CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE months went on, and seemed to me to creep as blind worms creep, and to do no more good than they to any living soul.

All these months she had shut herself in the studio of her tower, not stirring out, and only breathing the fresher air of night from one of her barred casements, when the sun was setting, or the stars had come out from. the dark blue of Roman skies. For me, I stitched at my stall, and Palès, growing older, slept more, and grew more sharp of tooth and temper; and there were many changes among my neighbors, right and left, and many marriage-groups went by, and many biers; but nothing touched me much, and all I cared to think of was of her, my Ariadne.

One day--it might perhaps be six or seven months after the day that I had led her through the Chiaramonti gallery to Hermes--when I had gone to ask of her, as never a day passed but I did do, nor Ersilia either scarcely, she opened the door of her lofty studio and came down a few of the stone stairs to my side.

"Come," she said to me; and then I knew that she had found her strength and compassed some great labor.

The studio was a wide and lofty place, with walls and floor of stone, and narrow windows that opened in their centre on a hinge, and the plants that grew upon the roof hung down before their bars, and the pigeons flew in and out in the daytime.

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"Look," she said, and led me in, and let me stand before the statue she had made, and which she had herself cut out from the block, and shaped in every line, till it stood there, a white and wondrous thing, erect in the sunlight shining from the skies, and seemed to live, nay, to leap forth to life as the Apollo does in Belvedere.

It was the same statue that she had made in the clay at Venice; that is, it was Hilarion: the man made god by the deifying power of the passion which thus beheld him. Every curve of the slender and symmetrical limbs was his, every line of the harmonious and Greek-like features his also; but it was no longer a mortal, it was a divinity; and about his feet played an ape and an asp, and in his hand he held a dead bird.

That was all.

There was no other allegory. She knew that marble must speak in the simplest words, as poets spake of old, or not at all.

Marble must be forever the Homer of the arts: ceasing to be that, as it does cease if it be wreathed with ornament or tortured into metaphor, it ceases also to be art. Marble must speak to the people as it did of old over the blue Ægean sea and under the woods of Pelion, or be dumb, a mere tricked-out doll of fancy and of fashion.

She knew this, she who had been trained by Maryx; and even had she forgotten his teachings, her own genius, cast on broad and noble lines, would have obeyed the axiom by instinct.

I stood silent and amazed before the statue: amazed because the spiritualized and perfect beauty given in it to Hilarion seemed to me the most amazing pardon that a woman's forgiveness ever on this earth bestowed; silent, because I, who had dwelt among sculptors all my years, could never have conceived it possible for her to give to any shape of stone such vitality, such proportion, such anatomical perfection, such personal sublimity, as were all here.

It was a great work; it would have been great in Athens, and was how much greater in this modern age! And she was only a woman, and so young.

"Oh, my dear! oh, my dear!" I moaned to her, standing before it. "Athene is with you still. You have the clue and the sword. Oh, my dear, with such gifts praise heaven! | | 346 What does the pain or the loss of life matter? You are great!"

She looked at me from under her lovely low brows and her half-falling hair, as the Ariadne of the Capitol looks at you; only with a look more intense,--a look of deep pity, deeper scorn.

"Is that all that you know? Great! What use is that? I could not kill the ape and the asp. Perhaps he would not have left me if I had been foolish and like other women."

I, like an idiot, cried out,--

"You blaspheme, and against yourself! The gods' gifts are greater than his. You have the clue and the sword. How can you care? Let him perish, the ingrate and fool!"

The look in her eyes grew darker and deeper with sadness and scorn. She turned from me with almost aversion.

"I have only created it that he may see it, and that others may still see his face when I shall have been dead a thousand years; for it will be of him they will think, not of me."

Then she was silent, and I could have spoken mad words against him, but I dared not; and I thought of the Daphne of Borghese with the laurel growing out of her breast, the laurel that always is bitter, and that hurts when it springs from the heart of a woman.

"Oh, my dear," I said humbly to her, " be grateful; you have the gifts that a million of mortals live and die without ever even comprehending. Be not thankless; genius is consolation."

"For all but one thing," she said, very low; and her eyelids were wet.

And indeed after all there is nothing more cruel than the impotence of genius to hold and keep those commonest joys and mere natural affections which dullards and worse than dullards rejoice in at their pleasure,--the common human things, whose loss makes the great possessions of its imperial powers all valueless and vain as harps unstrung or as lutes that are broken.

"It is very beautiful, and it is very great," I said to her, and said but barren truth.

"It is himself," she answered.

"What will you call it?"

"Only--a poet."

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"You will let it go out to the world, surely?"

"Yes, that he may see it."

"You think he will come to you?"

She shrank a little, as if one had stung her.

"No: he will not come back; no. But perhaps he will remember a little, and drive the asps and the apes away. If I could pray as the women pray in the churches, that is all I would ask; nothing else,--nothing else."

"My God! How can you forgive like that?"

"To love at all, is that not always to forgive?"

Then a heavy sigh parted her beautiful lips that were now so pale yet still so proud, and she went away from my presence and left me alone with the marble. Had it not been her creation I think I should have struck the statue, and cursed it and cast it down headlong, as of old they cast the false gods.

That day I went and sought Maryx. The fever had passed from him with the heats of summer and the perilous rains of the autumn, and its agues and its fires had ceased to chill and burn him turn by turn. But he was weakened and aged, and never, so Giulio told me, touched the plane or the chisel: his workmen he paid as of yore, but the workrooms were locked.

I asked to see him, and I told him.

"You bade me say how you could serve her," I said to him. "You can serve her now. I am an old man, and poor, and obscure; I can do nothing. Will you let the great world see her work? Of no other man could I ask such a thing after-after---- But you are not like others."

His heart heaved, and the nerves of his cheek quivered, but he pressed my hand.

"I thank you that you know me well enough. What I can do I will. She was my pupil. I owe her such simple service as that."

"The work is great," I said to him. "I thought it might bring her fame, and fame consoles."

Maryx smiled, a weary smile.

"Does it? Those who have it not, think so; yes, I dare say."

"But if it do not console it may do something at the least,--light some other passion, ambition, pride, desire of achievement, all an artist feels. If she can gather the laurel, let her. At the least, it will be better than love."

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"She shall gather it," said he, who had been her master; and he came out with me into the night. It was a cold clear night, and the stars shone on the river.

"I have gathered it," he added. "Well, I would change places with any beggar that crawls home to-night."

I could not answer him.

We walked through the city in silence. He had lost his strength and his elasticity of movement, but he bore himself erect, and something of the vigor of energy had returned to him,--since he could serve her.

Her tower was far from the Golden Hill; he had never entered it; but I had the keys of her working-room, and I knew that at this hour she slept, or at least lay on her bed, shut in her chamber if sleepless. On the threshold of the studio I paused, frightened, for it seemed to me cruel to bring him there, and yet he was obliged to see the statue if he meant to help her to fame.

"Perhaps you had better not see it," I muttered. "After all, it is nothing, though beautiful; nothing except--Hilarion."

His face did not change, as I watched it with fear in the dull yellow lamp-light.

"It could be nothing else, being her work. Open."

My hands shook at the lock; I felt afraid. If I had longed to take a mallet and beat its beauty down into atoms and dust, what might not he do, he who had struck the Nausicaa as men strike a faithless wife?

He took the key from me, and thrust it into the lock.

"What do you fear?" he said. "Shall I harm the stone when I have let the man live?"

Then he opened the door and entered. I had left a lamp burning there,--a lamp that swung on a chain hung from above, and was immediately above the head of the statue. The stream of soft golden light from the burning olive oil fell full on the serene beauty of the figure, holding the dead nightingale in its hand, with doubt upon its features that was not regret.

A strong shudder shook Maryx.

I drew the door to, and waited without. It seemed to me that I waited hours, but no doubt they were only minutes. When the door unclosed, and he came forth from the chamber, he was calm, and his face was only stern.

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It is a great work: it would be great for a great man. It will give her fame. It shall give it to her. You look strangely. What do you fear? Am I so base as not to serve the genius I fostered? My genius is dead: hers lives. That I can serve at least."

"You can reach such nobility as that!"

"I see nothing noble. I am not quite base, that is all. Tell her--nay, I forgot; she must not know that it is I who do anything,--else you should tell her that her master thanks her."

And with that brave and tender word he left me and went out into the darkness.

It seemed to me that his forgiveness was greater even than hers; since even greater than hers was his loss.

Now, when the spring-time of that year came, the world of the arts spoke only of one great piece of sculpture, shown in the public halls where Paris holds its rivalry of muses.

Before this statue of the poet all the great world paused in awe and ecstasy.

"Is it the work of Maryx?" asked one half the world, and the other half answered,--

"No! It is greater than any work of Maryx."

And before the new youthful strength thus arisen they slighted and spoke ill of the great strength that had been as a giant's in the past.

So had he his reward.