No one knew me. The servants gazed at me with
curiosity and surprise. A few years of intellectual elevation and
development had made a prodigious change in the poor fugitive stripling
from the convent. Still that no one should know me in my rightful home
was overpowering. I felt like the prodigal son returned. I was a
stranger in the house of my father. I burst into tears, and wept aloud.
When I made myself known, however, all was changed. I who had once been
almost repulsed from its walls, and forced to fly as an exile, was
welcomed back with acclamation, with servility. One of the servants
hastened to prepare my father for my reception; my eagerness to receive
the paternal embrace was so great that I could not await his return;
but hurried after him.
What a spectacle met my eyes as I entered the chamber! My father, whom
I had left in the pride of vigorous age, whose noble and majestic
bearing had so awed my young imagination, was bowed down and withered
into decrepitude. A paralysis had ravaged his stately form, and left it
a shaking ruin. He sat propped up in his chair, with pale, relaxed
visage and glassy, wandering eye. His intellects had evidently shared
in the ravage of his frame. The servant was endeavoring to make him
comprehend the visitor that was at hand. I tottered up to him and sunk
at his feet. All his past coldness and neglect were forgotten in his
present sufferings. I remembered only that he was my parent, and that I
had deserted him. I clasped his knees; my voice was almost stifled with
convulsive sobs. "Pardon - pardon - oh my father!" was all that I could
utter. His apprehension seemed slowly to return to him. He gazed at me
for some moments with a vague, inquiring look; a convulsive tremor
quivered about his lips; he feebly extended a shaking hand, laid it
upon my head, and burst into an infantine flow of tears.
From that moment he would scarcely spare me from his sight. I appeared
the only object that his heart responded to in the world; all else was
as a blank to him. He had almost lost the powers of speech, and the
reasoning faculty seemed at an end. He was mute and passive; excepting
that fits of child-like weeping would sometimes come over him without
any immediate cause. If I left the room at any time, his eye was
incessantly fixed on the door till my return, and on my entrance there
was another gush of tears.
To talk with him of my concerns, in this ruined state of mind, would
have been worse than useless; to have left him, for ever so short a
time, would have been cruel, unnatural. Here then was a new trial for
my affections. I wrote to Bianca an account of my return and of my
actual situation; painting in colors vivid, for they were true, the
torments I suffered at our being thus separated; for to the youthful
lover every day of absence is an age of love lost. I enclosed the
letter in one to Filippo, who was the channel of our correspondence. I
received a reply from him full of friendship and sympathy; from Bianca
full of assurances of affection and constancy.
Week after week, month after month elapsed, without making any change
in my circumstances. The vital flame, which had seemed nearly extinct
when first I met my father, kept fluttering on without any apparent
diminution. I watched him constantly, faithfully - I had almost said
patiently. I knew that his death alone would set me free; yet I never
at any moment wished it. I felt too glad to be able to make any
atonement for past disobedience; and, denied as I had been all
endearments of relationship in my early days, my heart yearned towards
a father, who, in his age and helplessness, had thrown himself entirely
on me for comfort. My passion for Bianca gained daily more force from
absence; by constant meditation it wore itself a deeper and deeper
channel. I made no new friends nor acquaintances; sought none of the
pleasures of Naples which my rank and fortune threw open to me. Mine
was a heart that confined itself to few objects, but dwelt upon those
with the intenser passion. To sit by my father, and administer to his
wants, and to meditate on Bianca in the silence of his chamber, was my
constant habit. Sometimes I amused myself with my pencil in portraying
the image that was ever present to my imagination. I transferred to
canvas every look and smile of hers that dwelt in my heart. I showed
them to my father in hopes of awakening an interest in his bosom for
the mere shadow of my love; but he was too far sunk in intellect to
take any more than a child-like notice of them.
When I received a letter from Bianca it was a new source of solitary
luxury. Her letters, it is true, were less and less frequent, but they
were always full of assurances of unabated affection. They breathed not
the frank and innocent warmth with which she expressed herself in
conversation, but I accounted for it from the embarrassment which
inexperienced minds have often to express themselves upon paper.
Filippo assured me of her unaltered constancy. They both lamented in
the strongest terms our continued separation, though they did justice
to the filial feeling that kept me by my father's side.
Nearly eighteen months elapsed in this protracted exile. To me they
were so many ages. Ardent and impetuous by nature, I scarcely know how
I should have supported so long an absence, had I not felt assured that
the faith of Bianca was equal to my own.
