The Sorceress of Rome. Gallizier Nathan

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СКАЧАТЬ Then without disclosing the nature of the business which he professed to have on hand, they parted earlier than had been their wont.

      The shades of evening began to droop with phantom swiftness. Over the city brooded the great peace of an autumnal twilight. The last rays of the sun streaming from between a heavy cloud-bank, lay across the landscape in broad zones of brilliancy. In the pale green sky, one by one, the evening stars began to appear, but through the distant cloud-bank quivered summer lightning like the waving of fiery whips.

      Feeling that sleep would not come to him in his present wrought up state of mind, Eckhardt resolved to revisit the spot which held the dearest he had possessed on earth. Perhaps, that prayer at the grave of Ginevra would bring peace to his soul and rest to his wearied heart. His feet bore him onward unawares through winding lanes and deserted streets until he reached the gate of San Sebastiano. There, he left the road for a turfy hollow, where groups of black cypress trees stretched out their branches like spectral arms, uplifted to warn back intruders. He stood before the churchyard of San Pancrazio.

      Pausing for a moment irresolutely before its gloomy portals Eckhardt seemed to waver before entering the burial ground. Hushing his footsteps, as from a sense of awe, he then followed the well-known path. The black foliage drooped heavily over him; it seemed to draw him in and close him out of sight, and although there was scarcely any breeze, the dying leaves above rustled mysteriously, like voices whispering some awful secret, known to them alone. A strange mystery seemed to pervade the silence of their sylvan shadows, a mystery, dread, unfathomable, and guessed by none. With a dreary sense of oppression, yet drawn onward by some mysterious force, Eckhardt followed the path, which here and there was over-grown with grass and weeds. Uneasily he lifted the overhanging branches and peered between the dense and luminous foliage. Up and down he wistfully gazed, now towards the winding path, lined by old gravestones, leading to the cloister; now into the shadowy depths of the shrubbery. At times he paused to listen. Never surely was there such a silence anywhere as here. The murmur of the distant stream was lost. The leaves seemed to nod drowsily, as out of the depths of a dream and the impressive stillness of the place seemed a silent protest against the solitary intruder, a protest from the dead, whose slumber the muffled echo of his footsteps disturbed.

      For the first time Eckhardt repented of his nocturnal visit to the abode of the dead. Seized with a strange fear, his presence in the churchyard at this hour seemed to him an intrusion, and after a moment or two of silent musing he turned back, finding it impossible to proceed. Absently he gazed at the decaying flowers, which turned their faces up to him in apparent wonderment; the ferns seemed to nod and every separate leaf and blade of grass seemed to question him silently on the errand of his visit. Surely no one, watching Eckhardt at this place and at this hour, if there was such a one near by chance, would have recognized in him the stern soldier who had twice stormed the walls of Rome.

      Onward he walked as in the memory of a dream, a strange dream, which had visited him on the preceding night, and which now suddenly waked in his memory. It was a vague haunting thing, a vision of a great altar, of many candles, of himself in a gown of sack-cloth, striving to light them and failing again and again, yet still seeing their elusive glare in a continual flicker before his eyes. And as he mused upon his dream his heart grew heavy in his breast. He had grown cowardly of pity and renewed grief.

      Following a winding path, so overgrown with moss that his footsteps made no sound upon it, which he believed would lead him out of the churchyard, Eckhardt was staggered by the discovery that he had walked in a circle, for almost directly before him rose the grassy knoll tufted with palms, between which shone the granite monument over Ginevra's grave. Believing at this moment more than ever in his life in signs and portents, Eckhardt slowly ascended the sloping ground, now oblivious alike to sight and sound, and lost in the depths of his own thoughts. Bitter thoughts they were and dreamily vague, such as fever and nightmare bring to us. Relentlessly all the long-fought misery swept over him again, burying him beneath waves so vast, that time and space seemed alike to vanish. He knelt at the grave and with a fervour such as is born of a mind completely lost in the depths of mysticism, he prayed that he might once more behold Ginevra, as her image lived in his memory. The vague deep-rooted misery in his heart was concentrated in this greatest desire of his life, the desire to look once more upon her, who had gone from him for ever.

      After having exhausted all the pent-up fervour of his soul Eckhardt was about to rise, little strengthened and less convinced of the efficacy of his prayer, when his eyes were fixed upon the tall apparition of a woman, who stood in the shadow of the cypress trees and seemed to regard him with a strange mixture of awe and mournfulness. With parted lips and rigid features, the life's blood frozen in his veins, Eckhardt stared at the apparition, his face covered with a pallor more deadly than that of the phantom, if phantom indeed it was. A long white shroud fell in straight folds from her head to her feet, but the face was exposed, and as he gazed upon it, at once so calm and so passionate, so cold and yet so replete with life, – he knew it was Ginevra who stood before him. Her eyes, strangely undimmed by death, burnt into his very soul, and his heart began to palpitate with a mad longing. Spreading out his arms in voiceless entreaty, the half-choken outcry: "Ginevra! Ginevra!" came from his lips, a cry in which was mingled at once the most supreme anguish and the most supreme love.

      But as the sound of his voice died away, the apparition had vanished, and seemed to have melted into air. Only a lizard sped over the stone in the moonlight and in the branches of the cypress trees above resounded the scream of some startled night-bird. Then everything faded in vague unconsciousness, across which flitted lurid lights and a face that suddenly grew dim in the strange and tumultuous upheaval of his senses. The single moment had seemed an hour, so fraught with strange and weird impressions.

      Dazed, half-mad, his brow bathed in cold dew, Eckhardt staggered to his feet and glanced round like one waking from a dream. The churchyard of San Pancrazio was deserted. Not another human being was to be seen. Surely his senses, strangely overwrought though they were, had not deceived him. Here, – close beside him, – the apparition had stood but a moment ago; with his own eyes he had seen her, yet no human foot had trampled the fantastic tangle of creepers, that lay in straggling length upon the emerald turf. He lingered no longer to reason. His brain was in a fiery whirl. Like one demented, Eckhardt rushed from the church-yard. There was at this moment in his heart such a pitiful tumult of broken passions, hopelessness and despair, that the acute, unendurable pain came later.

      As yet, half of him refused to accept the revelation. The very thought crushed him with a weight of rocks. Amid the deceitful shadows of night he had fallen prey to that fear from which the bravest are not exempt in such surroundings. The distinctness of his perception forbade him to doubt the testimony of his senses. Yet, what he had seen, was altogether contrary to reason. A thousand thoughts and surmises, one wilder than the other, whirled confusedly through his brain. A great benumbing agony gnawed at his heart. That, which he in reason should have regarded as a great boon began to affect him like a mortal injury. By fate or some mysterious agency he had been permitted to see her once more, but the yearning had increased, for not a word had the apparition vouchsafed him, and from his arms, extended in passionate entreaty, it had fled into the night, whence it had arisen.

      Accustomed to the windings of the churchyard, Eckhardt experienced little difficulty in finding his way out. He paced through the wastes of Campo Marzio at a reckless speed, like a madman escaped from his guards. His brain was aflame; his cheeks, though deadly pale, burned as from the hidden fires of a fever. The phenomenon had dazzled his eyes like the keen zigzag of a lightning flash. Even now he saw her floating before him, as in a luminous whirlwind, and he felt, that never to his life's end could he banish her image from his heart. His love for the dead had grown to vastness like those plants, which open their blossoms with a thunder clap. He felt no longer master of himself, but like one whose chariot is carried by terrified and uncontrollable steeds towards some steep rock bristling precipice.

      Gradually, thanks to the freshness of the night-air, Eckhardt became a little more calm. Feeling now but half convinced of the reality of the vision, he sought by the authentication of minor details СКАЧАТЬ