Valperga (43 page)

"Seek not to enquire into the mysteries of our art. You
tell your wishes; I direct their accomplishment;--obey--you can do
no more. When death, the mower, is in the field, few plants are
tough enough to turn the edge of his scythe: yet Castruccio is one
of these few; and patience and prudence alone can effect his fall.
Watch every thing; report all to me; and beware that the countess
leaves not Lucca; our power is gone, when she goes."

Such was the scene that immediately followed the destruction of
the castle of Valperga. Bindo had hitherto loved his mistress, with
an affection whose energy had never been called into action; but he
loved her, as the lioness in the desert loves her whelps, who day
by day feeds them in peace, but, when aroused by the hunters, will
defend them to the last drop of her blood. He loved her, as we all
love, and know not how fervently, until events awake our love to
the expression of its energy. He had seldom thought upon
Castruccio; when he came frequently to Valperga, and he saw his
mistress happy in his visits, then these visits also made the
Albinois joyful; yet he sympathized too little in the course of
daily life, to disapprove of him when he came no more: but, when he
sought to injure the sole being whom Bindo loved and reverenced,
then a hidden spring suddenly burst forth in the Albinois'
mind; and hate, till then unknown, arose, and filled every conduit
of his heart, and, mingling its gall with the waters of love,
became the first feeling, the prime mover in his soul.

He had long associated with this witch. He felt his defects in
bodily prowess; perhaps also he felt the weakness of his reason;
and therefore he sought for powers of art, which might overcome
strength, and powers of mind, which were denied to the majority of
the human species. Bindo was a very favourable subject for the
witch to act upon; she deceived him easily, and through his means
spread far the fame of her incantations. What made these women
pretend to powers they did not possess, incur the greatest perils
for the sake of being believed to be what they were not, without
any apparent advantage accruing to themselves from this belief? I
believe we may find the answer in our own hearts: the love of power
is inherent in human nature; and, in evil natures, to be feared is
a kind of power. The witch of the Lucchese forest was much feared;
and no one contributed to the spread of this feeling more than
Bindo.

She had no interest to preserve Euthanasia, or to destroy
Castruccio; but she must feign these feelings in order to preserve
her power over the Albinois. She resolved however not to be drawn
into any action which might attract the hatred of the prince; for
she knew him indeed to be a man out of her sphere, a man who went
to mass, and told his beads as the church directed him, and who
would have no hesitation in consigning to what he would call,
condign punishment, all such as dealt with evil spirits, infernal
drugs, and diabolical craft.

Bindo saw nothing of the motives which actuated her; and he
really believed that the star of Castruccio had the ascendant: so
after the first ebullitions of despair were calmed, he waited, with
the patience of cherished hate, for the events which the witch told
him might in the course of time bring about the sequel he so much
desired.

He had made calculations, and cast lots upon the fate of
Valperga, whose results were contrary to the enunciations of the
witch. These had proved false; and, when time had calmed his
feelings, this disappointment itself made him cling more readily to
the distant, but as he hoped, surer promises of the witch, and
build upon her words the certain expectation of the overthrow of
Castruccio, and the restoration of Valperga in more than its
original splendour. He returned to Euthanasia, and watched by her
sick chamber, as the savage mother of a wild brood tends upon her
expiring young; the fear of losing her by this sickness, at once
exasperated him against the man whom he believed to be the cause of
the mischief, and by the mightiness of his fear filled him with
that calm which is the consummation of wretchedness. He neither ate
nor slept; his existence appeared a miracle. But his mistress
recovered; and his exhausted frame was now as much shaken with joy,
as before with grief; yet, pale, emaciated, trembling as it were on
the edge of life, but still living, he survived all these
changes.

The summer advanced; and still Euthanasia remained at Lucca. A
number of slight circumstances caused this: her health was yet
weak; and her pale cheek and beamless eye shewed that life hardly
sat firm upon his throne within her frame; they were menaced with a
peculiarly hot season, and it was scarcely judged right that she
should expose herself to the excessive heat of a Florentine summer.
Lauretta also, her cousin, promised to accompany her, if she would
delay her journey until autumn; so she consented to remain,
although in truth she felt Lucca to be to her as a narrow prison,
and cherished the hope of finding healthful feelings, and some
slight return of happiness, at Florence. Yet the joyless state
which was not her portion, was one reason why she cared not to
change; it bred within her an indolence of feeling, that loved to
feed upon old cares, rather than upon new hopes. A sense of duty,
rather than any other sentiment, made her wish to remove; she
believed, that she owed it to herself to revive from the kind of
moral death she had endured, and to begin as it were a fresh life
with new expectations. But we are all such creatures of habit, that
we cling rather to sorrows which have been our companions of old,
than to a new-sprung race of pleasures, whose very names perhaps
are unknown to us.

Euthanasia loved to sit in the desolate garden of her palace,
and to moralize in her own mind, when she saw a tender rose
embraced and choked by evil weeds that grew in strength about it;
or sometimes to visit the tower of her palace, and to look towards
the rock where the castle of Valperga had once stood, now a heap of
ruins. Could she endure to look upon the formless mass which had
before constituted her shelter and home? where had stood the hall
within whose atmosphere she had grown to womanhood; where she had
experienced all the joys that her imagination and heart
(storehouses of countless treasure) could bestow? Yet that was all
gone, and she must begin life anew: she prayed for her father's
spirit to inspire her with courage; but her mind was too subtle and
delicate in its feelings, to forget its ancient attachments. There
are some souls, bright and precious, which, like gold and silver,
may be subdued by the fiery trial, and yield to new moulds; but
there are others, pure and solid as the diamond, which may be
shivered to pieces, yet in every fragment retain their indelible
characteristics.

"I can never change," she thought, "never become
other than I am. And yet I am told that this obstinate sorrow is
weakness, and that the wise and good, like strong plants, shoot up
with fresh vigour, when cut down even to the root. It may be so;
and so it may perhaps be with me: but as yet I feel all dead,
except pain, and that dwells for ever within me. Alas! life, and
the little it contains, is not worth the misery I endure; its best
joys are fleeting shadows; its griefs ought to be the same; and
those are true philosophers, who trample on both, and seek in the
grave for a wisdom and happiness, which life cannot bring us.

"Why was I born to feel sorrow! Why do I not die, that pain
may expire with me? And yet I now speak as a presumptuous caviller,
unread in the lessons of the wise, and who vainly blunders over and
misquotes their best learning. Life has more in it than we think;
it is all that we have, all that we know.

"Life is all our knowledge, and our highest praise is to
have lived well. If we had never lived, we should know nothing of
earth, or sky, or God, or man, or delight, or sorrow. When our
Creator bestowed on us this gift, he gave us that which is beyond
all words precious; for without it our apparent forms would have
been a blind atom in the mass, our souls would never have been. We
live; and we learn all that is good, and see all that is beautiful;
our will is called into action, our minds expand like flowers,
till, overworn, they fade; if we did not live, we should know
nothing of all this; and if we do not live well, we reap sorrow
alone.

"What do we know of heroes and sages, but that they lived?
Let us not spurn therefore this sum and summit of our knowledge,
but, cherishing it, make it so appear that we value, and in some
degree deserve, the gift of life, and the many wonders that
accompany it."

Euthanasia suffered much during the summer months; and all that
she heard of Castruccio turned the fount of wholesome tears to
drops of agony. He had in truth become a tyrant. He did not slay
his thousands like Ezzelin of Padua; but he had received the graft
of vain-glory into his soul, and he now bore the fruits. He put to
death remorselessly those whom he suspected, and would even use
torture, either to discover other victims, or to satisfy his desire
of revenge. Several circumstances of this kind happened during this
summer, which made Euthanasia more miserable than words or tears
could express. If she saw his enemies, they uttered deep curses on
his cruelty; if she saw those who had formerly been his friends,
their talk was filled with bitter sarcasms on his ingratitude, and
careless coldness of heart. That heart had once been the garden of
virtue, where all good qualities sprung up and flourished, like
odorous and delicately painted flowers; but now ambition had become
its gardener, and the weed-overgrown inclosure of Euthanasia's
palace was but a slight symbol of all of cruel and treacherous that
sprung up there, which allowed no rose to blow, and hid the blooms
of the jessamine in the coarse and broad leaves of worthless
brambles. Sometimes she thanked Providence that she had not become
the wife of this man: but it was a bitter thankfulness. She had not
been wedded to him by the church's rites; but her soul, her
thoughts, her fate, had been married to his; she tried to loosen
the chain that bound them eternally together, and felt that the
effort was fruitless: if he were evil, she must weep; if his
light--hearted selfishness allowed no room for remorse in his own
breast, humiliation and sorrow was doubly her portion, and this was
her destiny for ever.

His military exploits of this year rather consisted in the slow
laying of foundation-stones, than were distinguished by any
peculiar glory. The Florentine army retreated in trepidation before
him; he took several castles, made several new alliances, and
consolidated more and more the power which he hoped one day to put
to a mighty purpose. Desire of dominion and lordship was the only
passion that now had much power in his soul; he had forgotten
Euthanasia; or if he remembered her, he called her a peevish girl,
and wasted no further thought upon her.

The summer had been tremendously hot; and all the fields were
parched, and the earth baked and cracked from the long drouth.
These were all signs of a wet autumn; and hardly had Euthanasia
determined on her journey to Florence, before it was stopped by
tremendous rains and tempests, that deluged the earth, and
disturbed the sky. The lightning became as a shaft in the hands of
an experienced warrior; so true it seemed to its aim, and
destroying so many with its subtle fire: and the thunder,
reverberating along the hills, sent up to heaven the shout, which
proclaimed the triumph and desolation of its precursor. Then came
the rain; and the earth gladly received these tokens of
heaven's love, which blessed her with fertility. The torrents
roared down the hills; and the rivers, no longer restrained within
their banks, rose, and deluged the plain, filling even the streets
of Lucca with water.

Bindo looked on all this labour of the elements with a mind
hovering between pleasure and fear. He believed that the witch of
the forest had caused this inundation, to impede the journey of the
countess; but, thinking thus, he trembled at the power she
possessed, and at the strange company of unseen spirits, which
thus, unknown to mortals, interfere with their destinies. The
devil, he knew, was called prince of the air; but there is a wide
difference between our belief of an hearsay, and the proof which he
now thought was presented to him. When he repaired at the
mysterious hour of midnight to a running stream, and saw, as the
witch uttered her incantations, and lashed the waters with her
rod,--that a tempestuous wind arose from the south, and the dark
clouds among which the lightnings played, advanced over their
heads, and then the rain in quick big drops, accompanied by hail,
fell on the earth;--when he saw this, his limbs trembled, his heart
beat quick with fear; he dared not cross himself, nor mutter a
pater- noster; and, if love and hate had not possessed him so
entirely, he would never have ventured again to witness the magical
powers of his friend.

A cold and early winter followed the flood, and froze the waters
before they retreated from the inundated fields. For many years so
terrible a season had not been known in Italy; and, in the Lucchese
states particularly, it occasioned a great loss of fruit-trees and
vines. The mountains were covered with snow; the torrents were
arrested in their course by the subtle nets which winter cast over
them; it was a strange sight for an Italian to see. "And
this," thought Euthanasia, "is what the Transalpines
mean, when they talk of the fearful cold of winter. Oh! indeed, no
hunter is like him, when he comes down from the north, bringing
frost, his bride, along with him; he hunts the leaves from the
trees, and destroys the animals which inhabit the earth, even in
their holds and fastnesses. He casts bonds upon the rivers and
streams; and even the `sapless foliage of the ocean,' and the
mighty monsters and numberless spawn that rove through its wastes,
are all subdued by his fierce and resistless ravages."