In the fiercest heat of the day, and on foot, Adrian returned to
Florence. As he approached the city, all that festive and gallant scene
he had quitted seemed to him like a dream; a vision of the gardens and
bowers of an enchantress, from which he woke abruptly as a criminal
may wake on the morning of his doom to see the scaffold and the
deathsman;--so much did each silent and lonely step into the funeral
city bring back his bewildered thoughts at once to life and to death.
The parting words of Mariana sounded like a knell at his heart. And
now as he passed on--the heat of the day, the lurid atmosphere, long
fatigue, alternate exhaustion and excitement, combining with the
sickness of disappointment, the fretting consciousness of precious
moments irretrievably lost, and his utter despair of forming any
systematic mode of search--fever began rapidly to burn through his
veins. His temples felt oppressed as with the weight of a mountain; his
lips parched with intolerable thirst; his strength seemed suddenly to
desert him; and it was with pain and labour that he dragged one languid
limb after the other.
“I feel it,” thought he, with the loathing nausea and shivering dread
with which nature struggles ever against death; “I feel it upon me--the
Devouring and the Viewless--I shall perish, and without saving her; nor
shall even one grave contain us!”
But these thoughts served rapidly to augment the disease which began to
prey upon him; and ere he reached the interior of the city, even thought
itself forsook him. The images of men and houses grew indistinct and
shadowy before his eyes; the burning pavement became unsteady and
reeling beneath his feet; delirium gathered over him, and he went on his
way muttering broken and incoherent words; the few who met fled from
him in dismay. Even the monks, still continuing their solemn and sad
processions, passed with a murmured bene vobis to the other side from
that on which his steps swerved and faltered. And from a booth at the
corner of a street, four Becchini, drinking together, fixed upon him
from their black masks the gaze that vultures fix upon some dying
wanderer of the desert. Still he crept on, stretching out his arms like
a man in the dark, and seeking with the vague sense that yet struggled
against the gathering delirium, to find out the mansion in which he
had fixed his home; though many as fair to live, and as meet to die in,
stood with open portals before and beside his path.
“Irene, Irene!” he cried, sometimes in a muttered and low tone,
sometimes in a wild and piercing shriek, “where art thou? Where? I come
to snatch thee from them; they shall not have thee, the foul and ugly
fiends! Pah! how the air smells of dead flesh! Irene, Irene! we will
away to mine own palace and the heavenly lake--Irene!”
While thus benighted, and thus exclaiming, two females suddenly emerged
from a neighbouring house, masked and mantled.
“Vain wisdom!” said the taller and slighter of the two, whose mantle, it
is here necessary to observe, was of a deep blue, richly broidered with
silver, of a shape and a colour not common in Florence, but usual in
Rome, where the dress of ladies of the higher rank was singularly bright
in hue and ample in fold--thus differing from the simpler and more
slender draperies of the Tuscan fashion--“Vain wisdom, to fly a
relentless and certain doom!”
“Why, thou wouldst not have us hold the same home with three of the
dead in the next chamber--strangers too to us--when Florence has so many
empty halls? Trust me, we shall not walk far ere we suit ourselves with
a safer lodgment.”
“Hitherto, indeed, we have been miraculously preserved,” sighed the
other, whose voice and shape were those of extreme youth; “yet would
that we knew where to fly--what mount, what wood, what cavern, held my
brother and his faithful Nina! I am sick with horrors!”
“Irene, Irene! Well then, if thou art at Milan or some Lombard town, why
do I linger here? To horse, to horse! Oh, no! no!--not the horse with
the bells! not the death-cart.” With a cry, a shriek, louder than
the loudest of the sick man’s, broke that young female away from her
companion. It seemed as if a single step took her to the side of Adrian.
She caught his arm--she looked in his face--she met his unconscious eyes
bright with a fearful fire. “It has seized him!”--(she then said in a
deep but calm tone)--“the Plague!”
“Away, away! are you mad?” cried her companion; “hence, hence,--touch me
not now thou hast touched him--go!--here we part!”
“Help me to bear him somewhere, see, he faints, he droops, he
falls!--help me, dear Signora, for pity, for the love of God!”
But, wholly possessed by the selfish fear which overcame all humanity
in that miserable time, the elder woman, though naturally kind, pitiful,
and benevolent, fled rapidly away, and soon vanished. Thus left alone
with Adrian, who had now, in the fierceness of the fever that preyed
within him, fallen on the ground, the strength and nerve of that young
girl did not forsake her. She tore off the heavy mantle which encumbered
her arms, and cast it from her; and then, lifting up the face of her
lover--for who but Irene was that weak woman, thus shrinking not from
the contagion of death?--she supported him on her breast, and called
aloud and again for help. At length the Becchini, in the booth before
noticed, (hardened in their profession, and who, thus hardened,
better than the most cautious, escaped the pestilence,) lazily
approached--“Quicker, quicker, for Christ’s love!” said Irene. “I have
much gold; I will reward you well: help me to bear him under the nearest
roof.”
“Leave him to us, young lady: we have had our eye upon him,” said one of
the gravediggers. “We’ll do our duty by him, first and last.”
“No--no! touch not his head--that is my care. There, I will help you;
so,--now then,--but be gentle!”
Assisted by these portentous officers, Irene, who would not release
her hold, but seemed to watch over the beloved eyes and lips, (set and
closed as they were,) as if to look back the soul from parting, bore
Adrian into a neighbouring house, and laid him on a bed; from which
Irene (preserving as only women do, in such times, the presence of mind
and vigilant providence which make so sublime a contrast with their
keen susceptibilities) caused them first to cast off the draperies and
clothing, which might retain additional infection. She then despatched
them for new furniture, and for whatsoever leech money might yet bribe
to a duty, now chiefly abandoned to those heroic Brotherhoods who,
however vilified in modern judgment by the crimes of some unworthy
members, were yet, in the dark times, the best, the bravest, and the
holiest agents, to whom God ever delegated the power to resist the
oppressor--to feed the hungry--to minister to woe; and who, alone,
amidst that fiery Pestilence, (loosed, as it were, a demon from the
abyss, to shiver into atoms all that binds the world to Virtue and to
Law,) seemed to awaken, as by the sound of an angel’s trumpet, to that
noblest Chivalry of the Cross--whose faith is the scorn of self--whose
hope is beyond the Lazar-house--whose feet, already winded for
immortality, trample, with a conqueror’s march, upon the graves of
Death!
While this the ministry and the office of love,--along that street in
which Adrian and Irene had met at last--came singing, reeling, roaring,
the dissolute and abandoned crew who had fixed their quarters in the
Convent of Santa Maria de’ Pazzi, their bravo chief at their head, and
a nun (no longer in nun’s garments) upon either arm. “A health to the
Plague!” shouted the ruffian: “A health to the Plague!” echoed his
frantic Bacchanals.
“A health to the Plague, may she ever, as now, Loose the rogue from his
chain, and the nun from her vow; To the gaoler a sword--to the captive a
key, Hurrah for Earth’s Curse! ‘tis a blessing to me.”
“Holla!” cried the chief, stopping; “here, Margherita; here’s a brave
cloak for thee, my girl: silver enow on it to fill thy purse, if it ever
grow empty; which it may, if ever the Plague grow slack.”
“Nay,” said the girl, who, amidst all the havoc of debauch, retained
much of youth and beauty in her form and face; “nay, Guidotto; perhaps it
has infection.”
“Pooh, child, silver never infects. Clap it on, clap it on. Besides,
fate is fate, and when it is thine hour there will be other means
besides the gavocciolo.”
So saying, he seized the mantle, threw it roughly over her shoulders,
and dragged her on as before, half pleased with the finery, half
frightened with the danger; while gradually died away, along the lurid
air and the mournful streets, the chant of that most miserable mirth.