So saying, the man turned and began sliding and slipping
down the steep ashy sides of the mountain cone with
a dexterity which carried him to the bottom in a few
moments; and on he went, sending back after him a cheerful
little air, the refrain of which is still to be heard
in our days in that neighborhood. A word or two
of the gay song fluttered back on the ear of the monk,—
“Tutta gieja, tutta festa.”
So gay and airy it was in its ringing cadence that
it seemed a musical laugh springing from sunny skies,
and came fluttering into the dismal smoke and gloom
of the mountain-top like a very butterfly of sound.
It struck on the sad, leaden ear of the monk much
as we might fancy the carol of a robin over a grave
might seem, could the cold sleeper below wake one
moment to its perception. If it woke one regretful
sigh and drew one wandering look downward to the elysian
paradise that lay smiling at the foot of the mountain,
he instantly suppressed the feeling, and set his face
in its old deathly stillness.
CLOUDS DEEPENING.
After the departure of her uncle to Florence, the
life of Agnes was troubled and harassed from a variety
of causes.
First, her grandmother was sulky and moody, and though
saying nothing directly on the topic nearest her heart,
yet intimating by every look and action that she considered
Agnes as a most ungrateful and contumacious child.
Then there was a constant internal perplexity,—a
constant wearying course of self-interrogation and
self-distrust, the pain of a sensitive spirit which
doubts at every moment whether it may not be falling
into sin. The absence of her kind uncle at this
time took from her the strongest support on which
she had leaned in her perplexities. Cheerful,
airy, and elastic in his temperament, always full of
fresh-springing and beautiful thoughts, as an Italian
dell is of flowers, the charming old man seemed, while
he stayed with Agnes, to be the door of a new and fairer
world, where she could walk in air and sunshine, and
find utterance for a thousand thoughts and feelings
which at all other times lay in cold repression in
her heart. His counsels were always so wholesome,
his sympathies so quick, his devotion so fervent and
cheerful, that while with him Agnes felt the burden
of her life insensibly lifted and carried for her
as by some angel guide.
Now they had all come back upon her, heavier a thousand-fold
than ever they had been before. Never did she
so much need counsel and guidance,—never
had she so much within herself to be solved and made
plain to her own comprehension; yet she thought with
a strange shiver of her next visit to her confessor.
That austere man, so chilling, so awful, so far above
all conception of human weaknesses, how should she
dare to lay before him all the secrets of her breast,
especially when she must confess to having disobeyed
