CHAPTER XXXIX.

IT was the night of the second day when he reached Paris. He went straight to the house of Hilarion.

It was seven in the evening. He was well known there, and entered without question or hindrance.

They had been friends for a score of years. The household showed him without hesitation into the presence of their master, who was alone, in his own chamber, with all the graceful litter of a luxurious and curious taste strewn round him, and the smell of flowers, for which he had a feminine fondness, was upon the air, and their blossoms were glowing against the old armor, and the old sculptures, and the dark, book-lined walls of the place.

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Hilarion drew a deeper breath as he saw who had entered, but he had a graceful and gracious greeting always for friend and foe.

"It is years since we met, my friend," he said. " I am glad----"

Then he paused; for even to him it was not easy to be false of tongue to Maryx; nor did he mistake the glance that flashed for one instant from the passionate eyes that met his.

"We can be friends no more," said Maryx; yet he approached and stood by the hearth.

"Crispino went to take your life in Venice," he said, slowly, standing there; "the Greek boy watched for you night and day here; I swore to kill you; and you live still, because she bids us let you live."

Hilarion was silent; he felt no resentment. Brave himself, he had no anger against those who would have killed him: he thought them right.

"You make me think of the Devotio of the Romans," he said, with a passing smile. "Threatened men live long, they say."

Maryx kept down unuttered whatever passion he felt: he had nerved himself to a great unselfish effort,--a last supreme sacrifice,--and was too strong to be easily shaken from his purpose.

"Listen to me," he said, calmly still. "We are wrong, and she is right. To kill you would do her no service, and you perhaps no injury: what do we know? I have not come to avenge her: she told me the truth; I have no title to do it. Had she wished it, I would have stayed for that; but, since she chooses to forgive you, it is not for us to make her more desolate than she is."

Hilarion interrupted him.

"Have you no title?" said Hilarion, with his coldest smile. "Surely you have one. I think you loved her yourself."

"I did: I do."

He added nothing more, and there was silence between them.

Maryx breathed heavily, and his teeth were set hard: he looked away from Hilarion; all the while he had never once looked at him: he was afraid to look at him, lest the great | | 362 hate that filled his soul should vanquish the resolve on which he had come there.

"I loved her," he said, coldly; "I should have given her peace, honor, my name, such as it is, all that one can give:--that is why I have some right to speak to you. Bear with me. I would have killed you as her father, were he living, would have done: let me speak to you as her father could not do. I am no moralist. I will read you no homily. I want but to tell you the truth as I know it. She loves you with so great a love that I think the earth never held one like it. Honest men, and lovers that are faithful, break their hearts in vain for such passion as that; and you! nay, bear with me. You must know very well that what you did was the act of a coward,--since she was defenseless, and had no god but you."

Hilarion's serene eyes lit with sudden fire, but he looked down, and he remained mute.

"There is no one to tell you all that she has suffered, nor how absolutely she forgives," said Maryx. "That is why I have come to tell you. It is just to her that you should know."

Then he told him all he knew himself: from the time that she had lost her reason, when the clay image had crumbled down under the blows of Amiphion, to the moment, three nights before, when she had said to himself, ere she would touch his hand, "You will not hurt him?"

It would have cost him less to cut his heart out of his bosom than it cost him to tell the story of that changeless passion; but he told it without flinching, abating no tittle of its truth.

Hilarion heard him in unbroken silence, leaning against the oaken shelf of his hearth, with his head bent down and his eyelids drooped.

His face grew paler when he heard of her physical sufferings and needs, since it was these that he was touched by most keenly. With all the wide and varied comprehension of his intelligence, there was a certain shallowness of feeling in him which made the deepest woes of the human heart seldom intelligible to him.

"Why did the old man tell me nothing of this?" he muttered, when he had heard to the end.

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"He would not tell you lest you should go to her. I tell you that you may go."

Hilarion was silent still. He could ill measure the generosity of the man who loved her vainly; but it smote him and made him feel humbled and ashamed.

"No woman, I think, ever loved you as this woman does, whom you have left as I would not leave a dog," said Maryx, and something of his old ardent eloquence returned to him, and his voice rose and rang clearer as the courage in him consummated the self-sacrifice that he had set himself for her sake. "Have you ever thought what you have done? When you have killed Art in an artist you have done the cruelest murder that earth can behold. Other and weaker natures than hers might forget, but she never. Her fame will be short-lived as that rose, for she sees but your face, and the world will tire of that, but she will not. She can dream no more. She can only remember. Do you know what that is to the artist? It is to be blind and to weary the world,--the world that has no more pity than you have! You think her consoled because her genius has not left her: are you a poet and yet do not know that genius is only a power to suffer more and to remember longer,--nothing else? You say to yourself that she will have fame, that will beguile her as the god came to Ariadne. Perhaps; but across that fame, let it become what it may, there will settle forever the shadow of the world's dishonor: it will be forever poisoned, and crushed, and embittered by the scorn of fools and the reproach of women, since by you they have been given their lashes of nettles, and by you have been given their by-word to hoot. She will walk in the light of triumph, you say, and therefore you have not hurt her: do you not see that the fiercer that light may beat on her, the sharper will the eyes of the world search out the brand with which you have burned her? For when do men forgive force in the woman? and when do women ever forgive the woman's greatness? and when does every cur fail to snarl at the life that is higher than its fellows? It is by the very genius in her that you have had such power to wound, such power to blight and to destroy. By so long as her name shall be spoken, so long will the wrong you have done her cling round it, to make it meet for reproach. A mere woman dies, and her woe and her shame die with her, and the earth covers her and | | 364 them; but such shelter is denied forever to the woman who has genius and fame; long after she is dead she will lie out on common soil, naked and unhouseled, for all the winds to blow on her and all the carrion-birds to tear."

His voice broke down for a moment, and he paused and breathed heavily and with pain. A faint dusky red of anger, yet more of shame, came on the face of Hilarion.

What was noble in him was touched and aroused; what was vain and unworthy was wounded and stung.

"I do not follow you," he muttered. "What would you have me do?"

"What? Surely you know that when Paris salutes in her a great artist, it tells also the tale of her ruin by you?"

Hilarion moved restlessly.

"I know! She was seen here one winter. Is it my fault? If the statue had been unlike me, Paris would not have remembered."

"That is all you say?"

"It is all there is to say. If she would forget, the world would forget too."

"Oh, my God!"

Maryx groaned aloud. It seemed to him as terrible as when of old some lovely human life, in its first youth, was laid low in sacrifice to some god of stone, whose eyes of stone could not even behold in pity its death-throes.

"But she will not forget. Have I told you so in vain?" he cried, aloud, and his voice rose and rolled like thunder through the silence. "She will never forget,--God help her.

"Vile women and light ones forget; and the adulteress forgets, and the harlot; but she,--can you look at that marble and insult her, still? To her you are lover and lord, and husband and king, and the only God that she knows, and the one shame of her life and its one glory. Have you no pity? have you no human heart in your breast; were you not born of a woman? You found her content and innocent and in peace, and for your own pleasure and vanity drove all that away, and all her dreams and all her girlhood perished by you; and you only say she should forget! Can even men forget when they will?"

"I can," Hilarion answered; and he lied.

"Is it your boast?" said Maryx, and the fierce pangs in | | 365 him rose to fury, and he barely held his hand from the throat of the man who stood there.

"Well, then, forget if you will, and may God forget you in recompense! Listen one moment more, and I have done. To-day I come from the presence of men who are great, and who say that never has a woman been so near greatness as she is. You know her,--you, as no other can,--know her pure and perfect, and without soil save such as you, in your sport, have chosen to cast on her. You know her truth and innocence so entire that you have confessed how they shamed you and wearied you by their very excellence. She is lovely as the morning; she is yours in life and in death. What more can you want? Will you not go back to her? Will you not give honor where you have given dishonor? Will you not, when you are dying, be glad to feel one wrong the less was done? You have said she is to forget. She will only forget in her grave. Have you no pity? What can I say to move you? If you have no tenderness for such love as hers, you are colder than the marble in which she has made your likeness and lifted it up as a god to the world!"

The strength of his own emotion choked his words; he pleaded for her as never would he for his own life's sake have pleaded for himself.

Hilarion listened in silence; his eyelids were still drooped; his face was still tinged with the faint red of what was half shame, half anger.

He was shaken to the depths of his nature, but those depths were not deep as in the nature of the man who besought him, and they had long been filled up with the slough of vanity and of self-indulgence.

His heart thrilled, his pulse quickened, his eyes were dim, he was full of pain, even full of repentance; he thought of the young head that had lain on his breast in such faith, as the dove on its safest shelter; he felt the clinging caress of those hands which were so weak in his own, though so strong to wield the sword of Athene.

All that had ever been in him of manhood, of tenderness, of valor, yearned in one tender longing to yield to the impulse within him; but all that was vain, selfish, and cold stirred under censure and nerved him against emotion. The imperious irritation of his temper rose, and his vanity was wounded | | 366 by the very shame he felt. His pride refused; his impatience of counsel chafed; and that cruel mockery which often mastered him as if it were a devil that lived in him and were stronger than he, spurred him now to what he knew was an infamy.

He lifted his eyes slowly with a contemptuous regard, and smiled.

"You waste much eloquence," he said. "You have loved her: you love her still. Console her yourself."

Maryx struck him on the mouth.