CHAPTER XIV.

WITH the morning, Giojà went up as usual to the studio. Maryx was leaning over the balustrade of his terrace, as his habit often was in that lovely time of the clear early morning, when there are still mists hovering about the curving ways of Tiber, yet every spire and tower and ruined glory stands out distinct in all their varied architecture against the radiant sky.

Maryx advanced to her, and met her.

"My dear, why did you change your mind last night? Was it not sudden?"

"Yes, it was sudden," she answered him. "When I saw the things, then I remembered I could not buy them; I would not wear them. It was good of you; so good! Were you vexed?"

Maryx's changeful eyes darkened, and grew dimmer. He gave an angry gesture.

"Such a little thing! Had you not faith enough in me for that? Am I so little your friend after all this time?--I, who am your master?"

Giojà was silent. Then she took his hand and touched it with her lips.

"You are more than my friend; and if to serve you I had to hurt myself, that I would do. But this was different: it would have done you no good, and it would have made me ashamed."

He colored slightly, and his eyes grew soft. He drew away his hand with a sort of impatient confusion.

"God forbid that you should be ashamed--for me! But to refuse such a mere trifle! it looks like distrust of me."

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"How could I distrust you?"

She looked in his face, whilst she spoke, with the sweet, open seriousness of a young child.

"How could I distrust you? distrust you?" she repeated, as he remained silent. "I do not know what you can mean. But I did not wish for those rich things, and I did not wish to go at all."

Maryx smiled, reassured.

"If you did not wish to go, my dear, that is another matter. I think you are very wise. The artist loses more by the world than ever he gains from it. It was only that since it opened to you, I thought it right you should have the choice. But I was disappointed a little, I admit; I had looked forward to seeing you move in those great rooms as no girl can move except one like you, whom the sea has made strong, and whom the trammels of fashion never have fettered; only to see you walk would be despair to them. But I am content now that you chose as you did,--quite content; only you must promise me to keep my poor Etruscan gold. I should have told you so last night; but when I called for you, thinking to find you ready, you were in bed; your window was all dark."

"But did not Ersilia tell you?"

"Tell me what? Yes. She put her head out of her own casement, and called that you would not touch the clothes nor go; and then she slammed the window to again, and I got no more from her. What did you bid her say?"

"Nothing. I forgot."

"Forgot to leave a pretty message for me to soften the rejection?" said Maryx, with a smile. "Well, never mind, my dear. Soft words passing by that good soul's mouth would harden in the passage. Did you sleep well, young philosopher? Pagan though you are, I begin to think you have something of the early Christians in you after all,--of St. Ursula, or St. Dorothea."

Giojà flushed scarlet, then grew pale. "I did not sleep; I was not at home; I went with him, and he came back with me."

Maryx, leaning carelessly over the terrace parapet, casting the fallen flowers of the jessamines into the gulf of cactus and aloes below, raised himself erect with sudden quickness, and gazed at her.

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"With whom? With what? Went where? Of what are you talking?"

"Him."

"Who?"

"I went with him," she answered, very low, vaguely conscious that he grew angered, and that she had done ill. "It was to the music of Mozart. Why did you never take me? I seemed to understand everything in all the world; all that was dark grew clear; I understood why the woman did not feel the flames nor have any fear of death. Then he came back with me, and he had made the room like a garden, and Hermes was covered with roses, and it was very late, and he read to me his own poems, and the one on Sospitra, whom the Chaldean seers raised above every sorrow except death and love----" She stopped abruptly at that word; no doubt she could not have told why.

Maryx was silent. He looked like a man who had received a blow, and a blow that his manliness forbade him to return. His lips parted to speak, but, whatever he was about to say, he controlled its utterance.

"Go in to your work, my dear," he said, after a pause. "It grows late."

That was all. Giojà looked at him with a hesitating regret.

"Are you displeased?" she asked him, as she lingered. But he had left her, and had come down among the aloes, and thus met me, as I ascended the steep slopes of his gardens.

"She was with Hilarion?" he said, abruptly.

"Yes, but there was no harm in that," I answered him, and told him how the night had been spent.

He heard, looking far away from me towards the great pile of the Farnese glowing like bronze and gold in the morning light.

There was a great pain upon his face, but he said nothing: he was too generous to blame a creature owing so much to him as she did; and Maryx, so eloquent on matters of his art, and so felicitous in discussion and disquisition, was of few words when he felt deeply.

"So as she had some change and pleasantness, it is not much matter who gave it," he said, at length, when I had ended. "No doubt he knows how to amuse women better than I do. For the rest, we are not our keepers,--you and I."

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Then he moved to go on away down his gardens, towards Rome.

"You are not going back to the studio?" I ventured to say; for it was his practice always to spend there the hours of the forenoon, at the least.

"No; I have business yonder," he made answer; and I lost him to sight in the windings of the cypress alley that shelved sharply downward.

I understood that he did not wish me to go with him then; he had been wounded, and, like all other noble animals, sought to be alone.

I went up into his house, where I was always free to wander as I liked. It was beautifully still; the warm sun shone into the open courts; on the marble floors his great hounds lay at rest; the creepers were red with the touch of winter: through the white columns and porphyry arches there was a golden glory of chrysanthemums; it seemed the abode of perfect peace.

I went into the workrooms, where the blocks of marble were standing, and the scale stones, and the iron skeletons to hold the clay; and the workers were laboring under the guidance of the old foreman, Giulio.

Giojà was already at her own work before the plane on which she of late had been modeling in alto-rilievo.

He had let her choose her own subject, and she had chosen the death of Penthesileia. The fair daughter of Ares lay at the feet of Achilles, her helmet off, her long tresses sweeping the cruel earth that drank her blood; Thersites stood by, on his face the laughter that had cost him life; the Hero bent above her; in the rear were the press and tumult of armed men, the shock of shivered spears, the disarray of startled horses; and, farther yet, the distant walls of Troy.

The clay seemed sentient and alive; the whole composition was full of invention and of beauty; and the prominent recumbent figure of Penthesileia, in the drooping flexible abandonment of death, would scarcely have been unworthy of that Greek of the North, your Flaxman.

How great is the sorcery of Art! how mean and how feeble beside it are the astrologers and magicians of mere necromancy!

A little washed earth spread out upon a board and touched | | 194 by the hand of genius, and, lo! the wars of Homer are fought before your eyes, and life, and death, and woman's loveliness, and the valor of man, and the very sound of battle, and the very sight of tears, are all in that gray clay!

I looked over her shoulder at her work. I had seen it in its various stages many times: it was now almost complete.

"My dear," I said to her, saying what I thought, "you have that Aaron's wand which from the bare rods can call forth almond-flowers. Be content. Whoever has that has so much that, if life treat him unkindly in other ways, he can well afford to bear it."

Giojà sighed a little restlessly, leaning her face upon her hands, and looking down upon the plane on which her Penthesileia lay.

"Is it good?" she said, doubtfully. "Yesterday I thought so; I was so glad in it; but now----"

"Well?--now?"

"I do not care for it. Who can say in a world of marble what he can say in two lines of his Sospitra?"

Her eyes were full of tears; she had no pleasure in her noble Homeric labor; she could not have told why.

"Sospitra be accursed, and he who wrote it!" I muttered in my throat.

"You place the poet highest of all artists," I said, aloud, with such patience as I could assume. "Well, very likely you are right. He interprets the passions, the aspirations, the pains, and the gladness of living--what we call the soul--more directly, and of course with much more research and intimacy, than any other artist can do. The sculptor and the painter can but deal with the outward expression of emotion, and with nature in her visible and tangible forms. The singer, the reciter, in every nation, from Hellas to Scandinavia, was the earliest inspired; his were the first notes heard in the dusk of the world's slow dawn. It is natural that supremacy remains with him. But this is finished. What do you do to-day?"

She lifted her hair off her forehead, thick, clustering, soft hair, that was a weight to her small head.

"I do not know; I am tired. Is Maryx angry with me, that he does not come?"

"He is gone into Rome. No: he is not angry; perhaps he is pained."

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"I am sorry."

"You see, he meant to give you pleasure, and he failed, and another succeeded. A small thing, perhaps: still, a man may be wounded."

"I wonder if he would think this good," she murmured, her eyes still on her Penthesileia. "Do you think he would see any strength or beauty in it at all?"

"Maryx! But surely you must know! He never says what he does not think, nor ever stoops to give you mere flattery."

"I did not mean Maryx," she said, and then she turned away, and went to a desk in an inner room, and began to translate the legendary portions of Pausanias relating to Endæus,--a kind of employment which her master had given her to change at intervals the posture and the position of work at the clay, which he thought were not good too long together, for one of her sex and one so young.

I let her alone: it was of no use to speak. I went and talked a little to the old woman who sat in her wooden shoes in the beautiful chambers, and who looked out over Rome and wished she were hoeing in a cabbage-plot.

"Is the girl here to-day?" asked the mother of Maryx. "Ah! she has not been to see me this morning."

"Does she always come?"

"Always. We manage to understand each other. Not very much; but enough. It is good to look at her; it is like seeing the vines in flower."

"Shall I call her here?"

"No. Let her be. Perhaps Germain wants her."

"You have grown to like her?"

"Yes; one likes what is young. And then she is very fair to look at; a fair face is so much. It was hard in the good God to make so many faces ugly; to be born ugly,--that is, to enter the world with a hobble at your foot,--at least when you are a woman. Will my son marry her, think you?"

"I cannot tell. Who has thought of it?"

"No one. Only myself. But a man and a girl,--that is how it always ends; and he is not quite young, but he is so noble to look at, and so good, and so great. I think that is how it will end. And why not? It would be better for him--something living--than those marble women that he worships. | | 196 You see, he is very great and famous, and all that, but there is no one to watch for his coming and look the brighter because he comes. And a man wants that. I am his mother, indeed. But that is not much, because I am very stupid, and cannot understand what he talks of, nor the things he does, and all the use that I could be,--to sew, to darn, to sweep, to make the soup,--that he does not want, because he is so great, and can live as the princes do. All the world admires him and honors him,--oh, yes; but when at home he is all alone. But do not say a word,--not a word. Love is not like a bean-plant: you cannot put it in where you wish and train it where you like. If it grows, it grows, and it is God or the devil who sets it there: may the saints forgive me!"

Then she folded her hands, and began telling her beads, a little, quiet, brown figure, like a winter leaf, amidst the splendors of the room, with her wooden shoes sunk in the thick Eastern carpets, and the leaden effigy of the Madonna, that she had bought for a copper at a fair in her girlhood, still hung round her throat as more precious than pearls.

She was a good soul; she would have taken to her heart any creature that her son had loved, or that had loved him; she was old, and ignorant, and stupid, as she said, but she was upright and just, and what was pure, that she thought worthy. The greatness of her son she could not comprehend, and of his works and of his genius she was afraid, not understanding, them; but she would have understood if she had seen him happy with the simple common joys of innocent affection.

"But I am fearful; yes, I am fearful," she murmured, with her hands clasped together. "Because, you see, he has been good to her, very good; and my life has been long, and never yet did I see a great benefit done but what, in time, it came back as a curse. The good God has ordered it so that we may not do what is right just for the sake of reward."

Then she told her beads, unwitting of the terrible irony she had uttered.

I left her sorrowfully, and went down the hill, past the bright Pauline water, down the old Aurelian way to my stall by Ponte Sisto, for the labors of the day.

A sorrowful constraint fell upon us all after that morning, and marred the happy, unstrained intercourse with which our time had gone by so pleasantly. Maryx said nothing, and | | 197 nothing was altered in Giojà's mode of life, but still there was a change; there was that "little rift in the wood," which with the coming of a storm strikes down the tree.

For me, I sat and stitched in the driving of the winds, which began to grow very chill, and the neighbors round said that I had become churlish.

One is so often thought to be sullen when one is only sad. Anxiety is a sorry bedfellow, and when one rises in the morning he has chilled us for the day.

Palès snapped at her cats, and worried them, and gamboled before her lovers, and growled at them, and said, as plainly as her sharp black nose and fox's eyes could speak to me, "Why not come away to the Falcone and eat a bit of porcupine, and enjoy yourself as you used to do, and never trouble your head?"

But I would not adopt her philosophy, even though Fortune did so favor me at that time that in a roll of old vellum I bought to cut up for shoe-linings I actually found a fragment of a manuscript of a Tractatus Matheum of St. Hieronymus, written by an Italian scribe, and with some of the floreated borders still visible.

"Your lot should have been cast in those times, Crispin," said Hilarion, who saw it, and would have given me a roll of bank-notes for it if I would have taken them. "What a monk you would have made! I think I see you, spelling out the Greek manuscripts, collecting miniatures for the library Gospels, keeping an eye on the wines in the buttery, tending the artichoke and the sweet herbs, talking to Erasmus in Latin when he passed your way, and getting all the artists that had work in the chapel to do something or other for your cell, which would have been sure to have a painted window and a vine climbing about the window. You were meant for a sixteenth-century monk. There is no greater hardship than to be born in an age that is too late for us."

But I could not jest with him, for he had come down from the house on the bridge in that hour of dusk when Giojà's studies were over. It was worse than useless to object in any way: he would only have laughed: and, after all, as Maryx had said, we were not her keepers, and how could we insult him by saying that he should not approach her?

"Have you seen her Penthesileia?" I asked him.

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"At the studio? Yes."

"And what do you think of it?"

"It is wonderful, like everything that Maryx does; entirely noble, and pure, and classic."

"Maryx! He had no hand in it; he never touched it! Unaided she composed and executed every line of it! What are you thinking of?"

"My dear Lupercus, that is no woman's work,--and a girl's, too, a mere child's! How can you believe it?"

"I believe it, as I believe in the sun that hangs in the heavens!" I said, savagely, and feeling ready to strike him. "What! a man all truth and candor, and a girl who is truth itself, conspire to thrust a lie upon us like that? The very idea is an infamy! I tell you it is as utterly her own as the stitches in this shoe that I have stitched are mine!"

"You excite yourself; and I meant no infamy at all. Only, of course, it is Maryx's brain that has guided her hand everywhere. What shame is there in that? It is an impossible work for a girl of her years to have conceived and executed alone."

"Have you told her so?"

"Of course not. I never tell truth to any woman; and she has genius of her own, no doubt; more is the pity."

"The pity. And you are a poet?"

"Am I? The world has said so, but I have been very doubtful all my days."

And indeed he was so with reason, for, though he had a magical power of magnificent versification, and a classical grace of structure that amazed and awed his age, he was in no sense a poet, for he had no faith, and he derided love.

"Tell her what you have told me of the Penthesileia, and she will hate you," I said to him.

"Will she?" said he, with a little smile. "Tell her, then, if you like."

I went a little later, and found her. There were some logs on the hearth, and she sat dreaming before them, drawing lines in the embers with a charred stick. Her face was flushed, her eyes were abstracted and humid.

I had never before found her losing time, doing nothing,--she to whom the past was so full of inexhaustible riches, and the future so open for all accomplishments, that study was to | | 199 her as their playtime to children and their love-tryst to other maidens.

"He says that you did not do your Penthesileia," I said to her, abruptly. "Hilarion says so. He is certain that it is the work of Maryx."

She colored, and shrank a little as if in pain.

"He is wrong," she said, simply. "But it is natural he should think so; and what merit there is in it must of course be most due to my master,--that is quite true."

I felt my blood boil in my veins, for I knew that she shrouded her own pain in that patience, because she would not acknowledge that this stranger who misjudged her was cruel.

"I see you will be only a woman, my dear," I said, bitterly. "I thought you were something above your sex,--aloof from it,--born for art and nothing else, a very offspring of the gods you love. But I see you will be only a woman, after all."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because you suffer wrong, misjudgment, and even insult, in patience, when you like the giver of them."

She looked thoughtfully into the red embers on the hearth; her face was troubled. "If he knew me better, he would not doubt me at all. It is not his fault. I think he has lived with false people. But he ought not to doubt Maryx; he has known him so long, and Maryx could not lie. But I dare say he only says it to try me."

"And you forgive that?"

She was silent a moment.

"There is nothing to forgive," she said, after a little. "It must be such pain to him to doubt so much,--if he do really doubt. I suppose that is what you meant by the snakes of Heine."

"You have a noble soul, my dear."

She opened her grave soft eyes on me in surprise. She would have understood praise of her Penthesileia, but she did not understand it of herself.

I left her in the dull glow of the wood ashes, with the tawny-colored sunset of the winter's eve shining behind the iron bars of the casement and tinging the Pentelic marble of the Hermes to pale gold. When I got half-way down the stairs, she came after me.

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"Do you think he does really disbelieve?"

"He disbelieves everything. It is a habit; many men are like that who have been spoiled by Fortune. What does it matter?"

But if I did some greater thing,--something the world called great,--he would believe then?"

"My child, go on with your noble fancies, without caring whether he have faith, or good faith, or neither. Hilarion will always say some gracious thing to you, some captious thing of you to another; in his world, sincerity is rusticity. What does it matter? The artist should never heed any one individual opinion; to do so is to be narrowed at once. If you must have any one in especial, have that of Maryx alone,--a great master and a just judge."

She did not seem to hear. Her eyes glistened in the yellow light of the Madonna's lamp.

"I will do something greater, very great; then he must believe," she said, low to herself; and I could see her heart was heaving fast.

"As great as you like; but for yourself, not for Hilarion, or for any man," I said to her. "If your likeness in Borghese had kept the clue and the sword in her own hands, she never had been stranded on the rocks of Dia. Remember that."

But she did not heed me; her eyes had got in them a faraway gaze, and her young face grew resolute and heroic.

"If I had the clue and the sword," she said, softly, "I would guide him through the maze of doubt, and I would kill the snakes about his feet."

I bade her good-night. She had no more than ever any thoughts of human love; he was to her Apollo Soranus; that was all. What else but harm could I have done by shaking her awake and bidding her beware? This might be only a dream the more,--and so fade.

"If only he would go away!" I said to Palès and the faun in the fountain.

But it was the cool crisp beginning of winter, with all the shades of purple on the hills, where the grasses and flowers had lied, and the virgin snow upon Soracte, and the cyclamen in the hollows where the buried cities lay; and in winter and spring Hilarion loved Rome, even if he had ceased to love his | | 201 duchess with the broad imperial eyes,--ceased such love as alone he knew, worshiping the false gods of Apate and Philotes.

"Does she hate me?" said he, that day, with a smile in his calm blue eyes,--eyes that had so much light in them, and so little warmth.

"No. She is only sorry for you," I said, bluntly; " sorry that you have the pain of doubt, and the meanness of it; nay, she did not say that last word,--that is mine. Do you understand a great soul, great writer that you are, and vivisector of men and of women? There is not very often one in this world, but there is one up yonder where that lamp burns under my Hermes."

Hilarion was silent.

One might almost have said he was ashamed.

He bade me good-night gently, and did not go up towards the bridge. He would take rough words with sweet temper, and own a truth that went against himself; these were among those gracious things with which Nature had made him, and which the world and its adulation and his own contemptuous temper had not uprooted.

"If only he would but go away!" I said to Palès and the faun in the fountain.