in the life of the woman palled
with the "hack sights and sounds" of worldly life! How strangely happy
were those hours, when, lured on by her silent sympathy, the young
scholar spoke of his early struggles between circumstance and impulse,
musing amidst the flowers, and hearkening to the fountain; or of his
wanderings in the desolate, lamp-lit streets, while the vision of
Chatterton's glittering eyes shone dread through the friendless shadows.
And as he spoke, whether of his hopes or his fears, her looks dwelt
fondly on the young face, that varied between pride and sadness,--pride
ever so gentle, and sad ness ever so nobly touching. She was never
weary of gazing on that brow, with its quiet power; but her lids dropped
before those eyes, with their serene, unfathomable passion. She felt, as
they haunted her, what a deep and holy thing love in such souls must
be. Leonard never spoke to her of Helen--that reserve every reader can
comprehend. To natures like his, first love is a mystery; to confide it
is to profane. But he fulfilled his commission of interesting her in the
exile and his daughter, and his description of them brought tears to her
eyes. She inly resolved not to aid Peschiera in his designs on Violante.
She forgot for the moment that her own fortune was to depend on the
success of those designs. Levy had arranged so that she was not reminded
of her poverty by creditors,--she knew not how. She knew nothing of
business. She gave herself up to the delight of the present hour, and to
vague prospects of a future associated with that young image,--with that
face of a guardian angel that she saw before her, fairest in the moments
of absence; for in those moments came the life of fairy-land, when we
shut our eyes on the world, and see through the haze of golden revery.
Dangerous, indeed, to Leonard would have been the soft society of
Beatrice di Negra, had not his heart been wholly devoted to one object,
and had not his ideal of woman been from that object one sole and
indivisible reflection. But Beatrice guessed not this barrier between
herself and him. Amidst the shadows that he conjured up from his past
life, she beheld no rival form. She saw him lonely in the world, as
she was herself. And in his lowly birth, his youth, in the freedom from
presumption which characterized him in all things (save that confidence
in his intellectual destinies which is the essential attribute of
genius), she but grew the bolder by the b