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. At length my father died. Life
went from him almost imperceptibly. I hung over him in mute affliction,
and watched the expiring spasms of nature. His last faltering accents
whispered repeatedly a blessing on me - alas! how has it been fulfilled!
When I had paid due honors to his remains, and laid them in the tomb of
our ancestors, I arranged briefly my affairs; put them in a posture to
be easily at my command from a distance, and embarked once more, with a
bounding heart, for Genoa.
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