CHAPTER XXVI.

DAYS and weeks and months went by, for time devours so fast. It was again full summer,--the fierce, fair summer of the South,--and I was sitting vacantly one night by the stall, with the lamp swinging on its cord above my head, and the din of the laughter, and the swish of the oars in the water, and the light low chords of the twanging guitars, and the merry steps of the young men and maidens on the bridge, all sounding discordant and hateful on my ears, as they had always in the old time sounded welcome and musical; and this, I do think, as I have said before, is one of the unkindest things of sorrow, that it makes us almost loathe the gay and innocent mirth of others.

I was sitting so, I say, with the moonlight all silvery about my feet, and the people around me dancing our beautiful native saltarella, that since the foreigners have come in such shoals our lads and lasses have grown almost ashamed of, learning to jig and jump instead, with no more grace than the stranger from over sea, for want of grace is progress too, it seems. And now, being summer, there were no foreigners to look on and make them blush for being graceful, so they danced that perfect dance in the space betwixt the fountain and the street, and I sat aloof and weary in the moonlight, with the sound of the tambourines thumping through my brain.

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Suddenly a hand fell on my shoulder. It was that of Maryx.

"I am going away. Here I shall lose my brain before I lose my life. When one is strong, one does not die. You have seen,--I am like a paralytic. Perhaps travel may do something. You will not speak of me. Go and visit my mother. I shall be away till I feel some force to work, or until----"

He did not end his phrase, but I understood it as it stood. He meant, until he heard that she had been forsaken. I could say nothing to him. I knew that he was no longer himself.

He looked at my Apollo Sandaliarius, the little white figure that he had sculptured in the days of his youth, when he had been a lustrous-eyed, eager-limbed lad, filled with a noble and buoyant fervor of life and that faith in his own strength which compels the destiny it craves.

A great anguish came into his eyes.

"Ah! to go back five-and-twenty years;--who would not give his very soul to do it? Well, I have all I wished for then; and what use is it?"

Then, as if ashamed, he paused, and added, in a colder, calmer voice,--

"I cannot tell where I may go,--the East, most likely. Comfort my mother. You are a good man. Farewell, my friend."

He pressed my hand, and left me.

The sky seemed emptier, the world seemed grayer, than before. But he did wisely to go,--that I knew. Here, inaction and the desperate pain of failing force would gnaw at his very vitals, till he would curse himself and weep before the genius of his own works, as did your northern Swift. For there can be nothing so terrible as to see your soul dead whilst yet your body still lives.

So I was left alone in the city, and the days and weeks and months crept slowly on; "ohne Hast, ohne Rast," as the German says of the stars. Only, when one has neither the eager joy of haste nor the serene joy of rest, life is but a poor and wearisome thing, that crawls foot-sore, like a galled mule on a stony way. The mother of Maryx, left all alone on the Garden Hill, did | | 272 not murmur: she understood few things, but she understood why he was gone.

"I always said that it would be so. I always said it," she muttered, with her feeble hands feeling the wooden cross at her neck, that she had worn ever since her first communion, when she had been a little bright brown-eyed girl, no doubt, clanking in her wooden shoes over the sunburnt fields. "You see, because he had mastered that wicked thing so long, and struck it and hewn it into any shape he chose, and made a slave of it, he thought it never could harm him; but I knew. His father used to laugh, and say, 'How can it hurt me? It is I who hurt it, hewing it out of its caverns and breaking it up into atoms.' But all the same one day it had its revenge,--and crushed him. He was only a common, rough hewer of stone. Oh, I know! And my son is great, and a kind of king in his way; but it is all the same: the marble does not forgive. It bides its time, then it strikes in its turn."

And she accepted what it had brought her, with the kind of numbness of mingled despair and patience which is the peasant's form of resignation to the will of God. In her fancy, the marble never forgave its masters; in mine, I thought, "what art ever forgives its followers, when they open their eyes to behold any beauty outside its own?"

Love art alone, forsaking all other loves, and she will make you happy, with a happiness that shall defy the seasons and the sorrows of time, the pains of the vulgar and the changes of fortune, and be with you day and night, a light that is never dim. But mingle with it any human love, and art will look forever at you with the eyes of Christ when he looked at the faithless follower as the cock crew.