CHAPTER XV.

"MY son," said his mother to Maryx, one day, in the twilight, "is not the girl changed? She comes so little to me. And why do you never read to her in the evening-time, as last winter you did? I did not understand the words, but it had a fine sound; I liked to listen to it."

"She is a year older," said Maryx; "and do the same things ever please long?"

"Fools,--no. But she is not foolish; she cannot be fickle, I think. Do you ask her to come?"

"She does as she likes best. She knows that she is always welcome."

"And what does she do instead?"

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"She sits at home, in her room, and studies."

The old woman spun on at her wheel: she was remembering the days of her youth.

"Is there no one there," she said, sharply. "Is there a youth,--a student? any one young as she is?"

"No; that I know of. No."

"There must he some one, or else---- Germain, you are a great man, and wise, and go your own ways; but may-be you turn your back on happiness. I have heard that wise people often do that. They look up so at the sun and the stars that they set their foot on the lark that would have sung to them and woke them brightly in the morning,--and kill it. Are you like that, my son?"

He changed color.

"What do you mean?"

I mean this," said his mother, ceasing to spin, and looking up at him in the firelight. "Why do you let the girl escape you? Why do you not marry her"

His proud brows bent together and grew warm.

"Why say such things to me? Do you think----"

"Yes. I think that you have some love for her. Perhaps you do not know it;--very well."

Maryx was silent, communing with his own heart.

"If I did," he said, slowly and sadly, at length, neither denying nor affirming, "that would not be enough. She has no thought of me,--no thought at all, except as her master."

"That you cannot tell," said his mother, simply. "The heart of a girl,--that is as a rose still shut up: if it be too much frozen it never opens at all. Look you, Germain, you have been so busied with your marble women, and those vile living things that bare themselves before you, that you have not thought, perhaps; but I remember what girls were. I was a girl so long, long ago, down there in the old village, washing my linen in the brook, and seeing your father come through the colza and the rose-fields. Oh, yes! I can remember; and this I can tell you: women are poor things; they are like swallows numbed in the winter; the hand that warms them and lifts them up puts them in the breast without trouble. If you would be loved of a woman, give her the warmth of love: she will be roused, and tremble a bit, and perhaps try to get away, but she will be like the numbed swallow: if you | | 203 close your hand fast she is yours. Most women love love, and not the lover. Take my word!"

Maryx had grown very pale. He smiled a little.

"For shame, mother! That is what the wanton Pauline Venus said in Crispin's dream in Borghese. And if it be not ourselves, but only the passion, that is loved, where is the worth of such love?"

"Nay, if you begin to question, I get stupid. I keep to the thing I say. I know what I mean. She is asleep. He who wakes her, him will she cling to: there is an old song that says that in our country. Why not be the one? She has a great heart, though it is all shut up, and silent."

Maryx made no answer.

"Why are bad men the men that women love the most?" muttered his mother to the distaff, her mind plunging into a depth of recollection and stirring it dully. "Only because they are foremost, because they have no modesty, because they burn women up in their fires,--as the children burn up the locusts in summer nights. Oh, I have not forgotten what I used to see and to hear. Why let another come up with the lighted tow, while you stand by and say nothing?"

"Because it would be base to say anything," he answered her, suddenly, lifting his bent head and with a sternness in his voice that his mother had never heard. "Do you not see? she is friendless, and without money or a home. She has a great talent,--nay, a great genius; she depends on me for all the means of making her what she may be, what she will be, as a true artist in the years to come; were she to cease to come to me now, it would be impossible to measure what her loss might not be by broken studies and unaided effort. Do you not see? She can take everything from me now with no thought, and no sort of shame; she can come to me in all her difficulties as a child to a father: she can do here what it is easy for us to make her believe is student's labor worthy of its wage: it is an innocent deception; she was so proud, one was obliged to lead her thus a little astray. Do you not see?--if I approach her as a lover, all that is over. She does not care for me,--not in that way; and how can I seek to know whether she ever would, since if I speak words of love to her, and they revolt her, she is scared away from here, and loses all guidance and all aid? Do you not see? I am not free. Speaking to | | 204 her as you would have me, I should but seem a creditor demanding payment. I cannot be so mean as that. Granted that she is as the frost-numbed swallow that you think of, it is not for me, since I have sheltered her, to say, 'Be all my own, or else I cast you forth;' and it would be to say that, since what woman, however young or unsuspecting, could remain under the roof of a lover she repulsed? Love is not born from benefits, and must not be claimed by them."

His mother looked up at him, as he spoke, impetuously and almost fiercely, in the common tongue of their native province.

"You are a good man, Germain," she said, humbly, with the tears in her old dim eyes,--"a better man than your mother is a woman. For if she be deaf to you, if she be as a stone to your greatness and your generosity, I would say, let her be cast forth, and come to misery as she may, for she will merit it. Yes, that is what I would say, and there is no evil that I would not do to her; the saints above forgive me!"

"Hush!" said Maryx, with a sad smile, that broke through the sternness and pain upon his face. "That is because you think too well of me and set too great a store on me. It would be very base in us to claim her merely because we befriend her. The very savages leave free their guests, once having sheltered them. Besides, she is not as other maidens are; she has a great genius in her: that at least must be sacred to me above all other men. Could I do wrong to her, I would not do wrong to that. What should I be? A high-priest dishonoring his own altar!"

His mother was silent. Her lower and duller mind could not attain the nobility of his, but she honored it, and did not oppose it. Only she muttered, rather to herself than to him,--

"Your talk of what you call genius, that I do not understand; and if it bring hardness of heart, then it is an accursed thing and abominable; and as for making stone images,--that is not woman's work. She is seventeen years old, and fair as a flower: instead of shaping stone, and hanging over it, and setting all her soul on it, she should be seeing her own eyes in a living child's face and feeling its little wet mouth at her breast. What would she care for her marble things then?"

Maryx stood by the fireplace; his face was in shadow; all that his mother had said to him had stirred his heart painfully, | | 205 and showed him in naked truth what he had striven to put away from him, and had refused to dwell upon, even in his innermost thoughts.

"Good-night," he said, at last, arousing from his silence. "I must go to the Vatican. I have promised Antonelli. Never speak of this any more. It is useless, and it pains me."

"But is it impossible--?"

His face changed, and his olive cheek grew paler and then warm again.

"I think so,--yes. But who knows? Perhaps some time,--but yet--no gift that was not a free gift to me would I ever take. I could better go unloved all my life than be offered a passionless pale mistress, yielded from gratitude and given up without joy as the payment of debt. That were a hell indeed!"

Then he bent his head to her farewell, and went out to go to the great Cardinal. His way lay through the room where Giojà was used to work.

There was a single lamp burning. He paused and looked at the Penthesileia. The tears came into his eyes for the first time since the day that, starving and friendless and wretched, he had won the Prize of Rome in his youth.

The high desk was near, with the Greek and Latin volumes, and the loose sheets of her translations from them, and the goose-quills that she had written with, and the glass that she had filled with heliotrope and myrtle to be near her as she wrote.

He touched them all with his hand caressingly.

"Ah, my dear! how safe you would be with me!" he murmured, half aloud.

Then he went out; but, as he went, the whiteness of a marble figure barred his way.

A sickly sense of impatience passed over him as he turned to avoid it in his passage to the door and glanced upward at the lamp-illumined face, which was that of the Apollo Citharœdus,--the face of Hilarion.

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