by Ouida
Well, would you change that? Is it not a blessing for her?”
“No, I would not change it,” he answered, thoughtfully. “It has a great charm, to see those clear deep eyes of hers look so far out beyond oneself and all about one. But it will change, I suppose, some day. No one remains forever beyond the common fate of human lives. And just in proportion to the previous strength is the force of the fall from it. It would be better for her if she were like Nausicaa, playing ball, and thinking of the bridal clothes.”
“Alas! alas! who would marry her?” said I, with all a Roman’s prejudice.
“Any one who loved her, no doubt,” said Maryx, judging the minds of men by the greatness of his own.
Meanwhile, of such things Giojà had no thought. At times almost I grew superstitious, and thought she was hardly human, she was so indifferent to everything outside the pale of art, and so untouched by all that usually touches girls: she never seemed to see the children laughing in her path, the lovers in the twilight of the trees, the strings of pearl and coral in the artificers’ windows, the baby at its mother’s breast, the birds on their spring nests.
What she cared for was to stand in the damp moss-grown niches of the Vatican with the Mercury and Apollo, and to wander through the great stone galleries of the Capitol, until one really began to think she was some Vestal buried alive, and kept by some freak of nature fresh and fair in the bosom of mother earth, and released and awakened, but feeling astray in the sunlight, and bewildered to find so much of Rome remaining, yet so much destroyed.
One day we passed our lovely Santa Maria in Trastevere when a marriage-party were coming out from the doors. They were people of the laboring class, but the girl was very graceful, and the man was bold and handsome, and both looked happy, with that perfect happiness which has “the life of the rose,” but, unlike the rose, fades, not to bloom again with the next summer.
They were coming out, and we stepped back to give them room.
“What are they doing?” she asked me.
“They have been to the priest to be married,” said I. “I know them. They will be very poor. He is a fruit-seller. They will live in one room under the street. They will never eat meat. They will have many troubles. But for all that they will be happy. They love each other. They will run out in the sun, and laugh, and sing, and play with their children, and go to the theatre when they can—”
“And when he does not love her any more?” asked Giojà.
I was silent. It took my breath away. What should she know about men’s faithlessness?
“Why should he cease to care for her?” I stammered. “She is a good girl, and young, and so pretty.”
“I do not know. In all the old tales one or the other changes,” she said, gravely. “I suppose it is always so. There was a woman lived near us on the shore. She had grown quite old. But when she had been young she had been handsome, and a man loved her very much. She was then at Naples, and after a time he grew jealous, and he drew his knife, and gashed her all across the eyes and forehead, so that she should never be beautiful for any one any more, but hideous, — which she was. And after that, though he came to know that she had always deserved good of him, and never ill, he deserted her, and went to other women, and she fell into great misery; and when she lived upon our shore she was glad to boil the sea-weed and the jelly-fish to make a little food. But she told me her story, and, though she was disfigured and one of her eyes was blinded, she said she would not have had it otherwise. ‘My sight is dark,’ she said, ‘and in the wound he made you can lay two fingers still, and it still aches and throbs when the nights are cold; but I am glad he hurt me so: it tells me how he loved me once. When I think I must be dreaming, and that I never could have been lovely and beloved, then I put my hand up to the great cruel wound, and I know it was true, and I feel his kisses again. He left me, yes, — he was a man, and I was a woman, — but he loved me once. Else he would not have hurt me.’ That was what she said. She was old, and half blind, and wretched. But she had not forgotten.”
I shivered a little as I heard. There was a sound in her voice of sympathy with that poor wounded soul which frightened me for her.
“And you understand her?” I said. “Faith to the faithless? Is that well?”
“I think I understand it,” she said, slowly. “And I suppose if she had loved him once, whether he ceased to love her or not, that could not make any difference. But it must be terrible. Why do people love at all?”
“It is nature,” I said, feebly.
“Nature is cruel,” said the girl.
And from that I could not dissent, seeing that the only motive power and the sole key-note of all creation is cruelty in some form or another.
The marriage-party by this time were well away down the street, their voices caroling a chorus, and the bright colors of their costumes glancing in the sun. She looked after them.
“What will she do when he does not love her any longer?” she said, with that first touch of human pity that I have ever known in her.
“When he does not, — if he do not, — I dare say she will stab him: she is a Trasteverina. If not, she will weep a little, and play with her babies, and get over it: most women do so.”
A supreme disdain came on the thoughtful calmness of her face. “Women are poor creatures, then,” she said, and moved on past the Monastery of St. Anna, whose true saint is Vittoria Colonna.
As a man I could not assent to her; as a philosopher I could not dissent.
But I saw that Maryx and I both had been wrong in our belief, and that she had indeed thought of love and of its obligations, only perhaps too much: at any rate, she had learned a belief in Love’s great canon: better throbbing wounds by which to mark remembered kisses after death, than peace and solitude without a sign.
“Only, alas!” I groaned to myself, as I stumbled on in her steps, “they were right that day in the Borghese gallery: it is so seldom Eros; it is so often Apate and Philotes.”
But then of these mock gods she knew nothing.
CHAPTER XI.
WITH spring the city thinned, and the pleasure-folks went on their ways, and never stayed to see the Sabine mountains, and all the rest, grow like one soft sea of green with the young grass, and the Campagna a very ocean of blossoming flowers, with the great cattle knee-deep in it, and the mounted shepherds riding through a glory of waving color.
With spring Maryx usually went to his own land; but this year he did not stir, nor speak of leaving Rome. The Nausicaa went to sustain his great name, and the Nero; but he himself remained.
With the sweet glad spring weather, when one could lie and laugh all day on the turf of the Pamfili Doria woodlands, and groups stood chatting and love-making about the great cool fountains half the radiant night, he and she and I went on many a ramble together.
Together we feasted on porcupine in Ariosto’s tavern, and traced the ways of Tullia’s blood-stained chariot; together we bowed our heads to ruined altars in the bowels of the earth, and saw the tarantella danced under the spring-blossoming vines; together we pulled the anemones under the old oaks of Galba’s gardens, and traced the fancied sites of vanished temples under crowding hovels or frowning convent-walls; together we found our roads by Strabo and Denys, of Halicarnassus, through twisting lanes and heaps of rubble, and talked of buried cities that lay beneath us as we sat on the grassy mounds in the silent country, with the oxen coming to us between the high tufa banks, and the caper-flowers covering the fallen stones of nameless tombs.
“Are you happy now?” I asked of Giojà, one day. She was silent a moment, then answered, —
“I am content.”
The strong instinctive veracity in her weighed the measure of her days and gave them their right name. She was content: her life was full of the sweetness and strength of the arts, and of the peace of noble occupation and endeavor. But some true instinct in her taught her that this is peace, but is not more than peace. Happiness comes but from the beating of
one heart upon another.
She was Nausicaa on her path through the orchards, in the cool of the early morning, to the sea, with all the day to come.
Among our pilgrimages we went at times to Daïla, the estate of Hilarion. The site of it had once been a Sabine town, and in the vineyards were the foundations of a villa that, as I have said, according to tradition, had belonged to the gay sad author of the Satyricon, and coins found in the soil, and letters cut in the leaden water-pipes, seemed to confirm the supposition of antiquaries, which especially pleased its present owner, since between Petronius and Hilarion there was that certain sympathy which makes two thousand years seem but a moment.
Later it must have belonged to Julia Domna, or some other of the Syrian empresses, or some great creature of their household, for there were all the symbols, and many of the deities, of the Eastern creeds found in those excavations which for years Hilarion had had made there. The present. villa there, which he had purchased, was one of the sixteenth century, and magnificent enough, with its vast halls painted by Guilio Romano and his scholars with crowds of angels and throngs of heroes on the vaults and domes, and, without, the high clipped arbutus hedges, the stone terraces, the fish-ponds with their marble stairs and moss-grown nereids of an artificial age, and beyond these again the wide-spreading green glades, dusky with the ilex, and the oak, and the cedar, and the cork-tree, and the stone pine, through whose stately trunks one saw the silver gleam of the distant sea of Æneas, and the dark shadows of the Pontine marshes, and the bold blue mountains of the “people of the lance,” and the whiteness of snowy peaks that rose against the azure of the skies.
Giojà had gone but seldom there, for it was some twelve or fourteen miles out towards the northwest; but no place had so great a fascination for her, except the heart of Rome itself.
The mere name of Hilarion had a charm for her ear, and often in the studio of Maryx she would stand and look up to the face of his bust, and that of the Apollo Cytharœdus, which was his also; and whenever we spoke of him, as indeed we did often, she would listen with that look in her eyes which came into them for the marbles, and the fountains, and the dear dead gods.
“When will he come back?” she asked me, often; and that I never could tell her, for the moods of Hilarion were as variable as the winds that blew over Rome.
But he almost seemed to be at Daïla: there was his inkstand open in the library; there was his velvet coat thrown across a chair; there was his Martial lying open, with a dead rose in it to keep the place; there were his mares neighing in the stable; there were his flowers blossoming under the terraces; there were his laborers laboring for him among the buried marbles under the vines; and there was the tomb of the dog he had killed in a fit of petulance, kept with a care that the shades of Augustus and of Livia might have envied.
Hilarion, absent, became at Daïla a living reality to this girl, to whom Apollo and Virgil, and Adonis and Valeria, and all the gods and all the mortals of the old Latin land, were in a manner nearer than we who gave her her daily bread and touched her hand.
For me, I only wished that he might forever remain to her thus, like a Hellenic myth, looming larger and lovelier than life through the golden haze of mystical imaginations. For the sight of Hilarion was not less cruel to woman than was his soft, bitter, amorous verse.
When the very great heats of the midsummer came, Maryx took me aside one day.
“She is well now, but she will not be well much longer, if she stay in the drought of July,” he said to me. “Rome does not hurt you and me, but a creature as young as that, and a girl, it is different. Listen to what I want you to do. It is an innocent subterfuge, and I see no other way.”
Then he told me of a farm of his own — for he had purchased largely in and about the city, being now a rich man — which was close to Frascati, on those breezier heights, where health may be better kept than down in the ways of the town itself; and he told me that I was to go thither for the two perilous months, speaking of it as needful for my health, and persuade her by any means I could to accompany me, taking care not to speak of him in connection with it. For himself, he intended to stay on the Golden Hill.
“I have too much work in hand to leave,” he said; but the blood came into the clear olive skin of his cheeks as he spoke, and I thought my own thoughts, and was glad.
“You must not let her dream the place is mine,” he said, a little later. “She is so proud, and it would pain her. And, indeed, what obligation to me is there? None at all.”
I promised compliance; but when I sought to persuade her I found the task quite beyond my powers.
“I will not leave Rome,” she said, and was resolute.
“Rome will never hurt me,” she said. “It would hurt me much more to leave it. This room is high and cool, and you know this part of the river is healthy, even though the floods come. I could not go out of Rome; and, besides, I am learning so much; and he has promised to let me touch the clay next month.”
And to be moved she was not; and so I stayed as I had stayed for many a year, stitching at my stall in the summer heat, with the big melons and the bursting honey-filled figs all agape at the street-corners, and the lads and lasses coming over the bridge at midnight, with trailing rose-boughs, and the lilies of Mary in their hands, twanging their lutes and laughing.
As it happened, mercifully, the summer was unusually cool, and she did not suffer from it in any way, and worked arduously in the studio on the Mons Aureus, and gained from her great master much of his technical skill, and much of his catholic and noble views of art and its obligations.
Maryx, with all his passion of reverence for the art of the past, had a perception of the excellencies and of the failures of his own generation truer than that which is given to most men. He did not overrate the present age of the world, but neither did he deride it. It moved him rather to sympathy and compassion than to either of those two extremes of vanity and of scorn into one of whose opposite camps most of us are driven in too great heat and violence.
Hilarion, who had written much to emasculate it, spent all the brilliancy of his brain in heaping endless contumely upon his own generation; Maryx, who had done much to enrich it, regarded it with affection and regret, as a man may do his country when its ways are uneven and its future is dark.
“We are the sons of our time,” he would say. “It is not for us to slay our mother. Let us cover her dishonor if we see it, lest we provoke the Erinnyes.”
And he held that our own age was not so much debased as it was despairing, — not so often base as it was weary.
“Surely,” he said, one day, in those moments of eloquence which were frequent with him, for he had a trick of natural eloquence when with those for whom he had a liking, and who liked to listen to him,— “surely the world, made up of human beings as it is, is only like one human being in his passage through life. To youth belong ineffable graces all its own, and charms never to be counterfeited when youth has passed away; hope and faith and the freshness of unbroken illusions are with it; it has the bloom as of the untouched fruit, the charm as of the half-opened flower; it is rich in the treasures of its untried years, and strong; in the insolence of its beauty and its strength; it is without suspicion and without fear, but, also, it is without sympathy: it is glorious as the glory of the morning, but he who seeks its pity finds it hard, from pure joyousness of soul and ignorance of sorrow: its selfishness is only ignorance, but it is selfish: it says to every passing hour, ‘Thou art fair,’ why should it look elsewhere? When youth is gone, the character that has gained from living any profit will have softened and mellowed under the suns and storms of many days; with wide experience it will have wide toleration and comprehension; its sympathies will be unfailing, because it will be aware that ‘to understand is to pardon,’ since for all evil there is excuse, could all influences and motives and accidents of circumstance be traced: its own past lies behind it, a land forever lost, and its onward path is dark: it looks back so ofte
n because it has not heart to look forward, since all it sees is death: many are the graves of its desires and of its friends it is full of pity for all things that breathe, because it has learned that nearly every breath is pain: there is nothing in which it can have much belief, but there is little to which it can refuse compassion, since all creation suffers: the unutterable sadness and mystery of all forms of life oppress it, and it hears the children and the lovers say ‘forever,’ knowing itself too well that the mortal’s ‘forever’ is but the gnat’s day upon a ray of sun and breath of vapor.
“As thus with the individual character of man, so it is with the character of the world, and of those arts in which the voice of the world’s soul speaks.
“Fearlessness, loveliness, and force characterized all that it did, and all that it sang of, in an earlier time: tenderness and pity are the excellencies of all the best that it produces now. In the first ages all achievement and inspiration were fresh as the dews of dawn, and he who struck the lyre had no fear that his hymns were but weak echoes of a stronger sound. All was new, all was spontaneous. Now all this is changed. We feel that our production can hardly ever be more than repetition. We are, like the priests and the people of Lyonesse, powerless to raise the magic sword wielded by stronger hands than ours; and we have no child Arthur among us, or if we have we deny and put him aside, and the sword lies uplifted.
“But if we have lost the force and the freshness of an earlier day, we have gained something else not wholly to be despised.
“I think that whilst we have, perhaps, lost dignity, and certainly have lost concentration, our sight is more extended, our range of feeling more varied, our understanding of pain and of joy more acute.
“The pathos and mirth of the Knight of Mancha and the passions of Juliet and Francesca are our own; the vast comprehension of Shakspeare and the microscopic analysis of Balzac are purely modern: what depths of complex emotion and passion divide Heloïse from Helen, or Imogene from Antigone, and sever Shelley from Sophocles, and Faust from Paris!