CHAPTER XX.

MARYX stood quite silent and quite still.

I raved, and my own raving words fell back on my own ears and made me dumb again; and only the wailing of the dog at the moon, that was shining in the sky and on the river, filled the chamber.

I did not believe; I would not believe; I thrust all possibility of belief away from me as so much blasphemy and infamy against her; and yet all the while I knew that he was right, as you know that some ghastly sorrow is on its way to you long ere the day dawns that actually brings it.

"Why should you say so? why, why, why?" I said, over | | 239 and over again, till the words lost all sense to one. "She has gone astray somewhere in some old haunt of Rome, or fallen asleep or ill in some gallery of Capitol or Vatican. You know her ways: she dreams among the marbles till she is almost a statue like them. That is it; oh, that is it,--nothing more. We shall meet her coming through the darkness if we go into the streets, and then how she will smile at us! only she must never know. Why, Palès will find her; Palès is wiser than you are; Palès knows----"

And then I broke down, and laughed, and sobbed, and struck my head with my own hands, thinking of that day when my Ariadne had come to my stall in the summer noon, with the poppies and the passion-flowers in her hand; and Ariadne had the clue and the sword, and gave them up and drifted away into a common love and common fate of women, sought and then forsaken----

But this could not be hers.

"No! oh, thrice no!" I screamed. "Ariadne? It was but a jest to call her so, you know,--a fancy and a jest: the gods could not be so cruel as to make it true, just for a dream, an old man's foolish dream in the hot sunshine!"

"Come!" said Maryx, and grasped me with his fine and slender hands as in a vice of iron, and thrust me from the threshold down the stairs.

"Where would you go?" I stammered; "into the streets?--to the Capitol? that would be best: she loves it so, and will sit thinking there for hours. She is shut in some gallery there; oh, yes, that I am sure. Come to the Capitol, or, if not, to the Pio Clementino; she so often gets away among the marbles, that you know----"

"Are you a madman?" said Maryx. "Come with me to him."

And he drove me with that grip upon my arm to the palace where the frescoes were in the garden; but of Hilarion there was nothing to be heard; he had not been there that day.

We went to Daïla.

The night grew very cold; there had been much rain; the water glistened among the tombs and under the bushes; the hoofs splashed it, the wheels sank in it; the snow lying on the mountains showed white in the moonlight; the wild foxes stole and burrowed in the sand-holes as Nero did before them; | | 240 the owl and the bittern cried from the waving shrubs that covered the site of lost cities; the night's ride was long and horrible. Soracte was always before us.

Maryx spoke not one word.

We sped across the desolation of the Campagna in the teeth of the bitter north wind. It was early in March, but unusually cold; and I remember the smell of the violets as we crushed them, and of the sweet buds that were springing in the grass.

Hours went by ere we reached the ilex forest of Daïla. The great white house was shut and silent; dogs barked, and a mounted shepherd--a black weird figure against the moon--asked us what our errand was at such an hour, then, recognizing us, doffed his hat and let us pass.

Maryx, who had authority therein, entered. No mere word of any servant would he take. The house was empty, dark, mournful; the household was aroused from early sleep or friendly drinking, and could say nothing. Yes, their master had been there at three the day before, not since: of him they knew nothing.

It was of no use to question them: the people who served Hilarion were trained to silence and to lies.

We passed through all the grand, desolate, ghostly rooms, one by one, missing no gallery or cabinet or smallest chamber, then, baffled, drove back to Rome in the lonely, ice-cold midnight, through the rain-pools and the thickets that were now quite dark, the moon having by this time set.

"What will you do?" I muttered to him, as we passed the gate into the city and the guards of it.

"Find him," he answered me.

I was deadly cold; my limbs were cramped; the mists and the winds of the night had penetrated my very bones; but something in his tone chilled me with a ghastlier chill. It seemed so simply plain to him that there could be no other way to reach her,--only this.

For me, I would not own that she was other than somewhere astray, or sick and ill in one of the many favorite haunts she had in Rome.

"Let me down here," I said to him midway in the Corso. "I will go and ask at the galleries and palaces, and seek for her so. It will soon be dawn. The custodians all know me. | | 241 She may be in the Borghese villa itself. They close at dusk, and she is so careless, you know, once dreaming----"

Maryx smiled,--a smile I never thought to live to see on his noble and frank lips.

"Do you deceive yourself still?" he said.

He did not seek any such solace as lies in a vain hope; he knew the truth at once, and never pandered with it. It was his nature never to attempt to blind either himself or others.

As we neared the Ponte Sisto, there rose up from beneath my stall the small brown figure of a fisher-boy. It was Amphion.

He rose with difficulty, and signed to me, and I went to him. He was shivering, and spoke disconnectedly.

"You did not know, but I knew. I, in the boat underneath, I could see his shadow so often. Oh, no; no one knew. He was afraid of the woman with the great black eyes,--the woman they call a duchess. But he has cheated her. I have watched always night and day, underneath the bridge. But much I could not tell. So this morning they escaped me: he is gone to Santa Chiara, and she goes too. What is that story she told me?--Ariadne who went away over the sea,--you called her so,--Ariadne was left all alone. He will leave her just so; he always does. I was with him a year, and I know. Does that man yonder care? He looks so pale. You are too old, and I am too young; but he looks strong: does he listen? I ran and ran and ran to be even with him this morning, and the horse struck at me, and I fell. It was my head. I feel stupid. I do not think she saw: that is why I did not come here before. I have been stupid all day. Oh, it is not much. That man is strong. Let him go: it will be too late; but there is always vengeance."

And then the lad swooned on the stones, having told the truth that Maryx had known without the telling.

Maryx listened; and he never spoke once, not once. For me, I think I was mad for the moment. They have told me so since. For to me it was as though the sweet serene heavens had opened to vomit a spawn of devils upon earth, and I would have sworn by my soul and the God who made it that she, my Ariadne, would have borne the waters of the Tiber in a sieve by very force of her pure and perfect innocence, as did the Vestal Tuccia in this our Rome.

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I was conscious of nothing till in the full light of day we drove against the wind on the way to Santa Chiara.

Santa Chiara was on the sea-coast. It was a little villa in a little bay; its roses and its orangeries grew to the sea's edge; it belonged to Hilarion, who sailed thence not seldom.

We went thither. It was many leagues away; there was no manner of reaching it possible except by horses. We drove out of Rome as the day broke.

There was no doubt now, nor any kind of hope.

It was sunset on the second day when we reached that portion of the coast where Santa Chiara was.

"Let me go alone," said Maryx.

He seemed to me to have aged suddenly in those two nights and days as men do in a score of years. All his fearless royalty and carelessness of bearing was gone; he was gray and haggard, and had that deadly bloodlessness of the olive-skin which is so much ghastlier than the pallor of fair faces. He was quite silent, he whose warm fancies and eager eloquence had ever found so natural a vent in words.

"Let me go alone," he said.

But I clung to him, holding him back. When men look as he looked, there is always death upon the air.

"What right have we?" I said to him. "She is not ours by any tie of blood or name; and what do we know? She is not here, that I am sure, nor with him anywhere. God would not let all that nobility be trodden in the dust for a man's vileness,--oh, no! oh, no! What thought had she of love? No more than the Nausicaa you made standing by the seashore, pure as the pearls of it. Amphion is not to be listened to; he is a foolish boy--"

And then my words choked me; for I remembered how her face had looked as she had watched the Carnival pageantry, and how she had spoken that dark, wet, solitary night by Nero's Circus.

Maryx shook me roughly from him.

Right? Do you want right to stop murder if you see it? And the murderer only kills the body, not the soul. Let me go."

But if it be what you think, we are too late!"

The anguish upon his face smote me like a blow.

"There is always vengeance," he said, under his breath.

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I was a Roman.

Vengeance to me was sacred as duty.

I let him go. I begrudged him the first right to it, but I could not gainsay it: he had the right of infinite patience, priceless gifts, and great and generous love all wasted,--the supreme and foremost rights of a great wronged passion.

The morning had risen clear and fair; here southward the sunshine laughed upon a brilliant sea, deep-blue as the jewels men call sapphires; it was far milder weather; the orange-groves were as a green-and-golden wood to the water's edge; the turf was azure with the wild hyacinths; against the white walls ten thousand China roses blossomed, fresh as the little rosy mouths of children.

We, who for two days and nights had neither closed our eyes nor taken off our clothes, were cold and stiff from the heavy chills of long exposure. We shuddered like frozen things in all that radiant and elastic light, and delicate air fragrant with the smell of the orange-fruit and flower and with the glad salt scents of the surf that was breaking, curled and snowy, on the smooth beach at our feet.

But even vengeance was denied him. The long, low house, white as a sea-shell, and gay with many climbing plants, and walled all round with the high spears of aloes, was shut and silent even as Daïla had been.

In an oval window a woman was sitting, making thread-lace with nimble hands and singing among the little Bengalese roses.

Yes, the master had been there, but he had gone, sailed away in his own vessel, as his custom was. Yes, he had been gone twelve hours. Yes, there was some one with him; he was never alone, never alone. And the woman laughed, twisting the threads of her lace, knowing the ways of her employer. Then she looked across the roses seaward, and, shading her eyes from the sun, pointed to a vanishing speck of white on the horizon. That was the schooner, yes, if we looked quick; in another moment it would be out of sight.

We looked. The canvas shone for one second more in the sunshine far off, so far, no bigger than the leaf of a white camellia-flower, then blended with the blent light of sea and sky, and vanished and was lost.

I laughed aloud.

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"The sails should be black! they should be black!" I muttered, and caught at the roses to help me stand, and felt the earth and the water all swirl and heave in giddy eddies round me. "The sails should be black. Theseus has taken her, and he will leave her on Naxos, and he will dance and laugh and garland the helm. Why are the sails not black?"

Then I fell down on the yellow sands.

And for a space I remember nothing more.