Qui? Toi m’abandonner! Ou vas-tu? Non! demeure,
Demeure!
La Harpe, “Le Comte de Warwick,” Act 3, sc. 5.
(Who? THOU abandon me!--where goest thou? No! stay, stay!)
Letter from Viola to Zanoni.
“It has come to this!--I am the first to part! I, the unfaithful one,
bid thee farewell forever. When thine eyes fall upon this writing thou
wilt know me as one of the dead. For thou that wert, and still art my
life,--I am lost to thee! O lover! O husband! O still worshipped and
adored! if thou hast ever loved me, if thou canst still pity, seek not
to discover the steps that fly thee. If thy charms can detect and tract
me, spare me, spare our child! Zanoni, I will rear it to love thee, to
call thee father! Zanoni, its young lips shall pray for thee! Ah, spare
thy child, for infants are the saints of earth, and their mediation
may be heard on high! Shall I tell thee why I part? No; thou, the
wisely-terrible, canst divine what the hand trembles to record; and
while I shudder at thy power,--while it is thy power I fly (our child
upon my bosom),--it comforts me still to think that thy power can read
the heart! Thou knowest that it is the faithful mother that writes
to thee, it is not the faithless wife! Is there sin in thy knowledge,
Zanoni? Sin must have sorrow: and it were sweet--oh, how sweet--to be
thy comforter. But the child, the infant, the soul that looks to mine
for its shield!--magician, I wrest from thee that soul! Pardon, pardon,
if my words wrong thee. See, I fall on my knees to write the rest!
“Why did I never recoil before from thy mysterious lore; why did the
very strangeness of thine unearthly life only fascinate me with a
delightful fear? Because, if thou wert sorcerer or angel-demon, there
was no peril to other but myself: and none to me, for my love was my
heavenliest part; and my ignorance in all things, except the art to love
thee, repelled every thought that was not bright and glorious as thine
image to my eyes. But NOW there is another! Look! why does it watch me
thus,--why that never-sleeping, earnest, rebuking gaze? Have thy spells
encompassed it already? Hast thou marked it, cruel one, for the terrors
of thy unutterable art? Do not madden me,--do not madden me!--unbind the
spell!
“Hark! the oars without! They come,--they come, to bear me from thee! I
look round, and methinks that I see thee everywhere. Thou speakest to
me from every shadow, from every star. There, by the casement, thy lips
last pressed mine; there, there by that threshold didst thou turn again,
and thy smile seemed so trustingly to confide in me! Zanoni--husband!--I
will stay! I cannot part from thee! No, no! I will go to the room
where thy dear voice, with its gentle music, assuaged the pangs
of travail!--where, heard through the thrilling darkness, it first
whispered to my ear, ‘Viola, thou art a mother!’ A mother!--yes, I rise
from my knees,--I AM a mother! They come! I am firm; farewell!”
Yes; thus suddenly, thus cruelly, whether in the delirium of blind and
unreasoning superstition, or in the resolve of that conviction which
springs from duty, the being for whom he had resigned so much of empire
and of glory forsook Zanoni. This desertion, never foreseen, never
anticipated, was yet but the constant fate that attends those who would
place Mind BEYOND the earth, and yet treasure the Heart WITHIN it.
Ignorance everlastingly shall recoil from knowledge. But never yet, from
nobler and purer motives of self-sacrifice, did human love link itself
to another, than did the forsaking wife now abandon the absent. For
rightly had she said that it was not the faithless wife, it WAS the
faithful mother that fled from all in which her earthly happiness was
centred.
As long as the passion and fervour that impelled the act animated
her with false fever, she clasped her infant to her breast, and was
consoled,--resigned. But what bitter doubt of her own conduct, what icy
pang of remorse shot through her heart, when, as they rested for a
few hours on the road to Leghorn, she heard the woman who accompanied
herself and Glyndon pray for safety to reach her husband’s side,
and strength to share the perils that would meet her there! Terrible
contrast to her own desertion! She shrunk into the darkness of her own
heart,--and then no voice from within consoled her.