by Ouida
His face grew paler when he heard of her physical sufferings and needs, since it was these that he was touched by most keenly. With all the wide and varied comprehension of his intelligence, there was a certain shallowness of feeling in him which made the deepest woes of the human heart seldom intelligible to him.
“Why did the old man tell me nothing of this?” he muttered, when he had heard to the end.
“He would not tell you lest you should go to her. I tell you that you may go.”
Hilarion was silent still. He could ill measure the generosity of the man who loved her vainly; but it smote him and made him feel humbled and ashamed.
“No woman, I think, ever loved you as this woman does, whom you have left as I would not leave a dog,” said Maryx, and something of his old ardent eloquence returned to him, and his voice rose and rang clearer as the courage in him consummated the self-sacrifice that he had set himself for her sake. “Have you ever thought what you have done? When you have killed Art in an artist you have done the cruelest murder that earth can behold. Other and weaker natures than hers might forget, but she never. Her fame will be short-lived as that rose, for she sees but your face, and the world will tire of that, but she will not. She can dream no more. She can only remember. Do you know what that is to the artist? It is to be blind and to weary the world, — the world that has no more pity than you have! You think her consoled because her genius has not left her: are you a poet and yet do not know that genius is only a power to suffer more and to remember longer, — nothing else? You say to yourself that she will have fame, that will beguile her as the god came to Ariadne. Perhaps; but across that fame, let it become what it may, there will settle forever the shadow of the world’s dishonor: it will be forever poisoned, and crushed, and embittered by the scorn of fools and the reproach of women, since by you they have been given their lashes of nettles, and by you have been given their by-word to hoot. She will walk in the light of triumph, you say, and therefore you have not hurt her: do you not see that the fiercer that light may beat on her, the sharper will the eyes of the world search out the brand with which you have burned her? For when do men forgive force in the woman? and when do women ever forgive the woman’s greatness? and when does every cur fail to snarl at the life that is higher than its fellows? It is by the very genius in her that you have had such power to wound, such power to blight and to destroy. By so long as her name shall be spoken, so long will the wrong you have done her cling round it, to make it meet for reproach. A mere woman dies, and her woe and her shame die with her, and the earth covers her and them; but such shelter is denied forever to the woman who has genius and fame; long after she is dead she will lie out on common soil, naked and unhouseled, for all the winds to blow on her and all the carrion-birds to tear.”
His voice broke down for a moment, and he paused and breathed heavily and with pain. A faint dusky red of anger, yet more of shame, came on the face of Hilarion.
What was noble in him was touched and aroused; what was vain and unworthy was wounded and stung.
“I do not follow you,” he muttered. “What would you have me do?”
“What? Surely you know that when Paris salutes in her a great artist, it tells also the tale of her ruin by you?”
Hilarion moved restlessly.
“I know! She was seen here one winter. Is it my fault? If the statue had been unlike me, Paris would not have remembered.”
“That is all you say?”
“It is all there is to say. If she would forget, the world would forget too.”
“Oh, my God!”
Maryx groaned aloud. It seemed to him as terrible as when of old some lovely human life, in its first youth, was laid low in sacrifice to some god of stone, whose eyes of stone could not even behold in pity its death-throes.
“But she will not forget. Have I told you so in vain?” he cried, aloud, and his voice rose and rolled like thunder through the silence. “She will never forget, — God help her.
“Vile women and light ones forget; and the adulteress forgets, and the harlot; but she, — can you look at that marble and insult her, still? To her you are lover and lord, and husband and king, and the only God that she knows, and the one shame of her life and its one glory. Have you no pity? have you no human heart in your breast; were you not born of a woman? You found her content and innocent and in peace, and for your own pleasure and vanity drove all that away, and all her dreams and all her girlhood perished by you; and you only say she should forget! Can even men forget when they will?”
“I can,” Hilarion answered; and he lied.
“Is it your boast?” said Maryx, and the fierce pangs in him rose to fury, and he barely held his hand from the throat of the man who stood there.
“Well, then, forget if you will, and may God forget you in recompense! Listen one moment more, and I have done. To-day I come from the presence of men who are great, and who say that never has a woman been so near greatness as she is. You know her, — you, as no other can, — know her pure and perfect, and without soil save such as you, in your sport, have chosen to cast on her. You know her truth and innocence so entire that you have confessed how they shamed you and wearied you by their very excellence. She is lovely as the morning; she is yours in life and in death. What more can you want? Will you not go back to her? Will you not give honor where you have given dishonor? Will you not, when you are dying, be glad to feel one wrong the less was done? You have said she is to forget. She will only forget in her grave. Have you no pity? What can I say to move you? If you have no tenderness for such love as hers, you are colder than the marble in which she has made your likeness and lifted it up as a god to the world!”
The strength of his own emotion choked his words; he pleaded for her as never would he for his own life’s sake have pleaded for himself.
Hilarion listened in silence; his eyelids were still drooped; his face was still tinged with the faint red of what was half shame, half anger.
He was shaken to the depths of his nature, but those depths were not deep as in the nature of the man who besought him, and they had long been filled up with the slough of vanity and of self-indulgence.
His heart thrilled, his pulse quickened, his eyes were dim, he was full of pain, even full of repentance; he thought of the young head that had lain on his breast in such faith, as the dove on its safest shelter; he felt the clinging caress of those hands which were so weak in his own, though so strong to wield the sword of Athene.
All that had ever been in him of manhood, of tenderness, of valor, yearned in one tender longing to yield to the impulse within him; but all that was vain, selfish, and cold stirred under censure and nerved him against emotion. The imperious irritation of his temper rose, and his vanity was wounded by the very shame he felt. His pride refused; his impatience of counsel chafed; and that cruel mockery which often mastered him as if it were a devil that lived in him and were stronger than he, spurred him now to what he knew was an infamy.
He lifted his eyes slowly with a contemptuous regard, and smiled.
“You waste much eloquence,” he said. “You have loved her: you love her still. Console her yourself.”
Maryx struck him on the mouth.
CHAPTER XL.
TO a blow there is but one answer, — in our land at least.
The dawn was scarcely broken when they met again. The air was gray, and windless, and cold. They did not speak a word.
Hilarion fired, and the shot struck Maryx in the breast. Maryx had fired in the air.
He stood a moment erect, with his face to the sunrise, then fell to the ground, backward, his head striking the turf and the stones. They heard him say, as he fell, —
“She bade me not hurt him. I promised.”
Then he lay quite still, and the blood began to well out slowly from his mouth.
The delicate and nervous hand that had hewn such lovely and majestic shapes out from the rocks clinched the roots of the rank grasses in the convulsion of a mo
rtal agony; in another moment it relaxed its hold and was motionless, palm upward, on the earth, never more to create, never more to obey the will of the soul and the brain.
The sun came over the low hills suddenly, and it was day. He gave one long slow shuddering sigh as his life-blood choked him, then stretched his limbs out wearily, and lay there dead.
CHAPTER XLI.
AND the old mother was sitting at home, telling her wooden beads, and blind, and saying in her prayers, —
“Dear Mother of God, let him soon come back; for when I hear his voice I seem to see a little still; it is not all quite dark.”
I sat by my stall by the bridge, and it was brilliant noontide, and the waters were glancing like satin in the sun, when the story of his death came to me. Giulio brought it to me, rushing like a mad creature down from the Golden Hill, his white hair blowing from his bare head, and his eyes seeming to leap from their sockets.
“The master! the master!” he cried, and for a long time could say no more, staring at the skies and gasping the name of Maryx.
When I arose and understood, it seemed to me as if the Tiber ran blood, and as if all Rome rocked with the throes of an earthquake.
Maryx dead!
It seemed to me as if the very earth must groan aloud, and the very dogs of the street weep.
Why had I broken the steel in Venice? I cursed my imbecility and my feebleness of purpose, I cursed the mother that had borne me a fool only fit to bring ruin on all lives that I honored and loved!
“It is I who have murdered him, I!” I cried aloud to the terrified crowds.
Fortune had blessed him for five-and-twenty years, and I had bidden him pause that day by the Wingless Love!
I remember how bright the noon was, how the fresh winds from the sea rushed by, how the little birds were singing, and how the swallows and the pigeons were whirling and darting above the waters; and he was lying dead, he whose thoughts and whose labors had been strong as Hercules, and as Adonis beautiful!
He was dead, — dead, — dead! — the great soul of him gone out into nothingness as the flame of the lamp he had struck down had been quenched in the darkness!
An awful silence seemed to fall on Rome. There were so many wept for him.
And none could be found who dared tell her. For me, they say that I was mad, as I had been that day when I had seen the white sail fade out of sight on the sea.
I had murdered him, — that was all that seemed written to me, everywhere, on the sky as on a scroll, and on the streets as on tablets of stone. As the throngs of students and of poor rushed by me over the bridge, going to his beautiful home, where the sculptures were, and the nightingales, to know if indeed this thing were true, I stood in their way and cried to them, —
“Throw me in the river! it is I who killed him. I was the first to bid him look on her face!”
And they did not understand me, and pushed me aside, and I fell, and some of them trampled on me as they rushed onward. When I rose, bruised and crushed, a sudden memory struck across my heaving brain.
She must not know! oh, she must never know! I said to myself: yet how keep from her what all Rome mourned, how deafen her ear to the woe that was a whole city’s?
I staggered up to the house on the Golden Hill, — why, I know not, only that all Rome was flocking there. There was a great multitude before the gates, and there were throngs of his own friends in the green garden ways.
The old blind woman within heard the noise of the many feet, and nodded her head.
“That is all the princes come for him, I dare say: he lives with the kings, you know.” And then, for she grew childish, she sent her maids about: Go, tell them he is not home, but he will be home to-night; yes, to-night. I bade him not be long.”
And no one could be found who would tell her the truth. When at last a priest told her, she would not believe. She shook her head.
“Dead before me? Nay, nay; God is good.”
When the priest sadly insisted, she would not hear.
“Look you,” she said to him: “the marble killed them all, and the marble took the soul out of him, but God would not take his body too. No, because I should be all alone. God is too good for that.”
And she told her beads, and they could not make her believe, since she was sure that God was good.
I crept back to my stall, shivering in the full summer heat.
By evening I sent the Greek lad, who only lived to do her any service if he could, to say to the people of Giojà that I was unwell and would be with her on the morrow, bidding her caution those about her to keep the truth from her ear. I had no fear that she would come out into the streets. She seldom went abroad, for when she needed air there was the great garden of her own dwelling, and she never now left its gates.
The night and the day and another night passed. I sent the lad with messages to her to say that I was still sick, and should scarce be able to traverse the city for a few days. I felt as if I could never look upon her face and think of him and hold my silence; and surely to know the truth would kill her. I could not tell what to do.
It seemed to me as if the earth could never hold so much woe and still go on, through the air, round the sun, and bring the seasons one by one, and the birth of the children.
On the third day they brought his dead body home to Rome. Great artists came with it. They laid the bier down in the spare room: they laid it beneath the Apollo Citharœdus.
“A great man is dead,” they said, “and there are none living that are like to him.”
It was serene midsummer weather.
Outside, under the arbutus and laurel, his nightingales were still flooding the evening air with their music; his roses were blooming, his doves were sleeping under the leaves, his aloes were unsheathing fresh blades in the light; the sun-rays and the moon-rays wandered by turn across the marble floor, all night long the birds sang, — the birds he had loved to hear, — and he lay dead there in his leaden shroud: under the Apollo of the Lute.
The people came there and stood there in large quiet crowds, at times weeping and wailing, for all Rome had honored him.
His charities had been liberal as the fragrance of the summer, and the young and the old mourned, one with another, saying, “to be in need was to be his friend;” but neither the lamentation of the people nor the song of the nightingales could reach the ear that was deaf for the first time to their sorrow and to their song.
He was dead; and Hilarion had killed him.
I said it over and over to myself, again and again and again, kneeling on the threshold of the room by the side of Giulio: and still it seemed to me impossible; still it seemed to me that, if indeed it were so, the earth must stand still, and the sun cease to rise.
The lights burned around the bier; the shutters were closed; the nightingales sang without, one could hear them; in her own chamber his mother sat and told her beads and said, “Dead ? Nay, never! God is too good for that.”
I did not know how time went. I seemed to have knelt there for ever and ever; the candles were like clusters of stars; the faint singing of the birds was like a child’s dream of angels; the Apollo leaned above on his mute lyre; and in the midst was Maryx dead.
I suppose two or three nights had passed, and still he lay there for the sight of the Roman people, and the multitudes came and went, softly, and weeping, until out of all the great city there were few left who had not bent their knee there where he lay, and gone down, away under the stars, through the cypresses, saying that earth had not his like.
Once I heard the voice of a woman, saying, “There is one whom I pity more than he: it is the man who slew him.”
Were there women who pitied Hilarion?
Doubtless some women pitied Cain.
In the gloom, whilst the lights were burning still, some one raised me at last, and thrust me out from the doorway, and there were torches like a great fire, flaring and flaming under the warm summer skies, and making the moonlight red; and there w
ere voices chanting, and black robes and white, and the nightingales were frightened and dumb: then I knew that the end was come.
I stumbled out by the side of Giulio, and together we went down the green garden paths, under the boughs, over the fallen orange flowers that were like snow upon the ground: for the last time we followed him.
His fellow-sculptors bore his pall, and the youths of the Villa Medici were his first mourners. Behind them were the crowds of Rome, the illustrious and the beggar side by side.
Thus was his body borne down the Golden Hill for evermore, over the bridge across the water, in the hush of the night, and out of the city gates beyond the walls to the burial-ground by San Lorenzo.
I had so little sense left in me, so little consciousness, save that I was alive, and stumbled on in the midst of the multitudes, with the thousands of flaming torches and the ten thousand stars of light that even the poorest hand had found means to carry there, amidst the dull slow sound of the rolling wheels of the princes and the tramp of the feet of the poor, and the sighing moan of the chants as they rose and fell, that I never remembered that the funeral must pass by the tower which stood near the Holy Cross of Jerusalem Gateway of Honorius.
When I remembered, the torches were already burning on the wind under the very walls. I screamed aloud; but who should have beard, or hearing would have heeded?
I looked up: her casements were all open: she was awake in the lovely summer night that was near on its twelfth hour.
The people rolled on like the heavy waves of a sea, and the flare, as of fire, illumined the silent solitary way: I was borne on with the throngs onward and onward to the field of tombs.
There the earth yawned and the grave took him.
I know not how long a time had gone when the multitudes passed backward to the city, leaving him there alone.
The torches were burning low; old men were weeping like little children, the children in their fathers’ arms were silent and afraid; the sorrow of all Rome was his requiem.
As the crowds bore me with them through the gates, in the starlit midnight, the people nearest me gave way, a shadowy white figure came through the press, and I saw the face of Giojà, there, unveiled, in the dull red glow of the torchlight.