had done when he had brought her through the storm-
like a touch to a fluttering bird.             .
" You would love hke Heloïse, Castalia?
She drew a deep, soft breath; she was always aweo
with the despair and the beauty, half mystic, who!!;-
sublimated to her, of that eternal tale.
" Ah 1 who would not? That alone is love 1 Quant,
l'empereur eût voulu m'honorer du nom de son, épouse
n'aurais mieux aimer être appelée ta maîtresse!'
The words of Heloïse on her innocent hps, which
uttered them with no thought save of their devotion
and their fidelity-their choice of slavery to her Iovei
rather than of imperial pomp with any other—had at
eloquence and a temptation greater than she knew.
He sighed almost unconsciously; itwas the love oi