CHAPTER IX.

THE mother of Maryx was growing very old. The hard life of the poor enfeebles as age comes on the frame that it braced in earlier life.

She had known heat and cold, and hunger and pain, all her youth through. Now that her son was a great man, and kept her in comfort, and women waited on all her wants, and she dwelt in beautiful chambers, she did not understand.

She would have liked to go and wash the vegetables for the soup; she would have liked to go with her hoe out in the | | 111 cabbage-ground; she thought that it was only yesterday that they had brought her the dead body out of the quarry. She was very quiet, and spun on at the flax,--a little brown woman, like a squirrel, with bright eyes, who was always bewildered when her wooden shoes that she would not change sank into the soft thick carpets, and when she saw the great grand people round her son.

"I must cost him so much: if he would only let me wear my old gowns," she would say. And--like a true peasant. as she was--she would hoard away all her gold pieces in holes and corners against a rainy day.

"He is so good; but he may be poor to-morrow," she would say. "For me, I would not care if it came so; I could work still. I could hoe a little, and weed in the fields. But he would not like it now: he is always living with kings."

And she would bury her money against the evil time, and spin on, that at least when the time came he should have a store of linen.

She had a horror of the statues; they were only "the stone" to her,--the same pitiless rocks which had been the murderer of her husband. Like Menutius Felix, she believed that evil demons hid themselves in the marbles. She detested them like the early Christians,--like Martin of Tours, or Marcellus.

Could she have read a book, she would have loved better than any other that passage of Clement of Alexandria in which he rails against "those workmen who pass their lives making dangerous toys: I mean sculptors, painters, goldsmiths, and poets."

She had lost sight of her son for years,--all those years in which Maryx was studying and starving in Paris and tasting the first deep joys of art as a student of the Villa Medici,--and then all of a minute he had borne her away, and she had found him a great man, and what to her seemed surprisingly rich: she was always afraid that there was some sorcery in it. If he had made images of the saints, indeed it might have been right; but all these pagan gods and light women,--it troubled her: she prayed for his soul unceasingly.

If he had not been her beloved son, and so good, she would have been sure that he had sold his soul to one of those false gods of his, with the lotos flowers on their foreheads, or with | | 112 the goat's hoofs for their feet. As it was, she could not understand; so she told her beads half the day through, and, though she was infirm, would go to mass every morning in the church of Sant' Onofrio, and with the gold and silver that he gave her--it had always to be gold and silver: she had the peasant-distrust of paper money, and disbelief in it--she would buy prayers for him with one half, and put the rest away in little nooks and corners.

"He is a very great man, you know," she would say to me, for I could speak her dialect a little, having wandered much in that country; "oh, yes, very, very great. He chips the stones into figures as big as those that they have in the churches. His father used to bring the stones up in square solid pieces; I liked them better; you could build with them. But I suppose these are greater. Nobody ever came to look at the square pieces. The oxen dragged them away; I never heard where they went."

And then she would spin on again, thinking. She could never understand very much, except that her youngest-born was a great man, and that where they lived the Pope lived too, which made it almost like living with God. She could never understand: not any more than we, who have had the light of study on us all our days, and walk with the lamp of knowledge in our hand, can ever understand the absolute night of ignorance which enshrouds the peasant in its unbroken obscurity.

"I was always afraid of the stone," she said, once, after a pause, twirling her wheel. "Always. It is a cold, hard thing, and cruel. It let my husband toil at it all those years, and then all in a moment fell on him. How can they say it has no life? It knows very well what it is about. It kills men. My son laughs, and says it is his servant; he has mastered it; he deals it blow after blow, and it keeps still, and takes the shape he wants and will have. But it killed his father. He will not remember that. One day perhaps it will give him back his blows; that is what I am afraid of. For him, he only laughs. But I know what the marble is; I know there were ten of my family, old and young, little and big, one with another, all over the years that are gone, ten of them whom the marble killed in our own country: I am afraid."

"If he would make it into the likeness of Christ and his saints, always, nothing else," she went on, feeling the beads of | | 113 her rosary; "then perhaps it might not be allowed to hurt him. But all he makes are the images of light women and blind gods that had false priests,--so our priests tell one: that is not holy work. And he so good himself;--an angel! Perhaps he has gone astray to the false gods, looking always at their faces and thinking of them."

"Whatever his god be, it leads him to love his mother," I said to her.

"And that is true," she said, with her weather-worn bronzed face softened with tender recollections. "And when he was little I was a hard mother to him sometimes, for he was masterful and yet idle, and sat dreaming when others were working, and we with so many mouths to fill, and a soup-pot never full; but he is so good to me. Look! There was some monarch or another he was to go dine with,--some very mighty king, come a very long way off over the seas,--and that night I was ill. I was taken numb, and dumb, and stupid; they called it by some long name; and never a moment did he leave me. He let the king send and send, and only said, 'My mother is ill: I cannot come;' and he was gentle with me like a girl. And I a hard mother to him when he was little. For boys try your patience, love you them ever so. Ay, he is good to me. May the saints render it back to him, and save him from the works of his hands! For I am always afraid. I would sooner he were taking his oxen over the plow, and I cooking and washing and mending, and waiting for him when the sun went down."

She would have been much happier so, in a little hut on the broad sun-fed plains of her birth, living hardly, and trudging a day's walk to sell a few eggs and herbs for a few pence, than she was in the wing of this beautiful house, where all luxuries surrounded her, and the windows of her chamber opened on the pillars of the atrium, looking across the river to the convent-gardens upon Aventine, and the ruins of the Golden House, and the marshes where Acca Laurentia reared her mighty nurslings to brave the fierce Quirites.

Yet she was proud in her way, so far as her dim mind, which had only the gleam of a peasant's shrewdness and a mother's tenderness to give it any light, could in any manner grasp the fact of the great fame of Maryx. But she was always unquiet.

"I suppose he is glad," she would say. "But for me I | | 114 always thought it was bad to be lifted out over your fellows: it is always the big trees the woodman takes, it is always the finest bird that first feels the knife. Look you, when I was a little child I saw in the village a beautiful young man, and they were beating him and stoning him, and some one got a musket and put him out of his misery as if he were a mad dog, and they said they did that because he was great and rich, nothing more: it was in the days when everywhere they were burning the castles,--I do not know why: that people might be free, and do nothing, they said. But how should people be free like that? the land must be turned and the corn must be beaten; and for me I can always see that young man's face, with his hair soaked in blood,--it was fair-colored hair; very likely he had a mother at home. I don't think he had ever hurt any one."

And thus she would spin on anxiously, because her son had become great and rich and could live with princes.

Though she did not understand, she was shrewd in her way,--the shrewdness that the peasant acquires as a kind of instinct of self-preservation in the world where he has to grope his way like a beetle, with every foot lifted against him, perpetually rolling upward his ball of clay through the mire as best he can.

This day, when Maryx took his new pupil to her, she was sitting as usual in the room that, with three others, was especially her own: it opened on the atrium brilliant in the morning-light, with its white marbles and its red roses and its breadth of azure sky.

She was spinning; she had her wooden shoes on, for she would never wear any others; she had a little wooden crucifix near her, and a wooden rosary: she had brought them from her village; her sunken but still bright eyes lost their wandering sharpness, and softened greatly at sight of her son.

Maryx approached her, and, bending down, spoke to her some moments in her own Provençal, then beckoned Giojà to them.

She looked at the lovely face of the girl with kindliness and suspicion, the kindliness of the woman and the suspicion of the peasant.

"Why do you bring her to me?" she said, sharply.

"She comes to study my art, that is all," he answered. | | 115 "She is motherless and fatherless, and very desolate indeed. We must do for her what we can. I thought it would please you to see a young face near."

"It does not displease me."

She let her wheel stop, looking hardly all the while at Giojà, who stood motionless, understanding none of the words spoken, and glancing out into the court, where the doves were fluttering on the edge of the central tank.

"She comes to cut the stone?" his mother said, after a moment.

"As I do--yes."

The dark, harsh eyes of the old woman grew half angry; she knotted and entangled her hank of flax.

Her face grew very troubled.

"You make the stone into women,--into the likeness of them,--all evil women and light, or how would they bear the sun and the gaze of men on their naked limbs? Is it fit that a girl should see that? It is shameful."

"Mother, you do not understand----"

"No, I do not understand anything. But it is shameful. What should a girl do in that place with all those carved images of vileness? She has a pure face, and a true look. Marry her, and give me little children about me before I die."

Maryx flushed all over his wide proud brows, and turned abruptly away.

"She is nothing to me. You mistake, mother. But she is very desolate. Will you not give her your blessing?"

She laid her old brown hand on Giojà.

"My dear, I bless you; yes--why not? You are young, and I am old. I do not understand, as he says. But do not you touch the stone. It will turn you into its own likeness, or else kill you, making you think a stone a human thing. It killed his father. But he will not be warned."

The girl bent her knees to receive what she saw by the gesture was a benediction: the words were unintelligible to her.

"What does your mother say to me?" she asked of Maryx.

"She wishes you well," he answered. "My mother is old, and cannot speak your tongue. But you will be gentle to her. To be old is always to be sad."

Giojà was vaguely oppressed and troubled; she was glad to go out into the sunlight of the atrium, and throw grain to the | | 116 doves bathing there, and watch the gauze-winged sphinxes dart through the red gold of the bignonia-blossoms twisting round the columns.