第28章

"I thought--eh! I know not WHAT I have thought.But do not weep: I shall be well now,--quite well.She will come to me when she wakes,--will she?"Viola could not speak; but she busied herself in pouring forth an anodyne, which she had been directed to give the sufferer as soon as the delirium should cease.The doctor had told her, too, to send for him the instant so important a change should occur.

She went to the door and called to the woman who, during Gionetta's pretended illness, had been induced to supply her place; but the hireling answered not.She flew through the chambers to search for her in vain,--the hireling had caught Gionetta's fears, and vanished.What was to be done? The case was urgent,--the doctor had declared not a moment should be lost in obtaining his attendance; she must leave her father,--she must go herself! She crept back into the room,--the anodyne seemed already to have taken benign effect; the patient's eyes were closed, and he breathed regularly, as in sleep.She stole away, threw her veil over her face, and hurried from the house.

Now the anodyne had not produced the effect which it appeared to have done; instead of healthful sleep, it had brought on a kind of light-headed somnolence, in which the mind, preternaturally restless, wandered about its accustomed haunts, waking up its old familiar instincts and inclinations.It was not sleep,--it was not delirium; it was the dream-wakefulness which opium sometimes induces, when every nerve grows tremulously alive, and creates a corresponding activity in the frame, to which it gives a false and hectic vigour.Pisani missed something,--what, he scarcely knew; it was a combination of the two wants most essential to his mental life,--the voice of his wife, the touch of his Familiar.

He rose,--he left his bed, he leisurely put on his old dressing-robe, in which he had been wont to compose.He smiled complacently as the associations connected with the garment came over his memory; he walked tremulously across the room, and entered the small cabinet next to his chamber, in which his wife had been accustomed more often to watch than sleep, when illness separated her from his side.The room was desolate and void.He looked round wistfully, and muttered to himself, and then proceeded regularly, and with a noiseless step, through the chambers of the silent house, one by one.

He came at last to that in which old Gionetta--faithful to her own safety, if nothing else--nursed herself, in the remotest corner of the house, from the danger of infection.As he glided in,--wan, emaciated, with an uneasy, anxious, searching look in his haggard eyes,--the old woman shrieked aloud, and fell at his feet.He bent over her, passed his thin hands along her averted face, shook his head, and said in a hollow voice,--"I cannot find them; where are they?"

"Who, dear master? Oh, have compassion on yourself; they are not here.Blessed saints! this is terrible; he has touched me; I am dead!""Dead! who is dead? Is any one dead?"

"Ah! don't talk so; you must know it well: my poor mistress,--she caught the fever from you; it is infectious enough to kill a whole city.San Gennaro protect me! My poor mistress, she is dead,--buried, too; and I, your faithful Gionetta, woe is me!

Go, go--to--to bed again, dearest master,--go!"The poor musician stood for one moment mute and unmoving, then a slight shiver ran through his frame; he turned and glided back, silent and spectre-like, as he had entered.He came into the room where he had been accustomed to compose,--where his wife, in her sweet patience, had so often sat by his side, and praised and flattered when the world had but jeered and scorned.In one corner he found the laurel-wreath she had placed on his brows that happy night of fame and triumph; and near it, half hid by her mantilla, lay in its case the neglected instrument.

Viola was not long gone: she had found the physician; she returned with him; and as they gained the threshold, they heard a strain of music from within,--a strain of piercing, heart-rending anguish.It was not like some senseless instrument, mechanical in its obedience to a human hand,--it was as some spirit calling, in wail and agony from the forlorn shades, to the angels it beheld afar beyond the Eternal Gulf.They exchanged glances of dismay.They hurried into the house; they hastened into the room.Pisani turned, and his look, full of ghastly intelligence and stern command, awed them back.The black mantilla, the faded laurel-leaf, lay there before him.Viola's heart guessed all at a single glance; she sprung to his knees; she clasped them,--"Father, father, _I_ am left thee still!"The wail ceased,--the note changed; with a confused association--half of the man, half of the artist--the anguish, still a melody, was connected with sweeter sounds and thoughts.The nightingale had escaped the pursuit,--soft, airy, bird-like, thrilled the delicious notes a moment, and then died away.The instrument fell to the floor, and its chords snapped.You heard that sound through the silence.The artist looked on his kneeling child, and then on the broken chords..."Bury me by her side," he said, in a very calm, low voice; "and THAT by mine." And with these words his whole frame became rigid, as if turned to stone.The last change passed over his face.He fell to the ground, sudden and heavy.The chords THERE, too,--the chords of the human instrument were snapped asunder.As he fell, his robe brushed the laurel-wreath, and that fell also, near but not in reach of the dead man's nerveless hand.

Broken instrument, broken heart, withered laurel-wreath!--the setting sun through the vine-clad lattice streamed on all! So smiles the eternal Nature on the wrecks of all that make life glorious! And not a sun that sets not somewhere on the silenced music,--on the faded laurel!