Various

“ Life, and the joy of life, beauty so profuse that it can afford to have a few blemishes like a slatternly Venus, and the dolce far niente of poverty that neither works nor starves,—they lie all along the road.
Silvia was young, and had all her life looked forward to this journey. She could not be quite indifferent. She looked and listened, though all the time her heart was heavy for Claudio. They reached the gate of St. John Lateran just as all the bells began to ring for the noon Angelus, and in fifteen minutes were at the Signora Fantini’s door and Silvia in the kind lady’s arms. ”

“ She sat and stared at Rome while her busy fingers knit—at the wonderful city where she was one day to go and be a nun, where the pope lived and kings came to worship him. In the morning light the Holy City lay in the midst of the Campagna like her mother’s wedding-pearls when dropped in a heap on their green cushion; and Silvia knelt with her face that way and prayed for a soul as white, for she was to be the spouse of Christ, and her purity was all that she could bring Him as a dowry. ”

“ It is so easy to make the conquest of a young, ingenuous nature! so easy to fix its impetuous, unsuspecting enthusiasm! I marvel that these exquisite relations between master and pupil are so generally left uncultivated, or their charm wasted. I almost marvel that I did not rest completely satisfied with my life at that time; with its arduous study, and its growing fame, and Guy, with the delicious task of educating his supple intellect to my ideas, and penetrating his nature with my personality. ”

“ For the first time she looked at his face. By daylight it was thin and finely featured, and of a clear darkness like shaded water, through which the faintest tinge of color is visible. In this transfigurating moonlight it became of a luminous whiteness.
The song ended, the singer turned his head slightly and looked up at Silvia’s window. She did not draw back. There was no recognition of any human sympathy with him, and no slightest consciousness of that airy and silent friendship which had long been weaving itself over the tops of the mountains that separated them. ”

“ We could never hide from Matteo: he would find us out and kill us both.”
“I will go to the Holy Father and tell him all. We could be in Rome early in the morning if we should walk all night.”
“Matteo would hear us: he hears everything. We should never reach Rome. He would find us wherever we might be hidden. If we were dead and buried he would pull us out of the ground to stab us. I must go. I have sinned in having so much intercourse with you. Be resigned, Claudio. Be a good man, and we shall meet in heaven. The earth is a terrible place: I am afraid of it. ”

“ For the first time since he had been my pupil, I found Guy nervous, maladroit. He turned pale at the sight of blood. The struggling of a pigeon, or the yelp of a dog, seemed to make him sick, and a hundred times he laid down his scalpel as if unable to proceed. He was like a neophyte, and a prey to the sentimental horrors of which, up to this time, his absorbed intellect had been quite unconscious. I trembled. If his nerve should fail him when it became my turn, and the whole costly experiment be thrown away through some awkwardness on his part! ”

“ It went out there somewhere on the mountain-side. Matteo said the carriage tilted, and she, being asleep, fell out before he could prevent. Her temple struck a sharp rock, and Claudio missed his bride.
He had to keep quiet about it, though. What could he prove? what could any one prove? Where knives are sharp and people mind their own business, or express their opinions only by a shrug of the shoulders and a grimace, how is a poor boy, how is even a rich man or a rich woman, to come at the truth in such a case? Besides, the truth would not have brought her back, poor little Silvia! ”

“ And suddenly, before he ceased, and while they all thronged round me, there came a sharp strange sigh singing through the air, that grew into the wild discordant music of multitudinous echoes, and we all turned and sprang intuitively to see, rent in the moonlight and sheathed in the glorious spray of a thousand ice-falls, the Mount of Sorrow bow its head and come down, and, while the whole earth shook and smoked back in hoar vapors, the great snow-slide in its swift sheeting splendor flash and wipe out before our eyes the last timber of the hut and barn and byre of the Rayniers. ”

“ As a priest who volubly initiates the neophytes into the service of the temple, but points in silence to the inner court containing the Deity for whom the service is performed, so I, after the most magnificent display of animal life, silently indicated a concealed hereafter, a culmination in the human body, hitherto withheld from our curious gaze. I thus strove to suggest an ideal, left for a time incomplete; to foster an impetuous impatience, that, stimulated by the great acquisitions of the past, should reach forward irresistibly for the greater prize of the future. ”

“ Long ere the journey’s end our spirits became dead as last night’s wine; we shared the depression of all nature, and felt as if we had come out of chaos and the end of all things when the huge mountain gates closed behind us, and we dashed out on the plateau where the grass, from which the wintry wrapping had been washed, had not lost all its greenness, and in the sudden lifting of the rain-cloud a red sparkle of sunset lighted the windows, as if a hundred flambeaux had been kindled to greet us. ”

“ The ability of Mr. Sidney in his department had not brought that comfort which Mr. Burchard had hoped for. His distress of mind was so great that Mr. Sidney judged he had gone beyond the limit of safety, and he quoted, “‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend.’ As your friend I open to your view the peril from which it is your duty to escape. If you are involved, extricate yourself with honor if you can, and if you cannot, then do no more than honor requires.”
A long pause ensued. At length Mr. Burchard broke the silence by inquiring what evidence there was that Maguire was criminal. ”

“ But that a man could face Truth, and voluntarily scrimp his vision to a miserable corner of her robe,—could embrace a principle coldly, with the mere touch of a distant finger,—could pause to balance motives, and haggle over the price of devotion,—this was as incomprehensible to me as repugnant. My own sentiments were equally incomprehensible to the society by which I was surrounded, and the opposition which I constantly encountered served not a little to rivet my convictions, and fan my enthusiasm to passion. ”

“ What if I should tell you that it bubbles, like a caldron over the bottomless pit, with griefs and sins!—that in lives condemned to perpetual imprisonment on these bare rocks, feeding on themselves, traits intensifying, the loneliness, the labor, the negation, slowly extract the juices of humanity, and make crime a matter to be whispered of among them? If they feel they are forgotten by God, what matters the murder or the suicide more or less that gives release? ”

“ Meantime the great Pasterzen glacier had moved on, marking only the centuries; the men upon its borders had seen no change; the same great waves lifted their snowy heads upon its surface; the same crevasse still was where he had fallen. At night, the moonbeams, falling, still shivered off its glassy face; its pale presence filled the night, and immortality lay brooding in its hollows.
Friends were with Mrs. Knollys, but she left them at the inn. One old guide remembered her, and asked to bear her company. ”

“ I appealed to a professor who had concentrated the best years of his life to the problem I proposed to solve,—he pooh-poohed my scheme. In vain I tried to explain my methods for overcoming its practical difficulties; he decried them all, I am convinced, from pure jealousy.
“And you ought to know by this time,” he added with a scarcely disguised sneer, “that a single experiment on a human subject would be of little value until its results were controlled by a dozen others. And I doubt that your enthusiasm would prove sufficiently contagious to furnish the supply for the dissecting table.” ”

“ In my solitude it was easy to cherish illusions concerning the value of my own work, to picture myself as a mighty and triumphant wrestler with Nature, capable, by his single strength, of forcing her reluctant secrets, to reveal them afterwards to an admiring world. But at Paris, with its enormous condensation of intellectual force, I could not flatter myself on the solitary greatness of my achievements, nor ignore the collective action of society. ”

“ This city of Monte Compatri is a full and busy hive, with solid blocks of houses, and the narrowest of streets that break now and then into stairs. For those old builders respected the features of a landscape as though they had been the features of a face, and no more thought of levelling inequalities of land than of shaving down or raising up noses. When a man had a house-lot in a hollow, he built his house there, and made steps to go down to it: his neighbor, who owned a rocky knoll, built his house at the top, and made stairs to go up to it. ”

“ I was no longer an extravagant fanatic, prepared for a cloister or a crusade, but still a tolerably ardent ultra-montanist, pivoted upon the theory of the temporal power of the Pope. Valeria’s influence, in modifying the superficial exuberance of my enthusiasm, had only rendered its energy more practical, more eager for an opportunity to incarnate its ideal in vigorous facts. Now the opportunity had arrived, and the enthusiasm blazed forth afresh; all interests, all consciousness of other ties were absorbed in devotion to the Church of which I felt myself a not unimportant member. ”

“ Silvia suggested.
Gentle as she was, she had adopted the ruthless and ungrateful Italian custom of ascribing every ache and pain of the body to some almost imperceptible change in their too beautiful weather. The smallest cloud goes laden with more accusations than it holds drops of rain, and the ill winds that blow nobody any good blow through those shining skies from morning till night and from night till morning again. ”

“ I learn from the signora that this Claudio is a good young man, so the sooner you are married the better. Cheer up: we will have you a bride by the first week of November; and if Claudio has such a wonderful voice, he can make his way in Rome.” The reassurances of a man were more effectual than those of a woman.
[Pg 191]
“At last I believe! at last I fear no more!” Silvia cried, throwing herself into the arms of the Signora Fantini when the Monsignor was gone. “Oh how beautiful the earth is! how beautiful life is!” ”

“ Dear Claudio, be resigned: there is no help for it.”
“Silvia, why will you persist in ruining your life and mine? It is a sin. Say that you are too sick to go to-morrow. Stay in bed all day, and by night I will have a rope-ladder for you to come down to me. We can run away and hide somewhere.” ”

“ And as my mind leaped up into this grand thought, I felt cheek and brow flush with violent emotion. Carried along by the first impetus of the idea, I walked as rapidly as in a dream, unseeing, unhearing every thing that surrounded me. Before I knew whither I had come, I felt a cool wind blow over me, as if after a feverish journey on a heated road, I had suddenly stepped into a cool, dark cavern. ”

“ Will you be a man or a knave?”
Mr. Burchard answered not, but saw the desperate nature of the man with whom he had to deal, and that he was provided with weapons with which to enforce his argument. Malcolm proceeded, [Pg 127] “I never was and never will be a sneak. I am bound by honor as well as you. You are a lawyer, and a good one. I am a burglar, sir, and am not ashamed of my jobs. You exalt your profession, and so do I mine. Business is business, and mine is as honorable as yours. Think you I am less public-spirited than you? Think you I love my wife and children less than you? ”

“ Burchard explained, as has been previously stated.
“And that Maguire of yours is as bad a woman as walks the earth.”
“Woman!” exclaimed Mr. Burchard; “for eight years he has been one of the most faithful servants and upright men I ever knew.”
“Now, Mr. Burchard!” said Mr. Sidney, looking him straight in the eye, “do you mean to tell me that you don’t know Maguire is a woman?”
“I surely do not so suspect even.”
“Then the blindness of Bartimeus was nothing to yours. Has she any beard? Has she a man’s voice? Has she the figure of a man? Does she make any motions of body or limb like a man? ”

“ But pitying words over an accomplished and irremediable misfortune, serve only to revive useless pain, and blunder, like a man who should try to force open the eyelids of a corpse. Nature, wiser than officious human tenderness, takes the sorrow coolly, as a matter of course, and in silence buries [Pg 33] it out of sight among a million others, already thickly strewn with withered leaves. And, in presence of her imperturbable serenity during the blackest days of frost and winter, the sufferer becomes insensibly inspired with her unspoken confidence in the final return of spring. ”