Farina tossed back his locks, and held his forehead
to the moon. All the Monk’s ghostly wrath
was foiled by the one little last sweet word of his
beloved, which made music in his ears whenever annoyance
sounded.
‘And herein,’ say the old writers, ’are
lovers, who love truly, truly recompensed for their
toils and pains; in that love, for which they suffer,
is ever present to ward away suffering not sprung of
love: but the disloyal, who serve not love faithfully,
are a race given over to whatso this base world can
wreak upon them, without consolation or comfort of
their mistress, Love; whom sacrificing not all to,
they know not to delight in.’
The soul of a lover lives through every member of
him in the joy of a moonlight ride. Sorrow and
grief are slow distempers that crouch from the breeze,
and nourish their natures far from swift-moving things.
A true lover is not one of those melancholy flies
that shoot and maze over muddy stagnant pools.
He must be up in the great air. He must strike
all the strings of life. Swiftness is his rapture.
In his wide arms he embraces the whole form of beauty.
Eagle-like are his instincts; dove-like his desires.
Then the fair moon is the very presence of his betrothed
in heaven. So for hours rode Farina in a silver-fleeting
glory; while the Monk as a shadow, galloped stern
and silent beside him. So, crowning them in the
sky, one half was all love and light; one, blackness
and fell purpose.
Not to earth was vouchsafed the honour of commencing
the great battle of that night. By an expiring
blue-shot beam of moonlight, Farina beheld a vast
realm of gloom filling the hollow of the West, and
the moon was soon extinguished behind sluggish scraps
of iron scud detached from the swinging bulk of ruin,
as heavily it ground on the atmosphere in the first
thunder-launch of motion.
The heart of the youth was strong, but he could not
view without quicker fawning throbs this manifestation
of immeasurable power, which seemed as if with a stroke
it was capable of destroying creation and the works
of man. The bare aspect of the tempest lent terrors
to the adventure he was engaged in, and of which he
knew not the aim, nor might forecast the issue.
Now there was nothing to illumine their path but such
forked flashes as lightning threw them at intervals,
touching here a hill with clustered cottages, striking
into day there a May-blossom, a patch of weed, a single
tree by the wayside. Suddenly a more vivid and
continuous quiver of violet fire met its reflection
on the landscape, and Farina saw the Rhine-stream
beneath him.
‘On such a night,’ thought he, ‘Siegfried
fought and slew the dragon!’
A blast of light, as from the jaws of the defeated
dragon in his throes, made known to him the country
he traversed. Crimsoned above the water glimmered
the monster-haunted rock itself, and mid-channel beyond,
flat and black to the stream, stretched the Nuns’
Isle in cloistral peace.
