Valperga (34 page)

"Must I then forget to love? Oh! sooner shall that restless
lamp, which walketh up the heavens, and then descendeth, and
abideth no where, Oh! sooner shall that forget its path which it
hath ever traced, since God first marked it out, than I forget to
love! The air still surrounds the earth, filling the recesses of
the mountains, and even penetrating into their caverns; the sun
shines through the day, and the cloudless heavens of night are
starred with the air's fire- bearing children; and am not I as
unchanged and unchangeable as nature's own, everlasting works?
What is it then that startles every nerve, not as the sound of
thunder or of whirlwind, but as the still, small voice, that clings
to me, and will not be made silent, telling me that all is changed
from that which it once was?

"I loved! God and my own heart know how truly, how
tenderly! How I dwelt on his idea, his image, his virtues, with
unblamed affection: how it was my glory, my silent boast, when in
solitude my eyes swam in tears, and my cheek glowed, to reflect
that I loved him, who transcended his kind in wisdom and
excellence! Is this a dream? Oh! then all is a dream; and the
earth, and the fabric of the adamantine sky are as the gossamer
that may not endure! Yet, oh, ye stars, ye shine! And I live.
Pulse, and breath, and thought, and all is changed; I must no
longer love,--so let me suffer the living death of
forgetfulness.

"Surely my heart is not cold, for I feel deep agony; and
yet I live. I have read of those who have pined and died, when the
sweet food of love was denied to them; were their sensations
quicker, deeper, more all-penetrating than mine? Their anguish
greater? I know not; nor do I know, if God hath given this frame a
greater capacity for endurance than I could desire. Yet, methinks,
I still love, and that is why I live. A dark, blank, rayless,
motionless night is before me, a heavy, overwhelming annihilation
is above me, when for a moment I imagine that hope is not for me.
But for an instant does that idea live within me, yet does it come
oftener and stay longer than it was wont. The knowledge that I have
nought to expect but death, must become a part of my mind. When a
dear friend dies, what painful throes does one undergo, before we
are persuaded to know that he is no more! So now that hope dies; it
is a lesson hard for my heart to learn; but it will learn it; and
that which is now reality, will be as a dream; what is now a part
of me will be but a recollection, a shadow thrown upon life, from
which I at length shall emerge. And what is the state of being that
shall follow?

"Yet will I arouse all the pride and all the nobility of my
nature; I will not sink beneath this trial; the great and good of
past ages have left their lessons for me to meditate, and I will be
no indocile pupil; the honey of the cup is exhausted, but all is
not gall that remains."

The winter passed on thus: Euthanasia feared Castruccio as the
enemy of Florence; but she avoided Florence as his enemy.
Disappointed in her dearest hopes, her very heart destroyed, she
hated society, and felt solace in the contemplation of nature
alone; that solace which the mind gathers, in communing with its
sorrows, and, having lost every other resource, clings as to a
friend, to the feelings of woe with which it is penetrated.

The winter was chill; the mountains were covered with snow; yet,
when the sun gleamed on them, the Serchio, taking life from his
smiles, sped down in his course, roaring and howling, as if,
pursued by innumerable and overflowing streams, he hurried to find
repose in his home among the waters of the boundless ocean. The air
was filled with his turmoil; and winter, asleep among the icy crags
of the mountains, feared a sound, which he had not power to
silence, and which was the dirge that tolled out his passing hour:
the cold northern wind swept along the plain of Lucca, and moaned
as a repulsed beggar about the walls of Euthanasia's castle.
Within those walls, late the scene of content and joy, sat the
disconsolate mistress, a prey to all those sad, and sometimes wild
reveries, which utter hopelessness had made her companions. Duty,
and the associations of her early youth, had breathed in her ear
the terrible command to love no more; but her soul rebelled, and
often she thought that, in so mad a world, duty was but a
watch--word for fools, and that she might unblamed taste of the
only happiness she should ever enjoy.

But, in one who had so long submitted her very thoughts to the
control of conscience, such ideas found brief habitation; and her
accustomed feelings returned to press her into the narrow circle,
whence for her all peace was excluded. Duty, patriotism, and high
religious morality, were the watch-dogs which drove her scattered
thoughts, like wandering sheep, into their fold: alas! the wolf
nestled in the pen itself. If for a moment her will paused, and
love, breaking every bank she had carefully built up to regulate
her mind's course, burst in at once, and carried away in its
untameable course reason, conscience, and even memory, Castruccio
himself came to repair the breach, and to restrain the current;
some castle burnt, some town taken by assault, some friend or enemy
remorselessly banished, filled her with shame and anger, that she
should love a tyrant; a slave to his own passions, the avenger of
those of others. Castruccio was ever at war; peace subsisted
between him and Florence; but the siege of Genoa by the Ghibelines
of Lombardy, gave him occasion to turn his arms on that side; and,
his march extending from Lucca to beyond the Magra, he deluged the
country in blood, and obtained that which he desired, dominion and
fame.

It were curious to mark the changes that now operated in his
character. Every success made him extend his views to something
beyond; and every obstacle surmounted, made him still more
impatient of those that presented themselves in succession. He
became all in all to himself; his creed seemed to contain no
article but the end and aim of his ambition; and that he swore
before heaven to attain. Accustomed to see men die in battle for
his cause, he became callous to blood, and felt no more whether it
flowed for his security on a scaffold, or in the field of honour;
and every new act of cruelty hardened his heart for those to
come.

And yet all good feelings were not dead within him. An increased
ardour in friendship seemed to have taken the place of innocence
and general benevolence: virtue, as it were seeking to build her
nest in his heart, and thrust out of her ancient one, taking up
with the resting-place whose entrance still was free. Bravery and
fortitude were to him habitual feelings: but, although he were kind
and bounteous to his friends, so that he was loved with ardour, and
served with fidelity, there was no magnanimity, and little
generosity in his character. His moderate habits, abstemiousness,
and contempt of luxury, often gave him the appearance of
self-sacrifice; for he bestowed on others what they greatly valued,
but what he himself condemned. But, when it came to the sacrifice
of his own inclinations, his boundless ambition, and love of sway,
then no obstacle either of nature or art could stop him; neither
compassion which makes angels of men, nor love which softens the
hearts of the gods themselves, had over him the slightest
power,--he fixed his whole soul on the point he would attain, and
he never either lost sight of it, or paused in his efforts to
arrive there.

It were difficult to tell what his sensations were with regard
to Euthanasia; he had loved her, tenderly, passionately; and he
considered her refusal of his offers as a caprice to be surmounted.
Sometimes he was deeply grieved, sometimes angry; yet he ever loved
her, and believed that she would relent. Sometimes he thought of
poor Beatrice, her form, beaming with beauty, and alive with the
spirit of the sybil; or again, pale, struck to the heart as a poor
deer in the forest, and sinking beneath the wood:--he then felt
that he would give the world to assuage her sorrows. On returning
through Bologna, he had sent to Ferrara, and heard that she was
alive, that no change in her situation had taken place; and,
satisfied with this, he sought no further. Ambition had become the
ruling passion of his soul, and all bent beneath its sway, as a
field of reeds before the wind: love himself had brief power in his
mind; and, although this passion sometimes caused him pain, and the
sickness of disappointed hope, yet this was short, and yielded to
the first impulse that occurred, which hurried him along to new
designs and new conquests.

Once indeed he had loved, and he had drank life and joy from the
eyes of Euthanasia. His journey to Lombardy, his connection with
Beatrice, although indeed he loved her little, yet was sufficient
to weaken the bonds that confined him; and love was with him, ever
after, the second feeling in his heart, the servant and thrall of
his ambition.

His military exploits were now bounded to the entire reduction
of the territory around Lucca; Sarzana, Pontremoli, Fucecchio,
Fosedenovo,-- castles even beyond the Magra, Valdinera, Aquabuona,
La Valle, fortified villages among the Apennines, which had
hitherto been under the jurisdiction of the lords of Lombardy, now
submitted to the Lucchese consul. During the winter he was for some
time confined by the floods to the town of Lucca itself, where he
employed himself in establishing a vigorous system of police, in
discovering and punishing his enemies, and in the design and
foundation of public edifices. He was beloved by the nobles of his
own party, and by the common people, whose taxes he lightened, and
whom he relieved in a great measure from the tyranny of their
superiors; he was beloved even by the clergy, for, although an
enemy to the temporal usurpations of the Popes, he valued the
learning, and respected the persons of the priests. He was hated by
all the rich not immediately connected with his person and faction,
for they were deprived of power; despised by his followers, and
watched by himself, they could find no asylum from the suspicion
and severity of a tyrant who felt himself insecure on his seat of
power.

SPRING advanced, and the mountains looked forth from beneath the
snow: the chestnuts began to assume their light and fanlike
foliage; the dark ilex and cork trees which crowned the hills,
threw off their burthen of snow; and the olives now in flower
starred the mountain paths with their small fallen blossoms; the
heath perfumed the air; the melancholy voice of the cuckoo issued
from the depths of the forests; the swallows returned from their
pilgrimage; and in soft moonlight evenings the nightingales
answered one another from the copses; the vines with freshest green
hung over the springing corn; and various flowers adorned the banks
of each running stream. Euthanasia beheld the advance of summer
with careless eyes: her heart was full of one thought, of one
image; and all she saw, whether it were the snow-clad mountains of
winter, or the green and flowery fields of spring, was referred by
her to one feeling, one only remembrance. She determined to think
no more of Castruccio; but every day, every moment of every day,
was as a broken mirror, a multiplied reflection of his form
alone.

They had often met during the winter in the palaces of the
Lucchese nobles, and sometimes at her own castle; he was ever
gentle and deferential to her, and sometimes endeavoured to renew
the courtship that had formerly subsisted between them. Euthanasia
had not strength of purpose sufficient to avoid these meetings; but
each of them was as the life-blood taken from her heart, and left
her in a state of despair and grief that preyed like fever upon her
vitals. To see him, to hear him, and yet not to be his, was as if
to make her food of poison; it might assuage the pangs of hunger,
but it destroyed the principle of life. She became pale, sleepless,
the shadow of what she had been; her friends perceived the change,
and knew the cause; and they endeavoured to persuade her to go to
Florence, or to take some journey, which might occupy her mind, and
break the chain that now bound her to sorrow. She felt that she
ought to comply with their suggestions; but even her spirit, strong
and self-sustaining as it had been, sank beneath the influence of
love, and she had no power to fly, though to remain were death.
Tears and grief were her daily portion; yet she took it patiently,
as that to which she was doomed, and hardly prayed to have the
bitter cup removed.

A circumstance that occurred just at this crisis, when she
seemed to stand on the sharp edge which divides life from death,
saved her from destruction, and led her back to taste for a few
more years the food of sorrow and disappointment which was doled
out to her.

The summer solstice had passed, and Castruccio had been absent
during several months, carrying his conquests along the shore
beyond the Magra, while every day brought the news of some fresh
success he had obtained. This was the season of pilgrimages to
Monte San Pelegrino, a wild and high Apennine in the neighbourhood
of Valperga. It is said, that a king of Scotland, resigning his
crown to his son, and exiling himself from his country, finished
his days in penitence and prayer on this mountain. In Italy every
unknown pilgrim was a king or prince: but this was a strange
tradition; and it would seem as if the royal penitent, disdaining
the gladsome plains of Italy, sought for the image of his native
country on this naked peak among the heaped masses of the
Apennines.

His memory was there canonized, and many indulgences were the
reward of three successive visits to his rocky tomb; every year
numberless pilgrims flocked, and still continue to flock thither.
Straining up the rugged paths of the mountain, careless of the
burning sun, they walk on, shadowed by their broad pilgrim's
hats, repeating their pater-nosters, and thus, by the toil of the
body, buy indulgence for the soul's idleness. Many on their
return visited the castle of Valperga, and partook its hospitality.
One party had just withdrawn, as the Ave Maria sounded from the
vale below; and they chaunted the evening hymn, as they wound down
the steep. Euthanasia listened from her tower, and heard the last
song of the sleepy cicala among the olive woods, and the buzz of
the numerous night insects, that filled the air with their slight
but continual noise. It was the evening of a burning day; and the
breeze that slightly waved the grass, and bended the ripe corn with
its quick steps, was as a refreshing bath to the animals who panted
under the stagnant air of the day. Amid the buzzing of the crickets
and dragon flies, the agiolo's monotonous and regular cry told
of clear skies and sunny weather; the flowers were bending beneath
the dew, and her acacia, now in bloom, crowning its fan-like
foliage with a roseate crest, sent forth a sweet scent. A few of
the latest fire-flies darted here and there, with bright green
light; but it was July, and their season was well nigh past.
Towards the sea, on the horizon, a faint lightning shewed the
over--heated state of the atmosphere, and killed by its brightness
the last glories of the orange sunset; the mountains were losing
their various tints in darkness; and their vast amphitheatre looked
like a ponderous unformed wall, closing in Lucca, whose lights
glimmered afar off.