by Ouida
The boy would hardly say more than a mute, and was unhandy, and delicate as a girl, though at home in the water from childish habits in his own archipelago; but I suppose he used his money adroitly, for the fisherman never called him to account for laziness or clumsiness, but let him do very much as he liked, making a pretense of lying on the damp ground to watch the fish sweep with the current into the nets, or pulling the little boat about round the Tiberine Isle, and under the Temple of Vesta.
Amphion shunned me, and never went near Giojà, and I did not think it was my business to betray him; so I let things be, and often after dusk a flute as sweet as a nightingale’s song made music under the piles of the bridge of Sextus, sighing through the dark in answer to my faun in the fountain.
But Giojà took no notice. I do not suppose that she even heard. There was so much melody at twilight all about there, — from guitars thrumming in balconies, and tambourines ringing in tavern doorways, and students singing as they passed from shore to shore, and fishermen as they set their nets; and in her own heart, then, there was that perpetual music which makes the ear deaf to every other harmony or discord, — the music which is never heard but once in life.
But of this I then knew nothing.
I only saw that her step was elastic, that her eyes were full of light, that her face had lost that deep and troubled sadness which it had never been without before since the day that she sought Virgilian Rome and found but ruin. I was glad, and never thought to trace the change to its true source. She was more silent than ever, and more than ever seemed to like to be alone; but she was occupied on a new and greater work than her Penthesileia, and I supposed that this absorbed her.
I was used to the way of artists, and knew that true Art allows no friends; it is like Love. One day Love comes, and then slighted friendship is avenged.
Maryx noticed this change in her, and, despite himself, hope entered into him. Of Hilarion neither he nor I thought; for I never saw him pass Ersilia’s door, and indeed he seemed to me to be more than ever with his imperial jade the Duchess.
One evening as the people were coming out from the great church of the Trinity of the Pilgrims hard by my fountain, and there was a smell of incense on the air, and a sound of chanting everywhere, because it was in the days of Lent, and mirthful King Carnival had gone to his grave and Pasquino back to his solitude, — one evening as I sat stitching, communing with my own thoughts, and not liking them, because of late they had got confused and cloudy and I had a sense of impending woe without any corresponding sense of how to meet and to prevent it, Giojà, came to me as her habit had used to be, though of late she had changed it, and, touching me gently, said to me, —
“Let us go for one of our old walks. Will you not take me? The sun is setting.”
Palès leaped for joy, and I rose in obedience, glad as the dog was to see her return to one of our old familiar customs that of late had been abandoned, as the vague restraint of an unexplained estrangement had grown up between her and me.
She was very silent as we walked, but that she usually was; for unless strongly moved she had never been given to many words.
We came away through the vegetable-market, and the windy square, dedicated to Jesus, and so past the Hill of the Horse, as we call it, to our favorite Colonna gardens, where she and I had spent many a pleasant quiet hour, with Rome outspread like a map at our feet, and the iron gates closed between us and the outer world.
We sat down on the upper terrace, where the pigeons and the geese pace among the flowers, and the pine stem stands that was set there when Rienzi died, and that brave old tower rears itself above the ilexes against the blue sky, which the people will call the Tower of Nero, though Nero never beheld it.
She leaned there, as she had done a hundred times, looking down on to the shelving masses of verdure, and across the bare wilderness of roofs that seem to rise one on another, like the waves of a great sea arrested and changed to stone, with the sky-line always marked by the distant darkness of the pines and the dome of St. Peter’s against the light.
“If one lived in it a thousand years, could one exhaust Rome?” she said, below her breath. “Always I loved it; but now — —”
She paused; and I, coward-like, fool-like, did not ask her what she meant, because I shrank from every chance of hearing the name of Hilarion on her lips. God forgive me! If only I had known ——
The pretty pigeons, blue and bronze and white, came pecking and strolling round us, looking up with their gem-like eyes for the crumbs that we were used to bring them.
“I forgot their bread. I am sorry,” she said, looking down on them, and she stroked the soft plumage of one that she had always especially caressed, and which would let her handle it.
“Will you do something for me?” she said, holding the bird to her breast, as she had held the Sospitra. That is what I wanted to ask you. I have not seen Maryx since that day when you said that I wounded him. I have been to the studio, but he is never there. Listen: he was wrong and unjust, and it was not to me that the insult was, but to what he spoke of; but he has been so good to me, and I can never repay it, and I seem thankless, and he will not understand. Will you tell him for me that I can bear no bitterness in my heart against him, and that the gratitude I give to him will never change? Will you tell him?”
“My dear, it is not gratitude that he wants,” I said, and then paused; for, after all, I scarcely dared to speak for him, since for himself he was silent. “It is not gratitude that he wants; great natures do not think of that. They act nobly, as mean ones meanly, by their instinct, as the eagle soars and the worm crawls. Maryx would be glad of your faith, of your obedience, of your affection, for indeed you owe him much; I do not mean such vulgar debt as can be paid by any feeling of mere obligation, but such debt as may well be borne by one frank and pure nature from another, and can be only paid by loyal love.”
And then I stopped, for fear of saying too much, because I had no warrant from him, and a certain look of alarm and of distaste that came upon her face arrested me.
She did not answer me for a few moments, but bent her face over the bird she held.
“I shall seem thankless to him and you,” she said, sorrowfully, and then was still, and seemed to draw her words back, as remembering some order not to speak. She laid her hand upon my arm, the hand which had held the drooping poppies that day when I had seen her first.
“Pray tell him I am thankful, always thankful,” she said, with a tremor in her voice. “He has been very good to me, good beyond all my own deserving, — and you too. If ever I pain you you will forgive me, will you not? For so long as I shall live I shall remember always how you sheltered me in that time of wretchedness, and all the peaceful days that you have given me.”
The bird struggled from her breast and flew to regain its fellows; hot tears had fallen from her eyes upon its burnished sapphire head and seared it. I gazed on her, touched to my soul, yet troubled.
“Why, my child, why, my dear, you speak as though you were going to join those gods you love, and leave us and Rome desolate,” I murmured, with a poor attempt at lightness of heart and speech; “but as for what I did for you, it was nothing. You forget my dream: you know I could do no less for you, my Ariadne. Come from the shades to earth.”
Her hand fell from my arm; her face changed.
“Do not call me by that name: I loathe it,” she said, with a sudden impatience. “I am not like her. I never can have been like her, and Homer is too kind to her by far! Let us go home now. You will tell Maryx what I said. I would not pain him. But he will never understand — —”
“He understands well enough,” I said, bitterly, for something in her tone had stung me. “He understands that two years of purest devotion to every highest interest of yours weighs as nothing in the scale beside a few forced hot-house roses and a few hectic idle poems: he understands that well.”
“You are unjust,” she said merely, as she had said it to Maryx, and she walk
ed slowly away from the sunny terrace, down between the high walls of ilex and arbutus, and so homeward.
I did not speak any more. I felt angered against her, and, heaven forgive me! I did not know —— Silently and sadly I followed her through all the narrow crooked noisy passages and streets till we reached the familiar shadow of our Holy Trinity of Pilgrims, and, going a little farther, were at home.
At the bridge where Ersilia’s house-entrance gaped wide open, she stood still, and held her hands out to me once again.
“Forgive me,” she said, very low, under her breath.
I thought she meant me to forgive her impatience of my rebuke, and I took her hands tenderly, so fair and slender and unworn, within my own, that were so hard and brown and furrowed.
“Dear, where we love much, we always forgive, because we ourselves are nothing, and what we love is all.”
“Thank you,” she said, softly, and let her hands linger in mine. Then she passed away from me into the darkness and the coldness of the house. I went back to my stall, and though I was troubled yet I was relieved, because she had given me gentle words to bear to Maryx, if they were not all one could have wished. The Faun sang me a song in the fountain as I sat under the wall of the old monastic hospital that had sheltered me so many years.
I heard the song for the last time.
CHAPTER XIX.
Now it came to pass that the evening following, when I was sitting at my stall, having lit my lamp to see to finish a more delicate piece of work than common, I felt weary and out of spirits, I could not have well told why, and sat sighing as I stitched, — sighing in my own meditations for the blithe old days when a hand at cards and a flask of wine and a merry companion had made bright the winter nights to me, and the finding of an evangeliarium in the mediæval Greek or Latin, or of a broken seal-ring or a fragment of a marble hand, made me so happy that I would not have changed places with a king, as I tramped in the snow or the mud through the darkling streets of Rome.
Now I felt heavy-hearted. All my quarter was empty; the people were gone to the Piazza Navona, where a mid-Lent fair was, and the booths, and the fun, and the frolic, and a year or so before I should have gone too, and laughed with the loudest in the old Circus Agonalis around Domitian’s obelisk, with the splash and sparkle of Bernini’s fountains reflecting the changing lights of the little colored lamps.
As it was, I sat and stitched, and Palès slept, and the stars began to come out above Tiber, in clear cold skies that were cloudless.
I was so entirely still that a step coming down over the bridge made me look up. I saw Maryx as I had seen him many a time in a score of years since in the days of his youth he had made me Apollo Sandaliarius.
He paused by my stall.
“Is she not well, that she has not been to me to-day?” he asked.
A vague trouble began to stir in me. “Has she not been?” I asked him.
“No.”
“I have heard nothing.”
“But you have not seen her?”
“No; but often the day passes — —”
I did not end the phrase, fearing to seem to blame her; for indeed it pained me that of late she had so very seldom come to lean her hands on my board, and ask how things went with me, and beg me to go and sit with her in Hermes’ room, or wander through the streets, as before the last few months it had been so constantly her habit to do that I had grown used to it, and missed it as an old dog will miss the pleasure of a walk.
Maryx stood silent while the light from my lamp fell on his noble face, which was flushed and troubled.
“I spoke to her wrongly the day before yesterday,” he said, at last. “It was base in me, and very unworthy. It is not for me to deprecate his genius. It is not for me, if she find beauty in it, to say her nay. Beauty there is, and if she do not see the foulness beneath it, so be it. To the pure all things are pure. I would ask her pardon. Perhaps I have driven her away. Shall I find her in her room?”
“Of course!” I said, hastily; “and you were in no way to blame, and it is only like your nobleness; and she is worthy of it, for she, too, repents and regrets that moment of cold words. Look! she bade me say so to you only yesterday, in the Colonna gardens. She said, ‘Will you tell him for me that I can have no bitterness in my heart for him, and that my gratitude will never change?’ That is what she said, the tears in her eyes the while. She was too proud or too shy to say so to you herself. But her heart is tender, and if you put out your hand she will give hers now, — ah, so gladly: that I know!” So I spoke, like a fool as I was.
Maryx looked at me with a beautiful light and warmth upon his face.
“Is that indeed true? or do you say it to make me deceive myself? Better all pain — all life-long pain — than any self-deception.”
“Nay, it is true; that I swear. Go you and hear her say it again. She does repent herself.”
“I would take nothing from mere obedience, mere sense of gratitude,” he muttered; but the light of love was still in his eloquent eyes.
“Go you yourself to her,” said I, laughing, like the foolish thing I was, and got up and went quickly before him across the street to Ersilia’s door. “For now,” I said to myself, “he will speak straightly to her, and all will be well between them forever.”
But at the door Pippo, leaning there smoking, swore that the girl was not within, nor had she been seen all day, he said. I looked up at Maryx. His face seemed to me to be stern, and pale, and disquieted.
“Let us ask Ersilia,” he said; and I went with him into the house.
“Has she not been to you?” said Ersilia, coming out with a lamp held over her head. “Oh, yes; she left here this forenoon, quite early, as her habit is. I thought she was still up yonder with your marbles.”
Then a great and sore trouble fell upon us that was the beginning of the end.
Maryx never spoke. He went with swift strides up to the chamber, and entered it, for the door had no lock. The light from the newly-risen moon, that hung above his own Golden Hill, streamed soft and pallid across Hermes, and left the rest of the empty space in darkness.
She was not there. He struck a light, and searched the room, but there was nothing to show any intention of departure, and no word whatever of farewell. Only the beautiful head that she had drawn in black and white of Hilarion as the poet Agathon was no longer in its place against the wall.
There is something in the silence of an empty room that sometimes has a terrible eloquence: it is like the look of coming death in the eyes of a dumb animal: it beggars words and makes them needless.
Palès following raised her head and gave a long, low, wailing moan, that echoed woefully through the stillness in which only the lapping of the water against the stones of the bridges was to be heard, and the stroke of a single oar that was stirring the darkness somewhere near.
Maryx looked at me, and there was that in his look which frightened me. He pointed to the empty place upon the wall.
“She is gone with him,” he said: that was all: and yet in the sound of his voice it seemed to me that I heard speaking all the despair of a great life ruined and made valueless.
I broke out into God knows what wild protests and breathless denials; I would not let such a thing be said, be thought possible, for one single moment; she was so far above all touch of man, all weakness or passion or unwisdom of woman, it was impiety, profanation, folly, hatefulness, to hint such things or dream them. Was he mad?
Maryx stood there quite motionless; his face was white as his own marbles, and very rigid. All my passion passed him and left him unmoved as the winds leave the rocks.
“She has gone with him,” he said, again; and his lips were dry, and moved, as it were, with difficulty, and his great brown eyes, so brilliant and so bold, grew black with heavy wrath and desperate pain.
“Do you not see?” he muttered; “do you not see? whilst we thought her a holy thing, he all the time—”
And he laughed, — a terrible laug
h.
The moon was on the face of Hermes: the mouth seemed to smile in pity and derision.
CHAPTER XX.
MARYX stood quite silent and quite still.
I raved, and my own raving words fell back on my own ears and made me dumb again; and only the wailing of the dog at the moon, that was shining in the sky and on the river, filled the chamber.
I did not believe; I would not believe; I thrust all possibility of belief away from me as so much blasphemy and infamy against her; and yet all the while I knew that he was right, as you know that some ghastly sorrow is on its way to you long ere the day dawns that actually brings it.
“Why should you say so? why, why, why?” I said, over and over again, till the words lost all sense to one. “She has gone astray somewhere in some old haunt of Rome, or fallen asleep or ill in some gallery of Capitol or Vatican. You know her ways: she dreams among the marbles till she is almost a statue like them. That is it; oh, that is it, — nothing more. We shall meet her coming through the darkness if we go into the streets, and then how she will smile at us! only she must never know. Why, Palès will find her; Palès is wiser than you are; Palès knows — —”
And then I broke down, and laughed, and sobbed, and struck my head with my own hands, thinking of that day when my Ariadne had come to my stall in the summer noon, with the poppies and the passion-flowers in her hand; and Ariadne had the clue and the sword, and gave them up and drifted away into a common love and common fate of women, sought and then forsaken ——
But this could not be hers.
“No! oh, thrice no!” I screamed. “Ariadne? It was but a jest to call her so, you know, — a fancy and a jest: the gods could not be so cruel as to make it true, just for a dream, an old man’s foolish dream in the hot sunshine!”