Mosses from an old manse
Then, hiding her face, she fled from him and vanished beneath the
sculptured portal. As Giovanni followed her with his eyes, he beheld
the emaciated figure and pale intelligence of Dr. Rappaccini, who had
been watching the scene, he knew not how long, within the shadow of the
entrance.
No sooner was Guasconti alone in his chamber than the image of Beatrice
came back to his passionate musings, invested with all the witchery
that had been gathering around it ever since his first glimpse of her,
and now likewise imbued with a tender warmth of girlish womanhood. She
was human; her nature was endowed with all gentle and feminine
qualities; she was worthiest to be worshipped; she was capable, surely,
on her part, of the height and heroism of love. Those tokens which he
had hitherto considered as proofs of a frightful peculiarity in her
physical and moral system were now either forgotten, or, by the subtle
sophistry of passion transmitted into a golden crown of enchantment,
rendering Beatrice the more admirable by so much as she was the more
unique. Whatever had looked ugly was now beautiful; or, if incapable of
such a change, it stole away and hid itself among those shapeless half
ideas which throng the dim region beyond the daylight of our perfect
consciousness. Thus did he spend the night, nor fell asleep until the
dawn had begun to awake the slumbering flowers in Dr. Rappaccini’s
garden, whither Giovanni’s dreams doubtless led him. Up rose the sun in
his due season, and, flinging his beams upon the young man’s eyelids,
awoke him to a sense of pain. When thoroughly aroused, he became
sensible of a burning and tingling agony in his hand—in his right
hand—the very hand which Beatrice had grasped in her own when he was on
the point of plucking one of the gemlike flowers. On the back of that
hand there was now a purple print like that of four small fingers, and
the likeness of a slender thumb upon his wrist.
Oh, how stubbornly does love,—or even that cunning semblance of love
which flourishes in the imagination, but strikes no depth of root into
the heart,—how stubbornly does it hold its faith until the moment comes
when it is doomed to vanish into thin mist! Giovanni wrapped a
handkerchief about his hand and wondered what evil thing had stung him,
and soon forgot his pain in a reverie of Beatrice.
After the first interview, a second was in the inevitable course of
what we call fate. A third; a fourth; and a meeting with Beatrice in
the garden was no longer an incident in Giovanni’s daily life, but the
whole space in which he might be said to live; for the anticipation and
memory of that ecstatic hour made up the remainder. Nor was it
otherwise with the daughter of Rappaccini. She watched for the youth’s
appearance, and flew to his side with confidence as unreserved as if
they had been playmates from early infancy—as if they were such
playmates still. If, by any unwonted chance, he failed to come at the
appointed moment, she stood beneath the window and sent up the rich
sweetness of her tones to float around him in his chamber and echo and
reverberate throughout his heart: “Giovanni! Giovanni! Why tarriest
thou? Come down!” And down he hastened into that Eden of poisonous
flowers.
But, with all this intimate familiarity, there was still a reserve in
Beatrice’s demeanor, so rigidly and invariably sustained that the idea
of infringing it scarcely occurred to his imagination. By all
appreciable signs, they loved; they had looked love with eyes that
conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of
the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered by the way; they
had even spoken love in those gushes of passion when their spirits
darted forth in articulated breath like tongues of long-hidden flame;
and yet there had been no seal of lips, no clasp of hands, nor any
slightest caress such as love claims and hallows. He had never touched
one of the gleaming ringlets of her hair; her garment—so marked was the
physical barrier between them—had never been waved against him by a
breeze. On the few occasions when Giovanni had seemed tempted to
overstep the limit, Beatrice grew so sad, so stern, and withal wore
such a look of desolate separation, shuddering at itself, that not a
spoken word was requisite to repel him. At such times he was startled
at the horrible suspicions that rose, monster-like, out of the caverns
of his heart and stared him in the face; his love grew thin and faint
as the morning mist, his doubts alone had substance. But, when
Beatrice’s face brightened again after the momentary shadow, she was
transformed at once from the mysterious, questionable being whom he had
watched with so much awe and horror; she was now the beautiful and
unsophisticated girl whom he felt that his spirit knew with a certainty
beyond all other knowledge.
A considerable time had now passed since Giovanni’s last meeting with
Baglioni. One morning, however, he was disagreeably surprised by a
visit from the professor, whom he had scarcely thought of for whole
weeks, and would willingly have forgotten still longer. Given up as he
had long been to a pervading excitement, he could tolerate no
companions except upon condition of their perfect sympathy with his
present state of feeling. Such sympathy was not to be expected from
Professor Baglioni.
The visitor chatted carelessly for a few moments about the gossip of
the city and the university, and then took up another topic.
“I have been reading an old classic author lately,” said he, “and met
with a story that strangely interested me. Possibly you may remember
it. It is of an Indian prince, who sent a beautiful woman as a present
to Alexander the Great. She was as lovely as the dawn and gorgeous as
the sunset; but what especially distinguished her was a certain rich
perfume in her breath—richer than a garden of Persian roses. Alexander,
as was natural to a youthful conqueror, fell in love at first sight
with this magnificent stranger; but a certain sage physician, happening
to be present, discovered a terrible secret in regard to her.”
“And what was that?” asked Giovanni, turning his eyes downward to avoid
those of the professor.
“That this lovely woman,” continued Baglioni, with emphasis, “had been
nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature
was so imbued with them that she herself had become the deadliest
poison in existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich
perfume of her breath she blasted the very air. Her love would have
been poison—her embrace death. Is not this a marvellous tale?”
“A childish fable,” answered Giovanni, nervously starting from his
chair. “I marvel how your worship finds time to read such nonsense
among your graver studies.”
“By the by,” said the professor, looking uneasily about him, “what
singular fragrance is this in your apartment? Is it the perfume of your
gloves? It is faint, but delicious; and yet, after all, by no means
agreeable. Were I to breathe it long, methinks it would make me ill. It
is like the breath of a flower; but I see no flowers in the chamber.”
“Nor are there any,” replied Giovanni, who had turned pale as the
professor spoke; “nor, I think, is there any fragrance except in your
worship’s imagination. Odors, being a sort of element combined of the
sensual and the spiritual, are apt to deceive us in this manner. The
recollection of a perfume, the bare idea of it, may easily be mistaken
for a present reality.”
“Ay; but my sober imagination does not often play such tricks,” said
Baglioni; “and, were I to fancy any kind of odor, it would be that of
some vile apothecary drug, wherewith my fingers are likely enough to be
imbued. Our worshipful friend Rappaccini, as I have heard, tinctures
his medicaments with odors richer than those of Araby. Doubtless,
likewise, the fair and learned Signora Beatrice would minister to her
patients with draughts as sweet as a maiden’s breath; but woe to him
that sips them!”
Giovanni’s face evinced many contending emotions. The tone in which the
professor alluded to the pure and lovely daughter of Rappaccini was a
torture to his soul; and yet the intimation of a view of her character
opposite to his own, gave instantaneous distinctness to a thousand dim
suspicions, which now grinned at him like so many demons. But he strove
hard to quell them and to respond to Baglioni with a true lover’s
perfect faith.
“Signor professor,” said he, “you were my father’s friend; perchance,
too, it is your purpose to act a friendly part towards his son. I would
fain feel nothing towards you save respect and deference; but I pray
you to observe, signor, that there is one subject on which we must not
speak. You know not the Signora Beatrice. You cannot, therefore,
estimate the wrong—the blasphemy, I may even say—that is offered to her
character by a light or injurious word.”
“Giovanni! my poor Giovanni!” answered the professor, with a calm
expression of pity, “I know this wretched girl far better than
yourself. You shall hear the truth in respect to the poisoner
Rappaccini and his poisonous daughter; yes, poisonous as she is
beautiful. Listen; for, even should you do violence to my gray hairs,
it shall not silence me. That old fable of the Indian woman has become
a truth by the deep and deadly science of Rappaccini and in the person
of the lovely Beatrice.”
Giovanni groaned and hid his face
“Her father,” continued Baglioni, “was not restrained by natural
affection from offering up his child in this horrible manner as the
victim of his insane zeal for science; for, let us do him justice, he
is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own heart in an
alembic. What, then, will be your fate? Beyond a doubt you are selected
as the material of some new experiment. Perhaps the result is to be
death; perhaps a fate more awful still. Rappaccini, with what he calls
the interest of science before his eyes, will hesitate at nothing.”
“It is a dream,” muttered Giovanni to himself; “surely it is a dream.”
“But,” resumed the professor, “be of good cheer, son of my friend. It
is not yet too late for the rescue. Possibly we may even succeed in
bringing back this miserable child within the limits of ordinary
nature, from which her father’s madness has estranged her. Behold this
little silver vase! It was wrought by the hands of the renowned
Benvenuto Cellini, and is well worthy to be a love gift to the fairest
dame in Italy. But its contents are invaluable. One little sip of this
antidote would have rendered the most virulent poisons of the Borgias
innocuous. Doubt not that it will be as efficacious against those of
Rappaccini. Bestow the vase, and the precious liquid within it, on your
Beatrice, and hopefully await the result.”
Baglioni laid a small, exquisitely wrought silver vial on the table and
withdrew, leaving what he had said to produce its effect upon the young
man’s mind.
“We will thwart Rappaccini yet,” thought he, chuckling to himself, as
he descended the stairs; “but, let us confess the truth of him, he is a
wonderful man—a wonderful man indeed; a vile empiric, however, in his
practice, and therefore not to be tolerated by those who respect the
good old rules of the medical profession.”
Throughout Giovanni’s whole acquaintance with Beatrice, he had
occasionally, as we have said, been haunted by dark surmises as to her
character; yet so thoroughly had she made herself felt by him as a
simple, natural, most affectionate, and guileless creature, that the
image now held up by Professor Baglioni looked as strange and
incredible as if it were not in accordance with his own original
conception. True, there were ugly recollections connected with his
first glimpses of the beautiful girl; he could not quite forget the