te
CHANDOS.
Padre Giulio will be so wretched!   What will he think?
Let me go ; pray let me go. "
" Impossible; you would go to your certain death. I
could not venture myself in such a night: you hear the
hurricane?   You must remain with me."
" With ' ou?" sho repeated, under her breath.
"Surely: I would not let a dog leave my roof in such
weather as this. Besides, you are miles higher on the
slope here than Fontane; the return to the village
would be impossible for those far hardier thanyou."
She looked at him with a wondering awe; he seemed
to her such an emperor as Marcus Antoninus, who had
laid down his pomp and come to dwell a while like
other men. The deep-blue, weary, brilliant eyes that
gazed on her made her think of the serene, imperial
eyes or Augustus.
"I am a total stranger to you, it is true," he said,
gently, misinterpreting her silence; "but you are not
afraid to remain in my house? I am only here for a
villgiatura, and the place is desolate enough, but it
will at least give you shelter."
She lifted her head with the proud grace that
would have paled and shamed the grace of many
royal women.
" Afraid ? Afraid of you ! What could I fear? You
saved my life; it is yours to command. All isI can-
not thank you enough."
The words were very touching in their liquid Tus-
can, in their complete innocence, and in their perfect
trust.
" You have nothing to thank me for; a mule-driver
or a charcoal-burner must have done for you what I
did," he answered her, his voice unconsciously soften-
ing. "And now go to rest; you want it. I will send
the women to you, and they shall remain in your
chamber; for you are not well enough to be left
alone."
" Ah, eccellenza, how good you are I" she murmured.
A few years older, and she would have been grateful
to him in silence, better knowing the motive of his
words. " But indeed I am strong now; we, below Val-
lombrosa, have the strength of the mountain-air, and
shall I not trouble you with staying here?"
" Far from it; you bring your own welcome, like the
birds that come and sing under our windows. Good-
night, poverina, and sleep well."
He held his hand out to her; she was but a child to
him, and a child who had been sheltered on his breast
through the driving of the storm. She stooped with
the exquisite softness of movement of Southern
women, and touched the hand he gave her, lightly and
reverently, with her lips.
" I would thank you, eccellenza, but I cannot."
She did thank him, however, better than by all
words, with that hesitating touch of her young lips,
with that upward glance of her eyes, languid with
sleep and fatigue, yet lustrous as the Tuscan skies by
nighteyes that seemed to him to have some story of
his past in their depths.
Then he summoned the women to her. peasants who
dwelt in the villa, and she left him.
He, having surrendered to her, though she knew
nothing of it, the only habitable chamber that the half-
ruined villa afforded, stretched himself in the warmth
of the pine logs or. the wolf-skins strewn before it. She
had brought back X him, why or whence he could not
tell, memories that he would willingly let diememo-
ries that, through the length of weary years, burned
still into his heart with unutterable longing, with in-
tolerable pain.
In the loneliness of the old classic hall, in the leaping
light of the pine flames, throngs of shadowy shapes
arose around himthe shapes of his past, summoned
by the light of a child's smile.
She meanwhile lay wakeful, yet dreamy, gazing out
at the unfamiliar chamber and the swaying figure of
the peasant-woman keeping watch over her and nod-
ding in her sleep. Her thoughts were steeped in all
the wonders of legendary lore, and she fancied some
enchantment had been wrought in her since, out of
that awful forest-darkness, she had been brought to
this charmed stiUness in which only one remembrance
was with her, the remembrance of the musing, lustrous,
weary eyes that had looked so gently on her, of the
voice that had soothed her terror and her pain with an
accent softer than she had ever heard. She thought of
him, and thought, as one other had once done before,
that he was hke the Poet-king of Israel, but having
known the bitterness of abdication, having known the
ingratitude of the people. Then her musing became a
dream, and, with a smile upon her lips, she slept under
a stranger's roof till the tempest had passed away and
the dawn was bright. As she awoke, the morning had
risen. The sun broke in full glory over a splendid mass
of purple cloud and tumbled storm-mist that glowed in
magnificent color beneath the newly-risen rays. The
earth laughed again even amidst her ruinher ruin of
crushed olive-buds, and uprooted saplings, and trees
rent asunder, and nests flung down, with the young
birds kiUed, and the mothers flying with piteous cries
over the wreck; but the wheat-sprouts were too low to
be harmed; the vines, though they trailed and hung
helplessly under the dead weight of rain-drops, were
still only in blossom; the watercourses made the wilder,
merrier music, tilled to overflowing, and laying in
swathes the ran k grasses of their beds ; the mules began
to patter over the broken paths, picking their careful
way over the dislodged boulders of rocks and the deep
channels of brimming brooks. Beneath Vallombrosa
the morning was fair and sun-lightened again, deadly
though the tempest had been over-night, and rough
work of destruction through it had wrought. With the
sun she rose, her youth, like the youth of the spring
and the earth, the brighter for the storm and the dan-
ger gone by. There was the flush of waking childhood
and of past sleep upon her cheeks, and her eyes had
the gladness of a wondering dream in them, as she
found her way, marvelling if she dreamed a fairy-tale,
down some broken marble steps and out into the air.
CHAPTER III.
The full light poured into the open loggia before the
half-ruined courts and halls of the Latin villa. Within,
the one spacious chamber, with its frescoes and the
mosaics, its books and scrolls, was bare enough. But
the world of blossoming spring, of morning mists, of
lavish foliage that opened out before it, rr,ade ample
amends for any poverty and decay of the interior; and
it was perfect for a villgiatura, ttiis deserted place
that Roman pomp had once filled in Augustan days.
In this loggia, reading, her host sata man no longer
young, though as yet there was no silver amidst the
fair and golden length of his hair; a man of a grave
grace, of a serene, meditative dignity of look and of
movement that had to it something that was very '
weary, yet something not less grand, nor less royal:
he might have been a king in purples rather than what
he wasan exile, and poor.
The book was open upon his knee, but his eyes were
not upon it for the moment; they were resting on the
gardens withoutgardens wild, forsaken, uncultured,
but only the more beautiful for that, with dark waters
winding under laurel-thickets, and green cistus, and
ilex, and pomegranate, and Banksia roses growing at
their will, and, all ivy-coiled and covered, broken frag-
ments of arches and statutes and fountains. What he
watched in them was the passage of the young Tuscan
flitting through them with the freedom of a chamois in
her step, and all the languor of a dew-laden flower in
her loveliness.
Sixteen years beyond the Appenines bring woman-
hood; they had brought it to her in the loveliness nature
had dowered her with, but in all else she was young as
a childshe who had never wandered from the chest-
nut shadows of her village, who had but dimly heard of
another vast world beyond the beech-woods, who had
known no friends but the birds who sang to her, who
had known no pleasures but to watch a blue-warbler
shake his bright wings in the myrtles, or to look deep
down into the heart of a passion-flower and build a
thousand fancies from its mystic burning hues. She
was a child with the beauty of a woman; there could
be no greater peril for her.
He thought so as he saw her in this deserted garden.
Art had no handling with her; the pure hill-air of Tus-
cany had made her all she was; and she had the
abandon and unconsciousness of some rich-plumaged
bird, now  floating softly through tbe sunlight, now
Earising on the wing, now alighting to drop down in
appy rest in a couch of feathery grasses.
He gazed at her as she wandered through them, that
exquisite ease in her step which many a royal woman
has not, which a contadina may have balancing on her
dark imperial head a pannier of watermelons. The
lizai ds did not hurry from her, but watched her with
curious eyes; the timid hares let her stoop and stroke
them ; the old owls blinking in the ivy let her lift her
hand and touch their crests; the wood-doves flew about
her and pecked the buds from the boughs she held up
to them. She bent over the black swollen water, and
saw her own reflection laurel-crowned as the branches
met above her head; she gathered the lilies of the val-
ley, the buds of Banksia roses, and the young green
ivy-blossoms, and crowned herself with them till the
wreath was too heavy and shook all her glistening hair
downward in a shower of gold, like a picture of Flora.
Then, lastly, she sank to rest on a gray rock of fallen
sculpture, the crown of flowers still above her brow;
and after the glad, thoughtless pastime of a child, the
proud and profound sadness that usually in repose was
on her face succeeded it with a charm not the less
great because so sudden.
It was like the sudden fall of evening over the bril-
liance and the glow of her own Tuscan landscape.
As he saw it, he left the loggia and went towards her.
She did not hear his step till he had approached her
close; then she sprang up with the swiftness of a fawn,
and with words of gratitude made only softer by the
awe of him which lent her its delicate coyness.
" I have been watching you for the last half hour,
Castalia," he said, gently. " I am glad you could find
such companions in my flowers and my birds; there is
little else here fit for your bright youth."
She colored under his gaze, and rait her h_L_ "~
hurriedly to remove the dew-laden w;reath of bud and
blossom ; she had forgotten it till his speech brought it
back to her thoughts. He put out his own hand and
stayed her.
" Not for worlds ! I wish a Titian lived to paint you!
you look like a young priestess of Flora. But, tell me.
what spell have you that tames the Uzards, and stiUs
the hares, and brings ah the birds to your hand?"
She lifted to him her musing eloquent eyes, grave as
a child's when he pauses to think.
" I do not know, eccellenza, unlessit may be be-
cause I love them so well,"
His face grew a shade darker and yet softer; her
words recalled the fond belief of his own youth.
" You think love begets and secures love?  I thought
so once."
" And was it not so?"
" No; butthat knowledge should not kill love in us;
there is much that is worth it, if there be much that is
not. Because a viper turns and stings you, it would be
wild vengeance to wring the wood-pigeon's neck."
He spoke half to his own thoughts, half to her; she
regarded him with a reverent, grateful, wondering gaze;
in her little beech-forest nest of Fontane she had never
seen anything like him. She who had known but one
bent old priest, and brown, brawny muleteers and vin-
tagers from whom she shrank as the white sea-swallow
shrinks from the hard beak and cruel pursuit of the
kestrel, thought almost he must be more than mortal.
"I ought to leave you, 'lustrissimo?" she said, hesi
tatingly. " I have troubled you so long."
" Do you wish to leave me?"
Her eyes opened more lustrous than ever in their sur-
prised negation.
"Wish? oh, no!"
" Well, do not leave me yet, then. Come within, and
let me see, though no Titian, if I can paint you with
your crown of flowers. Your Padre Curato will feel
no anxiety; I sent a messenger to him to say you were
here."
The gravest contrition stole over her face; she looked
penitent as a cMdden child.
"Oh,'lustrissimo! I had forgotten him.   How un-
grateful, when he is so good!   How selfish one grows
when one is happy]"
Tho naf confession amused him.
" Then are you happy with me?"
' Excellenza," she said, under her breath, "it seems
to me that I have been happier than in aU the years of
my life."
The reply pleased him. He had always loved to see
happiness about him.
" I am glad it should be so. And do not believe that
happiness makes us selfish; it is a treason to the sweet-
est gift of life. It is who it has deserted us that it
grows hard to keep all the better things in us from
dying in the blight. Men shut out happiness from
their schemes for the world's virtue; they might as weU
seek to bring flowers to bloom without the sun "
He spoke again rather to his own thoughts than to
her, but she understood him. This young Tuscan, lost
amidst the chestnuts beneath Vallombrosa, hid in her
the heart of a Helose, the mind of a Hypatia, though
both were in their cMldhond yet
"Eccellenza," she said, hesitatingly, "that is true.
If we keep light from a plant, it will grow up warped,
When they condemn, do they ever ask if what they
condemn had a chance to behold the light? Perhaps
perhaps if my mother had been happy she would not
have been evil, as they call her?"
The color burned hotly in her face, but her eyes were
raised in wistful entreaty to him; it was but very
vaguely that she understood the shame that she was
made to feel was on her birth, but very dimly vhat shs
comprehended some vast indistinct error with which
her dead mother was charged.
The question touched him with great pity.
" Poverina," he said, caressingly, " do not weary your
young life with those subtleties. You do not know
that error lies at all upon your mother's history; who
can, since you say that history is wholly unknown-
even to her very name? It may be that the thing the
worldyour little woodland world, at leastblames in
her was some unrecognized martyrdom, some untold
unselfishness. At all events, be she what she will, you
are stainless and blameless; all you need seek is to be
so forever."
She looked at him with a look of passionate, of
intense, yet of restrained feeling, which told him now
well she would love some day, and how bitterly she
would suffer.
"I thank'you, eccellenza," she said, her voice very low
" more for those noble words than for the life that yoir
saved me."
The brief answer was very eloquenteloquent of her
nature and of her gratitude. He said no more, but led
her within to the old hall, only fit for a summer resi-
dence for an artist, or a scholar sufficiently content
with its classic charm and forest wildness to bear its
scant accommodation. An easel stood before the open
colonnade facing the gardens; he paused before it, and
glanced at her, A lovelier theme never lurred any
painter's brush, with the fresh crown of lilies and rose-
buds and light-green blossoms of ivy shaking their dew
upon the gold-flaked shower of her hair. He looked at
her, then he threw aside the colors he had taken up.
" Twenty years ago I could have given your picture
there," he said, half wearily. "Now I have not the
heart to paint you, my fair child: I have not the great
inspirationyouth. "
Twenty years ago he would have found no hour more
beguiling than that spring morning with the young
Tuscan, bringing the bloom of her beauty and of her
crown of flowers out on the canvas ; now it only recalled
to him all he had lost.
A shadow stole over her eyes; he saw it, and turned
back to the easel.
"Are you disappointed, poverina t"
She looked beseechingly in his face.
" I never saw any paintings except those in our Uttle
chapel."
"No? Well, then, I will try and give you your desire."
He took the colors and brushes up again, and, stand-
ing before the easel, sketched her as she leaned against;
one of the pillars of the colonnade, the rich glow and
warmth of her young face but the brighter for the
whiteness of the lilies and the deep green o  the leaves
that circled her hair.   He had both the skill and th
habit of Art; and the impassioned brilliance of her
beauty, with the coronal of blossoms weighting her
forehead with the weight of all diadems, rose gradually
under his hand out of the sea of brown opaque gloom
on which it was painted.   The hours passed, and the
pic?--------~y; it beguiled him for the time of heavier
cares, t..,vi won him out of deeper thoughts; yet ever
and again, as he lifted his eyes and glanced at her, the
weariness which had made him turn from the taste
came over him again. He thought of so mairy golden
hours, when faces as fair had bloomed to fresli l<fe thus
on his canvas, and the glory of his youth had beet with
him to lend its sweetness to the eyes, and teao\ the
language of love to the lips, of those he painted, yhe
soft labor only recalled to him* so many days that vt^ns
dead.
The noontide was intensely still, the heat of the sv.
quivered down through the open arches of the coloiy
nade; the picture grew clearer and richer beneath hit
hand, and the blossoms faded where they crowned he!
hair. She untwined them, and touched them mounv
fully.
" Ah, eccellenza, they are all dying!"
He smiled, not without sadness! too, though it was for
deeper things than the flowers.
" Never mind; you have had their sweetness. Be eon-
tent with that.   Nothing endures. "
" But it is better never to have had them than to see
them withered!"
" I doubt that. If we should have been spared much
pain, we should also have missed much joy."
His thoughts were with other things, though he spoke
still in the figure of the flowers. He had seen his own
crowns wither and fall and be trodden under foot, yeC-
he would not never have worn them. She looked at him
in silence, reverently, wonderingly; she mused on what
his history could be ; she thought him a king in exile.
So, in a sense, he was.
There was an infinite shyness of him in her that gave
her tenfold more charm, it was so innocent and so full
of religious veneration. He seemed to her like the
archangels of her Church, so full of majesty, so full of
pity. She thought with him of all the grand, serene,
lonely lives that she had read of in the Latin legends.
He rose, and turned the easel to her.
' ' Castalia, do what even wise men never do ; see your-
self as you are.
She came forward, and looked, as the sun fell full on
the work of a few hours, and her countenance changed
as by magic ; a breathless surprise was on her lips, a
scarlet flush upon her cheeks, the light of an immeas-
urable admiration and amaze beamed in her eye.   She
stood entranced at the likeness of herself, as. with its
diadem  of blossoms, it gazed  out at her from  the
brown shadows of the background.
"Well?" he asked her, smiling.
She turned to him bewildered and beseeching.
" Oh! 'lustrissimo, can it be?   Am I as beautiful as
that!"
" Did the river and the fountain never tell you so be-
fore?"
Her head drooped, the color in her cheek deepened;
her innocent delight had had no thought of vanity, but
at his words she remembered what she looked on van
herself.
"And yet it is beautifull" she murmured, very low.
as though in apology.   " And if I be really like it-----"
"What then?"
A prouder, more passionate glory flashed into ner
face; she lifted her head with the royalty of a dam,*?