by Ouida
If he would only come out into the air! ——
I sat down in an angle of the stonework and waited. It was very early: no one noticed me, — an old man mooning by the water’s side. I watched the house: she, of course, was there, but, strangely, I never thought of her then: my mind was intent, and solely intent, on him.
When you have said to yourself that you will kill any one, the world only seems to hold yourself and him, and God, — who will see the justice done.
The lofty doors of the palace were open; one could see straight up the marble steps into the courts and the halls: they were all vast, and cool, and solitary; not a soul seemed there. Perhaps the people of the streets had misled me? I rose and climbed the stone stairs, and entered the halls. I suppose some hours had gone by; the sun was vertical, the porphyry shone red in it, and the yellow marble was like brass. I remember that as I trod on them.
There was no sound. I ascended the staircase, lined with the forms of giants and of heroes in the paled and peeling fresco of an heroic time. I held my knife closer, and mounted step after step. What if he heard? so best, if it brought him forth. I would have stabbed him before an armed multitude; for I had no desire to live after him.
I went on up the stately stairs and the painted landing-places; there was a long gallery in front at the head of the stairs, and many doors. I opened the one that was nearest to me; he might be there: if not, I might learn of some one.
The chamber was immense, as our rooms are; the light that fell through it was of all kinds of hues from falling through the glass of painted casements. I went on across half its length, over its polished floor of many-colored stones; there came on my ear a sudden cry of welcome, — low, surprised, and happy as the summer cry of any bird. In the lily-scented air, in the halo of colored sunlight, she sprang up before me, glad and beautiful as any human thing could ever be, clothed in white, with a golden fillet on her forehead, and at her breast a knot of crimson carnations.
I stood still, stupefied and afraid. I had forgotten her.
“Dear friend! is it you?” she cried, with a pure and happy tone in her voice.
How shall I tell the change that had passed over her? Just such a change as I had seen when, in my dream, the bronze of the Borghese had blushed and moved and started into sudden life. Not greater the change upon the face of earth when from the still gray silvery dawn, in which the stars are trembling, the glory comes, and the sun shines over the hills.
What is it that love does to a woman? Without it she only sleeps; with it alone she lives.
Never in all my years have I seen happiness so perfect, so exquisite, so eloquent without a word, as was in her face, her air, her very limbs and movements. Before, she had been lovely as the statues were, and like them mute and cold, and scarcely human; now her eyes were like the light of day, her mouth was like the dew-wet rose, her whole form seemed to thrill with the grace and the gladness and the glory and the passion of life.
I stood before her stupidly and dumb.
“Dear friend, is it you?” she said, and came and took my hands and smiled.
What could I say to her? I had come to kill him.
“I must have seemed so thankless in my silence,” she said, softly. “It hurt me to keep silence; but he wished it so.”
I drew my hands away. I hated her to touch me.
“You are happy, then?” I said, and was dumb, staring upon her, for there were in her such power, such loveliness, such radiance, — and all the while she was looking in my eyes with the sweet candor of a fearless innocence.
“Happy!” she smiled, as she echoed the word.
No doubt it seemed so poor to her, and feeble to measure all she felt. Then all the old pride came into her eyes.
“He loves me!” she said, under her breath; as if that said all.
“Do you remember I wanted to know what happiness was?” she said, after a little while. “Do you remember my asking the girls under the trees by Castel Gondolfo? As if one could ever know until — —”
Then the warm color stole over her face, and she smiled, and the dreamy wondering look I knew so well came into her eyes, and she seemed to forget me.
I stood gripping the handle of my knife. I could not take my gaze from her. She seemed transfigured. To such a creature as this, in the fresh glory of her joy, what could one say of shame, and of the world’s scorn, and of her wrongs, and of the mockery of women?
Then her eyes came back from their musing towards me, and her thoughts with them.
“And did you come to find me? That is so good! You were always so good, and I seem always thankless. I wished to tell you; but he would not. And Maryx too, it must have seemed to him, also, so thankless. Only now he will know; he will understand.
“You look at me strangely! Are you tired?” she added, as I kept silence. “Why will you stand? Are you angered?”
“Are you happy? I said, hoarsely. How could I say to her, “I came to kill your seducer”?
“Am I?” she said, very low, under her breath. “What! when he loves me? Do you remember? — I was always afraid of Love, because it is all one’s life, and one is no more oneself, but breathes through another’s lips, and has no will any more, and no force. But now I know: there is no other thing worth living for or dying for; there is no other life. Do you remember? — I used to wonder why women looked so happy, and why they used to go and pray with wet eyes, and why the poets wrote, and the singers sung. Now I know: there is only one good on all the earth, and it is more beautiful to love than even to be loved.”
Then a sudden blush came all over her cheek and throat and she paused suddenly, ashamed, as if some beauty of her form had been suddenly laid bare to curious eyes.
“Come and look!” she said, and touched my hand with hers; and it seemed to me as though flame burnt me; and she went on a little way across the chamber, and drew back a curtain of brocade with heavy fringes, and signed me to pass beneath it.
Quite mechanically and stupidly I followed her, and on the other side of the curtain I saw a lovely eight-sided vaulted room, like many of the palace-rooms in our own Rome, and here there were marbles white and gray, and clay, and the tools of sculpture; and the light was pouring in from a high casement that faced the sea.
“Look!” she said, and showed me a statue, only in the clay as yet, but very beautiful.
It would be difficult to tell where its infinite beauty lay.
You can describe a picture, but not a statue. Marble is like music: it can never be measured or told of in words. What can any one know of the beauty of the Belvedere Mercury, who has not looked up in its face?
The solitary figure was Love; but the loveliest and noblest Love that ever human hand had fashioned, surpassing even the perfect Thespian Love of Borghese. All the passion of the whole world, and all the dreams of lovers, and all the visions of heaven that have ever come to poets in their sleep, were in the languor of its musing eyes and in the smile of its closed lips.
“What can all earth and all eternity bestow worth one hour that I give?” this great Love asked you by a look.
Yet the face was only the face of Hilarion, — but that face transfigured as those eyes which worshiped him beheld it; unlike the face of any mortal; great as godhead, and glorious as the morning.
I stood in silence.
I could have struck the statue down, and cleft it from head to foot, as the false god it was. But then it was god to her.
She looked at it, and then at me, and sank upon a block of stone that stood there near, ruffling back her dusky gold of curls, and smiling, while the carnations fell out from her bosom at Love’s feet.
“Look! this he knows that I have done, for he has seen it grow under my hands out of the mere moist earths; and now he does believe. Look! you will tell Maryx. It is greater than anything I ever did, — that I know; but it is because I look up in his face and find it there. He is glad, because he knows that it is mine, and he says they will say, ‘No girl’s h
and ever made that.’ What does it matter if they think so? he knows! and then when they say that it is beautiful, after all it will be him whom they praise, and if it should live after me, long long ages, like the Faun, people will not think of me, but only of him, and they will tell one another his name, — not mine. And that is what I pray for always. Who can care for fame for oneself alone? But to tell the world in all that Hereafter that one never will see, how beautiful was what we loved, so that even when one is dead one will seem to live for them and to serve them, — that is almost like immortality. Oh, the gods were good when they gave me that power, for in all the other ages I shall be able to make men see what he is now, and all that he is to me!”
Then she laughed, a sweet little low laughter, the tears of an exceeding joy wet upon her eyelids all the while; and she bent and kissed the feet of the statue.
“Maryx used to say that Love killed Art,” she murmured. “You will tell him now, — oh, how I pity him, that he does not know what love is!”
And softly she kissed again the feet of her god. Then, with a sudden flush over all her throat and bosom, for it was unlike her to show any emotion, or to pour forth thought in open words, she sat still on the block of stone at the base of the Love, with dreaming suffused eyes and silent lips.
“It will be in marble soon,” she said, after a space. “I shall carve it all with my own hands: no one shall touch it in any line. I can ‘hew the rocks,’ you know. Maryx was so good to teach me. This will be great, — that I can feel; but then I have had only to look in his face.”
What could I say to her? her innocence was so perfect, so perfect her joy and her pride; and to speak to her of the world, and the ways of its men and its women, seemed like a very blasphemy.
And the statue was great.
Perhaps she had only looked in his face, but she had seen it through the greatness of her own passion and of her own soul.
She rose quickly and put out her hand.
“Come away: he does not wish it to be seen; not yet.”
I did not take her hand.
“He is your only law!” I said, and stopped; for how could I say to her all that consumed my heart?
She looked at me in surprise.
“I do not know that any one else even lives,” she said, simply.
It was quite true, no doubt.
A great love is an absolute isolation, and an absolute absorption. Nothing lives or moves or breathes save one life; for one life alone the sun rises and sets, the seasons revolve, the clouds bear rain, and the stars ride on high; the multitudes around cease to exist, or seem but ghostly shades; of all the sounds of earth there is but one voice audible; all past ages have been but the herald of one soul; all eternity can be but its heritage alone.
O children of the world, what know you of such love? no more than the blind worm creeping to its fellow knows of the morning glory of the day.
CHAPTER XXII.
I STOOD by the base of the statue, and gazed still stupidly upon her. Her eyes were shining, sweet, and tender, and abstracted through the glad tears that were upon their lashes.
Whatever else he had done basely, he had made her happy, — as yet.
Perhaps she was right: for a few hours of joy one owes the debt of years, and should give a pardon wide and deep as the deep sea.
This Love which she had made in his likeness, the tyrant and compeller of the world, was to her as the angel which brings perfect dreams and lets the tired sleeper visit heaven. Who could tell her that her god was but a thing of clay? Not I; not I. And yet I could have wept with very tears of blood. She dropped the curtain, and came and stood by me.
“You will not cone away?” she said. “Well, never mind it does not matter for you to see it: you will go home and tell Maryx. Tell him that if I seem thankless, I have not forgotten all his noble lessons. You will wait with me, — stay all day? In half an hour he will be back, and he will be so glad to see you: oh, that I am sure—”
“He will be back soon?” I felt for the knife underneath my shirt.
“Yes; he had only gone to his boat, that pretty ship that is in the harbor.”
“The ship with the white sails: I know, I know!”
I laughed aloud. She looked at me surprised, and in a little fear.
“And when the ship sails away without you?” I said, brutally, and laughing still, because the mention of the schooner had broken the bonds of the silence that had held me against my will half paralyzed, and I seemed to be again upon the Tyrrhene shore, seeing the white sail fade against the sky.
“And when that ship sails without you? The day will come. It always comes: You are my Ariadne; yet you forget Naxos! Oh, the day will come! you will kiss the feet of your idol then, and they will not stay; they will go away, away, away, and they will not tarry for your prayers or your tears. Ay, it is always so. Two love, and one tires. And you know nothing of that, — you who would have love immortal.”
And I laughed again, for it seemed to me so horrible, and I was half mad.
No doubt it would have been kinder had I struck my knife down into her breast with the words unspoken.
All shade of color forsook her face; only the soft azure of the veins remained, and changed to an ashen gray. She shook with a sudden shiver from head to foot as the name she hated, the name of Ariadne, fell upon her ear. The ice-bolt had fallen in her paradise. A scared and terrible fear dilated her eyes, that opened wide in the amaze of some suddenly-stricken creature.
“And when he leaves you?” I said, with cruel iteration. “Do you remember what you told me once of the woman by the marshes by the sea, who had nothing left by which to remember love, — but wounds that never healed? That is all his love will leave you by and by.”
“Ah, never!”
She spoke rather to herself than me. The terror was fading out of her eyes, the blood returning to her face; she was in the sweet bewildered trance of that blind faith which goes wherever it is led, and never asks the end nor dreads the fate. Her love was deathless: how could she know that his was mortal?
“You are cruel,” she said, with her mouth quivering, but the old soft, grand courage in her eyes. “We are together forever: he has said so. But even if — if — I only remembered him by wounds, what would that change in me? He would have loved me. If he would wish to wound me, so he should. I am his own as the dogs are. Think! — he looked at me, and all the world grew beautiful; he touched me, and I was happy, — I who never had been happy in my life. You look at me strangely; you speak harshly: why? I used to think, surely you would be glad — —”
I gripped my knife and cursed him in my soul.
How could one say to her the thing that he had made her in man’s and woman’s sight.
I thought you would be glad,” she said, wistfully, “and I would have told you long ago, myself. I do not know why you should look so. Perhaps you are angered because I seemed ungrateful to you and Maryx. Perhaps I was so. I have no thought, — only of him. What he wished, that I did. Even Rome itself was for me nothing, and the gods, — there is only one for me; and he is with me always. And I think the serpents and the apes are gone forever from the tree, and he only hears the nightingales, now. He tells me so often, — very often. Do you remember I used to dream of greatness for myself? — ah, what does it matter? I want nothing now. When he looks at me, the gods themselves could give me nothing more.”
And the sweet tranquil radiance came back into her eyes, and her thoughts wandered into the memories of this perfect passion which possessed her, and she forgot that I was there.
My throat was choking; my eyes felt blind; my tongue clove to my mouth. I, who knew what that end would be as surely as I knew the day then shining would sink into the earth, I was dumb like a brute beast, — I, who had gone to take his life.
Before this love which knew nothing of the laws of mankind, how poor and trite and trivial looked those laws! What could I dare to say to her of shame? Ah! if it had only been for any othe
r’s sake! But he, — perhaps he did not lie to her; perhaps he did only hear the nightingales with her beside him; but how soon their song would pall upon his ear, how soon would he sigh for the poisonous kiss of the serpents! I knew! I knew!
I stood heart-broken in the warm light that was falling through the casement and streamed towards her face. What could I say to her? Men harder and sterner and surer in every way of their own judgment than I was of mine no doubt would have shaken her with harsh hands from that dream in which she had wandered to her own destruction.
No doubt a sterner moralist than I would have had no pity, and would have hurled on her all the weight of those bitter truths of which she was so ignorant; would have shown her that pit of earthly scorn upon whose brink she stood; would have torn down all that perfect credulous faith of hers which could have no longer life nor any more lasting root than the flowering creeper born of a summer’s sun and gorgeous as the sunset’s hues, and clinging about a ruin mantling decay. Oh, yes, no doubt. But I am only weak, and of little wisdom, and never certain that the laws and ways of the world are just, and, never capable of long giving pain to any harmless creature, least of all to her.
She seemed to rouse herself with effort to remember I was there, and turned on me her eyes that were suffused and dreamful with happiness, like a young child’s with sleep.
“I must have seemed so thankless to you: you were so very good to me,” she said, with that serious sweetness of her rare smile that I had used to watch for, as an old dog watches for his young owner’s, — an old dog that is used to be forgotten, but does not himself forget, though he is old. “I must have seemed so thankless; but he bade me be silent, and I have no law but him. After that night when we walked in Nero’s fields, and I went home and learned he loved me — do you not see I forgot that there was any one in all the world except himself and me? It must always be so; at least so I think. Oh, how true that poem was! Do you remember how he read it that night after Mozart among the roses by the fire? What use were endless life and all the lore of the spirits and the seers to Sospitra? I was like Sospitra, till he came, — always thinking of the stars and the heavens, in the desert, all alone, and always wishing for life eternal, when it is only life together that is worth a wish or a prayer. But why do you look at me so? Perhaps you do not understand. Perhaps I am selfish.”