by Ouida
But none came; her eyes never altered; she went with me obediently, passively, as she would have gone with any stranger who had led her so, past the great stairs, and the divine Brethren, who once had been to her not any whit less sacred than had been Rome itself.
We went down into the grim gray ruinous streets that pass under the Tarpeian Rock, with the lichen and the wild shrubs growing on mounds of brick that once were temples, and the poor crowding together in dusky hovels that once were the arched passages of palaces or the open courts of public pleasure-places.
There was little light; here and there a lantern swung upon a cord, or the glow from a smith’s forge shone ruddy on the stones. She did not notice anything; she came onward with me, walking straightly, as the blind do. Thence from the darkness and the squalor and the ruin we came out by winding ways on to the river’s bank by Quattro Capi.
The river was full, but not in flood; its tawny hues were brown with the soil of the mountains; on it a few boats were rocking, tied with ropes to the piles of the bridge; the island was indistinct, and the farther shore was dim, but at that instant the moon rose, and lines of silver passed across the pulsing stream, and touched to light the peristyle of the little moss-grown temple by our side, and the falling water of the Medicis’ fountain.
She moved forward of her own will, and walked to the edge of the Tiber, and stood and looked on the strong swift current and the shadowy shores, and on the domes and roofs and towers and temples that were gathered like a phantom city on the edges of the shores.
She looked in silence.
Then all at once the blindness passed from her eyes: she saw and knew the sight she saw. She stretched out her arms, with a tremulous hesitation and gesture of ineffable welcome.
“This is Rome!” she cried, with a great sigh, while her very soul seemed to go forth to the city as a child to its mother. Then she fell on her knees and wept aloud.
I knew that she was saved, and Rome had saved her.
CHAPTER XXX.
WE stood there, two creatures, quite alone on the edge of the river. There must have been people near, but there were none in sight; the boats rocked on the little waves; the heavy masses of the trees were black; breadths of silvery light rippled under the arches; from the convent of the Franciscans on the island there came distant sounds of chanting; the full moon hung above the pines of Pamfili. She remained kneeling, her head bowed down between her hands. Great sobs shook all her frame.
It was so still; there might have been only in the city the ghostly world of all its dead multitudes, it was so still. At last I grew frightened, seeing her thus upon the stones, so motionless. I touched and raised her: she rose slowly to her feet.
“Have I been mad?” she said to me.
Hardly could I keep from weeping, I myself.
“Nay, my dear, not that,” I said to her. “Nay, never that. You have been ill. But now — —”
She shivered from head to foot. With returning reason no doubt she remembered all things that had passed. She was silent, standing and looking on the Etruscan river she had loved so well, as it flowed to the sea beneath the moon. Her eyes had lost their strained look of unconscious pain, and the burning light had gone out of them: they were wet and dim, and had an unspeakable misery in them, like that in a young animal when it is dying and knows that it dies.
“What month is it?” she asked.
I told her.
“It was summer when he wrote,” she said, and then was still again, gazing at the water.
I began to fear that too soon I had rejoiced, and that the clouds would gather over her again, and that she again would lose herself in that strange awful night of the brain which we, for want of knowing what it is, call madness.
But, watching her features as the rays of the moon fell on them, I saw gradually returning there the look of silence, of resolution, of endurance, which was natural to them, and which had been on it on that first day of her sorrow, when she had dreamed of Virgilian Rome and found the Ghetto.
She turned her face to me, and though her voice was broken and faint, it was firm.
“Ask me nothing. I cannot speak,” she said to me. “But you are good. Hide me in some corner of Rome, and find me work. I must live, I must live, since he lives — —”
The last words she spoke so low that I scarcely heard them; she was speaking to herself then, not to me. I took her hand.
“Rest in the old place to-night. To-morrow we will see.”
She went with me obediently, speaking no more. There was no one in the entrance or upon the stairs; I had sent the boy there onward, to beg of Ersilia that it might be so; all was quiet and deserted; the one lamp burned before the Madonna in the wall.
Strong shivers shook her, but she did not resist. She passed up the staircase with me to my room, where no longer was there Hermes to greet her, — Hermes, who made woman, but not such a woman as she was.
They had made it clean, and it was spacious, but it looked desolate to me: she, however, seemed to see no change; as far as she saw anything she only saw the broad and open window, through which there shone the river and the sky.
I drew her to the hearth, where logs were burning. But suddenly she stopped still and looked, then with a cry threw herself forward on the rude warm bricks before the hearth, and kissed them again and again and again, as a mother kisses the flushed cheek of her sleeping child.
“O stones, you bore his feet, and felt the rose-leaves fall, and heard him say he loved me! O dear stones, speak and tell me it was true.”
So murmuring to them, she kissed the rough warm bricks again and yet again, and laid her tired head on them and caressed them: they were not colder than his heart, I thought.
“O stones, it was no dream? Tell me it was no dream! you heard him first!” she muttered, lying there, and then she laughed and wept and shuddered, and laid her soft mouth and beating breast to those senseless flags, because once they had borne his feet and once had heard his voice. Would he have laughed had he been there? Perhaps.
I drew back into the gloom and let her be. She had no thought of me or any living thing save of him by whom she had been forsaken: no thought at all.
She was mad still, if Love be madness, and not the sublimest self-oblivion which can ever raise the mortal to deity, as I think.
I let her be. She had fallen forward, with her arms flung outward, and her head resting on the stones. Strong shudders shook her at intervals, and the convulsion of her weeping; but she was otherwise still. The warmth from the burning wood fell on her, and touched to gold the loose thick coils of her hair. I closed the door, and went out and sat down on the stair outside, and waited in the dark.
Other women one might have striven to console with tidings of the peace that lies in riches; but her I dared not. When a great heart is breaking because all life and all eternity are ruined, who can talk of the coarse foolish sweetness that lies for fools and rogues in gold? I could not, at least. Perhaps because stitching there where the streets meet, and the fountain falls in the open air by the river, gold has always seemed so little to me: so great, indeed, as a tempter, but as a comforter — how poor!
I sat still in the dark, and I did not know how the hours went: the lamp was burning below in the wall of the twisting staircase, and there was the hum of distant voices on the bridge, and the sound of the water washing itself away under the bridge-arches, and now and then the beat of oars. I had done the best that I could, but it weighed on me as though I had done some crime.
Perhaps she would reproach me for having brought her back to consciousness, as the suicide, snatched by some passing hand from death, has blamed his savior. She had only awakened to agony, like the patient under the knife when the anæsthetic has too soon ceased its spell. I only made her suffer more a thousandfold by lifting up that cloud upon her brain. Yet I had done for the best, and I had praised heaven for its mercies when she had looked with eyes of consciousness upon the moonlit Tiber and had cried aloud th
e name of Rome!
I had done for the best: so had I done when I had gone up to the Golden Hill and told the story of my dream to Maryx.
As my memories went back to him, thinking dully there in the dark, not daring to enter the chamber again, for there was no sound, and I thought perhaps she slept in the gloom and the warmth of the hearth, a footfall that was familiar came upon the stairs, a shadow was between me and the dull lamp swinging down below, the voice of Maryx came through the silence and the darkness to my ear.
“Are you there?” he said to me. “Are you there?”
“Yes, I am here. Hush! speak low!” I answered him; and I rose up vaguely afraid, for I had had no idea that he could have returned to Rome, — which was stupid in me, doubtless, because several months had gone by since I had set forth to walk across France, and from home I had had no tidings, since none of my friends could either read or write.
A vague fear fell upon me, I hardly know why, seeing his dark and noble head bending down upon mine in the gloom.
“Hush! speak low!” I said to him, and I rose up from the stair and stared up at him. “You are come back?”
“Yes, I have come back. I heard that he was with another woman, there in Cairo: is that true?”
“No doubt it is true; I cannot tell where he may be; but she is here, — alone.”
His great dark eyes seemed to have flame in them, like a lion’s by night, as they looked down into mine in the dusk of the stairway. He gripped my shoulder with a hard hand.
“Tell me all,” he said. And I told him.
Once he moaned aloud, like a strong beast in torture, as he heard: that was all.
He heard me without breaking his silence to the end. Then be leaned against the wall of the stairs and covered his face with his hands, and I saw the large tears fall through his clasped fingers and drop one by one.
No doubt the man who sees what he cherishes dead by disease in her youth suffers much less than he did then. For to Maryx she was not only lost as utterly as by death, but she had perished in her soul as in her body; she was destroyed more absolutely than if he had beheld the worms of the grave devour her. The lover who yields what he loves to Death tries to believe he does but surrender her to God; but he ——
“Oh, my love, my love!” he said, once: that was all.
Very soon he had mastered his weakness, and stood erect, and the veins were like knotted cords on his bold broad forehead.
“We are free now,” he said; and I was silent. For I knew what he meant.
But what would vengeance serve her? It seemed to me, a Roman, to whom vengeance was wild justice and sacred duty, for the first time, a poor and futile thing. It could change nothing, undo nothing, restore nothing. What use was it? If one killed him, what would he care? — he was brave, and he believed in no hereafter.
Maryx put out his arm and grasped the old bronze handle of the door.
“Let me see her,” he said.
I clasped his hand in hesitation: I was afraid for him and for her.
“I am her master,” he said, bitterly. “I will see her. She shall know that she is not friendless, nor without an avenger. Let me see her. What do you fear? Have I not learned patience all these years?”
And he turned the handle of the door and entered. I stayed on the threshold in the gloom.
She was lying still upon the hearth as I had left her: her arms were folded, and her head was bent on them; the tumbled masses of her hair hid her face; the flame from the hearth shed a dull red light about the dark and motionless figure.
At the unclosing of the door she started and rose to her feet, and stood as a wounded deer stands at gaze.
Her face was white, and the eyes were dilated, and the misery of all her look was very great; but it had the calmness of reason and much of her old resolve of strength.
When she saw Maryx she knew him, and a deep flush mounted over all the pallor of her face, looking as if it scorched her as it rose.
He was a strong man, and had learned patience, as he said, the bitter uncomplaining patience of a hopeless heart. He had thought to be calm. But at the sight of her the iron bonds of his strength were wrenched apart; he shook from head to foot; all the manhood in him melted into a passionate pity, in which all other more selfish passions were for the moment drowned and dead. He crossed the floor of the chamber with a cry, and fell on his knees at her feet.
“Take me,” he muttered, “take me for the only thing I can be, — your avenger! O my love, my love!-your lover never, your master even never more, but your friend forever, and your avenger. Vengeance is all that is left to us; but, as God lives, I will give you that.”
And he kissed the dust on which she stood as he swore.
She looked down on him, startled and moved, and with the blood coming and going in her face, and her eyes resting on him, bewildered and in the old dullness of half-conscious wonder.
Then as he vowed his vow an electric thrill seemed to run through her: she put out her hands and thrust them against the air, as though thrusting him away.
“My friend! And you would hurt him?”
She muttered the words faintly: she was like a creature not fairly awake after a ghastly dream.
Maryx rose slowly to his feet, all the passion of his pity and his pardon frozen in his breast.
“Your avenger; and I will take his life for yours,” he answered, slowly, as he stood erect before her; and his face, burned darker by the desert sun, had a terrible look upon it.
All the yearning and anguish of months and years had gone out, as in one tempest-driven flood, in the oath with which he had knelt down on the stones before her as before a thing made, by wrong and by dishonor, only tenfold more sacred and beloved; and all this was frozen in him, and turned back upon himself, and lay upon his soul like ice.
She listened, and she understood.
With one splendid gesture she threw her hair out of her eyes, and stood erect, once more a living thing of soul and fire.
“I forbid you!” she said, as she faced him; and her voice lost its weakness, and rang clear and loud as a bell strikes. “I forbid you! There is nothing to avenge.”
“Nothing? What! You forgive?”
“There is nothing to forgive.”
“What! Are you woman and born of woman? Are you not forsaken like the vilest thing that lives?”
The burning color stained her face red once more.
“There is nothing to forgive! he has loved me!”
Maryx laughed aloud.
Men who have truth and honor and fidelity spent their lives like water year after year, unloved and uncared for, going to their graves unmourned. And such passion as this was given to falsehood and to faithlessness!
She took a step towards him; her face was crimson, her mouth was firm, her hair tossed back showed her eyes gleaming, but resolute, under her lovely, low, broad brows, — the brows of the Ariadne.
“Listen!” she said, swiftly. “I have been mad, I think, but now I am sane. I remember. You were always good, — good and great, — and I seemed thankless, though I was not in my heart. You used to be my master, and you were full of patience and pity, and I remember, and I am grateful. Yes. But — listen! Unless you promise me never to touch a hair of his head, never to go near to him save in gentleness, I will kill you before you can reach him. Yes; I am calm, and I say the thing I mean. Life is over for me, but I will find strength to save him: the gods hear me, and they know.”
Then she was silent, and her mouth shut close, as though it was the mouth of a mask in marble. Her words were not empty breath: she would have done the thing she said.
There was perfect silence in the chamber. Then Maryx laughed, as men laugh in the dreams of fever or when they die of thirst on a battle-field.
“And they say a god made woman!” he cried.
Her eyes were steady and resolute under the straight classic Ariadne brows. She was gathering her memories up slowly, one by one, and the courage and endura
nce natural to her were awakened.
“ There is nothing to avenge,” she said, again,— “nothing, nothing; if I choose to forgive. What are you to me? You have no right. If my father lived and would hurt him, I would say to him what I say to you. He has loved me: can anything alter that? I tired him: he left me: that must be my fault. When the sun passes, does the earth curse the sun?”
Her voice shook, and lost its momentary strength; but she conquered her weakness, — since such weakness would be blame to him.
“You are my friend: you speak of hurting him! Do you not know? While he lives I will live. I could not die and leave him on the earth, in the light, smiling on others! You will not hurt him? Promise me.”
Maryx made no reply.
“You do not promise?” she said.
“No.”
“Then go. I can see you no more until you do.”
Then she turned her face from him, and with a gesture signed him to leave her.
He stood there, not seeming to see the sign, nor to see that she had turned away from him.
“Must one be worthless to be loved like that?” he muttered; and his head fell on his chest, and he looked like an old man gray with age, and he turned and came out from the chamber, moving feebly and like one blind.
I went from the threshold to her side.
“Oh, my dear, are you grown cruel? That man is noble, and full of pity and pain, and in the old time he served you with so much tenderness.”
She crouched down by the side of the hearth and sighed heavily.
“I cannot help it. Let me be.”
Then suddenly she looked up at me with wide-open despairing eyes.
He was weary of me. It was my fault: not his. I did not know; I did not know. His love was my glory: how could I tell? When I went to that cruel city then I learned, — I was only a mere frail, foolish thing in his sight, as the others were, — only that; but how could I tell?”