The Last Man
hills were adorned with the luxuriant growth of chestnut-trees. Here we
fixed our summer residence. We had a lovely skiff, in which we sailed,
now stemming the midmost waves, now coasting the over-hanging and
craggy banks, thick sown with evergreens, which dipped their shining
leaves in the waters, and were mirrored in many a little bay and creek
of waters of translucent darkness. Here orange plants bloomed, here
birds poured forth melodious hymns; and here, during spring, the cold
snake emerged from the clefts, and basked on the sunny terraces of
rock.
Were we not happy in this paradisiacal retreat? If some kind spirit had
whispered forgetfulness to us, methinks we should have been happy here,
where the precipitous mountains, nearly pathless, shut from our view
the far fields of desolate earth, and with small exertion of the
imagination, we might fancy that the cities were still resonant with
popular hum, and the peasant still guided his plough through the
furrow, and that we, the world’s free denizens, enjoyed a voluntary
exile, and not a remediless cutting off from our extinct species.
Not one among us enjoyed the beauty of this scenery so much as Clara.
Before we quitted Milan, a change had taken place in her habits and
manners. She lost her gaiety, she laid aside her sports, and assumed an
almost vestal plainness of attire. She shunned us, retiring with Evelyn
to some distant chamber or silent nook; nor did she enter into his
pastimes with the same zest as she was wont, but would sit and watch
him with sadly tender smiles, and eyes bright with tears, yet without a
word of complaint. She approached us timidly, avoided our caresses, nor
shook off her embarrassment till some serious discussion or lofty theme
called her for awhile out of herself. Her beauty grew as a rose, which,
opening to the summer wind, discloses leaf after leaf till the sense
aches with its excess of loveliness. A slight and variable colour
tinged her cheeks, and her motions seemed attuned by some hidden
harmony of surpassing sweetness. We redoubled our tenderness and
earnest attentions. She received them with grateful smiles, that fled
swift as sunny beam from a glittering wave on an April day.
Our only acknowledged point of sympathy with her, appeared to be
Evelyn. This dear little fellow was a comforter and delight to us
beyond all words. His buoyant spirit, and his innocent ignorance of our
vast calamity, were balm to us, whose thoughts and feelings were
over-wrought and spun out in the immensity of speculative sorrow. To
cherish, to caress, to amuse him was the common task of all. Clara, who
felt towards him in some degree like a young mother, gratefully
acknowledged our kindness towards him. To me, O! to me, who saw the
clear brows and soft eyes of the beloved of my heart, my lost and ever
dear Idris, re-born in his gentle face, to me he was dear even to pain;
if I pressed him to my heart, methought I clasped a real and living
part of her, who had lain there through long years of youthful
happiness.
It was the custom of Adrian and myself to go out each day in our skiff
to forage in the adjacent country. In these expeditions we were seldom
accompanied by Clara or her little charge, but our return was an hour
of hilarity. Evelyn ransacked our stores with childish eagerness, and
we always brought some new found gift for our fair companion. Then too
we made discoveries of lovely scenes or gay palaces, whither in the
evening we all proceeded. Our sailing expeditions were most divine, and
with a fair wind or transverse course we cut the liquid waves; and, if
talk failed under the pressure of thought, I had my clarionet with me,
which awoke the echoes, and gave the change to our careful minds. Clara
at such times often returned to her former habits of free converse and
gay sally; and though our four hearts alone beat in the world, those
four hearts were happy.
One day, on our return from the town of Como, with a laden boat, we
expected as usual to be met at the port by Clara and Evelyn, and we
were somewhat surprised to see the beach vacant. I, as my nature
prompted, would not prognosticate evil, but explained it away as a mere
casual incident. Not so Adrian. He was seized with sudden trembling and
apprehension, and he called to me with vehemence to steer quickly for
land, and, when near, leapt from the boat, half falling into the water;
and, scrambling up the steep bank, hastened along the narrow strip of
garden, the only level space between the lake and the mountain. I
followed without delay; the garden and inner court were empty, so was
the house, whose every room we visited. Adrian called loudly upon
Clara’s name, and was about to rush up the near mountain-path, when the
door of a summer-house at the end of the garden slowly opened, and
Clara appeared, not advancing towards us, but leaning against a column
of the building with blanched cheeks, in a posture of utter
despondency. Adrian sprang towards her with a cry of joy, and folded
her delightedly in his arms. She withdrew from his embrace, and,
without a word, again entered the summer-house. Her quivering lips, her
despairing heart refused to afford her voice to express our misfortune.
Poor little Evelyn had, while playing with her, been seized with sudden
fever, and now lay torpid and speechless on a little couch in the
summer-house.
For a whole fortnight we unceasingly watched beside the poor child, as
his life declined under the ravages of a virulent typhus. His little
form and tiny lineaments encaged the embryo of the world-spanning mind
of man. Man’s nature, brimful of passions and affections, would have
had an home in that little heart, whose swift pulsations hurried
towards their close. His small hand’s fine mechanism, now flaccid and
unbent, would in the growth of sinew and muscle, have achieved works of
beauty or of strength. His tender rosy feet would have trod in firm
manhood the bowers and glades of earth— these reflections were now of
little use: he lay, thought and strength suspended, waiting unresisting
the final blow.
We watched at his bedside, and when the access of fever was on him, we
neither spoke nor looked at each other, marking only his obstructed
breath and the mortal glow that tinged his sunken cheek, the heavy
death that weighed on his eyelids. It is a trite evasion to say, that
words could not express our long drawn agony; yet how can words image
sensations, whose tormenting keenness throw us back, as it were, on the
deep roots and hidden foundations of our nature, which shake our being
with earth-quake-throe, so that we leave to confide in accustomed
feelings which like mother-earth support us, and cling to some vain
imagination or deceitful hope, which will soon be buried in the ruins
occasioned by the final shock. I have called that period a fortnight,
which we passed watching the changes of the sweet child’s malady—and
such it might have been—at night, we wondered to find another day gone,
while each particular hour seemed endless. Day and night were exchanged
for one another uncounted; we slept hardly at all, nor did we even quit
his room, except when a pang of grief seized us, and we retired from
each other for a short period to conceal our sobs and tears. We
endeavoured in vain to abstract Clara from this deplorable scene. She
sat, hour after hour, looking at him, now softly arranging his pillow,
and, while he had power to swallow, administered his drink. At length
the moment of his death came: the blood paused in its flow —his eyes
opened, and then closed again: without convulsion or sigh, the frail
tenement was left vacant of its spiritual inhabitant.
I have heard that the sight of the dead has confirmed materialists in
their belief. I ever felt otherwise. Was that my child—that moveless
decaying inanimation? My child was enraptured by my caresses; his dear
voice cloathed with meaning articulations his thoughts, otherwise
inaccessible; his smile was a ray of the soul, and the same soul sat
upon its throne in his eyes. I turn from this mockery of what he was.
Take, O earth, thy debt! freely and for ever I consign to thee the garb
thou didst afford. But thou, sweet child, amiable and beloved boy,
either thy spirit has sought a fitter dwelling, or, shrined in my
heart, thou livest while it lives.
We placed his remains under a cypress, the upright mountain being
scooped out to receive them. And then Clara said, “If you wish me to
live, take me from hence. There is something in this scene of
transcendent beauty, in these trees, and hills and waves, that for ever
whisper to me, leave thy cumbrous flesh, and make a part of us. I
earnestly entreat you to take me away.”
So on the fifteenth of August we bade adieu to our villa, and the
embowering shades of this abode of beauty; to calm bay and noisy
waterfall; to Evelyn’s little grave we bade farewell! and then, with
heavy hearts, we departed on our pilgrimage towards Rome.
[25] Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Norway.
[26] Solomon’s Song.
CHAPTER IX.
Now—soft awhile—have I arrived so near the end? Yes! it is all over
now—a step or two over those new made graves, and the wearisome way is
done. Can I accomplish my task? Can I streak my paper with words
capacious of the grand conclusion? Arise, black Melancholy! quit thy
Cimmerian solitude! Bring with thee murky fogs from hell, which may
drink up the day; bring blight and pestiferous exhalations, which,
entering the hollow caverns and breathing places of earth, may fill her
stony veins with corruption, so that not only herbage may no longer
flourish, the trees may rot, and the rivers run with gall—but the
everlasting mountains be decomposed, and the mighty deep putrify, and
the genial atmosphere which clips the globe, lose all powers of
generation and sustenance. Do this, sad visaged power, while I write,
while eyes read these pages.
And who will read them? Beware, tender offspring of the re-born world—
beware, fair being, with human heart, yet untamed by care, and human
brow, yet unploughed by time—beware, lest the cheerful current of thy
blood be checked, thy golden locks turn grey, thy sweet dimpling smiles
be changed to fixed, harsh wrinkles! Let not day look on these lines,
lest garish day waste, turn pale, and die. Seek a cypress grove, whose
moaning boughs will be harmony befitting; seek some cave, deep
embowered in earth’s dark entrails, where no light will penetrate, save
that which struggles, red and flickering, through a single fissure,
staining thy page with grimmest livery of death.
There is a painful confusion in my brain, which refuses to delineate
distinctly succeeding events. Sometimes the irradiation of my friend’s
gentle smile comes before me; and methinks its light spans and fills
eternity—then, again, I feel the gasping throes—
We quitted Como, and in compliance with Adrian’s earnest desire, we
took Venice in our way to Rome. There was something to the English
peculiarly attractive in the idea of this wave-encircled,
island-enthroned city. Adrian had never seen it. We went down the Po
and the Brenta in a boat; and, the days proving intolerably hot, we
rested in the bordering palaces during the day, travelling through the
night, when darkness made the bordering banks indistinct, and our
solitude less remarkable; when the wandering moon lit the waves that
divided before our prow, and the night-wind filled our sails, and the
murmuring stream, waving trees, and swelling canvass, accorded in
harmonious strain. Clara, long overcome by excessive grief, had to a
great degree cast aside her timid, cold reserve, and received our
attentions with grateful tenderness. While Adrian with poetic fervour
discoursed of the glorious nations of the dead, of the beauteous earth