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CHAPTER XXXV.

THAT very night I made a sculptor's workroom in the tower, and I had brought thither the earths and planes and tools of the glyptic art, and once more that desire to create entered into her without which the soul which has been once possessed by it is dumb as a flute without the breath of man, is empty as a temple whose gods have been overthrown.

The passion which consumed her would at least find some vent and solace in this,--so I thought; even if, as I feared greatly, the genius in her might no more revive than can a flower that has been scorched by the noon sun and then frozen by the night. I did not know how this might prove; any way, obedient to her wish, I placed within her reach all the material necessaries of sculpture, and left her alone to summon what vision she would. Alas! no visions were possible to her now; on the silver of the sunlight, as on the blackness of the darkness, she saw only one face.

Shut in her tower, where only the pigeons saw her, flying about the high casements to their homes in the roof, she held communion with that art which now was in her only another form of love. In the marbles she only saw his features and his form: as the soft winds touched her cheek, she thought of his kisses; when the stars shone on her, she thought only of his eyes. Love is an absolute possession of all the senses and all the soul, or it is nothing.

Therefore there are few who know love: as there are few who are great, or do heroic deeds, or know or attain to anything which demands intensity of character.

"Do not enter there," she said to me, meaning this highest place under the roof, where the sun shone on the clay and the stones. "If I can content myself, ever, then I will tell you. But it escapes me." And she would sit for hours silent and looking into vacancy, striving, no doubt, to recall that power which had passed away from her,--that mystical power | | 340 of artistic creation which is no more to be commanded than it can be explained.

Sometimes I was half afraid of what I had done, for she grew weaker and more feverish, it seemed to me, and would not stir from the place in the heavy torrid weather, when the very dogs in the streets could scarcely drag their limbs from sun to shadow; and sometimes I could have beaten out my brains against the wall because I had had that accursed dream in Borghese, and now had to watch its slow fulfillment and could do nothing; for the Roman woman had said, justly, "Either the temple of Lubentina or death."

There was no middle course between the two. And who could wish her less faithful even to the faithless, since by fidelity alone is love lifted from the beast into the god?

So months passed by, and she remained all the long empty days shut there with the dumb clays and the Carrara marbles, that would lie there blocks of poor pale stone till she could bid them arise and speak.

Sometimes the artist's creation is spontaneous, electric, full of sudden and eager joys, like the birth of love itself; sometimes it is accomplished only with sore travail, and many pangs, and sleepless nights, like the birth of children. Whether the offspring of joy or of pain be the holiest and the strongest, who shall say?--is Our Lady of San Sisto or the Delphic Sibyl worth the most?

All this time I never saw the one whose pleasure it had been to teach her the gladness of laborious days, and all the secrets of the arts that say to the wood and the stone, "Tell men the vision I have had of heaven." He did not summon me and I did not dare to seek him.

I saw the old mother, who grew quite blind, and who struck her staff at the empty air, and said to me, "So would I strike the girl were she here. Was she blind like me, that she could not see a great life at her feet?"

One night Giulio, the foreman, said to me, "The master has been ill: we were very afraid."

It seemed that the fever of our city, which had never touched Maryx once in all the five-and-twenty years which had passed since he had first stood by the white lions in the portico of Villa Medici, had taken hold on him in this unhealthy and burning summer.

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I suppose the fever comes up from the soil,--our marvelous soil, that, like the water of our springs and fountains, never changes, take it away or shut it up as you may, and bears such lovely luxuriance of leaf and blossoms; because the earth here has all been so scorched through and through with blood , and every hand-breadth of its space is as it were an ossuary, and the lush grass, and the violets that are sweeter here than ever they are elsewhere, and all the delicious moist hanging mosses and herbs and ferns, are, after all, so rich, because born from the bodies of virgins, and martyrs, and heroes, and all the nameless millions that lie buried here.

Blood must have soaked through the soil deeper than any tree can plunge its roots: ten thousand animals would be slaughtered in the circus in a day, not to speak of men. However, come when it may, the fever, that even Horace feared, is here always, and terrible in our Rome, above all, when the first great rains come; and at last, after letting him go free of it five-and-twenty years, the fever had struck down Maryx.

But he had never lain down under it nor seen any physician: it had only wasted and worn him, as the slow fire at the roots wastes and wears the trunk of a doomed tree that the charcoal-burners have marked: that was all.

I had not dared to go to him; but one night when I sat by my stall, with Palès sleeping, and the lamp swinging, and the people standing or lying about to get a breath of air, though no air was there under the sultry skies, Maryx touched me on the shoulder. He was very enfeebled, and leaned upon a stick, and his face was pale and haggard, and the look of age, of old age, had deepened on his face, whilst yet he was in the prime of his manhood.

I rose and looked in his face, for indeed before him I felt always so much remorse that I felt as a criminal in his presence,--I, who had dared to meddle with Fate and compel it.

"I am grieved----" I began to him; and then I could not end the phrase, for all words seemed so trite and useless between him and me, and like an insult to him.

"I know," he said, gently. "Yes, I have been ill; it does not matter. For the first time I have been glad that my mother was blind."

"I did not dare to ask to see you."

"No: I understand he has been in Rome?"

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"Yes; months since."

"I knew. Tell her I broke my oath for her sake. I shut myself in my house. If I had seen him----"

His lips closed with no more spoken, but there was no necessity for words.

I told him what had passed between me and Hilarion by the church of Agrippa. He heard in silence, sitting on the bench from which I had risen. The blood rose over his wasted features, pale with the terrible pallor of dark skins.

When I had ended, he smiled a little drearily.

"That is the love that women choose,--God help them!"

Then he was silent, and as the lamp-light fell on him, I thought his face looked darker, wearier, older than it had done a few moments earlier. For there is nothing more piteous than the waste of a great nature which gives all its gold,--to see dross preferred.

He was kinder to the dog he slew!" he said, and he drew his breath heavily and with labor as he spoke.

"And the dog--he regretted," I answered, for my heart was as hard as flint against Hilarion, and I would fain have heard another curse him as I cursed him.

But the hatred of Maryx was too deep for words; and beyond even his hate was his infinite yearning of pity for her and the sickness of loathing that filled his soul. To one who had loved her with a lover's love, her fate was horrible as it could not be even to me, an old man, and only her friend.

He sat still in the light of my poor dull lamp, and the people went by and he saw nothing of them, and the water fell down from the wall behind him and looked like gleaming sabres crossed.

"I would not promise," he muttered, very low: "but I will hold my hand while I can. She told me, I have no right!"

That had been the bitterest word that she had uttered to him: he had no right, none upon earth,--he who had lost all peace, all ambition, all art, all happiness, through her, and for her would have lost the world and his own soul.

"We have no right, you and I," he said, once more, and then he rose up with that dreary dejection of movement which makes the limbs drag like leaden weights when the spirit within is broken.

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"She wants for nothing?" he asked, abruptly.

"Nothing that we can give."

"If I can serve her, come to me. If not, let her forget that I live, whilst I do live. This fever kills in time, they say. I shall not complain when the time comes. Good-night."

Then his hand, which was dry and hot with the malady within him, pressed mine, and he went away slowly, walking with bent head, as old men do.

I thought of the day when he had come past my board with vigorous, elastic steps, and his bold brilliant eyes, bright as an eagle's,--the day when he had taken up the Wingless Love.

Alas! what love that is love indeed bears wings? Love that is love is fettered where it is born, and stirs not, even under any rain of blows.

"Maryx is ill," I said to her on the morrow.

"I am sorry," she said, and looked pained.

"Will you not see him?--say some gentle word?"

"I cannot, to be faithful."

"Faithful to the faithless! That is asked of none."

Her face gathered upon it that look of resolution and of force which made its delicate lines severe as the features of the Athene to whom her youth had been dedicated. The flush of a deep emotion, that in another would have been shame, but in her was rather anger than shame, burned on her face.

"To be faithful is no virtue; but only women that are vile can be faithless. It is nothing what one is asked: it is what one is, what one wills, that matters."

I remember how in the early days she had scorned Ariadne, saying that Ariadne should have died ere Dionysos scaled the rock.

Fidelity in her was purification,--nay, was innocence that needed no purification; and not alone innocence, but supreme duty and joy that defied all cruelty of man to bruise it much, or utterly to destroy it.

She knew not enough of human nature and human ways and the evil thereof to understand all that faithless women were; but the instinct in her recoiled from them not less with scorn than horror. Faith to Hilarion was in her nature what faith in heaven was to the martyrs whose bones lie here in the | | 344 eternal night of subterranean Rome. It was a religion, an instinct, and a paradise,--a paradise whence not even the silence and the abandonment of the god by whom she was forsaken could drive her out wholly into darkness.

For in a great love there is a self-sustaining strength by which it lives, deprived of everything, as there are plants that live upon our barren ruins burned by the sun, and parched and shelterless, yet ever lifting green leaves to the light.