Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/53

46 these, and gained—nothing! Oh! let me crawl to her feet! Let me see her once again!”

As he spoke his voice grew fainter, fading at last into little more than a trembling of his lips. As he essayed to rise, his strength failed him, and he sunk back into the arms of Geronimo. A quivering of the seared eyelids, one long-drawn sigh, and all was over.

The procession of nuns, singing the Ave, passed the house of the alchemist. They paused at the sight of the young man bearing in his arms the lifeless Francesco, and holding to his lips a silver cross. One of the nuns came forward—a tall, slight figure, with a pale, sorrowing face, and a pained look in her eyes.

“He is my cousin,” said poor Geronimo, “and very sick, I fear.”

The nun bent down, and touched with her thin white fingers the blackened hand of the painter-alchemist.

“He is dead!” said the nun. “Heaven rest his soul!”

“My poor Francesco!” said Geronimo, and his tears fell on the dead man’s face as he stooped to kiss his forehead.

“Was that his name?”

“Francesco Mazzuoli, painter of Parma, sometimes called Parmigiano.”

“No! no!” With a strange wild cry the nun took his head into her breast. “This is not Francesco!” and she gazed into the livid, withered face eagerly, passionately.

“So please you, it is he indeed—a noble painter. I am his cousin, and know what I say. He sought to grow rich, poor soul! May God forgive him, he practised alchemy! He sought for gold, yet not for himself. Perhaps his brain was turned; he loved, yet haplessly so.”

The nun did not speak. She had fainted on the body of Francesco, with her lips upon the lips of the dead man.

“And there were tears in her eyes,” said the lady abbess of the convent afterwards. “I never saw tears in her eyes before. Perhaps she will be happier now.”

Parmigiano was buried, as he had desired, in the church of the Servite monks, with a cypress cross upright on his breast. Geronimo often found other flowers strewn upon the grave than those he had himself placed there, yet he never knew from whose hand they came. Often to himself, though, he would say:

“Surely the eyes of that sister of Santa Lucia look out in the eyes of the Roman Lucretia, and in the eyes of the Holy Virgin in the fresco of the Staccata.”

2em

to Gosse, who tells us “the Sea Anemone is an indubitable animal, and its organisation more complex than is usually supposed,” and to other men of science of our day, Marine Zoology rises year by year like a growing child, and in the microcosms of our rock pools, nestling rocks, and sandy nooks, we find that life there has its pleasures and its pains, and that there are beings, who, in spite of having once puzzled writers whether to consider them “as a superior rank of vegetables or the humblest order of the animated tribe,” are replete with vivacity and animation, sensible of the summer sunlight and the winter cold, and day by day developing to our minds the fact that they have instincts, will, and disposition, as full of interest and amusement as their forms delight us, each in its own kind by their beauty, their varying hues, and their peculiar and most wondrous construction.

When we hear of the “Beadlet Actinia,” who displayed its velvety robe and blue turquoises in an aquarium for twenty years, how utterly insignificant sounds the tale we tell, in an experience that boasts of little more than a year; but each day might have been a month, such a source of occupation and pleasure has it afforded me to foster and watch the lovely inhabitants of my two or three glass vases—Aquaria. Each individual is endeared to me by association, whether coaxed and petted from its home in the depth of a glassy pool, “from its snug arm-chair,” in its native lime or sandstone, from some niche in the overhanging or perpendicular rocks, “or on the surf-beaten sands that encircle it around.”

The oldest, and to me the most attractive of my pets, is a beautiful Sagartia Viduata, a slim, graceful shaded drab column, warmer in the tint as it rises higher, and carefully striped longitudinally with lighter hues; a fancifully pencilled greyish-tinted disc, with a distinct white mark at the corners of the mouth, and five rows of the purest translucent greyish-blue-tinted tentacula and viola. The substance of the Viduata is of a leathery construction and its constitution apparently like most creatures well formed and healthy, fully adapted to battle with the storms of life; and agreeing with the poet “that sure there is need of social intercourse in a world that seems to toll the death-blow of its decease, and by the voice of all its elements to preach the general doom,” the Viduata is seldom found alone. It is somewhat select, however, in the choice of its companions, and found most frequently on terms of the greatest intimacy with the queenly Actinoloba Dianthus Anemone, whether pendent side by side with it, and like it revelling in a crystal drop—for the Sagart Anemone, like the prudent oyster, retains sufficient water to keep it in luxurious comfort during the ebb of tide—cushioned within its own walls, a pulpy cone of jelly, or gummed and flattened to the rock, like a piece of card, in lazy indolence and apathy. Born to an active bright existence, and reared to remain steady and unmoved amidst the roaring of the waters and the violence of the storm, the Viduata, with the patient calmness and resignation that betokens a well-regulated mind, bears his reverse of fortune and translation to a narrow and circumscribed home