Tristis Erinnys
Praetulit infaustas sanguinolenta faces.
Ovid.
(Erinnys, doleful and bloody, extends the unblessed torches.)
And they placed the child in the father’s arms! As silently he bent
over it, tears--tears, how human!--fell from his eyes like rain! And
the little one smiled through the tears that bathed its cheeks! Ah, with
what happy tears we welcome the stranger into our sorrowing world!
With what agonising tears we dismiss the stranger back to the angels!
Unselfish joy; but how selfish is the sorrow!
And now through the silent chamber a faint sweet voice is heard,--the
young mother’s voice.
“I am here: I am by thy side!” murmured Zanoni.
The mother smiled, and clasped his hand, and asked no more; she was
contented.
....
Viola recovered with a rapidity that startled the physician; and the
young stranger thrived as if it already loved the world to which it had
descended. From that hour Zanoni seemed to live in the infant’s life,
and in that life the souls of mother and father met as in a new bond.
Nothing more beautiful than this infant had eye ever dwelt upon. It was
strange to the nurses that it came not wailing to the light, but smiled
to the light as a thing familiar to it before. It never uttered one cry
of childish pain. In its very repose it seemed to be listening to some
happy voice within its heart: it seemed itself so happy. In its eyes
you would have thought intellect already kindled, though it had not yet
found a language. Already it seemed to recognise its parents; already
it stretched forth its arms when Zanoni bent over the bed, in which
it breathed and bloomed,--the budding flower! And from that bed he was
rarely absent: gazing upon it with his serene, delighted eyes, his soul
seemed to feed its own. At night and in utter darkness he was still
there; and Viola often heard him murmuring over it as she lay in
a half-sleep. But the murmur was in a language strange to her; and
sometimes when she heard she feared, and vague, undefined superstitions
came back to her,--the superstitions of earlier youth. A mother fears
everything, even the gods, for her new-born. The mortals shrieked aloud
when of old they saw the great Demeter seeking to make their child
immortal.
But Zanoni, wrapped in the sublime designs that animated the human love
to which he was now awakened, forgot all, even all he had forfeited or
incurred, in the love that blinded him.
But the dark, formless thing, though he nor invoked nor saw it, crept,
often, round and round him, and often sat by the infant’s couch, with
its hateful eyes.