Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “She wants for nothing,” I answered him; “and my patience I cannot answer for, if you insult her — so. Words are of no use. I came to say to you, ‘Go out of Rome.’ Do not outrage her with the sight of you beside that patrician jade in the palace yonder; break with that Jezebel, and go to what other vile woman you will, — only not here.”

  Hilarion laughed a little drearily.

  “Jezebel, as you call her, has the wit to sting me, and burn me, whenever she touches me: so she keeps me. Men are made so. Jezebel makes me a beast in my own sight, and a fool in the sight of men: still, she keeps me. Why? I do not know very well. What is the sorcery of shameless women? Who can tell? But a sorcery it is. History tells you that.”

  “Will you leave her? That is all I care to know.”

  “If she be here,” he said, softly. Yet for this jade he had left her!

  “Tell me of her,” he said, again.

  “Do you regret her?”

  “Yes, — and no. I seem brutal to you, no doubt. But I could not live beside her: Jezebel suits me far better.”

  “What fault had she?”

  “The worst: she loved me too well. Do you not see? It was a perpetual reproach.”

  He was silent; his face was troubled and ashamed, and he moved impatiently away.

  “Can you not understand ? To be thought faithful, faultless, half divine, and all the time one knows —— Oh, say it is thanklessness and worthlessness in one, no doubt it is; but men are made so. There are women that all the time one works one’s will on them, make one ashamed.”

  “And so one does worse?”

  He threw his head back with a gesture of irritation.

  “And leaves them? Is that worse? One cannot live in air too rarefied: we are but brutes, as nature made us. That is not our fault. Not that I meant to leave her long, only she took it so. She could not understand.”

  No, she could not understand.

  It seemed to me that never word more pitiful had been spoken. She could not understand that Love was mortal.

  He sighed, — a sigh selfish and restless.

  “Would you have the truth, the whole truth? Well, then, I never loved her; I tell you I never loved her. No! She was so lovely, and had so much genius, and she was so unlike all others, and she was so utterly at peace, so given over to her art and dreams, so still, so far away, — I wanted to destroy it all. Oh, not from any vileness: men are not vile; they are only children: when children see a flower they must root it up; a frost-crystal, they must snatch and break it. I was a child, and cruel: children are cruel. Passion is brutal, too; but it is strong and constant. I had not passion. I said to myself, She shall care for me, and not for her art; but I never should have said it if she had not looked so far away from earth and all its follies. I never loved her; no! One must be hurt to love: she never hurt me.”

  Oh, terrible words and terrible truth! he had hurt her as he would, and she alone of the two had been faithful.

  He descended the steps of the temple, and walked to and fro wearily, for his conscience stirred and smote him.

  “Was it vanity?” he muttered. “Perhaps it was vanity. It was not love. Something of love — its amorous charm, of course — came into it; for she was so lovely in body and mind, and she worshiped me as never other creature ever did, I think; but for the rest —— I never should have touched her if you had not cautioned me, and if she had not had those deep, serene, abstracted eyes of hers, that seemed to be always seeing heaven and to pass by men. One longed to call up one’s own image in them, as in calm waters, and trouble them forever! — Do you not know? You call that base? Well, you are right, may-be. It was so. I cared but little for her, but I wished to be the first. Perhaps I was a coward, and treacherous, as you say: I did not think of that. She loved her art, her gods, her dreams; I said to myself, she should love me. I never had met a woman with a pure soul; hers was quite pure; I wrote my name across it out of sport, and you say the name burns there in fire always: well it may.”

  Then he laughed a little, partly in cruelty and more in sadness, and looked me full in the face.

  “If you were a young man you would kill me.”

  I looked him also full in the face.

  “If I had not promised her never to kill you, I would find the means to do it now, old as I am.”

  “You would do quite right,” he said, dreamily, “and perhaps you would do me a service: who can tell? We know so little.”

  Alas, no: he said truly. We know so little, and it cripples our hand: the worst vengeance we can think of is a swift, sure blow that deals out death, and then, perhaps, all the while we only summon man’s best friend.

  I stood before him baffled, impotent, paralyzed.

  The merciless frankness of him froze the very current of my blood, and I saw that he spoke the truth. He had not even loved her once.

  He had better loved this black-browed illustrious jade here in Rome, who struck him in her furies, and dragged him in the dust in her soft moments.

  “Will you tell me where she is?” he said, abruptly.

  “No, I will not.”

  “Are you afraid that I should make her return to me?”

  “No: your vanity has nothing more to gain.”

  “I should have gone back to her.”

  “You think so. But you would not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you know that though she may never look upon your face again, none the less is she yours forever. Men are faithful only to the faithless. What is true to them they can easily forsake.”

  He was silent. There was a mist like tears in his eyes.

  “She loved me too much: no man should ever be loved much,” he said, impatiently. “It wearies us, and it makes us too sure. Women will not understand.”

  “Base women understand that well, and, understanding, keep you and such as you. Go to them.”

  Then I turned, and would have gone away. But he overtook me.

  “I respect you, because you would kill me. Cannot we part in peace? Is there nothing that I could do?”

  “No. There is nothing. When men do what you have done, God Himself could do nothing. You must know that. As for peace, there can be none between us. Farewell: when you lie dying, may-be you will wish that Love were beside you, and you will call on it, and call in vain.”

  Then without other words I left him.

  CHAPTER XXXIV.

  THUS I left him and went away by myself from the Pantheon homeward to the chamber where Hermes and all other treasures of my past were missing.

  I knew that he would go out of Rome; I knew that he would not seek her; because, although his heart in a manner smote him thinking of her so near and knowing himself so beloved, yet the desire of ease and the dislike of pain were stronger emotions with him than any other. She was so utterly his own: though lands and seas had stretched between them, and half a world had parted them, none the less, he knew well enough, — too well — would she be faithful; never, though she were left alone till her youth should flee away and gray age come, never would any other gain from her a moment’s thought or a passing glance, he knew.

  Why should he return to her? — his passion had nothing to conquer, his vanity nothing to gain. And what did he know of love? — this poet with words that burned as they sang, this lover with eyes that caressed as they looked, till the souls of women dropped in his path like jasmine-flowers when the wind passes.

  “I had never left Dorothea had she refused me her trust,” says the lover who is faithless, in a play of Calderon’s.

  Never was line written that embodied sadder truth; and Dorothea forgives outrage on outrage, crime on crime, and even when he has bidden assassins slay her, would still kiss his hand and pray for him to the Christ on her cross; but he never forgives, — though against him she has no fault, save the one fault of having had faith in him.

  “If you love me you will listen to me!” prays the man to the woman; and she listens. “You should have tu
rned your ear from me!” says the man when it is too late.

  Not because he is vile; no. Hilarion said justly; very few men are that; but because he is like a child, and his plaything was beautiful whilst yet it was a refused secret, a treasure withheld, a toy untried, but being once attained and owned, the plaything lies forgotten in a corner, whilst the player runs forth in the sun.

  Calderon’s Dorothea was not hated because she had given her trust, but she was forsaken because she had done so, and then hated because the memory of wrong done to her stung a fickle fierce heart to remorse.

  Who has done the wrong, never pardons:” in love, beyond all else, is this true.

  Hilarion went back to the apes in his upas-tree, because they never made him wish himself other than he was; they never recalled to him all he might have been: innocently she had done both. So he had left her.

  I knew, as I say, that he would go out of Rome; and on the morrow I learned that he had done so.

  I was thankful. Women hope that the dead love may revive; but men know that of all dead things none are so past recall as a dead passion.

  The courtesan may scourge it with a whip of nettles back into life; but the innocent woman may wet it forever with her tears, she will find no resurrection.

  I was thankful, for it was best so; yet if I could have hated him more than I did it would have been for his obedience to me.

  To be near her, yet not even look upon her face! I forgot that hardly could he care to look on it much more than a murderer cares to look on the thing he stifled and thrust away into the earth. “Why could he not have left her in peace?” I said, again and again. No doubt he often asked himself so; for men are not base; they are children.

  Maryx all this while I never saw. I believed that, although he had refused to give his promise, he would not harm her lover for her sake; but I knew nothing: I only knew that Hilarion passed out of Rome, as he had entered it, in safety.

  The nightingales sang through all the long lovely spring-tide nights under the myrtles on the Golden Hill, but their master never came out to hear them, nor heeded that the summer drew nigh.

  Art is an angel of God, but when love has entered the soul the angel unfolds its plumes and takes flight, and the wind of its wings withers as it passes. He whom it has left misses the angel at his ear, but he is alone forever. Sometimes it will seem to him then that it had been no angel ever, but a fiend that lied, making him waste his years in a barren toil and his nights in a joyless passion; for there are two things beside which all Art is but a mockery and a curse: they are a child that is dying and a love that is lost.

  Meanwhile she grew thinner and thinner and taller still, as it seemed, and the colorless fairness of her face had the pallid whiteness of the stephanotus flower, and she was lovely still, but it was a loveliness which had a certain terror in it for those who saw her, though such were only the poor of the city.

  “She has the look of our Beatrice,” said one woman who cleaned the stone stairs of Barberini, sometimes, and knew those haunting eyes that have all the woe of all creation in their appeal.

  And what to me was the most hopeless sorrow of all was this, that every memory and impulse of art seemed extinct in her. What had once been the exclusive passion of her life seemed to have been trodden down and stamped out by the yet more absolute and yet more tyrannical passion which had dethroned it: as a great storm-wave rises and sweeps over and effaces all land-marks and dwellings of the earth wherever it reaches, so had the passion of Hilarion swept away every other thought and feeling.

  The sickness and the sorrow round her she would do her best to help, going from one to another, silent and afraid of no pestilence. The people were afraid of her, but she not of them, even when the breath of their lips was death.

  To the little children she was very tender, she who had never seemed even to see that the children played in the sun, or smiled at their mothers’ bosoms; and she would touch them gently, and a great anguish would come into her eyes, that now were always so wistful, and strained, and full of hopeless longing, like the eyes of a captive animal.

  “You must love these people, that you serve them so,” said a priest to her one day, meeting her where the pestilence raged.

  “No,” she answered him: “I am only sorry for them. I am sorry for anything that lives.”

  And it was the truth. Her heart had opened to pity, but it was closed to all save one love.

  It was a summer heavy and sickly. Wan, fever-worn children glided through the streets; the little bell, that told of passing souls needing the Church’s sacraments, rang ceaselessly; by daylight and by torchlight the black figures of the beccamorti passed along the beautiful, solemn, empty ways, where the sun burned and the dust drifted; the heat lay on the city like a pall, and the wide, scorched, yellow plain was like a basin of brass beneath the unchanging pallid blue of the sky.

  For myself, I had borne such seasons before, and had been unharmed; but for her I was anxious. Yet she seemed to feel no change in the weather, nor in the aspect of the city around her; she was vaguely oppressed, and would lie for hours motionless in the darkened rooms, and would drag herself outward with effort, only if she heard of any in need; but she never made any lament. To physical discomfort she had always been indifferent, and I think of it now she was insensible.

  In the heats of summer I would have had her take some sort of change, but, as before, she refused to leave Rome.

  “It is here that he will seek me if he want me, — ever,” she said; and I, thinking of the cruel truths that he had uttered in the moonlight by the Temple of Agrippa, felt my very heart grow cold.

  “Oh, my dear! oh, my love! you perish for a dream,” I said, and dared say no more.

  She smiled faintly a smile that hurt one more than other women’s weeping.

  “In your dream Love brought the poppy-flowers; but that I do not understand. How can one die while what one loves still lives? To lie a dead thing in the cold, and the dark, while others — —”

  A shudder shook her; the Greek-like temper in her recoiled from the Christian horrors of the grave. With him she would have gone to her grave as a child to its mother; but without him —— if she were dead under the sod, or walled in the stones of a crypt, it seemed to her that she would wake and rise when the lips of others touched him.

  Alas! alas! she never thought of him save as alone. She never knew what were those apes which jibbered in the bay-tree of his fame and passions. He was still sacred to her, with the sublime sanctity of a great love which enfolds the thing it cherishes as with the divine mist which of old veiled the gods.

  Whoever can still love thus is happy, — ay, even in wretchedness, even when alone. It is when the mist has dissolved, as the mists of the morning, and the nakedness and the deformity and the scars which it hid are disclosed, — it is then, and then only, that we are miserable beyond all reach of solace, and can have no refuge but in the eternal oblivion of that death which then we know can be only a forgetting and an end, without hope.

  She stayed all the summer in Rome.

  One day a thought struck me. It was early in the morning, and the heaviness of the weather had lifted a little, a few showers having fallen, and it was just so golden and white and sunny a morning as that when I had fallen asleep before the Ariadne in Borghese, with rosy mists upon the mountain-heights, and breadths of amber light upon the river, and tender little clouds that flew before the breeze and promised rain at sunset.

  A thought struck me, and I allured her into the open air while yet it was very early, and bent her steps — she not heeding whither she went — across the Tiber to the Scala Regia of the Vatican.

  “Come hither with me; I have business here,” I said to her; and she came, not hearing at all, most probably, for her mind was most always plunged so deeply into the memories of her dead joy that it was easy to guide her where one would.

  Sometimes I fancied she had not wholly yet all clearness of her reason; but there I was w
rong; she was quite sane, only she had but one thought night and day.

  They knew me well at that mighty place, and had always orders to let me pass.

  I took her up the immense stairways that seem builded for some palace of Hercules, and the wide, still, solemn passages and corridors, where all the art of the whole world’s innumerable centuries seems to be so near one, from the golden crowns of the Etruscan Larthia to the flower-garlands of Raffaelle’s scholars.

  I took her into the galleries which she had never entered since the days when she had studied there the humblest yet the greatest of Art’s acolytes. It was eight in the morning; there was no one near; the vast chambers seemed countless, like the centuries they held embalmed. We went past the sarcophagi and the stones from the tombs, past the colossal heads and the cinerary urns, past the vases of porphyry and agate and chalcedony, and the deep, serene-eyed faces of the gods, and so into the Chiaramonti gallery, past the Ganymede of Leucares, and the colossal Isis, and the olive-presses of the Nonii, to the spot where what I had once owned was standing, between the radiated jasper of the Assyrian basin and the yellow marble of the Volscian Jove; near the grand bust of Cæsar as high pontiff, and the sculptured legend of Alkestes, which Evhodus has inscribed to his “very dear and very blessed wife, Metilia Acte.” For there is love which lives beyond the tomb.

  There my Hermes was, well companioned, and better sheltered than with me, beneath those noble arched roofs, amidst those endless processions of gods and of heroes and of emperors; but for myself, you know, as I have said, it always seemed to me that the smile had passed off the mouth of the statue.

  Of course it was a foolish and vain fancy; for what could a few years spent in a poor man’s chamber matter to a creature endowed with that splendid life of marbles which counts by centuries and cycles and sees whole dynasties and nations roll away?

  She walked with me down the long gallery, cold even in the midsummer morning; and she looked neither to right nor left, but into vacancy always, for she saw nothing that was around her, or at the least cared not for it, because all memories of the art she had adored seemed to have perished in her. I laid my hand upon her shoulder, and made her pause before the Mercury. I said to her, —