CHAPTER XXXIV.

THUS I left him and went away by myself from the Pantheon homeward to the chamber where Hermes and all other treasures of my past were missing.

I knew that he would go out of Rome; I knew that he would not seek her; because, although his heart in a manner smote him thinking of her so near and knowing himself so beloved, yet the desire of ease and the dislike of pain were stronger emotions with him than any other. She was so utterly his own: though lands and seas had stretched between them, and half a world had parted them, none the less, he knew well enough,--too well--would she be faithful; never, though she were left alone till her youth should flee away and gray age come, never would any other gain from her a moment's thought or a passing glance, he knew.

Why should he return to her?--his passion had nothing to conquer, his vanity nothing to gain. And what did he know of love?--this poet with words that burned as they sang, this lover with eyes that caressed as they looked, till the souls of women dropped in his path like jasmine-flowers when the wind passes.

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"I had never left Dorothea had she refused me her trust," says the lover who is faithless, in a play of Calderon's.

Never was line written that embodied sadder truth; and Dorothea forgives outrage on outrage, crime on crime, and even when he has bidden assassins slay her, would still kiss his hand and pray for him to the Christ on her cross; but he never forgives,--though against him she has no fault, save the one fault of having had faith in him.

"If you love me you will listen to me!" prays the man to the woman; and she listens. "You should have turned your ear from me!" says the man when it is too late.

Not because he is vile; no. Hilarion said justly; very few men are that; but because he is like a child, and his plaything was beautiful whilst yet it was a refused secret, a treasure withheld, a toy untried, but being once attained and owned, the plaything lies forgotten in a corner, whilst the player runs forth in the sun.

Calderon's Dorothea was not hated because she had given her trust, but she was forsaken because she had done so, and then hated because the memory of wrong done to her stung a fickle fierce heart to remorse.

Who has done the wrong, never pardons:" in love, beyond all else, is this true.

Hilarion went back to the apes in his upas-tree, because they never made him wish himself other than he was; they never recalled to him all he might have been: innocently she had done both. So he had left her.

I knew, as I say, that he would go out of Rome; and on the morrow I learned that he had done so.

I was thankful. Women hope that the dead love may revive; but men know that of all dead things none are so past recall as a dead passion.

The courtesan may scourge it with a whip of nettles back into life; but the innocent woman may wet it forever with her tears, she will find no resurrection.

I was thankful, for it was best so; yet if I could have hated him more than I did it would have been for his obedience to me.

To be near her, yet not even look upon her face! I forgot that hardly could he care to look on it much more than a murderer cares to look on the thing he stifled and thrust | | 332 away into the earth. "Why could he not have left her in peace?" I said, again and again. No doubt he often asked himself so; for men are not base; they are children.

Maryx all this while I never saw. I believed that, although he had refused to give his promise, he would not harm her lover for her sake; but I knew nothing: I only knew that Hilarion passed out of Rome, as he had entered it, in safety.

The nightingales sang through all the long lovely spring-tide nights under the myrtles on the Golden Hill, but their master never came out to hear them, nor heeded that the summer drew nigh.

Art is an angel of God, but when love has entered the soul the angel unfolds its plumes and takes flight, and the wind of its wings withers as it passes. He whom it has left misses the angel at his ear, but he is alone forever. Sometimes it will seem to him then that it had been no angel ever, but a fiend that lied, making him waste his years in a barren toil and his nights in a joyless passion; for there are two things beside which all Art is but a mockery and a curse: they are a child that is dying and a love that is lost.

Meanwhile she grew thinner and thinner and taller still, as it seemed, and the colorless fairness of her face had the pallid whiteness of the stephanotus flower, and she was lovely still, but it was a loveliness which had a certain terror in it for those who saw her, though such were only the poor of the city.

"She has the look of our Beatrice," said one woman who cleaned the stone stairs of Barberini, sometimes, and knew those haunting eyes that have all the woe of all creation in their appeal.

And what to me was the most hopeless sorrow of all was this, that every memory and impulse of art seemed extinct in her. What had once been the exclusive passion of her life seemed to have been trodden down and stamped out by the yet more absolute and yet more tyrannical passion which had dethroned it: as a great storm-wave rises and sweeps over and effaces all land-marks and dwellings of the earth wherever it reaches, so had the passion of Hilarion swept away every other thought and feeling.

The sickness and the sorrow round her she would do her best to help, going from one to another, silent and afraid of no | | 333 pestilence. The people were afraid of her, but she not of them, even when the breath of their lips was death.

To the little children she was very tender, she who had never seemed even to see that the children played in the sun, or smiled at their mothers' bosoms; and she would touch them gently, and a great anguish would come into her eyes, that now were always so wistful, and strained, and full of hopeless longing, like the eyes of a captive animal.

"You must love these people, that you serve them so," said a priest to her one day, meeting her where the pestilence raged.

"No," she answered him: "I am only sorry for them. I am sorry for anything that lives."

And it was the truth. Her heart had opened to pity, but it was closed to all save one love.

It was a summer heavy and sickly. Wan, fever-worn children glided through the streets; the little bell, that told of passing souls needing the Church's sacraments, rang ceaselessly; by daylight and by torchlight the black figures of the beccamorti passed along the beautiful, solemn, empty ways, where the sun burned and the dust drifted; the heat lay on the city like a pall, and the wide, scorched, yellow plain was like a basin of brass beneath the unchanging pallid blue of the sky.

For myself, I had borne such seasons before, and had been unharmed; but for her I was anxious. Yet she seemed to feel no change in the weather, nor in the aspect of the city around her; she was vaguely oppressed, and would lie for hours motionless in the darkened rooms, and would drag herself outward with effort, only if she heard of any in need; but she never made any lament. To physical discomfort she had always been indifferent, and I think of it now she was insensible.

In the heats of summer I would have had her take some sort of change, but, as before, she refused to leave Rome.

"It is here that he will seek me if he want me,--ever," she said; and I, thinking of the cruel truths that he had uttered in the moonlight by the Temple of Agrippa, felt my very heart grow cold.

"Oh, my dear! oh, my love! you perish for a dream," I said, and dared say no more.

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She smiled faintly a smile that hurt one more than other women's weeping.

"In your dream Love brought the poppy-flowers; but that I do not understand. How can one die while what one loves still lives? To lie a dead thing in the cold, and the dark, while others----"

A shudder shook her; the Greek-like temper in her recoiled from the Christian horrors of the grave. With him she would have gone to her grave as a child to its mother; but without him----if she were dead under the sod, or walled in the stones of a crypt, it seemed to her that she would wake and rise when the lips of others touched him.

Alas! alas! she never thought of him save as alone. She never knew what were those apes which jibbered in the bay-tree of his fame and passions. He was still sacred to her, with the sublime sanctity of a great love which enfolds the thing it cherishes as with the divine mist which of old veiled the gods.

Whoever can still love thus is happy,--ay, even in wretchedness, even when alone. It is when the mist has dissolved, as the mists of the morning, and the nakedness and the deformity and the scars which it hid are disclosed,--it is then, and then only, that we are miserable beyond all reach of solace, and can have no refuge but in the eternal oblivion of that death which then we know can be only a forgetting and an end, without hope.

She stayed all the summer in Rome.

One day a thought struck me. It was early in the morning, and the heaviness of the weather had lifted a little, a few showers having fallen, and it was just so golden and white and sunny a morning as that when I had fallen asleep before the Ariadne in Borghese, with rosy mists upon the mountain-heights, and breadths of amber light upon the river, and tender little clouds that flew before the breeze and promised rain at sunset.

A thought struck me, and I allured her into the open air while yet it was very early, and bent her steps--she not heeding whither she went--across the Tiber to the Scala Regia of the Vatican.

"Come hither with me; I have business here," I said to her; and she came, not hearing at all, most probably, for her | | 335 mind was most always plunged so deeply into the memories of her dead joy that it was easy to guide her where one would.

Sometimes I fancied she had not wholly yet all clearness of her reason; but there I was wrong; she was quite sane, only she had but one thought night and day.

They knew me well at that mighty place, and had always orders to let me pass.

I took her up the immense stairways that seem builded for some palace of Hercules, and the wide, still, solemn passages and corridors, where all the art of the whole world's innumerable centuries seems to be so near one, from the golden crowns of the Etruscan Larthia to the flower-garlands of Raffaelle's scholars.

I took her into the galleries which she had never entered since the days when she had studied there the humblest yet the greatest of Art's acolytes. It was eight in the morning; there was no one near; the vast chambers seemed countless, like the centuries they held embalmed. We went past the sarcophagi and the stones from the tombs, past the colossal heads and the cinerary urns, past the vases of porphyry and agate and chalcedony, and the deep, serene-eyed faces of the gods, and so into the Chiaramonti gallery, past the Ganymede of Leucares, and the colossal Isis, and the olive-presses of the Nonii, to the spot where what I had once owned was standing, between the radiated jasper of the Assyrian basin and the yellow marble of the Volscian Jove; near the grand bust of Cæsar as high pontiff, and the sculptured legend of Alkestes, which Evhodus has inscribed to his "very dear and very blessed wife, Metilia Acte." For there is love which lives beyond the tomb.

There my Hermes was, well companioned, and better sheltered than with me, beneath those noble arched roofs, amidst those endless processions of gods and of heroes and of emperors; but for myself, you know, as I have said, it always seemed to me that the smile had passed off the mouth of the statue.

Of course it was a foolish and vain fancy; for what could a few years spent in a poor man's chamber matter to a creature endowed with that splendid life of marbles which counts by centuries and cycles and sees whole dynasties and nations roll away?

She walked with me down the long gallery, cold even in the | | 336 midsummer morning; and she looked neither to right nor left, but into vacancy always, for she saw nothing that was around her, or at the least cared not for it, because all memories of the art she had adored seemed to have perished in her. I laid my hand upon her shoulder, and made her pause before the Mercury. I said to her, --

"Look. He was a friend to you once. Will you pass him by now?"

She lifted her eyes with an effort, and rested them on the pentelic stone of the statue.

Hermes's head was slightly bent downward, like that most beautiful Hermes of the Belvedere.

His gaze seemed to meet hers.

A thrill ran through her. She stood and looked upward at the calm, drooped face.

"It is your Greek god!" she said, and then was still, and there seemed to fall on her that strange, mystical, divine tranquillity which does lie in the glance of all great statues, whether from the rude sphinx that lies couchant in the desert, or the perfect godhead that was brought to Rome from the seashore by Antium.

Its own calm seemed to fall upon her.

Then hot tears filled her eyes, and fell slowly down her pale cheeks.

"Once I too could make the marbles speak!" she murmured; and her fainting soul stirred in her, and awoke to a sense of its own lost power.

She did not ask how it was that Hermes was here in the palace of the Pope,--not then: she stood looking at the statue, and seeming, as it were, slowly to gather from it remembrance, and strength, and the desires of art, and the secrets of art's creation.

That desire of genius which in the artist never wholly dies, and makes the painter in the swoon of death behold golden horizons and lovely cities of the clouds, and the musician hear the music of the spheres, and the poet rave of worlds beyond the sun,--that desire, or instinct, or power, be it what it will, woke in her at the feet of Hermes; Hermes, who had seen all her efforts, and watched all her dreams, and been the silent witness of those first kisses of passion which had burned away her genius beneath them.

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She sat down by the zaccho of the statue, on the great lion's head, that bore, with three others like it, the burden of the oval jasper basin.

She was lost in thought. I did not speak to her. The early light of morning streamed through the length of the gallery. Her face had the pained bewilderment of one who, after long unconsciousness and exhaustion, recovers little by little the memories and the forces of life.

Here, if anywhere in the "divine city of the Vatican,"--for in truth a city and divine it is, and well has it been called so,--here, if anywhere, will wake the soul of the artist; here, where the very pavement bears the story of Odysseus, and each passage-way is a Via Sacra, and every stone is old with years whose tale is told by hundreds or by thousands, and the wounded Adonis can be adored beside the tempted Christ of Sistine, and the serious beauty of the Erythrean Sibyl lives beside the laughing grace of ivy-crowned Thalia, and the Jupiter Maximus frowns on the mortals made of earth's dust, and the Jehovah who has called forth woman meets the first smile of Eve. A divine city indeed, holding in its innumerable chambers and its courts of granite and of porphyry all that man has ever dreamed of, in his hope and in his terror, of the Unknown God.

She sat quite still a long while, while the sunbeams came in from on high, and the grave guardians of the place paced behind the grating. There was no sound at all anywhere, except the sound of the distant water falling in the gardens without, farther away beyond the home of the Muses and of the Apollo Musagetese.

Then suddenly she rose and looked again at the statue.

"This has lived two thousand years and more, and men still say it is beautiful. I tried to make such a statue of him, so that his beauty should live always. I will try once more. Other women could not do that. Perhaps the world will praise it, and he will see it, and then he will know----"

Know how well she loved him still! Ah, that he knew too well! Men like Hilarion never distrust their own power to keep what once is theirs. Only after a little while they do not want it: so they leave it,--that is all.

"Let us go home," she said, with eager haste, the first sign of eagerness that I bad seen in her since I had brought her | | 338 to the Tiber's side. "Let us go home. I will work there in the tower. You shall get me marble,--the old marble of Luna, the Etruscan marble,--and I will try; then perhaps the world will keep it as it has kept Hermes; and me they will forget, but him never. It is the statues that live, not the sculptor."

And then for a moment, in that loneliness of the Chiaramonte, she leaned against the Greek god, and laid her lips to his cold, pure limbs, as she had done to the stones of the hearth in my chamber.

"He used to caress you," she murmured to the marble. "Dear god, give me strength!"

Then we went silently through the Braccio Nuovo, past the bronze Augustus, fit master of the world, and Titus's hive of honey, between the Corinthian columns, and past the pillars of red granite, over the mosaics of the shining floor, and so through many halls and corridors into the open air of the gardens. It was early morning, and the birds were astir in the thick walls of the clipped box and ilex; blue butterflies flew over the old Latin tombstones; lizards ran in between the blossoming orange-hedges; here and there a late-fallen fruit had tumbled, a ball of gold, upon the grass.

These gardens are green valleys full of fragrance and shadow; behind them, like their mountain alp, is the great dome, altering from white to purple as the day passes and the clouds change.

"Tell me," she said, below her breath, as we paced among the trees, "why is the Hermes there? I can remember nothing, only----"

Walking between the tall walls of leaf and bough, I took courage, and told her of the things that I had done and the sorrow I had suffered since I had seen the sail upon the sea.

For the first time she wept for us, not for him.

"And I am thankless!--only thankless!" she murmured. "Oh, why love me so much, you two for whom I have no love?"

I heard the birds singing in the orange-flowers, and the bees hum in the fountain's edge, and they only sounded sad and harsh to me.

"My dear, love is given, not bought," I said to her. "That is all."