Zanoni — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“ Unhappiest one! ” cried Glyndon, shuddering, “ hast thou indeed given birth to a victim thou canst not save ? Refuse it sustenance, — let it look to thee in vain for food! In the grave, at least, there are repose and peace! ”

Then. there came back to Viola’s mind the remembrance of Zanoni’s night-long watches by that cradle, and the fear which even then had crept over her as she heard his murmured half-chanted words. And as the child looked at her with its clear, steadfast eye, in the strange intelligence of that look there was something that only confirmed her awe. So there both Mother and Forewarner stood in silence, —the sun smiling upon them through the casement, and dark by the cradle, though they saw it not, sat the motionless, veiled Thing! But by degrees better and juster and more grateful memories of the past returned to the young mother. The features of the infant, as she gazed, took the aspect of the absent father. A voice seemed to break from those rosy lips, and say, mournfully, “I speak to thee in thy child. In return for all my love for thee and thine, dost thou distrust me, at the first sentence of a maniac who accuses ? ” Her breast heaved, her stature rose, her eyes shone with a serene and holy light. “Go, poor victim of thine own delusions,” she said to Glyndon; “I would not believe mine own senses, if they accused tts father! And what knowest thou of Zanoni? What relation have Mejnour and the grisly spectres he invoked, with the radiant image with which thou wouldst connect them ?” “ Thou wilt learn too soon,” replied Glyndon, gloomily.

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“ And the very phantom that haunts me, whispers, with its bloodless lips, that its horrors await both thine and thee! I take not thy decision yet; before I leave Venice we shall meet again.” He said, and departed.

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CHAPTER VI

Quel est l’égarement ot ton ame se livre? 1 La Harpr, Le Comte de Warwick, Act 4, sc. 4.

Aas, Zanoni! the aspirer, the dark, bright one! — didst thou think that the bond between the survivor of ages and the daughter of a day could endure? Didst thou not foresee that, until the ordeal was past, there could be no equality between thy wisdom and her love? Art thou absent now seeking amidst thy solemn secrets the solemn safeguards for child and mother, and forgettest thou that the phantom that served thee hath power over its own gifts, —over the lives it taught thee to rescue from the grave? Dost thou not know that Fear and Distrust, once sown in the heart of Love, spring up from the seed into a forest that excludes the stars? Dark, bright one! the hateful eyes glare beside the mother and the child! All that day Viola was distracted by a thousand thoughts and terrors, which fled as she examined them to settle back the darklier. She remembered that, as she had once said to Glyndon, her very childhood had been haunted with strange forebodings, that she was ordained for some preternatural doom. She remembered that, as she had told him this, sitting by the seas that slumbered in the arms of the Bay of Naples, he, too, had acknowledged the same forebodings, and a mysterious sympathy had appeared to unite their fates. She remem

1 To what delusion does thy soul abandon itself ?

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bered, above all, that, comparing their entangled thoughts, both had then said, that with the first sight of Zanoni the foreboding, the instinct, had spoken to their hearts more audibly than before, whispering that “with umm was connected the secret of the unconjectured life. And now, when Glyndon and Viola met again, the haunting fears of childhood, thus referred to, woke from their enchanted sleep.

With Glyndon’s terror she felt a sympathy, against which her reason and her love struggled in vain. And still, when she turned her looks upon her child, it watched her with that steady, earnest eye, and its lips moved as if it sought to speak to her, — but no sound came. The infant refused to sleep.

Whenever she gazed upon its face, still those wakeful, watchful eyes! — and in their earnestness, there spoke something of pain, of upbraiding, of accusation. They chilled her as she looked.

Unable to endure, of herself, this sudden and complete revulsion of all the feelings which had hitherto made up her life, she formed the resolution natural to her land and creed; she sent for the priest who had habitually attended her at Venice, and to him she confessed, with passionate sobs and intense terror, ‘he doubts that had broken upon her.

The good father, a worthy and pious man, but with little education and less sense, one who held (as many of the lower Italians do to this day) even a poet to be a sort of sorcerer, seemed to shut the gates of hope upon her heart. His remonstrances were urgent, for his horror was unfeigned.

He joined with Glyndon in imploring her to fly, if she felt the smallest doubt that her husband’s pursuits were of the nature which the Roman Church had benevolently burned so many scholars for adopting. And even the little that Viola could communicate seemed, to the ignorant ascetic, irrefragable proof of sorcery and witchcraft;