by Ouida
Maryx passed me that evening on the stairs.
“Is Giojà there?” he asked. “I have a pleasure for her, at least if it be one to her: she is so unlike to others that one cannot tell. They want her at the palace to-night.”
“In that great world?” I stammered; for they were among the haughtiest of our princes.
“Is she not worthy it?” said Maryx, with some impatience of me and contempt. “Nay, is that worthy her? They have seen her clay figures and her drawings; they would see her. It would be best; she lives too much alone. Can we persuade her?”
“But in her clothes, — she has none fit.”
“I thought of that. I got Ersilia to steal me one of her old woolen dresses when there was first talk of it a week ago: I have clothes fit for her below. But will she go? That is what I doubt — —”
“Will Hilarion be there?”
“No doubt. Why?”
“Tell her so. She will go then.”
Maryx changed countenance a little, and his broad brows knit together.
“Has he so much influence — already?”
“No influence that I know of; but attraction.”
“Do you want me?” asked Giojà at that moment, her slender body hanging over the rail in the gloom; the lamp that always burned there under a Madonna shone on the soft colors of her face and gave it a Titian look. He told her why he came. She did not answer anything.
Are you glad or sorry, willing or unwilling? Say!” he said, a little quickly, and with some disappointment.
“How can I be either? It does not matter.”
“You are right. It does not matter. Only so many are so pleased at such things. Will you come?”
“If you wish me.”
“Oh, child! It is the greatest house in Rome, and what an honor!” cried Ersilia, who was washing at a tub in a niche in the staircase wall.
“In a great house or a small, I suppose one is always oneself,” said Giojà, to whose mind no ideas of social difference could present themselves; she had only lived on the wild sea-coast, and in the old chamber with Hermes, on the bridge; and in the house of Maryx all greatness was fused into that of art, and no other recognized.
Maryx himself stood thoughtful and a little troubled.
“I think that it is best,” he said, half to me, half to himself. “It is unjust to her, it is selfish, to shut her up like a dove in a tower. What do you say?”
“I suppose it is. And to the tower the hawks can come.”
“St. Barbara’s father built a tower to keep her in and shut out the blessed news of Christ,” said Ersilia from her washtub. “But it was of no use, you know. The great news found her there. No tower is too high for the angels to soar to — —”
“And so you mean —— ?”
“That, whether hawk or angel is to be her fate, either will come to her, whether she be here or there,” said Ersilia, wringing her linen.
“You are a fatalist,” said Maryx, with a smile. “It is a curious creed: it nerves whilst it emasculates.”
“Nay, I am a good Christian,” said Ersilia, who did not understand a word he said, but felt that he impugned her faith; “and I will get my hands dry in a minute, and go fetch that box of clothes. Why dilly-dally about it? Let her have honor and pleasure while she can. There is not much to be had anywhere.”
That was a joyous and grand night to Ersilia; but it was doomed to be a hapless one. We did our best in honesty of intent. The gods made sport of us; and I think there are few things sadder than the way in which honest intents and candid and innocent efforts to do right are, so often as we see them in this world, twisted and turned by obstinate and unkind influences to the hurt of those that feel them. It is as cruel as though one were to take a child’s long curls to strangle him with, when he was coming up for kisses.
It was a joyous night to Ersilia, who, in truth, had been sometimes picked to pieces by the neighbours for harboring a strange girl.
“She goes among the princes,” she said proudly to all her gossips. And she attired her with a tenderness one never would have believed could have been in her, looking at her fierce and broad black eyes that lit so quickly into rage.
But an hour later Ersilia called to me shrilly, coming to the end of the bridge and screaming in a way that would have almost frightened back Porsenna, had he been, as of yore, on the other side.
I hurried to her call.
“Only think!” shouted Ersilia, her face all in a dark flame of wrath. “Only think! she will not wear them! No, not for anything will she wear them! Was there ever such perversity? Come you and speak to her. Lovely stuffs fit for an empress! I always said she ways not natural. The marble has got into her herself. Who ever heard of any girl that did not care for clothes?”
“What is it, Giojà?” I asked her, when I had mounted.
“I will not wear them,” she said, simply. “I did not understand. If I cannot go as I am, then not at all. These clothes must have cost much money, and I have none.”
“Money?” screamed Ersilia. “Of course! Money! Enough for an honest girl’s dower, that I know, for he grudged nothing! How can you look at them and say you will not put them on? Jesù Maria! It is impious.”
“Why will you not wear them?” I asked Giojà, quietly.
The tears came in her eyes. “I shall be sorry if I pain him. He is good and generous. But I cannot pay for them. I will not take them. No, I will not.”
“But, my dear, it is impossible for you to go to a great house unless you go suitably — —”
“Then I will not go; I do not care to go. What is it to me? — except that I am sorry if I pain him.”
“May one enter?” said Hilarion, standing at the door, and not perceiving me. It had grown dusk, and the lights were beginning to burn on the winding bank of the river. When he did see me he smiled, — that tantalizing smile of his which might mean anything or nothing, and must have hurt many a woman worse than a blow or an oath.
Giojà colored as she saw him, — a warm, wavering blush that went to the very waves of the hair hanging over her brows. She was silent.
The white robes of Maryx’s choosing were lying there. with some jewelry of Etruscan gold found by himself years before in old tombs opened at his cost under the thick brushwood about Veïi.
“What is the question at issue? May I hear?”
He spoke as if he had already known her for years.
Giojà looked at him with the flush fading.
“It is that I will not wear — all that. He has sent it: he is always so good. But why should I go thither even? I do not want the great people, if they be great; nor am I great myself, that they should seek me. If I could go as I am, it would be very well; but if I cannot, I will stay away. The things are beautiful, no doubt; but the very last words nearly that my father spoke were, ‘Keep free; have your hands empty, but clean; take nothing.’ So I cannot take anything, even though he gives it.”
Hilarion looked at her intently. He did not ask any more. He had the poet’s quickness of comprehension, and could gather whole facts from fragmentary words.
“No doubt you are right,” he said, as though he had heard it all from the beginning. “And why should you go into that vapid and turbulent world that calls itself great? You could only lose. The artist always loses. Society is a crucible in which all gold melts. Out of it is drawn only one of two prizes, — vanity or disgust: the perfectly successful in it are like the children that the Chinese imprison in jars from their birth, — dwarfs that believe their compressed distortion beautiful. Hermes here is a better companion than the world. What do you say, Crispin?”
“I say, let her do as she likes,” I answered, roughly; for I was angry with his presence there. “I cannot say that she is wrong; no one could say so; but such a trifle I think she might have taken without harm to her pride; and it is hard on Maryx, thinking only to give pleasure, and believing it bad, as it is bad, for her to live alone here, dreaming of broken marbles an
d dead gods, — not that I would speak lightly of either the gods or arts, but such a life is too mournful, and in a little while it will become morbid.”
“Better that than the foul gases of crowded rooms and empty compliments. Maryx and you are both at fault, my sensible Lupercus!” said Hilarion, with that smile which so provoked me, his eyes resting on the girl, who herself stood abstracted and sorrowful, the tears still not dry upon her lashes.
“Take them away,” she said to Ersilia, with a gesture towards the pretty rejected things. Then she lifted her arms with a little sigh of relief, like one decided to put down a burden. “I do not want to see these people. I see them pass. They look foolish; they are just the same as when Juvenal wrote about them, I suppose. And what do they want with me?”
“I will tell you what they want,” said Hilarion. “Genius scares the world. It is like the silver goblet to Œdipus, telling of vanished greatness and the power of the gods; the world that is like Œdipus, blind and old and heavy with many nameless sins, cannot bear the reproach of it; it wants to stamp it into dust. Never being quite able to do that, it fondles it, fills it with sugared drinks, nails it with golden nails to the board where fools feast. Often the world succeeds, and the goblet falls to baser uses and loses the power to remind the blind sinner any more of the ancient glories and of the dishonored children of Zeus. Can you understand? — only my allegory halts, as most allegories do. Œdipus was repentant: the world never repents. So I think you are right not to go to it. Keep the silver goblet for yourself, and only touch it with your own lips, since from the gods it came to you.”
There was a sort of emotion in his voice as he said the last words. Nor was it affected. In his impulses he was always sincere, and his impulse then was earnest, was tender, and was sorrowful. He himself had let his silver goblet often fall and be often choked up with the lees of spilled wines and the dust of dead passions.
Her face lightened with a happy smile. It was like remembered music to her to hear this kind of speech. She did not answer in words. She seemed to me to be timid with Hilarion, and to lose that calm, indifferent composure which characterized all her intercourse with other people.
“We are so serious, and you are so young!” said he, shaking off the momentary depression that had fallen on him. “You have lost a night’s pleasure, too. We are bound to make you amends. Crispin, you look as dull as Pasquino without a pasted epigram. Wake up! Hermes wonders at you; he thinks that when men’s lives are so short as they are, it is astonishing they should spend any of their little measure of time in mere moodiness; and you, — you used never to know the meaning of such a word. Now let us see what we can give to Giojà in compensation. I may call you Giojà?”
“Oh, yes; it is my name,” she answered him; for the only ways that she had known were the simple ways and habits of the people, and of the ceremonies of polished life she knew nothing, though nature had taught her grace and that serenity which is the highest form of grace.
“It is a lovely name, and has a lovely meaning” said Hilarion. “Now I have thought — you care for music. Of course you care; music has all the other arts in it, and something that none of them have as well. Will you come and hear some with me? There is my own box always ready, and you can go in your own manner, with your veil if you like, and enjoy it unseen if you please; and Crispino, too, can come. There is the Zauberflöte to-night, and there is no magician like Mozart, though at the best he is poorly rendered here. Come; it will be better for you than the crowds that stare.”
“Mozart!”
She had heard some of his music in requiems and masses in the churches; but she had no idea what he spoke of, for she had never been inside a theatre.
“Yes, the Zauberflöte, — on the whole, the most perfect music in the world. Of old, the gods came down and whispered their secrets to the poets. You remember Dionysus waking Æschylus among the vines and bidding him go write the Oresteia. Nowadays the gods only whisper to the musicians; the poets are left to grope their way among the cancer hospitals and the charnel-houses. No doubt it is the poets’ fault. What we wish to see I suppose we do see, — see most of, at all events, after all. Goethe was the last to listen to the god under the vines. ‘What beautiful things the vines have said to me!’ he wrote from Italy. And yet, let them pretend what they will, Goethe was not a poet: he was too cold and too clear; and, besides, he could live at Weimar! Well, will you come? Trust me; you will be very happy and very unhappy both at once, and is not that the very essence and epitome of life? Not to have heard great music is like having lived without seeing Rome.”
“I will come,” said Giojà, and looked at me, “if Maryx will not be vexed. Will he be vexed?”
“My dear,” I said to her, “he meant to have given you pleasure, and he will find that he has failed, and that another has given it instead. That is all. A very common lot, — so common that it needs no pity.”
For I was irritated and impatient, and hated Hilarion, though he was doing no harm, but only looking pale and handsome, like any one of the statues that she loved leaning there underneath Hermes, with the shadows of the coming night about him, and his sweet voice coming through the stillness in the fantastic and decorous talk which of all other was most certain to enchain her attention by its likeness to her own dreams.
He had his way in the end: he was one of those men who always have their way. She hesitated, and was afraid to pain her absent master, but in the end yielded, and went out with him into the night air, which had grown colder and starry, so that already Rome was beginning to look paved with silver and carved with alabaster, as it looks always when the moon shines there.
I followed them as a dog would have done. The horses were there; but the night was beautiful, and they went on, on foot, lingering here and there as the moonlight grew clearer and the shades more black.
Giojà was well used to Rome at night. After sunset, when my labors were done, I often went with her through the avenues about the Flavian amphitheatre and the twisting streets whose centre is the mighty dome of Agrippa, or any other of the many quarters familiar to me from my babyhood, and now in my old age eloquent of a million histories. Maryx went often with us too. After a long day spent in the studio, it had always been his habit to go about Rome, which he knew by heart, as Ampère knew it, and some of the finest conceptions of his works had come to him sitting in the, stillness of the great Thermæ, with only the bats and owls moving between the dull red walls where your Northern singer composed his great Prometheus.
I was used to seeing Maryx by her side. It incensed me to watch the graceful head of Hilarion bending to her in his stead: it seemed a wrong to the one who was absent.
It was an ordinary night at the opera, and the Apollo Theatre was almost empty, and the little light there was burned very low, as it is our economical habit to have it in our playhouses. And, indeed, what music is not sweetest in the softness of the dusk?
To hear music well, sit in twilight and in stillness, only meeting eyes you love. Your new school, which thinks that music needs the assistance of glitter and glare and pictorial effect, sadly insults the divinest of the arts.
The large box close to the stage belonging to Hilarion was all in gloom: I stayed at the back of it, for I would not leave them; and Giojà in her dark clothing no one saw.
She thought it very strange, the large, shadowy, almost empty space in which the first notes of the orchestra only were dully humming; but when the full glory of the music burst over her, she held her breath, entranced, and one could see her great eyes wide opened and lustrous as the stars.
He did not speak to her, but only watched her. The rendering was in no way fine; but it is impossible for even poor singers utterly to mar the sway of the Zauberflöte; and when the music ceased at the first act, the girl was pale as her own marbles, and the tears were coursing down her cheeks in silence.
“Did I not tell you rightly?” said Hilarion, in his soft, caressing voice. “Are you not most happy an
d most unhappy?”
She smiled on him a little through her tears.
“It is all the past, — it is all the future! I did not know. Oh, why did they never bring me here?”
“I am glad that it was left for me to do,” he answered her. “I think Maryx does not care for music. Why do you turn away?”
“I do not want to see the people; they jar on it,” said Giojà, meaning the actors on the stage. “Why can they not sing without being seen?”
“I, too, should prefer that,” said Hilarion. “But then it would no longer be an opera.”
“Would that matter?” said Giojà, who was always indifferent to the great reasoning that because a thing has been so thus it must ever be.
Then she was quiet again and breathless. As for me, she had forgotten that I lived. She had almost forgotten Hilarion, only that now and again her eyes, brilliant through moisture of unshed tears, like any passion-flowers through dew, turned on him as on the giver of her deep delight. He was her Apollo Soranus.
“You are contented?” he murmured softly once.
She answered him as from a dream:
“It is like Homer!”
She knew no greater comparison; and perhaps there is none greater.
At the close, the passionate music troubled her, and made her color rise and her breath come and go. Those lovers in the flames, happy merely because together, she did not understand; yet the tumult of emotions disturbed that classic calm in her which made her always so grave, yet so serene.
She did not speak at all when it was over and she had left the dusky, desolate opera-house; nor did Hilarion speak to her. He understood that the melodies were all about her, in the air, in the stars, in the very voices of the streets: and he let the strange passion of which she had heard the first notes steal on her unawares. He was a master in these things.
We went silently through the Tordinona street, and past the house of Raffaelle, and homeward. Rome was quiet, and all white with the light of a full moon. Now and then a shadowy form went by, touching a guitar; now and then an orange-bough heavy with blossom and fruit swung over a wall in our faces; at one corner there stood a bier, with torches flaring and men praying; some one was dead, — some one dies with every moment, they say; the great melodious fountains sounded everywhere through the night, as though the waters were always striving, striving, striving in vain to wash the crimes of the city away, — the endless centuries of crime whose beginning is lost in the dull roll of Tullia’s chariot wheels. Tullia! the vile name! — there is only Tarquinia perhaps viler still. How right the Sabines were when they sent the bronze weight of their shields crash down on the base beauty of Tarquinia, the creature that first sold Rome!