by Ouida
He might have been hers, all hers; and she had loved the base things of a worldly greatness better than himself. And now he lay dying there, as the sun dropped westward and night came.
She felt no chill of evening. She felt neither hunger nor thirst. Crowds of weeping people hung about in the gardens below. She heard nothing that passed round her, save the few words of her old friend, when from time to time he came and told her that there was no change.
The moon rose, and its light fell on the stone of the terrace, and through the vast deserted chambers opening from it; on the grey worn marbles of the statues, and on the pale angels of the frescoes.
It was ten o’clock: the chimes of the convent above on the mountains told every hour. Unceasingly she paced to and fro, to and fro, like some mad, or wounded creature. The silence and serenity of the night, the balmy fragrance of it, and the silvery light, were so much mockery of her wretchedness. She had never thought that there could be agony like this — and yet from heaven no sign!
Nearly another hour had passed before her friend approached her again. She caught the sound of his step in the darkness; her heart stood still; her blood was changed to ice, frozen with the deadliness of the most deadly fear on earth; she could only look at him with wide-opened, strained, blind eyes.
For the first time he smiled: —
“Take comfort,” he said, softly. “He has fallen asleep, he is less exhausted, they say that he may live. How cold you are! — this night will kill you!”
She dropped down upon her knees on the stone pavement, and all her bowed frame was shakened by convulsive weeping.
He drew aside in reverence and left her alone in the light of the moon.
When midnight came hope was certain.
The sleep still lasted; the fever had abated, the cold chills had not returned.
She called her old friend to her out into the terrace.
“I will go now. Send to me at daybreak and keep my secret.”
“May I tell him nothing?”
“Tell him to come to me — when he is able.”
“Nothing more?”
“No; nothing. He will know—”
“But—”
She turned her face to him in the full moonlight, with the tears of her joy coursing down her cheeks, and he started at the change in her that this one night of suffering had wrought.
“No, say nothing more. — But — but — you shall see what my atonement shall be, and my thankfulness.”
Then she went away from him softly in the darkness and the fragrance of the April night. The Duc looked after the lights of her carriage with a mist over his own eyes, but he shrugged his shoulders with a sigh.
“Who can ever say that he knows a woman! Who can ever predcit what she will not say, or will not do, or will not be!” he murmured, as he turned and went within to watch beside the bed of his friend, as the stars grew clearer and the dawn approached.
CHAPTER XIII.
A MONTH later Paolo della Rocca led his wife through what had once been his mother’s chambers at Palestrina, and which were now prepared for her, with all their wide windows unclosed and looking out to the rose and golden afternoon glories of the bright south-west.
In the little oratory, which opened out of the bed-chamber, there was hung an altar picture; it was the picture of San Cipriano il Mago.
“Take it as my marriage gift,” he murmured to her. “You threw away your magic wand and renounced the world for me, — oh, my love, my love! God grant you the Saints’ reward!”
She laid her hands upon his heart, and leant her cheek upon them.
“My reward is here.”
“And you will never repent?” —
“Did Cyprian repent when he broke his earthly bonds and gained eternal life? Once I was blind, but now I see. The world is nothing: — Love is enough!”
CHAPTER XIV.
“C’EST étonnant!” murmured the Duc de St. Louis the same evening softly to himself, standing on the steps of the Hôtel Murat, after assisting in the morning at those various civil ceremonies and impediments with which our beloved Italy, in her new character as a nation of Free Thought, does her best to impede and deter all such as cling to so old-world and pedantic a prejudice as marriage.
The dénoûment of the drama which he himself had first set in action had fallen upon him like a thunder-bolt. He had had no conception of what would happen. He had thought to enrich his friend by one of the finest fortunes in Europe, and lo! — the Due remained in an amazement and a sense of humiliation from which he could not recover, “C’est étonnant!” he murmured again and again. “Who would ever have believed that Miladi was a woman to beggar herself and play the romance of the ‘world lost for love?’ If I had only imagined — if I had only dreamed! I will never propose a marriage to any living being again; never.”
“You have nothing to be so remorseful abolit, Duc,” said Lord Clairvaux, with a sigh, himself utterly exhausted by all the law work that he had been obliged to go through. “It is very funny certainly — she of all women in the world! But they are happy enough, and he really is the only living creature that ever could manage her. If anybody had ever told me that any man would change Hilda like that!”
“Happy!” echoed M. de St. Louis, with his delicate and incredulous smile. He was a man who had no delusions; he was perfectly aware that there were no marriages that were happy; some were calm, this was the uttermost, and to remain calm required an immense income; money alone was harmony.
Lord Clairvaux lighted a very big cigar, and grumbled that it had been horrible to have to leave England in the Epsom month, but that he thanked goodness that it was the last of her caprices that he would be worried with; and he hoped that this Italian would like them when he had had a year or two of them.
“I don’t know, though, but what it is the only sensible caprice she ever did have in her life; eh?” he added; “except buying Escargot and giving him to me after the races — you remember? — Hang it, I’ve never seen such a Chantilly before or since as that was!”
“We never do see such a race as the one that we happen to win,” murmured M. de St. Louis.
“Of course it’s an awful cropper to take, and all that; but I’m not sure but what she’s done a wise thing, though all the women are howling at her like mad,” continued Lord Clairvaux; “a woman can’t live for ever on chiffons, you see.”
“Most women can — admirably. They buy at eighty as much white hair, the coiffeurs tell me, as they buy blonde or black at twenty.”
“Ah, but they can’t, if they have a bit of heart or mind in them. Hilda has both.”
“The case is so rare I could not prescribe for it — let us hope Miladi’s own prescription will suit her,” said the Duc, whose serene good-humour was still slightly ruffled.
“Well, she always was all extremes and contraries,” said Lord Clairvaux. “You never could say one minute what she wouldn’t do the next. By George! you know there is nothing too odd for her to go in for; I should not wonder an atom if when we come here two or three years hence, we find her worshipping a curly Paolino, seeing to the silkworms, and studying wine-making: she’s really tried everything else, you know.”
“Everything except happiness? Well, very few of us get any chance of trying that, or would appreciate it if we did get it. Happiness,” pursued the Due pensively, “must, after all, be almost as monotonous as discontent — when one is used to it. It is comforting to think so; for there is very little of it. I cannot realize Miladi amongst the babies and the winepresses; but you may be right.”
“Well, you know she’s tried everything else,” repeated Lord Clairvaux. “It will be like Julius Cæsar and his cabbage-garden.”
“You mean Diocletian,” said the Duc. “Do you leave to-night? We may as well go as far as Paris together.”
And he turned back into the hotel to bid farewell to Madame Mila.
Madame Mila, — who had made the religious and civil ceremonies gorg
eous in the last new anomalous anachronisms, with a classic and clinging dress, quite Greek in its cut, covered all over with the eyes out of peacocks’ feathers, and a cotte de maille boddice, stiff as pasteboard, with gold and silver embroideries, — was now on the point of departure from the Winter City across the Mont Cenis, and was covered up in the most wonderful of hooded cloaks trimmed with the feathers of the Russian diver and the grebe; about one hundred and fifty birds, happy, peaceful, and innocent under their native skies, had died to trim the wrap, and it would probably be worn about half-a-dozen times; for feathers are so very soon tumbled, as everybody knows.
“They are quite mad, both of them!” said the little lady, giving her small fingers in adieu, and turning to see that Maurice had all the things she wanted, and was duly hooking them on to her ceinture of oxydised silver.
She travelled with her two maids, a courier, and a footman, but none of them did as much hard work as the indefatigable Maurice.
“Perhaps, Madame,” said the Duc, who indeed thought so himself; but was not going to admit it too strongly of two persons who, despite their lamentable weakness, remained his favourites. “But if a few people were not mad occasionally there would be no chance for the sanity of the world.”
“Well, they will repent horribly, that is one comfort; she most of all,” said Madame Mila, with asperity. “She ought to have been prevented; treated for lunacy, you know; in France they would have managed it at once with a conseil de famille. Maurice, you are screwing the top of that flacon on all wrong — do take more care! She will repent horribly, but she don’t see it now. Of course if she had had to lose the jewels they would have brought her to reason. As it is she don’t in the least realise the horrible thing that she’s done; — not in the least, not in the least! And the idea of going to his villa to-day! So unusual you know; — so positively improper! So utterly contrary to all custom! When I said to her, too, that she wouldn’t be able even to afford Worth, she laughed, and answered, that she would have one dress from him every year for old friendship’s sake for the Palestrina vintage balls, and that he would be sure to embroider her the loveliest Bacchic symbolisms and put the cone of the thyrsus for buttons! — only fancy! She could actually jest about that! How miserable she will be in three months when she has come back to her senses; and how miserable she will make him!”
“Chère comtesse,” said the Duc, taking up his hat and cane, “everybody repents everything. It is a law of Fate. The only difference is that some people repent pleasantly, and some unpleasantly. Let us hope that our beautiful Duchesse will repent pleasantly. Madame, j’ai l’honneur de vous saluer — Bon voyage; au revoir.”
Ariadne
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
CHAPTER I.
“IT is an Ariadne; of course it is an Ariadne. A Bacchus? — pooh!” I said over and over again to myself, sitting before it in the drowsy noon, all by myself in the warm summer weather; for the porter in the hall yonder was a friend of mine, and often let me in when the place was closed to the public, knowing that I was more likely to worship the marbles than to harm them.
It was intensely still.
Outside the sun was broad and bright upon the old moss-grown terraces and steps, and not a bough was stirring in the soft gloom of drooping cedar and of spreading pine. There was one of the lattice casements open. I could see the long lush grass full of flowers, the heavy ilex shadows crossing one another, and the white shapes of the cattle asleep in that fragrance and darkness of green leaves. The birds had ceased to sing, and even the lizards were quiet in these deep mossy Faunus-haunted ways of beautiful Borghese, where Raffaelle used to wander at sunrise, coming out from his little bedchamber that he had painted so prettily with his playing gleeful Loves, and flower-hidden gods, and nymphs with their vases of roses, and the medallions of his Fornarina.
“It is an Ariadne,” I said, sitting in the Cæsars’ Gallery, — that long, light, most lovely chamber, with its wide grated casements open to the woodland greenness, and the gleam of the brown lily-laden waters, and the leaf-tempered glory of the golden sunlight.
Do you know the bust I mean? — the one in bronze on a plinth of flowered alabaster, with a crown of thickly-woven ivy-leaves on its clustered hair? It is not called an Ariadne here in Villa Borghese: it is called a young Bacchus; but that is absurd. It might be Persephone or Libera, but to my thinking it is an Ariadne.
It has a likeness to her of the Capitol, only it is without her heaviness of cheek and chin, and with something of extreme youth, of faith, of hope, of inspiration, which are very beautiful and are all its own. Go you, traveller, and see it where it stands, with all the bestial, bloated, porphyry emperors around it, and the baby Hercules in his lion-skin hood in front of it, and you will see that I am right: only it is an Ariadne, mind you, before the abandonment on Naxos.
There is a Bacchus here, — nay, there are many, — but there is one in this Gallery of the Cæsars that is perhaps the most beautiful ideal of the Homeric Dionysus in the world, and it stands here, too, in this room of the Cæsars. Do not confound him with the Bacchus of the Vestibule: that is a finer statue, may-be, since more famous; but a far lower deity; indeed, no deity at all, for anything that his eyes say of soul, or that his mouth breathes of creation; but this Bacchus, younger also, is all a god, — the true Dionysus ere the Asiatic and Latin adulterations corroded the Greek conception of his person and his office. He is the incarnation of youth, beneath whose footfall all flowers of passion and of fancy arise, but youth with all the surprise of genius in it, and all its strength, — its strength, and not its weakness, for he is divine, not human; he rejoices, but he reigns. Looking at him, one knows how far sweeter it must have been to have been old when the world was young, than it is now to be young when the world is old. “You Greeks are forever boys,” said the Egyptian to Solon. But now “nous vieillards nées d’hier” is the bitterest and truest epithet for us.
Then there was childhood even in the highest godhead.
Now the very children are never young.
This Bacchus and my Ariadne stand close to one another, ever near, yet never meeting, like lovers parted by irrevocable wrong.
I sat and looked at them for the hundredth time; and I thought if only the old myths could but have been kept pure they had never been bettered since Pan’s pipe was broken. One could wish Euhemerus had never been born: it was he who spoilt them first.
“It is an Ariadne, — certainly an Ariadne,” I said to myself. Maryx, the great sculptor, had laughed at me for saying so, but he had gone into some other of the chambers, and had left me of the same opinion still.
The warmth was great; the stillness perfect; the air was sweet with the smell of the woods and of the cattle’s breath.
I had slept but littl
e that night, having found a fragment of a book which I thought bore marks of the press of Aldus, and sitting until near dawn over my treasure in effort to verify it with a dear and learned monk I knew. I had been still up when with the first light on the earth the nightingales ceased a little, and the thrushes and merles took up the story and began a riot of song above me in the woods on the hill of Janus.
So now I was drowsy as the day was.
Noon is the midnight of the South. Deep dreams and peace fall upon all creation. The restless lizard pauses and basks, and even that noisiest denizen of summer sunshine, the cicala, is ashamed to make such an endless self-glorification with that old rattle which he carries in his stomach, and is almost quiet in the trees, only creaking a little now and then to assure mankind that he has not forgotten them; for every cicala, like each of us, believes himself the pivot of the world.
It was all so still, so warm and yet so cool, so full of sweet smells and of balmy quietude, here in Borghese, that a sort of slumber overtook me, and yet I was conscious in it all the while, as the mind in day-sleep often is of the pleasant passage of the west wind through the opened lattice, and of the noisy chimes that were ringing in the city and only echoed faintly and softly here through all the woodland thickness of green leaves.
Through half-closed eyes I saw the open window and the iron grating, and the bronze of the ilex boughs dark almost to blackness, and the high grass wherein the cattle were lying, and the broad blue skies that Raffaelle loved; and before me I saw the white god and the ivy-crowned head of my Ariadne.
“Yes, yes, surely it is an Ariadne,” I muttered to myself, for there is such pleasure in one’s own opinions. “Of course an Ariadne: how can they be so blind? There is dawning womanhood in every line. But she knows nothing about Naxos.”