“Together we have said one prayer,
And sung one vesper strain;
My soul is dim with clouds of care,
Tell me those words again.”
NEW things could be more enjoyable than a journey through the plains of beautiful Italia, when the summer heats were over, and the vineyards were laden with their rich clusters of purple and amber, or yielding up their treasures to laughing youths and maidens, whose pleasant labor was almost a holiday. Such a journey was that of Theodore and Giulio, and they made it with every advantage that money could procure. They slept at the best inns, where, in those days of intellectual activity, the most distinguished literary society was often to be met; and they could command the services of an adequate guard, whenever they had to pass through a district infested with banditti, although, being both of them active and courageous men, they usually preferred relying upon their own resources.
They spent one night at the ancestral home of Campano, and Giulio gave the sorrowing parents a letter with which Raymond had furnished him, containing their son’s last message, and other details of mournful interest. These brought comfort; and warm was the gratitude evinced towards the Jewish physician whose kindness had softened the lot of all the captives in the Castle of St. Angelo, though it had been principally intended for Raymond.
The journey ought to have been a holiday pastime, but to one of the two it was a long agony. Theodore ever afterward remembered those smiling fields and vineyards as a man might remember the walls of a torture chamber. For his whole life, inward and outward, was being torn up by the roots ―roots which were strong and vigorous, which had struck deep and stretched far and wide. The wrench was terrible. The only woman he had ever loved was lost to him irrevocably; and this in itself was a sorrow great enough to fill the man’s great heart with anguish. But in losing Viola he lost also his prospect of a settled home, a domestic hearth. All those softening, ennobling, hallowing influences which gather round the idea of the family were for him (as he thought then), never more to exist; no wife was to console him in trouble or sickness; no son was to continue his name amongst men.
Even Work―that silent, modest, unobtrusive comforter, who professes and promises nothing, and yet insensibly wins the mourner from his tears, the sufferer from his pain―seemed about to fail him. How could he go back to Montpellier and tell the band of earnest, intelligent youths, to whom he had been teaching Atheistic Materialism, that he had wholly misread the enigma of the universe? He believed now in Jehovah, and in the first sentence of the Hebrew Scriptures, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.” What was more, he believed in Jehovah as the God of Righteousness, and in the supreme obligation laid upon himself to be righteous too.
Well, then, had he not acted the part of a righteous man? Had he not, in obedience to the imperative “ought,” saved Raymond and given up Viola? He dealt out a stern approval to himself as if he had been another man, but he did not take any pleasure in the contemplation of his own righteousness. He thought of the words of Solomon, “A good man is satisfied from himself,” and he tried to realize their truth. But he found self-satisfaction a poor, flavorless, innutritive kind of food, somewhat of the nature of the apples of Sodom.
To Giulio he was impenetrable and unapproachable. That true friend and “camarade” saw the anguish of his soul, and longed to comfort him, with the longing of one who believed that he possessed an infallible panacea for all the sorrows of humanity. “Dr. Theodore is a good man,” thought Giulio. “He is true, just, and brave; but he knows, as yet, only the law of Moses, not the gospel of Christ. He has learned, ‘If thine enemy hunger, feed him;’ but he has not yet learned, ‘Love your enemies.’ He cannot understand the law of love until his eyes are opened to the love of God that passeth knowledge―that means, to Christ. But he does whatever he knows; and therefore, no doubt, that which he knows not yet God will teach him.”
At least he seemed determined to have no other teacher. When he talked to Giulio, and he did so often, it was about the features of the country through which they were journeying, its trees, planta, and flowers; or yet oftener, about “travel in far lands.” In the unsettling of all his ties and associations, the passion of his childhood for exploration and discovery seemed to be returning. Many a long hour’s ride did he beguile for Giulio with tales of the Isles of St. Brandon, and other fair and fleeting dreams that shadowed forth truths yet unknown; or with mysterious passages from the great Arabian philosophers―and especially from Averroës―hinting at undiscovered worlds beyond the Western Sea; or with stories, scarcely less romantic, of the voyages of Marco Polo and the great Portuguese adventurers. He told also of the recent voyages of Christopher Columbus to the Azores and to Iceland, and to these Giulio listened with especial interest, as he himself was by birth a Genoese, and therefore a townsman of Columbus, though his family had removed to Venice in his early childhood.
But always, when they halted for the night, Theodore borrowed Giulio’s MSS. and devoted every spare moment to their perusal. His long residence in the South of France enabled him to master the dialect as easily as Giulio himself. He was especially fascinated by the Gospel of John; accounting for the fascination to himself by reflecting that it was the work of a mystic, probably an Alexandrian Platonist, and that mysticism was the natural recoil from the materialism he had been forced to abandon. He considered Giulio a mystic also, though of a peculiar kind; but he did not at all intend to become one himself.
So Venice was reached at last. Theodore brought Giulio to his father’s house, and introduced him there as an honored guest, to whom he was under many obligations. But, taking him aside as soon as the first social meal was over, he said, “Do me one more kindness, friend Giulio. The Lady Erminia Chalcondyles ought to know her son’s safety at once, and to receive his letter. But I have no fancy for a scene, and a lady’s tears and thanks, and so forth. You can give her every information she desires just as well as L Go, my dear fellow, be the bearer of good tidings, and my substitute in a task from which I shrink.”
Giulio acquiesced, and took a gondola for the island of Murano. As the rowers shot across the Lagoon, he sat in the little cabin buried in profoundest thought. But when they neared the quay he drew aside the curtain and gazed, as one who sought to drink in every feature of the scene, now bathed in the fair and mellow light of an autumn afternoon. “The place thereof knoweth it no more,” he murmured. “Ay, ‘the grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our God shall stand forever.’ Days of youth, how long ago they seem!― Sciar, gondolier, sciar!”
The gondola was touching the steps of the dwelling with which the descriptions of Raymond had made him so familiar. He sprang up them with a vigor which seemed to show the days, of youth not so very far removed, and entered, unchallenged, by the open door. Still he met no one; and, after standing a moment undecided, he saw an inner door ajar, and pushed it open also.
It admitted him into the studio of an artist. This, happily, was not unoccupied. The owner stood with his back to the door and his face to the window, carefully examining a small painting upon glass which he held in his hand. Hearing, however, the steps of an intruder, Giacomo turned, and with a dreamy look and absent manner―for that momentous question whether the coloring of those grapes was quite natural still occupied his mind―inquired the stranger’s business.
“‘Scusi, signor. Does the Lady Erminia Chalcondyles live here?”
“Yes, signor; but she has gone forth, with her servant, to hear a sermon in the church yonder.” Then, thinking himself scarcely courteous, and attracted besides by an undefined something in the stranger’s look and manner, he added, “They will return in an hour or so. You are welcome to wait for them here if you please, signor.”
Giacomo courteously offered a seat, but Giulio did not take it. The two men stood together, looking each in the other’s face. Both were advanced in years, though Giulio, really the younger by nearly ten years, looked fully as old as the painter, for the life of the imagination keeps men looking and feeling young. Still, both were grey-haired and travail-worn, as though the storms of the world had beaten upon them. But the expression of Giacomo was gentle, dreamy, sorrowful, unsatisfied; that of Giulio strong, firm, assured, courageous. Yet with all this difference there was a certain likeness, indescribable but real, such as a third person, looking on the two, would have noticed immediately.
Giacomo was the first to speak.
“Signor, favor me, I pray you, with your name. For surely I remember your face. It awakens old associations. No, I cannot be mistaken. I have known you, have I not, in other days?” The words were spoken falteringly, interspersed with breaks and pauses.
“Are you Giacomo Salvi―or Morgagna?” Giulio asked in his turn, for Giacomo was far less changed in every way than himself. “If so, I am your brother―Giovanni Giulio Morgagna.”
“Brother?―Gian?―Thank God, He has heard my prayer at last!”
The brothers threw themselves into each other’s arms, and exchanged a loving brotherly embrace and salutation; a manifestation of feeling sanctioned by the customs of their time and their country.
Giulio’s life had been a series of adventures, whilst Giacomo’s had glided tranquilly onwards in the same city, and his faculties found their natural and harmonious development in the direction promised by his childhood. Giulio therefore had the most to tell, Giacamo the most to hear. Before the strange story of the wandering sectary was half ended, the returning footsteps of the Lady Erminia and of Manuel were heard in the passage.
Giacomo led them at once into the studio, found a seat for the lady, and respectfully presented his brother, “Gian Giulio Morgagna, who had come to her Excellency with tidings of the young Count.”
The sad stillness of a woman’s life, keeping for long years the same narrow unchanging groove, is often amongst its greatest trials. Through how many vicissitudes had Raymond passed―how much had he learned, felt, Buffered, and enjoyed―whilst the current of his mother’s life, naturally as intense and strong as that of his own, flowed on noiselessly through a desolate land, without an event to mark its progress. To agonize for him, to weep for him, to pray for him, had been all the work her hand found to do. Had she been a little richer she might have helped other exiles from her native land; had she been a little poorer, the very struggle for subsistence would itself have given her occupation and interest. As it was, the years came and went, finding and leaving her with folded hands, “eating her own heart.” No wonder her cheek was blanched, and the ashes which the slaughter of her kindred had sprinkled on her head were changing quickly into snow. Yet it may be that the pain of those sad years was worth the cost―if indeed it had taught her to pray.
Giulio told her of Raymond’s sickness and recovery, and of Dr. Theodore’s care of him; adding that by his advice he was now going to Montpellier, where there was a professorship vacant, which would afford him for the present an honorable occupation and a comfortable asylum. For further particulars he referred her Excellency to the Count’s own letter, which he had the honor of placing in her hand. He kept silence upon the subject of Raymond’s marriage, not knowing how she might be affected by it; and upon that of his rivalry with Theodore, since, much as he longed to do justice to the magnanimity of his patron, it seemed to him that Raymond alone had the right to tell that story.
Still, he told enough to transport Manuel to the seventh heaven of grateful delight, and to make him bless Dr. Theodore, and Giulio also, by all the Saints in the Greek Calendar. It certainly jarred a little upon his idea of the pretensions of Count Raymond Chalcondyles to imagine him earning his daily bread by teaching the tongue of his forefathers to a crowd of noisy lads in a lecture hall; still he knew that other Greek exiles, as well-born as Raymond, had been thankful to do the same, and, moreover, he had not dwelt so long beneath the roof of Pomponius Laetus, without acquiring some respect for the hierophants of literature. And, after all, what mattered aught else if his young master himself were safe and well?
The Lady Erminia thanked Giulio in fewer words, but with yet deeper feeling. “Tell Dr. Theodore Benedetto,” she added, “that the blessing of a widow never yet harmed any man, nor was it ever earned more nobly, or bestowed more heartily, than mine is this day. But, if he permit me, I shall tell him so myself tomorrow.”
Having said this, she withdrew to her own apartment, and to the undisturbed enjoyment of Raymond’s letter, which had been written in the osteria, in the interval between the departure of Theodore and that of Giulio.
He wrote hopefully about the future; and frankly about his own prospects with regard to Viola, and his relations with Theodore. It was somewhat startling to Erminia to learn that her son, whom she had last seen a boy of fifteen, had by this time actually given her a daughter; but she repressed a rising sigh, and told herself that hers was the common lot of mothers. And her heart was softened by the earnest pleading that followed, that she would come to Montpellier and take up her abode with him. She could make the journey with ease, Raymond said, under the escort of Manuel. Messer Benedetto would secure her a passage in a comfortable ship, and Giulio also would probably be soon returning to what he now accounted his home. “Come to me, dearest mother,” he concluded. “My heart yearns to see thy face again; and to repay thee, if I may, for the lonely years thou hast spent for me.” The Lady Erminia’s eyes were wet with happy tears when she folded up the letter.
Meanwhile the stream of talk was flowing rapidly between the long-separated brothers, Giacomo the painter, and Giulio, Gian, or Zun, as he was familiarly called in the Venetian idiom. Each at once took the other to his heart. Their very differences made them dovetail the better (so to speak) into the needs of each other’s lives. The younger supplied the masculine element―daring, enterprise, boldness―while the nature of the elder, although gentler and more dependent, had a quiet strength of its own, touched into beauty by the rare peculiar grace of artistic genius.
It was a terrible shock to the painter to find. that his brother no longer owned allegiance to the Church; the only Church (in Western Christendom) Giacomo had ever heard or dreamed of, whose shrines and altar; he spent his days in trying to decorate, and whose observances were linked with every action of his life and every aspiration of his soul.
But Giulio reassured his brother and vindicated himself by a confession of faith that came from depths “below the tide of war” ―those regions of the mind that controversy agitates―and was “based on the crystalline sea” of all that is most real in the soul of man. To him, he said, Christ was all in all. He was the Way, the Truth, and the Life. By Him alone we come to the Father. Everything that man has put between his soul and Christ must therefore be swept aside; ay, though it were dear and beautiful as the face of the Madonna, or venerable and awe-inspiring as the chanted psalm or the lifted Host. “The Church has been making one great and terrible mistake, which has involved a thousand more,” he added. “She has forgotten the tenderness of Christ. She has ignored His true humanity. She has set before the eyes of mankind the terrors of the law, the powers of the world to come, the awfulness of the great Judge of quick and dead, until, in the Judge, the whole world has forgotten the Saviour. She has taken away the ladder He set up between Heaven and Earth―the ladder which is Himself, the Son of Man―and she has built another of her own contrivance, of which the steps are sacramenta, and penances, and saints, and angels, with the blessed Madonna standing at the top. Ah, Giacomo, if men but knew Him as He is―but saw His face”
“Ah, Zun, my brother, if I could see that face!” sighed Giacomo, with the unsatisfied longing of years at his heart. Then, rising from his place, he drew back the cloth that covered his unfinished picture and showed it to Giulio. It was still as far from completion as on the day when Raymond had seen it last.