And now, for the first time, the drudgeries of this hard earth claimed the beautiful Neapolitan.  In that profession, giving voice and shape to poetry and song, in which her first years were passed, there is, while it lasts, an excitement in the art that lifts it from the labour of a calling.  Hovering between two lives, the Real and Ideal, dwells the life of music and the stage.  But that life was lost evermore to the idol of the eyes and ears of Naples.  Lifted to the higher realm of passionate love, it seemed as if the fictitious genius which represents the thoughts of others was merged in the genius that grows all thought itself.  It had been the worst infidelity to the Lost, to have descended again to live on the applause of others.  And so—­for she would not accept alms from Glyndon—­so, by the commonest arts, the humblest industry which the sex knows, alone and unseen, she who had slept on the breast of Zanoni found a shelter for their child.  As when, in the noble verse prefixed to this chapter, Armida herself has destroyed her enchanted palace,—­not a vestige of that bower, raised of old by Poetry and Love, remained to say, “It had been!”

And the child avenged the father; it bloomed, it thrived,—­it waxed strong in the light of life.  But still it seemed haunted and preserved by some other being than her own.  In its sleep there was that slumber, so deep and rigid, which a thunderbolt could not have disturbed; and in such sleep often it moved its arms, as to embrace the air:  often its lips stirred with murmured sounds of indistinct affection,—­not for her; and all the while upon its cheeks a hue of such celestial bloom, upon its lips a smile of such mysterious joy!  Then, when it waked, its eyes did not turn first to her,—­wistful, earnest, wandering, they roved around, to fix on her pale face, at last, in mute sorrow and reproach.

Never had Viola felt before how mighty was her love for Zanoni; how thought, feeling, heart, soul, life,—­all lay crushed and dormant in the icy absence to which she had doomed herself!  She heard not the roar without, she felt not one amidst those stormy millions,—­worlds of excitement labouring through every hour.  Only when Glyndon, haggard, wan, and spectre-like, glided in, day after day, to visit her, did the fair daughter of the careless South know how heavy and universal was the Death-Air that girt her round.  Sublime in her passive unconsciousness,—­her mechanic life,—­she sat, and feared not, in the den of the Beasts of Prey.

The door of the room opened abruptly, and Glyndon entered.  His manner was more agitated than usual.

“Is it you, Clarence?” she said in her soft, languid tones.  “You are before the hour I expected you.”

“Who can count on his hours at Paris?” returned Glyndon, with a frightful smile.  “Is it not enough that I am here!  Your apathy in the midst of these sorrows appalls me.  You say calmly, ‘Farewell;’ calmly you bid me, ’Welcome!’—­as if in every corner there was not a spy, and as if with every day there was not a massacre!”