Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “Of course I searched for her everywhere, but it was long before I found her. The man at the gate seemed uneasy, for fear of the displeasure of Hilarion; but he said, ‘We have no orders; we can do nothing. When he comes back—’ So they did not stir, nor care. As for me, I thought she was dead. But still I sought high and low.

  “One day, in this very street, I heard some women talking; this woman whom you have seen with her was one of them. They spoke of a stranger who was dying of hunger, yet who had spent the only coin she could earn by making the nets for the fishermen of the Seine, in buying gray clay and earth. Then I thought of her, for often she would mend the old men’s nets by the Tiber, having learned to do it by the sea; and who but she would have bought sculptors’ clay instead of bread?

  “Then I questioned the Frenchwoman of her, and little by little she told me. She has a good soul, and a tender one, and she was sorrowful, though knowing nothing. ‘This girl is beautiful, she said, ‘and belongs to noble people, I think, but she has had some great grief, or else is mad. She passed down my street one day at daybreak and asked for a little empty room that I had to let, and told me that she had not a coin in the world, and bade me get her the fishing-nets to make or mend. I do not know why she spoke to me: children and dogs like me, — perhaps that was why. And she seemed to be in such great woe that I had not the heart to turn her away; and I gave her the room, and got her the work; and piteous it is to see her lovely slender hands among all that rough cordage and hemp, and torn by them, and yet working on and on. And the first money she gained she bought clay, and she began to model a statue, like the figures one sees in the churches; and all day she makes or mends the nets, and half the night, or more, labors at this clay; and she is mad, I think, for she never speaks, and scarcely a mouthful passes her lips, save a draught of water.’

  “And when the woman told me this, then I felt sure that it was she. And I told a lie as of having lost my sister, and begged to see her, and after a while the woman, who was anxious, and even frightened, let me go up to the room on the roof. And this is how I found her.

  “The room was bare, and there was a heap of nets on the floor, and there was a statue in clay, which had his features and his form, only it was winged and seemed as a god. She was clad in the rough white garments she wore in Rome, and her arms were bare, and she was modeling the clay still with her hands, and she never heard me enter, nor the woman speak, who said to me, trembling, ‘Look! is it a false god, that she will not even leave it to break bread?’ And I said to her, ‘Ay, it is a false god.’ For indeed it was in his very likeness, — only greater than he, more beautiful, more perfect, as, no doubt, he always seemed to her: may he live forever in pain, and die without a friend!

  “The woman, trembling, went and touched her, and said, ‘Come away: it is night: you must be hungry.’ She turned and looked at us both. ‘Hush! it will be finished very soon; then he will come back.’ Then she turned again to the statue, and worked on at it, and her hands seemed so feverish that I thought they must have burnt the clay as they touched it. ‘Is it your sister?’ asked the woman; and I answered, ‘Yes;’ and together we stood and watched her. ‘Whilst she still made the nets, she seemed to have some reason left, though she never spoke,’ said the woman; ‘but since she has touched that earth she seems mad. Is it indeed your sister? What sorrow is on her, that she is thus?’ But I could not speak. I watched her till I felt suffocated. I knew not what I did. I was beside myself. God forgive me!

  “I had my knife in my vest, — the knife that should have ended his life in those nights of his pleasure, if I had not been a coward, — such a coward! And now, like the foolish wretch I was, I so loathed the sight of that image, and of her lovely life wasting and burning away on it, that as I saw it I sprang upon it, and plunged my knife into the very breast of it, and the moist clay reeled and crumbled, and fell away, and all its beauty sank down into a mere heap of earth, — God forgive me!

  “And she herself fell down at the sight of the ruined thing, as though my knife had stricken her life, — fell with a great cry, as if her very heart were bursting; and her forehead struck the stones, and the blood came from her mouth.”

  His voice sank into silence with a sob. For me, I sat quietly by his side, with the Seine water flowing underneath the wall down below, and the lamps looming yellow through the mist.

  I wanted to know nothing more. I saw all the cruel months and years, as in a mirror one sees one’s own eyes looking back at one.

  “Go on,” I said to the lad; and after a little he took up his tale.

  “She was like a dead creature many days and weeks,” he said. “We called help; they gave it some learned name; some fire of the spine and brain, they called it. She rose from her bed, for she is strong, they say, but her mind seems gone ever since then. ‘Will he be long?’ she is always asking: that is all; you have heard her?”

  “Yes, I have heard her.”

  I spoke calmly, but it seemed to me as if the lamps burning; through the fog were lights of hell and I heard all its fiends laughing.

  “How has she lived all this while?”

  This had passed in September, the boy said, and we were now in midwinter, passing into early days of February, and all the while that treasure and ill-got wealth, hoarded in Fiumara, had been waiting her, whilst she was lying between life and death in this river-attic in the heart of a foreign city!

  He hung his head, ashamed.

  “I should have sent to you; yes, I know. I thought of that, but I could not: it was horrible, yet it was a kind of happiness to be the only thing between her and the workhouse, — the hospital, — the grave. For without me she would have gone there. ‘She is my sister,’ I said to the woman; and they believed me, and let me do for her. My money was almost gone, but I had the flute, and I could always get money in plenty, playing here and there. They would have hired me for the great theatres, but I was afraid of that. I have played at the singing-places in the open air, — nowhere else, — for I was always afraid he might return and see me, and so know. Indeed, she has wanted for nothing, for nothing that we could give. She is as well here as if she were in a palace; she knows nothing of where she is. Of the statue she does not seem to have any remembrance: the people shoveled it away: it was only a heap of gray earth. You are angered; you think I did wrong: yes, but for the moment, almost, I thought the clay image was alive, and I fancied I should see her free of its spell. Indeed, indeed, she wants for nothing. She is docile; she lets the woman do what she likes; but all day long she watches the window, and all she says is that ‘Will he be long?’ The woman says she sleeps but very little; when she awakes she says always the same thing. And all Paris raves and weeps over Fauriel!”

  The boy laughed bitterly, the tears coursing down his cheeks.

  “I suppose he never sends to know where she is, else his people would seek for her, — it is so easy to know anything in this city. I think they have never tried to know. She has never gone out of that room since that day,” he continued. “She has all she can want, oh, yes, indeed; she does not know whether it is a garret or a palace; only sometimes, I think, she feels the want of air, without knowing what it is she feels.

  “You will say I should have sent to you. Yes, I thought of it; but, you see, I cannot write, and then I have been glad to be the only one near her, — the only thing she had. Of course she does not know. She sees me very often, but she never knows me. There is always that blank look in her eyes. I suppose it is her brain that is gone.

  “Oh, you are angry. Do not be angry. Perhaps I did ill. But had I let you know you would have come, and that man who lives on the Golden Hill, and is rich, and she would never have wanted me any more.

  “I make plenty of money; yes, indeed. If I went to the concerts, I should be rich too, they say, and I have been so happy to work for her, and to buy flannels and pretty things, — though she never seems to see them; and then I think always, some day that cloud that seems over her will brea
k and go away, and then perhaps I shall dare to say to her, ‘I have been of some little use: just look at me kindly once.’ And, you see, if I had let you know, all that would have been over, as it is over now. Of course you will take her away?”

  “Be still, for the pity of heaven!” I cried to him. “Be still, or I too shall be mad.”

  For the simple tale, as the lad told it, was to me as full of woe and terror as the sublimest tragedy that ever poet writ. Listening, I seemed to see and to hear all that had been suffered by her; every one of his poor words was big with grief, big as the world itself for me. Oh, why had I broken the steel!

  Men repent of evil, they say: it is ten thousand times more bitter to repent of having held back from evil. Sorely, and in passion and agony, I repented then having held my hand in Venice.

  The boy was nothing to me. I had no mercy for him, or remembrance.

  It was quite late at night now. I sat dumb and stupid in his garret on the edge of his truckle-bed: the muffled sound of all the life of Paris came up dully, like the distant sound of the sea when one is miles inland.

  “Will you take her away?” he said, with a piteous entreaty in his voice.

  “Let me think,” I said to him; and the stars and the roofs seemed to whirl, and all the pulses of the bestial world to beat in mine.

  For it is bestial, — a beast that forever devours and has never enough.

  Yes, of course I would take her away; I would take her to Rome.

  Rome is the mighty mother of nations; in Rome she might find peace once more.

  I had heard in other days that sometimes where the mind is shaken from its seat, and reason clouded by any great shock, nothing is so likely to restore it and awaken consciousness as the sight of a familiar place and a beloved scene linked by memory with perished happiness.

  Yes, I would take her away.

  Here I did not dare to ask for any counsel or any surgeon’s aid; I had a dread of the inquisition of strangers and of the many delays of long inquiry, and the same feverish eagerness that Amphion had had to keep close to himself her sorrow and her needs did now consume me likewise.

  If I could only get her back once more, back to the chamber on the river.

  And, with that odd remembrance of trifles which comes to one sometimes across great woe, I thought what a pity it was that Hermes was gone, and that there were now no red-and-golden bean-flowers to run across the casement!

  “Yes, I will take her away,” I said.

  The poor lad said nothing; his head dropped on his chest. He had done all he could, and for six months had gone to and fro and out in all weathers, playing to get the means wherewith to find her shelter and care, denying himself, and thinking only of her; but to me then he was no more than any one of the leafless lime-boughs drooping by the gates of Hilarion.

  Shivering I went across the passage-way and opened the door of her chamber. The woman that he paid for such service was sitting there, sewing at linen, a woman old and gentle; she herself was sitting, too, with her arms leaning on the bare table, and one hand dreamily moving into figures some loose white rose-leaves fallen from a rose-tree in a pot. She did not hear me or heed me. When I touched her she lifted her heavy eyes, in which a light like that of flame seemed to burn painfully.

  “Will he be long?” she said, and moved the rose-leaves to and fro feverishly.

  The woman shook her head.

  “That is all she ever says,” she muttered, as she stitched. “She says it in her sleep, — such times as she does sleep, — and she wakes stretching out her arms. Who is he? He must be a beast.”

  “He is a poet!” I said, and went out from the chamber into the lighted ways of the city and their noise. My brain seemed reeling, and my eyes were blind.

  In the gay and shining avenues, all alight and full of moving crowds, women were talking with wet soft eyes of Fauriel.

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  NEXT day I got such changes in my papers as were needful for the journey, and I took her on her homeward way. She did not resist. She was not in any way sensible of where she went, and she was docile, like a gentle animal stunned with many blows. Her bodily health did not seem weak, though she was very feverish, and her pulses stopped at times in a strange way.

  The woman who had been with her wept at parting from her.

  “Will she find him there?” she asked.

  “Nay, never there, nor anywhere,” I said; for who finds love afresh that once has been forsaken?

  She had had the clue and the sword, and she had given them up to him, and he in return had given her shipwreck and death. It was so two thousand years ago, and it is so to-day, and will be so to-morrow.

  From my carefully-hoarded money I paid that woman well, for she had been true and tender: the rest I spent in going back to Rome. The boy came with me. I was hard and cruel to him at that time, but I could not say him nay.

  Throughout the journey she did not change in any way. The noise and movement and many changes seemed to perplex and trouble her vaguely, as they trouble a poor lamb sent on that iron road, but no more. She never spoke, except that now and then she would look wistfully out at some gleam of sky or water or spreading plain, and ask, “Will he be long?” Neither of me nor of Amphion had she the slightest consciousness. It was the madness of one all-absorbent and absorbed idea: indeed, what else is Love?

  Even the beautiful snow-ranges and the serene glory of the mountains, from which I had hoped something, failed to alter her or rouse her. I think she did not know them from the clouds, or see them even. No doubt all she ever saw in daylight or in darkness was one face alone.

  It seemed to me as if that journey would never end; to me it was like a horrible, distorted dream, a nightmare in which an appalling horror leaned forever on my heart; all the splendors of early winter, of virgin snows, of clear blue ice, of falling avalanche and glacier spread upon the mountain-side, and underneath in the deep valleys the splendor still of russet gold, and of the gorgeous purples and rubies mantling decay, all these, I say, only served to heighten the ghostliness of that long passage through the slow short days back to my country.

  For despair went with me.

  But, tardy and terrible though it was, it drew on towards its end before many suns had risen and set.

  It is so beautiful, that highway to our Rome across the land from Etrurian Arezzo; the Umbrian soil is rich and fresh, masses of oak clothe the hills, avenues of oak and beech and clumps of forest-trees shelter the cattle and break the lines of olive and of vine; behind are the mountains, dusky against the light, with floating vapors veiling them, and half hiding some ruined fortress or walled village, or some pile, half palace and half prison, set high upon their ridges; and ever and again, upon some spur of them or eminence, some old gray city, mighty in the past, and still in fame immortal; Cortona, with its citadel like a towering rock, enthroned aloft; Assisi, sacred and gray upon the high hill-top; Spoleto, lovely in her ancientness as any dream, with calm deep woods around, and at her back the purple cloud-swept heights that bear its name; Perugia Augusta, with domes and towers, cupolas and castles, endless as a forest of stone; Foligno, grand and gaunt, and still and desolate, as all these cities are, their strength spent, their fortresses useless, their errand done, their genius of war and art quenched with their beacon-fires; one by one they succeed one another in the long panorama of the Apennine range, wood and water, and corn and orchard, all beneath them and around them, fruitful and in peace, and in their midst, lone Thrasymene, soundless and windless, with the silvery birds at rest upon its silvery waters, and here and there to be seen a solitary sail, catching, the light and shining like a silver shield amidst the reedy shallows.

  Then, after Thrasymene come the wild, bold gorges of the Sabine mountains; wooded scarps, bold headlands, great breadths of stunted brushwood, with brooks that tumble through it; rocks that glow in the sun with the deep colors of all the marbles that earth makes; deep ravines, in which the new-born Tiber runs at will; and
above these the broad blue sky, and late in the day the burning gold of a stormy sunset shining out of pearly mists that wreath the lower hills; then the wide level green plains, misty and full of shadows in the twilight, white villages hung aloft on mountain edges like the nests of eagles ; then a pause in the green fields, where once the buried vestals were left alone in the bowels of the earth, with the single loaf and the pitcher of water, to face the endless night of eternity; then “Roma,” says some voice, as quietly as though the mother of mankind were only a wayside hamlet where the mules should stop and drink.

  Ay, there is no highway like it, wander the world as you will, and none that keeps such memories.

  But for me, I saw no loveliness then of city or of citadel hoary with years, of monastery sheltered amidst snows and forest, of silent lake sleeping in the serenest folds of the hills. I only strained my ear, with the eager hearkening of any spent and hunted animal, to hear .the name of Rome.

  At last I heard it, when the night had fallen, though the moon was not as yet up over the edge of the eastern horizon.

  The great bells were booming heavily; some cardinal had died.

  Gently, and without haste, I led her by the hand through the old familiar ways, shrouded in shadows under the cold starless skes [sic] .

  My heart almost ceased to beat. Here was my last hope. If this had no spell to rouse her, she would sleep in the dreams of madness forever; none would ever awaken her. She had loved the stones and the soil of Rome with a filial devotion: Rome alone would perchance have power to save her.

  I walked on and led her by the hand. Her fingers moved a little in my hold as we passed through the Forum, and past the basilica of Constantine, as though some thrill ran through her. But I looked in her face, and there was no change: it was still as stone, and the eyes were burning and had a sightless look.

  I went onward by way of the Capitol, past the Ara Cœli and the colossal figures of the Dioscuri. Once she paused, and a sort of tremor shook her, and for an instant I hoped for some passing remembrance, ever so slight, that yet should come to link her once more with the living world.