One afternoon in November, Stelio returned on the steamer from the Lido, accompanied by Daniele Glauro. They had left behind them the thunder of the greenish waves of the Adriatic, the trees of San Niccolò despoiled by a predaceous wind, whirlwinds of dead leaves, heroic phantoms of departures and arrivals, the memory of the archers playing to win the scarlet ensign, and the mad rides of Lord Byron, devoured by the desire to surpass his own destiny. "I too, to-day, would have given a kingdom for a horse," said Effrena, in self-ridicule, irritated by the mediocrity of life. "Not a cross-bow nor a horse in San Niccolò, not even the courage of an oarsman! Perge andacter! So here we are, on this ignoble gray carcass that smokes and seethes like a kettle. Look at Venice, dancing down there!"
The anger of the waves was extending to the lagoon. The waters were agitated by a violent wind, and the agitation seemed to reach to the foundations of the city, and the palaces, cupolas, and campaniles appeared to heave like vessels on the water. Clusters of floating seaweed showed their white roots; and flocks of sea-gulls circled in the wind, their strange, wild laughter echoing above the crested waves.
"Wagner!" Daniele Glauro said suddenly, in a low tone, touched with emotion, as he pointed at an old man leaning against the railing of a prow. "There he is, with Franz Liszt and Donna Cosima. Do you see him?"
Stelio's heart beat quicker; for him too all other surrounding figures disappeared; his bitter sense of ennui and inertia disappeared; and he felt remaining only the suggestion of superhuman power evoked by that name, and realized that the only reality hovering over all those indistinct phantoms was the ideal world conjured up by that name around the little old man leaning over the troubled waters.
Victorious genius, fidelity of love, unchangeable friendship, the supreme apparitions of heroic nature, were reassembled in silent union beneath the tempestuous sky. The same dazzling whiteness crowned the three heads, whose hair had become blanched through sadness. A troubled sorrow was revealed in their faces and attitudes, as if the same undefined presentiment oppressed their blended spirits. The white face of the woman had a beautiful, strong mouth, with clear-cut lines, revealing a tenacious soul; and her light, steel-like eyes were fixed continually on him who had chosen her for the companion of his noble warfare, watching over him who, having vanquished all hostile forces, would be powerless to vanquish Death, whose menace perpetually pursued him. That feminine vigil, full of fear, opposed itself to the invisible gaze of the other Woman, and threw around the old man a vague, funereal shadow.
"He seems to be suffering," said Daniele Glauro. "Do you not see? He seems almost on the point of swooning. Shall we go to them?"
Effrena looked with inexpressible emotion at those white locks blown about by the sharp wind on the aged neck under the broad brim of the felt hat, and at the almost livid ear, with its swollen lobe. That body, which had withstood the keenest warfare by the proud instinct of its own domination, now looked as limp as some rag which the wind could bear away and destroy.
"Ah, Daniele! what can we do for him?" said Stelio, yielding to an almost religious impulse to manifest in some way his reverence and pity for that great oppressed heart.
"What can we do?" repeated Glauro, to whom that ardent desire to offer something of himself to the hero now suffering the human fate had immediately communicated itself. Their souls were blended in that impulse of fervor and gratitude, that sudden exaltation of their innate nobility; but they could give nothing more than that. Nothing could check the secret ravages of the fatal malady; and both were filled with profound sorrow as they saw the snowy hair tossed about on the old man's neck by the wind coming from afar, and bringing to the quivering lagoon the murmur and the foam of the open sea.
"Ah, glorious sea, thou shalt hear me still! Never shall I find on the earth the health I seek. To thee, therefore, will I remain faithful, O waves of the boundless sea!" The impetuous harmonies of The Flying Dutchman returned to Effrena's memory, with the despairing call that pierces through them from time to time; he fancied that in the rushing wind he could hear again the wild chant of the crew on the ship with the blood-red sails: "Iohohé! Iohohé! come ashore, black Captain! Seven years have passed!" Again his imagination conjured up the figure of Richard Wagner in youth; he saw once more the lonely one wandering in the living horror of Paris, poor yet undaunted, devoured by the fever of genius, his eyes fixed on his star, and his mind resolved to force the world to recognize it. In the myth of the shadowy captain, the exiled one had seen the image of his own breathless race, his furious struggle, his supreme hope. "But some day the pale hero may be delivered, should he meet on earth a woman that will be faithful to him until death."
The woman was there, beside the hero, an ever vigilant guardian. She too, like Senta, knew the sovereign law of fidelity; and death was soon to dissolve the sacred vow.
"Do you think that, steeped as he is in poetic myths, he has dreamed of some extraordinary mann............