CHAPTER XIII.

NEXT day I had divers errands to execute, and shoes to take home; among them, I went to the old Palazzo Spada, having some boots of a custodian there, and looked in for the five-hundredth time at Pompey's statue, which always seduces one to stand and think, remembering what blood was once set flowing at its feet.

If Cæsar had not gone out that day, but had hearkened to the warning, of Calphurnia's dream, would the fate and the | | 156 face of the world have been very much changed, after all? Probably not: for, anyway, when his death should have come, Octavius would have succeeded him. Augustus found Rome brick and left it marble,--perhaps, though there was a deal of brick underneath his marble. But he found men virile and left them venal; and the world is still eating the lotus-seeds that he sowed broadcast.

Liberty and the old wooden Ovilia, like a sheep-pen, was better than the ornamental and stately Septa of Agrippa, with liberty a laughing-stock, and manliness sunk in the laps of courtesans and the couches of slaves.

Thinking of Cæsar and Cæsarism,--which never will thoroughly pass off the earth, because it is safe-rooted in the chronic cowardice and indolence and need of leadership ingrained in human nature,--I crossed the Square of Cape di Ferro, and, passing an arched kitchen where they were baking loaves and pastries, which they sold just outside it on the pavement, I heard the master-baker beating and belaboring a little baker-boy.

I always rescue little cook-boys, for the sake of Golden Claude, and I went in and freed the child by a few reasonable words, and more strongly reasoning pence. One may be a genius and yet burn a biscuit. Saxon Alfred did, who was here too in Rome, you know, a fair-haired seven-year-old child. I wish Julius and Bramante had left the old basilica standing, if only for the sake of that pretty Northern boy who came so far on pilgrimage from the Barbarian isle.

I went along the dirty vegetable-market of the Campo di Fiore, where once the flames bore "to those worlds which he had imagined" the great master of Free Thought. I walked on, hearing still my little baker-boy's sobs of gratitude, and thinking of Claude Lorraine, and what an odd thing it was that a creature too stupid to slip a cake properly into an oven, and too awkward to put it properly on a plate when baked, should have had the sense of the sunset and the soul of the sunrise in him as he had.

It is very wonderful; for, say what you like, a great painter he is, though artificial, and if anything would make one hate a classic temple he would do it, but a great painter, beyond doubt, and one who would not have been even artificial if he would but have worked out of doors; but, though he would | | 157 sit for hours out of doors, he would always go within to paint,--which is what spoiled him.

Thinking of Claude, and of that fugitive golden glow which he who could not brown a biscuit could imprison on his canvas, I walked across the Field of the Flower, where not a flower grows, so much death has it seen and still does see: and my thoughts strayed away to the time when on its stories a grocer's lad recited and improvised there to an enraptured throng, and Hellenic scholars metamorphosed his name to Metastasio.

"Dreaming by daylight, Crispino?" said a voice I knew. "But that you always do. Well, you are right; for dreams are the best part of life."

It was the voice of Hilarion. He was coming across the square, with the calm smile in his eyes that had always a little mockery in them,--an indulgent mockery, for human nature indeed was a very poor thing in his sight, but then be admitted that was not its own fault.

He greeted me in kindly manner, and turned and walked beside me. He had none of the pride which would have moved some men to be ashamed at being seen with an old cobbler with a leather apron twisted up about his loins. Indeed, he had too much pride for any such poor sentiment; what he chose to do was his own law and other people's, or if it were not other people's it ought to be so. Besides, Hilarion, practically the most tyrannical of masters, was theoretically the most democratic of thinkers. In his eyes all men were equal,--in littleness of worth.

How handsome he was as he came across the old desolate place, with the shadows of the huge Cancelleria and of the granite colonnades from the Theatre of Pompey falling sombrely across his path!--almost more so than when I had first seen his face as a boy on the night that his light-o'-love died.

How handsome he was!--one could not but feel it, as one feels the beauty of a roebuck, of a diamond, of a palm-tree, of a statue, of a summer night. It was real beauty, mournful and tender, but not emasculated: he had the form of the disk-thrower in the Vatican, and the face of my Borghese Bacco. I could understand how women loved Hilarion just because he looked at them, just because they could not help it. I did | | 158 the same, though there were things and thoughts I hated in him, and times when I fancied it might be possible for one to kill him,--and do well.

"If you had really loved one woman," I had sometimes said to him. And he had smiled.

"Women are best in numbers. Who makes a pasty with one truffle?"

That was all he knew. The poet who would write of Sappho and of Sospitra and of the great passion in the words that burn, knew no more of it than a man moulding casts in plaster here knows of the art of Phidias or of the face of the bronze Athene.

To Hilarion love was an appetite, an animal pleasure, and no more. Women were soft pretty brutes like panthers, that one stroked with the more pleasure because of the peril in their velvet paws. They were all like Lilas to him, some lower, some higher, but no more worth to weep over when lost. So he said in his delicate, bitter, amorous, cruel voice; and so he said in his heart.

"Who is she?" he asked of me, without preface, moving beside me across the cabbage-strewn stones of the Campo di Fiore.

"Maryx told you," I answered him.

"Of course he did not tell the truth. How could he before her? Tell me their story."

"There is no other to tell, and Maryx never lies. It is not what you think. She learns with him. No more. For myself----"

Then I told him how I had found her coming travel-worn and weary from the sea.

"It is very pretty," he said, when I had ended. "And Maryx and you are good enough for anything: even to play the part of the divine Lupercus to such a lamb!"

There was more of sincerity than sarcasm in his words, yet there was enough of the latter to anger me.

It does not need much virtue," I said, roughly, "still less divinity, to act like decent men."

"Lupercus objected to the wolf, but never to the Flamen's fire and knife," said Hilarion, with a little laugh at my irritation. "You have given her over to the Flamen, since you | | 159 have devoted her to art. Art for a woman! and that insatiable art, too! Think of Properzia of Bologna."

"It was not art that killed Properzia. It was the love, or rather the cruelty, of men. Do you stay long this winter?"

"My dear Lupercus, I do not know. Life loses something--spent out of Rome. It is only here that each day holds for us two thousand years. Now tell me all you have done besides finding an Ariadne; not that the Borghese bust is an Ariadne, but that does not matter at all. What palimpsests have you lighted on, what early Boccaccio or black-letter St. Jerome have you picked up for a drink of wine, what mural paintings have you stumbled on through a hole in the grass that Palès made after a rat, what ivory pyx beyond price have you found an old woman keeping her pills or her pins in? And to think there are people in the world who do not care for a pyx or a palimpsest! And to think that learning has ever been figured as a serious and wearisome thing! As if there were any other thing that could make life one-half so entertaining! What else can paint a whole teeming Agora on the dull face of a single old coin, and embalm a whole nation's faith in a mere branch of rosemary? Do you not pity from your soul the poor folks to whom the palimpsest is only an old scrawled scroll, and the pyx a box of bone? And then learning is the only pleasure that one cannot exhaust. It is the deep sea that the child showed St. Augustine. The deepest waders among us touch scarcely more than its surf. If love were but like learning----"

"What has become of Neria?"

Neria was the dark-browed singer who had left Rome with him.

"Neria? Her temper was insupportable, or mine was, I have forgotten which. Neria was the mistress of Mars; I am no Mars, and I like peace."

"That is, you like to be inconstant without being reproached for it."

"Perhaps. All men do, I suppose. Reproaches are an error: when they begin to reproach me I give them something that they wish for,--very much as the Romans sacrificed the parca præsyntanea when they buried a dead body,--and then I see them no more. There are two women that I should like to have known: they are the second Faustina, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. They are the most singular women that | | 160 ever lived, and the most unlike to each other that the world ever saw."

"Which would keep you longest?"

"Faustina, no doubt: innocent women are always forsaken. One is too sure of them."

And with that terrible truth he paused by an old stall in the street, allured by the glimmer of an onyx on which was carved the veiled figure of Pudicitia, with one hand hidden in her robe.

Some Roman lover had had it engraved for his bride, I dare say,--some soft serious creature who put all her soul into the ubi to Gaius, ego Gaia, when she crossed his threshold and lived at home, and never opened her doors to the roisterers of the Bona Dea in the December nights, and never donned a transparent tunic and drank the philtres of the East and spent all his substance in love-gifts and license when all the town was shouting Io Saturnalia, but went in quiet and humility to her own altar, and prayed for her unborn child to mother Ops and Spes. There were such women even in Cæsarean Rome. There are such women always everywhere,--lest men should quite despair.

"Poor Pudicitia! Perhaps this was a signet-stone of one of the Agrippinas," said Hilarion, with a little laugh, buying the seal. "It was a fashion to salute the foulest empresses in her name. There are many fashions of old Rome we cling to still. Do you remember that the first statue of Modesty, the veiled one of the Forum Boarium, was always called by the people the statue of Fortune? It may serve as a pretty enough allegory that the good fortune of a nation does lie in the chastity of its women, though I do not suppose that the Romans meant that. I wonder what other statues I shall find at Daïla. I shall give myself up for a while to Daïla. If one could only discover the Kypris Anadyomene! But it never came into Italy. What would you like the best if you could choose of all the lost treasures of the world? I think I would have that copy of the Iliad corrected by Aristotle, that Alexander always carried about with him shut in its golden box."

"Or the famous three lines that Apelles and Protogenes drew,--if it were only to stop the eternal squabbling of artists about it."

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"Yes, Pliny does not tell one enough, though he saw it himself: so he might have said more. I would sooner, perhaps, have the portrait of Kampaspe, or the Kypris, or the Zeus. Not but what, though Maryx would call it a heresy, I always fancy, myself, that those chryselephantine and polylithic statues, with their eyes of precious stones, must have been in reality very ugly. I would rather have the lost Lycurgeia, or the Montefeltro Menander, or the missing books of Tacitus. or that history of Etruria which Claudius wrote,--because he was a scholar, you know, though an imbecile in other things, and it might have given us the key to the language. Perhaps, though, better than all, I would choose in a heap all those lovely pagan things that Savonarola and his boys burnt on Palm Sunday, the Petrarch with the illuminated miniatures included. When one thinks of all those things it does really seem just that he was burnt himself! Indeed, why does the world make such a lament over his burning? It does not care for Giordano Bruno's, who perished on this very spot we are crossing. Yet Giordano Bruno was far the finer man of the two. It required a thousandfold more courage to refuse the crucifix than to raise it in those days. Savonarola was a narrow ascetic, who preached the miserly creeds that have sheared the earth bare of all beauty. Yes, when one thinks of all the classic marbles and erotic pictures and priceless relics of the early arts that his fanaticism lost to us forever, one cannot but feel that though the world sees but little fair measure, it did see some for once when the pile was lit for the preacher. Not that anybody meant to be just in burning him: men always stumble on justice by the merest accident when they do chance to arrive at it all."

So he talked, passing over the Campo di Fiore, talked discursively, as his habit was, of all things, relevant and irrelevant, as the fancy occurred to him.

Then he left me and went into a dark doorway, to see some artist, as he said.

It was quite evening when my errands were all done and I got home again to Palès and the fountain in the wall; for one cannot walk straightly in Rome: if you have brains and eyes, nohow will your feet carry you dully on your proper road; there will be always some old angle of acanthus cornice, some colossal porphyry fragment, some memory of monastic legend or of pagan feast, some fancy that here stood such a temple, | | 162 or there lived such a poet, some marble seen ten thousand times and never seen enough, some church doors set wide open with the torches and the jewels and the white robes gleaming in the dusk, some palm-tree leaning over a high palace wall that may have come from Syria with the worship of the Magna Mater and of Attis, when Orontes overflowed into Tiber:--always something to turn aside for, and linger over, and set one wondering and sighing; for although Hilarion is right, that learning is the only pleasure of which there is no surfeit, and which lends a lovely light to all the darkest corners where we walk, yet all our choicest knowledge is at best but a mitigated ignorance.

The wisest men I have ever known have always been the first to say so. Of course I cannot judge myself, having only picked up a little knowledge, as poor travelers see beautiful things by looking in through such doors and gates as stand open along the wayside.

It was quite evening when I got back to the barking of Palès and the singing of my Faun. A good woman at a fruit-stall had given me some prickly pears and pomegranates, and I thought I would take them to Giojà: I had seldom much to give, and I knew she was always at home at this hour, for she went to bed with the birds and rose with them.

When I climbed the steep stairs and opened her door, her lamp was burning, but the window was opened, and left in sight the sky, still tinged with the pale primrose light of the dead day, with here and there the stars already out. She had some great books before her on the table, and was leaning her arms upon them, and her cheeks upon her hands; her face was upturned, the light of the lamp fell on it; Hilarion was leaning against the casement, and was talking to her.

I felt angry,--which was foolish,--and as though some wrong were done to me and Maryx,--which was more foolish still.

"Dear Crispin, I have been expecting you an hour," said he; and that I felt was a lie, for he had known where I had been going, and knew my dilatory and divergent ways of going anywhere. There were some great lilies, and rose-red cactus flowers, and other blossoms very rare at that time of the year; of course he had brought them there. Not that there was any harm in that.

"She is perfect, your Ariadne," he said, as we went down a | | 163 while later into the street together. "At least she will be. At present she is not fairly awake. She has her soul shut in her marbles. Has Maryx no eyes?"

"Maryx has honor."

Hilarion laughed a little.

"Dear Lupercus, how grave you are! So you have given her your room, and your Hermes and all your treasures. You never told me that."

"How did you find her, then?"

"Oh, that was easy enough. Can you live at a street-corner and hope to keep a secret? She has really genius. It is a pity."

"Why? since it is all she has?"

"Is it all? Maryx and you are as cruel as the Pontifex Maximus when the fires were let out. Art for a woman is as sad as the temple of Vesta. To gather the sacred grain, and draw the sacred water, and guard the sacred flame,--that was not worth one little hour of joy. The Romans knew that. Their Venus Felix had always a child in her arms."

Then he took his horse which waited there, and went away through the dark to Daïla. I went back for a moment.

"What do you think of him?" I asked her.

She hesitated a moment, and it seemed to me that she colored a little. "He is beautiful," she said, softly: sculptor-like, form was what she thought of first.

"The most beautiful man the world ever saw was Heliogabalus," I said to her. "And perhaps the next most beautiful was St. Just."

She looked at me in surprise, her hands among the lilies and cactus flowers.

"I thought he was your friend?"

I felt the rebuke, and was ashamed.

"He is very great in the world, is he not?" she asked.

"Yes, in a way. It is not Maryx's way. Hilarion's fame is like that cactus flower, glorious, brilliant lustre, born of a barren stem, and without fruit; the fame of words that burn but do not illumine."

She put the cactus blossoms together tenderly.

"He says beautiful things, and I think he is not happy. Look, did you ever see such flowers in winter? Maryx says | | 164 one must never attempt flowers in marble,--that it is as absurd as it would be to try and reproduce the dew or the waves. Otherwise, one might make a head of the Dea Syria, crowned with those cactus----"

"Yes. They would be appropriate symbols for the religion that embodied the corruption of Rome."

I was angry, unwisely so: the cacti were to me symbols of corruption.

She had left the flowers, and was drawing. Maryx had taught her that design must underlie all great sculpture, as the skeleton underlies the beauty of human or animal form, and until she could satisfy him with the chalk he had always refused to trust her with the clay. Hence her designs were fine and firm and fearless. "Tell me all you know of him," she said. "'Hilarion'? What country is that name? Hilarion was a saint in the desert, you know."

I would not answer her at first, but she would not be denied; she had a stubborn resoluteness under her soft and serious ways. I told her reluctantly about him; it was not very much that I knew that was fit for her ears, but I had always had a love for him, and he had done me and others grateful and gracious things: of those I spoke, in justice to him, knowing I had been churlish and unfair. Then, at her entreaties, which I never could well understand, I went to an old credenza against the wall, where I kept some few books, black-letter and otherwise, and found a volume he had written, and read to her two or three of his poems, translating them as I went, though I felt that I spoiled sadly the languid and melodious dithyrambics of his genius.

She listened in perfect silence, drawing with her charcoal and chalk all the while by the light of the lamp, under the statue of Hermes.

At length I shut up the book, angry with myself for having given in to her.

"It is getting late, at least late for you. Put up your work, my dear," I said to her, and looked what she was doing.

She had drawn the head of Hilarion in as perfect a likeness as it was possible to see, and had crowned it with the cactus flowers like a Syrian god.

"It would do for an Antinoüs; and he was a slave and a | | 165 suicide," I said, venomously, for I would not admit the excellence of the work or its grace.

"Oh, no," she said, lifting; the lamp to light me to the door. "It would do for an Agathon: I should think he is like Agathon. It was so good of you to read me his songs. You will read me some more to-morrow?"

What other girl or woman in the whole world would have thought of Agathon of Athens as a likeness for him,--of him of the "Flower," and of the "Symposium," whom all men united to call "the beautiful?"

I had been a fool, I said to myself, stumbling down the dark stairs to see that my stall was safe. Palès woke out of her sleep in the straw, and told me that I had been a fool, and the Faun in the fountain was silent.

Hilarion had asked me to breakfast with him. I went, walking across the Campagna in the tracks between the honeysuckle banks, where the ox-carts go. The earth is so beautiful at dawn, but so very few people see it, and the few that do are almost all of them laborers, whose eyes have no sight for that wonderful peace and coolness and unspeakable sense of rest and hope which lies like a blessing on the land. I think if people oftener saw the break of day they would vow oftener to keep that dawning day holy, and would not so often let its fair hours drift away with nothing done that were not best left undone.

I had the mutilated volume from the Aldus press in my pocket for him, for he loved such things and had a fine knowledge of them; the thyme was sweet under my feet; the goats plucked at the long creepers in the broken arches of the aqueduct; big oxen with wide-branching horns passed, ringing the bells about their necks; the sun rose red; birds sang in the low clumps of bearberry and hawthorn; little field-mice scudded before my steps, where the wheels of Sulla's triumphal chariot once had rolled; and Palès chased a rat where gens on gens of the great Roman world lay buried root and branch.

But I could enjoy but little of it. I felt uneasy, and in a vague alarm.

I found him in the great walled garden that lay behind his villa. He was lying at full length in a hammock of silk netting, | | 166 that swung between magnolia stems; and his flute-boy was playing, seated in the grass. There was a delicious calm about the place; the autumnal roses were all in bloom, and thickets of the Chinese olive scented the air like the incense of some Indian god's temple.

There was a high wall near, covered with peach-trees, and topped, with wisteria and valerian and the handsome wild caper plant; and against the wall stood rows of tall golden sunflowers, late in their blooming; the sun they seldom could see for the wall, and it was pathetic always to me, as the day wore on, to watch the poor stately amber heads turn straining to greet their god, and only meeting the stones and the cobwebs and the peach-leaves of their inexorable barrier.

They were so like us!--straining after the light, and only finding bricks and gossamer and wasps'-nests! But the sunflowers never made mistakes, as we do: they never took the broken edge of a glass bottle or the glimmer of a stable lantern for the glory of Helios, and comforted themselves with it,--as we can do.

"If this wall were mine, I should throw it down for their sakes," I said to Hilarion; "though, to be sure, by the time it came down, every poor helianthus would each be dead with frost."

"Would you sacrifice my peaches for those weeds? Crispin, you should have been born a poet. You are improvident enough for one. Taste those peaches. That one is the Madeleine Blanche, and that yonder is the Pucelle de Malines. Are you learned in fruit? I am when I am in France. But here you have no great gardening. Everything grows too easily. Your husbandry is like your brains! Will you hear the boy play?" said Hilarion, stretching himself at ease among the bronze foliage of the magnolia boughs.

The boy played, and beautifully. Hilarion listened with closed eyes.

"If anything could make one believe in immortality it would be music," he said, when the lovely sounds had died away. "The best things I have ever written have been written when I heard music: thought should be like the stones of Thebes. How true in allegory all the old myths are!"

"Where did you find this lad?"

"In a little island off Greece; and I call him Amphion."

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"And what will you do with him?"

"Keep him while he pleases me."

"And after?"

"I never think of 'after.' It is the freedom from any obligation to think of it that is the real luxury of tolerable riches----"

"Is the immediate moment sufficient?"

"Perhaps not. But it is the best that one has. You do not choose your peaches well. Take that Téton de Vénus. Will Maryx be here to-day?"

"I fancy not: he is occupied on some great idea that is only in the clay." Hilarion smiled.

"Or only in the flesh? I wish it may be in the clay. All he does is great. He belongs to another time than ours. One fancies he must have sat at Homer's feet. And he is so unspoiled by fame and so indifferent to praise. Most of us who have any success in any art are no wiser than Glaukus, who ran after a mouse and tumbled into a reservoir of honey; and no god-endowed Polyeidus comes to shake us back into life and vigor."

"Why do you talk so? You like your tank of honey: it is as sweet as a death 'by Malmsey wine.'"

"Nevertheless, a death it is," said Hilarion, with that contempt of himself and of his career which often moved him. "Perhaps we too began by running after a star instead of a mouse, but we stifle in the honey all the same; and the honey has always some stings of the makers left in it. The honey has been waiting for Maryx for twenty years, and he has never fallen into it. He is the strongest man I ever knew; praise has no power to intoxicate him, nor has censure any power to pain."

"You are equally indifferent, I think."

"Oh, no! " I am weak enough to be glad that the foolish people come and pull the leaves of my myrtles, because they are my myrtles. Maryx cannot understand that. He is only glad when his own consciousness tells him his work is good. He does not care, I doubt whether he even knows, that a crowd in the streets looks after him. I think there is some charm in marble that keeps sculptors nobler than other men. The lives of most of them have been singularly pure; look at Michael Angelo's, Flaxman's, Canova's, Thorwaldsen's. By | | 168 the way, I have had the Feronia put in the great hall: she looks well there. They have come on some broken Etruscan pottery now, and are digging deeper: very likely there are tombs underneath all. I will make an imaginary history of the spot, as the old Dominican, Fra Giovanni Nanni, did about Viterbo. Fancy walking all your life to and fro a cloister, with an old buried city for your Juliet! No doubt he ended by believing his own lies; all dreamers do. I can never understand the complete annihilation of Etruria: can you? It was so mighty a confederacy; but then, after all, it was not so much obliterated as transmuted; all that was Rome's best was Etrurian. Oh, you do not agree to that, because you believe in the Quirites. Well, they were a strong people, but they had no art except war. Let me get you your peach. You do not choose well. There is no time to eat fruit like the early morning: the birds know that. Only we spoil our palates with wine."

He filled my bands with peaches, and then would have me in to his breakfast-table, and seat me at it, having no sort of pride in that way, though much in others; and he praised my Aldus, and decided that it was no Lyons imitation, and talked of the early printers, and of rare copies from their presses, and of anything and everything under the sun in that light yet dreamy fashion, scholarly and yet half flippant, which was natural to him, and which had a provoking charm of its own that seduced one into strange pleasure, yet irritated one, because the pleasure was after all so shifting and uncertain.

All the while he never once mentioned Giojà, and that alarmed me, because of what he thought of most Hilarion was a man to speak the least; for his manner was candid and careless, but his mind was neither.

At last, wisely or foolishly, I spoke of her.

"Have you seen the Nausicaa?" I asked him.

"No. A statue, or a picture?--new, or old?"

"The last work of Maryx."

"Oh! the Nausicaa that was in Paris in spring? I forgot. Of course. A most lovely figure. But I do not know but what the original is fairer still."

"You recognized her, then?"

"Beloved Lupercus, am I blind?"

It made me angry to be given that name; it seemed as if | | 169 we all looked foolish in his eyes; and he was smiling as he spoke. Then, as simple people do blunderingly, and to their own hindrance, and the hurt of those they fain would serve, I took my heart in my hand, and laid it before Hilarion.

"You went to see her last night. I wish you would not. I read to her your poems; I was a fool. She said you were like Agathon of Athens. What other girl could think of that? Can you understand? I am nothing to her,--an old man that she asked her way of in the street the day she came to Rome, and old enough to be her grandsire and more,--but in a way, you know, I seem too to belong to her, because I never can forget my dream in the Borghese, and it makes me anxious, because Love laughed: he always laughs when he has done his worst. And now she is so utterly at peace; she wants for nothing; she is safe, and all is well. She has true genius, too; you may see that in the things that she has done; and she is not like a girl; she has such knowledge of the past, and so much of the strength of art; if she be let alone she will be happy; she will be even great, I think, as that Properzia was we spoke of yesterday. You said that she sleeps still; yes, it is true, she sleeps and sees the gods. It were a sin to wake her. It were a cruelty; and who could measure all that she would lose? You have so much; you have all the world. I wish--I wish that you would let her alone, pass by, think of her as a child asleep, and nothing more, and not go near her."

No doubt I spoke foolishly, but something in what I said touched him as he heard.

We were sitting in one of the great painted chambers, with the angelic hosts of Giulio Romano above our heads; the room was all in shadow, strong beams of light alone finding out here and there the riches it contained, the gems, the marbles, the mosaics, the bronzes, the vases; and one of these rays of sun fell on the eyes of Hilarion: they were troubled and softened, and had a look of pity in them,--almost of shame.

"I had no thought of it," he said; and then I knew the error I had committed, and its folly.

"Perhaps it would be a sin," he added, wearily. "Sometimes I think all life is, for that matter; though whether a sin of ours against the gods or of the gods against us, I never am sure. But I had no thought of it. I have entanglements | | 170 enough,--too many; and I do not know why you should be so anxious. What have I done? I took her a few flowers, and sat there for an hour; nothing more."

"An hour has colored eternity before now," I murmured, knowing that I was unreasonable and unwise. "It is not what you have done; it is what you may do. She has no mother. She is quite alone."

"She has Maryx," said Hilarion, with a smile I did not like.

"You mistake,--if that be what you think. He is her master; nothing more. I am stupid, I dare say, and may seem rude. But I am afraid you are capricious and inconstant."

"Is that my fault?" he said, with a sigh.

"I do not see what any god can ever answer to that charge of Goethe's. It is unanswerable. So you would have me leave your Ariadne to Maryx?"

"No, I would have you leave her to her art and to herself. I do not think Maryx has any thoughts of her,--of that kind. He cares only for her genius. He is a generous man, and good."

"None better. Do not try to make him out a bloodless pedant."

"A pedant!"

"Yes; to talk of his only seeing a muse in her! Maryx is a great man, and greater in nothing than in the manner of his life. But he is human, I suppose. When he modeled his Nausicaa, I doubt if he were half as much a sculptor as a lover. It is not ideal at all. It is simply the girl herself. Maryx for once in his career only copied. He must know that."

"Could he have done better?"

"I do not say he could. I say when we are content only to reproduce a living thing we are not artists any longer; we are lovers. If the contentment remains with us, art is exiled."

"Is it in the interest of art, then, that you are always faithless?"

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"Am I so much worse than others?" he said, with a little amusement.

"You are more cruel," I said, simply.

He was silent. He knew that I was right.

"At least, you are cruel when you are tired; and you tire quickly," I said to him.

Hilarion laughed.

"Dear Crispin, you are bitter. I lay no claim to art. I am sure none of the scattered poets of the Anthology did; and if I be anything at all, I am as one of them. Only they lived in a happier time than I. So she called me Agathon? I do not think I ever had so pretty a flattery as that."

I could have bitten my tongue off, that I had told him: Agathon of the "Flower" and of the "Symposium!" Agathon of Athens, who was called pre-eminently "the beautiful!" Of course he was not likely to think the less of her, hearing that.

Palès, could she have spoken, would have had more sense than I.

"Her head is full of those people of the past," I said to him. "She lived all alone with the old books and her father's talk of them. She is like Julian,--always expecting to see the gods give signs. All the old time is to her as yesterday to others. It is a good in one way, and an evil in another. I do not think she sees the time she lives in, one whit more than, reading Virgil as she goes, she sees the throngs that bawl and pass her. Of course she may be run over, and be killed so, any day. Virgil will not save her."

"A curious danger! Women do not often suffer much from love of the impersonal. Tell her that all that past she thinks so great was only very like the Serapis which men worshiped so many ages in Theophilis, and who, when the soldiers struck her down at last, proved itself only a hollow colossus, with a colony of rats in its head, that scampered right and left. My friend, you drink nothing. Taste that tokay: it comes off my own vines by the Danube, and it is as soft as mother's milk. You have lost your mirth, Crispin. You should not have gone to sleep in the Cæsar's gallery: it has dazed you. You used to be as cheerful as any cricket in the corn."

"Would you promise me?" I said, and hesitated, for it seemed absurd to be so anxious about a danger that was yet | | 172 unmenaced, and a thing that might be farthest from his thoughts.

Hilarion laughed, and rose.

"Oh, no! I never promise anything; I have not many scruples, but I do scruple about breaking my word, and so I never give it. Why should you be afraid of me? Maryx can hold his own; and I am not Agathon, as she would soon find out, if she saw me ever so little. I am not even young now!"

I was impatient and pained. He saw it, and touched my shoulder with a kindly caressing gesture.

"Come and see some pictures I brought from France. They are landscapes. Maryx is right, that landscape-painting is the only original form of painting that modern times can boast. It has not exhausted itself yet: it is capable of infinite development. Ruysdael, Rembrandt, and the rest did great scenes, it is true, but it has been left to our painters to put soul into the sunshine of a cornfield, and suggest a whole life of labor in a dull evening sky hanging over a brown plowed upland, with the horses going tired homeward, and one gray figure trudging after them to the hut on the edge of the moor. Of course the modern fancy of making nature answer to all human moods, like an Eolian harp, is morbid and exaggerated, but it has a beauty in it,. and a certain truth. Our tenderer souls take refuge in the country now, as they used to do in the cloister. Come and see my two Millets; and there are some slighter things by lesser men of his school, that are touching in their way: whom could your dear Claude ever touch?"

"These pictures touch you: do your own peasants ever?"

"No," said Hilarion: "I never think about them."

And he never did. He had been brought up in the purest egotism. No one had even spoken to him of such things as the duties of fortune. He had been given the most careful culture of the mind and the body, and the graces of both: there his education had ended. That he ever did sweet and gracious things was due to the changeful impulses of his nature, and a certain disdain in him of all meanness, which at times became almost nobility. But that was all. And yet one loved him.

Love does not go by attributes, as is said in some comedy. It may be said out of a comedy, and in all sad seriousness. | | 173 The best-loved men and women have seldom been the best men or the best women.

He was summoned away by the arrival of same new treasures that he had bought on his way home; and I went out and looked for the little flute-player, whom he called Amphion, and whom we had left sitting where the sunflowers were.

He was as lovely a youth as I have ever seen; with a pale oval face, and great eyes, that had the pathos and the meditation of the ox's in them; you laugh: well, look straight into our oxen's eyes when next they meet you coming under the yoke across the fields, and say if all the unutterable sadness and wonder of existence are not in their lustrous gaze. "Why are we here to suffer?" say those eyes; the eternal question that all creation asks, and asks in vain, for aught that we can see.

Poor little lad!--he was eighteen years old, perhaps, and had lived on one of those little islands of the Ægean, where the population is like one family, lives by the tillage of the earth, sleeps out of doors under the stars,--men, women, and children,--and is hardly altered at all since the ages of the "Works and Days."

He had run barefoot, leapt in the sea, mown the hay, slumbered on his bit of carpet under the broad shining skies, and been quite happy, till a passer-by, touching at the little isle, had heard him play to his goats and for the maidens, and had spread gold before his dazzled parents, and filled his head with dreams by a word or two, and carried him off to the great world of cities, there to be listened to a while and then forgotten.

Hilarion was kind to him, since his fancy was fresh; had him richly dressed in the national costume, and bade his people see that he had all he wanted; but no one except Hilarion could speak modern Greek, and the boy was very lonely.

He looked up at me with the timidity of a dog that had strayed. I myself could speak his tongue, though not with all the modern changes that Hilarion knew, and by little and little I gathered his short story from him.

He was not very happy. He sighed for his barefooted liberty; his little coracle on the sea; his mother's cool little dark hut with all the sun shut out, and no smell but the scent of the cow's breath and the dried grasses; but he did not dare | | 174 to say so. He loved Hilarion, but he was very afraid of him.

"How long have you been with him?" I asked him, where he sat under the sunflowers.

"It was in the spring he came to the island."

"And you have seen wonderful places since then?"

"Yes," said the boy, wearily. "Many crowds,--crowds,--crowds. Once some great person, an emperor, came to see him. He had me to play. It did not matter to me. I did not see the great people; I saw the hay-fields, and the sea, and my white goats running to the honeysuckle. The emperor called me up and gave me a fine ring, and told me I should make my fortune. What is fortune? In the island he is rich who has six goats."

"I think you will be rich if you go back to your goats, caring for them."

He did not understand.

"They would not know me, perhaps," he said, sadly. "Praxides took them when I came away."

"Animals do not forget, my dear: that is a human privilege. And you would like to go back? You are not very happy?"

He looked with a frightened glance right and left.

"Yes, I would like to go back. But do not tell him. It is better here than it has been. One is in the air. But in that great place they call Paris, it was like being shut in a golden box. I could not play at first, in all that noise and glitter: he was angry, I could not help it. But one day I heard the goats bleat in the street; I thought my heart would break; I ran and got the flute, it was a friend. Then the old songs and dances came back to me."

Poor little misnamed Amphion!

"You cannot read?" I asked him. He shook his head.

"Not even music?"

"Do people read music? I thought it was in the air."

"You must be lonely?"

"Not when he remembers me. But he does not very often. And I should like to take these shoes off; I feel crippled----"

"We are all crippled. And we have crippled even our horses to keep us company. Two or three thousand years ago in your country the horse was a beautiful, free, joyous thing: now it is an automaton; most of us are so. We call it civili- | | 175 zation. The tighter the bonds, the more advanced are the wearers deemed. But your gold-laden jacket cannot be as easy as the old white shirt with the red sash."

The boy was silent, crushing a peach with his small dazzling teeth.

I was sorry for him.

Great singers end in millionaires; small singers end as clerks, and this poor, pretty, ill-called Amphion, who played so sweetly that it called tears to your eyes to hear him, had no genius, I thought, but only a beautiful instinct of innocent melody, as a bird has. And you could not make even a clerk of a little Greek who sighed for the sea, and the green grass, and the dances under the stars. He could not read, and he was ignorant of everything in the most absolute manner. Yet he interested me.

It is not what the human being knows, it is what he is, that is interesting.

I think it is Musset that says that the utterances of most men are very monotonous and much alike: it is what is in their heads that is never spoken which is the epic, the idyl, the threnody, the love-sonnet.

He goes on to say that every mortal carries about a world in himself, a world unknown, which lives and dies in silence; for what a solitude is every human soul!

It is of that inner world that I try to get a glimpse, though reluctantly I am bound to say that I do believe that it does not exist at all in many, and that not a few are as completely empty inside of them by nature as any pumpkin of which a little beggar-boy has had the scooping.

"Let him come home with me: he is dull here; there is not a creature that can talk to him," I said to Hilarion, a little later.

"Of course, so he be here at night to play for the duchess."

She, whom he spoke of, was a Roman, his reigning caprice of the hour.

"He shall be here," I said, and took Amphion with me in the quick rattling wagon of one of the wine-carriers, who was going to the city without his wine, and with only a load of flowers for the gardeners.

Amphion scarcely spoke as we flew over the Campagna. Only once he looked at me with pleasure in his eyes.

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"It is like the sea!" he said: he had arrived by night, and had seen nothing of it before this.

It was noon when I got to my fountain on the wall; and I had to be busy the rest of the day, and the lad would go back with the wine-cart at sunset. I took him up to Giojà's room: she was sometimes at home at noon, and was so now.

"Here is a Greek boy for you," I said to her, and put Amphion into the chamber, with his sad, lovely face, that would have done for Icarus, and his pretty dress all loose and white and shining with gold thread.

"Here is a little Greek for you," I said. "He is all alone, and very unhappy. You know his tongue a little: will you try and make him a little happier?"

"Are you a Greek, really?" said my Ariadne, coming to him with a grave courtesy, which never was familiarity, but always a little distant, like some girl-queen's.

"Yes, I am a Greek," said Amphion, who stood looking at her in a kind of awe.

Giojà's face lighted and grew eager.

"Then you have heard Homer sung? Tell me: do they recite it all at night as they used to do round the watch-fires when there is danger, and in the summer in time of peace, under the olive-trees: tell me."

"What is Homer?" said poor Amphion.

Giojà glanced at him with contempt.

"You are no Greek," she said, and turned away.

"Why did you bring him here?" she said to me. "He asks what Homer is!"

"My dear," I said to her, "he was a little peasant, on a little isle in the sea. I have been to those islands; the people only think of their flocks and their hay and their harvest. They tell tales indeed at night, as of old, but it is not of Achilles and Ithacus now; it is of the hill thieves on the main shore, or of the soldiers billeted on themselves, or of the next love that the priest is to bless, or of whatever else may be happening. Be kind to him. You can make him understand, though you only know the Greek of the poets. And he will play to you."

Amphion, who could not understand what I said, understood the contempt of those lustrous eyes resting on him, and felt that it was something shameful not to know what Homer was.

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He came with shy and timid grace, and knelt to her, and touched the hem of her skirt with his lips.

"I cannot read, and Homer--is it a singer you mean?--but if you will let me play I will tell you so what I feel. You are like the sunrise on our sea: our girls there are fair, but not like you." Giojà laughed, a thing she seldom did.

"You come from the country of Helen, and call me good to look upon?--and what music can there ever be like the march of the hexameters telling of your heroes? But if you are not happy, then I am sorry. I suppose I speak ill; I know enough Greek to read it, but that is not your Greek. You can play to me while I finish my work if you like, and afterwards I will tell you about Homer."

He had his flute in pieces in his vest, where he always carried it, a silver flute that Hilarion had bought for him. He sat down on the floor, as he was used to sit on his bit of carpet under the great plane-tree at home in the starry evenings; and, with his eyes still fastened on her as on some creature of another world, he began to make his tender melodies, there at the foot of my Hermes.

I left them so, and went my way down to the stall and Palès, who was grumbling sore at being left alone so long.

They were a boy and girl: it was a fresher and more healthful interest for her than the poems of Hilarion.

When I went up the stairs an hour afterwards to see if they were friends, I opened the heavy door so that I did not disturb them. Amphion was sitting on the floor, his flute lying across his knees, and Giojà, seated high above on the old oak-seat under the Hermes, was telling him the story of Patrocles' burial, and of how the absent Winds were feasting in the house of Zephyrus till the swift-footed Iris fetched them, and how they rose and scourged the clouds before them, across the Thracian sea, until the flames leaped up, and, making night terrible, devoured the body of his hero and the golden curls of his friend, and the honey and the horses, and the rich wood steeped with the wine that all night long Achilles poured from the golden bowl till daylight broke.

Amphion's pale face was glowing, and his eyes were full of wonder: nothing so wearies me as a twice-told tale, says Homer; but yet he told tales that echoing through thousands of years are ever fresh and ever welcome.

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Giojà, to whom every word that she recited was true as that the sun hung in heaven, saw nothing of him, but only saw the Thracian shore, the blowing flames, the surging sea, the peace that came with morn.

I closed the door unheard, unwilling to disturb them or break in on those old sweet Greek cadences that her voice tinged with a Latin accent, not ungracious; and I was sorry when still another hour later I had to fetch the lad away to go back, as he was ordered to Daïla.

"I was going now to tell him of Ulysses," said Giojà, reluctantly. "Only think! He has a brother called Ulysses, and yet does not know----"

"It will be for another day," I said. Amphion's face bad a warm color in it, and looked happy.

"I may come again?"

"Yes. Do you still wish to go back to the goats?"

"No," he said, and smiled.

"I do not care for the heroes," he whispered to me as he went down the stairs. "And why did he burn his friend? I do not understand. But do not tell her. The sound of her voice is so lovely,--that is enough."

I began to doubt whether I should not have done better for him to have left him in his solitude and sorrowfulness, eating his peaches underneath the wall with his sunflowers. But I had been thinking more of her than of him. To interest her in something living and natural, instead of always old stories and old marble, seemed to me desirable. The boy was better than Apollo Soranus.

Maryx passed me that evening on the stairs.

"Is Giojà there?" he asked. "I have a pleasure for her, at least if it be one to her: she is so unlike to others that one cannot tell. They want her at the palace to-night."

"In that great world?" I stammered; for they were among the haughtiest of our princes.

"Is she not worthy it?" said Maryx, with some impatience of me and contempt. "Nay, is that worthy her? They have seen her clay figures and her drawings; they would see her. It would be best; she lives too much alone. Can we persuade her?"

"But in her clothes,--she has none fit."

"I thought of that. I got Ersilia to steal me one of her | | 179 old woolen dresses when there was first talk of it a week ago: I have clothes fit for her below. But will she go? That is what I doubt----"

"Will Hilarion be there?"

"No doubt. Why?"

"Tell her so. She will go then."

Maryx changed countenance a little, and his broad brows knit together.

"Has he so much influence--already?"

"No influence that I know of; but attraction."

"Do you want me?" asked Giojà at that moment, her slender body hanging over the rail in the gloom; the lamp that always burned there under a Madonna shone on the soft colors of her face and gave it a Titian look. He told her why he came. She did not answer anything.

Are you glad or sorry, willing or unwilling? Say!" he said, a little quickly, and with some disappointment.

"How can I be either? It does not matter."

"You are right. It does not matter. Only so many are so pleased at such things. Will you come?"

"If you wish me."

"Oh, child! It is the greatest house in Rome, and what an honor!" cried Ersilia, who was washing at a tub in a niche in the staircase wall.

"In a great house or a small, I suppose one is always oneself," said Giojà, to whose mind no ideas of social difference could present themselves; she had only lived on the wild sea-coast, and in the old chamber with Hermes, on the bridge; and in the house of Maryx all greatness was fused into that of art, and no other recognized.

Maryx himself stood thoughtful and a little troubled.

"I think that it is best," he said, half to me, half to himself. "It is unjust to her, it is selfish, to shut her up like a dove in a tower. What do you say?"

"I suppose it is. And to the tower the hawks can come."

"St. Barbara's father built a tower to keep her in and shut out the blessed news of Christ," said Ersilia from her washtub. "But it was of no use, you know. The great news found her there. No tower is too high for the angels to soar to----"

"And so you mean----?"

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"That, whether hawk or angel is to be her fate, either will come to her, whether she be here or there," said Ersilia, wringing her linen.

"You are a fatalist," said Maryx, with a smile. "It is a curious creed: it nerves whilst it emasculates."

"Nay, I am a good Christian," said Ersilia, who did not understand a word he said, but felt that he impugned her faith; "and I will get my hands dry in a minute, and go fetch that box of clothes. Why dilly-dally about it? Let her have honor and pleasure while she can. There is not much to be had anywhere."

That was a joyous and grand night to Ersilia; but it was doomed to be a hapless one. We did our best in honesty of intent. The gods made sport of us; and I think there are few things sadder than the way in which honest intents and candid and innocent efforts to do right are, so often as we see them in this world, twisted and turned by obstinate and unkind influences to the hurt of those that feel them. It is as cruel as though one were to take a child's long curls to strangle him with, when he was coming up for kisses.

It was a joyous night to Ersilia, who, in truth, had been sometimes picked to pieces by the neighbors for harboring a strange girl.

"She goes among the princes," she said proudly to all her gossips. And she attired her with a tenderness one never would have believed could have been in her, looking at her fierce and broad black eyes that lit so quickly into rage.

But an hour later Ersilia called to me shrilly, coming to the end of the bridge and screaming in a way that would have almost frightened back Porsenna, had he been, as of yore, on the other side.

I hurried to her call.

"Only think!" shouted Ersilia, her face all in a dark flame of wrath. "Only think! she will not wear them! No, not for anything will she wear them! Was there ever such perversity? Come you and speak to her. Lovely stuffs fit for an empress! I always said she ways not natural. The marble has got into her herself. Who ever heard of any girl that did not care for clothes?"

"What is it, Giojà?" I asked her, when I had mounted.

"I will not wear them," she said, simply. "I did not | | 181 understand. If I cannot go as I am, then not at all. These clothes must have cost much money, and I have none."

"Money?" screamed Ersilia. "Of course! Money! Enough for an honest girl's dower, that I know, for he grudged nothing! How can you look at them and say you will not put them on? Jesù Maria! It is impious."

"Why will you not wear them?" I asked Giojà, quietly.

The tears came in her eyes. "I shall be sorry if I pain him. He is good and generous. But I cannot pay for them. I will not take them. No, I will not."

"But, my dear, it is impossible for you to go to a great house unless you go suitably----"

"Then I will not go; I do not care to go. What is it to me?--except that I am sorry if I pain him."

"May one enter?" said Hilarion, standing at the door, and not perceiving me. It had grown dusk, and the lights were beginning to burn on the winding bank of the river. When he did see me he smiled,--that tantalizing smile of his which might mean anything or nothing, and must have hurt many a woman worse than a blow or an oath.

Giojà colored as she saw him,--a warm, wavering blush that went to the very waves of the hair hanging over her brows. She was silent.

The white robes of Maryx's choosing were lying there. with some jewelry of Etruscan gold found by himself years before in old tombs opened at his cost under the thick brushwood about Veïi.

"What is the question at issue? May I hear?"

He spoke as if he had already known her for years.

Giojà looked at him with the flush fading.

"It is that I will not wear--all that. He has sent it: he is always so good. But why should I go thither even? I do not want the great people, if they be great; nor am I great myself, that they should seek me. If I could go as I am, it would be very well; but if I cannot, I will stay away. The things are beautiful, no doubt; but the very last words nearly that my father spoke were, 'Keep free; have your hands empty, but clean; take nothing.' So I cannot take anything, even though he gives it."

Hilarion looked at her intently. He did not ask any more. | | 182 He had the poet's quickness of comprehension, and could gather whole facts from fragmentary words.

"No doubt you are right," he said, as though he had heard it all from the beginning. "And why should you go into that vapid and turbulent world that calls itself great? You could only lose. The artist always loses. Society is a crucible in which all gold melts. Out of it is drawn only one of two prizes,--vanity or disgust: the perfectly successful in it are like the children that the Chinese imprison in jars from their birth,--dwarfs that believe their compressed distortion beautiful. Hermes here is a better companion than the world. What do you say, Crispin?"

"I say, let her do as she likes," I answered, roughly; for I was angry with his presence there. "I cannot say that she is wrong; no one could say so; but such a trifle I think she might have taken without harm to her pride; and it is hard on Maryx, thinking only to give pleasure, and believing it bad, as it is bad, for her to live alone here, dreaming of broken marbles and dead gods,--not that I would speak lightly of either the gods or arts, but such a life is too mournful, and in a little while it will become morbid."

"Better that than the foul gases of crowded rooms and empty compliments. Maryx and you are both at fault, my sensible Lupercus!" said Hilarion, with that smile which so provoked me, his eyes resting on the girl, who herself stood abstracted and sorrowful, the tears still not dry upon her lashes.

"Take them away," she said to Ersilia, with a gesture towards the pretty rejected things. Then she lifted her arms with a little sigh of relief, like one decided to put down a burden. "I do not want to see these people. I see them pass. They look foolish; they are just the same as when Juvenal wrote about them, I suppose. And what do they want with me?"

"I will tell you what they want," said Hilarion. "Genius scares the world. It is like the silver goblet to Œdipus, telling of vanished greatness and the power of the gods; the world that is like Œdipus, blind and old and heavy with many nameless sins, cannot bear the reproach of it; it wants to stamp it into dust. Never being quite able to do that, it fondles it, fills it with sugared drinks, nails it with golden | | 183 nails to the board where fools feast. Often the world succeeds, and the goblet falls to baser uses and loses the power to remind the blind sinner any more of the ancient glories and of the dishonored children of Zeus. Can you understand?--only my allegory halts, as most allegories do. Œdipus was repentant: the world never repents. So I think you are right not to go to it. Keep the silver goblet for yourself, and only touch it with your own lips, since from the gods it came to you."

There was a sort of emotion in his voice as he said the last words. Nor was it affected. In his impulses he was always sincere, and his impulse then was earnest, was tender, and was sorrowful. He himself had let his silver goblet often fall and be often choked up with the lees of spilled wines and the dust of dead passions.

Her face lightened with a happy smile. It was like remembered music to her to hear this kind of speech. She did not answer in words. She seemed to me to be timid with Hilarion, and to lose that calm, indifferent composure which characterized all her intercourse with other people.

"We are so serious, and you are so young!" said he, shaking off the momentary depression that had fallen on him. "You have lost a night's pleasure, too. We are bound to make you amends. Crispin, you look as dull as Pasquino without a pasted epigram. Wake up! Hermes wonders at you; he thinks that when men's lives are so short as they are, it is astonishing they should spend any of their little measure of time in mere moodiness; and you,--you used never to know the meaning of such a word. Now let us see what we can give to Giojà in compensation. I may call you Giojà?"

"Oh, yes; it is my name," she answered him; for the only ways that she had known were the simple ways and habits of the people, and of the ceremonies of polished life she knew nothing, though nature had taught her grace and that serenity which is the highest form of grace.

"It is a lovely name, and has a lovely meaning" said Hilarion. "Now I have thought--you care for music. Of course you care; music has all the other arts in it, and something that none of them have as well. Will you come and hear some with me? There is my own box always ready, and you can go in your own manner, with your veil if you like, | | 184 and enjoy it unseen if you please; and Crispino, too, can come. There is the Zauberflöte to-night, and there is no magician like Mozart, though at the best he is poorly rendered here. Come; it will be better for you than the crowds that stare."

"Mozart!"

She had heard some of his music in requiems and masses in the churches; but she had no idea what he spoke of, for she had never been inside a theatre.

"Yes, the Zauberflöte,--on the whole, the most perfect music in the world. Of old, the gods came down and whispered their secrets to the poets. You remember Dionysos waking Æschylus among the vines and bidding him go write the Oresteia. Nowadays the gods only whisper to the musicians; the poets are left to grope their way among the cancer hospitals and the charnel-houses. No doubt it is the poets' fault. What we wish to see I suppose we do see,--see most of, at all events, after all. Goethe was the last to listen to the god under the vines. 'What beautiful things the vines have said to me!' he wrote from Italy. And yet, let them pretend what they will, Goethe was not a poet: he was too cold and too clear; and, besides, he could live at Weimar! Well, will you come? Trust me; you will be very happy and very unhappy both at once, and is not that the very essence and epitome of life? Not to have heard great music is like having lived without seeing Rome."

"I will come," said Giojà, and looked at me, "if Maryx will not be vexed. Will he be vexed?"

"My dear," I said to her, "he meant to have given you pleasure, and he will find that he has failed, and that another has given it instead. That is all. A very common lot,--so common that it needs no pity."

For I was irritated and impatient, and hated Hilarion, though he was doing no harm, but only looking pale and handsome, like any one of the statues that she loved leaning there underneath Hermes, with the shadows of the coming night about him, and his sweet voice coming through the stillness in the fantastic and decorous talk which of all other was most certain to enchain her attention by its likeness to her own dreams.

He had his way in the end: he was one of those men who always have their way. She hesitated, and was afraid to pain her absent master, but in the end yielded, and went out with | | 185 him into the night air, which had grown colder and starry, so that already Rome was beginning to look paved with silver and carved with alabaster, as it looks always when the moon shines there.

I followed them as a dog would have done. The horses were there; but the night was beautiful, and they went on, on foot, lingering here and there as the moonlight grew clearer and the shades more black.

Giojà was well used to Rome at night. After sunset, when my labors were done, I often went with her through the avenues about the Flavian amphitheatre and the twisting streets whose centre is the mighty dome of Agrippa, or any other of the many quarters familiar to me from my babyhood, and now in my old age eloquent of a million histories. Maryx went often with us too. After a long day spent in the studio, it had always been his habit to go about Rome, which he knew by heart, as Ampère knew it, and some of the finest conceptions of his works had come to him sitting in the, stillness of the great Thermæ, with only the bats and owls moving between the dull red walls where your Northern singer composed his great Prometheus.

I was used to seeing Maryx by her side. It incensed me to watch the graceful head of Hilarion bending to her in his stead: it seemed a wrong to the one who was absent.

It was an ordinary night at the opera, and the Apollo Theatre was almost empty, and the little light there was burned very low, as it is our economical habit to have it in our playhouses. And, indeed, what music is not sweetest in the softness of the dusk?

To hear music well, sit in twilight and in stillness, only meeting eyes you love. Your new school, which thinks that music needs the assistance of glitter and glare and pictorial effect, sadly insults the divinest of the arts.

The large box close to the stage belonging to Hilarion was all in gloom: I stayed at the back of it, for I would not leave them; and Giojà in her dark clothing no one saw.

She thought it very strange, the large, shadowy, almost empty space in which the first notes of the orchestra only were dully humming; but when the full glory of the music burst over her, she held her breath, entranced, and one could see her great eyes wide opened and lustrous as the stars.

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He did not speak to her, but only watched her. The rendering was in no way fine; but it is impossible for even poor singers utterly to mar the sway of the Zauberflöte; and when the music ceased at the first act, the girl was pale as her own marbles, and the tears were coursing down her cheeks in silence.

"Did I not tell you rightly?" said Hilarion, in his soft, caressing voice. "Are you not most happy and most unhappy?"

She smiled on him a little through her tears.

"It is all the past,--it is all the future! I did not know. Oh, why did they never bring me here?"

"I am glad that it was left for me to do," he answered her. "I think Maryx does not care for music. Why do you turn away?"

"I do not want to see the people; they jar on it," said Giojà, meaning the actors on the stage. "Why can they not sing without being seen?"

"I, too, should prefer that," said Hilarion. "But then it would no longer be an opera."

"Would that matter?" said Giojà, who was always indifferent to the great reasoning that because a thing has been so thus it must ever be.

Then she was quiet again and breathless. As for me, she had forgotten that I lived. She had almost forgotten Hilarion, only that now and again her eyes, brilliant through moisture of unshed tears, like any passion-flowers through dew, turned on him as on the giver of her deep delight. He was her Apollo Soranus.

"You are contented?" he murmured softly once.

She answered him as from a dream:

"It is like Homer!"

She knew no greater comparison; and perhaps there is none greater.

At the close, the passionate music troubled her, and made her color rise and her breath come and go. Those lovers in the flames, happy merely because together, she did not understand; yet the tumult of emotions disturbed that classic calm in her which made her always so grave, yet so serene.

She did not speak at all when it was over and she had left the dusky, desolate opera-house; nor did Hilarion speak to | | 187 her. He understood that the melodies were all about her, in the air, in the stars, in the very voices of the streets: and he let the strange passion of which she had heard the first notes steal on her unawares. He was a master in these things.

We went silently through the Tordinona street, and past the house of Raffaelle, and homeward. Rome was quiet, and all white with the light of a full moon. Now and then a shadowy form went by, touching a guitar; now and then an orange-bough heavy with blossom and fruit swung over a wall in our faces; at one corner there stood a bier, with torches flaring and men praying; some one was dead,--some one dies with every moment, they say; the great melodious fountains sounded everywhere through the night, as though the waters were always striving, striving, striving in vain to wash the crimes of the city away,--the endless centuries of crime whose beginning is lost in the dull roll of Tullia's chariot wheels. Tullia! the vile name!--there is only Tarquinia perhaps viler still. How right the Sabines were when they sent the bronze weight of their shields crash down on the base beauty of Tarquinia, the creature that first sold Rome!

All these odd, disjointed thoughts went stumbling through my brain as my feet went stumbling home.

It was late.

At the door I would have sent her up-stairs alone and sent Hilarion away; but he would not have it so, and he was a man that always had his way.

"Let us see her safe back to Hermes," he said.

And when we reached Hermes I saw why he had chosen to do that. In our absence his orders had arranged a surprise for her. A fire burnt on the hearth; there was a little supper spread; there were many flowers; there was only the old bronze lamp set burning; through the unshuttered and grated casement all the moonlit brilliancy of the river was visible.

Giojà gave a little cry of pleasure and of wonder. Maryx had encompassed her with every solid care that strength and nobleness could give; but he did not think of such little things as this. Scenic display was not in his temperament.

"This is folly. It is midnight. She eats nothing at this hour. She has to be up at dawn," I grumbled, feeling stupid and ill at ease and angry.

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Hilarion laughed at me.

His own way he would have. He was so gay, so gracious, so charming, so kindly, it was impossible to altogether withstand him; and, after all, what harm had he done?

Yet eat I could not, and drink I would not. But if I should be a killjoy, it made no difference to him; it was not for me that his peaches showed their bloom like infants' cheeks, nor for me that his tea-roses clustered round his starry astias.

He had his way, sitting within the broad mellow glow from the hearth-fire, with the great moon looking in through the iron bars, sailing in a silvery radiance of snowy cloud.

She said but little,--very little; but I felt that if I had asked her now if she were only content, she would have answered, " I am happy." Once she got up and took a little book and gave it to him.

"Read me something,--once."

It was my odd volume of his translated sonnets.

He smiled, and was silent, looking on her face with a dreamy pleasure of contemplation. Then he did read, his memory awakening and the volume closing in his hand, as he read.

What he chose was a fragment of a poem on Sospitra, the woman who, being, visited by spirits in the guise of two Chaldeans, was dowered by them with transcendent powers and superhuman knowledge, and enabled to behold at once all the deeds that were done in all lands beneath the sun, and was raised high above all human woes and human frailties,--save only Love and Death.

Save only Love and Death.

It was a great poem, the greatest that he had ever given to the world, and perhaps the most terrible.

For it was all the despair of genius, and was all the derision of hell.

The woman dwelt alone with the stars and the palms and the falling waters, and was tranquil and proud and at peace, and, when night fell, saw all the darkened earth outspread before her as a scroll, and read the hidden souls of millions, and knew all that the day had seen done; and the lion lay at her feet, and the wild antelope came to her will, and the eagle told her the secret ways of the planets, and the nightingale sang to her of lovers smiling in their sleep, and she was equal to the gods in knowledge and in vision, and was content.

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Then one day a tired wanderer came and asked her for a draught of water to slake his thirst and lave his wounds. And she gave it, and, giving it, touched his hand; and one by one the magic gifts fell from her, and the Chaldeans came no more.

In all the vastness of the universe she only hearkened for one voice; and her eyes were blind to earth and heaven, for they only sought one face; and she had power no more over the minds of men, or the creatures of land and air, for she had cast her crown down in the dust, and had become a slave; and her slavery was sweeter than had ever been her strength.

Sweeter far,--for a space.

Then the wanderer, his wounds being healed and his thirst slaked, wearied, and arose and passed away; and she was left alone in the silence of the desert. But never more came the Chaldeans.

When the last words died on the silence, the silence remained unbroken. One could hear the lapping of the river against the piles of the bridge, and the sound of the little flames eating the wood away upon the hearth.

Hilarion at length rose abruptly.

"Good-night, and the Chaldeans be with you," he said; and touched the soft loose locks on her forehead with a familiarity of gesture that not I or Maryx had ever offered to her.

Giojà did not move: her face was rapt, pale, troubled, infinitely tender; she looked up at him and said nothing.

"This is how you keep your promise!" I said, faintly, on the stairs, and then paused,--for he had made no promise.

Hilarion smiled.

"I would not make any. I never make any. We are all too much the playthings of accident to be able to say, 'I will,' or, 'I will not.' And what have I done? Is there harm in the Zauberflöte?"

"You are more cruel than the Chaldeans," I said. "They at least did not call the destroyers."

Hilarion went out into the night air.

"I hardly know why I read her the poem," he said, almost regretfully: "it was a pity, perhaps. Of love, believe me, I have had more than enough; and besides," he added, with a laugh that I did not like, "besides, there is Maryx!"

Then he went away down the darkness of the Via Pettinari, | | 190 the feet of his horses, wearied with waiting, ringing sharply on the stones.

He went to his duchess, whom he more than half hated, yet with whom he would not break his unholy relation, because she had that flame in her eyes, and that flint in her heart, at which men whose passions are worn out are glad to strive to rekindle them.