CHAPTER XXII.

I STOOD by the base of the statue, and gazed still stupidly upon her. Her eyes were shining, sweet, and tender, and abstracted through the glad tears that were upon their lashes.

Whatever else he had done basely, he had made her happy, --as yet.

Perhaps she was right: for a few hours of joy one owes the debt of years, and should give a pardon wide and deep as the deep sea.

This Love which she had made in his likeness, the tyrant and compeller of the world, was to her as the angel which brings perfect dreams and lets the tired sleeper visit heaven. Who could tell her that her god was but a thing of clay? Not | | 254 I; not I. And yet I could have wept with very tears of blood. She dropped the curtain, and came and stood by me.

"You will not cone away?" she said. "Well, never mind it does not matter for you to see it: you will go home and tell Maryx. Tell him that if I seem thankless, I have not forgotten all his noble lessons. You will wait with me,--stay all day? In half an hour he will be back, and he will be so glad to see you: oh, that I am sure--"

"He will be back soon?" I felt for the knife underneath my shirt.

"Yes; he had only gone to his boat, that pretty ship that is in the harbor."

"The ship with the white sails: I know, I know!"

I laughed aloud. She looked at me surprised, and in a little fear.

"And when the ship sails away without you?" I said, brutally, and laughing still, because the mention of the schooner had broken the bonds of the silence that had held me against my will half paralyzed, and I seemed to be again upon the Tyrrhene shore, seeing the white sail fade against the sky.

"And when that ship sails without you? The day will come. It always comes: You are my Ariadne; yet you forget Naxos! Oh, the day will come! you will kiss the feet of your idol then, and they will not stay; they will go away, away, away, and they will not tarry for your prayers or your tears. Ay, it is always so. Two love, and one tires. And you know nothing of that,--you who would have love immortal."

And I laughed again, for it seemed to me so horrible, and I was half mad.

No doubt it would have been kinder had I struck my knife down into her breast with the words unspoken.

All shade of color forsook her face; only the soft azure of the veins remained, and changed to an ashen gray. She shook with a sudden shiver from head to foot as the name she hated, the name of Ariadne, fell upon her ear. The ice-bolt had fallen in her paradise. A scared and terrible fear dilated her eyes, that opened wide in the amaze of some suddenly-stricken creature.

"And when he leaves you?" I said, with cruel iteration. "Do you remember what you told me once of the woman by | | 255 the marshes by the sea, who had nothing left by which to remember love,--but wounds that never healed? That is all his love will leave you by and by."

"Ah, never!"

She spoke rather to herself than me. The terror was fading out of her eyes, the blood returning to her face; she was in the sweet bewildered trance of that blind faith which goes wherever it is led, and never asks the end nor dreads the fate. Her love was deathless: how could she know that his was mortal?

"You are cruel," she said, with her mouth quivering, but the old soft, grand courage in her eyes. "We are together forever: he has said so. But even if--if--I only remembered him by wounds, what would that change in me? He would have loved me. If he would wish to wound me, so he should. I am his own as the dogs are. Think!--he looked at me, and all the world grew beautiful; he touched me, and I was happy,--I who never had been happy in my life. You look at me strangely; you speak harshly: why? I used to think, surely you would be glad----"

I gripped my knife and cursed him in my soul.

How could one say to her the thing that he had made her in man's and woman's sight.

I thought you would be glad," she said, wistfully, "and I would have told you long ago, myself. I do not know why you should look so. Perhaps you are angered because I seemed ungrateful to you and Maryx. Perhaps I was so. I have no thought,--only of him. What he wished, that I did. Even Rome itself was for me nothing, and the gods,--there is only one for me; and he is with me always. And I think the serpents and the apes are gone forever from the tree, and he only hears the nightingales, now. He tells me so often,--very often. Do you remember I used to dream of greatness for myself?--ah, what does it matter? I want nothing now. When he looks at me, the gods themselves could give me nothing more."

And the sweet tranquil radiance came back into her eyes, and her thoughts wandered into the memories of this perfect passion which possessed her, and she forgot that I was there.

My throat was choking; my eyes felt blind; my tongue clove to my mouth. I, who knew what that end would be as | | 256 surely as I knew the day then shining would sink into the earth, I was dumb like a brute beast,--I, who had gone to take his life.

Before this love which knew nothing of the laws of mankind, how poor and trite and trivial looked those laws! What could I dare to say to her of shame? Ah! if it had only been for any other's sake! But he,--perhaps he did not lie to her; perhaps he did only hear the nightingales with her beside him; but how soon their song would pall upon his ear, how soon would he sigh for the poisonous kiss of the serpents! I knew! I knew!

I stood heart-broken in the warm light that was falling through the casement and streamed towards her face. What could I say to her? Men harder and sterner and surer in every way of their own judgment than I was of mine no doubt would have shaken her with harsh hands from that dream in which she had wandered to her own destruction.

No doubt a sterner moralist than I would have had no pity, and would have hurled on her all the weight of those bitter truths of which she was so ignorant; would have shown her that pit of earthly scorn upon whose brink she stood; would have torn down all that perfect credulous faith of hers which could have no longer life nor any more lasting root than the flowering creeper born of a summer's sun and gorgeous as the sunset's hues, and clinging about a ruin mantling decay. Oh, yes, no doubt. But I am only weak, and of little wisdom, and never certain that the laws and ways of the world are just, and, never capable of long giving pain to any harmless creature, least of all to her.

She seemed to rouse herself with effort to remember I was there, and turned on me her eyes that were suffused and dreamful with happiness, like a young child's with sleep.

"I must have seemed so thankless to you: you were so very good to me," she said, with that serious sweetness of her rare smile that I had used to watch for, as an old dog watches for his young owner's,--an old dog that is used to be forgotten, but does not himself forget, though he is old. "I must have seemed so thankless; but he bade me be silent, and I have no law but him. After that night when we walked in Nero's fields, and I went home and learned he loved me--do you not see I forgot that there was any one in all the world except himself and | | 257 me? It must always be so; at least so I think. Oh, how true that poem was! Do you remember how he read it that night after Mozart among the roses by the fire? What use were endless life and all the lore of the spirits and the seers to Sospitra? I was like Sospitra, till he came,--always thinking of the stars and the heavens, in the desert, all alone, and always wishing for life eternal, when it is only life together that is worth a wish or a prayer. But why do you look at me so? Perhaps you do not understand. Perhaps I am selfish."

That was all that it seemed to her,--that I did not understand. Could she see the tears of blood that welled up in my eyes? could she see the blank despair that blinded my sight? could she see the frozen hand that I felt clutching at my heart and benumbing it? I did not understand,--that was all that it seemed to her.

She was my Ariadne born again to suffer the same fate. I saw the future: she could not. I knew that he would leave her as surely as the night succeeds the day. I knew that his passion--if passion indeed it were, and not only the mere common vanity of subjugation and possession--would pall on him and fade out little by little, as the stars fade out of the gray morning skies. I knew, but I had not the courage to tell her.

Men were faithful only to the faithless. But what could she know of this?

"Thinking of the stars and of the heavens in the desert all alone! Yes!" I cried; and the bonds of my silence were unloosed, and the words rushed from my lips like a torrent from between the hills.

"Yes, and never to see the stars any more, and to lose forever the peace of the desert,--that you think is gain ! Oh, my dear, what can I say to you? What can I say? You will not believe if I tell you. I shall seem a liar, and a prophet of false woe. I shall curse when I would bless. What can I say to you? Athene watched over you. You were of those who dwell alone, but whom the gods are with: you had the clue and the sword, and they are nothing to you: you lose them both at his word, at the mere breath of his lips, and know no god but his idle law, that shifts as the wind of the sea. And you count that gain? Oh, just heaven! Oh, my dear, my heart is broken; how can I tell you? One man loved you who was great and good,--to whom you were a sacred thing, | | 258 who would have lifted you up in heaven, and never have touched too roughly a single hair of your head; and you saw him no more than the very earth that you trod; he was less to you than the marbles he wrought in; and he suffers! and what do you care? You have had the greatest wrong that a woman can have, and you think it the greatest good, the sweetest gift! He has torn your whole life down as a cruel hand tears a rose in the morning light; and you rejoice! For what do you know? He will kill your soul, and still you will kiss his hand. Some women are so. When he leaves you, what will you do? For you, there will only be death. The weak are consoled, but the strong never. What will you do? What will you do? You are like a child that culls flowers at the edge of a snake's breeding-pit. He waked you,--yes! to send you in a deeper sleep, blind and dumb to everything but his will. Nay, nay! that is not your fault. Love does not come at will; and of goodness it is not born, nor of gratitude, nor of any right or reason on the earth. Only that you should have had no thought of us,--no thought at all,--only of him by whom your ruin comes,--that seems hard! Ay, it is hard. You stood just so in my dream, and you hesitated between the flower of passion and the flower of death. Ah, well might Love laugh: they grow on the same bough; Love knows that. Oh, my dear, my dear, I come too late! Look! He has done worse than murder, for that only kills the body; but he has killed the soul in you. He will crush out all that came to you from heaven,--all your mind, and your hopes, and your dreams, and all the mystery in you, that we poor half-dumb fools call genius, and that made the common daylight above you full of all beautiful shapes and visions, that our duller eyes could not see, as you went. He has done worse than murder, and I came to take his life. Ay, I would slay him now as I would strangle the snake in my path. And even for this I come too late. I cannot do you even this poor last service. To strike him dead would only be to strike you too. I come too late! Take my knife, lest I should see him; take it; till he leaves you, I will wait."

I drew the fine, thin blade across my knee and broke it in two pieces, and threw the two halves at her feet.

Then I turned, without looking once at her, and went away.

I do not know how the day waned and passed: the skies seemed red with fire, and the canals with blood. I do not | | 259 know how I found my road over the marble floors and out into the air. I only remember that I felt my way feebly with my hands, as though the golden sunlight were all darkness, and that I groped my way down the steps and out under an angle of the masonry, staring stupidly upon the gliding waters.

I do not know whether a minute had gone by, or many hours, when some shivering sense of sound made me look up at the casement above, a high vast casement fretted with dusky gold and many colors and all kinds of sculptured stone. The sun was making a glory as of jewels on its painted panes. Some of them were open: I could see within the chamber Hilarion's fair and delicate head, and his face drooped with a soft smile. I could see her, with all her loveliness, melting, as it were, into his embrace, and see her mouth meet his.

If I had not broken the steel!----

I rose from the stones and cursed them, and departed from the place as the moon rose.