University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.

The autumn following found Mr. Clay a pilgrim
for health to the shores of the Mediterranean. Exhausted,
body and soul, with the life of alternate
gayety and passion into which his celebrity had drawn
him, he had accepted, with a sense of exquisite relief,
the offer of a cruise among the Greek Isles in a friend's
yacht, and in the pure stillness of those bright seas,
with a single companion and his books, he idled away
the summer in a luxury of repose and enjoyment such
as only the pleasure-weary can understand. Recruited
in health, and with a mind beginning to yearn once

more for the long foregone stimulus of society, he
landed at Naples in the beginning of October.

“We are not very gay just now,” said the English
minister with whom he hastened to renew an acquaintance
commenced in his former travels, “but the
prettiest woman in the world is `at home' to-night,
and if you are as susceptible as most of the cavaliers
of the Chiaja, you will find Naples attractive enough
after you have seen her.”

“English?”

“Yes—but you can not have known her, for I think
she was never heard of till she came to Naples.”

“Her name?”

“Why, you should hear that after seeing her.
Call her Queen Giovanna and she will come nearer
your prepossession. By-the-by, what have you to do
this morning?”

“I am at your excellency's disposal,”

“Come with me to the atelier of a very clever artist
then, and I will show you her picture. It should be
the man's chef-d'œuvre, for he has lost his wits in
painting it.”

“Literally, do you mean?”

“It would seem so—for though the picture was
finished some months since, he has never taken it off
his easel, and is generally found looking at it. Besides,
he has neither cleaned pallet nor brush since the last
day she sat to him.”

“If he were young and handsome—”

“So he is—and so are scores of the lady's devoted
admirers; but she is either prudent or cold to a degree
that effectually repels hope, and the painter pines with
the rest.”

A few minutes walk brought them to a large room
near the Corso, tenanted by the Venetian artist,
Ippolito Incontri. The minister presented his friend,
and Clay forgot their errand in admiration of the
magnificent brigand face and figure of the painter,
who, after a cold salutation, retreated into the darkest
corner of the point of view, and stood gazing past them
at his easel, silent and unconscious of observation.

“I have seen your wonder,” said Clay, turning to
the picture with a smile, and at the first glance only
remarking its resemblance to a face that should be
familiar to him. “I am surprised that I can not
name her at once, for I am sure I know her well.
But, stay!—the light grows on my eye—no!—with
that expression, certainly not—I am sure, now, that I
have not seen her. Wonderful beauty! Yet there
was a superficial likeness! Have you ever remarked,
Signor Incontri, that, through very intellectual faces,
such as this, you can sometimes see what the countenance
would have been in other circumstances—without
the advantages of education, I mean?”

No answer. The painter was absorbed in his picture,
and Clay turned to the ambassador.

“I have seen somewhere a face, and a very lovely
one, too, that was strangely like these features; yet,
not only without the soul that is here, but incapable,
I should think, of acquiring it by any discipline, either
of thought or feeling.”

“Perhaps it was the original of this, and the painter
has given the soul!”

“He could as soon warm a statue into life as do it.
Invent that look! Oh, he would be a god, not a
painter! Raphael copied, and this man copies; but
nature did the original of this, as he did of Raphael's
immortal beauties; and the departure of the most
vanishing shadow from the truth would be a blot irremediable.”

Clay lost himself in the picture and was silent.
Veil after veil fell away from the expression as he
gazed, and the woman seemed melting out from the
canvass into life. The pose and drapery were nothing.
It was the portrait of a female standing still—perhaps
looking idly out on the sea—lost in revery perhaps—
perhaps just feeling the breath of a coming thought,
the stirring of some lost memory that would presently
awake. The lips were slightly unclosed. The heavy
eyelashes were wakeful yet couchant in their expression.
The large dark orbs lustrous and suffused,
looked of the depth and intense stillness of the mid-night
sky close to the silver rim of a moon high in
heaven. The coloring was warm and Italian, but
every vein of the transparent temple was steeped in
calmness; and even through the bright pomegranate
richness of a mouth full of the capability of passion,
there seemed to breathe the slumberous fragrance of
a flower motionless under its night-burthen of dew.
It portrayed no rank in life. The drapery might have
been a queen's or a contadina's. It was a woman stolen
to the canvass from her inmost cell of privacy,
with her soul unstartled by a human look, and mere
life and freedom from pain or care expressed in her
form and countenance—yet, with all this, a radiance
of beauty, and a sustained loftiness of feeling, as apparent
as the altitude of the stars. It was a matchless
woman incomparably painted; and though not a
man to fall in love with a semblance, Clay felt and
struggled in vain against the feeling, that the creature
drawn in that portrait controlled the next and perhaps
the most eventful revolution of his many-sphered existence.

The next five hours have (for this tale) no history.

“I have perplexed myself in vain since I left you,”
Clay said to the ambassador, as they rolled on their
way to the palace of the fair Englishwoman; “but
when I yield to the secret conviction that I have seen
the adorable original of the picture, I am lost in a
greater mystery—how I ever could have forgotten her.
The coming five minutes will undo the Sphinx's riddle
for me.”

“My life on it you have never seen her,” said his
friend, as the carriage turned through a reverberating
archway, and rapidly making the circuit of a large
court, stopped at the door of a palace blazing with
light.

An opening was made through the crowd, as the
ambassador's name was announced, and Clay followed
him through the brilliant rooms with an agitation to
which he had long been a stranger. Taste, as well
as sumptuous expensiveness, was stamped on everything
around, and there was that indefinable expression
in the assembly, which no one could detect or
appreciate better than Clay, and which is composed,
among other things, of a perfect conviction on the
part of the guests, that their time, presence, and approbation,
are well bestowed where they are.

At the curtained door of a small boudoir, draped
like a tent, a Neapolitan noble of high rank turned
smiling to the ambassador and placed his finger on
his lip. The silken pavilion was crowded, and only
uniforms and heads, fixed in attention, could be seen
by those without; but from the arching folds of the
curtain came a female voice of the deepest and sweetest
melodiousness, reading in low and finely-measured
cadence from an English poem.

“Do you know the voice?” asked the ambassador,
as Clay stood like a man fixed to marble, eagerly
listening.

“Perfectly! I implore you tell me who reads!”

“No!—though your twofold recognisance is singular.
You shall see her before you hear her name.
What is she reading?”

“My own poetry, by Heaven! and yet I can not
name her! This passes belief. I have heard that
voice sob—sob convulsively, and with accents of love—
I have heard it whisper and entreat—you look incredulous,
but it is true. If she do not know me—nay,
if she has not—” he would have said “loved me”—
but the look of scrutiny and surprise on the countenance
of the ambassador checked the imprudent

avowal, and he became aware that he was on dangerous
ground. He relapsed into silence, and crowding
close to the tent, heard the numbers he had long ago
linked and forgotten, breathing in music from those
mysterious lips, and, possessed as he was by suspense
and curiosity, he could have wished that sweet moment
to have lasted for ever. I call upon the poet, if
there be one who reads this idle tale, to tell me if
there is a flattery more exquisite on earth, if there is
a deeper-sinking plummet of pride ever dropped into
the profound bosom of the bard, than the listening to
thoughts born in pain and silence, articulate in the
honeyed accents of woman! Answer me, poet!
Answer me, women beloved of poets, who have
breathed their worshipping incense, and know by
what its bright censor was kindled!

The voice ceased, and there was one moment of
stillness, and then the rooms echoed with acclamation.
“Crown her!” cried a tall old man, who stood near
the entrance covered with military orders. “Crown
her!” repeated every tongue; and from a vase that
hung suspended in the centre of the pavilion, the
fresh flowers were snatched by eager hands and
wreathed into a chaplet. But those without became
clamorous to see the imposition of the crown; and,
clearing a way through the entrance, the old man took
the chaplet from the busy hands that had entwined it,
and crying out with Italian enthusiasm, “A triumph! a
triumph!” led forth the majestic Corinna to the crowd.

The ambassador looked at Clay. He had shrunk
behind the statue of a winged cupid, and though his
eyes were fixed with a gaze of stone on the magnificent
creature who was the centre of all regards, he
seemed by his open lips and heaving chest, to be gasping
with some powerful emotion.

“Give me the chaplet!” suddenly exclaimed the
magnificent idol of the crowd. And with no apparent
emotion, except a glowing spot in her temples, and a
quicker throb in the snowy curve of her neck and
bosom, she waved back the throng upon her right,
and advanced with majestic steps to the statue of Love.

“Welcome, Ernest!” she said in a low voice,
taking him by the hand, and losing, for a scarce perceptible
moment, the smile from her lips. “Here,
my friends!” she exclaimed, turning again, and leading
him from his concealment, “honor to whom honor
is due! A crown for the poet of my country, Ernest
Clay!”

“Clay, the poet!” “The English poet!” “The
author of the poem!” were explanations that ran
quickly through the room, and as the crowd pressed
closer around, murmuring the enthusiasm native to
that southern clime, Julia Beverley sprang upon an ottoman,
and standing in her magnificent beauty conspicuous
above all, she placed the crown upon Clay's
head, and bending gracefully and smilingly over him,
impressed a kiss on his forehead, and said, “This for
the poet!”

And of the many lovers of this superb woman who
saw that kiss, not one showed a frown or turned away,
so natural to the warm impulse of the hour did it
seem—so pure an expression of admiration of genius—
so mere a tribute of welcome from Italy to the bard,
by an inspiration born of its sunny air. Surrounded
with eager claimants for his acquaintance, intoxicated
with flattery, giddy with indefinable emotions of love
and pleasure, Ernest Clay lost sight for a moment of
the face that had beamed on him, and in that moment
she had made an apology of fatigue and retired, leaving
her guests to their pleasures.