Zanoni — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

chair —a tall, high-backed chair — beside the musician, seemed to take a part in the festive meal. Its honest varnished face glowed in the light of the lamp; and there was an impish, sly demureness in its very silence, as its master, between every mouthful, turned to talk to it of something he had forgotten to relate before. The good wife looked or affectionately, and could not eat for joy; but suddenly she rose, and placed on the artist’s temples a laurel wreath, which she had woven beforehand in fond anticipation; and Viola, on the other side her brother, the barbiton, rearranged the chaplet, and, smoothing back her father’s hair, whispered, “Caro Padre, you will not let him scold me again! ” ‘ Then poor Pisani, rather distracted between the two, and excited both by the /éerima and his triumph, turned to the younger child with so naive and grotesque a pride, “TJ don’t know which to thank the most. You give me so much joy, child, —I am so proud of thee and myself. But he and I, poor fellow, have been so often unhappy together! ” Viola’s sleep was broken, — that was natural. The intoxication of vanity and triumph, the happiness in the happiness she had caused, all this was better than sleep. But still from all this, again and again her thoughts flew to those haunting eyes, to that smile with which forever the memory of the triumph, of the happiness, was to be united. Her feelings, like her own character, were strange and peculiar. They were not those of a girl whose heart, for the first time reached through the eye, sighs its natural and native language of first love. It was not so much admiration, though the face that reflected itself on every wave of her restless fancies was of the rarest order of majesty and beauty;

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nor a pleased and enamoured recollection that the sight of this stranger had bequeathed: it was a human sentiment of gratitude and delight, mixed with something more mysterious, of fear and awe. Certainly she had seen before those features; but when and how? Only when her thoughts had sought to shape out her future, and when, in spite of all the attempts to vision forth a fate of flowers and sunshine, a dark and chill foreboding made her recoil back into her deepest self. It was a something found that had long been sought for by a thousand restless yearnings and vague desires, less of the heart. than mind; not as when youth discovers the one to be beloved, but rather as when the student, long wandering after the clew to some truth in science, sees it glimmer dimly before him, to beckon, to recede, to allure, and to wane again. She fell at last into unquiet slumber, vexed by deformed, fleeting, shapeless phantoms; and, waking, as the sun, through a veil of hazy cloud, glinted with a sickly ray across the casement, she heard her father settled back betimes to his one pursuit, and calling forth from his Familiar a low mournful strain, like a dirge over the dead. “And why,” she asked, when she descended to the room below, —“ why, my father, was your inspiration so sad, after the joy of last night? ” “T know not, child. I meant to be merry, and compose an air in honor of thee; but he is an obstinate fellow, this, — and he would have it so.”

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CHAPTER IV.

E cosi i pigri e timidi desiri Sprona. ! Gerusal. Lib., cant. iv. 1xxxviii.

Iv was the custom of Pisani, except when the duties of his profession made special demand on his time, to devote a certain portion of the mid-day to sleep, —a habit not so much a luxury as a necessity toa man who slept very little during the night. In fact, whether to compose or to practise, the hours of noon were precisely those in which Pisani could not have been active if he would. His genius resembled those fountains full at dawn and evening, overflowing at night, and perfectly dry at the meridian. During this time, consecrated by her husband to repose, the signora generally stole out to make the purchases necessary for the little household, or to enjoy (as what woman does not?) a little relaxation in gossip with some of her own sex. And the day following this brilliant triumph, how many congratulations would she have to receive! At these times it was Viola’s habit to seat herself without the door of the house, under an awning which sheltered from the sun without obstructing the view; and there now, with the prompt-book on her knee, on which her eye roves listlessly from time to time, you may behold her, the vine-leaves clustering from their arching trellis over the door behind, and the lazy whitesailed boats skimming along the sea that stretched before.

1 And thus the slow and timid passions urged.

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