Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “Come!” said Maryx, and grasped me with his fine and slender hands as in a vice of iron, and thrust me from the threshold down the stairs.

  “Where would you go?” I stammered; “into the streets? — to the Capitol? that would be best: she loves it so, and will sit thinking there for hours. She is shut in some gallery there; oh, yes, that I am sure. Come to the Capitol, or, if not, to the Pio Clementino; she so often gets away among the marbles, that you know — —”

  “Are you a madman?” said Maryx. “Come with me to him.”

  And he drove me with that grip upon my arm to the palace where the frescoes were in the garden; but of Hilarion there was nothing to be heard; he had not been there that day.

  We went to Daïla.

  The night grew very cold; there had been much rain; the water glistened among the tombs and under the bushes; the hoofs splashed it, the wheels sank in it; the snow lying on the mountains showed white in the moonlight; the wild foxes stole and burrowed in the sand-holes as Nero did before them; the owl and the bittern cried from the waving shrubs that covered the site of lost cities; the night’s ride was long and horrible. Soracte was always before us.

  Maryx spoke not one word.

  We sped across the desolation of the Campagna in the teeth of the bitter north wind. It was early in March, but unusually cold; and I remember the smell of the violets as we crushed them, and of the sweet buds that were springing in the grass.

  Hours went by ere we reached the ilex forest of Daïla. The great white house was shut and silent; dogs barked, and a mounted shepherd — a black weird figure against the moon — asked us what our errand was at such an hour, then, recognizing us, doffed his hat and let us pass.

  Maryx, who had authority therein, entered. No mere word of any servant would he take. The house was empty, dark, mournful; the household was aroused from early sleep or friendly drinking, and could say nothing. Yes, their master had been there at three the day before, not since: of him they knew nothing.

  It was of no use to question them: the people who served Hilarion were trained to silence and to lies.

  We passed through all the grand, desolate, ghostly rooms, one by one, missing no gallery or cabinet or smallest chamber, then, baffled, drove back to Rome in the lonely, ice-cold midnight, through the rain-pools and the thickets that were now quite dark, the moon having by this time set.

  “What will you do?” I muttered to him, as we passed the gate into the city and the guards of it.

  “Find him,” he answered me.

  I was deadly cold; my limbs were cramped; the mists and the winds of the night had penetrated my very bones; but something in his tone chilled me with a ghastlier chill. It seemed so simply plain to him that there could be no other way to reach her, — only this.

  For me, I would not own that she was other than somewhere astray, or sick and ill in one of the many favorite haunts she had in Rome.

  “Let me down here,” I said to him midway in the Corso. “I will go and ask at the galleries and palaces, and seek for her so. It will soon be dawn. The custodians all know me. She may be in the Borghese villa itself. They close at dusk, and she is so careless, you know, once dreaming — —”

  Maryx smiled, — a smile I never thought to live to see on his noble and frank lips.

  “Do you deceive yourself still?” he said.

  He did not seek any such solace as lies in a vain hope; he knew the truth at once, and never pandered with it. It was his nature never to attempt to blind either himself or others.

  As we neared the Ponte Sisto, there rose up from beneath my stall the small brown figure of a fisher-boy. It was Amphion.

  He rose with difficulty, and signed to me, and I went to him. He was shivering, and spoke disconnectedly.

  “You did not know, but I knew. I, in the boat underneath, I could see his shadow so often. Oh, no; no one knew. He was afraid of the woman with the great black eyes, — the woman they call a duchess. But he has cheated her. I have watched always night and day, underneath the bridge. But much I could not tell. So this morning they escaped me: he is gone to Santa Chiara, and she goes too. What is that story she told me? — Ariadne who went away over the sea, — you called her so, — Ariadne was left all alone. He will leave her just so; he always does. I was with him a year, and I know. Does that man yonder care? He looks so pale. You are too old, and I am too young; but he looks strong: does he listen? I ran and ran and ran to be even with him this morning, and the horse struck at me, and I fell. It was my head. I feel stupid. I do not think she saw: that is why I did not come here before. I have been stupid all day. Oh, it is not much. That man is strong. Let him go: it will be too late; but there is always vengeance.”

  And then the lad swooned on the stones, having told the truth that Maryx had known without the telling.

  Maryx listened; and he never spoke once, not once. For me, I think I was mad for the moment. They have told me so since. For to me it was as though the sweet serene heavens had opened to vomit a spawn of devils upon earth, and I would have sworn by my soul and the God who made it that she, my Ariadne, would have borne the waters of the Tiber in a sieve by very force of her pure and perfect innocence, as did the Vestal Tuccia in this our Rome.

  I was conscious of nothing till in the full light of day we drove against the wind on the way to Santa Chiara.

  Santa Chiara was on the sea-coast. It was a little villa in a little bay; its roses and its orangeries grew to the sea’s edge; it belonged to Hilarion, who sailed thence not seldom.

  We went thither. It was many leagues away; there was no manner of reaching it possible except by horses. We drove out of Rome as the day broke.

  There was no doubt now, nor any kind of hope.

  It was sunset on the second day when we reached that portion of the coast where Santa Chiara was.

  “Let me go alone,” said Maryx.

  He seemed to me to have aged suddenly in those two nights and days as men do in a score of years. All his fearless royalty and carelessness of bearing was gone; he was gray and haggard, and had that deadly bloodlessness of the olive-skin which is so much ghastlier than the pallor of fair faces. He was quite silent, he whose warm fancies and eager eloquence had ever found so natural a vent in words.

  “Let me go alone,” he said.

  But I clung to him, holding him back. When men look as he looked, there is always death upon the air.

  “What right have we?” I said to him. “She is not ours by any tie of blood or name; and what do we know? She is not here, that I am sure, nor with him anywhere. God would not let all that nobility be trodden in the dust for a man’s vileness, — oh, no! oh, no! What thought had she of love? No more than the Nausicaa you made standing by the seashore, pure as the pearls of it. Amphion is not to be listened to; he is a foolish boy—”

  And then my words choked me; for I remembered how her face had looked as she had watched the Carnival pageantry, and how she had spoken that dark, wet, solitary night by Nero’s Circus.

  Maryx shook me roughly from him.

  Right? Do you want right to stop murder if you see it? And the murderer only kills the body, not the soul. Let me go.”

  But if it be what you think, we are too late!”

  The anguish upon his face smote me like a blow.

  “There is always vengeance,” he said, under his breath.

  I was a Roman.

  Vengeance to me was sacred as duty.

  I let him go. I begrudged him the first right to it, but I could not gainsay it: he had the right of infinite patience, priceless gifts, and great and generous love all wasted, — the supreme and foremost rights of a great wronged passion.

  The morning had risen clear and fair; here southward the sunshine laughed upon a brilliant sea, deep-blue as the jewels men call sapphires; it was far milder weather; the orange-groves were as a green-and-golden wood to the water’s edge; the turf was azure with the wild hyacinths; against the white walls ten thousand China roses blosso
med, fresh as the little rosy mouths of children.

  We, who for two days and nights had neither closed our eyes nor taken off our clothes, were cold and stiff from the heavy chills of long exposure. We shuddered like frozen things in all that radiant and elastic light, and delicate air fragrant with the smell of the orange-fruit and flower and with the glad salt scents of the surf that was breaking, curled and snowy, on the smooth beach at our feet.

  But even vengeance was denied him. The long, low house, white as a sea-shell, and gay with many climbing plants, and walled all round with the high spears of aloes, was shut and silent even as Daïla had been.

  In an oval window a woman was sitting, making thread-lace with nimble hands and singing among the little Bengalese roses.

  Yes, the master had been there, but he had gone, sailed away in his own vessel, as his custom was. Yes, he had been gone twelve hours. Yes, there was some one with him; he was never alone, never alone. And the woman laughed, twisting the threads of her lace, knowing the ways of her employer. Then she looked across the roses seaward, and, shading her eyes from the sun, pointed to a vanishing speck of white on the horizon. That was the schooner, yes, if we looked quick; in another moment it would be out of sight.

  We looked. The canvas shone for one second more in the sunshine far off, so far, no bigger than the leaf of a white camellia-flower, then blended with the blent light of sea and sky, and vanished and was lost.

  I laughed aloud.

  “The sails should be black! they should be black!” I muttered, and caught at the roses to help me stand, and felt the earth and the water all swirl and heave in giddy eddies round me. “The sails should be black. Theseus has taken her, and he will leave her on Naxos, and he will dance and laugh and garland the helm. Why are the sails not black?”

  Then I fell down on the yellow sands.

  And for a space I remember nothing more.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  I DO not remember how I found my way back to Rome. I lost sight of Maryx. I was clearly conscious of nothing till I felt the wet tongue of Palès against my cheek and found that I was sitting on my own old bench beside my stall in the moonlight by the bridge. I suppose he must have brought me home. I do not know; I had forgotten him. Perhaps he had forgotten me: why not?

  It was night, and the place was deserted. There was no one about, only some girl from an open window above in the street was singing aloud a love-song. I could have choked her throat into silence. It is not wonderful that there is so much crime on earth; it is rather wonderful that there is so little, seeing how much pain there is, pain that is the twin brother of madness.

  It was the middle of the night. I think two or three days had gone by. I cursed the stones of the street because they had borne his steps, and the waters under the arches because they had not risen and swallowed him.

  Ah, God! in our hate (as in our love) how we feel our own cramped littleness! we stretch our arms for the whole universe to give us vengeance, and the grand old dome of the sky seems to echo with inextinguishable laughter. Ah, God! why are our hearts so great, our years so few and feeble? Therein is all the mockery and cruelty of life!

  I sat there like a stupid frozen thing, the vast mighty heavens above me, the heavens that should have been full of weeping angels and of avenging swords, if there were any more heed of human souls, there, than of the ants that crawl along black dust on a white summer way.

  The dog kissed me, moaning, full of woe, because she knew that I was so.

  I rose to my feet.

  The Apollo Sandaliarius shone white in the moon-rays. Surely it was only yesterday that she had come to me there, having her hands on my stall with the passion-flower and the poppy in them, — the flower of death?

  Surely it was but yesterday that I had dreamed my dream in Borghese?

  Then I looked at my things in the drawer under my stall. The dog had guarded everything safely, being fed, no doubt, by the neighbors.

  There was in the drawer a long slender-pointed knife, — a blade of steel made in past ages, and very keen; I had used it to cut through the skins of leather. I put it in my breast, where it is most at home with a Roman.

  After all, there was no other vengeance than the poor simple trite one, all too short, that never could quench the thirst of man yet, nor wash out any wrong; there was no other. The skies did not fall, the stars did not pause in their courses. I looked at them. It seemed to me strange. I felt the edge of the knife and waited for morning. There was only the old, old way.

  “May death never come when you call on it!” said the old murdered man, Servianus, dying, to Hadrian. And in the after-time Hadrian did cry on death to relieve him, and death would not come; not even his own hirelings would give the blow at his command; and Servianus was avenged.

  But then Servianus never saw his vengeance.

  I would see mine, or, rather, hers; so I told myself.

  I was old, but I was strong enough for this.

  I waited for the morning.

  Of Maryx I had no thought.

  I only saw the ship going away, away, away, over the shining silent sea in the clear daylight, with the white sails against the blue.

  When the morning broke, I went across the river, and across the fields, still misty and wreathed with fog, to officers of the Vatican.

  “You have offered me often many ducats for my Greek Hermes: give me them now, and take him,” I said to them, — I, who had never sold the smallest fragment or the rustiest relic of the arts I loved. They closed with me eagerly, having for many a year desired that fair Greek thing for the great gallery they call the Pio Clementino.

  “Put him next your Ariadne!” I said to them, and laughed aloud in that grave palace of the Pope. They thought me mad, no doubt; but they desired the statue, and they took no heed of me.

  I sold him without looking on him, as a man in a pagan land may sell a cherished son. But I had ceased to care for him: he was a dumb dead thing to me, — a carven stone. The thought of any statue froze my blood.

  They fetched him down with oxen and men, bearing his beautiful tender snow-white limbs along the streets, where of course he must have passed so often in other ages, throned and garlanded in such processions of the gods as Ovid and his ladies loved to watch.

  I never looked at him, — not once; I clutched the money that the guardians of the galleries gave me, and signed something they pushed to me, and hurried out into the air. Bells were ringing, and the sun was bright. I felt dizzy, and deaf, and blind.

  Hermes woke all mortals from sleep with his wand at the break of the day. Oh that he had not wakened me!

  I clutched my wealth that I had bought with my bartered god as with some human life, and felt for my long narrow knife in the folds of my shirt, and hurried away on my quest.

  I had no clue to guide me, for the sea is wide, and its shores are many. Yet I had no doubt but that I should find them, — no doubt at all; and so I passed out of Rome. And Hermes was set in the great gallery, with the leonine head of a Jupiter Axur beside him, and at his feet a jasper basin of Assyria, in which Semiramis might once have bathed.

  It does not matter where I wandered, or how I fared; I went on no clue whatever save the well-known name of Hilarion; but whosoever has any sort of fame has lighted a beacon that is always shining upon him, and can never more return into the cool twilight of privacy, even when most he is wishes; it is of these retributions — some call them compensations — that life is full.

  Hilarion, living always, whether he would or not, in the red light of that beacon-fire, was not very difficult to track. I went my ground over and over, indeed, and made many a needless journey, but I had the money for my Hermes, which was a large sum, and more than enough; and so it came to pass that in the full heat of June, that sweetest month, when the stars are so many and every soul on earth it seems ought to be glad, I found him in Venice.

  There in the shallow salt lagoons was riding his own pleasure-vessel, the ship with the white sai
ls. They said it was about to bear him eastward, to the old enchanted lands of the East.

  The city was lovely then in the full summer. I knew it well, and in my day had been happy there. Now it appeared to me hateful.

  Its water streets were once familiar to me as the ways of Rome, and I had learned to row the fruit-boat to and fro, gorgeous with the autumn colors of their freight and the beauty of the women of the Lido; now it was horrible to me.

  The silence seemed like the awful stillness of a God-forgotten world; the gliding water seemed like the silvery sliding course of serpents; the salt-scented beach of the marshy shores seemed like the sulphurous dank mists of the awful world where Persephone mourned.

  I stumbled along the narrow footpaths of the place, and the song of the boatmen and the laughter of the little children, dancing and dabbling on the edges of the canals, jarred through my brain, as in other years the like must have jarred on the heavy pains of the condemned creatures in the cells beneath the water-line.

  I had no definite thought except to take his life.

  The purpose had gone with me in my bosom; had lain with me by night; had grown to be a very part and parcel of myself, going with me over the blossoming lands in the summer of the year, lying down with me, and rising with me, — the last memory and the first.

  It had no horror for me.

  I was a Roman, and to me vengeance was duty; beyond all other duty when it was vengeance for the innocent. I did not reason about it; I only said to myself that he should die. It was easy to find the palace where he dwelt; any one of the idlers of the street could show it me. He was famous. The house was in a large street; a great old palace, fretted and fantastic, gilded and carved, and majestic, looming over the thread of dull waters in gorgeous sombreness, as it had loomed there in blind Dandolo’s own day.

  Generally, everything passed near without entering this narrow, silent way: it was out of the thread of traffic. There was a great bell tolling heavily from a tower near, and a flock of pigeons in the air, and the scent of lilies: these I noticed at the time. My sight was quite clear, and my brain, too: all I thought of was, where I should strike him!