CHAPTER XXIII.

WHEN I went back to my place by Ponte Sisto, I think the Faun in the fountain was dead or gone. I never heard him any more; I never have heard him again.

Is nature kind, or cruel? Who can tell?

The cyclone comes, or the earthquake; the great wave rises and swallows the cities and the villages, and goes back whence it came; the earth yawns, and devours the pretty towns and the sleeping children, the gardens where the lovers were sitting, and the churches where women prayed, and then the morass dries up and the gulf unites again. Men build afresh, and the grass grows, and the trees, and all the flowering seasons come back as of old. But the dead are dead: nothing changes that!

As it is with the earth, so it is with our life,--our own poor, short, little life, that is all we can really call our own. Calamities shatter, and despair engulfs it; and yet after a time the chasm seems to close; the storm-wave seems to roll | | 260 back; the leaves and the grass return; and we make new dwellings. That is, the daily ways of living are resumed, and the common tricks of our speech and act are as they used to be before disaster came upon us. Then wise people say, He or she has " got over it." Alas, alas! the drowned children will not cone back to us; the love that was struck down, the prayer that was silenced, the altar that was ruined, the garden that was ravished, they are all gone forever,--forever,--forever! Yet we live; because grief does not always kill, and often does not speak. I went back to my stall, and to Palès, because habit is strong and I was old.

The people spared me, and asked few questions. There is more kindness than we think in human nature,--at least when it has nothing to gain by being otherwise than kind.

And I began to stitch leather, though all around me seemed to have grown gray and black, and the voices of the merry crowds hurt me as a finger hurts that lightly and roughly touches a deep wound. It is hard for us when we shrink from the innocent laughter of others, and when the cloudy day seems kinder than the sunshine.

I shut the shutters of my window that looked upon the river, and locked the door of the chamber. It seemed to me accursed.

From the moment that Maryx and I saw the sail against the sky, white as a gull's wing,--the sail that should have been sable as the night,--no word passed his lips or mine to each other. He would not speak. I dared not. There are some wrongs, some griefs, so dire you cannot put words to them.

When, timidly, after many days, I ventured up through the aloes and the myrtle to his house, being afraid of what I had seen upon his face that day by the sea-shore, I saw in the first chamber a statue thrown down, broken and headless: the head was only a little mound of white and gray marble-dust.

The old man Giulio came and stood by me. Tears rolled down his cheeks. I envied them.

"My master did that," he said,--"did it the night he returned. He struck it down with a mallet, blow after blow. The beautiful thing! It seemed like a murder."

The statue was what had been the Nausicaa's. I turned away: I dared not ask for him.

| | 261

"He works as usual," said Giulio. The little old brown woman tottered in, more than ever like a dull dusky leaf that a breeze blows about feebly: she shook me gently, and pointed to the fallen marble.

"It is as I told you it would be: the marble has killed him," said his mother. "Yes, he works, he breathes, he moves, he speaks. There is nothing to see, perhaps,--not for others,--but he is dead for all that. I am his mother, and I know----"

I crept away, sick, as with some remorse, and feeling as though guilty of some heavy sin. Why had I meddled with Fortune, the maker and mocker of men? Why had I dared to compel fate, that day when he had paused by me, to take up the Wingless Love?

What was my grief beside his? and what my wrong? All the great gifts of his great soul he had given; and they had been uncounted and wasted like water spilled upon the ground.

I crept through the myrtles downward, away from the house where the statue lay shattered. The earliest of the nightingales of the year was beginning her lay in some leafy covert hard by, but never would he hear music in their piping again; never,--any more than I should hear the song of the Faun in the fountain.

For the song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in our hearts. And his heart would be forever empty and silent, like a temple that has been burned with fire, and left standing, pitiful and terrible, in mockery of a lost religion and of a forsaken god.