第88章

Merc: Tell me, therefore, what thou seekest after, and what thou wilt have.What dost thou desire to make?

Alch: The Philosopher's Stone.

Sandivogius.

It wanted several minutes of midnight, and Glyndon repaired to the appointed spot.The mysterious empire which Zanoni had acquired over him, was still more solemnly confirmed by the events of the last few hours; the sudden fate of the prince, so deliberately foreshadowed, and yet so seemingly accidental, brought out by causes the most commonplace, and yet associated with words the most prophetic, impressed him with the deepest sentiments of admiration and awe.It was as if this dark and wondrous being could convert the most ordinary events and the meanest instruments into the agencies of his inscrutable will;yet, if so, why have permitted the capture of Viola? Why not have prevented the crime rather than punish the criminal? And did Zanoni really feel love for Viola? Love, and yet offer to resign her to himself,--to a rival whom his arts could not have failed to baffle.He no longer reverted to the belief that Zanoni or Viola had sought to dupe him into marriage.His fear and reverence for the former now forbade the notion of so poor an imposture.Did he any longer love Viola himself? No; when that morning he had heard of her danger, he had, it is true, returned to the sympathies and the fears of affection; but with the death of the prince her image faded from his heart, and he felt no jealous pang at the thought that she had been saved by Zanoni,--that at that moment she was perhaps beneath his roof.Whoever has, in the course of his life, indulged the absorbing passion of the gamester, will remember how all other pursuits and objects vanished from his mind; how solely he was wrapped in the one wild delusion; with what a sceptre of magic power the despot-demon ruled every feeling and every thought.Far more intense than the passion of the gamester was the frantic yet sublime desire that mastered the breast of Glyndon.He would be the rival of Zanoni, not in human and perishable affections, but in preternatural and eternal lore.He would have laid down life with content--nay, rapture--as the price of learning those solemn secrets which separated the stranger from mankind.Enamoured of the goddess of goddesses, he stretched forth his arms--the wild Ixion--and embraced a cloud!

The night was most lovely and serene, and the waves scarcely rippled at his feet as the Englishman glided on by the cool and starry beach.At length he arrived at the spot, and there, leaning against the broken pillar, he beheld a man wrapped in a long mantle, and in an attitude of profound repose.He approached, and uttered the name of Zanoni.The figure turned, and he saw the face of a stranger: a face not stamped by the glorious beauty of Zanoni, but equally majestic in its aspect, and perhaps still more impressive from the mature age and the passionless depth of thought that characterised the expanded forehead, and deep-set but piercing eyes.

"You seek Zanoni," said the stranger; "he will be here anon; but, perhaps, he whom you see before you is more connected with your destiny, and more disposed to realise your dreams.""Hath the earth, then, another Zanoni?"

"If not," replied the stranger, "why do you cherish the hope and the wild faith to be yourself a Zanoni? Think you that none others have burned with the same godlike dream? Who, indeed in his first youth,--youth when the soul is nearer to the heaven from which it sprang, and its divine and primal longings are not all effaced by the sordid passions and petty cares that are begot in time,--who is there in youth that has not nourished the belief that the universe has secrets not known to the common herd, and panted, as the hart for the water-springs, for the fountains that lie hid and far away amidst the broad wilderness of trackless science? The music of the fountain is heard in the soul WITHIN, till the steps, deceived and erring, rove away from its waters, and the wanderer dies in the mighty desert.Think you that none who have cherished the hope have found the truth, or that the yearning after the Ineffable Knowledge was given to us utterly in vain? No! Every desire in human hearts is but a glimpse of things that exist, alike distant and divine.No! in the world there have been from age to age some brighter and happier spirits who have attained to the air in which the beings above mankind move and breathe.Zanoni, great though he be, stands not alone.