Beck Center English Dept. University Libraries Emory University
Emory Women Writers Resource Project Collections:
Women's Genre Fiction Project

Ariadne, an electronic edition

by Ouida [Ouida, 1839-1908]

date: 1877
source publisher: J.B. Lippincott Company
collection: Genre Fiction

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CHAPTER XXVIII.

I WENT to Pippo, and I said to him,--

"You are an old friend, and a true one: will you lend me a sum of money?" and I assured him that for what I wanted there were things enough still in the chamber to give him back his loan, if that was what he feared.

But Pippo scratched his head mournfully.

"Dear one, do not ask it," said he. "Friendship is a sturdy plant, a sweet herb and a savory, but when it touches the purse-strings--somehow it shrivels. I should be loath to love you less. So let us say nothing about money."

It was wise in him, no doubt, and he proceeded to show that it was because of his very love for me that he spoke so, after cooking for me more than a score of years, and charging me at pleasure.

Ersilia, who had listened as she washed her clothes on the edge of the well in the yard, hung her linen to dry, then followed me out.

"I have money; take it," said she,--"if it be to find her, or to do any good for her. And when you see her, tell her that I have promised her Lady six candles as tall as I am if only she will bring her back; but, to be sure, she never cared for these things, nor believed in them. Nay, take the money. I am not like Pippo. You will pay me back; and if not-- | | 281 not. I have cursed her many a time, but I would walk barefoot to bring her back."

I saw the hot tears in her fierce black eyes with the brown wrinkles round them: she was a stern and hasty soul, but her heart was true.

But I would not take a woman's money, and I went and unlocked the chamber of mine, that I never had entered since the day that I had sold Hermes, which had been to me as the bidding to bind his son to the altar must have been to Abraham of old.

And I took the other things that I had, the Etruscan armlet, and the bronze catacomb lamp, and the beautiful fire-blackened flower-crowned colossal head, and sold them to men who have the heart to chaffer and deal in such sacred things,--I never had been able to do it,--and put the money that they gave me in a leathern bag, and set off on my way to the gilded city that Hilarion best loved.

For there I knew that quite easily I or any one could hear of him, and know at once whither he had gone, and who was with him.

"Bring her back!" Ah, dear God! from the path she had taken there is no return.

Yet I went to search for her, having these tidings of her inheritance.

I took the money, and made up my little pack as in the days of my wanderings, so that it strapped tightly on my back, and called to Palès to come with me, and left Rome once more. It was in the light shining weather of early autumn, when the air is once more elastic after the swooning; heats of summer, and there is the scent of fresh wine everywhere upon the wind, and oranges begin to fall at your feet, as you walk, and the arbutus begins to redden its berries, and the maize has its embrowned plumes, tall as the saplings of maple.

It matters nothing how I fared, toiling on through the white dust along that road by the sea, with the blue waves underneath and the green palms above me.

I walked all the way: the sum of my money was small, and I could not tell how soon I might need it. Often I paid my night's lodging and supper by an hour of stitching at broken shoe-leather, and Palès if tired never complained.

I knew a dog once who, taken from its home in Paris to | | 282 new owners in Milan, ran away from the unknown master, and found its way on foot all those many weary miles, across the mountains, back to Paris, and died upon the doorstep of its old home. This is true; no fancy, but a fact: will you heed it, ye who call the animals dumb beasts?

I only did what that poor lonely little dog found possible, hunted and baffled, and tormented with hunger and thirst, as no doubt it must have been, all along the cruel strange highways.

I walked along the sea-road first, and then across the great central plains of France, and it was fair autumn weather always, broken only by noble storms that swept the land majestically and made the swollen rivers rise.

The air had the first crispness of winter when I entered the city of Paris. I was weary in limb and brain, but I went straight to the house of Hilarion.

I had not seen it since the night that Lilas had died there. It was in a by-street, being an old small palace in a noble but antiquated quarter: it had belonged to his mother's people in other centuries: it stood between court and garden, and was darkened by some stately trees of lime and chestnut. I found it not without difficulty. It was evening: I rang at the large bronze gate-bell, without thinking what I should do when it was answered.

An old servant came and replied to me through the bars of the gates. Hilarion was not there; he had gone away in the spring; no doubt he would return soon for the winter; they could not tell where he was; no, there was no one in the house except domestics. That was all he said, or would say,--being trained to silence, no doubt.

I turned away, and went into the busier streets, Palès clinging close to me, for the blithe and busy gayety, and the crowds, and the glitter, and the innumerable lamps make these streets so strangely bewildering after the dusky moonlit ways of Rome, with their vast flights of stairs, and their great deserted courts, and their melody of murmuring waters, and their white gloom of colossal marbles or gigantic domes. The city was all in the height of a fine frosty winter night's merriment, and what seemed to me after such long absence incredible multitudes, all light-hearted and light-footed, were | | 283 pouring down the streets, going to theatres or cafes or other places of diversion, with the lights all sparkling among their trees, and the windows of their shops and frontages of their buildings all gay with color and ornament and invitation to amusement.

I felt my head whirl,--I who had sat so long by the moss-grown fountain in the wall, where even Carnival had reeled away without touching me, and had left me quiet.

I sat down on a bench under a plane-tree, and tried to collect my thoughts.

Now that I had come, what could I do? how nearer was I? I seemed to myself to have come on a fool's errand.

Under the tree was one of those gay little painted metal houses they call kiosks, where they sell newspapers always, and sometimes volumes as well. In this little minaret-shaped toy, with its bright gas, and its ear-ringed black-haired girl to sit in it, I saw Hilarion's name in large letters: there was a new poem of his on sale there, just as Martial's used to be at "the shop of Pallion, the freedman of the noble Lucan, by the Temple of Peace."

The volume was called Fauriel.

I asked the woman if it were selling well. She laughed at me for an ignoramus: who was I that did not know that all Paris thought and spoke of nothing else?

I bought the slender, clear-typed book. I sat down under the trees and read it, Palès at my feet.

It was beautiful. He seldom wrote anything that was otherwise. He had the secret of a perfect melody, and the sense of unerring color and form.

It had but a slight story: Fauriel loved and wearied of love; there was little else for a theme; but the passion of it was like a pomegranate-blossom freshly burst open to the kiss of noon; the weariness of it was like the ashes of a charnel-house, which craves contrasts, as the sick palate craves to be burnt and cloyed.

The union was intoxication to his own generation.

I sat under the leafless branches and read the book by the light of the lamps above me. There were bands playing near, some wheeling, waltzing, dreamy measure; the verse seemed to go with the music; the crowd went by, the many wheels were a sound like the sea; beyond at the end was the white | | 284 pile of Napoleon's arch, and wintry masses of trees, and countless lights:--if I look at a line of the poem now, all the scene comes back to me.

As I read, the scorching passion, like a sand-wind that burns and passes,--the hollow love, that even in its first fresh vows was not sincere,--the cruel analysis, the weary contempt of human nature,--the slow voluptuous and yet indifferent analysis of the woman's loveliness and of the amorous charm that could no more last than lasts the hectic flash of the sky at evening-time,--they all seemed to cut into my very flesh like stripes.

I seemed to hear her doom in them; the letters seemed stamped in fire.

I read it as a man reads a death-warrant, seeing from beginning to end, as it were, in one flash of horrible comprehension. It told me no more than I knew, indeed; and yet it seemed to kill all hope in me,--because this book was freshly written, and it told me that the poet of it knew nothing of love save its brutality and its satiety; and how as a lover could he give any more than he knew?

It frenzied me. It seemed to me as if I saw her dead, and he showing all her unveiled beauties to the gaze of men, as Nero showed in death Agrippina. I tore the paper cover off it, and the pages with their delicate printing, and bit them through and through with my teeth, and flung, them on the ground and to the winds.

People passing by must have thought me mad: the boys of the streets ran and caught the flying pages from the gutter to make them into any of the ten thousand uses that the ingenuity of poverty can teach them. Then I rose and tried to remember where I was, and to find my way to a cheap house of call where I had used to live with the comedians twenty odd years before.

That little hostelry had been pulled down to make way for the blank, glaring, dreary, plastered piles which your modern architects love, and which have no more story in them, or light and shade, or meaning of any kind, than has an age-worn coquette's hard enameled face.

The little wine-shop, once the abode of much harmless merriment and wise content, had been pulled down; but I found another, that suited me, and stayed on in Paris, going every | | 285 night and day to stare up at Hilarion's house, and ring at the closed gate, and receive the same answer, until the keeper of the gate grew angry, and threatened to hand me over to the keeping of the gendarmes.

No doubt wiser folks and richer ones would have gone at once to the aid of the law to find her or hear of her, in many various ways; but I was afraid: we Trasteverini have no love of the law, or of its administrators, high and low, and I thought it best, rightly or wrongly, to keep close my own counsel.

Once, passing a great public place, newly erected and very handsome in the soulless sort of splendor which is the highest that your modern architecture ever reaches, I saw through the ranges of the columns in its halls the Nero and the Actæa high-throned in a place of honor.

The young artists were speaking of it.

"How perfect it is!" said one. "He is a great man."

"Ay, truly," said the other; "and what a beautiful life his has been!--beautiful as any Greek's in Ægina. If there be one whom I envy----"

I hurried out of the hall, sick at heart.

It had been a beautiful life indeed, and I had ruined it when I had bidden him take the face of his Actæa from my Ariadne.

So ill does the world judge: seeing but the golden-green burnished smooth side of the laurel leaf, and not knowing the bitterness and the poison in it for him who chews it.

Fame consoles, say the vulgar: oh, fools! that which has the strength to achieve fame has also the strength that intensifies the pang of every woe.

Going through the streets, with Palès clinging to my heels, not noticing any of the sights and sounds about me, but seeing before my eyes, as though they were written everywhere, upon the stones and in the sky, those beautiful vile mocking verses and treasures of language, sent to show the hopeless vainness of all human loves, the music of a flute divinely played caught my dull ear and made me pause.

There is so much music in Paris always that I cannot tell why this should have had power to enter my brain and make me stop, but so it was; and Palès pricked her sandy fox-like ears, as though in that multitude of strangers seeing some familiar face. I went where the flute was being played, before a coffee- | | 286 house door, beneath the roadside trees, under the bright still skies and the desert of gas-lights.

It was hard to see the player, for there were so many people crowding round and sitting at ease upon green iron chairs, sipping coffee and eating sweet things, for the night was serene and not cold. But I listened on the edge of the crowd, and though all flutes have but one voice among them, yet it seemed to me that this one spoke with the sweet sad sound that I had heard at Daïla when the peaches had been ripe, and, edging in a little nearer, I saw that the player was Amphion, whom I had never seen from the night that he had sent Maryx and myself to the seashore in time to behold the vanishing sail.

When I had returned to Rome after that time I had utterly forgotten him, and when, remembering, I reproached myself and asked of him, I had been able to hear nothing: the fisherman by Quattro Capi could only say he had been an honest though not a useful lad whilst with him, and had gone away,--out of the city, for aught that he knew.

And now I was sure that this was Amphion playing here, with the small olive face, and the big black eyes, and the nervous girlish hands, and making such soft, sweet, wailing music that even the Paris crowd was still and touched.

When the music ceased, he took off the flat scarlet cap that he wore on his dark curls, and held it out to those who had listened; they were numerous, and all gave willingly. The flute he played on was a common one of ebony,--not the silver flute of Daïla. He divided it and slipped it in his breast, as his way always had been, then came out of the crowd.

I stopped him. "Do you know me?" I said. "Where are you going? Why do you struggle like that?"

For he was trying to escape me.

He stood still, finding me resolute, but his face was downcast, and his voice faltered, as he stammered some ill-connected words of where he lived and how it fared with him: then, looking me suddenly in the face, the tears sprang into his eyes, and he drew me aside hurriedly down into a passageway.

"You are old and poor. I can tell you," he said, quickly. "I shall not be jealous of you. You care for her; but you cannot keep her. Come home with me, and I will tell you."

| | 287

"She is in the city, then?" I said, with a great leap at my heart, and a dizziness before my sight.

"Yes, yes," he said, impatiently. "Come home with me."

I kept pace with his lithe and quick young steps to a house on the river.

"You will make me lose money," he said, restlessly looking backward at the crowded and illuminated streets we left.

He had changed sorely from the pretty soft lad that he had been at Daïla; poverty and feverish passions, and the air and the ways of cities, had pinched and wasted his features, and given a false color to his worn cheeks, and a piteous eagerness to his glance. He drew me aside in a little passageway, where there was a bench under a pear-tree, and a sign of a silver deer swinging, as I well remember, in the artificial light.

"Sit down," he said, imperiously, and yet timidly. "You will say I have done wrong, no doubt. But if the time was to come over again I would not do otherwise. I could not."

I shook with impatience.

"Who cares what you have done or left undone?" I cried, cruelly, "who cares? Tell me of her: has he left her?"

Amphion laughed aloud.

"Have you read Fauriel?"

"I have had it read to me. I can understand the tongue now. Have you read it? Oh, it is beautiful, so the world says: it is beautiful, no doubt. Only reading it! why do you ask?"

A great heart-sickness came over me: I held him with both my hands on his arm.

"For the love of God, tell me in a few words. Since you know everything, it would seem,--is she near me now? Is she living? Has he forsaken her quite?"

Amphion was silent, thinking.

"Come with me," he said, and turned towards the quarter where the gray Seine was gliding in the moonlight through Old Paris, the Paris of Philippe d'Orleans and of the Reine Isabeau.

Something in the boy's look and the sound of the voice froze my blood in my veins and nailed my tongue to my throat.

I thought to see her lying dead, or perhaps to see some | | 288 nameless wooden cross above the ditches where the friendless and forlorn lie buried.

I could not ask him another word. Palès crept after us wearily, with her head hung down.

I had forgotten that for ten hours I had never eaten nor drunk.

He took me to a house standing quite on the water, with the towers and walls of the more ancient quarter close about it, and a few trees and the masts of boats rising above their boughs. He climbed a steep dark stairway, smelling of all foul odors, and paused up on high before a closed door.

"Go in there," he said, and opened the door. My heart stood still. I had no clear thought of anything that I should see, only one idea,--that she must be within the chamber lying dead.

I set my foot upon the threshold with the ghastliest fear my life had ever known.

The room was almost in darkness, for one small lamp would not light it: it was a garret, but clean and spacious, with one casement, through whose leaded panes the stars were shining, and the zinc roofs were glistening under the rays of the moon.

There was the form of a woman there: her face I could not see. She was leaning her forehead against the window. She did not turn or move at the unclosing of the door. Palès ran forward whining: then I knew who it was. I went to her timidly, and yet in joy, seeing that she lived, even though she lived in misery.

My dear, will you not speak to me?" I said, and tried to touch her hand. "Will you not even look? I am your friend always, though poor, and of so little use;" and then I stopped, and a greater horror than the fear of death consumed me, for as she turned her face towards me there was no light of any kind in it, no light of the reason or the soul: it had the mild, dumb, patient pain of a sick animal upon it, and in the great eyes, so lustrous and wide-opened, there was no comprehension, no answer, no recognition.

The eyes looked at me; that was all: they did not see me.

"Will he be long?" she said. Her voice sounded faint, and far away.

"Do you not know me, oh, my dear ? Do you not even | | 289 know me?" I cried, in my mortal agony. She did not seem even to hear: she sighed a little wearily, and turned to the casement and leaned her forehead there. I burst into tears.

I shall always see that bare white room, and the plank floor, and the high garret window, with the stars shining through it, as long as I see anything on earth. Sometimes in the night I wake up shivering, and thinking I am there with her lustrous, hopeless eyes looking at me so, with no sight in them and no reason.

"Oh, my dear! Oh, my dear! Where is God, that he lets such things be?" I cried, in my suffering, and raved and blasphemed, and knew not what I said, but seemed to feel my very heart-strings being rent asunder.

But she heard nothing, or, at least, she took no notice: she was looking through the narrow panes, as if her lover were to come back to her from heaven.

The boy, standing on the threshold, drew me back to him.

"She is always like that," he said, very low. "It is a pity he cannot see: it would serve him for fine verses."

"Hush, for the mercy of heaven! Can you jest?"

"I?--Jest?"

Then I felt ashamed that I had hurt him with such a word, for I saw in his face what he felt.

"Forgive me, child," I said, humbly, to him, as I felt I too was mad, I think. "Mad! Oh, who dares say any such word?--who dares?--the clearest, purest, loftiest mind that ever loved the sunlight of God's truth! Oh, she will know me in a little while. Let me go back and speak to her again. She has not seen me well: the place is dark."

And again I touched her, and spoke, and again her eyes rested on me, not seeming even to see that I was a human thing. "Will he be long?" she muttered, once more, being disturbed.

"She asks only that," muttered Amphion: "nothing else is ever said by her. You only pain her; you only make her more restless. Come away: now you have seen her."

The boy spoke with the authority of an old gray-headed man, and his boyish face had the look of age. He drew me out across the threshold, and across the narrow passage-way, into another garret, much smaller, and quite as bare.

"You want to hear," he said, with a heavy sigh, pressing | | 290 his hands to his forehead. "You will be angry: you will say I have done wrong. But I hated to let you know, or any one. I was all the friend she had, and, though she never knew, that was a kind of joy. Well, this is how it was."

He breathed quickly, then drew a long sigh, and so began to speak.

"You stayed in Rome; that strong man, too, who makes the carven images. I could not stay. I had plenty of money,--his money, you remember. I came here. Here, I thought to myself, he would be sure to come: never is he long away, for he says that here only do men know how to live, if in Rome only can they learn to die. So I stayed here, and I watched his house.

"I know how to watch: I was friends with the snakes at home. The windows of the house were always shut: it was like the face of a blind man; it told nothing. One day, that is a year ago now, they opened. I lived in a little room high up, very near,--so high, so near, I could see down into his garden: and I learned their tongue, only I let them believe I. did not know it: so I heard more. He lived his old life,--quite his old life: it was all pleasure,--what he calls pleasure,--and she stayed in her own chambers with her marbles: what did she know? She was shut up as you shut up a bird. Once or twice he had her with him at the opera: she was as white as the statues that she worships; she had a quantity of old Greek gold upon her. I knew that it was Greek, for I had seen him buy it in Athens. Some one near me said it was Helen,--risen. But she is not Helen, nothing in her like her: she read me of Helen in those old songs of war, in Rome. I think she suffered very much, because all those people looked so at her: as for him, he only smiled. This that I tell you of now belongs to last winter. Have patience: I must tell it my own way.

"There came then to this city the wicked witch from Rome, she whom you call a duchess. She sent for him. He went, and when he had gone once, then he went often. She, in those rooms with her marbles, was more than ever alone. Her window opened on to the gardens and from my garret window I could see. Sometimes she would come out under the trees: they grow very thickly, and it is damp there, but she would sit still under them, hour after hour,--and he all | | 291 the while about in the pleasure-places or with the Roman woman. I do not think he was cruel to her; no, I think not: he only left her: that is not cruelty, they say.

"When the spring came, and all those lilies were in flower, and the air, even in this place, so sweet, she was all the day long in the garden: I could see her shadow always on the grass. The grass hardly ever had his shadow too. Sometimes I followed him, and I saw how he spent his nights. If I had been strong, like your sculptor, I would have killed him; but I am only a boy. Why did not the sculptor come? The Roman woman went away, and he went also: I learned from his people that he had left no word where he had gone.

"She used to walk to and fro in the moonlight under the trees, till one was sick to see her. All day long she did nothing, nothing, only sit and listen, I suppose, for his steps, or the sound of some one bringing some word from him. She got a look on her face like that look that your dog's eyes have when it loses you in a crowd. You know what I mean. Men came and tried to see her,--men who were his friends; that is their friendship; but never would she see any one. She was so foolish, I heard the servants say; but I think they were sorry for her, and I know they loved her. All this time I kept myself by means of my flute, and watched the house all the time I was not playing. It was a hot summer: heat is so heavy here, where all these zinc roofs burn your eyes: it is not like the heat on our shores, where we lie in the air all night, and hear the cool sound of the waves;--oh, I have not forgotten!"

The summer was horrible here: it was all clouds of dust by day and glare of gas by night, and the noise of the streets roaring like an angry beast. She never left the garden. She was never quiet; she was always moving up and down, and doing nothing,--she who used to do so much in every second of the day in Rome. I heard the people of the house say, 'She thinks he is coming back;' and the older ones sighed and seemed pitiful, but the man at the gate, who is wicked, laughed with his friends. They tried to enter and see her; great princes some of them were; but never would she see any one.

"One day, when she was walking in the garden, I saw a messenger take her a great casket. She said not one word, | | 292 but she threw it on the ground, and the lid of it burst open, and pearls and other jewels rolled out, and she trampled on them and trod them into the earth. I never had seen her like that. The man who had brought them was frightened. and gathered them up and hurried away. The man at the gate laughed, and told him she was a fool.

"That is how the summer went by; and from my garret I could always see her, and all the long moonlight nights she would pace up and down there under those trees ; and the lilacs grew shriveled and black. Then all at once I missed her. Days went by. At last I asked. The man at the gate laughed again. 'She is gone,' said he: 'she is a lovely creature, but not human, I think; he wrote to her, but she did not understand. She is gone away, somewhere or other. You see, she did not understand,--as if it were not always so.' What is always so?"

The Greek lad sighed, and drew his breath wearily, then again took up the thread of his bald narrative, which he told in simple, unlearned fashion.

"Of course I searched for her everywhere, but it was long before I found her. The man at the gate seemed uneasy, for fear of the displeasure of Hilarion; but he said, 'We have no orders; we can do nothing. When he comes back--' So they did not stir, nor care. As for me, I thought she was dead. But still I sought high and low.

"One day, in this very street, I heard some women talking; this woman whom you have seen with her was one of them. They spoke of a stranger who was dying of hunger, yet who had spent the only coin she could earn by making the nets for the fishermen of the Seine, in buying gray clay and earth. Then I thought of her, for often she would mend the old men's nets by the Tiber, having learned to do it by the sea; and who but she would have bought sculptors' clay instead of bread?

"Then I questioned the Frenchwoman of her, and little by little she told me. She has a good soul, and a tender one, and she was sorrowful, though knowing nothing. 'This girl is beautiful, she said, 'and belongs to noble people, I think, but she has had some great grief, or else is mad. She passed down my street one day at daybreak and asked for a little empty room that I had to let, and told me that she had not a coin in | | 293 the world, and bade me get her the fishing-nets to make or mend. I do not know why she spoke to me: children and dogs like me,--perhaps that was why. And she seemed to be in such great woe that I had not the heart to turn her away; and I gave her the room, and got her the work; and piteous it is to see her lovely slender hands among all that rough cordage and hemp, and torn by them, and yet working on and on. And the first money she gained she bought clay, and she began to model a statue, like the figures one sees in the churches; and all day she makes or mends the nets, and half the night, or more, labors at this clay; and she is mad, I think, for she never speaks, and scarcely a mouthful passes her lips, save a draught of water.'

"And when the woman told me this, then I felt sure that it was she. And I told a lie as of having lost my sister, and begged to see her, and after a while the woman, who was anxious, and even frightened, let me go up to the room on the roof. And this is how I found her.

"The room was bare, and there was a heap of nets on the floor, and there was a statue in clay, which had his features and his form, only it was winged and seemed as a god. She was clad in the rough white garments she wore in Rome, and her arms were bare, and she was modeling the clay still with her hands, and she never heard me enter, nor the woman speak, who said to me, trembling, 'Look! is it a false god, that she will not even leave it to break bread?' And I said to her, 'Ay, it is a false god.' For indeed it was in his very likeness,--only greater than he, more beautiful, more perfect, as, no doubt, he always seemed to her: may he live forever in pain, and die without a friend!

"The woman, trembling, went and touched her, and said, 'Come away: it is night: you must be hungry.' She turned and looked at us both. 'Hush! it will be finished very soon; then he will come back.' Then she turned again to the statue, and worked on at it, and her hands seemed so feverish that I thought they must have burnt the clay as they touched it. 'Is it your sister?' asked the woman; and I answered, 'Yes;' and together we stood and watched her. 'Whilst she still made the nets, she seemed to have some reason left, though she never spoke,' said the woman; 'but since she has touched that earth she seems mad. Is it indeed your sister? What | | 294 sorrow is on her, that she is thus?' But I could not speak. I watched her till I felt suffocated. I knew not what I did. I was beside myself. God forgive me!

"I had my knife in my vest,--the knife that should have ended his life in those nights of his pleasure, if I had not been a coward,--such a coward! And now, like the foolish wretch I was, I so loathed the sight of that image, and of her lovely life wasting and burning away on it, that as I saw it I sprang upon it, and plunged my knife into the very breast of it, and the moist clay reeled and crumbled, and fell away, and all its beauty sank down into a mere heap of earth,--God forgive me!

"And she herself fell down at the sight of the ruined thing, as though my knife had stricken her life,--fell with a great cry, as if her very heart were bursting; and her forehead struck the stones, and the blood came from her mouth."

His voice sank into silence with a sob. For me, I sat quietly by his side, with the Seine water flowing underneath the wall down below, and the lamps looming yellow through the mist.

I wanted to know nothing more. I saw all the cruel months and years, as in a mirror one sees one's own eyes looking back at one.

"Go on," I said to the lad; and after a little he took up his tale.

"She was like a dead creature many days and weeks," he said. "We called help; they gave it some learned name; some fire of the spine and brain, they called it. She rose from her bed, for she is strong, they say, but her mind seems gone ever since then. 'Will he be long?' she is always asking: that is all; you have heard her?"

"Yes, I have heard her."

I spoke calmly, but it seemed to me as if the lamps burning; through the fog were lights of hell and I heard all its fiends laughing.

"How has she lived all this while?"

This had passed in September, the boy said, and we were now in midwinter, passing into early days of February, and all the while that treasure and ill-got wealth, hoarded in Fiumara, had been waiting her, whilst she was lying between life and death in this river-attic in the heart of a foreign city!

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He hung his head, ashamed.

"I should have sent to you; yes, I know. I thought of that, but I could not: it was horrible, yet it was a kind of happiness to be the only thing between her and the workhouse,--the hospital,--the grave. For without me she would have gone there. 'She is my sister,' I said to the woman; and they believed me, and let me do for her. My money was almost gone, but I had the flute, and I could always get money in plenty, playing here and there. They would have hired me for the great theatres, but I was afraid of that. I have played at the singing-places in the open air,--nowhere else,--for I was always afraid he might return and see me, and so know. Indeed, she has wanted for nothing, for nothing that we could give. She is as well here as if she were in a palace; she knows nothing of where she is. Of the statue she does not seem to have any remembrance: the people shoveled it away: it was only a heap of gray earth. You are angered; you think I did wrong: yes, but for the moment, almost, I thought the clay image was alive, and I fancied I should see her free of its spell. Indeed, indeed, she wants for nothing. She is docile; she lets the woman do what she likes; but all day long she watches the window, and all she says is that 'Will he be long?' The woman says she sleeps but very little; when she awakes she says always the same thing. And all Paris raves and weeps over Fauriel!"

The boy laughed bitterly, the tears coursing down his cheeks.

"I suppose he never sends to know where she is, else his people would seek for her,--it is so easy to know anything in this city. I think they have never tried to know. She has never gone out of that room since that day," he continued. "She has all she can want, oh, yes, indeed; she does not know whether it is a garret or a palace; only sometimes, I think, she feels the want of air, without knowing what it is she feels.

"You will say I should have sent to you. Yes, I thought of it; but, you see, I cannot write, and then I have been glad to be the only one near her,--the only thing she had. Of course she does not know. She sees me very often, but she never knows me. There is always that blank look in her eyes. I suppose it is her brain that is gone.

"Oh, you are angry. Do not be angry. Perhaps I did ill. | | 296 But had I let you know you would have come, and that man who lives on the Golden Hill, and is rich, and she would never have wanted me any more.

"I make plenty of money; yes, indeed. If I went to the concerts, I should be rich too, they say, and I have been so happy to work for her, and to buy flannels and pretty things,--though she never seems to see them; and then I think always, some day that cloud that seems over her will break and go away, and then perhaps I shall dare to say to her, 'I have been of some little use: just look at me kindly once.' And, you see, if I had let you know, all that would have been over, as it is over now. Of course you will take her away?"

"Be still, for the pity of heaven!" I cried to him. "Be still, or I too shall be mad."

For the simple tale, as the lad told it, was to me as full of woe and terror as the sublimest tragedy that ever poet writ. Listening, I seemed to see and to hear all that had been suffered by her; every one of his poor words was big with grief, big as the world itself for me. Oh, why had I broken the steel!

Men repent of evil, they say: it is ten thousand times more bitter to repent of having held back from evil. Sorely, and in passion and agony, I repented then having held my hand in Venice.

The boy was nothing to me. I had no mercy for him, or remembrance.

It was quite late at night now. I sat dumb and stupid in his garret on the edge of his truckle-bed: the muffled sound of all the life of Paris came up dully, like the distant sound of the sea when one is miles inland.

"Will you take her away?" he said, with a piteous entreaty in his voice.

"Let me think," I said to him; and the stars and the roofs seemed to whirl, and all the pulses of the bestial world to beat in mine.

For it is bestial,--a beast that forever devours and has never enough.

Yes, of course I would take her away; I would take her to Rome.

Rome is the mighty mother of nations; in Rome she might find peace once more.

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I had heard in other days that sometimes where the mind is shaken from its seat, and reason clouded by any great shock, nothing is so likely to restore it and awaken consciousness as the sight of a familiar place and a beloved scene linked by memory with perished happiness.

Yes, I would take her away.

Here I did not dare to ask for any counsel or any surgeon's aid; I had a dread of the inquisition of strangers and of the many delays of long inquiry, and the same feverish eagerness that Amphion had had to keep close to himself her sorrow and her needs did now consume me likewise.

If I could only get her back once more, back to the chamber on the river.

And, with that odd remembrance of trifles which comes to one sometimes across great woe, I thought what a pity it was that Hermes was gone, and that there were now no red-and-golden bean-flowers to run across the casement!

"Yes, I will take her away," I said.

The poor lad said nothing; his head dropped on his chest. He had done all he could, and for six months had gone to and fro and out in all weathers, playing to get the means wherewith to find her shelter and care, denying himself, and thinking only of her; but to me then he was no more than any one of the leafless lime-boughs drooping by the gates of Hilarion.

Shivering I went across the passage-way and opened the door of her chamber. The woman that he paid for such service was sitting there, sewing at linen, a woman old and gentle; she herself was sitting, too, with her arms leaning on the bare table, and one hand dreamily moving into figures some loose white rose-leaves fallen from a rose-tree in a pot. She did not hear me or heed me. When I touched her she lifted her heavy eyes, in which a light like that of flame seemed to burn painfully.

"Will he be long?" she said, and moved the rose-leaves to and fro feverishly.

The woman shook her head.

"That is all she ever says," she muttered, as she stitched. "She says it in her sleep,--such times as she does sleep,--and she wakes stretching out her arms. Who is he? He must be a beast."

"He is a poet!" I said, and went out from the chamber | | 298 into the lighted ways of the city and their noise. My brain seemed reeling, and my eyes were blind.

In the gay and shining avenues, all alight and full of moving crowds, women were talking with wet soft eyes of Fauriel.

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