Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  All these odd, disjointed thoughts went stumbling through my brain as my feet went stumbling home.

  It was late.

  At the door I would have sent her up-stairs alone and sent Hilarion away; but he would not have it so, and he was a man that always had his way.

  “Let us see her safe back to Hermes,” he said.

  And when we reached Hermes I saw why he had chosen to do that. In our absence his orders had arranged a surprise for her. A fire burnt on the hearth; there was a little supper spread; there were many flowers; there was only the old bronze lamp set burning; through the unshuttered and grated casement all the moonlit brilliancy of the river was visible.

  Giojà gave a little cry of pleasure and of wonder. Maryx had encompassed her with every solid care that strength and nobleness could give; but he did not think of such little things as this. Scenic display was not in his temperament.

  “This is folly. It is midnight. She eats nothing at this hour. She has to be up at dawn,” I grumbled, feeling stupid and ill at ease and angry.

  Hilarion laughed at me.

  His own way he would have. He was so gay, so gracious, so charming, so kindly, it was impossible to altogether withstand him; and, after all, what harm had he done?

  Yet eat I could not, and drink I would not. But if I should be a killjoy, it made no difference to him; it was not for me that his peaches showed their bloom like infants’ cheeks, nor for me that his tea-roses clustered round his starry astias.

  He had his way, sitting within the broad mellow glow from the hearth-fire, with the great moon looking in through the iron bars, sailing in a silvery radiance of snowy cloud.

  She said but little, — very little; but I felt that if I had asked her now if she were only content, she would have answered, “ I am happy.” Once she got up and took a little book and gave it to him.

  “Read me something, — once.”

  It was my odd volume of his translated sonnets.

  He smiled, and was silent, looking on her face with a dreamy pleasure of contemplation. Then he did read, his memory awakening and the volume closing in his hand, as he read.

  What he chose was a fragment of a poem on Sospitra, the woman who, being, visited by spirits in the guise of two Chaldeans, was dowered by them with transcendent powers and superhuman knowledge, and enabled to behold at once all the deeds that were done in all lands beneath the sun, and was raised high above all human woes and human frailties, — save only Love and Death.

  Save only Love and Death.

  It was a great poem, the greatest that he had ever given to the world, and perhaps the most terrible.

  For it was all the despair of genius, and was all the derision of hell.

  The woman dwelt alone with the stars and the palms and the falling waters, and was tranquil and proud and at peace, and, when night fell, saw all the darkened earth outspread before her as a scroll, and read the hidden souls of millions, and knew all that the day had seen done; and the lion lay at her feet, and the wild antelope came to her will, and the eagle told her the secret ways of the planets, and the nightingale sang to her of lovers smiling in their sleep, and she was equal to the gods in knowledge and in vision, and was content.

  Then one day a tired wanderer came and asked her for a draught of water to slake his thirst and lave his wounds. And she gave it, and, giving it, touched his hand; and one by one the magic gifts fell from her, and the Chaldeans came no more.

  In all the vastness of the universe she only hearkened for one voice; and her eyes were blind to earth and heaven, for they only sought one face; and she had power no more over the minds of men, or the creatures of land and air, for she had cast her crown down in the dust, and had become a slave; and her slavery was sweeter than had ever been her strength.

  Sweeter far, — for a space.

  Then the wanderer, his wounds being healed and his thirst slaked, wearied, and arose and passed away; and she was left alone in the silence of the desert. But never more came the Chaldeans.

  When the last words died on the silence, the silence remained unbroken. One could hear the lapping of the river against the piles of the bridge, and the sound of the little flames eating the wood away upon the hearth.

  Hilarion at length rose abruptly.

  “Good-night, and the Chaldeans be with you,” he said; and touched the soft loose locks on her forehead with a familiarity of gesture that not I or Maryx had ever offered to her.

  Giojà did not move: her face was rapt, pale, troubled, infinitely tender; she looked up at him and said nothing.

  “This is how you keep your promise!” I said, faintly, on the stairs, and then paused, — for he had made no promise.

  Hilarion smiled.

  “I would not make any. I never make any. We are all too much the playthings of accident to be able to say, ‘I will,’ or, ‘I will not.’ And what have I done? Is there harm in the Zauberflöte?”

  “You are more cruel than the Chaldeans,” I said. “They at least did not call the destroyers.”

  Hilarion went out into the night air.

  “I hardly know why I read her the poem,” he said, almost regretfully: “it was a pity, perhaps. Of love, believe me, I have had more than enough; and besides,” he added, with a laugh that I did not like, “besides, there is Maryx!”

  Then he went away down the darkness of the Via Pettinari, the feet of his horses, wearied with waiting, ringing sharply on the stones.

  He went to his duchess, whom he more than half hated, yet with whom he would not break his unholy relation, because she had that flame in her eyes, and that flint in her heart, at which men whose passions are worn out are glad to strive to rekindle them.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  WITH the morning, Giojà went up as usual to the studio. Maryx was leaning over the balustrade of his terrace, as his habit often was in that lovely time of the clear early morning, when there are still mists hovering about the curving ways of Tiber, yet every spire and tower and ruined glory stands out distinct in all their varied architecture against the radiant sky.

  Maryx advanced to her, and met her.

  “My dear, why did you change your mind last night? Was it not sudden?”

  “Yes, it was sudden,” she answered him. “When I saw the things, then I remembered I could not buy them; I would not wear them. It was good of you; so good! Were you vexed?”

  Maryx’s changeful eyes darkened, and grew dimmer. He gave an angry gesture.

  “Such a little thing! Had you not faith enough in me for that? Am I so little your friend after all this time? — I, who am your master?”

  Giojà was silent. Then she took his hand and touched it with her lips.

  “You are more than my friend; and if to serve you I had to hurt myself, that I would do. But this was different: it would have done you no good, and it would have made me ashamed.”

  He colored slightly, and his eyes grew soft. He drew away his hand with a sort of impatient confusion.

  “God forbid that you should be ashamed — for me! But to refuse such a mere trifle! it looks like distrust of me.”

  “How could I distrust you?”

  She looked in his face, whilst she spoke, with the sweet, open seriousness of a young child.

  “How could I distrust you? distrust you?” she repeated, as he remained silent. “I do not know what you can mean. But I did not wish for those rich things, and I did not wish to go at all.”

  Maryx smiled, reassured.

  “If you did not wish to go, my dear, that is another matter. I think you are very wise. The artist loses more by the world than ever he gains from it. It was only that since it opened to you, I thought it right you should have the choice. But I was disappointed a little, I admit; I had looked forward to seeing you move in those great rooms as no girl can move except one like you, whom the sea has made strong, and whom the trammels of fashion never have fettered; only to see you walk would be despair to them. But I am content now that you chose as you d
id, — quite content; only you must promise me to keep my poor Etruscan gold. I should have told you so last night; but when I called for you, thinking to find you ready, you were in bed; your window was all dark.”

  “But did not Ersilia tell you?”

  “Tell me what? Yes. She put her head out of her own casement, and called that you would not touch the clothes nor go; and then she slammed the window to again, and I got no more from her. What did you bid her say?”

  “Nothing. I forgot.”

  “Forgot to leave a pretty message for me to soften the rejection?” said Maryx, with a smile. “Well, never mind, my dear. Soft words passing by that good soul’s mouth would harden in the passage. Did you sleep well, young philosopher? Pagan though you are, I begin to think you have something of the early Christians in you after all, — of St. Ursula, or St. Dorothea.”

  Giojà flushed scarlet, then grew pale. “I did not sleep; I was not at home; I went with him, and he came back with me.”

  Maryx, leaning carelessly over the terrace parapet, casting the fallen flowers of the jessamines into the gulf of cactus and aloes below, raised himself erect with sudden quickness, and gazed at her.

  “With whom? With what? Went where? Of what are you talking?”

  “Him.”

  “Who?”

  “I went with him,” she answered, very low, vaguely conscious that he grew angered, and that she had done ill. “It was to the music of Mozart. Why did you never take me? I seemed to understand everything in all the world; all that was dark grew clear; I understood why the woman did not feel the flames nor have any fear of death. Then he came back with me, and he had made the room like a garden, and Hermes was covered with roses, and it was very late, and he read to me his own poems, and the one on Sospitra, whom the Chaldean seers raised above every sorrow except death and love — —” She stopped abruptly at that word; no doubt she could not have told why.

  Maryx was silent. He looked like a man who had received a blow, and a blow that his manliness forbade him to return. His lips parted to speak, but, whatever he was about to say, he controlled its utterance.

  “Go in to your work, my dear,” he said, after a pause. “It grows late.”

  That was all. Giojà looked at him with a hesitating regret.

  “Are you displeased?” she asked him, as she lingered. But he had left her, and had come down among the aloes, and thus met me, as I ascended the steep slopes of his gardens.

  “She was with Hilarion?” he said, abruptly.

  “Yes, but there was no harm in that,” I answered him, and told him how the night had been spent.

  He heard, looking far away from me towards the great pile of the Farnese glowing like bronze and gold in the morning light.

  There was a great pain upon his face, but he said nothing: he was too generous to blame a creature owing so much to him as she did; and Maryx, so eloquent on matters of his art, and so felicitous in discussion and disquisition, was of few words when he felt deeply.

  “So as she had some change and pleasantness, it is not much matter who gave it,” he said, at length, when I had ended. “No doubt he knows how to amuse women better than I do. For the rest, we are not our keepers, — you and I.”

  Then he moved to go on away down his gardens, towards Rome.

  “You are not going back to the studio?” I ventured to say; for it was his practice always to spend there the hours of the forenoon, at the least.

  “No; I have business yonder,” he made answer; and I lost him to sight in the windings of the cypress alley that shelved sharply downward.

  I understood that he did not wish me to go with him then; he had been wounded, and, like all other noble animals, sought to be alone.

  I went up into his house, where I was always free to wander as I liked. It was beautifully still; the warm sun shone into the open courts; on the marble floors his great hounds lay at rest; the creepers were red with the touch of winter: through the white columns and porphyry arches there was a golden glory of chrysanthemums; it seemed the abode of perfect peace.

  I went into the workrooms, where the blocks of marble were standing, and the scale stones, and the iron skeletons to hold the clay; and the workers were laboring under the guidance of the old foreman, Giulio.

  Giojà was already at her own work before the plane on which she of late had been modeling in alto-rilievo.

  He had let her choose her own subject, and she had chosen the death of Penthesileia. The fair daughter of Ares lay at the feet of Achilles, her helmet off, her long tresses sweeping the cruel earth that drank her blood; Thersites stood by, on his face the laughter that had cost him life; the Hero bent above her; in the rear were the press and tumult of armed men, the shock of shivered spears, the disarray of startled horses; and, farther yet, the distant walls of Troy.

  The clay seemed sentient and alive; the whole composition was full of invention and of beauty; and the prominent recumbent figure of Penthesileia, in the drooping flexible abandonment of death, would scarcely have been unworthy of that Greek of the North, your Flaxman.

  How great is the sorcery of Art! how mean and how feeble beside it are the astrologers and magicians of mere necromancy!

  A little washed earth spread out upon a board and touched by the hand of genius, and, lo! the wars of Homer are fought before your eyes, and life, and death, and woman’s loveliness, and the valor of man, and the very sound of battle, and the very sight of tears, are all in that gray clay!

  I looked over her shoulder at her work. I had seen it in its various stages many times: it was now almost complete.

  “My dear,” I said to her, saying what I thought, “you have that Aaron’s wand which from the bare rods can call forth almond-flowers. Be content. Whoever has that has so much that, if life treat him unkindly in other ways, he can well afford to bear it.”

  Giojà sighed a little restlessly, leaning her face upon her hands, and looking down upon the plane on which her Penthesileia lay.

  “Is it good?” she said, doubtfully. “Yesterday I thought so; I was so glad in it; but now — —”

  “Well? — now?”

  “I do not care for it. Who can say in a world of marble what he can say in two lines of his Sospitra?”

  Her eyes were full of tears; she had no pleasure in her noble Homeric labor; she could not have told why.

  “Sospitra be accursed, and he who wrote it!” I muttered in my throat.

  “You place the poet highest of all artists,” I said, aloud, with such patience as I could assume. “Well, very likely you are right. He interprets the passions, the aspirations, the pains, and the gladness of living — what we call the soul — more directly, and of course with much more research and intimacy, than any other artist can do. The sculptor and the painter can but deal with the outward expression of emotion, and with nature in her visible and tangible forms. The singer, the reciter, in every nation, from Hellas to Scandinavia, was the earliest inspired; his were the first notes heard in the dusk of the world’s slow dawn. It is natural that supremacy remains with him. But this is finished. What do you do to-day?”

  She lifted her hair off her forehead, thick, clustering, soft hair, that was a weight to her small head.

  “I do not know; I am tired. Is Maryx angry with me, that he does not come?”

  “He is gone into Rome. No: he is not angry; perhaps he is pained.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “You see, he meant to give you pleasure, and he failed, and another succeeded. A small thing, perhaps: still, a man may be wounded.”

  “I wonder if he would think this good,” she murmured, her eyes still on her Penthesileia. “Do you think he would see any strength or beauty in it at all?”

  “Maryx! But surely you must know! He never says what he does not think, nor ever stoops to give you mere flattery.”

  “I did not mean Maryx,” she said, and then she turned away, and went to a desk in an inner room, and began to translate the legendary portions of
Pausanias relating to Endæus, — a kind of employment which her master had given her to change at intervals the posture and the position of work at the clay, which he thought were not good too long together, for one of her sex and one so young.

  I let her alone: it was of no use to speak. I went and talked a little to the old woman who sat in her wooden shoes in the beautiful chambers, and who looked out over Rome and wished she were hoeing in a cabbage-plot.

  “Is the girl here to-day?” asked the mother of Maryx. “Ah! she has not been to see me this morning.”

  “Does she always come?”

  “Always. We manage to understand each other. Not very much; but enough. It is good to look at her; it is like seeing the vines in flower.”

  “Shall I call her here?”

  “No. Let her be. Perhaps Germain wants her.”

  “You have grown to like her?”

  “Yes; one likes what is young. And then she is very fair to look at; a fair face is so much. It was hard in the good God to make so many faces ugly; to be born ugly, — that is, to enter the world with a hobble at your foot, — at least when you are a woman. Will my son marry her, think you?”

  “I cannot tell. Who has thought of it?”

  “No one. Only myself. But a man and a girl, — that is how it always ends; and he is not quite young, but he is so noble to look at, and so good, and so great. I think that is how it will end. And why not? It would be better for him — something living — than those marble women that he worships. You see, he is very great and famous, and all that, but there is no one to watch for his coming and look the brighter because he comes. And a man wants that. I am his mother, indeed. But that is not much, because I am very stupid, and cannot understand what he talks of, nor the things he does, and all the use that I could be, — to sew, to darn, to sweep, to make the soup, — that he does not want, because he is so great, and can live as the princes do. All the world admires him and honors him, — oh, yes; but when at home he is all alone. But do not say a word, — not a word. Love is not like a bean-plant: you cannot put it in where you wish and train it where you like. If it grows, it grows, and it is God or the devil who sets it there: may the saints forgive me!”