CHAPTER XIX.

Now it came to pass that the evening following, when I was sitting at my stall, having lit my lamp to see to finish a more delicate piece of work than common, I felt weary and out of spirits, I could not have well told why, and sat sighing as I stitched,--sighing in my own meditations for the blithe old days when a hand at cards and a flask of wine and a merry companion had made bright the winter nights to me, and the finding of an evangeliarium in the mediæval Greek or Latin, or of a broken seal-ring or a fragment of a marble hand, made me so happy that I would not have changed places with a king, as I tramped in the snow or the mud through the darkling streets of Rome.

Now I felt heavy-hearted. All my quarter was empty; the people were gone to the Piazza Navona, where a mid-Lent fair was, and the booths, and the fun, and the frolic, and a year or so before I should have gone too, and laughed with the loudest in the old Circus Agonalis around Domitian's obelisk, with the splash and sparkle of Bernini's fountains reflecting the changing lights of the little colored lamps.

As it was, I sat and stitched, and Palès slept, and the stars began to come out above Tiber, in clear cold skies that were cloudless.

I was so entirely still that a step coming down over the bridge made me look up. I saw Maryx as I had seen him many a time in a score of years since in the days of his youth he had made me Apollo Sandaliarius.

He paused by my stall.

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"Is she not well, that she has not been to me to-day?" he asked.

A vague trouble began to stir in me. "Has she not been?" I asked him.

"No."

"I have heard nothing."

"But you have not seen her?"

"No; but often the day passes----"

I did not end the phrase, fearing to seem to blame her; for indeed it pained me that of late she had so very seldom come to lean her hands on my board, and ask how things went with me, and beg me to go and sit with her in Hermes' room, or wander through the streets, as before the last few months it had been so constantly her habit to do that I had grown used to it, and missed it as an old dog will miss the pleasure of a walk.

Maryx stood silent while the light from my lamp fell on his noble face, which was flushed and troubled.

"I spoke to her wrongly the day before yesterday," he said, at last. "It was base in me, and very unworthy. It is not for me to deprecate his genius. It is not for me, if she find beauty in it, to say her nay. Beauty there is, and if she do not see the foulness beneath it, so be it. To the pure all things are pure. I would ask her pardon. Perhaps I have driven her away. Shall I find her in her room?"

"Of course!" I said, hastily; "and you were in no way to blame, and it is only like your nobleness; and she is worthy of it, for she, too, repents and regrets that moment of cold words. Look! she bade me say so to you only yesterday, in the Colonna gardens. She said, 'Will you tell him for me that I can have no bitterness in my heart for him, and that my gratitude will never change?' That is what she said, the tears in her eyes the while. She was too proud or too shy to say so to you herself. But her heart is tender, and if you put out your hand she will give hers now,--ah, so gladly: that I know!" So I spoke, like a fool as I was.

Maryx looked at me with a beautiful light and warmth upon his face.

"Is that indeed true? or do you say it to make me deceive myself? Better all pain--all life-long pain--than any self-deception."

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"Nay, it is true; that I swear. Go you and hear her say it again. She does repent herself."

"I would take nothing from mere obedience, mere sense of gratitude," he muttered; but the light of love was still in his eloquent eyes.

"Go you yourself to her," said I, laughing, like the foolish thing I was, and got up and went quickly before him across the street to Ersilia's door. "For now," I said to myself, "he will speak straightly to her, and all will be well between them forever."

But at the door Pippo, leaning there smoking, swore that the girl was not within, nor had she been seen all day, he said. I looked up at Maryx. His face seemed to me to be stern, and pale, and disquieted.

"Let us ask Ersilia," he said; and I went with him into the house.

"Has she not been to you?" said Ersilia, coming out with a lamp held over her head. "Oh, yes; she left here this forenoon, quite early, as her habit is. I thought she was still up yonder with your marbles."

Then a great and sore trouble fell upon us that was the beginning of the end.

Maryx never spoke. He went with swift strides up to the chamber, and entered it, for the door had no lock. The light from the newly-risen moon, that hung above his own Golden Hill, streamed soft and pallid across Hermes, and left the rest of the empty space in darkness.

She was not there. He struck a light, and searched the room, but there was nothing to show any intention of departure, and no word whatever of farewell. Only the beautiful head that she had drawn in black and white of Hilarion as the poet Agathon was no longer in its place against the wall.

There is something in the silence of an empty room that sometimes has a terrible eloquence: it is like the look of coming death in the eyes of a dumb animal: it beggars words and makes them needless.

Palès following raised her head and gave a long, low, wailing moan, that echoed woefully through the stillness in which only the lapping of the water against the stones of the bridges was to be heard, and the stroke of a single oar that was stirring the darkness somewhere near.

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Maryx looked at me, and there was that in his look which frightened me. He pointed to the empty place upon the wall.

"She is gone with him," he said: that was all: and yet in the sound of his voice it seemed to me that I heard speaking all the despair of a great life ruined and made valueless.

I broke out into God knows what wild protests and breathless denials; I would not let such a thing be said, be thought possible, for one single moment; she was so far above all touch of man, all weakness or passion or unwisdom of woman, it was impiety, profanation, folly, hatefulness, to hint such things or dream them. Was he mad?

Maryx stood there quite motionless; his face was white as his own marbles, and very rigid. All my passion passed him and left him unmoved as the winds leave the rocks.

"She has gone with him," he said, again; and his lips were dry, and moved, as it were, with difficulty, and his great brown eyes, so brilliant and so bold, grew black with heavy wrath and desperate pain.

"Do you not see?" he muttered; "do you not see? whilst we thought her a holy thing, he all the time--"

And he laughed,--a terrible laugh.

The moon was on the face of Hermes: the mouth seemed to smile in pity and derision.