by Ouida
That was all that it seemed to her, — that I did not understand. Could she see the tears of blood that welled up in my eyes? could she see the blank despair that blinded my sight? could she see the frozen hand that I felt clutching at my heart and benumbing it? I did not understand, — that was all that it seemed to her.
She was my Ariadne born again to suffer the same fate. I saw the future: she could not. I knew that he would leave her as surely as the night succeeds the day. I knew that his passion — if passion indeed it were, and not only the mere common vanity of subjugation and possession — would pall on him and fade out little by little, as the stars fade out of the gray morning skies. I knew, but I had not the courage to tell her.
Men were faithful only to the faithless. But what could she know of this?
“Thinking of the stars and of the heavens in the desert all alone! Yes!” I cried; and the bonds of my silence were unloosed, and the words rushed from my lips like a torrent from between the hills.
“Yes, and never to see the stars any more, and to lose forever the peace of the desert, — that you think is gain ! Oh, my dear, what can I say to you? What can I say? You will not believe if I tell you. I shall seem a liar, and a prophet of false woe. I shall curse when I would bless. What can I say to you? Athene watched over you. You were of those who dwell alone, but whom the gods are with: you had the clue and the sword, and they are nothing to you: you lose them both at his word, at the mere breath of his lips, and know no god but his idle law, that shifts as the wind of the sea. And you count that gain? Oh, just heaven! Oh, my dear, my heart is broken; how can I tell you? One man loved you who was great and good, — to whom you were a sacred thing, who would have lifted you up in heaven, and never have touched too roughly a single hair of your head; and you saw him no more than the very earth that you trod; he was less to you than the marbles he wrought in; and he suffers! and what do you care? You have had the greatest wrong that a woman can have, and you think it the greatest good, the sweetest gift! He has torn your whole life down as a cruel hand tears a rose in the morning light; and you rejoice! For what do you know? He will kill your soul, and still you will kiss his hand. Some women are so. When he leaves you, what will you do? For you, there will only be death. The weak are consoled, but the strong never. What will you do? What will you do? You are like a child that culls flowers at the edge of a snake’s breeding-pit. He waked you, — yes! to send you in a deeper sleep, blind and dumb to everything but his will. Nay, nay! that is not your fault. Love does not come at will; and of goodness it is not born, nor of gratitude, nor of any right or reason on the earth. Only that you should have had no thought of us, — no thought at all, — only of him by whom your ruin comes, — that seems hard! Ay, it is hard. You stood just so in my dream, and you hesitated between the flower of passion and the flower of death. Ah, well might Love laugh: they grow on the same bough; Love knows that. Oh, my dear, my dear, I come too late! Look! He has done worse than murder, for that only kills the body; but he has killed the soul in you. He will crush out all that came to you from heaven, — all your mind, and your hopes, and your dreams, and all the mystery in you, that we poor half-dumb fools call genius, and that made the common daylight above you full of all beautiful shapes and visions, that our duller eyes could not see, as you went. He has done worse than murder, and I came to take his life. Ay, I would slay him now as I would strangle the snake in my path. And even for this I come too late. I cannot do you even this poor last service. To strike him dead would only be to strike you too. I come too late! Take my knife, lest I should see him; take it; till he leaves you, I will wait.”
I drew the fine, thin blade across my knee and broke it in two pieces, and threw the two halves at her feet.
Then I turned, without looking once at her, and went away.
I do not know how the day waned and passed: the skies seemed red with fire, and the canals with blood. I do not know how I found my road over the marble floors and out into the air. I only remember that I felt my way feebly with my hands, as though the golden sunlight were all darkness, and that I groped my way down the steps and out under an angle of the masonry, staring stupidly upon the gliding waters.
I do not know whether a minute had gone by, or many hours, when some shivering sense of sound made me look up at the casement above, a high vast casement fretted with dusky gold and many colors and all kinds of sculptured stone. The sun was making a glory as of jewels on its painted panes. Some of them were open: I could see within the chamber Hilarion’s fair and delicate head, and his face drooped with a soft smile. I could see her, with all her loveliness, melting, as it were, into his embrace, and see her mouth meet his.
If I had not broken the steel! ——
I rose from the stones and cursed them, and departed from the place as the moon rose.
CHAPTER XXIII.
WHEN I went back to my place by Ponte Sisto, I think the Faun in the fountain was dead or gone. I never heard him any more; I never have heard him again.
Is nature kind, or cruel? Who can tell?
The cyclone comes, or the earthquake; the great wave rises and swallows the cities and the villages, and goes back whence it came; the earth yawns, and devours the pretty towns and the sleeping children, the gardens where the lovers were sitting, and the churches where women prayed, and then the morass dries up and the gulf unites again. Men build afresh, and the grass grows, and the trees, and all the flowering seasons come back as of old. But the dead are dead: nothing changes that!
As it is with the earth, so it is with our life, — our own poor, short, little life, that is all we can really call our own. Calamities shatter, and despair engulfs it; and yet after a time the chasm seems to close; the storm-wave seems to roll back; the leaves and the grass return; and we make new dwellings. That is, the daily ways of living are resumed, and the common tricks of our speech and act are as they used to be before disaster came upon us. Then wise people say, He or she has “ got over it.” Alas, alas! the drowned children will not cone back to us; the love that was struck down, the prayer that was silenced, the altar that was ruined, the garden that was ravished, they are all gone forever, — forever, — forever! Yet we live; because grief does not always kill, and often does not speak. I went back to my stall, and to Palès, because habit is strong and I was old.
The people spared me, and asked few questions. There is more kindness than we think in human nature, — at least when it has nothing to gain by being otherwise than kind.
And I began to stitch leather, though all around me seemed to have grown gray and black, and the voices of the merry crowds hurt me as a finger hurts that lightly and roughly touches a deep wound. It is hard for us when we shrink from the innocent laughter of others, and when the cloudy day seems kinder than the sunshine.
I shut the shutters of my window that looked upon the river, and locked the door of the chamber. It seemed to me accursed.
From the moment that Maryx and I saw the sail against the sky, white as a gull’s wing, — the sail that should have been sable as the night, — no word passed his lips or mine to each other. He would not speak. I dared not. There are some wrongs, some griefs, so dire you cannot put words to them.
When, timidly, after many days, I ventured up through the aloes and the myrtle to his house, being afraid of what I had seen upon his face that day by the sea-shore, I saw in the first chamber a statue thrown down, broken and headless: the head was only a little mound of white and gray marble-dust.
The old man Giulio came and stood by me. Tears rolled down his cheeks. I envied them.
“My master did that,” he said,— “did it the night he returned. He struck it down with a mallet, blow after blow. The beautiful thing! It seemed like a murder.”
The statue was what had been the Nausicaa’s. I turned away: I dared not ask for him.
“He works as usual,” said Giulio. The little old brown woman tottered in, more than ever like a dull dusky leaf that a breeze blows about feebly
: she shook me gently, and pointed to the fallen marble.
“It is as I told you it would be: the marble has killed him,” said his mother. “Yes, he works, he breathes, he moves, he speaks. There is nothing to see, perhaps, — not for others, — but he is dead for all that. I am his mother, and I know — —”
I crept away, sick, as with some remorse, and feeling as though guilty of some heavy sin. Why had I meddled with Fortune, the maker and mocker of men? Why had I dared to compel fate, that day when he had paused by me, to take up the Wingless Love?
What was my grief beside his? and what my wrong? All the great gifts of his great soul he had given; and they had been uncounted and wasted like water spilled upon the ground.
I crept through the myrtles downward, away from the house where the statue lay shattered. The earliest of the nightingales of the year was beginning her lay in some leafy covert hard by, but never would he hear music in their piping again; never, — any more than I should hear the song of the Faun in the fountain.
For the song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in our hearts. And his heart would be forever empty and silent, like a temple that has been burned with fire, and left standing, pitiful and terrible, in mockery of a lost religion and of a forsaken god.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE months wore on, — those colorless, long, slow-footed spaces of time, so heavy as they pass, so dead a blank to remember and try to number, which all men and all women know into whose life has come any great grief; spaces of time where one lives and moves, and eats and drinks, and sleeps, ay, and even may laugh perhaps (Heaven help one!), and yet all the while, as the mother of Maryx said, one is dead — quite dead — for any pulse of real bright life that beats in us.
“What is she to you?” my good friends of the Rione said. “Only a stray girl, come and gone, — no more. Have reason.
Ay, truly she was no more to me; and yet she had taken with her all the gladness I had, and all the peace; and when I sat stitching leather for old Rome the world seemed very dark.
I remained fettered, as the poor are fettered, hand and foot to the soil by poverty.
I had no other Hermes to sell.
I stayed by my stall, stitching and seeing nothing that I did, and doing my work so ill that people were angry and began to forsake me entirely, — those very poor folks whose sandals and shoes I had always cobbled gratis being the first and loudest to say that I was purblind.
It did not matter very much; I wanted so very little for myself, and I could always get enough food for the dog, any day, from Pippo’s stove; only, all the peace of my simple life was gone, and gone forever. It seems hard when one does no wrong, and has no envy or ill feeling of any kind, and only takes delight in the mere open air and the mere movement of life and the charm of the arts and the innocent mysteries of study and antiquity, — it seems hard, I say, when these things are one’s joy and can hurt no one, to have all one’s pleasure in them dashed out of one’s keeping like a slender glass that is shivered on the ground.
It seems hard. But I tried to think that it did not matter. I was old, and it was only dying a little before my time to have the days become so gray and empty, and the sky seem only a hollow gourd, and the trouble of birth and of death feel too great for the short, sad, hurried, impotent handful of years that divided the two; and I stayed on at my stall, and the fountain was only a confused and tiresome sound, and the hastening of the people’s feet over the bridge seemed cruel, — why did they hasten, when mine could not? — and all I sat thinking of was of my dream in Borghese that summer noon when the white statues had awakened and spoken.
It was only a dream. No, of course; it was only a dream. Often I went there, and would have called to them to have mercy; but they were only marble: the beautiful Thespian Love was mute as stone, and the Roman woman on her bier kept the flowers of oblivion close folded in her hands and would not yield them.
It had been only a dream; only a dream.
“Oh, God! must she suffer for that?” I cried always in my heart, and wandered Rome stupidly; and, if a son can hate his mother most revered, almost I hated the stones of Rome. For I was sure that Hilarion had left or would leave her; and who could tell whether she were living or dead?
They who live after Naxos are base; and she was holy as any creature sleeping in a virgin martyr-tomb in the womb of the earth under the city laid to rest in the hope of Christ.
Ah, yes! for a great love is a great holiness. Ye fools and pharisees have said otherwise, because it is as far beyond you as the stars of the night.
Rome itself seemed to me to shrivel and grow small, lying in the circle of the mountains dead as the nymph Canens had lain dead by Tiber’s side.
Sometimes I would climb up the winding road, and stand under the cedars, and look at the sea from the heights above the city, and wish and wish ——
But I was old and poor.
Palès and I could only look till the blue gleam faded into the dusk of night, and go back wearily with our heads drooped to our corner by the fountain, the fountain in which there was no music for us now, but only the noisy gushing of water restless to escape, and the sharp ring of the women’s brazen jars.
Sometimes I would go and stand before my lost Hermes.
“That was mine once,” I said to a stranger who was calling it most lovely where it stood on the mosaic floors, bathed in the sunlight.
He looked at me in contempt, and went and spoke to one of the Swiss guards, thinking me mad or drunk, no doubt.
I never dared to name her to Maryx, — never. There was a look on his face when I passed him by in the streets that daunted one into fear and silence. But one night after several months I came upon him suddenly in the dead silence of the Flavian amphitheatre.
It was midnight and moonlight: the plants that then grew like a green wreath in the travertine stood out clear in every stem and leaf against the cold blue light of the skies; the water glistened in the underground cells; the newt ran and the toad squatted in the seat of emperors.
I know not what in the silence and the solemnity of the awful place opened my lips. Stopping him, as he would have passed me, we two alone in the vast space, I told him all that I had seen at Venice and all that I had gone thither meaning to do.
He shrank with an irrepressible gesture at the first word, as a man shrinks when a nerve in his flesh is laid bare; then he stood still and heard me to the end.
He was a very proud man, and he had never said to her or to me or to any one that he had loved her.
He heard me in patience to the end; then he said, slowly, with the paleness of a, great suppressed emotion on his face, —
Yes; if one could strike him without striking her, do you think I would have let him live a day? Not that we have any right, you and I. We are nothing to her! You forget. We never had any hold on her, not even as her friends. We gave her all we had to give; it counted nothing: that was not our fault, nor hers. We missed the way; he found it.”
Then he was silent.
He had found it; yes, he had found it without effort, cost, or sacrifice, and would turn aside front it when another path beguiled him, as easily as a child runs a little way through the daisies in a flowering meadow and then tires of it, he knows not why, and throws his gathered blossoms down, and runs away.
Maryx looked up at the skies, where the moon was sailing high in a clear space where the storm-wreath of the clouds had parted and left it free.
As its light fell on his features, one saw how aged they were and worn, with all the bold and noble cast of them fatigued and hardened, and their lines deepened like the channel of a river after a heavy flood. He had suffered very terribly, this man who had owned to no suffering save such as the ruthless blows of his mallet on his own marble had shown when he had shattered the Nausicaa.
It was all still about us. The mighty place was in a deep shadow. The statues of Christ were blacker than all the rest, and the cross in the midst was shrouded
in gloom, as though it were the very hour of the crucifixion.
Maryx, whose hand leaned on it, shook it with the force of a sudden shudder that ran through him.
“We must wait. When he leaves her, then — —”
The Cross of Christ has been called in witness of many an oath of vengeance, but it never heard one more just than the one that was then sworn mutely by it.
Then he shook himself free of me, and went down among the many ruins in the darkness.
He waited: that was all. Vengeance only demands a long patience.
And I, remembering, felt that he would have few years to wait.
CHAPTER XXV.
So the months passed by and became years, fulfilling their course with that terrible speed which sows the earth so thick with graves.
I stitched on for the people of Rome, and the people said, “He grows old; he has no sport in him; let him be;” and very often therefore passed me by to hurry to another stall before the old stone mouth of Truth, where there was a newly-come cobbler of leather who had a very comical wit and had very cheap prices. I do not know whether his work wore well. But I made enough to live on and get bread for Palès. That sufficed.
Very often I would go and look at my lost Hermes in the gallery of the Vatican. I might as well never have sold him; but we know everything too late.
And when the gaping foreign crowds, all frothy talk and not a shred of knowledge or reverence amidst them, gathered round the pedestal he stood on, and praised him, I wanted to cry out to them, “Stand aside, ye fools! He is mine.”