“Thou wilt learn too soon,” replied Glyndon, gloomily. “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.
CHAPTER 6.VI.
Quel est l’egarement ou ton ame se livre?
La Harpe, “Le Comte de Warwick,” Act 4, sc. 4.
(To what delusion does thy soul abandon itself?)
Alas, 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 remembered, 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 HIM was connected
the secret of the unconjectured life.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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