by Ouida
Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes of the deities spoke. Thus he saw them, thus he heard, whilst the pale and watery sunlight lit up the form of the toiler in Pheræ.
For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with the genius of a man, which, being born of a god, yet is bound as a slave to the grindstone. Since, even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring Bow, so is genius mocked of the world when it has bartered the herds, and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that no ear, dully mortal, can hear.
And as he looked upon this symbol of his life, the captivity and the calamity, the strength and the slavery of his existence overcame him; and for the first hour since he had been born of a woman Arslàn buried his face in his hands and wept.
He could bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he chose, as the chained god in Pheræ bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to carry his yoke; yet, like the god, he likewise stood fettered to the mill to grind for bread.
BOOK IV.
CHAPTER I.
A valley long and narrow, shut out from the rest of the living world by the ramparts of stone that rose on either side to touch the clouds; dense forests of pines, purple as night, where the erl-king rode and the bear-king reigned; at one end mountains, mist, and gloom, at the other end the ocean; brief days with the sun shed on a world of snow, in which the sounds of the winds and the moans of the wolves alone were heard in the solitude; long nights of marvelous magnificence with the stars of the arctic zone glowing with an unbearable luster above a sea of phosphorescent fire; those were Arslàn’s earliest memories — those had made him what he was.
In that pine-clothed Norwegian valley, opening to the sea, there were a few homesteads gathered together round a little wooden church, with torrents falling above them, and a profound loneliness around; severed by more than a day’s journey from any other of the habitations of men.
There a simple idyllic life rolled slowly on through the late and lovely springtimes, when the waters loosened and the seed sprouted, and the white blossoms broke above the black ground: through the short and glorious summers, when the children’s eyes saw the elves kiss the roses, and the fairies float on the sunbeam, and the maidens braided their fair hair with blue cornflowers to dance on the eve of St. John: through the long and silent winters, when an almost continual night brooded over all things, and the thunder of the ocean alone answered the war of the wind-torn forests, and the blood-red blaze of the northern light gleamed over a white still mountain world, and, within doors, by the warm wood fire the youths sang Scandinavian ballads, and the old people told strange sagas, and the mothers, rocking their new-born sons to sleep, prayed God to have mercy on all human lives drowning at sea and frozen in the snow.
In this alpine valley, a green nest, hidden amidst stupendous walls of stone, bottomless precipices, and summits that touched the clouds, there was a cottage even smaller and humbler than most, and closest of all to the church. It was the house of the pastor.
The old man had been born there, and had lived there all the years of his life, — save a few that he had passed in a town as a student, — and he had wedded a neighbor who, like himself, had known no other home than this one village. He was gentle, patient, simple, and full of tenderness; he worked, like his people, all the week through in the open weather among his fruit-trees, his little breadth of pasturage, his herb-garden, and his few sheep.
On the Sabbath-day he preached to the people the creed that he himself believed in with all the fond, unquestioning, implicit faith of the young children who lifted to him their wondering eyes.
He was good; he was old: in his simple needs and his undoubting hopes he was happy; all the living things of his little world loved him, and he loved them. So fate lit on him to torture him, as it is its pleasure to torture the innocent.
It sent him a daughter who was fair to sight, and had a voice like music; a form lithe and white, hair of gold, and with eyes like her own blue skies on a summer night.
She had never seen any other spot save her own valley; but she had the old Norse blood in her veins, and she was restless; the sea tempted her with an intense power; she desired passionately without knowing what she desired.
The simple pastoral work, the peaceful household labors, the girls’ garland of alpine flowers, the youths’ singing in the brief rose twilight, the saga told the thousandth time around the lamp in the deep midwinter silence; these things would not suffice for her. The old Scandinavian Bersaeck madness was in her veins. The mountains were to her as the walls of a tomb. And one day the sea tempted her too utterly; beyond her strength; as a lover, after a thousand vain entreaties, one day tempts a woman, and one day finds her weak. The sea vanquished her, and she went — whither?
They hardly knew: to these old people the world that lay behind their mountain fortress was a blank. It might be a paradise; it might be a prison. They could not tell.
They suffered their great agony meekly; they never cursed her; they did not even curse their God because they had given life to a woman-child.
After awhile they heard of her.
She wrote them tender and glowing words; she was well, she was proud, she was glad, she had found those who told her that she had a voice which was a gift of gold, and that she might sing in triumph to the nations. Such tidings came to her parents from time to time; brief words, first teeming with hope, then delirious with triumph, yet ever ending with a short, sad sigh of conscience, a prayer for pardon — pardon for what? The letters never said: perhaps only for the sin of desertion.
The slow salt tears of age fell on these glowing pages in which the heart of a young, vainglorious, mad, tender creature had stamped itself; but the old people never spoke of them to others. “She is happy, it does not matter for us.” This was all they said, yet this gentle patience was a martyrdom too sharp to last; within that year the mother died, and the old man was left alone.
The long winter came, locking the valley within its fortress of ice, severing it from all the rest of the breathing human world; and the letters ceased. He would not let them say that she had forgotten; he chose to think that it was the wall of snow which was built up between them rather than any division raised by her ingratitude and oblivion.
The sweet, sudden spring came, all the white and golden flowers breaking up from the hard crust of the soil, and all the loosened waters rushing with a shout of liberty to join the sea. The summer followed, with the red mountain roses blossoming by the brooks, and the green mountain grasses blowing in the wind, with the music of the herd-bells ringing down the passes, and the sound of the fife and of the reed-pipe calling the maidens to the dance.
In the midst of the summer, one night, when all the stars were shining above the quiet valley, and all the children slept under the roofs with the swallows, and not a soul was stirring, save where here and there a lover watched a light glare in some lattice underneath the eaves, a half-dead woman dragged herself feebly under the lime-tree shadows of the pastor’s house, and struck with a faint cry upon the door and fell at her father’s feet, broken and senseless. Before the full day dawned she had given birth to a male child and was dead.
Forgiveness had killed her; she might have borne reproach, injury, malediction, but against that infinite love which would bear with her even in her wretchedness, and would receive her even in her abasement, she had no strength.
She died as her son’s eyes opened to the morning light. He inherited no name, and they called him after his grandsire, Arslàn.
When his dead daughter lay stretched before him in the sunlight, with her white large limbs folded to rest, and her noble fair face calm as a mask of marble, the old pastor knew little — nothing — of what her life through these two brief years had been. Her lips had scarcely breathed a word before she had fallen senseless on his threshold. That she had had triumph he knew; that she had fallen into dire necessities he saw. Whether she had surrendere
d art for the sake of love, or whether she had lost the public favor by some public caprice, whether she had been eminent or obscure in her career, whether it had abandoned her, or she had abandoned it, he could not tell, and he knew too little of the world to be able to learn.
That she had traveled back on her weary way homeward to her native mountains that her son might not perish amidst strangers; thus much he knew, but no more. Nor was more ever known by any living soul.
In life there are so many histories which are like broken boughs that strew the ground, snapped short at either end, so that none know the crown of them nor the root.
The child, whom she had left, grew in goodliness, and strength, and stature, until the people said that he was like the child-king, whom their hero Frithiof raised up upon his buckler above the multitude: and who was not afraid, but boldly gripped the brazen shield, and smiled fearlessly at the noonday sun.
The child had his mother’s Scandinavian beauty; the beauty of a marble statue, white as the snow, of great height and largely moulded; and his free life amidst the ice-fields and the pine-woods, and on the wide, wild northern seas developed these bodily to their uttermost perfection. The people admired and wondered at him; love him they did not. The lad was cold, dauntless, silent; he repelled their sympathies and disdained their pastimes. He chose rather to be by himself, than with them. He was never cruel; but he was never tender; and when he did speak he spoke with a sort of eloquent scorn and caustic imagery that seemed to them extraordinary in one so young.
But his grandfather loved him with a sincere love, though it was tinged with so sharp a bitterness; and reared him tenderly and wisely; and braced him with a scholar’s lore and by a mountaineer’s exposure; so that both brain and body had their due. He was a simple childlike broken old man; but in this youth of promise that unfolded itself beside his age seemed to strike fresh root, and he had wisdom and skill enough to guide it justly.
The desire of his soul was that his grandson should succeed him in the spiritual charge of that tranquil and beloved valley, and thus escape the dire perils of that world in which his mother’s life had been caught and consumed like a moth’s in flame. But Arslàn’s eyes looked ever across the ocean with that look in them which had been in his mother’s; and when the old Norseman spoke of this holy and peaceful future, he was silent.
Moreover, he — who had never beheld but the rude paintings on panels of pine that decorated the little red church under the firs and lindens, — he had the gift of art in him.
He had few and rough means only with which to make his crude and unguided essays; but the delirium of it was on him, and the peasants of his village gazed awe-stricken and adoring before the things which he drew on every piece of pine-wood, on every smooth breadth of sea-worn granite, on every bare surface of lime-washed wall that he could find at liberty for his usage.
When they asked him what, in his manhood, he would do, he said little. “I will never leave the old man,” he made answer; and he kept his word. Up to his twentieth year he never quitted the valley. He studied deeply, after his own manner; but nearly all his hours were passed in the open air alone, in the pure cold air of the highest mountain summits, amidst the thunder of the furious torrents, in the black recesses of lonely forests, where none, save the wolf and the bear, wandered with him; or away on the vast expanse of the sea, where the storm drove the great arctic waves like scourged sheep, and the huge breakers seized the shore as a panther its prey.
On such a world as this, and on the marvelous nights of the north, his mind fed itself and his youth gained its powers. The faint, feeble life of the old man held him to this lonely valley that seemed filled with the coldness, the mystery, the unutterable terror and the majesty of the arctic pole, to which it looked; but unknown to him, circumstance thus held him likewise where alone the genius in him could take its full shape and full stature.
Unknown to him, in these years it took the depth, the strength, the patience, the melancholy, the virility of the North; took these never to be lost again.
In the twentieth winter of his life an avalanche engulfed the pastor’s house, and the little church by which it stood, covering both beneath a mountain of earth and snow and rock and riven trees. Some of the timbers withstood the shock, and the roof remained standing, uncrushed, above their heads. The avalanche fell some little time after midnight: there were only present in the dwelling himself, the old man, and a serving woman.
The woman was killed on her bed by the fall of a beam upon her; he and the pastor still lived: lived in perpetual darkness without food or fuel, or any ray of light.
The wooden clock stood erect, uninjured; they could hear the hours go by in slow succession. The old man was peaceful and even cheerful; praising God often and praying that help might come to his beloved one. But his strength could not hold out against the icy cold, the long hunger, the dreadful blank around as of perpetual night. He died ere the first day had wholly gone by, at even-song; saying still that he was content, and still praising God who had rewarded his innocence with shame and recompensed his service with agony.
For two more days and nights Arslàn remained in his living tomb, enshrouded in eternal gloom, alone with the dead, stretching out his hands ever and again to meet that icy touch rather than be without companionship.
On the morning of the third day the people of the village, who had labored ceaselessly, reached him, and he was saved.
As soon as the spring broke he left the valley and passed over the mountains, seeking a new world.
His old familiar home had become hateful to him; he had no tie to it save two low graves, still snow-covered underneath a knot of tall stone-pines; the old Norse passion of wandering was in his veins as it had been in his mother’s before him; he fiercely and mutely descried freedom, passion, knowledge, art, fame, as she had desired them, and he went: turning his face from that lowly green nest lying like a lark’s between the hills.
He did not go as youth mostly goes, blind with a divine dream of triumph: he went, consciously, to a bitter combat as the sea-kings of old, whose blood ran in his veins, and whose strength was in his limbs, had gone to war, setting their prow hard against the sharp salt waves and in the teeth of an adverse wind.
He was not without money. The pastor, indeed, had died almost penniless; he had been always poor, and had given the little he possessed to those still poorer. But the richest landowner in the village, the largest possessor of flocks and herds, dying childless, had bequeathed his farm and cattle to Arslàn; having loved the lad’s dead mother silently and vainly. The value of these realized by sale gave to Arslàn, when he became his own master, what, in that valley at least, was wealth; and he went without care for the future on this score into the world of men; his mind full of dreams and the beautiful myths of dead ages; his temper compounded of poetry and of coldness, of enthusiasm and of skepticism; his one passion a supreme ambition, pure as snow in its instinct, but half savage in its intensity.
From that spring, when he had passed away from his birthplace as the winter snows were melting on the mountain-sides, and the mountain flowers were putting forth their earliest buds under the pine-boughs, until the time that he now stood solitary, starving, and hopeless before the mocking eyes of his Hermes, twelve years had run their course, and all through them he had never once again beheld his native land.
Like the Scandinavian Regner, he chose rather to perish in the folds, and by the fangs, of the snakes that devoured him than return to his country with the confession of defeat. And despite the powers that were in him, his life had been a failure, an utter failure — as yet.
In his early youth he had voyaged often with men who went to the extreme north in search of skins and such poor trade as they could drive with Esquimaux or Koraks; he had borne their dangers and their poverty, their miseries and their famine, for sake of seeing what they saw; — the pathless oceans of the ice realm, the trailing pines alone in a white, snow-world, the red moon fantastic and
horrible in a sky of steel, the horned clouds of reindeer rushing through the endless night, the arch of the aurora spanning the heavens with their fire. He had passed many seasons of his boyhood in the silence, the solitude, the eternal desolation of the mute mystery of the arctic world, which for no man has either sympathy or story; and in a way he had loved it, and was often weary for it; in a way its spirit remained with him always; and its inexorable coldness, its pitiless indifference to men’s wants and weakness, its loneliness and its purity, and its scorn, were in all the works of his hand; blended in a strange union with the cruelty and the voluptuousness, and the gorgeousness of color, that gave to everything he touched the gleed and the temper of the case.
Thus, what he did pleased none; being for one half the world too chill, and being for the other half too sensual.
The world had never believed in him; and he found himself in the height and the maturity of his powers condemned to an absolute obscurity. Not one man in a million knew his name.
During these years he had devoted himself to the study of art with an undeviating subservience to all its tyrannies. He had studied humanity in all its phases; he had studied form with all the rigid care that it requires; he had studied color in almost every land that lies beneath the sun; he had studied the passions in all their deformities, as well as in all their beauties; he had spared neither himself nor others in pursuit of knowledge. He had tried most vices, he had seen all miseries, he had spared himself no spectacle, however loathsome; he had turned back from no license, however undesired, that could give him insight into or empire over human raptures and affliction. Neither did he spare himself any labor however costly, however exhausting, to enrich his brain with that varied learning, that multifarious scene which he held needful to every artist who dared to desire greatness. The hireling beauty of the wanton, the splendor of the sun and sea, the charnel lore of anatomy, the secrets of dead tongues and buried nations, the horrors of the lazar wards and pest-houses, the glories of golden deserts and purple vineyards, the flush of love on a young girl’s cheek, the rottenness of corruption on a dead man’s limbs, the hellish tint of a brothel, the divine calm of an Eastern night; all things alike he studied, without abhorrence as without delight, indifferent to all save for one end, — knowledge and art.