by Ouida
His mother was silent. Her lower and duller mind could not attain the nobility of his, but she honored it, and did not oppose it. Only she muttered, rather to herself than to him, —
“Your talk of what you call genius, that I do not understand; and if it bring hardness of heart, then it is an accursed thing and abominable; and as for making stone images, — that is not woman’s work. She is seventeen years old, and fair as a flower: instead of shaping stone, and hanging over it, and setting all her soul on it, she should be seeing her own eyes in a living child’s face and feeling its little wet mouth at her breast. What would she care for her marble things then?”
Maryx stood by the fireplace; his face was in shadow; all that his mother had said to him had stirred his heart painfully, and showed him in naked truth what he had striven to put away from him, and had refused to dwell upon, even in his innermost thoughts.
“Good-night,” he said, at last, arousing from his silence. “I must go to the Vatican. I have promised Antonelli. Never speak of this any more. It is useless, and it pains me.”
“But is it impossible — ?”
His face changed, and his olive cheek grew paler and then warm again.
“I think so, — yes. But who knows? Perhaps some time, — but yet — no gift that was not a free gift to me would I ever take. I could better go unloved all my life than be offered a passionless pale mistress, yielded from gratitude and given up without joy as the payment of debt. That were a hell indeed!”
Then he bent his head to her farewell, and went out to go to the great Cardinal. His way lay through the room where Giojà was used to work.
There was a single lamp burning. He paused and looked at the Penthesileia. The tears came into his eyes for the first time since the day that, starving and friendless and wretched, he had won the Prize of Rome in his youth.
The high desk was near, with the Greek and Latin volumes, and the loose sheets of her translations from them, and the goose-quills that she had written with, and the glass that she had filled with heliotrope and myrtle to be near her as she wrote.
He touched them all with his hand caressingly.
“Ah, my dear! how safe you would be with me!” he murmured, half aloud.
Then he went out; but, as he went, the whiteness of a marble figure barred his way.
A sickly sense of impatience passed over him as he turned to avoid it in his passage to the door and glanced upward at the lamp-illumined face, which was that of the Apollo Citharœdus, — the face of Hilarion.
CHAPTER XVI.
LITTLE almond-eyed Greek Amphion came often, with his flute in the pocket of his vest, to the house upon the bridge; and he played to her, but she ceased to recite to him.
“He does not feel it; what is the use?” she said. But of his melodies she was never tired, and he was never tired of playing them.
She would sit by the embers of the hearth-fire and listen with half-closed eyes. The boy was no more to her than a chorister or a nightingale; less, for the nightingale she would have ever imagined to be the sorrowful sister of Itys, and so would have cherished it.
She grew dreamier than of old, she studied less, she passed far fewer hours in the studio.
One day Maryx found her with her head resting on her arms beside a plane on which the wet clay was spread out, awaiting her compositions. When she lifted her head, her eyes were heavy with tears.
“What use is it to create anything?” she said, before he could speak. “He would always think that I did not do it.”
Maryx turned away from her without a word.
Then a little later she took up work with eager energy and feverish ambition, for she had become changeable and uncertain, — she, the equable, meditative, deep-souled young muse who had been so indifferent and so serene, thinking that nothing mattered much, since there were Art and Rome.
As for Hilarion, who had dropped this poison of unrest into her heart, I seldom saw him. I never found him in her room. Ersilia told me that he went sometimes at noonday or at twilight, and no doubt it was so; but for some weeks I never saw him there. I had to be busy in the days; for light was short, and, as the last week of the Carnival drew near, all the lads and lasses of my quarter came to me to be shod afresh for the tarantella and the mask; and Palès had to eat, and I, and there was no longer that little store of money in the cupboard in the wall; and when I saw a bit of black-letter manuscript, or a rusty gem, or a fragment of old marble turned up from under the shore, I had to look the other way, and could not even think of them.
One day when I was there Maryx found her thus sitting beside her untouched works, with one hand buried in the clusters of her hair, and her face hung in a very ecstasy of adoration over the open pages of a volume. It was the volume which contained the poem of Sospitra.
Maryx went and looked over her shoulder, and read also, she not hearing or perceiving him. I had come to accompany her homeward over the bridge; for it was near six of the evening, and the vespers were being said and sung in all the million churches of our Rome.
His face grew dark as he read. He touched her, and she looked up. Her eyes had a soft moisture in them, languid and lovely, and her cheeks were flushed.
“You have forsaken Homer!” he said, abruptly. “He is the finer teacher. Go back to him.”
She was silent. She seemed still in a dream.
Maryx shut the volume of the Sospitra with a gesture as though he had touched some noxious fruit.
“Those verses that you wander in,” he said, roughly, “are like our Roman woods in midsummer, — glades of flowering luxuriance, whose soil is vile from putrefaction, and whose sunset glories are fever and delirium and death. Come out from them, and walk as you used to love to walk in the old Homeric temples, where you learn the excellence of strength and patience and the mysteries of gods. You waste your words and you misuse your gifts, hanging on that persuasive sorcery of words that has no single good or great thing that it can tell you of, but only stories of fever and decay.”
She seemed to awaken from her dream and listen to him with an effort. She took the volume tenderly from where he had pushed it.
“You are unjust,” she said; “and I think you do not understand.”
Then I saw that she flushed hotly again, and I thought to myself that, alas! alas! she had begun to understand only too well the lessons of that fatal book, — fatal and fateful as Francesca’s.
The face of her master flushed hotly.
“Perhaps I am unjust,” he said, abruptly. “But I think not. I would say to him what I say to you. He is no poet.
“He is a singer of songs, and his heart is cold, and his passion is vileness, and his life knows neither sorrow nor shame. When he sings to them, men and women listen, and their ears are lulled, but their souls are withered, and they go away faint and full of fever. He is your Apollo Soranus: he has the lyre, indeed, in his hands, but the snakes are about his feet. Why will you listen?”
His eyes grew wistful and full of entreaty; his voice lost its furious scorn, and had in it a pathetic pleading. She did not speak, but she held the volume to her, and her face did not lose its resolute coldness.
The silence of her stung him into sharper pain and more bitter earnestness.
“You have loved art. Is it art only to see the canker in the rose, the worm in the fruit, the cancer in the breast, and let all freshness and all loveliness go by uncounted? Would you go to the pestilence ward to model your Hebe, to the ulcered beggar to mould your Herakles? Yet that is what he does. Art, if it be anything, is the perpetual uplifting of what is beautiful in the sight of the multitudes, — the perpetual adoration of that loveliness, material and moral, which men in the haste and the greed of their lives are everlastingly forgetting unless it be that, it is empty and useless as a child’s reed-pipe when the reed is snapped and the child’s breath spent. Genius is obligation. Will you be faithless to that great canon? The writings of Hilarion will poison your genius, for they will embitter it wit
h doubt and corrupt it with evil teaching. Bid him come here, and I will say the same to him. I will not say that as your master I forbid, but I do say, as your friend, I beseech you to resist his influence.”
“You are unjust,” she said, simply, again; and her face did not change, and she turned to move away, her hands still clasping the book. She was cold to the eager and ardent supplication of his gaze and his voice; for indeed there is nothing on earth so cold as is a woman who loves to all things outside her love; and this love was in her then, though we knew it not.
Something in that indifferent and tranquil resolution fell on the heart of Maryx as ice falls on fire. The blood burned in his face, and his eyes lit with an ungovernable rage. With a sudden and uncontrollable gesture, he caught the book from her hands, and with an oath he dashed the volume to the ground. His face was dark with furious scorn.
“Do you call him a poet because he has the trick of a sonorous cadence and of words that fall with the measure of music, so that youths and maidens recite them for the vain charm of their mere empty sound? It is a lie! it is a blasphemy! A poet! A poet suffers for the meanest thing that lives; the feeblest creature dead in the dust is pain to him; his joy and his sorrow alike outweigh tenfold the joys and the sorrows of men; he looks on the world as Christ looked on Jerusalem, and weeps; he loves, and all heaven and all hell are in his love; he is faithful unto death, because fidelity alone can give to love the grandeur and the promise of eternity; he is like the martyrs of the Church who lay upon the wheel with their limbs racked, yet held the roses of Paradise in their hands and heard the angels in the air. That is a poet: that is what Dante was, and Shelley, and Milton, and Petrarca. This a poet? This singer of the senses, whose sole lament is that the appetites of the body are too soon exhausted; this languid and curious analyst, who rends the soul aside with merciless cruelty, and puts away the quivering nerves with cold indifference, once he has seen their secrets! This a poet? Then so was Nero harping! Accursed be the book and all the polished vileness that his verses ever palmed off on men by their mere tricks of sound. This a poet! As soon are the swine that rout the garbage the lions of the Apocalypse by the throne of God!”
The passionate eloquence natural to him shook him now as an oak-tree is shaken by a storm. The scorn and the hate that were in him poured forth their fury on the printed thing as on an emblem and offspring of the man by whom it had been begotten. He thought that it was the false genius which he cursed: in truth it was the faithless passion that he foreboded.
Giojà listened, and her young face grew stern as that of the Athene Promachos: the lines of her mouth curved with a silent severity of pain and wrath. She took the book up from the floor of the room, and held it with clasped hands to her bosom.
“You are unjust,” she said, simply, and said no more.
Maryx stood silent and breathless, like a man exhausted from some bodily conflict. His breast heaved, and his face grew very pale.
“I was too violent; I insulted you. Forgive me,” he muttered, very low. “My dear, — I forgot myself: will you put your hand in mine?”
She looked at him with a look that was almost cruel, so unforgiving and so unresponsive as it was.
You are my master, and have been my friend; otherwise—” she said, slowly, and held out her hand slowly, as she paused.
But he motioned her from him with an irrepressible gesture of passionate pain.
“If only so, better never!” he said, hoarsely. “Leave me unpardoned, then. I claim no debts by force.”
And he turned and went out of the chamber, and I heard his swift, firm steps echoing over the marble pavement of the atrium, and passing into the gardens that lay without.
“Oh, my dear, my dear! What have you done? how could you wound him so?” I moaned to her, feeling the arrow of her hardness in my heart. There was a great pain in her own eyes, as she turned them on me; they had a dreamy look too, as of one seeing afar off some sweet vision.
“I am sorry, but I could do no less, — not to be faithful,” she said, softly and very low. Then she also went away, holding her book, and left me sorrowful and afraid.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE days of joyous, foolish mumming came, — the Carnival mumming that as a boy I had loved so well, and that, ever since I had come and stitched under my Apollo and Crispin, I had never been loath to meddle and mix in, going mad with my lit taper, like the rest, and my whistle of the Befana, and all the salt and sport of a war of wits such as old Rome has always heard in midwinter since the seven nights of the Saturnalia.
Dear Lord! to think that twice a thousand years ago and more, along these banks of Tiber, and down in the Velabrum, and up the Sacred Way, men and women and children were leaping, and dancing, and shouting, and electing their festal king, and exchanging their new-year gifts of wax candles and little clay figures, and that nowadays we are doing just the same thing in the same season, in the same places, only with all the real faunic joyfulness gone out of it with the old slain Saturn, and a great deal of empty and luxurious show come in instead! It makes one sad, mankind looks such a fool.
Better be Heine’s fool on the sea-shore, who asks the winds their “wherefore” and their “whence.” You remember Heine’s poem — that one in the “North Sea” series — that speaks of the man by the shore, and asks, What is man, and what shall become of him, and who lives on high in the stars? and tells how the waves keep on murmuring, and the winds rising, the clouds scudding before the breeze, and the planets shining so cold and so far, and how on the shore a fool waits for an answer, and waits in vain. It is a terrible poem, and terrible because it is true.
Every one of us stands on the brink of the endless sea that is Time and is Death; and all the blind, beautiful, mute, majestic forces of creation move around us, and yet tell us nothing.
It is wonderful that, with that awful mystery always about us, we can go on on our little lives as cheerfully as we do; that on the edge of that mystical shore we yet can think so much about the crab in the lobster-pot, the eel in the sand, the sail in the distance, the child’s face at home.
Well, no doubt it is heaven’s mercy that we can do so: it saves from madness such thinking souls as are among us.
Now, as for our Carnival, foolish no doubt it is, and strange, that for five-and-twenty hundred years souls that all that time have held themselves immortal should have liked such pranking and parading and fooling and fussing. But, all the same, Carnival is pretty, and we Romans are perhaps the only folk since the Milanese who know really how to amuse ourselves in its sports.
Out of place, too, it may be; yet Rome looks well in the winter’s sun, with all the colors of the maskers shining on its great staircases and its vast courts, under the great gloomy walls overtopped with the orange and aloe, and in the arched passage-ways where the lanterns swing; when costumes by the million flaunt their tinsel and satin at the shop-doors and in the dens of the hucksters, and blow in the breeze with all colors, and in every nook and corner of the old steep streets and the wide piazzas there are groups dancing and sporting and the thrum of a tambourine to be heard.
One is glad to get away from it all into the quiet of the deserted galleries, or of the ilex avenues of the gardens and woods; but, all the same, Rome looks well, and would have pleased Commodus and Messalina when the riderless horses fly from the Column of the Sun to the Venetian palace, and the war of the lighted tapers wages all down the mile of the Corso under the red-and-white balconies; and there are groups to gladden a painter’s soul, if not a sculptor’s, where girls in their black masks caper atop of a flight of steps to the sound of a mandoline, and through the gigantic gates of some palace a band of many-colored roisterers rush into the darkness where the fountains are shining among the jagged leaves of the palms and the cactus.
All foolish sights, no doubt, as were the revels of Saturn long ago, yet picturesque and pretty.
In the high days of Carnival Giojà had never gone out often, and never even to the
studio, unless accompanied by Maryx or myself. Indeed, little of the riot came near the Ponte Sisto in any way; but still there were always stray groups of maskers twanging their guitars and thumping their tambourines, and the good folk of the Via Giulia and thereabouts were at that time none of the quietest neighbours.
She never could endure to hear the sounds or see the grotesque dresses: the Rome of the past to her was never the actual ancient Rome of the gross Saturnian verses, of the coarse Ludi Liberales, of the drunken Matrons of the Bona Dea, of the debased populace scrambling and scuffling for the fried meats and the savory cakes of Domitian.
The Rome of the past was always in her sight chaste, austere, noble, self-contained, as it was actually in the earliest days, when a tuft of grass with earth on the roots was symbol of the highest power, and the voice of Scipio Nasica was raised against the erection of the theatre as an emasculating spectacle.
This was how she always thought of Rome; and the Carnival crowds were almost worse to her than had been the fish-sellers and the barrow-drivers clamoring round the site of the Porticus Octaviana on that first summer noon which had brought her to the city. Once I had tried to persuade her that the Corso was pretty to behold, with its motley crowds and draped balconies, its flowers and soldiers, its masks and dominoes, its cars and chariots, its resounding music and its mirthful faces; but she would not hear of it.
“It was the Flaminian Way!” she said to me, in reproof. “There is only one kind of procession befits it, — when the ghosts of the legions come down at nightfall, passing Sulla’s tomb. Do you never see them? Oh, I can see them, whenever you take me there by moonlight.”
And no doubt she could, as Martial’s imagination saw “all Rome” waiting there for Trajan whilst Trajan was lying dead.