“I tell you, Lucia, I do not love those stuffs; they do not become me.
Saw you ever so poor a dye?--this purple, indeed! that crimson! Why did
you let the man leave them? Let him take them elsewhere tomorrow.
They may suit the signoras on the other side the Tiber, who imagine
everything Venetian must be perfect; but I, Lucia, I see with my own
eyes, and judge from my own mind.”
“Ah, dear lady,” said the serving-maid, “if you were, as you doubtless
will be, some time or other, a grand signora, how worthily you would
wear the honours! Santa Cecilia! No other dame in Rome would be looked
at while the Lady Nina were by!”
“Would we not teach them what pomp was?” answered Nina. “Oh! what
festivals would we hold! Saw you not from the gallery the revels given
last week by the Lady Giulia Savelli?”
“Ay, signora; and when you walked up the hall in your silver and pearl
tissue, there ran such a murmur through the gallery; every one cried,
‘The Savelli have entertained an angel!’”
“Pish! Lucia; no flattery, girl.”
“It is naked truth, lady. But that was a revel, was it not? There was
grandeur!--fifty servitors in scarlet and gold! and the music playing
all the while. The minstrels were sent for from Bergamo. Did not that
festival please you? Ah, I warrant many were the fine speeches made to
you that day!”
“Heigho!--no, there was one voice wanting, and all the music was marred.
But, girl, were I the Lady Giulia, I would not have been contented with
so poor a revel.”
“How, poor! Why all the nobles say it outdid the proudest marriage-feast
of the Colonna. Nay, a Neapolitan who sat next me, and who had served
under the young Queen Joanna, at her marriage, says, that even Naples
was outshone.”
“That may be. I know nought of Naples; but I know what my court should
have been, were I what--what I am not, and may never be! The banquet
vessels should have been of gold; the cups jewelled to the brim; not
an inch of the rude pavement should have been visible; all should
have glowed with cloth of gold. The fountain in the court should have
showered up the perfumes of the East; my pages should not have been
rough youths, blushing at their own uncouthness, but fair boys, who had
not told their twelfth year, culled from the daintiest palaces of Rome;
and, as for the music, oh, Lucia!--each musician should have worn a
chaplet, and deserved it; and he who played best should have had a
reward, to inspire all the rest--a rose from me. Saw you, too, the
Lady Giulia’s robe? What colours! they might have put out the sun
at noonday!--yellow, and blue, and orange, and scarlet! Oh, sweet
Saints!--but my eyes ached all the next day!”
“Doubtless, the Lady Giulia lacks your skill in the mixture of colours,”
said the complaisant waiting-woman.
“And then, too, what a mien!--no royalty in it! She moved along the
hall, so that her train well nigh tripped her every moment; and then
she said, with a foolish laugh, ‘These holyday robes are but troublesome
luxuries.’ Troth, for the great there should be no holyday robes; ‘tis
for myself, not for others, that I would attire! Every day should
have its new robe, more gorgeous than the last;--every day should be a
holyday!”
“Methought,” said Lucia, “that the Lord Giovanni Orsini seemed very
devoted to my Lady.”
“He! the bear!”
“Bear, he may be! but he has a costly skin. His riches are untold.”
“And the fool knows not how to spend them.”
“Was not that the young Lord Adrian who spoke to you just by the
columns, where the music played?”
“It might be,--I forget.”
“Yet, I hear that few ladies forget when Lord Adrian di Castello woos
them.”
“There was but one man whose company seemed to me worth the
recollection,” answered Nina, unheeding the insinuation of the artful
handmaid.
“And who was he?” asked Lucia.
“The old scholar from Avignon!”
“What! he with the gray beard? Oh, Signora!”
“Yes,” said Nina, with a grave and sad voice; “when he spoke, the whole
scene vanished from my eyes,--for he spoke to me of HIM!”
As she said this, the Signora sighed deeply, and the tears gathered to
her eyes.
The waiting-woman raised her lips in disdain, and her looks in wonder;
but she did not dare to venture a reply.
“Open the lattice,” said Nina, after a pause, “and give me yon paper.
Not that, girl--but the verses sent me yesterday. What! art thou
Italian, and dost thou not know, by instinct, that I spoke of the rhyme
of Petrarch?”
Seated by the open casement, through which the moonlight stole soft
and sheen, with one lamp beside her, from which she seemed to shade her
eyes, though in reality she sought to hide her countenance from Lucia,
the young Signora appeared absorbed in one of those tender sonnets which
then turned the brains and inflamed the hearts of Italy. (Although it is
true that the love sonnets of Petrarch were not then, as now, the most
esteemed of his works, yet it has been a great, though a common error,
to represent them as little known and coldly admired. Their effect was,
in reality, prodigious and universal. Every ballad-singer sung them
in the streets, and (says Filippo Villani), “Gravissimi nesciebant
abstinere”--“Even the gravest could not abstain from them.”)
Born of an impoverished house, which, though boasting its descent from
a consular race of Rome, scarcely at that day maintained a rank
amongst the inferior order of nobility, Nina di Raselli was the spoiled
child--the idol and the tyrant--of her parents. The energetic and
self-willed character of her mind made her rule where she should have
obeyed; and as in all ages dispositions can conquer custom, she had,
though in a clime and land where the young and unmarried of her sex
are usually chained and fettered, assumed, and by assuming won, the
prerogative of independence. She possessed, it is true, more learning
and more genius than generally fell to the share of women in that day;
and enough of both to be deemed a miracle by her parents;--she had,
also, what they valued more, a surpassing beauty; and, what they feared
more, an indomitable haughtiness;--a haughtiness mixed with a thousand
soft and endearing qualities where she loved; and which, indeed, where
she loved, seemed to vanish. At once vain yet high-minded, resolute yet
impassioned, there was a gorgeous magnificence in her very vanity and
splendour,--an ideality in her waywardness: her defects made a part
of her brilliancy; without them she would have seemed less woman; and,
knowing her, you would have compared all women by her standard. Softer
qualities beside her seemed not more charming, but more insipid. She had
no vulgar ambition, for she had obstinately refused many alliances which
the daughter of Raselli could scarcely have hoped to form. The untutored
minds and savage power of the Roman nobles seemed to her imagination,
which was full of the poetry of rank, its luxury and its graces, as
something barbarous and revolting, at once to be dreaded and despised.
She had, therefore, passed her twentieth year unmarried, but not without
love. The faults, themselves, of her character, elevated that ideal of
love which she had formed. She required some being round whom all her
vainer qualities could rally; she felt that where she loved she must
adore; she demanded no common idol before which to humble so strong and
imperious a mind. Unlike women of a gentler mould, who desire, for a
short period, to exercise the caprices of sweet empire,--when she loved
she must cease to command; and pride, at once, be humbled to devotion.
So rare were the qualities that could attract her; so imperiously did
her haughtiness require that those qualities should be above her own,
yet of the same order; that her love elevated its object like a god.
Accustomed to despise, she felt all the luxury it is to venerate! And
if it were her lot to be united with one thus loved, her nature was
that which might become elevated by the nature that it gazed on. For
her beauty--Reader, shouldst thou ever go to Rome, thou wilt see in the
Capitol the picture of the Cumaean Sibyl, which, often copied, no copy
can even faintly represent. I beseech thee, mistake not this sibyl for
another, for the Roman galleries abound in sibyls. (The sibyl referred
to is the well-known one by Domenichino. As a mere work of art, that by
Guercino, called the Persian sibyl, in the same collection, is perhaps
superior; but in beauty, in character, there is no comparison.) The
sibyl I speak of is dark, and the face has an Eastern cast; the robe
and turban, gorgeous though they be, grow dim before the rich, but
transparent roses of the cheek; the hair would be black, save for that
golden glow which mellows it to a hue and lustre never seen but in the
south, and even in the south most rare; the features, not Grecian, are
yet faultless; the mouth, the brow, the ripe and exquisite contour, all
are human and voluptuous; the expression, the aspect, is something more;
the form is, perhaps, too full for the perfection of loveliness, for the
proportions of sculpture, for the delicacy of Athenian models; but the
luxuriant fault has a majesty. Gaze long upon that picture: it charms,
yet commands, the eye. While you gaze, you call back five centuries. You
see before you the breathing image of Nina di Raselli!
But it was not those ingenious and elaborate conceits in which Petrarch,
great Poet though he be, has so often mistaken pedantry for passion,
that absorbed at that moment the attention of the beautiful Nina. Her
eyes rested not on the page, but on the garden that stretched below the
casement. Over the old fruit-trees and hanging vines fell the moonshine;
and in the centre of the green, but half-neglected sward, the waters of
a small and circular fountain, whose perfect proportions spoke of days
long past, played and sparkled in the starlight. The scene was still
and beautiful; but neither of its stillness nor its beauty thought Nina:
towards one, the gloomiest and most rugged, spot in the whole garden,
turned her gaze; there, the trees stood densely massed together, and
shut from view the low but heavy wall which encircled the mansion of
Raselli. The boughs on those trees stirred gently, but Nina saw them
wave; and now from the copse emerged, slowly and cautiously, a solitary
figure, whose shadow threw itself, long and dark, over the sward. It
approached the window, and a low voice breathed Nina’s name.
“Quick, Lucia!” cried she, breathlessly, turning to her handmaid:
“quick! the rope-ladder! it is he! he is come! How slow you are! haste,
girl,--he may be discovered! There,--O joy,--O joy!--My lover! my hero!
my Rienzi!”
“It is you!” said Rienzi, as, now entering the chamber, he wound his
arms around her half-averted form, “and what is night to others is day
to me!”
The first sweet moments of welcome were over; and Rienzi was seated at
the feet of his mistress: his head rested on her knees--his face looking
up to hers--their hands clasped each in each.
“And for me thou bravest these dangers!” said the lover; “the shame of
discovery, the wrath of thy parents!”
“But what are my perils to thine? Oh, Heaven! if my father found thee
here thou wouldst die!”
“He would think it then so great a humiliation, that thou, beautiful
Nina, who mightst match with the haughtiest names of Rome, shouldst
waste thy love on a plebeian--even though the grandson of an emperor!”
The proud heart of Nina could sympathize well with the wounded pride of
her lover: she detected the soreness which lurked beneath his answer,
carelessly as it was uttered.
“Hast thou not told me,” she said, “of that great Marius, who was no
noble, but from whom the loftiest Colonna would rejoice to claim his
descent? and do I not know in thee one who shall yet eclipse the power
of Marius, unsullied by his vices?”
“Delicious flattery! sweet prophet!” said Rienzi, with a melancholy
smile; “never were thy supporting promises of the future more welcome to
me than now; for to thee I will say what I would utter to none else--my
soul half sinks beneath the mighty burthen I have heaped upon it. I want
new courage as the dread hour approaches; and from thy words and looks I
drink it.”
“Oh!” answered Nina, blushing as she spoke, “glorious is indeed the lot
which I have bought by my love for thee: glorious to share thy schemes,
to cheer thee in doubt, to whisper hope to thee in danger.”
“And give grace to me in triumph!” added Rienzi, passionately. “Ah!
should the future ever place upon these brows the laurel-wreath due to
one who has saved his country, what joy, what recompence, to lay it
at thy feet! Perhaps, in those long and solitary hours of languor and
exhaustion which fill up the interstices of time,--the dull space for
sober thought between the epochs of exciting action,--perhaps I should
have failed and flagged, and renounced even my dreams for Rome, had they
not been linked also with my dreams for thee!--had I not pictured to
myself the hour when my fate should elevate me beyond my birth; when thy
sire would deem it no disgrace to give thee to my arms; when thou,
too, shouldst stand amidst the dames of Rome, more honoured, as more
beautiful, than all; and when I should see that pomp, which my own soul
disdains, [‘Quem semper abhorrui sicut cenum’ is the expression used by
Rienzi, in his letter to his friend at Avignon, and which was probably
sincere. Men rarely act according to the bias of their own tastes.) made
dear and grateful to me because associated with thee! Yes, it is these
thoughts that have inspired me, when sterner ones have shrunk back
appalled from the spectres that surround their goal. And oh! my Nina,
sacred, strong, enduring must be, indeed, the love which lives in the
same pure and elevated air as that which sustains my hopes of liberty
and fame!”
This was the language which, more even than the vows of fidelity and the
dear adulation which springs from the heart’s exuberance, had bound the
proud and vain soul of Nina to the chains that it so willingly wore.
Perhaps, indeed, in the absence of Rienzi, her weaker nature pictured to
herself the triumph of humbling the highborn signoras, and eclipsing the
barbarous magnificence of the chiefs of Rome; but in his presence,
and listening to his more elevated and generous ambition, as yet all
unsullied by one private feeling save the hope of her, her higher
sympathies were enlisted with his schemes, her mind aspired to raise
itself to the height of his, and she thought less of her own rise than
of his glory. It was sweet to her pride to be the sole confidante of his
most secret thoughts, as of his most hardy undertakings; to see bared
before her that intricate and plotting spirit; to be admitted even to
the knowledge of its doubts and weakness, as of its heroism and power.
Nothing could be more contrasted than the loves of Rienzi and Nina,
and those of Adrian and Irene: in the latter, all were the dreams, the
phantasies, the extravagance, of youth; they never talked of the future;
they mingled no other aspirations with those of love. Ambition, glory,
the world’s high objects, were nothing to them when together; their love
had swallowed up the world, and left nothing visible beneath the sun,
save itself. But the passion of Nina and her lover was that of more
complicated natures and more mature years: it was made up of a thousand
feelings, each naturally severed from each, but compelled into one focus
by the mighty concentration of love; their talk was of the world; it was
from the world that they drew the aliment which sustained it; it was of
the future they spoke and thought; of its dreams and imagined glories
they made themselves a home and altar; their love had in it more of the
Intellectual than that of Adrian and Irene; it was more fitted for this
hard earth; it had in it, also, more of the leaven of the later and iron
days, and less of poetry and the first golden age.
“And must thou leave me now?” said Nina, her cheek no more averted from
his lips, nor her form from his parting embrace. “The moon is high yet;
it is but a little hour thou hast given me.”
“An hour! Alas!” said Rienzi, “it is near upon midnight--our friends
await me.”
“Go, then, my soul’s best half! Go; Nina shall not detain thee one
moment from those higher objects which make thee so dear to Nina.
When--when shall we meet again!”
“Not,” said Rienzi, proudly, and with all his soul upon his brow, “not
thus, by stealth! no! nor as I thus have met thee, the obscure and
contemned bondsman! When next thou seest me, it shall be at the head of
the sons of Rome! her champion! her restorer! or--” said he, sinking his
voice--
“There is no or!” interrupted Nina, weaving her arms round him, and
catching his enthusiasm; “thou hast uttered thine own destiny!”
“One kiss more!--farewell!--the tenth day from the morrow shines upon
the restoration of Rome!”