to shut the gates of hope upon her heart. His
remonstrances were urgent, for his horror was unfeigned.
He joined with Glyndon in imploring her to fly, if
she felt the smallest doubt that her husband’s
pursuits were of the nature which the Roman Church
had benevolently burned so many scholars for adopting.
And even the little that Viola could communicate seemed,
to the ignorant ascetic, irrefragable proof of sorcery
and witchcraft; he had, indeed, previously heard some
of the strange rumours which followed the path of
Zanoni, and was therefore prepared to believe the worst;
the worthy Bartolomeo would have made no bones of
sending Watt to the stake, had he heard him speak
of the steam-engine. But Viola, as untutored as
himself, was terrified by his rough and vehement eloquence,—terrified,
for by that penetration which Catholic priests, however
dull, generally acquire, in their vast experience
of the human heart hourly exposed to their probe,
Bartolomeo spoke less of danger to herself than to
her child. “Sorcerers,” said he,
“have ever sought the most to decoy and seduce
the souls of the young,—nay, the infant;”
and therewith he entered into a long catalogue of
legendary fables, which he quoted as historical facts.
All at which an English woman would have smiled, appalled
the tender but superstitious Neapolitan; and when the
priest left her, with solemn rebukes and grave accusations
of a dereliction of her duties to her child, if she
hesitated to fly with it from an abode polluted by
the darker powers and unhallowed arts, Viola, still
clinging to the image of Zanoni, sank into a passive
lethargy which held her very reason in suspense.
The hours passed: night came on; the house was
hushed; and Viola, slowly awakened from the numbness
and torpor which had usurped her faculties, tossed
to and fro on her couch, restless and perturbed.
The stillness became intolerable; yet more intolerable
the sound that alone broke it, the voice of the clock,
knelling moment after moment to its grave. The
moments, at last, seemed themselves to find voice,—to
gain shape. She thought she beheld them springing,
wan and fairy-like, from the womb of darkness; and
ere they fell again, extinguished, into that womb,
their grave, their low small voices murmured, “Woman,
we report to eternity all that is done in time!
What shall we report of thee, O guardian of a new-born
soul?” She became sensible that her fancies had
brought a sort of partial delirium, that she was in
a state between sleep and waking, when suddenly one
thought became more predominant than the rest.
The chamber which, in that and every house they had
inhabited, even that in the Greek isles, Zanoni had
set apart to a solitude on which none might intrude,
the threshold of which even Viola’s step was
forbid to cross, and never, hitherto, in that sweet
repose of confidence which belongs to contented love,
had she even felt the curious desire to disobey,—now,
that chamber drew her towards it. Perhaps there
might be found a somewhat to solve the riddle, to
dispel or confirm the doubt: that thought grew
and deepened in its intenseness; it fastened on her
as with a palpable and irresistible grasp; it seemed
to raise her limbs without her will.