Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  And then once more her head sank down, and she wept bitterly.

  Yet you think those who love you have no right to avenge you?” I cried to her.

  She stretched her arms out to the vacant air.

  “There is no vengeance that would not beggar me more. Whilst he lives, I will find strength to live. What vengeance do I want? He has loved me; the gods are good!”

  Then she swooned, and lost consciousness, and lay there, by the low fire of the hearth, like some fair plucked flower cast down upon the stones.

  What could one do? Any vengeance would only beggar her the more.

  I sat awake all the long cold night.

  CHAPTER XXXI.

  QUITE in the east of Rome, nigh the Porta Tiburtina, on the way that goes to Tivoli, there is an old brick tower, whose age no man knows, and whose walls are all scarred and burned with war. The winding streets are set about it in a strange network, and at its base there is a great stone basin, where the women wash their linen and the pretty pigeons bathe. From its casements, barred with iron, you looked downward into one of the green gardens, shadowed with leaning pines and massive ilex, that are the especial glory of our city; and outward you saw over all the majestic width of Rome, away to the far distance where the trees of Monte Mario tower, and the Spada Villa sits on the hill-side, like an old man who crouches and counts over the crimes of his youth, to the lovely long lines of light where the sea lies, and where at sunset all the little white and rosy clouds seem to go flocking westward like a flight of birds.

  In the Middle Ages, and may-be even earlier, when Stilicho counseled the making of the adjacent gate, the tower had been a fortress and a fighting-place; later on, it had been a dwelling-place, chiefly sought by artists for the sunlit wonder of its view, and its solitude in the centre of the city, and the many legends that had gathered about it, as the owls lived on its roof. It had spacious chambers, painted and vaulted, and some were so high that no single sort of noise from the streets below could reach there, and nothing could be heard save the sound of the birds’ wings and the rush of the wind on stormy days among the clouds.

  To this place after a while she came and lived. When I told her at last of the curious treasure she had inherited, it scarcely seemed to make any impression on her. Her first instinct was to refuse it; then, when I reasoned with her, she would only take a small part.

  “Keep me enough to live on,” she said, “and give the rest to the poor.”

  From the great goodness of my priestly friend, she had no trouble or interference of any kind: only it was difficult to make her understand or comply with the few formalities that were needful for her entrance into the inheritance of the dead miser.

  Among other things which had belonged to him and been secreted by him were many jewels, — diamonds, large as the eggs of little birds, and rubies and sapphires uncut. She looked at them, and pushed them away with disgust.

  “Let them be sold,” she said: “there are always the poor — —”

  And indeed there are always the poor, — the vast throngs born, century after century, only to know the pangs of life and death, and nothing more. Methinks that human life is, after all, but like a human body, with a fair and smiling face, but all the limbs ulcered and cramped and racked with pain. No surgery of statecraft has ever known how to keep the fair head erect, yet give the trunk and the limbs health.

  As time went on she grew thankful to have the needs of life thus supplied to her without effort, for she would have found it difficult to maintain herself; and her old pride, though it had bent to one, changed in nothing to others. She would have starved literally sooner than have taken a crust she had not earned. But all the time she refused to take more of the stores of the Ghetto than was necessary for her personal and daily wants; and she gave away such large sums and so much treasure that she left herself barely enough for those wants, simple though they were.

  The money was wrung from the poor, that I am sure. It shall go back to them,” she said.

  And if I had not been able to cheat her innocently, and so restrain her hand, she would have been once more among those who wake in the morning not knowing whence their daily bread will come.

  Rome began to speak of her, but no one ever saw her.

  “Find me some place where no one will know that I am living,” she said to me. And I found her the old brick tower, with its pines and its old orange-trees behind it, and the owls and the pigeons about its roof, where the wind-sown plants had made a living wreath of green.

  I made it as beautiful as I could without letting it show that money had been spent there, for of riches she had a strange horror, and when she saw anything that seemed to her to have cost gold, she said always, “Take it away, and sell it for the poor.” For she had something in her, as in the old days we had used to say, of the serenity of the early saints, mingled with all the pagan force and pagan graces of her mind and character. And, so far as she thought of them at all, she abhorred the riches of Ben Sulim, because she was sure that oppression and dishonesty and avarice, and all the unpunished sins of the usurer and of the miser, had piled that hoard together.

  It were hard to tell the change that had come over her. All the absorption into Art which had once isolated her from the world of others had now become equally absorbed into the memory of her love, and a more absolute isolation still. After that night beside the hearth-fire, she never named him. Only once, when, in my loathing of his heartlessness, I let escape me words too furious against him, she stopped me as though I uttered blasphemy.

  The great fidelity of hers never waned or wavered. He had forsaken her: she could not see that this could make any change in her own fealty. She lived because he lived, and for no other reason.

  Her life indeed was a living death.

  When one is young still, and has by nature pure health and strength, actual death does not come as easily as poets picture it. But because the body ails little, and the limbs move without effort, and the pulses beat with regularity, none the less does a living death fall on the senses and the soul; and the days and the years are a long blank waste that no effort can recall or distinguish, and all the sweet glad sights and sounds of the earth are mere pain, as they are to the dying.

  And there was no consolation possible for her, for her by whom Rome had been found a ruin, and Love had been found a destroyer. To her all gods were dead: she had no faith on which to lean.

  The Farnesiani women who live immured in the walls by the Viminal Hill, murmuring their ceaseless adoration of the Sacrament, where never daylight comes, or voices of friends are heard, or human faces seen, are less desolate, are more blessed, than she; for in their living sepulchre they have dreams of an eternal life that shall compensate for all.

  But to her this self-deception was not possible. For her the Mother of Angels had no sigh or smile.

  Yet there was in her a great tenderness, which had been lacking before; suffering and love had brought to her that sympathy which before had been wanting. She had been pure and truthful, and never unkind; but she had been hard as the marble on which she wrought. Now no kind of pain was alien to her; the woe of others was sacred to her; when she spoke to the hungry and the naked, there were tears in her voice; when she saw a little child at its mother’s breast, an infinite yearning came into her eyes.

  So the days and the weeks and the months went on, and she dwelt here in this high tower, undisturbed, and thinking only of one creature. I am sure she had no hope that he would return to her. He had left her alone in her desolation, as Ariadne was left on Naxos. Only to her no consolation was possible.

  I do not think either that she ever understood the deep wrong that he had done to her. In some way she had wearied him, and he had forsaken her: that she understood. But she cherished the memories of his love as her one chief glory upon earth. She would have said, as Héloïse says in one of her letters, —

  “Plus je m’humiliais pour toi plus j’espérais gagner dans ton cœur. Si le ma
ître du monde, si l’empereur lui-meme, eut voulu m’honorer du nom de son épouse, j’aurais mieux aimé être appelée to maîtresse que sa femme et son impératrice.”

  The world calls this sin. Ay, the world is very wise, no doubt.

  It chooses its words well, — the world which lets the adulteress pass up the throne-rooms of courts, and live in the sunshine of prosperity, and bear her jewels on her forehead of brass, and wear the robe of her husband’s shame as though it were a garment of righteousness, but on the woman who has loved greatly, and only loved too well, and has dared be faithful and know no solace for love’s loss, pours down its burning oil of contumely, whilst it thrusts her to a living tomb, as Rome its vestals.

  No doubt the world is wise, — and just.

  As for her, she knew nothing of the world. The little she had seen of it in that white gilded city which had made her misery had filled her with horror. She had felt any look of homage from other eyes than his an infidelity to him. She would have been glad to be unlovely in others’ sight to be more utterly his own.

  As for me, I never asked her anything.

  I could imagine without any words the terrible ease with which he had made her believe a great passion, pure as religion and divine as martyrdom, and then, wearying himself of the very purity and grace of the thing he had invoked, had dropped the veil, and let her see herself and him as others saw them. He had been like the magicians of old, who by their spells called up shapes so beautiful and unearthly that the magician flung down his crystal and fled appalled from the thing that he had summoned.

  I never asked her anything. I served her in all ways I could, as I had done ever since that time when she had come to me in the mid-day sun with the poppies and the passion-flowers in her hands, and I had awakened from my sleep and said to her, “Dear, Love is cruel; that he always is.”

  I was glad and thankful that she knew me well enough never to offer me any of the gold of the dead man; that would have stung me so indeed that I think I could never more have looked upon her face. But she knew me too well; and I did such service for her as I could, making fit for her the old, dusky, lofty rooms, and finding an honest woman to dwell there, for Ersilia could not leave her own dwelling-house, and going on with my own labors at the corner of the bridge, so as to be no burden to any one.

  The poor little Greek boy haunted the place, and begged so piteously to see her once that I could not deny him. But it hurt her so much that I was fain to hurry him away. She knew nothing of his service to her, and only remembered at the sight of him all the days that were gone. He was sorely wounded, but he loved her well, and submitted.

  “It is hard,” he said, once.

  “It is hard,” said I. “All great love is. That is how we tell the true from the false. You would not purchase the right of seeing her at the cost of telling her the debts she owes to you?”

  “Ah, no! never, never,” said the poor little lad, who, though timid and false in some ways, in his love of her was courageous and very true; and he would come at evening-time under the walls of the tower and play on his flute, in hope that the sounds might float up to her and soothe her; and the women at the fountain would stop in beating their linen, and the dogs would cease barking and come round, and the people at the doorways would pause in their quarreling and swearing, and the very pigeons seemed to be pleased as they wheeled round and round before their good night’s sleep; but I doubt if ever she heard.

  She never seemed to me either to listen to, or to see, any thing that was in the air or around her in the streets, — unless it were some misery that she could relieve in any way, or some little child laughing and catching at its mother’s hair.

  I think the world only held for her one face, and the air only one voice; and wherever she went she saw and heard those.

  And though I had promised what Maryx had refused to promise, there were times when I felt that whoever killed Hilarion would do well.

  He never came to Rome.

  But I think she always hoped with every sun that rose that he might come there, for she would cover herself so that no one could have told whether she were lovely or unlovely, young or old, and would walk to and fro the city hour after hour, day after day, week after week, looking in every face she met; and Rome was only dear to her now because its stones had borne his steps and its waters mirrored his image.

  All powers, or thought, of Art, seemed to have perished in her; and this pained me most of all. It seemed as if when that clay figure had crumbled down into a heap of gray earth in Paris, all the genius in her had passed away with it.

  I hoped always that the sight of the marbles would awake it in her once more, as the sight of tawny Tiber rolling beneath the moon had brought back her reason. But she passed by the noble things that she had worshiped as though they were not, and looked in the face of the Dioscuri, and knew them not, for any sign she gave. I would have spoken to Maryx and asked his counsel, but I dared not. His own fate seemed to me so terrible, and his woe so sacred, that I dared not enter his presence.

  He stayed on in Rome: that was all I knew.

  Once or twice I went and saw his mother, to whom I dared not speak of Giojà, for she had a peasant’s narrowness of judgment, and a mother’s bitterness of exclusive love. She grew blind, and had ceased to be able to see the colors of the flowers in the atrium, and the sun shining on the roof of the Pope’s palace, which had made her feel she was living in the city of God. But she could still see the face of her son, and could read what it told her, though she saw it through the mist of failing sight.

  “It is as I said,” she repeated, for the hundredth time. “It is as I said. The marble has fallen on him and crushed him; it fell on his father’s breast, it has fallen on his heart; that is all. He thought he had mastered it; but you see — —”

  For the marble was to her a real and devilish thing, bearing blows in subjection many a year, to rise and crush its hewer at the last.

  “If he had only made the image of the true God!” she said, and told her beads. She had in her the firm belief and the intense hatred which made the monks and nuns of the early monastic ages rend out the eyes and bruise the bosoms of the pagan deities, and obliterate with axe and knife the laughing groups of houris and of nymphs.

  “Does he work?” I asked Giulio.

  “Since he came back, — never,” the old man answered me; and I was afraid to ask to see him, and went out of the light lovely house, where the roses were pushing between the columns, and the nightingales sang all the long spring nights.

  For it was spring now once more.

  “You are cruel to Maryx, my dear,” I said, timidly, to her that evening, for I felt timid with her, being ever afraid to touch some wound.

  “He would hurt him,” she said, under her breath, and her face flushed and grew white again.

  And I knew that it would be useless to urge her. I think that, without her knowing it, it was her sense of the love of Maryx which made her heart close itself like stone to him; for to a woman who loves greatly even the mere utterance of any passion from any other than the one she loves seems a sort of insult, and to hearken to it would be an infidelity.

  “Why did she let the god come to her? she could have died first,” she had said, long before, of Ariadne; and she herself would have died, that being her reading of faithfulness. And truly there is no other.

  Spring had come, I say, and nowhere is spring more beautiful than here in Rome.

  The glad water sparkles and ripples everywhere; above the broad porphyry basins butterflies of every color flutter, and swallows fly; lovers and children swing balls of flowers, much as only our Romans know how; the wide lawns under the deep-shadowed avenues are full of blossoms; the air is full of fragrance; the palms rise against a cloudless sky; the nights are lustrous; in the cool of the great galleries the statues seem to smile. So spring had been to me always; but now the season was without joy, and the scent of the flowers on the wind hurt me as it smote my nostrils. />
  For a great darkness seemed always between me and the sun, and I wondered that the birds could sing, and the children run among the blossoms, — the world being so vile.

  The spring brought no change to her. No change could ever come: there was the pity of it. She lived on merely because he lived; she had said the truth; she could not set the yawning gulf of the grave between herself and him; she could not sink into eternal silence whilst his voice was still upon some other’s ear, his kiss upon some other’s mouth. For all else life was terrible to her; and the fever of it began to consume her; and she grew weak, and suffered much, though she never complained: always indifferent to physical pain, she was now as it seemed insensible to it, and her genius seemed dead.

  She had bought everything that ever he had written, and she had learned the tongue that they were written in, and night and day she hung over them, and their pages grew blistered and illegible in many places with the scorching tears that fell on them.

  Once I found her thus: her eyes gazed at me wearily, and with sad bewilderment.

  “I try to see in them what he wished for, and where I failed,” she said, with a piteous humility in her words.

  I cursed the books, and him by whom they were written. I could have said to her the truth; I could have said, “You had no fault save this, — that with you he heard but the nightingales, and so pined for the jibbering apes!”

  But I forbore: I was afraid lest she should turn to hate me, knowing that I hated him.

  CHAPTER XXXII.

  WEAKER natures than hers would have sought sympathy, and would have suffered shame: she did neither. She was too absolutely pure in the perfectness of her love to be conscious of that shame which is the reflection of the world’s reproaches; there was no “world” for her; and she had been too used to dwell alone amidst her dreams and her labors to seek for the pity or the pardon of others, or to regret its absence. She had fallen in her own sight, not because he had loved her, but because he had left her, — because she had in some way that she did not understand become of no value, and no honor, and no worth, in his sight.