Francesca Carrara/Chapter 52
CHAPTER XXV.
"I feel thy tears—I feel thy breath,
I meet thy fond look still;
Keen is the strife of love and death!"
Mrs. Hemans.
It was one of those bright mornings which unite the softness of spring with the warmth and glow of summer. The sunshine flung its own gladness over all; every rippling brook ran in light; and the deep blue of the sky was made yet deeper by a few white clouds floating along in snowy flakes. The greenwood glade was the only chamber for such a noon-tide, and the Carraras wandered forth. They soon reached the solitary dell where Rufus's stone marks how a random shot quelled the pride of the haughty Norman.
Never place made such accident appear more probable. The trees grow thickly and irregularly round, and the silvery stems of the ash-trees glisten so as to dazzle the steadiest eye. A rude stone is carved with half-obliterated characters; but the record of the fatal arrow is enough to make the place mournful with the presence of death, and to fill the mind with solemn fancies of life's strange accidents. The royal huntsman rode forth that morning to the baying of the hound and the ringing of the horn—his gallant charger hounding over the greensward, obedient to his slightest sign, and yet less docile than the vassals who followed, watching every turn of his fierce and flashing eye. How little did he deem that a few hours would see him carried a dishonoured corpse in a common cart, with less care than would have waited on its usual load of the meadow hay or the yellow corn. And little, too, did Sir Walter Tyrrell deem that the morning, which beheld him a favourite guest in the royal train, would also see him a murderer and an exile, flying from the scaffold—which in those days would have waited for no nice distinctions of intention in the guilt. Ay, these are the lessons by which history teaches its severe morality,—mocking human power with its own nothingness—changing the face of a nation's affairs by a chance—smiting the proud in his place of pride—and staining the wild flowers with blood, human and princely blood, poured out instead of that from the menaced deer.
It was firmly believed in the New Forest, that the judgment of Heaven had struck down the cruel and arbitrary monarch in the very place which be had made desolate. The levelled cottage and the wasted field—the peasant, driven forth homeless and despairing, in the selfishness of barbarous amusement—were now avenged: the offender's pleasure had been his punishment—the visible wrong followed by the visible penalty.
The dell itself was lovely and lonely, and a favourite haunt with the Carraras. Death leaves behind its own solemnity; and, even with the sunshine checkering the grass, the place had a peculiar gloom. Though they sat beneath the shade of the hawthorn, whose blossoms strewed the ground at their feet, and with the long branches drooping around them their sweet shelter, yet their talk was grave, and often broken by long intervals of silence.
"Do not let us stay here!" at last exclaimed Francesca; "I am not happy enough to bear its melancholy. True, that the fate of the Norman king was well deserved; but how often has inexorable fate struck down the innocent as suddenly! Alas! life is full of strange chances; and it is terrible to think that on them we must depend."
"Yes," said Guido, rising, "who shall deny that the shaft which sent the princely huntsman to the ground was a just judgment?"
"Ah! my brother," replied she, "judgment is an awful word for mortal lips to utter! Who dares pronounce that a doom is deserved? If the sudden and early death be a judgment on one, must it not be so on all? What had Henriette, so gentle, so kind, so good, done, that she should perish? Yet she died, with all the hopes, joys, and affections of life warm around her." Francesca spoke of Madame de Mercœur, but her brother was in her hidden thought;—why was he to die so young?
Rufus's stone lies in the outskirts of the forest, and in a few minutes they emerged upon the broad heath which bounds it, then like a sea of gold; for the furze was in the first glory of its spendthrift wealth.
"Look there!" exclaimed Guido, both struck with the scene, and wishing to divert Francesca's thoughts, whose eyes, fixed on the ground, were filled with tears.
Placed beside a little copse on the edge of the road, whose branches, covered with the white May, were contrasted by the long dark garlands of ivy, like some fatal love redeeming and beautifying the ruin itself has wrought, was a wood fire, whose red blaze cast a vivid reflection on the deep green herbage by which it was surrounded. Three children, with the rich brown and richer crimson colour, and the bright black eyes which mark a southern extraction, were rolling on the grass at a little distance; and close beside the fire were seated two men, with red kerchiefs knitted round their close-curled dark hair. There was something in the complexions and the out-of-doors life that at once carried the Italians back to their own country. Such a group was to them a familiar sight, linked with a thousand early recollections.
They had quickened their pace with an intention of accosting the party, when a few large drops of rain, and a huge cloud spreading rapidly on the sky, induced them to retreat towards the forest. They took refuge beneath a majestic beech, whose spreading foliage afforded ample shelter, while the now-fast-falling shower played like music in the upper branches.
There is nothing more delicious than one of these summer and sudden showers. There is something so inexpressibly lulling in the sound of the falling drops—like remembered poetry, inwardly murmured, rather than spoken. The leaves and flowers seem as if they were conscious of the reviving moisture, and wear fresher verdure and livelier hues; the perfume which they exhale makes the very breathing a delight—so sweet is the cool and fragrant air: while the birds flutter to and fro, as if they, too, shared the general enjoyment.
The sun soon broke forth from that one dark cloud, gradually melting into light; and the sunbeams and the glittering rain went driving together through the forest glades—those long vistas, of which the slender deer seemed the sole habitants. Yet the gaze of the young Italians rather turned to the white windings of the smoke, which marked the site of the gipsies' fire, and recalled so many associations of their childhood and their country. Light—transitory—winding its graceful circles, till finally lost in the blue air, born of the fiery element which smoulders below, smoke is the very type of that vapour of the human heart, hope. So does hope spring from the burning passions, which consume their home and themselves—so does it wander through the future, making its own charmed path—and so does it evanish away: lost in the horizon, it grows at last too faint for outline.
But Francesca, who perceived that the heavy drops were beginning to ooze through the thick leaves, while the sun had already dried the rain that but a few minutes before had shone on crystallised grass, now proposed their proceeding onwards. They wound along a little path, edged on either side with that delicate moss, which is alone enough to make one believe in fairies; for what but their tiny fingers could ever have traced the minute colours of its starred embroidery?
Suddenly, where the luxuriant growth of a bog-myrtle, whose leaves are perfumed as flowers, shut out all view but of itself, they heard voices, and removing one of the boughs, caught a glimpse of Lucy, in deep converse with a female gipsy. Equally unwilling to overhear or to interrupt, they turned aside; but in a few minutes Lucy passed them by, too absorbed in her own reflections to see them. It was obvious that her meditations were very pleasant; for a slight blush yet rested on a cheek dimpled with unconscious smiles.
Francesca was about to speak to her, when she was prevented by Guido. "Nay," said he, "let her dream out her dream; she will waken soon enough. What would not we give again to indulge those once fondly believed illusions!"
"Believed!" exclaimed Francesca: "she cannot possibly believe, that to the ignorant vagrant those secrets should be revealed which baffle the closest study and the deepest science!"
"Perhaps," replied he, "she does not exactly credit the fortune just foretold; but, at all events, it is pleasant to think about, and it enables her to dwell on the subject nearest her heart."
He was right: love delights in hearing its own name, and has a childish pleasure in making excuses for the enjoyment it takes in aught that links its future to that of the beloved. Moreover, Lucy had a pretty feminine credulity about her, which was fain to believe, especially a prophecy that echoed her hope. Wiser heads than her's have their superstitions; and so far from wondering that people should seek to dive into the future, and attach faith to the spell and to the omen, the real wonder is, that the future, the dark, the terrible, the fast-approaching, should excite so little fear and so little attention as it does.
Another winding in their path brought them to the gipsy, who immediately addressed them. She was a picturesque specimen of the race. Her complexion, of the deepest olive, was relieved by the peculiar and rich red which gives such light to the small bright eye—half arch, half cunning. Her long black hair hung in straight but thick masses over her forehead and round her throat. Her mouth was small; but the very red lips, and the glitter of the very white teeth, conveyed something of the image of a wild animal. In broken English and a foreign accent, she offered to tell their fortunes; while her quick eye glanced from one to another, as if taking the most minute observation.
"We have not time," answered Francesca.
"Nay, lady," said the gipsy, in Italian; "yourself and your brother are too young not to look eagerly towards the future."
Her shrewd eye, accustomed to note the slightest indications, had already marked their likeness to each other, and that ease of affection which belongs to habit and relationship.
Only those who have dwelt in a foreign land, can tell the charm of hearing their native tongue spoken unexpectedly,—the tongue whose music was around their infancy, and in which were breathed their first words of love! Tears brightened the eyes of the young Italians; a passionate longing for their own land was at that moment the only feeling in their mind.
The gipsy, noticing their emotion, added, "And, beside the future, I can tell you of the past. Is there nothing,—are there none of whom yon care to hear,—in your own and beautiful Italy?"
"Nothing, nothing!" exclaimed Guido; "we left nothing behind us but the grave!" Then, ashamed of this passion before a stranger, he said, taking out his purse, and pouring its contents into the woman's hand, "we will not tax your skill; but take this for the sake of the land we have alike left, and the tongue we have alike spoken."
The amount of the gift for the moment put to flight even the ready wit of the gipsy; and she let them pass on in silence; but they moved slowly, for the least excitation was too much for Guido, and he leant faintly on Francesca. With the tenderness of feminine tact, she only followed them for an instant with a whispered and earnest blessing, and then left them. "They might well say," murmured she, as they passed through the thicket, "that I could tell them nothing; for the death-damp is on his hand; and she—there is that in her face which never boded happiness!"