Zanoni — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

to be the protector of the two. From how many dis: graces with the despots of San Carlo and the Conservatorio had her unknown officious mediation saved him! In how many ailments — for his frame was weak — had she nursed and tended him!

Often, in the dark nights, she would wait at the theatre with her lantern to light him and her steady arm to lean on; otherwise, in his abstract reveries, who knows but the musician would have walked after his “ Siren ” into the sea!

And then she would so patiently, perhaps (for in true love there is not always the finest taste) so delightedly, listen to those storms of eccentric and fitful melody, and steal him — whispering praises all the way — from the unwholesome night-watch to rest and sleep!

I said his music was a part of the man, and this gentle creature seemed a part of the music; it was, in fact, when she sat beside him that whatever was tender or fairy-like in his motley fantasia crept into the harmony as by stealth. Doubtless her presence acted on the music, and shaped and softened it; but, he, who never examined how or what his inspiration, knew it not. All that he knew was, that he loved and blessed her.

He fancied he told her so twenty times a day; but he never did, for he was not of many words, even to his wife. His language was his music,— as hers, her cares! He was more communicative to his barbiton, as the learned Mersennus teaches us to call all the varieties of the great viol family. Certainly barbiton sounds better than fiddle; and barbiton let it be.

He would talk to that by the hour together, — praise it, scold it, coax it, nay (for such is man, even the most guileless), he had been known to swear at it; but for that excess he was always penitentially remorseful. And the barbiton had a tongue of his own, could take his own part,

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and when he also scolded, had much the best of it. He was a noble fellow, this Violin! — a Tyrolese, the handiwork of the illustrious Steiner. There was something mysterious in his great age. How many hands, now dust, had awakened his strings ere he became the Robin Goodfellow and Familiar of Gaetano Pisani! His very case was venerable,— beautifully painted, it was said, by Caracci. An English collector had offered more for the case than Pisani had ever made by the violin. But Pisani, who cared not if he had inhabited a cabin himself, was proud of a palace for the barbiton. His barbiton, it was his elder child! He had another child, and now we must turn to her. How shall I describe thee, Viola? Certainly the music had something to answer for in the advent of that young stranger. For both in her form and her character you might have traced a family likeness to that singular and spirit-like life of sound which night after night threw itself in airy and goblin sport over the starry seas. . . . Beautiful she was, but of a very uncommon beauty, —a combination, a harmony of opposite attributes. Her hair of a gold richer and purer than that which is seen even in the North; but the eyes, of all the dark, tender, subduing light of more than Italian — almost of Oriental — splendor. The complexion exquisitely fair, but never the same,— vivid in one moment, pale the next. And with the complexion, the expression also varied; nothing now so sad, and nothing now so joyous. I grieve to say that what we rightly entitle education was much neglected for their daughter by this singular pair. To be sure, neither of them had much knowledge to bestow; and knowledge was not then the fashion, as it is now. But accident or nature favored

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young Viola. She learned, as of course, her mother’s language with her father’s. And she contrived soon to read and to write; and her mother, who, by the way, was a Roman Catholic, taught her betimes to pray.

But then, to counteract all these acquisitions, the strange habits of Pisani, and the incessant watch and care which he required from his wife, often left the child alone with an old nurse, who, to be sure, loved her dearly, but who was in no way calculated to instruct her. Dame Gionetta was every inch Italian and Neapolitan. Her youth had been all love, and her age was all superstition. She was garrulous, fond, —a gossip.

Now she would prattle to the girl of cavaliers and princes at her feet, and now she would freeze her blood with tales and legends, perhaps as old as Greek or Etrurian fable, of demon and vampire, —of the dances round the great walnut-tree at Benevento, and the haunting spell of the Evil Eye. All this helped silently to weave charmed webs over Viola’s imagination that afterthought and later years might labor vainly to dispel.

And all this especially fitted her to hang, with a fearful joy, upon her father’s music. Those visionary strains, ever struggling to translate into wild and broken sounds the language of unearthly beings, breathed around her from her birth.

Thus you might have said that her whole mind was full of music; associations, memories, sensations of pleasure or pain, — all were mixed up inexplicably with those sounds that now delighted and now terrified ; that greeted her when her eyes opened to the sun, and woke her trembling on her lonely couch in the darkness of the night.

The legends and tales of Gionetta only served to make the child better understand the signification of those mysterious tones; they furnished her with words to the music. It was natural that the