CHAPTER XVI.

LITTLE almond-eyed Greek Amphion came often, with his flute in the pocket of his vest, to the house upon the bridge; and he played to her, but she ceased to recite to him.

"He does not feel it; what is the use?" she said. But of his melodies she was never tired, and he was never tired of playing them.

She would sit by the embers of the hearth-fire and listen with half-closed eyes. The boy was no more to her than a chorister or a nightingale; less, for the nightingale she would have ever imagined to be the sorrowful sister of Itys, and so would have cherished it.

She grew dreamier than of old, she studied less, she passed far fewer hours in the studio.

One day Maryx found her with her head resting on her arms beside a plane on which the wet clay was spread out, awaiting her compositions. When she lifted her head, her eyes were heavy with tears.

"What use is it to create anything?" she said, before he could speak. "He would always think that I did not do it."

Maryx turned away from her without a word.

Then a little later she took up work with eager energy and feverish ambition, for she had become changeable and uncertain,--she, the equable, meditative, deep-souled young muse who had been so indifferent and so serene, thinking that nothing mattered much, since there were Art and Rome.

As for Hilarion, who had dropped this poison of unrest into her heart, I seldom saw him. I never found him in her room. Ersilia told me that he went sometimes at noonday or at twilight, and no doubt it was so; but for some weeks I never saw him there. I had to be busy in the days; for light was short, and, as the last week of the Carnival drew near, all the lads and lasses of my quarter came to me to be shod afresh | | 207 for the tarantella and the mask; and Palès had to eat, and I, and there was no longer that little store of money in the cupboard in the wall; and when I saw a bit of black-letter manuscript, or a rusty gem, or a fragment of old marble turned up from under the shore, I had to look the other way, and could not even think of them.

One day when I was there Maryx found her thus sitting beside her untouched works, with one hand buried in the clusters of her hair, and her face hung in a very ecstasy of adoration over the open pages of a volume. It was the volume which contained the poem of Sospitra.

Maryx went and looked over her shoulder, and read also, she not hearing or perceiving him. I had come to accompany her homeward over the bridge; for it was near six of the evening, and the vespers were being said and sung in all the million churches of our Rome.

His face grew dark as he read. He touched her, and she looked up. Her eyes had a soft moisture in them, languid and lovely, and her cheeks were flushed.

"You have forsaken Homer!" he said, abruptly. "He is the finer teacher. Go back to him."

She was silent. She seemed still in a dream.

Maryx shut the volume of the Sospitra with a gesture as though he had touched some noxious fruit.

"Those verses that you wander in," he said, roughly, "are like our Roman woods in midsummer,--glades of flowering luxuriance, whose soil is vile from putrefaction, and whose sunset glories are fever and delirium and death. Come out from them, and walk as you used to love to walk in the old Homeric temples, where you learn the excellence of strength and patience and the mysteries of gods. You waste your words and you misuse your gifts, hanging on that persuasive sorcery of words that has no single good or great thing that it can tell you of, but only stories of fever and decay."

She seemed to awaken from her dream and listen to him with an effort. She took the volume tenderly from where he had pushed it.

"You are unjust," she said; "and I think you do not understand."

Then I saw that she flushed hotly again, and I thought to myself that, alas! alas! she had begun to understand only too | | 208 well the lessons of that fatal book,--fatal and fateful as Francesca's.

The face of her master flushed hotly.

"Perhaps I am unjust," he said, abruptly. "But I think not. I would say to him what I say to you. He is no poet.

"He is a singer of songs, and his heart is cold, and his passion is vileness, and his life knows neither sorrow nor shame. When he sings to them, men and women listen, and their ears are lulled, but their souls are withered, and they go away faint and full of fever. He is your Apollo Soranus: he has the lyre, indeed, in his hands, but the snakes are about his feet. Why will you listen?"

His eyes grew wistful and full of entreaty; his voice lost its furious scorn, and had in it a pathetic pleading. She did not speak, but she held the volume to her, and her face did not lose its resolute coldness.

The silence of her stung him into sharper pain and more bitter earnestness.

"You have loved art. Is it art only to see the canker in the rose, the worm in the fruit, the cancer in the breast, and let all freshness and all loveliness go by uncounted? Would you go to the pestilence ward to model your Hebe, to the ulcered beggar to mould your Herakles? Yet that is what he does. Art, if it be anything, is the perpetual uplifting of what is beautiful in the sight of the multitudes,--the perpetual adoration of that loveliness, material and moral, which men in the haste and the greed of their lives are everlastingly forgetting unless it be that, it is empty and useless as a child's reed-pipe when the reed is snapped and the child's breath spent. Genius is obligation. Will you be faithless to that great canon? The writings of Hilarion will poison your genius, for they will embitter it with doubt and corrupt it with evil teaching. Bid him come here, and I will say the same to him. I will not say that as your master I forbid, but I do say, as your friend, I beseech you to resist his influence."

"You are unjust," she said, simply, again; and her face did not change, and she turned to move away, her hands still clasping the book. She was cold to the eager and ardent supplication of his gaze and his voice; for indeed there is nothing on earth so cold as is a woman who loves to all things outside | | 209 her love; and this love was in her then, though we knew it not.

Something in that indifferent and tranquil resolution fell on the heart of Maryx as ice falls on fire. The blood burned in his face, and his eyes lit with an ungovernable rage. With a sudden and uncontrollable gesture, he caught the book from her hands, and with an oath he dashed the volume to the ground. His face was dark with furious scorn.

"Do you call him a poet because he has the trick of a sonorous cadence and of words that fall with the measure of music, so that youths and maidens recite them for the vain charm of their mere empty sound? It is a lie! it is a blasphemy! A poet! A poet suffers for the meanest thing that lives; the feeblest creature dead in the dust is pain to him; his joy and his sorrow alike outweigh tenfold the joys and the sorrows of men; he looks on the world as Christ looked on Jerusalem, and weeps; he loves, and all heaven and all hell are in his love; he is faithful unto death, because fidelity alone can give to love the grandeur and the promise of eternity; he is like the martyrs of the Church who lay upon the wheel with their limbs racked, yet held the roses of Paradise in their hands and heard the angels in the air. That is a poet: that is what Dante was, and Shelley, and Milton, and Petrarca. This a poet? This singer of the senses, whose sole lament is that the appetites of the body are too soon exhausted; this languid and curious analyst, who rends the soul aside with merciless cruelty, and puts away the quivering nerves with cold indifference, once he has seen their secrets! This a poet? Then so was Nero harping! Accursed be the book and all the polished vileness that his verses ever palmed off on men by their mere tricks of sound. This a poet! As soon are the swine that rout the garbage the lions of the Apocalypse by the throne of God!"

The passionate eloquence natural to him shook him now as an oak-tree is shaken by a storm. The scorn and the hate that were in him poured forth their fury on the printed thing as on an emblem and offspring of the man by whom it had been begotten. He thought that it was the false genius which he cursed: in truth it was the faithless passion that he foreboded.

Giojà listened, and her young face grew stern as that of the Athene Promachos: the lines of her mouth curved with a | | 210 silent severity of pain and wrath. She took the book up from the floor of the room, and held it with clasped hands to her bosom.

"You are unjust," she said, simply, and said no more.

Maryx stood silent and breathless, like a man exhausted from some bodily conflict. His breast heaved, and his face grew very pale.

"I was too violent; I insulted you. Forgive me," he muttered, very low. "My dear,--I forgot myself: will you put your hand in mine?"

She looked at him with a look that was almost cruel, so unforgiving and so unresponsive as it was.

You are my master, and have been my friend; otherwise--" she said, slowly, and held out her hand slowly, as she paused.

But he motioned her from him with an irrepressible gesture of passionate pain.

"If only so, better never!" he said, hoarsely. "Leave me unpardoned, then. I claim no debts by force."

And he turned and went out of the chamber, and I heard his swift, firm steps echoing over the marble pavement of the atrium, and passing into the gardens that lay without.

"Oh, my dear, my dear! What have you done? how could you wound him so?" I moaned to her, feeling the arrow of her hardness in my heart. There was a great pain in her own eyes, as she turned them on me; they had a dreamy look too, as of one seeing afar off some sweet vision.

"I am sorry, but I could do no less,--not to be faithful," she said, softly and very low. Then she also went away, holding her book, and left me sorrowful and afraid.