Itis a pathetic paradox that we never truly acquire anything until we have lost it. To possess rightly what is ours we must be deprived of it, must come to view it down the perspectives of the past and gone, to enable us to get its real proportions into focus. That would seem to imply that, as the mystics teach us, matter is the illusion and imagination the reality, since loss opens our mental vision to a thousand truths, to which while possessing them we were blind. The miser, robbed and pauperised, realises too late the countless opportunities for happiness he has forgone; the desolated lover knows at last the devotion which risked death to pleasure him, rather than deny to the lesser faith that proof which, to its own, more strong and pure, was inessential. So it often is that to die is to live for the first time as one’s true self, even in the hearts of those who cherished us.
Ah, death, who clears the vision; in whom all revealed truths corradiate—give us back the child, the friend, the lover, whose worth we never really estimated until you opened our eyes to all that it had meant to us. The qualities we were impatient of because we could not understand; the motives we misinterpreted; even the small vitalities that often worried us, got in our way, seemed importunate and tiresome—what would we not give at last to hear again one tone of the insistent voice, to feel again one touch of the restless hands, whose very tyranny expressed a fearless confidence in the love that would not see. But it may not be; our knowledge comes in loss; and were these to be restored to us, the veil of flesh would again close in and blind our vision to their truth.
That lost presence! If with all our memory of its faults it can figure so ineffably dear to us, be so comprehended at last for its lovely indispensability, how must it live in a heart which has never learned to associate anything with it but the gentlest perfection of form and nature. So the widowed heart of Tiretta regarded its deprivation. With him the larger knowledge was but as the knowledge of a transfiguration from Love the saint to Love the goddess.
At first he could not realise that she was gone—even from the house that her voice and light step had made so beautiful. That she could have gone out of his life would have seemed a desolation too monstrous for belief. And yet he had known throughout on what a precarious tenure he held his lease of light, and how wilfully, how infatuatedly he had blinded his soul to its impermanence.
It could not but be blinded still, while the glamour of that last meeting hung in his brain like an intoxicating incense. In his ecstasy of sure possession there was no room at the moment for doubts and apprehensions. It was only when he came fully to grasp the fact that, in the official view, he was wholly done with her, that she had been taken from him like a patient cured, and that no reason existed in the world why they should ever meet again, that a sense of his own incredible position seemed to break in upon him. She was not gone for a day, a week, a month; she was gone, so far as their intimacy was concerned, for ever. Henceforth her august and his obscure destinies separated, to flow continually wider apart; no road of his conceivably led to Parma, where she was established not again to return.
Not to return! He had to grip himself to realise that stupendous fact, to get at last on terms with the conscience he had so long eluded. And then, flowing, flowing in from that outer darkness to which it had been relegated, came the deadly spirit of guilt and remorse; and he awoke to blank amazement of his dream, and whither it had brought him.
Now he had to stand up, a desperate creature, and parley with his soul. What was he going to do in this crisis of his affairs? The just, the expiatory thing, since, mercifully, it might be said, heaven had snatched him from his self-delusion in time to make atonement possible? If hitherto the odds against him had been morally overwhelming, here was the psychologic moment of respite, the breathing, the renewing time, when he could still withdraw with some honour to himself. And so, what of her, sacrificed in her innocent trust, like piteous Iphigenia, to appease the anger of the gods? No, it was unthinkable; he was not hero or coward enough to condemn his own soul to that renunciation, let the gods visit his weakness on his head as they would. To go; to let her believe him faithless, spiritless, believe his love, to which she leaned in wistful confidence, a thing of straw? He could not do it, not though reason pointed to it as the wise and noble course. What had he to do with reason, whose bliss had been in defying it? He had sinned to his friend already beyond redemption; would it mend his salvation to play the traitor to his love?
O, his love—his beautiful love! If it had been madness before to relinquish that dream, how much more impossible was it now, when loss had made of it an immortal ecstacy, had transported it from earth to heaven, had exalted its little Madonna of the white feet to those starry heights where no breath of gross desire might reach her. Now she belonged to him tenfold by right of that immaculateness; he was jealous of her virgin fame, since she was enthroned there by his will—a tender thing, no longer for the rough wounding of man’s passion. Let her thus dwell for ever in the skies, serene and chaste and adorable. The world was free to kneel with him and worship; though her chosen one, he would demand no closer privilege for himself.
But they would not let it be; they had haled her from her heaven, meaning to despoil her; and what alternative had he then but to claim her bodily for his own? Friendship, good faith, policy—what were all these as against his age-long title, the wild mystic compact made in those far green gardens? That was the older, the more binding troth, of which, when he accepted his credentials from the archduke, he had guessed nothing. Now, if honour bound him, it was there. He could not help it if the humour of the thing jumped with his inclination.
He would recognise all this sometimes for the casuistry it was; but mostly, so strangely was the mystic in him blended with the rationalist, it would possess his mind with all the force of an actual memory. But it mattered little, after all, with what he chose to salve his conscience, since, angry or half-healed, he found no solution in it of his difficulties.
Those were to know what to do, now the inevitable, against which he had made no provision, was upon him. He had sung like the improvident grasshopper, and the winter of his rapture found him unprepared. Was it still possible they might communicate, and arrange some plan of action? And, if so, what plan? At the least it must be a mad and a desperate one, staking their all on the cast, hopeless from the first of compromise. Yet he was ready, if she was brave. He must learn that; must force the knowledge somehow. Or would she find means to provide him with it unasked? Not for one moment would he believe in the reality of her asserted reconciliation to her doom. He was as sure of her true heart as he was of his own imperishable constancy. Yet what to do?
He did nothing. As, I opine, all but the resourceful heroes of romance would do under like circumstances, so did he—he temporised.
He could not bring himself to believe, indeed, that their separation was final. He was always in the hope that, the formal betrothal achieved, she would be allowed to return to Colorno; and he was doggedly resolved, pending such blissful restoration, not only to outstay his welcome, but to ignore the broadest and least delicate hints, of which the marquise was not sparing, that he might with advantage to everyone be gone.
His amiable persistency even had its effect at length on the rude old lady; especially when, for diplomacy’s sake, he brought the persuasion of his voice to bear upon her still responsive susceptibilities. The suggestion that, the main theme withdrawn, he could find even freer inspiration for his songs in her ripe understanding came so to captivate her that in the end, from suffering his flatteries, she quite coveted them—and, finally, she made love to him.
Thereat, a little alarmed, he drew back; and perhaps so obviously as to precipitate his own downfall. But of that in a moment.
In the meanwhile he spent the most of his days in wandering about the now desolate grounds, his heart a prey to vain longings and vainer expectations. No word or sign came in all this time to solace or decide him; he walked, the very spirit of loneliness and brooding melancholy, a being most pathetically haunted.
Once he went to Aquaviva’s gardens; and talked graciously with the little Bissy because he was a pet of hers; and spent a sweet sad hour in the orange grove, absorbed in one delirious memory. But mostly he frequented the palace walks, retasting unforgettable delights. He could have kissed her lilies one by one on their open mouths; to stand approximately in her footprints was a fatuous joy to him; often he stole to her vacant windows, and committed his soul to their sweet inaccessible mysteries.
The children he rather avoided. They worried him with their unfeeling prattle. Yet still he lingered on. It could not last much longer; and he knew it could not. But what was to be the end?
He never doubted her love—not for one instant. He pictured her, like himself, waiting, waiting for the deliverance that would not come, for the reunion that hard fate debarred them. She would yield herself to him, she had said, when hope was gone; he had but to call and she would fly to hide herself in his breast. So it was hope that parted them; yet how was he to banish hope and still regain her? It was upon hope he lived.
Once he wove this sorrowful exaltation of his into a rhapsody of love and loss, the sense of which may be rendered in the following lines:
“Once for a thousand years ’twas Spring;Love reigned, and Death stood still;The world paused at its burgeoningOf may and daffodil.“Like buds from spiring lilies thrown,Time blossomed over Time;It seemed, ere yet its sweets were blown,That earth to heaven would climb—“It seemed, all wrath, all hate were fled,And sole bright sense remained;That something evil had been sped,And some new knowledge gained.“Then no fruits were, but endless blissOf Love that knew no sting,And laughed him on from kiss to kiss,Like bees a’honeying.“The rains were gone, the skies were blue,Nor any cloud had birthSave but to drop a gentle dewLike balm upon the earth.“Nor grief nor grievance ere could beIn fields so fair bedight;And, above, the fields of eternitySoft blossomed through the night.“And there the moon, the witch of dreams,Her web of slumber wrought,Till in its soft and silken beamsTen thousand stars were caught.“And there the moon with shining eyesHer silken web prepared,To catch the stars like fireflies,And kiss them, being snared.“O! sweet it was in woods and bowers,And no fear to conceive;But meal of honey gave the flowersAnd dew the cups of eve.“O! sweet it was. O! sweet it was.No sweeter could befall,While love the end was and the cause—God knows what changed it all!“A kiss too much, too full a sigh—The vessel brimméd o’er;And the creaking wain of DestinyMoved onwards as before.”
“Once for a thousand years ’twas Spring;Love reigned, and Death stood still;The world paused at its burgeoningOf may and daffodil.“Like buds from spiring lilies thrown,Time blossomed over Time;It seemed, ere yet its sweets were blown,That earth to heaven would climb—“It seemed, all wrath, all hate were fled,And sole bright sense remained;That something evil had been sped,And some new knowledge gained.“Then no fruits were, but endless blissOf Love that knew no sting,And laughed him on from kiss to kiss,Like bees a’honeying.“The rains were gone, the skies were blue,Nor any cloud had birthSave but to drop a gentle dewLike balm upon the earth.“Nor grief nor grievance ere could beIn fields so fair bedight;And, above, the fields of eternitySoft blossomed through the night.“And there the moon, the witch of dreams,Her web of slumber wrought,Till in its soft and silken beamsTen thousand stars were caught.“And there the moon with shining eyesHer silken web prepared,To catch the stars like fireflies,And kiss them, being snared.“O! sweet it was in woods and bowers,And no fear to conceive;But meal of honey gave the flowersAnd dew the cups of eve.“O! sweet it was. O! sweet it was.No sweeter could befall,While love the end was and the cause—God knows what changed it all!“A kiss too much, too full a sigh—The vessel brimméd o’er;And the creaking wain of DestinyMoved onwards as before.”
“Once for a thousand years ’twas Spring;
Love reigned, and Death stood still;
The world paused at its burgeoning
Of may and daffodil.
“Like buds from spiring lilies thrown,
Time blossomed over Time;
It seemed, ere yet its sweets were blown,
That earth to heaven would climb—
“It seemed, all wrath, all hate were fled,
And sole bright sense remained;
That something evil had been sped,
And some new knowledge gained.
“Then no fruits were, but endless bliss
Of Love that knew no sting,
And laughed him on from kiss to kiss,
Like bees a’honeying.
“The rains were gone, the skies were blue,
Nor any cloud had birth
Save but to drop a gentle dew
Like balm upon the earth.
“Nor grief nor grievance ere could be
In fields so fair bedight;
And, above, the fields of eternity
Soft blossomed through the night.
“And there the moon, the witch of dreams,
Her web of slumber wrought,
Till in its soft and silken beams
Ten thousand stars were caught.
“And there the moon with shining eyes
Her silken web prepared,
To catch the stars like fireflies,
And kiss them, being snared.
“O! sweet it was in woods and bowers,
And no fear to conceive;
But meal of honey gave the flowers
And dew the cups of eve.
“O! sweet it was. O! sweet it was.
No sweeter could befall,
While love the end was and the cause—
God knows what changed it all!
“A kiss too much, too full a sigh—
The vessel brimméd o’er;
And the creaking wain of Destiny
Moved onwards as before.”
And so he lingered on amidst the golden ruins of his paradise, wondering, as if his brain were stupefied, over what he had done to bring it thus in a moment about his ears.
He was not permitted to wonder long. Whether it were that she soon realised the hollowness of his attentions to herself; or the real peril of his continued presence in the neighbourhood; or, which is most probable, that she was wearied with the whole business, the marquise took steps to make his further stay in the palace impossible to him. Once resolved, she went about the business after her uncompromising fashion. She opened upon him one night without relevance or preface:
“Like Cupid, monsieur, you are everyone’s match-maker, it seems, and nobody’s gallant. And yet sometimes I wonder.”
“Over what, madame?”
“Why as to there being possibly a subtler purpose in your advocacy than you let appear.”
“What purpose, for example?”
“Call it the purpose of the first-fruits, such as it is said our provincial monseigneurs claim on unions to which they give their blessing.”
He drew back as if he had received a blow in the face. But she went on with perfect serenity:
“There was, for instance, that little volage Fanchette—now in Parma with her mistress—whom you made happy with her gentleman.”
“Imade happy?”
“Did you not? Or was it only that, having taken your fee, the case resolved itself without your help?”
He rose from his chair, as pale and grim as death.
“What purpose can you have in thus insulting me?” he said.
She gave a high little laugh, quite placid.
“Insult! Such as you! O, I can assure you, monsieur, your methods have not failed to interest us. You have been very discreet; but walls have eyes as well as ears. Do not think I blame you for insisting on your price; such devotion deserves to be paid in kind.”
“You lie,” he said, quite quietly now. “I have only that to say.”
“Eh!” she cried. “It was not for that, then, that you intrigued with her? Or was it possibly that you thought to use the girl as stepping-stone to higher things?”
His amazement showed in his face.
“I have neither used nor abused her,” he said. “I know nothing whatever of her affairs of the heart. It is a base and wicked slander, whoever uttered it. I say so much and no more, because my honour demands it. You will permit me to withdraw, madame. I quit the palace to-night.”
“That is as you please,” she answered, unruffled; and he left her.
He had no alternative, his raging heart assured him. He must go at once, whatever his departure might portend to his hopes. But to stay on here thus vilified, thus enlightened, was impossible. O, into what foul passes had his sin allured him! And that they could have been existing all this time, unsuspected by him, like filthy slums environing the places which her very footsteps had made holy! The thought of them, of himself in such connection, was a profanation to her memory. His soul cried out to him to claim and bear her away, to a purer atmosphere, to a lovelier knowledge—into the white grave mysteries of the North.
Whither first? As he halted a moment, undecided, a palace functionary pursued him with a despatch. He opened it and read. It was from the archduke, recalling him peremptorily to Vienna.
“I wouldhave laid down my life for my friend: my friend asked of me a harder thing.”
He stood before the prince, his head erect, his hand motionless upon his sword hilt. Joseph, sitting, as quietly, in the chair he had pushed back from the table, regarded him steadily, dispassionately—even, at last, with an odd touch of pity in his expression. The season was early August; the place, a private cabinet in the old imperial palace called the Burg.
“So much I have inferred,” said the young archduke, his voice not cold but even, “from the Duke of Parma’s recent advices to me recommending your recall. I had not known before, Tiretta, that a soldier looked upon the vindication of his honour as so difficult a task.”
He noted, with an observant interest, the spasm that twitched the set features at his words. He was in all things curious and analytical.
“I have deserved this,” was the low answer. “Stab, sir, and turn your creese in the wound.”
“You do me an injustice,” said Joseph calmly. “It is to the scalpel, not the sword, that I would have you reveal yourself. If I probe, I probe for instruction. The soldier’s code, for instance—is it not a strict one? What harder thing did I ask of you than to obey orders? I seek simply for information.”
“No need to. I am a villain.”
“Tut-tut, my friend! That is merely to beg the question. You know my views very well. A man is not to be summed up in that convenient fashion. Is it, for instance, the assertion of a villain that he would sacrifice his life for his friend?”
“Would to God I could do it, and so cut the knot!”
The eyes, watchful, inquisitive, in the pale narrow young face, canvassed the speaker curiously.
“Well,” said their owner at length: “will you not answer my question?”
“You ask me, sir, what was peculiarly hard to me, a soldier, in that mere call to obedience? Nothing, I answer. That you could send me into the fight, having first broken my sword in its scabbard—that was the hard thing.”
The prince seemed to ponder a little, sitting without movement, save for a slight corrugation of his brows.
“No, I do not understand,” he said presently. “You would seem to imply that I wilfully dedicated you to destruction.”
“Wilfully, yes. I do not say consciously.”
“Can will be unconscious of itself?”
“In princes, sir, because no one dreams of questioning it in them. There can be no conscious force without conscious resistance.”
The young philosopher considered again, as appraising a plausible theory.
“Very well,” he said. “Then, to return from the abstract to the particular, what is represented in fact by this symbol of the broken sword?”
“My broken honour, sir, for which you were responsible.”
“No, you must explain.”
“What—have you forgotten the incident at the ford, from which all this luckless mission derived? To send a convicted pander to sing his employer’s praises! God in heaven! Who but a prince could have failed to foresee the end?”
“Well, sir—continue. I begin, I think, to perceive.”
“Not justly, sir, nor the whole. I sang your praises; I was loyal to my friendship and my humiliating task. Never doubt that for one instant. But what was the force of an advocacy so recommended? What any but a prince might have foretold. I was scorned, I was repudiated, and rightly, because my honour was in question; and that I could not endure. It was above all things dear to me, and I wrought to exculpate it. I could not have gained a hearing without—and that is my excuse and my crime.”
He ended, breathing deeply. Still the unwinking eyes canvassed him, and without emotion, it seemed.
“You sought to convince her of your honour?”
“I had no alternative.”
“By converting it, so vindicated, to a dishonourable purpose?”
“I never ceased to extol your Highness’s noble qualities—no, not to the end.”
“The end!”
For the first time some emotion showed itself in Joseph’s face. He started, as if he would rise; but leaned back again, resolute to control himself.
“You may question my honour, sir,” said Tiretta. “In the name of God, leave hers unsullied by a thought.”
Steadfastly, for some moments, the two regarded one another; then Joseph rose from his chair, and, walking to a window, stood looking out upon an inner court of the palace which it commanded. Presently, without turning, he spoke:
“You are very severe on princes, my friend; yet it seems they can be guileless in their trusts.”
“If, sir, by guileless you mean despotic, they are the most trusting souls on earth. So might we all be, if a wish with us overruled, without question, every possible or impossible objection. How can princes enter into common human feelings when they have had no least experience of them? To feel, one must suffer and be denied.”
“Do I not feel? I think I could convince you.”
“You feel for yourself, sir—I do not doubt it—in this disillusionment about one you had thought to be your true friend and servant.”
“I feel for you, Tiretta.”
He had turned as he spoke, and now came forward, until he stood face to face with the man who had wronged him. There was a look in his eyes strangely like compassion.
“Truly I can feel for you,” he said—“as for anyone who lets his heart go out towards the unattainable.”
A shadow seemed to fall upon the soldier’s face.
“So speaks the prince,” he said—“generous and fine-minded; but still the prince. Can a prince be slave to love, sir?”
“History would seem to say so.”
“Ah! He may rule everything else, but not that: he cannot rule what, in common with all men, he is subject to. A prince in love is just a man in love. He, too, may suffer the unattainable.”
For some moments the archduke stood silent; then, slightly nodding his head, made answer:
“True, Tiretta—that is quite true. I cannot command love. I might possess, and murder to possess its form: still not to me but to the shadow of the dead would belong all that was worth possessing in it. Have you deserved death? I do not know. I only know I would not have the thing I seek made unattainable; and that would it become, were I to kill you. Yet what to do? Tell me, my friend, for I am in your hands.”
“In mine!”
Emotion, sudden and startled, shook the inflexible voice.
“Tiretta!”
The young prince put a hand, quite movingly and unexpectedly, on his erst-favourite’s shoulder. The action, generous and manly, spoke the real heart under all its philosophic veneer.
“Admit,” said Joseph: “have you not a little exaggerated the cause in order to justify the end? The name you gave yourself——”
“It was given me, sir, by implication.”
“By whom or what? The sweetest and most innocent lips in the world? You wrong them, I am sure, even more than you do yourself or me. But the fault was mine, you say; yet I had always honestly thought you insusceptible to such emotions—a dreamer, a wooer of abstractions. Well, I was mistaken, it seems. Your strength was unequal to the task my faith in it imposed on you. Which of us was most to blame—I in directing, you in accepting? What need to quarrel about that now? We have made a botch of it between us, and the thing for us to discuss is how best to mend a lamentable case. Will you not tell me the whole truth, Tiretta, my friend?”
“Before God, I will.” The man was profoundly touched.
“Then, say, are you to her what she is to you?”
“That were impossible.”
“Nay, you equivocate.”
“On my soul, then, I believe that, heaven helping us, she would give me her hand to-morrow.”
A slight tremor seemed to take the archduke’s features. He stood back, quitting his hold on the other. A minute’s tense silence ensued.
“Well,” he said at length, just repressing a sigh. “I repeat I am in your hands.”
Again, impulsively, he advanced and renewed his caressing touch.
“There can be no issue but one. You know it, Tiretta—man, you know it. We are all in the bonds of fate, and helpless. Now, listen and believe me. If it were possible, I would yield her to you. It is not possible. Then would you condemn your friend to a loveless match?”
“What would you have me do?”
His voice was quite wrung and broken.
“I would have you,” said Joseph, “atone, in the only way you can, the wrong you have done, not to me but to her.”
“I am to go—never to see her again—to leave her believing me faithless?”
“Better a faithless lover than a faithless wife. So only can you heal the wound you have inflicted. For her sake, Tiretta.”
“Why do you not call in your guards, and have me silenced for ever? I will make no resistance.”
“Because I am human, though a prince, Tiretta.”
For a while, desperate, still mutinous, the man’s torn soul fought out its tragedy of renunciation. And at last impulsively surrendered. With bowed head, he spoke the words:
“You have a noble mind, sir. If you will not retaliate on me as you might, death is always somewhere waiting for the soldier. I will go do what I may to seek an honourable one. And so heaven forgive me and requite your Highness!”
He took the gracious young hand in his, put his lips to it, and, turning, left the room, walking with blinded eyes and upright head, like a prisoner who passes from the dock to the condemned cell.
Thereal tragedy of separation is not for the banished lover; it is for the desolate home-keeper, who knows no distractions of change and movement to solace her aching heart. He, at least, has his freedom, his new interests; she, none but the old, grown now so flat and unprofitable since the glorifying light was once flashed upon them and withdrawn. How darker than darkness looks a room when the lamp is blown out; how stale and charmless seems life the morning after the play; how remote from the witching darling of last night’s masque appears this love-sick Chloe, yawning biliously over her untouched breakfast plate! Perhaps Strephon this morning also looks a little “off colour” and feels a little sick; but he has the imperative duties of office to call him to a sane resumption of life’s prose, and no doubt by lunch time he has earned himself a vigorous appetite, no less hearty for the sentiment which has intervened between his chop of yesterday and his curried prawns of to-day.
But, for poor stay-at-home Chloe, some zest has gone for ever from the old placid satisfactions; she cannot recover at their past valuation the humdrum routine of things; she has seen the commonplace transformed, and henceforth life to her, to be life, must reveal itself on a higher plane. So she still toys with her food at luncheon, and again at dinner, and sighs over the insufferable dreariness and monotony of that social existence which once made her full content.
“What made the assembly shine?” O, what, indeed, poor Isabel, since your days have fallen into so sad a melancholy, and the light has fled from your haunted eyes? “Because Lorenzo came not?” Alas he did not come, he did not speak; and to what was life reduced, lacking his voice and presence. So, thinking the same thought of unaccountable neglect, these divided lovers mourned apart. Sometimes in her heart she would upbraid him, calling him false and cruel; but more often she accused herself, saying she had been his ruin, his evil genius, and again bemoaning her own fatal weakness in not flying with him when he had bidden her. Yet, granted they were well parted, he might have salved her anguish with something kinder than this killing silence. Had he so soon forgotten her—forgotten how she had bidden him call to her, when all hope was gone, and she would fly to him? No, she could not, she would not believe it. It was only that he did not realise how cruelly souls condemned to pining inaction might suffer. Out in the free air it was so hard to enter into the feelings of the dull prisoner hidden from one’s ken. She made every loving excuse for him; and still, poor thing, she hungered for a sign, and, hungering, trembled at the thought of her own wickedness.
For was she not a plighted bride—enslaved by token of the hateful golden fetter clasping her finger? She wore it in public, to the duke her father’s vacuous content; but at night she would fling it from her, and kneel to her basil, and kiss its perfumed leaves, and moan out her passionate penitence for even that show of disloyalty. She had brought this, her treasure of treasures, with her, and it was her one comfort and reassurance in all the grievous time.
One day it came to her, did he know of the formal betrothal? Perhaps he had looked to her love’s high courage to resist to the last, and, learning the mortal truth, how at the first onset she had failed him, had renounced so frail an ally. O, in that case, how could she let him know that her heart had never once wavered in its fidelity to him—let him know that, whatever bitter fate forced their steps apart, she was his, in everything but seeming, to all eternity?
Poor child; she was always more loving than wilful—no forceful heroine to command her own destiny. She waited for the call, only bewildered as to what to do to evoke it. She could obey, but she could not initiate. Perhaps, at first, she had hoped, like that other, that, the ceremony once achieved, she would be allowed to return to Colorno. If so, it did not take long to disillusion her. At the first hint of such a wish the duke, angrily suspicious, half revealed himself:
“Understand, your salad days are over, and for ever. Henceforth you await here the completion of the contract which is to make you woman out of child. All romantic follies of the past must be forgotten. You renounced them, in all faith and honour, when you accepted his Highness’s token from my hands.”
She shrank back, as if detected in her guilt; and Don Philip continued:
“I look to you not to force me into some very drastic measures to cut this trouble at its root. Think well of what I say, for much concerning another welfare than yours depends on it.”
He had found the way to silence her. She could not misread the hint, or blind herself to the understanding which lay behind it.Hislife lay at the mercy of her conduct. If she would preserve it, she must assume a placid resignation, seem to repudiate the very suggestion of anyarrière penséein her proposal.
The shock was stunning, but, having surmounted it, she bent herself with piteous eagerness to play the deceiver’s part. Her fear went on tiptoe; she smiled and sang in the duke’s presence, so that it was pathetic to see her—a thing to turn one’s eyes from. He may have approved the effort; yet in truth she could not so suffer without betraying a sign. To clinch the matter, he decided to play, in collusion with another, his reserve card.
One day, the Infanta being present, his Highness began, on some pre-arranged provocation, to banter La Coque upon his former jealousy of a rival musician.
“Admit he sang divinely,” he said.
“In truth, monseigneur, I saw but little divinity in the man.”
“O, you would not, chirruping with your nose to the ground!”
“That’s as it may be. I fear no test, before an impartial judge.”
“What; you would back yourself in a competition of voices?”
“Aye, and of improvisation—this day, this moment, if you will. Let M. Tiretta be summoned, and give us both a fair hearing.”
“Coquin, you dare the challenge, knowing he is gone.”
“On my faith, no, sir. I believed him at Colorno. Whither is he vanished?”
“To the devil—to Vienna—to anywhere, for what I care, so he remains to shock our sense of decorum no longer. Truth is the rascal claimed too many of the prerogatives of the troubadour—free sport among the petticoats for one. The scandal grew notorious. There was a wench, for instance—but ware, bully-boy! I tread on dangerous ground.”
“Myground, sir?”
“How he threats us with his brow! Spare us, good Charlot—I but quote the common report. Yet admit the fellow had an endearing way with him.”
“Curse him!”
La Coque was half caught in the snare of his own setting. He stood glowering sulkily, while Don Philip, with a little stealthy sidelong glance at his daughter, turned with a snigger to some other of his suite.
A flush of colour to her cheek; a just perceptible lift of the lip—the duke was scarce intelligent enough to read the signs.
That they could think her capable of being trapped by such a shallow artifice! Her heart swelled in her breast over the base wrong to him, the despicable meanness to herself. O, how fine and proud he appeared by contrast with these ignoble minds, how remote from them in his living intensity, his spiritual dignity! She would not even condescend to defend him in thought against a slander so gross and obvious. Its effect was to confirm her tenfold in her faith.
“She is pricked,” thought the duke. “We may leave the poison to work.”
But the poison was not as he surmised: it was shame, not for the slandered but the slanderer, that burnt in her veins. Her father! That he could have debased himself to such methods! All in a moment he seemed revealed to her for what he was, a prince with a clown’s heart, a whited sepulchre, behind the mask of elegance a soul like a shrivelled kernel, without life or savour. She turned from him, in a very sickness of repulsion.
But that night, as Fanchette was preparing her for bed, she rose suddenly from her chair, and, turning upon the maid, clasped her convulsively by the arms.
“Tell me of him, or I shall die,” she said.
The girl for the moment was completely taken aback. She did not know what to answer, and could only stare and gasp. The feverish clutch closed more urgently upon her.
“I have no friend but you in all the world, Fanchette. Have I not been kind to you? O, be kind to me and tell me! You know very well—you have always known, I think. Forgive me if I pretended not to understand you. I tried so long to fight against it; and I could not—and my heart is breaking.”
Startled, unnerved as she was, Fanchette could not but be touched by that piteous appeal.
“Hush!” she said. “What do you want to know? There, sit upon this couch, and speak low, while I kneel to you. So. Now, tell me, are you always thinking of him?”
“Always, always, Fanchette—all the weary day and night. Why does he not send me one least little message?”
“It is said he is gone to Vienna.”
“O, cruel!”
“Would you kill him with your rashness? Do you not know he is suspected?”
“Fanchette!—my God! Tell him to keep away. You must—you can find means.”
“What is the good, when by your every look and act you betray him.”
“I will not—O, I will not! But to hear him so slandered and maligned—it is hard to suffer and to smile.”
“Do they slander him—are you sure?”
“What do you mean?”
“O, nothing!” She gave a little affected laugh. She was beginning to consider her part. “Only it does not do with us to idealise our fancies too much.”
She failed, for all her effort, to meet the inquisition of the true grief-stricken eyes.
“Fanchette!”
“O, we know how gossip is to be discounted. For myself, at least, I never took him seriously.”
“In what?”
“It is only natural to propitiate the maid if you would come at the mistress.”
“Did he make love toyou?”
“O, that is too definite a term! He said enough to put me on my guard against him—that is all.”
“You need not have been so scrupulous. He is ever courteous and considerate—attentions that woman in her vanity is always too ready to accept as single to herself.”
“O, I took his for what they were worth! I was under no delusions as to their value.” She tossed her head. There was a spot of anger on her cheek; some venom in her tone. “I am sure I had no intention,” she said loftily, “to disabuse your mind about him.”
“No one could do that but himself,” answered Isabella proudly. “Though all the world slandered him, I should not listen or believe.” She drooped her sad head, knotting and unknotting her fingers. “I hoped I had a friend,” she said; “but I think I am quite alone.”
Fanchette sulked a little, though with a certain bewildered contempt in her mind. How was one to circumvent this loyal fool, so obdurate in her love’s faith? If all evidence was so to be discredited by her, what was the use of their conspiring to produce it? And as she thought—even with some grudging sympathy with a pertinacity which was, after all, characteristically feminine—two soft arms came about her neck, and two soft entreating eyes looked into hers.
“Fanchette; in pity tell me,whatam I to do.”
The girl sniffed, and caught her breath. If she had but little heart, the emotionalism in her was always a responsive quantity. She answered, almost hysterically:
“O! what is the good of asking me? He is gone, I tell you—some say summoned by the archduke to answer for his conduct. Perhaps he is dead by now.”
She saw the roses quit the cheek, and clutched at the slender form as it swayed backwards. She was full of passionate remorse and alarm in a moment.
“Mistress—dearest, it was a lie. Look up—listen to me—I am a wicked heartless wretch! He is not dead—I know it—I was told by one who knows it. He has been to Vienna, and left again: it is thought he has gone to the wars.”
She wept, and upbraided herself, and fondled the scarce animate form, calling upon it to speak, to forgive her, not to die and curse her to eternal despair. And presently her urgency prevailed, and a tinge of colour came back to the white face, and the ghost of a voice reassured her:
“Without one word to me?”
She took her in her arms, and rocked her, soothing and protesting in one:
“They are all alike for that. Loin des yeux, loin du coeur, is it not. There, don’t give way so. It is wiser anyhow that he should disappear for the time being; and like enough he sees it, and sees clearer than you. If he’s all your fancy paints him, he’ll come back again when the dust he’s kicked up has settled; and in the meantime—” she ventured to coax, trusting to the impression she was making—“I’d try to forget him, dear mistress, an I were you—if for no better reason than to prepare yourself against emergencies. He’s not strong enough to fight against a throne, and if he hasn’t realised that by this time, a little reflection will be sure to convince him. And then it isn’t as if you were asked to make your choice between honey and gall. His Highness by all accounts is a very proper man, tender but self-willed, as we women like, and with all the advantage of youth on his side——”
She submitted, falling silent, to the quick passionate rebuff which her words evoked. Isabella, putting her aside, rose to her feet and stood breathing spasmodically, her hand crushed to her bosom.
“There,” she said, panting a little: “you have said enough. I have been weak and foolish; and I am ashamed. Forget everything I said, Fanchette, and let me forget it. I am very tired, and I wish to sleep.”
With a face of formal duty, the maid rose from her knees, and, very stiff and punctilious, completed her young mistress’s night toilette. Not another word did she speak; until presently the parting benediction, which she uttered in a voice so cold that it might have been mistaken for an anathema.
And Isabella? Once alone, she crept and found her basil-pot, and sighed her love’s orisons among its muffling leaves, where still the envious flowers delayed to show, and eased her sore heart in silent tears.
Gone to the wars? And without one word or sign to her? Perhaps to be slain, and so to leave her for evermore bereaved and desolate. O, was it true—was it? Did he want to die, perhaps, because his hope was already killed? She had killed it; it was her silence that had driven him to despair. The anguish of that thought was exquisite. He had trusted to her, and she had failed him. O, for some poison in these gentle leaves, to breathe and sleep and die upon her love! She never once doubted his fidelity—not once. All those cruel calumnies had left her unshaken. Her pure heart was incapable of such treachery. They might as well forbear to hurt a faith that was immortal.
In the midst of her agony a thought stole upon her like balm. A report!—it was nothing more than that. Was it possible that he himself had given it currency, in order to throw dust in their eyes—that, under cover of it, he had returned to Parma, and was somewhere in hiding, waiting till he could communicate with her? There was life, passionate, exulting, in that reaction to hope. How could she ever have believed he would abandon her so, after what had passed between them—her lord, her noble heart? She was a poor trustless thing, unworthy of his choice.
Steadfastly she strove to keep that dear belief before her eyes; and, little as it was, it was enough to steel her to endure the long long days of waiting. For still they passed and passed without a sign, drawing her hour by hour nearer to the fate she so unspeakably dreaded. She did not ask herself by what miracle she was to escape her doom. She felt only that to see him again, to rest upon his heart, were to solve all difficulties.
And so the year sped on. To Fanchette she betrayed no more of herself; only her basil was her only friend; and she would speak softly to it, and with pretty wooings ask it to blossom soon—very soon now, lest its tardiness should prove their undoing. It was odd and pitiful how she had come to regard this plant as the sure symbol of their destiny.
About the court, those who knew, and watched her privately, believed her to be truly reconciled. She was very quiet and gracious with all; they took her sweet seriousness for first flower of the solemn election to which she was called, as one fits oneself with gravity for the sacrament. And yet she was guileful—a most wilful and passionate rebel under her seeming repose, since Love had first taught her his outlawry. Only she had learned discretion of necessity; she could play a part with her spies, and lead them on to false conclusions. Because for her love’s dear using alone she preserved the perfect treasure of her truth and loyalty. What did anything else matter?
Once or twice during this time she received a letter from her royal betrothed—documents of the heart inevitably a little pompous, but kind and manly. There was no least allusion in them, of course, to a dismissed episode, no condescending to a reference to so inconsiderable a spark in the orbit of the imperial system as a certain M. Tiretta. Had there been, Isabella might have cast them aside, the formal pretence of reading once achieved, with less impatience than she did. And yet, in honest truth, they were more than she deserved.
And still the year, like a celestial lamplighter, ran down its golden ladder from the topmost heavens; and as the sun dropped daily from its high estate, and the earth grew slowly chill, so into the girl’s heart stole ever more and more the killing frost of hope deferred. All her first despair crept back, and now with renewed terror that it must indeed be as Fanchette had hinted, and that he was gone to fight—perhaps was even now lying stark and dead upon some battlefield, or weeks-long buried under the bloody sods. For all her frantic longings and strained listening, no reference to him in her father’s court had ever again, since that shameful day, reached her ears; and there were already wedding rumours in the air.
Then, in the loneliness of her room, she fell upon her knees and called miserably upon death, if he had taken her love, to take her too—to save her from the unspeakable anguish of the fate with which she was now nearly threatened.
And death responded, after his manner with those who impiously take his name. He saved her, as she prayed him to, but, inasmuch as her plea to him was conditional on a life, with a life he answered.
Early in December came the news that the Duchess Louise-Elizabeth had been seized with the smallpox at Versailles; and within a few days she was dead.
Isabella had her desire: the wedding was indefinitely postponed.
Isabellahad loved her mother, truly if rather fearfully, and in return had been loved by her with as condescending a devotion as a spirit so incessantly restless and ambitious as that of Louis XV.’s eldest daughter could lavish on a child not born into the first order of creation. How the indomitable sick woman had rejoiced in that early fulfilment of her hopes, when the Austrian ambassador had come to put an end to her doubts and apprehensions, her communications to her husband show. She was jubilant; and so was impure old Bien-aimé, who wrote the most touching and beautiful letter to congratulate his son-in-law on the event, a letter full of sentiments “de les exprimer pourrait les diminuer.” And now, before she might see brought to ripeness any one of the countless schemes she was perpetually revolving in her feverish brain for her family’s aggrandisement, she had herself dropped in a moment from the tree like a rotten medlar.
The shock of her death did more to bring poor Isabel to her senses than the harshest tyranny could have done. It seemed a very retribution on her for her sins; and I doubt, if it had been possible to marry her then offhand, but she would have acquiesced in her fate—with despairing, perhaps, but without further revolt. The thought that during all this time, while her mother had been sojourning for her health’s sake at Versailles, she had been planning in her guilty soul an act which, if committed, would have struck the deadliest of blows at the pride and trusting affection, possibly at the life itself, of that beloved parent, filled her with inexpressible remorse. She went in these days with a face so pale and scared, that one might have believed her haunted by the thought of her own direct responsibility for the tragedy. The very memory of what had been seemed to her a profanation to the sainted dead. She strove to cleanse her conscience of all offence, even to the lingering shadow of a dream which now could never come to be realised. She told herself so: it was ended and finally; how, even if but one star from its firmament were allowed to twinkle on, could she kneel and pray, without blasphemy, for the repose of her mother’s soul?
To her father, in this emotional reaction, she wistfully and naturally turned. Their common sorrow brought them closer together than they had ever been as yet; and, while mothering his weakness and his distress, she bitterly reproached herself for all that past unfilial attitude of hers towards what she had considered his shallowness and vanity. Now she recognised, or believed that she recognised, how much more fondly wise than its chosen expression had been the purpose underlying that attempt of his upon her faith. She no longer blamed him for it, because his method had been simply characteristic.
It had been characteristic, indeed, as was no less the selfish quality of his present grief. He bewailed his loss, almost as if it implied some treachery to himself. Having grown resigned in submission to the stronger will, to which he had conceded the practical management of all his affairs of State and policy, he felt as if cruelly abandoned by it at that moment in the promised maturation of its schemes when its support was most needed. It was always his helplessness rather than his sorrow that came uppermost in the tale of woe; and perhaps to the heart of the woman and potential mother that made the surest appeal. In ministering to his despair Isabella forgot her own.
And yet it is not to be inferred that Don Philip had been other than devoted in his way to the vigorous soul who through such long years had been his spirited coadjutor and support. To do him justice, he had purposed on the first warning note of tragedy to set out for Versailles—an intention for which the king his father-in-law, when he came to hear of it, had gently rebuked him. And, indeed, the journey would have been in vain. Short shrift and shift was the order in all cases where that dreaded scourge proved mortal; and scarce was the breath out of the august body before it was being hurried away by night to the royal mausoleum of Saint Denis, where it was lowered with scant ceremony into the vault from which, thirty years later, the ghouls of the Revolution were to tear it, with fifty others, to scatter its still impregnated dust to the winds. It was from Marly—whither the Court, after its custom, had already fled the terror—that Louis wrote his mild reproof, ending it with the words “mes yeux baignent de larmes.”
So Don Philip, frustrated in his dutiful design, stayed on at home, and regarded and pitied himself with something of the stupefaction of the dreamer, who, thinking himself standing among company, discovers suddenly that he has forgotten to put on his clothes. Thus he felt as if delivered naked and aghast to a situation with which he was quite unable to cope. He had leaned so long on that imperious will that he seemed to have lost his capacity for standing alone.
His prostration was even abject while it lasted; but the true quality of grief is to be measured more by endurance than collapse. Those who succumb easily revive easily, and it was not to be supposed but that that volatile brain would quickly rally from its depression under the stimulus of such local distractions as offered.
Those were necessarily at first of a mortuary complexion, touching such matters as the depth and period of the court mourning, the fasts to be observed and the masses to be sung. The opportunities presented by obsequies are only fully appreciated by two classes—those standing at the opposite social extremes. A funeral is the poor man’s chance, and the prince’s, since each in his way borrows a relative distinction from the Majesty of Death. In the one case it is a brief affair, in the other a protracted; but at the bottom of both there is the same sentiment of reflected glory. Whether it be a lying-in-state, or a hearse with one poor coach to follow, it is the corpse which ennobles the relatives, and makes them greater than themselves by reason of their kinship with it.
Now the widower awoke to the exciting potentialities of his position as chief mourner, and to the realisation that a living ass might command more attention than a dead lioness. As executor to the mighty departed, it was his to rule, and thereby to take the credit for, the quality of the honours to be accorded her. He extracted, at least, some revivifying comfort from the process, some soothing flattery from the profuse condolences of his subjects. When the dead was declared great and unforgettable—and, indeed, whatever the personal trend of Louise Elizabeth’s ambition, her forceful character had left its stamp upon her times—he inhaled the incense as proffered to his own nostrils. His vanity swallowed the innumerable eulogies, monodies and elegiacs, extolling the deceased’s virtues, and, waxing fat upon them, like Jeshurun kicked. “Where, then,” ended one passionate encomiast, Frugoni, an abbé, “O, where, then, Death, is thy sting!” It is certain that, if it lay rankling in that bereaved heart, there was also much solace of honey to alleviate the pain it caused.
In short the duke only took means according to his lights to forget his trouble; and what should we all do, under like circumstances, but so study to fight the brooding demon of morbidity? Did he find a wholesome diversion in discussing with la Coque the details of a mourning coat, the braided sorrow of its cuffs, the sad expressive disposition of its buttons, why grudge him that comfort simply because we ourselves could see none in it? If a man can find solace for his grief in cat’s-cradle, by all means let him play with strings. The two played with strings in another sense, composing between them a touching threnody, thick with the most harassing sobs and wails, to which their own tears responded plentifully. They enjoyed it all immensely in a sort of smug lugubrious way. His Highness looked double the man he had been after a week or two’s enjoyment of these softly melancholy preoccupations.
To Isabella, standing wistful and sorrowful in the background, the improvement in her father’s spirits brought, with a greater ease on his account, some vague feeling of distress. She was glad to see him shed his despair for a healthier sentiment; yet she could not but marvel over the choice of the means he could adopt, and find sufficient, for the medicining of a sick soul. She tried to blind herself to the essential shallowness of the nature which could thus console its tragedy with sweetmeats; she tried to make allowances, to be steadfastly loyal to her own converted sense of duty; yet the conscious truth in her would not be so hoodwinked, or wholly justify to her the self-sacrifice of which she had been so lavish.
Still she would have remained faithful to its ideals, if only he had continued to cling to her; but, as she felt herself, her sympathy and loving support, needed by him less and less—even at last, as he developed these other healing resources, impatiently rejected—a sense of such loneliness settled upon her as brought her own soul near the verge of despair. She shrank back, like one who has put out a confident hand to caress a dog, and has been savagely torn for one’s trust. Thenceforth she seemed to realise, as she had never done yet, the complete misery of her state. She had thrown away the substance to grasp at the shadow, and her reward was in the righteousness of utter desolation.
One day Fanchette alluded before her, with a disdainful lip, to a poor little neglected herb, which had stood long untended on its table in a sunless corner.
“Shall I throw it away, your Highness?” she said. “I think it is dead.”
“Dead!” The word brought a shock of colour to the girl’s cheek, which fled as quickly, leaving it ashy white. She seemed to have awakened in an instant as from a distressed dream to the reality of something left beside her when she fell asleep. So a mother, irresistibly overcome, might startle to reconsciousness of her baby weakling, and sit up aghast, with panic ears strained for reassurance of the soft-drawn breaths. Her baby—theirs! and dying or dead! She looked, with wide eyes glazed, staring at the pretty piteous thing, which her heart, in its stupefaction, had forgotten. And then a rush of anger swept her, coming from what source the power that made the feminine must answer.
“Why do you refer to it like that?” she said. “Am I to submit for ever to your insults and innuendoes? You should have made it your duty to water it without consulting me. What has it done, poor thing, to be so cruelly treated? Please to attend to it at once.”
And she walked haughtily away, scornful of the storm she knew her reproof would evoke in that hysteric bosom; careless of how her words might rankle and give forth poisonous humours.
But that night she dreamed that she awoke and saw her lover stand beside her; and his face to her ghast eyes appeared all thinly laced with blood; and in his hand he held a shrunk and withered plant.
“Dead!” he moaned: “O, faithless and untrue, look here! Dead, dead!”
And so wailing, while she strove madly for speech, he passed and faded, seeming to melt away into the darkness; and, struggling, she awoke in truth, her cheeks all wet with tears, and held out wild entreating arms.
“No!” she whispered: “Beloved—no, no! Not to take it with you—not to kill me like that! I will be true; I will never sin to it or you again.” And so she lay sobbing, a great fear and rapture at her heart.
Then, suddenly, listening, with panic pulses, she rose, and, the cold moonbeams playing on her white breast and feet, stole to a shadowy corner, and gasped with joy to finditstill was there, and felt the soil to see that it was moist, and let her tears drop on the shrunken leaves.
She remembered all this the next morning as something that strangely hovered between fact and fancy—a half actual, half dreaming ecstasy like a sleepwalker’s. But, while she could not kill the impression of joy it had recreated in her, she still strove to remain faithful to her resolution of duty to her mother’s memory. That was an impossible compromise, of course; but it sufficed the situation, while matters, owing to the mourning, hung in abeyance.
On the 2nd of February, following that fatal December, a solemn requiem mass for the repose of the soul of Madame Louise-Elizabeth of France, eldest daughter of the King, Infanta of Spain, and Duchess of Parma, was sung at Paris in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. There were present the Dauphin and Dauphiness, Mesdames Adélaïde and Victoire, younger sisters of the deceased, and a host of court notables. The funeral oration was pronounced by the Bishop of Troyes, who, says the chronicler, “found nothing to say about the deceased except the usual banalities, and who even pushed hyperbole so far as to eulogise Don Philip, representing him as one ‘adorned with every talent which makes for the first success, with every quality which merits it, unshirking the least labour which assures it.’”
That flattery, when it reached the ears of its object, may likely have stimulated him to an emulation, and more than an emulation, of the “pomp and circumstance” of the Parisian “service solennel.” Anyhow, to the public obsequies of the late duchess, which were announced to be held in the Church of the Madonna della Steccata, at Parma, on the 27th March following, all the ingenuity of symbol and device of which an upholstering brain was capable was brought into play, with a result calculated to impress the most flippant with the dignity and majesty of death as interpreted by a master in the art of “make-up.”
To quote, somewhat loosely, the words of the same chronicler: “The interior of the church [a fine Renaissance structure, in the Greek form, dating from the early sixteenth century] was hung with black cloth embellished with a mosaic of bones and tears. Six Corinthian pillars fluted with silver had been erected at intervals round the nave. Medallions, representing the virtues of the princess, and ornamented with inscriptions and ermine-lined draperies, filled the intercolumniations of the arches both great and small. The octagonal catafalque set in the midst bore the arms of Madame on a field of tears and fleurs-de-lys. Below this rose a pyramid draped with black velvet, having on its summit a crown veiled in crêpe; while around were grouped six white marble statues representing Religion, Faith, Hope, Charity, and two others that stood for Death. From the vaulted roof hung a great baldaquin ornamented with five sable plumes.
“The presence of the court bishop, the stately and melancholy intoning, combined, with the throb of the organ, the wailing of the stringed instruments and the countless lights, to give to the ceremony a majesty worthy of the Infanta.”
Rather an abrupt pull-up that, as if the author in the midst of his declamation had been hit suddenly in the middle. But enough has been described to illustrate the fertility of the brain responsible for the decorations.
On the day of the service, the streets from an early hour were thronged with sombre-clad citizens all hurrying to anticipate all others in the securing of the best places for viewing and hearing. It was a cold clear morning, and the soaring dome of the church, surmounting its four shallow cupolas, seemed to glitter very remote and quiet up in its blue vault. More than all the glooming symbols in the depths below it spoke the free tranquil thought of immortality, lovely and consoling; and so it seemed to two sad unmothered eyes, that caught a glimpse of it through the window of the state coach, as that solemn vehicle approached the porch.
By now all business was suspended in the city, a tithe of whose population was packed away within those close and throbbing walls, while hundreds, unable to gain a footing in the building, crowded the Piazza and all the approaches outside, awaiting the arrival of the ducal party.
Among these watchers was a young gentleman, who had come riding in that morning from Mantua thirty miles away. He had left the old Virgilian town at midnight, being hard pressed for time, and had entered Parma to the clang of tolling bells, many and monotonous. The sound at first had knocked upon his heart with a strange foreboding, and he had reined in, with a thick catch at his throat. What did this melancholy music portend—and these sombre crowds, all silent, all intent, all streaming in one direction?