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CHAPTER XLII.

THE summer went on; the nightingales of Maryx sang on under the rose-thickets, and the glossy leaves of the laurels; the rank grass grew on his grave, and it was marked by one vast rough block of white marble, as though to say that no hand after his dared carve the rocks; his mother, blind and in dotage, sat and told her wooden beads, and smiled, and said always, "Dead! Nay, nay! God were too good for that."

Rome was empty and silent as the grave, and only the hot winds were left to wander, unquiet, through the deserted streets.

And she--my Ariadne--was dying slowly as the summer died.

"You have killed her!" I had said to Giulio that night.

"So best," he had answered me; for his soul was set against her as a thing accursed,--he, who had seen the blows of the mallet shatter the Nausicaa.

The wise men whom I brought to her said there was no disease: there may have been none; but none the less I knew that her life was over, and the Greek lad knew it too, because he loved her. From that night when she had seen the funeral of Maryx pass beneath her walls, and learned by whom he had been slain, she seemed to droop just as a flower will; there is no decay that you can see, the blossom is lovely, and its leaves young, and the dews of morning are on it, but nevertheless it fades,--fades,--fades, and you know that in a little while you will rise some day and find it dead.

Who can measure what she felt?

Aïdon never had more innocence and more remorse, Aïdon, who slew what she cherished in the dark, not knowing.

By her had death come to the one and crime to the other: had she been in the old days of Rome she would have plunged her living body into the yawning earth, or the leaping fires, to purify the souls of those whom she had cursed.

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"Let me go to him!" she cried once; for it was still the living man of whom she thought the most, and perchance the woman in the crowd had been right: perhaps it was he who needed pity the most.

Then her head fell on her breast.

"I cannot!" she muttered. "He will hate me forever,--now."

She dared not go to him,--she through whom, all innocently, his hands were red with the blood of his friend.

She was to herself accursed, and the death and the sin that had come by her lay on her innocent soul like lead, and under the ghastly weight of it the youth in her withered as the grass withers up under a heavy stone.

Day by day, slowly, the strength in her waned, and the loveliness of her faded.

To her none of the common excuses for his act would have been intelligible. She understood none of the customs and conventions that ruled the world he dwelt in; she could not have comprehended why in the eyes of men he had done no wrong, but merely followed out his right in vengeance of a blow. She knew nothing of all this: she only understood that he had killed his friend,--through her.

She, who would have dragged herself through seas of blood to save him from pang or shame, had brought this guilt upon her head: that was all she understood. For her Maryx had died. For her Hilarion was a murderer. This was all she knew. A sense of overwhelming and ineffaceable guilt fell upon her: she shrank away, ashamed and afraid, from the light of the day.

Of him I heard nothing, save that he had not attempted to escape from whatever the laws of his fellows might do to him; that I heard. Justice! I laughed aloud as I heard. What could bring back the dead from the sepulchre? What could light again the divine fires of the genius he had quenched?

Justice!

Then I understood how men could grow cruel. Had his doom been in my hands, I would have made every breath a pang to him such as Dante himself never conceived in hell.

There is no justice upon earth; and hardly any vengeance. When we are young we hope for both; but we wait and wait, and we grow old, and death comes, but on justice we never | | 374 have looked. Death makes all men equal, say the preachers. Oh, terrible irony! Equal lie the murdered and the murderer.

Once more, and forever, the sword and the clue of Athene dropped from her weary hands. Art ceased to exist to her: from the sight of the whiteness of marble she shrank as from the sight of a murdered creature; from the calm changeless eyes of the statues she fled as from the gaze of an avenging god.

She was innocent: yet the Erinnyes pursued her, and night and day she had no rest. With each hot month of the summer the spirit within her seemed to faint more and more, and her body grew weaker and weaker, till at length she could not rise, but lay there still and mute as the young angels that lie on the tombs with folded hands and their wings drooped, waiting----

"Could I but suffer for him!" she said, often; and it was still the living man that she meant. The dead was at rest; but he----

I dared not say to her the thing I thought,--that he suffered nothing, he who had slain men before this and only called it honor.

She lay there, I say, in the solitude of her chamber, and at last could not rise or move at all, and only saw the blue skies and the changes of sun and of stars through the high-arched casements barred with iron, with the blue veronica flowers hanging down them, and past them the pigeons flying.

The wise men said she should go from Rome; but that she would not do. Rome was to her as the mother in whose arms she would fain breathe her last.

From the height of her chamber even as she lay she could see the whole width of the city outspread, and the long dark lines of the pines on the hills, and the light which told where the sea was. She would lie and look, as the dying child looks at its mother's face.

No one said she was dying: they said it was weakness, and the hot heavy air of the summer. But I knew it, and Amphion, and Ersilia, whose fierce eyes clouded with the rush of tears whenever she looked upon her.

Whether she knew it herself I cannot tell; she had so little thought of herself. All her life had gone out to the dead in his grave and the living man with his sin. If she could have | | 375 gone to Hilarion, I think she would still have found strength to live.

Out in the world of men, fame awaited her, for the myriad tongues of it made her great; and because her laurel had grown out of passion and death, the world spoke but the more of it, and was ready to crown as its reigning caprice this woman of so much loveliness and so much genius who had been so faithlessly forsaken and so fatally beloved.

But the world called in vain.

As well might the Satyrs and Sileni have tried to wake Ariadne, dead on the shore, with the shaft in her breast.

Men came to me, great men, and other men whose trade it was to chaffer in the works of genius; and they all told the same tale; and the trumpets of Fame were blowing loud in her honor yonder over the mountains, and Rome itself began to wake and say, "What daughter of mine is this that has the ancient strength and the ancient grace in her?"

But I heard them, and bade them go their ways.

They came too late.

The trumpets of Fame sounded but as the empty hooting of the gnats; the voice of Rome was as the voice of Niobe calling in vain.

"You come too late," I said to them; and my eyes were dry and my brain was calm; for the gods had done their worst, and the earth might as well have perished, for aught that it held for me.

The summer wore away; the desert winds blew hotly, filled with sand, and driving it, and bringing the pestilence from the reedy swamps and the feebleness of slow sickness from the shallows of the river.

The vastness of Rome lay under the sun like a grave-yard: Death had been digging there three thousand years, and had yet not done his labors.

The sky was like a brazen vessel, and the feet of the few passing people sounded always like the steps of muffled mourners burying their dead. By night in the white streets there seemed to be no other thing than the masked men and the torches and the dead.

It was not a sicklier season than any other, they said; but thus it seemed ever to me, and the noise of the fountains lost all melody to my ears, and sounded only a dull hollow murmur, | | 376 as of a sea that could never wash out the crimes of the blood-stained earth.

I wandered stupidly to and fro, and nearly always, day and night, sat on the threshold of her door, the dog beside me.

I could do her no good.

It is hard to suffer oneself; but not to be able to spare from suffering what we love,--that is worse. She was almost always silent. Silence seemed to have fallen on her like a spell. From the night when Giulio had told her the hideous truth she had scarcely spoken, save once or twice, when she had cried out that she would go to him by whom this death had come.

She grew stiller and stiller, whiter and whiter, day by day; nothing seemed alive in her save her great, lovely, lustrous eyes; her limbs lay motionless. At times I used to think that she was changing into the marble she had loved so much. At times I grew foolish and mad, and would go to the place where Hermes stood and call aloud to him to help her,--he who had made women out of sport.

But neither from Hermes nor from any other god could any help come.

One day she broke her silence and said to me, "How long shall I live?"

I broke down and wept.

"As long as God wills!" I answered her, as any other would have done, since we are used to speak so,--we who know nothing.

"But I am near death?"

"Oh, my dear! oh, my love! We cannot tell!"

"I can tell," she said, slowly; then, for the first time since that awful night when she had heard of the death of Maryx, the large tears gathered in her eyes and rolled down her wasted cheeks.

I thought to make him hear the nightingales," she said; and then her eyes closed and she was dumb once more.

She had thought that through her only the angels of the spring would fill his life, and she had brought him instead the curse of crime!

I kneeled down and kissed her slender hands, which had had strength to call out such noble shapes from the dull stone and make it speak to men.

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"Oh, my love, you are innocent as the children unborn," I murmured. "How could you make him hear, when he loved best the laughter of devils!"

She sighed wearily and shook her head: her eyes and lips were still closed. In her own sight she was guilty,--guilty of having missed the way to hold his soul and keep it.

She had given all her life, but it had not been enough: it had not sufficed to hold his heart to hers one moment. With all her force she had striven; but evil had been stronger than she; it had beaten her, and when she had cried to the gods they had been silent.

For what can be stronger than vileness, and of what avail is love?

I went out from her chamber and into the drouth and drought of the air. No rain had fallen for many weeks, and the wind was full of hot sand, and the air was full of the hissing and hooting of stinging things. The wise men on the threshold said to me, 'Indeed, indeed, there is no disease,--none at all that we can see.'

And I seemed no doubt to be mad to them, for I said, in reply,--

"Nay, nay, the laurel was set in her breast, and that kills, when the breast is a woman's. If not the temple of Lubentina,--then death. And the temple she would not enter. Were she vile she were living now, living and laughing loud!"

And I went and wandered the streets, and the dog followed me spiritless and sorrowful, and as we passed by the Greek lad he said to me,--

"In the verse that she once read to me they threw in the flames what they loved the best. See, I have broken my flute and burnt it. Will that please the gods she told me of? will they be appeased? will they save her?"

Ah, heaven! since ever the world began, men and women have been burning their treasures in vain, and never has any answer come.

It was a parching, sultry, misty day, with no sunshine, but a heavy heat everywhere. I wandered into the woods of Borghese, and into the balls and chambers of the sculpture, and stood before the Ariadne. It seemed so cruel: there was the bronze head, beautiful and strong, with the ivy-leaves around it, and there it would stay no doubt century after cen- | | 378 tury, in the light there, while she, its living likeness, would perish as a flower perishes plucked before its time.

Mine had been only a dream,--nothing but a dream; and she had to die for that.

It seemed to me as if the lips of the lovely Thespian Love parted, and moved, and said, " For a great love the earth is too narrow; and where I am not, Death is kind."

I sat down in the Cæsar Gallery, and leaned my tired forehead on my hands, and wished that I had never wakened from my sleep that summer morning when the gods had spoken in my dream.

The place was solitary, and not a soul was near; the day was waning; through the iron bars of the casements the turf, burnt yellow by the sun, looked full of glare against the black dense shadows of the ilex-leaves; the insects' hooting in the branches sounded like the mocking of the Fates; the bloated bestial emperors seemed to leer like living things. I thought the imperial wanton in her high chamber up above was surely laughing.

Ay, indeed, it must seem strange to harlots that a woman can so love that death is sweeter to her than fame, or gold, or homage, or the world of men, or any consolations of the senses and the vanities of life; it must seem strange, for what should faithless women know of Love, they who worship these poor base gods, Apate and Philotes?

I leaned my head upon my hands, and shut out from my sight the gray and sickly day: pestilence was abroad in all those amber and brown glades of the scorched woods, and all that purple darkness of sweet shade; but that did not matter to me: it would harm me no more than it would harm the infant Herakles smiling in his lion's skin: when life is no longer a desire to us, it will stay with us faithfully.

I sat and thought, not of the bronzes or the marbles, but of the man who had come to me there, on that day of my dream, with the sunlight shining in his brave brown eyes, and smiling said, "Still before your Ariadne? And if it be an Ariadne, who cares for her? She could be consoled."

But this my Ariadne had denied all consolation, and he--the man to whom Fortune had been good for five-and-twenty years--was dead.

I sat weary and stupid in the gray sultry air, before the | | 379 feet of the white Dionysos, thinking only of the great life that had gone out like the flame of a lamp, and of the young life that was fading slowly, dying as the summer died, unreconciled and unconsoled, though the hoary Sileni of the world, who had brought her the foaming wine of fame, and the god that is art, had descended to her.

I felt weary and stupid. A step came to me over the marble floor: I looked up, and it would not have seemed to me strange to have seen the gods arise, as I had seen them in my dream. I looked up, and I saw Hilarion.

How can I tell what I felt?

I put out my hands and thrust at the mere air, as on impulse one would do seeing some deadly shape in the darkness. He stood between me and the bronze Ariadne.

The strange colors of the light, yellow and gray and weird, fell upon his face. I raised my voice to curse him, to curse him in his uprising and his downlying, in his present and his future, in life and in death, as men of old cursed what they abhorred. But something in his face stopped me, and froze the torrent on my lips: it was the face of a man on whom every curse of God and man had already fallen: it was the face of one who had killed his best friend. Those who have looked on the like can understand: no other can.

He stood erect, and his old proud grace was unchanged, because it was in him as it was in the statues around; but his beauty was like the bruised, faded, worn beauty of a marble that has been subject to every storm and scorch of weather through long years, and his eyes had the piteous beseeching humiliation of a man vanquished and loathsome to himself.

I could not curse him then, any more than I could have struck a wounded prisoner whose hands were fettered: there was that on his face which told me that the woman in the crowd had been right when she had pitied him more than the man he had slain.

He spoke first, and his voice had lost all its accustomed melody, and sounded faint, yet harsh.

"Say nothing to me," he muttered. "You can say nothing that I have not heard night and day, ever since, in the air, all around. Say nothing. Tell me where she is."

I was silent: to me it was so horrible to be face to face with him, that he enchained me only by his gaze, as they say | | 380 that some great snakes do. And he was so changed!--great God, so changed! as the white Dionysos would have been, dragged through flame and carnage and the smoke of war.

He spoke again.

"I came as soon as I was free. Where is she?"

"What is she to you?" I said. "You never loved her!"

My mouth felt dry as if drink had not passed my lips for days; I could scarcely shape my words to cast his own against him.

"I never loved her; no! The greater my curse."

His voice was faint, and had a strange sound in it. In his eyes there was a look that woke a bitter pity in me,--pity I thrust away as vilest wrong to Maryx and to her. I mastered it.

"Go you your ways," I said to him. "You have done nothing that will make you unfit for your great world, nothing against honor or the codes of men. Go. The dead are dead. Women will not love you less, nor men less feast you. Nay, you will have a charm the more for both. To me you are a murderer, but not to them. I am an ignorant man, and low and poor, and do not understand. Go: that is all I ask of you."

He stood with his head bent patiently: he was humble before me as a slave before his master, he who had treated the world as a dog, and lashed it and kicked it, and had had it fawn on him the more for all his careless and audacious insolence.

"You must say what you choose," he muttered. "It is waste of words. You cannot say to me what I have not merited. I have taken a life that was beside mine own as Christ's is beside a Satyr's--my God!--"

His face had a strange convulsion on it; the blood seemed to burn on his brow and leave his lips an ashen white; he put his hand to his throat, as though some other hand were there and choking him.

"Go and forget," I said to him. "It has been your boast,--you have no memories, you do not choose to have; you have mocked at poor illiterate fools who spoke of regret or conscience. Go; write a poem on it: you have often said the poet should use the sufferings of others for his lamp, as southward, they kill fireflies to read with: that is all."

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"You are cruel," he said, simply, and with his old cold accent; but he stood patiently. Even in my loathing of him some shame of myself stirred in me: I had struck a wounded man, and one who was at my mercy.

"Go! why will you not go?" I cried to him furiously. "Why come here to insult their graves? Is the world not wide enough, that you must drag your crimes to Rome? Rome loved him, leave him alone to her. Go, I say. You are soilless enough, as the world sees, your world; nay, you will seduce women all the easier for that blood upon your hand. Most women are but beasts of prey, and love the smell of carnage. I am cruel?

"How many have cried that out against you, and when have you ever hearkened? What was your pity, ever? What was a dead love to you? You cast your porca præsentanea after it, and buried it, and thought no more,--except to smile. Why cannot you smile now? Be true to yourself. Nothing matters. You can make the world weep, and you are laughing all the while. Ay, you are right. His life was to yours as Christ's to a Satyr's: one day of his brought forth a harvest that all your barren years can never show. He blessed the nations: you have cursed them. He loved: you betrayed. He lived for all mankind: you for the narrow kingdom of your senses. And you have killed him, you. But in a twelvemonth you will have forgotten--why will you stand there? You will have forgotten: you will tell the world the story in sonorous verse,--and then forget. Go, before I do worse to you; I am old, and would not offend heaven."

He stood quite silent, silent and patient, and with the discolored paleness as of bruised marble on his face. Then suddenly he put out his hands with a pathetic gesture, almost like a timid child's, and a great sob heaved his breast.

"Have some mercy. Do you not see?--I suffer!"

There was silence between us.

I understood that he did suffer, passing all power of man to make him suffer more.

A compassion that I could no longer combat stole into me. Ah, if Maryx, lying in his grave, could have seen into my soul, he would not have been angered: he would have pitied his murderer too.

There was stillness between us.

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He leaned one hand on the pedestal of the Dionysos, and stood with his head and shoulders bowed so that I could not see his face. The day was declining; the shadows were growing dark: they began to veil the bronze of the Ariadne.

"Where is she?" he said, suddenly.

"What matter to you?" I said to him.

"Can you not understand?" he said, and his labored breath seemed to choke him as he spoke. "If she do not shrink from me,--if I do not appall her,--what atonement I can make I will. I never loved her,--no. He did: as no other man could have done. I never loved her; but her message in the marble,--that I understood. She loves me: no other woman could ever love like that. If she do not shrink from me, what I can do I will. What honor, what peace, what amends I can render her I will give. Beside her innocence, her holiness, I am vile indeed; but, since she loves me thus, I shall have power to console."

I made him no answer.

It seemed to me as if all the devils of hell swarmed in the beautiful marble chamber, and jibed and laughed and mocked around us, crying, "All things come too late!"

I looked up at him. The day was at an end; the dull red glow of a clouded sunset shone through the iron bars of the casement, and bathed the feet of the white sculptures as in a sea of blood.

"You would do this?"

He answered,--

"By his life and by his death I swear it; yes."

I turned my face to the sunset, and I said to him, "Come."

I went out of the halls and through the glades of the wood. He walked beside me. The bells of the city were tolling the last hour of light. Around us were grayness and darkness.

Away in the great west that fronted us as we passed down into Rome was the glow of the sun that had sunk; behind the dark trees of the Vatican there were long low lines of tremulous luminance, and a vast field of pale, soft blue, and above it a deep flush like the awful rose of dawn.

He closed his eyes as all its beauty met them. Never more could he look with calm gaze at all the lovely mysteries of the air, or watch with peace the glories of the sky.

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We passed without a word through the entangled streets of the city.

At last we reached her threshold, and climbed the winding stair.

It was almost dark; they had lit one lamp. There was the cry of the owls in the dusk.

I opened her door. She lay quite still as I had left her; the dim gold of her curls fell over the broad low brow that was the brow of Ariadne; her lips were slightly parted; her eyes gazed at the western sky: where she looked, there was still a pale radiance and a flush left by the dead day.

I signed to him to enter.

He entered, and looked.

"She is dying!" he called aloud, with a cry that rang through all the lonely house.

She heard his voice, and sprang up on her narrow bed, and stretched her arms to him.

He sank on his knees beside her.

"You can forgive?" he cried to her.

In answer her white and wasted arms stole about his throat, and her lips sought his.

"Live, oh, my God, live!" he moaned, as he knelt. " Live for me: I love you!"

And for the first time he told no lie.

She made him no answer, but her arms rested about his throat, and her cheek was against his own. For a few moments she lay thus; then with a little sigh she moved a little, and lifted her tender weary eyes to his.

"Forgive me; I missed the way!" she murmured, faintly, while her sight grew blind. Then her lips sought his once more, and on his own they trembled one moment longer, then grew cold and still.

He loved her, and she was dead.