CHAPTER XXIV.

THE months wore on,--those colorless, long, slow-footed spaces of time, so heavy as they pass, so dead a blank to remember and try to number, which all men and all women know into whose life has come any great grief; spaces of time where one lives and moves, and eats and drinks, and sleeps, ay, and even may laugh perhaps (Heaven help one!), and yet | | 262 all the while, as the mother of Maryx said, one is dead--quite dead--for any pulse of real bright life that beats in us.

"What is she to you?" my good friends of the Rione said. "Only a stray girl, come and gone,--no more. Have reason.

Ay, truly she was no more to me; and yet she had taken with her all the gladness I had, and all the peace; and when I sat stitching leather for old Rome the world seemed very dark.

I remained fettered, as the poor are fettered, hand and foot to the soil by poverty.

I had no other Hermes to sell.

I stayed by my stall, stitching and seeing nothing that I did, and doing my work so ill that people were angry and began to forsake me entirely,--those very poor folks whose sandals and shoes I had always cobbled gratis being the first and loudest to say that I was purblind.

It did not matter very much; I wanted so very little for myself, and I could always get enough food for the dog, any day, from Pippo's stove; only, all the peace of my simple life was gone, and gone forever. It seems hard when one does no wrong, and has no envy or ill feeling of any kind, and only takes delight in the mere open air and the mere movement of life and the charm of the arts and the innocent mysteries of study and antiquity,--it seems hard, I say, when these things are one's joy and can hurt no one, to have all one's pleasure in them dashed out of one's keeping like a slender glass that is shivered on the ground.

It seems hard. But I tried to think that it did not matter. I was old, and it was only dying a little before my time to have the days become so gray and empty, and the sky seem only a hollow gourd, and the trouble of birth and of death feel too great for the short, sad, hurried, impotent handful of years that divided the two; and I stayed on at my stall, and the fountain was only a confused and tiresome sound, and the hastening of the people's feet over the bridge seemed cruel,--why did they hasten, when mine could not?--and all I sat thinking of was of my dream in Borghese that summer noon when the white statues had awakened and spoken.

It was only a dream. No, of course; it was only a dream. | | 263 Often I went there, and would have called to them to have mercy; but they were only marble: the beautiful Thespian Love was mute as stone, and the Roman woman on her bier kept the flowers of oblivion close folded in her hands and would not yield them.

It had been only a dream; only a dream.

"Oh, God! must she suffer for that?" I cried always in my heart, and wandered Rome stupidly; and, if a son can hate his mother most revered, almost I hated the stones of Rome. For I was sure that Hilarion had left or would leave her; and who could tell whether she were living or dead?

They who live after Naxos are base; and she was holy as any creature sleeping in a virgin martyr-tomb in the womb of the earth under the city laid to rest in the hope of Christ.

Ah, yes! for a great love is a great holiness. Ye fools and pharisees have said otherwise, because it is as far beyond you as the stars of the night.

Rome itself seemed to me to shrivel and grow small, lying in the circle of the mountains dead as the nymph Canens had lain dead by Tiber's side.

Sometimes I would climb up the winding road, and stand under the cedars, and look at the sea from the heights above the city, and wish and wish----

But I was old and poor.

Palès and I could only look till the blue gleam faded into the dusk of night, and go back wearily with our heads drooped to our corner by the fountain, the fountain in which there was no music for us now, but only the noisy gushing of water restless to escape, and the sharp ring of the women's brazen jars.

Sometimes I would go and stand before my lost Hermes.

"That was mine once," I said to a stranger who was calling it most lovely where it stood on the mosaic floors, bathed in the sunlight.

He looked at me in contempt, and went and spoke to one of the Swiss guards, thinking me mad or drunk, no doubt.

I never dared to name her to Maryx,--never. There was a look on his face when I passed him by in the streets that daunted one into fear and silence. But one night after several months I came upon him suddenly in the dead silence of the Flavian amphitheatre.

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It was midnight and moonlight: the plants that then grew like a green wreath in the travertine stood out clear in every stem and leaf against the cold blue light of the skies; the water glistened in the underground cells; the newt ran and the toad squatted in the seat of emperors.

I know not what in the silence and the solemnity of the awful place opened my lips. Stopping him, as he would have passed me, we two alone in the vast space, I told him all that I had seen at Venice and all that I had gone thither meaning to do.

He shrank with an irrepressible gesture at the first word, as a man shrinks when a nerve in his flesh is laid bare; then he stood still and heard me to the end.

He was a very proud man, and he had never said to her or to me or to any one that he had loved her.

He heard me in patience to the end; then he said, slowly, with the paleness of a, great suppressed emotion on his face,--

Yes; if one could strike him without striking her, do you think I would have let him live a day? Not that we have any right, you and I. We are nothing to her! You forget. We never had any hold on her, not even as her friends. We gave her all we had to give; it counted nothing: that was not our fault, nor hers. We missed the way; he found it."

Then he was silent.

He had found it; yes, he had found it without effort, cost, or sacrifice, and would turn aside front it when another path beguiled him, as easily as a child runs a little way through the daisies in a flowering meadow and then tires of it, he knows not why, and throws his gathered blossoms down, and runs away.

Maryx looked up at the skies, where the moon was sailing high in a clear space where the storm-wreath of the clouds had parted and left it free.

As its light fell on his features, one saw how aged they were and worn, with all the bold and noble cast of them fatigued and hardened, and their lines deepened like the channel of a river after a heavy flood. He had suffered very terribly, this man who had owned to no suffering save such as the ruthless blows of his mallet on his own marble had shown when he had shattered the Nausicaa.

It was all still about us. The mighty place was in a deep | | 265 shadow. The statues of Christ were blacker than all the rest, and the cross in the midst was shrouded in gloom, as though it were the very hour of the crucifixion.

Maryx, whose hand leaned on it, shook it with the force of a sudden shudder that ran through him.

"We must wait. When he leaves her, then----"

The Cross of Christ has been called in witness of many an oath of vengeance, but it never heard one more just than the one that was then sworn mutely by it.

Then he shook himself free of me, and went down among the many ruins in the darkness.

He waited: that was all. Vengeance only demands a long patience.

And I, remembering, felt that he would have few years to wait.