"Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one."--INGOMAR.
AT the end of the long, gloomy day following the conclusion of the
carnival, Zanotti accompanied his father to a midnight mass, and there
for the first time saw Leonora D'Alvarez, the daughter of Spain's
ambassador to the court of the winged Lion of St. Mark's. She was one
of those beautiful creations that we so often dream of, and sigh for,
and sometimes, but very seldom, see. _Soul_ there shed its spiritual
attributes over one from whose features even the bloom of youth seemed to
catch a brighter hue. Like all Italians, Zanotti had dreamed of love--the
love of the poet and the dreamer; and now he felt it in its strength--the
love of a pure, unselfish, yet deep and ardent nature!
To shorten a long story (for we must leave much to be divined in this
history), he felt the inspiration growing out of love impelling him to
give him his feelings to the world in immortal song. He wrote, and he
became famous! Then, when a nation bowed before his genius--when a world
re-echoed his name with reverence--he sought the woman who had roused his
soul to exertion; he told her that he loved her; he told her that all
the bright thoughts and sparkling fancies the _universe_ had claimed as
its own were hers--all hers; that she, and she alone, had made his name
as deathless as the ethereal essence the Almighty had endowed his body
with--and that unless she gave still another gift--_her heart_--fame,
fortune, name, genius--were but empty, and hollow, and useless!
The whispered reply was no denying one, and he seemed to have attained
all of happiness the world can offer. Months flew by--months in which
life seemed born, like Venus, "of a rosy sea and a drop from heaven;"
months when each to-morrow hung an "arch of promise," a ladder of
sunlight, each round of which seemed made to lead the feet through
Ivan gardens--up--up towards the sky! The glorious sun, warming like a
lover's glance the beautiful bosom of the "Doge's bride"--the swelling
"Adriatic"--the churches, the palaces, the prisons, whose gloom was
hallowed by romantic memories, the legends attached to the palatial home
of his own proud sires--these were subjects upon which, all the livelong
day, he could expatiate, and she delightedly listen; and when night stole
like a dream through the soft atmosphere, the stars, with their Chaldaic
interpretations, furnished a new page from whence he could cull prophecies
of their fate! Then would he weave old superstitions with the fancies of
the poet and the lover, till he grew amazed at his own strange eloquence!
She, too, on her part, had an exhaustless theme in telling how, by
degrees, _his_ soul had, as it were, become a part of hers; how every
emotion in his own mind, by an imperceptible and view-less magnetism,
awakened hers to action. The simplest speech had a charm for him; there
was music in her voice; her thoughts were dimless mirrors reflecting the
spirituality of her soul; to use his own language, "each word was the
spray of her heart, which mirrored in its sparkling globule all the beauty
and none of the defects of the world around it!" The days glided by upon
the swift pinions lent by unclouded happiness.
They lived in an atmosphere where all was of the past, save their love
and their hopes; the multitude of traffickers and idlers that crossed
their daily path were as unheeded shadows; they mingled only with beings
of other times. Their friends--for the friends of the scholar became
those of the maiden--were Homer and Virgil, Tasso and Marino, the graceful
Catullus, and the rough, but noble-tongued Lucretius! They strolled in
imagination through Ilion's Scæn gate, along the luxuriant banks of her
winding rivers, and lay down to repose beneath her wild and broad-leaved
fig-tree. And then, when they had gathered around them the heroes and the
poets of past and buried ages, unlike Alaric, they would weigh the myrtle
crown against the laurel wreath, and see glory kick the beam!
Could year after year of their lives have rolled away with such feelings
and amid such employments, they would have indeed been blessed! But no!
Alas! that could not be! Love, and youth, and hope, are but the sun-fringe
of the cloud of life, the flame that gilds the bark it consumes, the
lightning flashes that foretell a rent and shattered heart! For love,
if no outward influences assail (or assailing, are conquered and driven
back), there is custom, that slow, insidious lullaby, singing in Morphean
tones unceasingly, till, wearied and overcome, _that_ passion, that would
have repelled a visible foe, sinks at his post in quietness--asleep!
It came! It burst upon them without a warning! Fate had suspended a
sword above their heads; but, unlike the tyrant's envious favorite, they
saw it not ere it fell! It came--crushing and blighting the flowers
that had blossomed for them, and, tearing their young hearts from the
beautiful dream-world in which they revelled, brought them back to the
harsh and dull and cold realities of this! The father of the lover was
suddenly arrested by the myrmidons of the terrible Council of Ten. It was
discovered he was the head of a wide-spread conspiracy against the state,
and the expiration of the month of his arrest saw the noble and powerful
family of Zanotti exiles--its lord sent forth with the boon of life, but
with ruined fortunes and a tarnished name--its heir an outcast, though
spotless of a single crime.
The parting of the lovers was brief and terrible. _She_ swore to him that
death only should take the bloom from her love, that, ruined in name and
fortune as he was, he was, as ever, the high priest of her heart's temple,
and that no other could ever approach its altar. _He_ offered _no vows_,
but said to her, that if five years sped by without his presence, to deem
him dead, and know he had died in striving to win laurels worthy to lay
before her father's daughter!
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