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CHAPTER XVIII.

EARLY in the morning of the next day I was sitting at my stall, working by such grim light as there was, for it was a gray and gusty day, and the fountain sounded cold and chill, and Palès shivered despite all the straw, and there was a discordant blare of trumpets somewhere near that made one think of Seneca and his sore trouble in the showman's bugle-playing.

There was not a creature astir near me: people were tired after the night's frolicking, and were lying abed to begin their capers afresh with spirits when noontide should be passed. I worked on in silence undisturbed, a few flakes of snow falling on the heads of Crispin and of Crispian above mine.

Suddenly, a little figure running fast down the Via Giulia paused by me: it was a pretty figure, all in a Carnival disguise of mediæval minstrelsy, shivering sadly now, and splashed with mud.

"Amphion!" I called out, in amaze, as Palès began snarling at his slender ankles.

It was indeed the lad,--jaded and tremulous, very cold, and very pitiful to see.

"He has turned me out!" he moaned, like a child of seven years old. "Without a word, without a sign,--only told me to go, and never dare return. What have I done? Oh, what have I done?"

"You have angered Hilarion?" I asked him, not surprised, for very often his caprices ended thus; and I remembered the poor dog he had killed.

"I do not know !" the boy sobbed. "I have done nothing! Nothing, nothing! When he came back last night, it was very late,--he had told me to wait for him, so I had not dared undress,--he looked at me-just looked! but it was like the blue lightning, just as cruel and as cold; then he put his hand on my collar, and led me out of the great doors. 'Go out of Rome, and never dare return;' that was all he said. He put a roll of money in my vest,--here it all is,--but not another | | 227 word did he ever say, but shut the doors himself upon me. It was nearly dawn. It was snowing. It was so bitterly cold! I came to you. I do not know where to go, what to do. I have no friends!----"

I looked at the money; it was a roll of notes for a heavy sum,--enough to keep the lad a year or more.

"You must have displeased him," I said; "and it is very like him to do so. He never wastes words on what displeases him. But it was cruel. He can be cruel."

Poor little Amphion was sobbing all the while, his gay dress all splashed and torn, his dark curls tumbled, his olive cheek blue with cold.

It was of no use to press him more: if he knew or guessed what had caused his expulsion, he would not say it; he was a Greek. All one could do was to shelter him, and take care of the money, and send him back to his own home.

As for speaking to Hilarion, past experience told me the uselessness of that.

Yet of course I tried it: when ever did the known futility of anything prevent one from essaying it, or when ever was past experience enough deterrent?

I warmed and fed the lad in the little den near the fountain, which I had taken to sleep in since giving up my Hermes chamber; then I went and sought Hilarion.

He was at those rooms in one of the old palaces of which the boy had spoken. There was difficulty in seeing him. They brought word first that he was not there, and then many very various excuses.

Not being easily baffled, and being convinced that there he was, I said nothing, but sat down on the steps to watch his coming out.

There were a grand staircase, and old stone lions, and a lovely little green garden, then all in a golden glow with oranges, and with one of the few palms of Rome burning under its green diadem in their midst. Along one side of it ran a frescoed casino like the one of Rospigliosi, in which Aurora and the rosy Hours are.

After waiting a long time, I saw him in that casino. I made straight to him. It might be fancy, but I thought he turned paler and looked guilty as his eyes lighted on me. Evidently he would have avoided me, but he could not do so.

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"Perhaps I have no right to speak to you; but I cannot help myself," I began to him. "That poor little fellow whom you call Amphion,--is his offense so great?"

It did not strike me at the time, but I remembered later that his face cleared and he looked relieved as of some apprehension of annoyance.

"Dear Crispin," he said, with a little smile, "that is so like you! Why waste your morning and disturb your peace? Has the boy been to you?"

I told him, and begged for the poor little culprit with the best eloquence I knew.

Hilarion heard indifferent,--patient out of courtesy to me, but I could see no yielding in his face. He was looking at the frescoes on the wall near him, and pulling the orange-blossoms.

He heard me till my breath and my zeal both paused, panting. Then he spoke:

"The boy has nothing to complain of. I have given him enough money to keep him for two years. I have done with him. That is all. If you are his friend, put him in the first vessel that sails for Greece. Only take care he come near me no more. Do you know these frescoes are disputed? But I am nearly sure they are Masaccio's. He was in Rome, you know.

"After all," he went on, "there is no life like a Roman prince's,--like life at all in these grand old palaces of yours. Even the motley modern world gains grandeur from them, and even modern society itself looks like a pageant of the Renaissance when the ambassador or the noble receives it in his great galleries rich in Raffaelle's and Guido's and Guercino's frescoes, and with all the lustre of that splendid age still lingering on the sculptured walls and on the velvet dais, and all its light and laughter hiding with the Cupids among the flowers on the paneled mirrors, and all its majesty still abiding in the immense domes and stairs and halls where kings might marshal their armies or the very archangels summon their heavenly hosts. Oh, there is no life like it, in these cool marble chambers, with their lovely pale frescoes, and their open courts, and their fountains, and their gardens. It is not difficult to forget the time we live in, and to think that Lucrezia is going by with her two hundred ladies, and their horses, and their cavaliers, | | 229 or to shut the shutters and light the lamps, and in these noble rooms, where floor and ceiling and wall and casement are all masterpieces of the arts, think that Bernardo Accolti is reading aloud to us by torchlight with his guard of honor round him. Oh, there is no life like the life of Rome! a woman going to her ball looks on these stairways like Veronica Gambara herself, and when you look in the glass, a little Love of Mario dei Fiori throws roses at you from it, and when you open your window you see a palm, or a god, or a lion of Egypt under a colossal arch, and the stars shine through the orange-leaves, and the lute in the street sounds magical, and the gardener's daughter crossing the court looks like a pale sweet Titian of the Louvre. There is no life like the life in Rome. I shall purchase this palace."

"But what could a little lad so young have done?" I argued, foolishly, and having no patience to hear his picturesque discursive talk.

Hilarion played with the orange-flowers.

"Have you anything more to say to me? for I am going to Daïla, and am pressed for time."

"But he is so young, and all alone----"

"Dear Crispin, when I am tired, I am tired; and I am tired of flute-playing: that is all. There is no more to be said. Ask me anything for yourself, and you know I am glad to grant it always. But leave my own affairs to my own fancies. I think I shall buy this place, if only for the sake of these frescoes: the damp is hurting them. And there are some Overbecks up-stairs in the great hall, dry and cold and joyless, but still very fine in drawing. Walk up and look at them; and forgive me if I seem rude to hurry from you----"

And so he went, seeming desirous to escape my importunity, but courteous and even kindly, though quite unyielding, as I had known him twenty and twice twenty times before.

I did not go and look at the Overbecks. I went back vexed and dispirited, having wasted my forenoon, as he had said.

I found the poor little flute-player warming himself over my brazier.

"You had best go seaward, and get home," I said to him, sadly.

But the boy set his small pearly teeth tight.

"No. I will stay in Rome, but he shall not know it."

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"How can you do that?"

"I have enough money."

"But it is his money; you can hardly do what he forbids with that."

"What do you mean?" said Amphion, with an evil gleam in his soft dark indolent eyes. "When any one has given you a blow, it does not matter whether it is their own knife or not that you take out of their girdle to give it back with; at least so they say where I come from----"

"Give back a blow? Hush, hush! what vengeance should you take, my poor little girlish lad? And, besides, those are evil thoughts, Amphion, and he is only a patron, and capricious; such men always are."

He clasped his slender hands about the brazen vessel with the ashes in, and his pretty face looked pinched and sullen and changed.

"In those tales she read me," he said, slowly, "the hero slew twelve of their enemies to please his dead friend; and she thought that right and great; and it was a Greek did it. I know what I know. I can wait."

I thought it boyish prattling, and thought that it would pass; so let him be.

But there was more purpose in him than I thought; for that very night, without saying anything to me, he slipped off his gay clothes, and cut his dark curls, and made himself look like any other of the little brown half-clad fisher-lads swarming about the bank of the populous Tanners' Quarter, and hid his money heaven knew where, and hired himself out, as if he had none, to a fisherman of the Rione, who spent life watching his girella and pulling his skiff to and fro between the arches of Ponte Sisto and Quattro Capi.

The boy would hardly say more than a mute, and was unhandy, and delicate as a girl, though at home in the water from childish habits in his own archipelago; but I suppose he used his money adroitly, for the fisherman never called him to account for laziness or clumsiness, but let him do very much as he liked, making a pretense of lying on the damp ground to watch the fish sweep with the current into the nets, or pulling the little boat about round the Tiberine Isle, and under the Temple of Vesta.

Amphion shunned me, and never went near Giojà, and I | | 231 did not think it was my business to betray him; so I let things be, and often after dusk a flute as sweet as a nightingale's song made music under the piles of the bridge of Sextus, sighing through the dark in answer to my faun in the fountain.

But Giojà took no notice. I do not suppose that she even heard. There was so much melody at twilight all about there,--from guitars thrumming in balconies, and tambourines ringing in tavern doorways, and students singing as they passed from shore to shore, and fishermen as they set their nets; and in her own heart, then, there was that perpetual music which makes the ear deaf to every other harmony or discord,--the music which is never heard but once in life.

But of this I then knew nothing.

I only saw that her step was elastic, that her eyes were full of light, that her face had lost that deep and troubled sadness which it had never been without before since the day that she sought Virgilian Rome and found but ruin. I was glad, and never thought to trace the change to its true source. She was more silent than ever, and more than ever seemed to like to be alone; but she was occupied on a new and greater work than her Penthesileia, and I supposed that this absorbed her.

I was used to the way of artists, and knew that true Art allows no friends; it is like Love. One day Love comes, and then slighted friendship is avenged.

Maryx noticed this change in her, and, despite himself, hope entered into him. Of Hilarion neither he nor I thought; for I never saw him pass Ersilia's door, and indeed he seemed to me to be more than ever with his imperial jade the Duchess.

One evening as the people were coming out from the great church of the Trinity of the Pilgrims hard by my fountain, and there was a smell of incense on the air, and a sound of chanting everywhere, because it was in the days of Lent, and mirthful King Carnival had gone to his grave and Pasquino back to his solitude,--one evening as I sat stitching, communing with my own thoughts, and not liking them, because of late they had got confused and cloudy and I had a sense of impending woe without any corresponding sense of how to meet and to prevent it, Giojà, came to me as her habit had used to be, though of late she had changed it, and, touching me gently, said to me,--

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"Let us go for one of our old walks. Will you not take me? The sun is setting."

Palès leaped for joy, and I rose in obedience, glad as the dog was to see her return to one of our old familiar customs that of late had been abandoned, as the vague restraint of an unexplained estrangement had grown up between her and me.

She was very silent as we walked, but that she usually was; for unless strongly moved she had never been given to many words.

We came away through the vegetable-market, and the windy square, dedicated to Jesus, and so past the Hill of the Horse, as we call it, to our favorite Colonna gardens, where she and I had spent many a pleasant quiet hour, with Rome outspread like a map at our feet, and the iron gates closed between us and the outer world.

We sat down on the upper terrace, where the pigeons and the geese pace among the flowers, and the pine stem stands that was set there when Rienzi died, and that brave old tower rears itself above the ilexes against the blue sky, which the people will call the Tower of Nero, though Nero never beheld it.

She leaned there, as she had done a hundred times, looking down on to the shelving masses of verdure, and across the bare wilderness of roofs that seem to rise one on another, like the waves of a great sea arrested and changed to stone, with the sky-line always marked by the distant darkness of the pines and the dome of St. Peter's against the light.

"If one lived in it a thousand years, could one exhaust Rome?" she said, below her breath. "Always I loved it; but now----"

She paused; and I, coward-like, fool-like, did not ask her what she meant, because I shrank from every chance of hearing the name of Hilarion on her lips. God forgive me! If only I had known----

The pretty pigeons, blue and bronze and white, came pecking and strolling round us, looking up with their gem-like eyes for the crumbs that we were used to bring them.

"I forgot their bread. I am sorry," she said, looking down on them, and she stroked the soft plumage of one that she had always especially caressed, and which would let her handle it.

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"Will you do something for me?" she said, holding the bird to her breast, as she had held the Sospitra. That is what I wanted to ask you. I have not seen Maryx since that day when you said that I wounded him. I have been to the studio, but he is never there. Listen: he was wrong and unjust, and it was not to me that the insult was, but to what he spoke of; but he has been so good to me, and I can never repay it, and I seem thankless, and he will not understand. Will you tell him for me that I can bear no bitterness in my heart against him, and that the gratitude I give to him will never change? Will you tell him?"

"My dear, it is not gratitude that he wants," I said, and then paused; for, after all, I scarcely dared to speak for him, since for himself he was silent. "It is not gratitude that he wants; great natures do not think of that. They act nobly, as mean ones meanly, by their instinct, as the eagle soars and the worm crawls. Maryx would be glad of your faith, of your obedience, of your affection, for indeed you owe him much; I do not mean such vulgar debt as can be paid by any feeling of mere obligation, but such debt as may well be borne by one frank and pure nature from another, and can be only paid by loyal love."

And then I stopped, for fear of saying too much, because I had no warrant from him, and a certain look of alarm and of distaste that came upon her face arrested me.

She did not answer me for a few moments, but bent her face over the bird she held.

"I shall seem thankless to him and you," she said, sorrowfully, and then was still, and seemed to draw her words back, as remembering some order not to speak. She laid her hand upon my arm, the hand which had held the drooping poppies that day when I had seen her first.

"Pray tell him I am thankful, always thankful," she said, with a tremor in her voice. "He has been very good to me, good beyond all my own deserving,--and you too. If ever I pain you you will forgive me, will you not? For so long as I shall live I shall remember always how you sheltered me in that time of wretchedness, and all the peaceful days that you have given me."

The bird struggled from her breast and flew to regain its fellows; hot tears had fallen from her eyes upon its burnished | | 234 sapphire head and seared it. I gazed on her, touched to my soul, yet troubled.

"Why, my child, why, my dear, you speak as though you were going to join those gods you love, and leave us and Rome desolate," I murmured, with a poor attempt at lightness of heart and speech; "but as for what I did for you, it was nothing. You forget my dream: you know I could do no less for you, my Ariadne. Come from the shades to earth."

Her hand fell from my arm; her face changed.

"Do not call me by that name: I loathe it," she said, with a sudden impatience. "I am not like her. I never can have been like her, and Homer is too kind to her by far! Let us go home now. You will tell Maryx what I said. I would not pain him. But he will never understand----"

"He understands well enough," I said, bitterly, for something in her tone had stung me. "He understands that two years of purest devotion to every highest interest of yours weighs as nothing in the scale beside a few forced hot-house roses and a few hectic idle poems: he understands that well."

"You are unjust," she said merely, as she had said it to Maryx, and she walked slowly away from the sunny terrace, down between the high walls of ilex and arbutus, and so homeward.

I did not speak any more. I felt angered against her, and, heaven forgive me! I did not know---- Silently and sadly I followed her through all the narrow crooked noisy passages and streets till we reached the familiar shadow of our Holy Trinity of Pilgrims, and, going a little farther, were at home.

At the bridge where Ersilia's house-entrance gaped wide open, she stood still, and held her hands out to me once again.

"Forgive me," she said, very low, under her breath.

I thought she meant me to forgive her impatience of my rebuke, and I took her hands tenderly, so fair and slender and unworn, within my own, that were so hard and brown and furrowed.

"Dear, where we love much, we always forgive, because we ourselves are nothing, and what we love is all."

"Thank you," she said, softly, and let her hands linger in mine. Then she passed away from me into the darkness and the coldness of the house. I went back to my stall, and though I was troubled yet I | | 235 was relieved, because she had given me gentle words to bear to Maryx, if they were not all one could have wished. The Faun sang me a song in the fountain as I sat under the wall of the old monastic hospital that had sheltered me so many years.

I heard the song for the last time.