by Ouida
He went away through the blackness and the stench, muttering, as he struck his staff upon each stair, —
“The picture will feed the stove; the law will give me that.”
She heard and shivered, and looked at the bed of straw, and on the great canvas of the Barabbas.
Before another day had come and gone, he would lie in the common ditch of the poor, and the work of his hand would be withered, as a scroll withers in a flame.
If she tried once more? If she sought human pity, human aid? Some deliverance, some mercy — who could say? — might yet be found, she thought. The gods were dead; but men, — were they all more wanton than the snake, more cruel than the scorpion?
For the first time in seven days she left his side.
She rose and staggered from the garret, down the stairway, into the lower stories of the wilderness of wood and stone.
She traced her way blindly to the places she had known. They closed their doors in haste, and fled from her in terror.
They had heard that she had gone to tend some madman, plague-stricken with some nameless fever; and those wretched lives to life clung closely, with a frantic lore.
One woman she stayed, and held with timid, eager bands. Of this woman she had taken nothing all the summer long in wage for waking her tired eyes at daybreak.
“Have pity!” she muttered. “You are poor, indeed, I know; but help me. He dies there!”
The woman shook her off, and shrank.
“Get you gone!” she cried. “My little child will sicken if you breathe on her!”
The others said the same, some less harshly, some more harshly. Twice or thrice they added:
“You beg of us, and send the jewels back? Go and be wise. Make your harvest of gold whilst you can. Reap while you may in the yellow fields with the sharp, sure sickle of youth!”
Not one among them braved the peril of a touch of pity; not one among them asked the story of her woe; and when the little children ran to her, their mothers plucked them back, and cried, —
“Art mad? She is plague-stricken.”
She went from them in silence, and left them, and passed out into the open air.
In all this labyrinth of roofs, in all these human herds, she yet thought, “Surely there must be some who pity?”
For even yet she was so young; and even yet she knew the world so little.
She went out into the streets.
Her brain was on fire, and her heart seemed frozen; her lips moved without sound, and unconsciously shaped the words which night and day pursued her, “A little gold, — a little gold!”
So slight a thing, they said, and yet high above reach as Aldebaran, when it glistened through the storm-wrack of the rain.
Why could he have not been content — she had been — with the rush of the winds over the plains, the strife of the flood and the hurricane, the smell of the fruit-hung ways at night, the cool, green shadows of the summer woods, the courses of the clouds, the rapture of the keen air blowing from the sea, the flight of a bird over the tossing poppies, the day-song of the lark? All these were life enough for her; were freedom, loveliness, companionship, and solace. Ah, God! she thought, if only these had made the world of his desires likewise. And even in her ghastlier grief her heart sickened for them in vain anguish as she went, — these the pure joys of earth and air which were her only heritage.
She went out into the streets.
It was a night of wind and rain.
The lamps flickered through the watery darkness. Beggars, and thieves, and harlots jostled her in the narrow ways.
“It must be hell, — the hell of the Christians,” she muttered, as she stood alone on the flints of the roads, in the rancid smell, in the hideous riot, in the ghastly mirth, in the choking stench, in the thick steam of the darkness, whose few dull gleams of yellow light served to show the false red on a harlot’s cheek, or the bleeding wound on a crippled horse, or the reeling dance of a drunkard.
It was the hell of the Christians: in it there was no hope for her.
She moved on with slow unconscious movement of her limbs; her hair blew back, her eyes had a pitiless wonder in their vacant stare; her bloodless face had the horror in it that Greek sculptors gave to the face of those whom a relentless destiny pursued and hunted down; ever and again she looked back as she went, as though some nameless, shapeless, unutterable horror were behind her in her steps.
The people called her mad, and laughed and hooted her; when they had any space to think of her at all.
“A little food, a little wine, for pity’s sake,” she murmured; for her own needs she had never asked a crust in charity, but for his, — she would have kissed the mud from the feet of any creature who would have had thus much of mercy.
In answer they only mocked her, some struck her in the palm of her outstretched hand. Some called her by foul names; some seized her with a drunken laugh, and cursed her as she writhed from their lewd hold; some, and these often women, whispered to her of the bagnio and the brothel; some muttered against her as a thief; one, a youth, who gave her the gentlest answer that she had, murmured in her ear, “A beggar? with that face? come tarry with me to-night.”
She went on through the sulphurous yellow glare, and the poisonous steam of these human styes, shuddering from the hands that grasped, the voices that wooed her, the looks that ravished her, the laughs that mocked her.
It was the hell of the Christians: it was a city at midnight; and its very stones seem to arise and give tongue in her derision and cry, “Oh, fool, you dreamt of a sacrifice which should be honor; of a death, which should be release; of a means whereby through you the world should hear the old songs of the gods? Oh, fool! We are Christians here: and we only gather the reeds of the river to bruise them and break them, and thrust them, songless and dead, in the name of our Lord.”
She stumbled on through the narrow ways.
After a little space they widened, and the lights multiplied, and through the rushing rains she saw the gay casements of the houses of pleasure.
On the gust of wind there came a breath of fragrance from a root of autumn blossom in a balcony. The old fresh woodland smell smote her as with a blow; the people in the street looked after her.
“She is mad,” they said to one another, and went onward.
She came to a broad place, which even in that night of storm was still a blaze of fire, and seemed to her to laugh through all its marble mask, and all its million eyes of golden light. A cruel laugh which mocked and said, —
“The seven chords of the lyre; who listens, who cares, who has ears to hear? But the rod of wealth all women kiss, and to its rule all men crawl; forever. You dreamt to give him immortality? — fool! Give him gold — give him gold! We are Christians here: and we have but one God.”
Under one of the burning cressets of flame there was a slab of stone on which were piled, bedded in leaves, all red and gold, with pomp of autumn, the fruits of the vine in great clear pyramids of white and purple; tossed there so idly in such profusion from the past vintage-time, that a copper coin or two could buy a feast for half a score of mouths. Some of the clusters rotted already from their over-ripeness.
She looked at them with the passionate woeful eyes of a dog mad with thirst, which can see water and yet cannot reach it. She leaned towards them, she caught their delicious coldness in her burning hands, she breathed in their old familiar fragrance with quick convulsive breath.
“He dies there!” she muttered, lifting her face to the eyes of the woman guarding them. “He dies there; would you give me a little cluster, ever such a little one, to cool his mouth, for pity’s sake?”
The woman thrust her away, and raised, shrill and sharp through all the clamor of the crowd, the cry of thief.
A score of hands were stretched to seize her, only the fleetness of her feet saved her. She escaped from them, and as a hare flies to her form, so she fled to the place whence she came.
She had done all she could;
she had made one effort, for his sake; and all living creatures had repulsed her. None would believe; none would pity; none would hear. Her last strength was broken, her last faint hope had failed.
In her utter wretchedness she ceased to wonder, she ceased to revolt, she accepted the fate which all men told her was her heritage and portion.
“It was I who was mad,” she thought; “so mad, so vain, to dream that I might ever be chosen as the reed was chosen. If I can save him, anyhow, what matter, what matter for me?”
She went back to the place where he lay — dying, unless help came to him. She climbed the stairway, and stole through the foulness and the darkness of the winding ways, and retraced her steps, and stood upon his threshold.
She had been absent but one hour; yet already the last, most abject, most wretched penalty of death had come to him. They robbed him in his senselessness.
The night was wet. The rain dropped through the roof. The rats fought on the floor and climbed the walls. The broken lattice blew to and fro with every gust of wind.
A palsied crone, with ravenous hands, sheared the locks of his fair hair, muttering, “They will fetch a stoup of brandy; and they would take them to-morrow in the dead-house.”
The old man who owned the garret crammed into a wallet such few things of metal, or of wood, or of paper as were left in the utter poverty of the place, muttering, as he gathered the poor shreds of art, “They will do to burn; they will do to burn. At sunrise I will get help and carry the great canvas down.”
The rats hurried to their holes at the light; the hag let fall her shears, and fled through an opening in the wall.
The old man looked up and smiled with a ghastly leer upon her in the shadows.
“To-morrow I will have the great canvas,” he said, as he passed out, bearing his wallet with him. “And the students will give me a silver bit, for certain, for that fine corpse of his. It will make good work for their knives and their moulding-clay. And he will be dead to-morrow; — dead, dead.”
And he grinned in her eyes as he passed her. A shiver shook her; she said nothing; it seemed to her as though she would never speak again.
She set down her lamp, and crossed the chamber, and kneeled beside the straw that made his bed.
She was quite calm.
She knew that the world gave her one chance — one only. She knew that men alone reigned, and that the gods were dead.
She flung herself beside him on the straw and wound her arms about him, and laid his head to rest upon her heart; one moment — he would never know.
Between them there would be forever silence. He would never know.
Greatness would come to him, and the dominion of gold; and the work of his hands would pass amidst the treasures of the nations; and he would live and arise and say, “The desire of my heart is mine;” — and yet he would never know that one creature had so loved him that she had perished more horribly than by death to save him.
If he lived to the uttermost years of man, he would never know how, body and soul, she had passed away to destruction for his sake.
To die with him!
She laughed to think how sweet and calm such sacrifice as that had been.
Amidst the folded lilies, on the white waters, as the moon rose, — she laughed to think how she had sometimes dreamed to slay herself in such tender summer peace for him. That was how women perished whom men loved, and loved enough to die with them, their lips upon each other’s to the last. But she ——
Death in peace; sacrifice in honor; a little memory in a human heart; a little place in a great hereafter; these were things too noble for her — so they said.
A martyrdom in shame; a life in ignominy — these were all to which she might aspire — so they said.
Upon his breast women would sink to sleep; among his hair their hands would wander, and on his mouth their sighs would spend themselves. Shut in the folded leaves of the unblossomed years some dreams of passion and some flower of love must lie for him — that she knew.
She loved him with that fierce and envious force which grudged the wind its privilege to breathe upon his lips, the earth its right to bear his footsteps, which was forever jealous of the mere echo of his voice, avaricious of the mere touch of his hand. And when she gave him to the future, she gave him to other eyes, that would grow blind with passion, meeting his; to other forms, that would burn with sweetest shame beneath his gaze; to other lives, whose memories would pass with his to the great Hereafter, made immortal by his touch: all these she gave, she knew.
Almost it was stronger than her strength. Almost she yielded to the desire which burned in her to let him die, — and die there with him, — and so hold him forever hers, and not the world’s; his and none other’s in the eternal union of the grave, so that with hers his beauty should be consumed, and so that with hers his body should be shut from human sight, and the same corruption feed together on their hearts.
Almost she yielded; but the greatness of her love was stronger than its vileness, and its humility was more perfect than its cruelty.
It seemed to her — mad, and bruised, and stunned with her misery — that for a thing so worthless and loveless and despised as she to suffer deadliest shame to save a life so great as his was, after all, a fate more noble than she could have hoped. For her — what could it matter? — a thing baser than the dust, — whether the feet of men trampled her in scorn a little more, a little less, before she sank away into the eternal night wherein all things are equal and all things forgotten.
CHAPTER XV.
That night the moon found the Red Mouse, and said, —
“Did I not declare aright? Over every female thing you are victorious — soon or late?”
But the Red Mouse answered, —
“Nay, not so. For the soul still is closed against me; and the soul still is pure. But this men do not see, and women cannot know; — they are so blind.”
CHAPTER XVI.
Ere another year had been fully born, the world spoke in homage and in wonder of two things.
The one, a genius which had suddenly arisen in its midst, and taken vengeance for the long neglect of bitter years, and scourged the world with pitiless scorn until, before this mighty struggle which it had dared once to deride and to deny, it crouched trembling; and wondered and did homage; and said in fear, “Truly this man is great, and truth is terrible.”
The other, — the bodily beauty of a woman; a beauty rarely seen in open day, but only in the innermost recesses of a sensualist’s palace; a creature barefooted, with chains of gold about her ankles, and loose white robes which showed each undulation of the perfect limbs, and on her breast the fires of a knot of opal; a creature in whose eyes there was one changeless look, as of some desert beast taken from the freedom of the air and cast to the darkness of some unutterable horror; a creature whose lips were forever mute, mute as the tortured lips of Læna.
One day the man whom the nations at last had crowned, saw the creature whom it was a tyrant’s pleasure to place beside him now and then, in the public ways, as a tribune of Rome placed in his chariot of triumph the vanquished splendor of some imperial thing of Asia made his slave.
Across the clear hot light of noon the eyes of Arslàn fell on hers for the first time since they had looked on her amidst the pale poppies, in the noonrise, in the fields.
They smiled on her with a cold, serene, ironic scorn.
“So soon?” he murmured, and passed onward, whilst the people made way for him in homage.
He had his heart’s desire. He was great. He only smiled to think — all women were alike.
Her body shrank, her head dropped, as though a knife were thrust into her breast.
But her lips kept their silence to the last. They were so strong, they were so mute; they did not even once cry out against him, “For thy sake!”
CHAPTER XVII.
In the springtime of the year three gods watched by the river.
The golden willows blew in
the low winds; the waters came and went; the moon rose full and cold over a silvery stream; the reeds sighed in the silence. Two winters had drifted by, and one hot, drowsy summer; and all the white still shapes upon the walls of the granary already had been slain by the cold breath of Time. The green weeds waved in the empty casements; the chance-sown seeds of thistles and of bell-flowers were taking leaf between the square stones of the paven floors; on the deserted threshold lichens and brambles climbed together; the filmy ooze of a rank vegetation stole over the loveliness of Persephone and devoured one by one the immortal offspring of Zeus; about the feet of the bound sun-king in Phæros and over the calm serene mockery of Hermes’ smile the gray nets of the spiders’ webs had been woven to and fro, around and across, with the lacing of a million threads, as Fate weaves round the limbs and covers the eyes of mortals as they stumble blindly from their birthplace to their grave. All things, the damp and the dust, the frost and the scorch, the newts and the rats, the fret of the flooded water, and the stealing sure inroad of the mosses that everywhere grew from the dews and the fogs had taken and eaten, in hunger or sport, or had touched and thieved from, then left gangrened and ruined.
The three gods alone remained, who, being the sons of eternal night, are unharmed and unaltered by any passage of the years of earth, — the only gods who never bend beneath the yoke of Time, but unblenchingly behold the nations wither as uncounted leaves, and the lands and the seas change places, and the cities and the empires pass away as a tale that is told, and the deities that are worshiped in the temples change name and attributes and cultus at the wanton will of the age that begat them.
In the still, cold moonlit air they stand together hand in band, looking outward through the white night-mists. Other gods perished with the faith of each age as it changed; other gods, lived by the breath of men’s lips, the tears of prayer, the smoke of sacrifice; but they — their empire is the universe. In every young soul that leaps into the light of life, rejoicing blindly, Oneiros has dominion, and he alone. In every creature that breathes, from the conqueror resting on a field of blood to the nest-bird cradled in its bed of leaves, Hypnos holds a sovereignty which nothing mortal can long resist and live. And Thanatos — to him belongs every created thing, past, present, and to come; beneath his foot all generations lie, and in the hollow of his hand he holds the worlds. Though the earth be tenantless, and the heavens sunless, and the planets shrivel in their courses, and the universe be desolate in an endless night, yet through the eternal darkness Thanatos still will reign, and through its eternal solitudes he alone will wander and he still behold his work.