Beck Center English Dept. University Libraries Emory University
Emory Women Writers Resource Project Collections:
Women's Genre Fiction Project

Ariadne, an electronic edition

by Ouida [Ouida, 1839-1908]

date: 1877
source publisher: J.B. Lippincott Company
collection: Genre Fiction

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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.

She did not rebel against his sentence, but she loathed herself because she had incurred it. All the lofty, pure, and poetic passion which she had dreamed of in her ignorance over the pages of Dante and Petrarca and Sospitra she had given to him: that she had been nothing, in truth, higher or better than a toy to him was incomprehensible to this nature which had the purity and the force of Electra and Antigone. In some way she had failed: that was all she knew.

With her he had heard only the nightingales. And in some strange, horrible way, the snakes and the apes had been stronger than she, and to him had been sweeter, and so had drawn him back to them and had left her alone.

That was all she knew.

With an intense pride she had an intense humility. "He loved me once," she said; and this seemed to her to be a | | 319 wonder still so great that it excused in him all later cruelty; and, like the woman she once had pitied on the Maremma shore, she would not have wished her wounds less deep, nor their pain less, nor their hideousness less, because those wounds assured her he had loved her once.

Alas! even this poor and bitter consolation was a self-deception. Even when he had laid his roses on her knees and wooed her first, he had not loved her, not even with such love as that foul patrician jade wrung from him by treading on his worn heart, as a vine-gatherer on the bruised and pressed-out grapes crushed in the vats at autumn.

For so he soon told me, even he, himself, with that cynical frankness which at times broke up from under the soft disguises of his usual words.

He had never come to Rome,--never once since that chill and bitter Lenten night when Maryx and I had found the chamber empty, and Hermes in the moonlight alone.

I, asking always people whom I knew, learned that he had never been in Rome since then, nor ever once at Daïla. It was not fear, certainly, which kept him from the city; but probably it was that sort of restless but fruitless and vague remorse which is the repentance of such a man as he.

For the difference between good and bad in men lies less, I think, in what they do than in how they feel, and so less in act than in conscience; and many a one among us could undo the evil he has done if only he would not push away the pain it causes him, and hurry on leaving the past behind him like a dead mule on the high-road to rot forgotten.

We all sin, but some of us walk on, not looking back, and some of us do look back, and thus do go again over the ill-trodden path, and so, perchance, meet angels on the way,--to mend it.

Hilarion never looked back: not because he was altogether cruel, but because he had tenderness sufficient twined in with his cruelty to make him reluctant to see pain, although quite reckless as to causing it. The masters of the world would slay ten thousand victims here in Rome, yet weep sometimes if a beloved slave died. And why?--because they were only Humanity let loose to all its instincts.

I dreaded lest he should come to Rome, for I knew that even such comparative calm as she had attained would be de- | | 320 stroyed again, if she could behold his face or hear his footstep on the stones. I watched for him ceaselessly and in anxiety, but he never came, and I heard that he was in Paris and in other places that he loved, and the vile Sovrana woman was also absent, and the pale sad peace that reigned with us, as it reigns over a buried village when the snow has covered it, and the fires are out, and the cries stilled, and the sleepers all sleeping forever, was untroubled by any burst of storm or break of dawn.

It was night with us always,--night always: even in the golden glory of wide Rome, with the light upon the amethystine hills, and blue aerial distances, and the sound of birds' wings and children's laughter, and the people's gladness, everywhere about the bright broad waters.

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