Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  And as I looked she seemed to change and hear; the bronze lips parted a while, and seemed to smile and answer me, “Yes, I am Ariadne. But how do you know, — you, an old man sitting all day long at a street-corner far from all converse with the gods?”

  And then a great change passed over all the bust, and a quiver and glow of life seemed to me to run through all the bronze and alabaster; the Egyptian stone of the column seemed to melt, and fold and unfold as a flower unfolds itself, and became delicate and transparent raiment through which one saw the rosy flesh and the rounded lines of a girl’s limbs and body; the metal in which the sculptor had imprisoned his thoughts seemed to dissolve, and grow warm and living, and become flesh, till breast and throat and cheek and brow blushed into sudden life.

  The eyes grew liquid and lustrous like lake-waters in starlight; the ivy-leaves grew green and fresh with dew; the clustered curls took brighter hues of gold and stirred as with the breeze; she grew alive and looked on all these white and silent gods.

  “I am Ariadne,” she said, sadly. “Yes. I knew Naxos. What woman escapes it that loves well? I am on earth once more, to my great woe. I prayed to Aidoneus to remain, lost in the dark, and with Persephone. But she said, ‘Nay, go upward into light, though into pain. Wept not Achilles here, and wished to be the meanest thing that lived and labored upon earth rather than king among immortal shades? For better is it to see the sun, though toiling in the dust; and sweeter is it to be kissed on the mouth, though stabbed to the heart, than to abide in endless night and windless quiet: — go.’ What did she mean? She said the gods would tell me. Tell me now. For of life I have forgotten as the dead forget. Only I forget not Naxos.”

  The gods were silent.

  The lewd Caesars hung their heads, and dared not lift their impure glances on hers.

  Her own betrayer spoke first, and smiled with a smile that was at once pitiful yet cruel. What was Naxos to him, save as a dull spot that he had left gladly, leaving the dead behind him, to pass across the summer seas in his flower-garlanded vessel?

  “Theseus and I gave you passion dear: without it you could not see the sun nor feel the knife. Be thankful to us.”

  Then he touched the marble floor with his thyrsus, and on its barren whiteness a purple passion-flower bloomed, and an asp ate its starry heart.

  The child Hercules cast from his head downward at her feet the lion’s skin.

  “The strong alone know passion. Perhaps their pain is better than the peace of the feeble.”

  And his curved and rosy mouth grew sorrowful: he seemed to be foreseeing his own shame when he should sit and spin, and think a woman’s lightest laugh of scorn more worth than smile of Zeus, or Olympus’s praise.

  The white cow lying sleeping beneath the ilex boughs rose from her bed in the grasses, and came and looked with lustrous weary eyes through the iron bars of the casement.

  “Once men called me Io,” she said, with wistful gaze. “But the gadfly in my flesh left me no peace till I sank content into the beast. It will be so with her when the purple passion-flower fades. The solitude of Naxos kills, — if not the body, then the soul.”

  But Apollo, hearing where he stood in all his white glory in the halls within, came with the sun’s rays about his perfect head, and answered for her:

  “No. Had you had ears for my songs, Io, never could you have been changed into the brute, to browse and graze. The souls my sibyls keep are strong.”

  Daphne — whom her lover had left alone in her agony — Daphne followed, with the boughs of the bay springing from her slender feet and from her beating bosom, and her floating hair becoming twisted leaves of bay.

  “Your sibyls are too strong for mortals, and there is no wisdom I see but Love!” she cried, in her torment. “Gods and men begrudge us the laurel, but when the laurel grows from the breast of a woman, — ah, heaven! it hurts!”

  Apollo smiled.

  “Of Love you would have nothing. Your wisdom comes too late. Is the bay bitter? That is not my fault.”

  Artemis came and looked, — she who ever slew the too audacious or too forgetful mortal with her slender and unerring shaft.

  “My sister Persephone has been more cruel than I,” she said, with a smile. “Does she send you back to your isles of Dia again? And where was your father in that darksome world where he judges, that he lets you come hither to brave me once more? Oh, fair fool of too much love and too much wisdom! Why have lifted the sword? Why have found the clue? The gods ever punish the mortal too daring and too excelling.”

  “Eros is more cruel than you or Persephone, O my sovereign of the Silver Bow!” said Dionysus, and smiled. He knew, had he not betrayed, not even the sacred Huntress could have slain her.

  Anacreon and Alcæus came from the central chambers and stood by: they had become immortals also.

  They murmured low one to another, —

  “When gods and men speak of Love, they wrong him: it is seldom he that reigns: it is only Philotès, who takes his likeness.”

  Among the deities from the upper chamber a mortal came, — the light lewd woman who had bared her charms to live forever here in marble, in counterfeit of the Venus Pandemos.

  “There is no Naxos for women who love Love and not one lover,” she said, with a wanton laugh. “Gods and men alike are faithful only to the faithless. She who worships the beauty of her own body and its joys is strong; she only: Aphrodite, who made me, taught me that.”

  Bacchus touched her in reproof, and the imperial harlot fled.

  “Aphrodite’s bond is hard,” he said. “My sister Helen knew: serving her once, she served forever; and day and night she drank Lethe, and drank in vain.”

  The Roman woman lying in a farther chamber on her marble bier, with the poppy-flowers of eternal sleep in her folded hands, glided as a shade glides from the asphodel meadows of the dead.

  “If not the temple of Lubentina, — then Death,” she said. “There is no middle path between the two. Return to Orcus and Dis-Pater.”

  And she held out to Ariadne the poppies red as war, which yet are symbols of the sole sure Peace.

  But Psyche playing with Eros in a niche where the motes of the sun were dancing to the sound of a satyr’s syrinx flew in on her rosy wings that are like the leaves of a pomegranate-blossom, and caught the butterfly that always hovers above her own head and would have given with it immortal life.

  But Love coming after her, the dancing sunbeams in his curls stayed her hand.

  “Nay; if this be Ariadne, she knows full well if I abide not with her she needs death, not life.”

  “Then stay,” said Ariadne’s traitor, with his sweet and cruel smile.

  Love shook his head and sighed.

  “You and men after you have forbidden me rest. The passion-flower blossoms but a single day and night, and I can lie no longer in one breast.”

  Anacreon said, —

  “Of old you had no wings, Eros. You were worthier of worship then.”

  Alcæus said, —

  “The laurel grew even as a high wall betwixt me and Sappho, but it was no fence betwixt her and the grave in the sea.”

  Love laughed, for he is often cruel.

  “I am stronger than all the gods, for, even being dead, you cannot forget me. Anacreon, all your songs were as the dumb beside one murmur of mine. Alcæus, all your verses and all your valor could not save you from one death-blow that I dealt.”

  Anacreon and Alcæus were silent.

  They knew that Love was stronger than men, fiercer than flame, and as the waves and the winds faithless.

  Ariadne stood silent and irresolute, the purple passion-flower lifted to her bosom, and at her feet the strong and bitter laurel, and the poppies that give death. Her hand hovered now over one, now over the other, like a poised bird that doubts between the east and west.

  Love chose for her, and lifted up the red flower of death.

  “Be wise. When I shall leave you, eat of this and sleep.”

&n
bsp; I awoke. It had been but a dream: there were no gods near; only statues that gleamed in a faint whiteness in the dark, for the people of the place had come in to close the casements, and were shutting out the golden sun.

  My Ariadne was but bronze once more. Io was lying in the grass without. Psyche and Love and all were gone. Bacchus still, only, seemed to smile.

  My friend the sculptor was coming in to the gallery from his study of the frieze of the Labors of Hercules.

  “Still before your Ariadne? And it is not an Ariadne,” said Maryx. “And if it be, who cares for her? The true Ariadne is in the Capitol. Let us go home: it is too warm, and I am tired. I was at work at four this morning, whilst my nightingales still were singing. Come and have your noonday wine with me.”

  We went away out of the emperors’ room into the dusky dreamful glades, where all artists love to wander and think of Raffaelle coming out through the morning dews, under the everlasting oaks.

  “One is always glad to come here,” said Maryx; “no habit dulls the charm of these old gardens: and no length of time dulls one’s regret for Raffaelle’s pavilion, — destroyed in our own generation, yet we speak evil of the Huns and Visigoths, and revile the Greeks for casting down the statues of the Mausoleum! These woods must have suited Raffaelle so well; I dare say his dear violinist played to him here of a spring-day morning, where the violets grew thickest. It is a pity there was no better nymph for him than the Fornarina: those little, hard, leering, cunning eyes of hers never could have cared for the violets, or for anything except the bracelets on her arms and the ducats in her purse. Are you dreaming of your Ariadne still? It is not of much value, and it is no Ariadne. I went by chance into the room of the Pauline Venus: my mouth will taste bitter all day. How venal and gaudy and vile she is, with her gilded upholstery! It is the most hateful thing that ever wasted marble. It is not even sensual; for sensuality may have its force to burn, its imagery to madden; but Canova’s Venus says nothing, — unless, indeed, it says what fools men are, and what artificial wantons they have cared for ever since the Roman matrons bought false hair and paint in the Sacred Way. How one loves Canova the man, and how one execrates Canova the artist! Surely never was a great repute achieved by so false a talent and so perfect a character! One would think he had been born and bred in Versailles instead of Treviso. He is called a naturalist! Look at his Graces! He is always Coysevox and Coustou at heart, — never purely classic, never frankly modern. Louis XIV. would have loved him better than Bernini.”

  We went out of the gates into the broad blaze of light; then away across the white piazza, where scarce a soul was stirring, and there was not a sound save of the rushing of the water from the lions’ mouths at the base of the sun-pillar of Heliopolis, that was rising like a sword of flame against the dazzling radiance of the air.

  I loved and honored Maryx; he was a great man, and good, and lived the life of the men of old, where his nightingales sang under his studio windows, among his myrtles and his marbles, on the side of the Sabine hill.

  But I refused to go on across the water and make my noonday meal with him; I was too full of dreams, and stupid still with sleep. I let him go home alone, and stopped at my own place by the corner of the street that leads to the bridge of Sextus, where the water gushes from the wall in the fountain that Fontana made for Pope Paul.

  CHAPTER II.

  A FAUN lives in this Ponte Sisto water. Often in those days I heard him laughing, and under the splashing of the spouts caught the tinkle of his pipe.

  In every one of the fountains of my Rome a naiad, or a satyr, a god, or a genius, has taken refuge, and in its depths dreams of the ruined temples and the leveled woods, and hides in its cool, green, moss-growing nest all day long, and, when the night falls, wakes and calls aloud.

  Water is the living joy of Rome.

  When the sky is yellow as brass, and the air sickly with the fever-mists, and the faces of men are all livid and seared, and all the beasts lie faint with the drought, it is the song of the water that keeps our life in us, sounding all through the daylight and the darkness across the desert of brick and stone. Men here in Rome have “written their names in water,” and it has kept them longer than bronze or marble. When one is far away across the mountains, and can no more see the golden wings of the archangel against the setting sun, it is not of statues or palaces, not of Cæsars or senators, not even of the statues, that you think with wistful longing remembrance and desire: it is of the water that is everywhere in Rome, floating, falling, shining, splashing, with the clouds mirrored on its surface, and the swallows skimming its foam.

  I wonder to hear them say that Rome is sad, with all that mirth and music of its water laughing through all its streets, till the steepest and stoniest ways are murmurous with it as any brook-fed forest-depths. Here water is protean; sovereign and slave, sorcerer and servant; slaking the mule’s thirst, and shining in porphyry on the prince’s terrace; filling the well in the cabbage-garden, and leaping aloft against the Pope’s palace; first called to fill the baths of the Agrippines and serve the Naumachia of Augustus, it bubbles from a griffin’s jaws or a wolf’s teeth, or any other of the thousand quaint things set in the masonry at the street-corners, and washes the people’s herbs and carrots, and is lapped by the tongues of dogs, and thrashed by the bare brown arms of washing-women; first brought from the hills to flood the green Numidian marble of the thermæ and lave the limbs of the patricians between the cool mosaic walls of the tepidarium, it contentedly becomes a household thing, twinkling like a star at the bottom of deep old wells in dusky courts, its rest broken a dozen times a day by the clash of the chain on the copper pail, above it the carnations of the kitchen balcony and the caged blackbird of the cook.

  One grows to love the Roman fountains as sea-born men the sea. Go where you will there is the water: whether it foams by Trevi where the green moss grows in it like ocean weed about the feet of the ocean god, or whether it rushes, reddened by the evening light, from the mouth of an old lion that once saw Cleopatra; whether it leaps high in air trying to reach the gold cross on St. Peter’s, or pours its triple cascade over the Pauline granite, or spouts out of a great barrel in a wall in old Trastevere, or throws up into the air a gossamer as fine as Arachne’s web in a green garden-way where the lizards run, or in a crowded corner where the fruit-sellers sit against the wall; — in all its shapes one grows to love the water that fills Rome with an unchanging melody all through the year.

  And best of them all I love my own fountain that tumbles out of the masonry here close to the bridge of Sextus, and has its two streams crossing one another like sabres gleaming bright against the dark, damp, moss-grown stones. There are so many fountains in our Rome, glorious, beautiful, and springing to high heaven, that nobody notices this one much, as coming down through the Via Giulia the throngs hurry on over the bridge, few I fear praying for the soul of the man that built it, — as the inscription asks of you to do, with a humility that is touching in a pontiff.

  I would not go over the bridge with Maryx that morning, but sat down underneath my fountain, that was so fresh and welcome in the warm June noon, where twenty years before I had raised my stall and dedicated it to Apollo Sandaliarius and the good Saints Crispin and Crispian, in that jumbling of the pagan and the ecclesiastic which is of all Roman things most Roman.

  My Faun was singing, sheltered safe under the mossy wall. The Fauns are nowhere dead. They only hide in the water or the leaves, laughing and weeping like children: then you say, “the fountains play;” or you say, “the leaves quiver.”

  Birds may not sing at noon. They are afraid to wake great Pan, who sleeps all mid-day, as they know, and will have silence. The Fauns in the water do not heed Pan’s pleasure or displeasure; he is driven out of all cities, and they know the grand god has small pleasure in a world that fells all his sacred woods. The birds are more faithful, being led by the woodpecker, who once was the friend of Mars, and then father of Faunus, and made all the kings of t
he earth meet together in his palace that Virgil has painted for us.

  But all this is nonsense, you say. Very well: if it be nonsense to you, be sure to you Rome is dead, and you walk over its stones blindfold and deaf.

  “It is an Ariadne,” said I to the Faun in the water, for to keep one’s opinion is a sweet pleasure and a cheap one; as Winckelmann would have it that the Capitoline Ariadne was a Leucothea, so I was resolute that the Borghese Bacchus was an Ariadne. Of course I know little of art; I only love it greatly, — just as the men who most love women are those who know their moods and minds the least.

  “It is an Ariadne,” I said to my dog Palès, left on guard on a little straw under my stool, — a white, fox-faced, female thing, with a shrewish temper, and many original views of her own.

  There was not a soul about, and not a body astir. The broad sunshine lay on the Tiber, making it look all of a hot brazen yellow: many martyrs used to be thrown into it just here, so Eusebius says, and it is not very far off that the boatman lived, in the Borgian time, who, being asked why he had not given alarm when he saw a corpse thrown in, replied that he saw so many every night that he naturally thought nothing of it.

  There was no one moving, and no shadows on the hot, white stones; over the bridge and down the Via Giulia all was still and empty, and all the shutters of the houses were closed. Only at the house at the corner where I lived, my friend Pippo, the cook, stepped out one moment into the balcony over the bridge, and, with one of his pet pigeons perched on his forehead, hallooed out that he had a stew ready, full of onions and peppercorns.

  But a stew on a noonday in mid-summer was an abomination to the senses and the reason; and I took no notice of him; and he went in out of the sun, pigeon and all, and the place was quite quiet, except for the splashing and the foaming of the water in the wall, which sounded so cool and babbled so of forest-leaves and brook-fed rushes that no one could be hot within earshot of it. I scarcely envied Maryx in his marble court upon the hill, above Tasso’s cypresses and under Galba’s oaks.