Giulietta—A Tale of the Fourteenth Century.563
and energy found a ready career to power and honour in the church. It may be believed that Aldobrandini would not have exchanged the waking certainties of his ambition for the realization of all his once—romantic fantasies; but, for a moment, the flood of years rolled back, the woman he had once so loved was dying at his side, and feeling became but the more bitter from the consciousness of the vanity of indulgence. "Giulietta," at length, he said, in a low and broken tone, "years have passed since you and I spoke of the future as of a thing in which we took interest together. Then we spoke in vain: not so now; for, let the remembrance of our own youth be the pledge how precious another—your—Giulietta shall be in my sight." The countess extended her emaciated hand towards him. Aldobrandini remembered it when its perfect beauty had been a model for the sculptor; he took it tenderly. Could it be the rigid and ascetic priest whose tears fell heavily on the dying Giulietta's hand? The lady was the first to recover her self. "Aldobrandini," she whispered, "I trust her happiness wholly to you." The girls now re-appeared in the garden, the cardinal himself beckoned them in, and, with a few brief but kind words, took his departure to the city. Deeper and deeper fell the shades of melancholy over that sea-side villa. Day by day, those youthful sisters became more conscious of the approach of death. Their voices took a lower tone; their steps were more subdued; and their laughter, once so frequent, was unheard. At length, the worn eyes of the countess closed for ever: but their latest look was on her children. Drearily did the rest of the summer pass away; and, when the leaves fell from the garden, and the bleak sea-breeze swept through the desolate lattices, it was with a feeling of rejoicing that the two elder sisters heard that they were to leave the villa, and pass the next year in the convent of Santa Caterina: after which their home would be the palace of the cardinal. But Giulietta left her mother's late dwelling with reluctance: it seemed almost like another separation. She visited and re-visited every spot which she could remember that the countess had once loved, and parted from it with many and bitter tears, as if it had been an animate object conscious of her regret. But youth is as a flowing stream, on whose current the shadow may rest but not remain; sunshine is natural to its glad waters, and the flowers will spring up on its banks: thus, though still preserving the most tender recollection of the parent whom she had lost, Giulietta's spirits gradually recovered their tone, and some very happy hours were spent in the convent. |
A year in youth is like a month in spring; it is wonderful what an alteration it makes; the germ expands into a leaf, and the bud into a flower, almost before we have marked the change. On the cardinal's return from Rome, where he had made a long sojourn, he was surprised to perceive how the three Aldobrandini had sprung up into graceful womanhood. Constanza, the eldest, was nineteen, and Giulietta seventeen; but the sisters had never been parted, and he resolved that they should together take up their residence in his palace.
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